Different Day, Same Shit.

When Marissa Alexander used her legally licensed firearm to protect herself and her kids, she didn't imagine she'd be sent up the river for 20 years. But that's exactly what's happening. What makes it worse is that Alexander's case is the perfect scenario for how Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law should be used:

Alexander claims she was acting in self-defense, that her husband, Rico Gray, attacked her when he found messages to her ex-husband on her cell phone. Gray has said in testimony that he had previously warned Alexander that he would kill her if he ever found out that she had been unfaithful. In her panic, she ran to the garage, hoping to escape. Once there, she found that she did not have her keys and that the garage door was broken.

Feeling that there was no other route of escape, Alexander armed herself and re-entered the house. Gray confronted her, threatening to kill her once again. The mother of three turned her face away and fired a warning shot into the ceiling in hopes that Gray would back down, which he did, taking his children from a previous relationship and fleeing the house.

Ironically, there'd be a much greater chance of her walking free had she actually shot and killed him. Now there's a lesson domestic abuse victims might pick up in similar situations. It'd also help if Alexander was a photogenic blonde woman of noticeably WASP heritage. The law tends to be an ass when it comes to black Americans, black American women especially.

It's also worth noting that Alexander passed up a three-year plea deal, like any person would do if they genuinely believed themselves to be innocent. For some odd reason, the prospect of a 20-year bid seems like the prosecution and judges making an example of someone who didn't cop out when asked to.

The judge's rationale for convicting Alexander?

“Maybe I would be agreeing to a new Stand Your Ground motion, which highlights some of the difficulties we are struggling with procedurally implementing this new law,” he wrote, “but ultimately the motion is denied.” In his opinion, Alexander’s decision to re-enter the house was “inconsistent with a person in genuine fear of his or her life.”

Now contrast this ruling with the one for Greyston Garcia:

Circuit Judge Beth Bloom ruled Mar. 27 in a widely reported case that Greyston Garcia would not have to stand trial for killing Pedro Roteta, whom Garcia stabbed. According to Judge Bloom, Garcia was within his rights under Stand Your Ground law, because Roteta swung a bag of radios at Garcia, which, had it struck its intended target, could have been lethal.

Garcia, of Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, did not come under attack from Roteta. Instead, he found Roteta stealing a radio from his car. When Roteta saw Garcia, he ran away, and Garcia followed him, pulling out a knife. Garcia chased Roteta for a block, cornering him, and Roteta swung his bag of radios at Garcia - the potential lethal force. It was then that Garcia stabbed him.

Protecting your property is OK and "protecting" your neighborhood from an imagined menace is OK, too. But protecting yourself from an abusive human being isn't in the cards.

Rulings like these send a message. Battered wives, minorities and those who are perceived to be at the bottom of America's socioeconomic totem pole are now being put on notice.

For some reason, plenty of people don't believe that proper office decorum extends to the cyberspace realm of the workplace. To wit, most people know it's not a good idea to spend your downtime surfing porn or forwarding Goatse pics to one another on Exchange. Such behavior would get most people a talking down to and a trip to Human Resources. Or a lovely little pink slip. Conservatives have this thing about passing forwarded emails around like a good toke: they take a puff, savor the smoke and after they've gotten their high off of it, pass it around to other good friends with similar tastes.

One fine afternoon, Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Frank Cebull of the District of Montana forwarded an email to six of his dearest friends from his official email account. Normally, this wouldn't be something anyone would give two shits about unless it had unencrypted instructions on how to raise Osama Bin Laden's spirit from the beyond. Unfortunately, it contained the following text:

"Normally I don't send or forward a lot of these, but even by my standards, it was a bit touching. I want all of my friends to feel what I felt when I read this. Hope it touches your heart like it did mine.

"A little boy said to his mother; 'Mommy, how come I'm black and you're white?'" the email joke reads. "His mother replied, 'Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!'"

Here we have a joke that manages to kill three birds with one large, bleached stone:

• It insinuates that Barack Obama's mother was a loose whore with little to no morals. Only a whore would dare to be so loose with herself and only a whore would have mixed offspring.
• It suggests that blacks are in the same league as or possibly lower than four-legged animals when it comes to how well-regarded they are.
• It denigrates those of mixed parentage, especially those of both black and white heritage. Such couplings are considered "unnatural" by the unreconstructed and their fellow faux-reconstructed hangers-on.

The joke touched Cebull's heart so much that he had to forward it to his friends. That was some good stuff he was toking and he had to pass the joint around the room.

The judge acknowledged that the content of the email was racist, but said he does not consider himself racist. He said the email was intended to be a private communication.

"It was not intended by me in any way to become public," Cebull said. "I apologize to anybody who is offended by it, and I can obviously understand why people would be offended."

Cebull said his brother initially sent him the email, which he forwarded to six of his "old buddies" and acquaintances.

He admitted that he read the email and intended to send it to his friends.

So he's not a racist, but he does enjoy racist jokes now and again and furthermore, he apologizes that it somehow got in the wrong hands. Yep, it's all being blown out of proportion.

It's A Bad Thing™ for a federal judge to engage in activity that potentially colors otherwise impartial decision making in a courtroom setting. A man who finds a crude, racially-charged 3-for-1 joke about the president's heritage may also have no problem with being biased against a black American standing before him. He may also be willing to push said person towards the harshest sentences possible regardless of the crime and possibly disregard evidence and testimony pointing towards an acquittal or a lesser charge. By virtue of engaging in color-aroused activity, he's put a clean shot through his own credibility as far as most people are concerned.

This is why people are standing up and taking notice. That and the fact the judge made no attempt in sugarcoating or P.R. spin. He simply said "Why yes, that was incredibly racist........but I'm not a racist." Like most people caught in a bind of their own making, he's only sorry he got caught. Some people expect that blunt honesty to win people over.

Meanwhile, a comment sums up the suspicions that black Americans have towards their white counterparts in just about any social setting:

Every time I hear crap like this from a white person, it makes it that much harder for me to be in the company of black people because I am concerned they think I feel the same way.

You have no idea what people are thinking about you. A black person has to go through life wondering if the white people they briefly interact with think of him or her as a human being worthy of respect or as a plain-old "nigger." Now imagine having to put up with this in a rather powerful courtroom jurisdiction.

Cebull, of Billings, was nominated by former President George W. Bush and received his commission in 2001 and has served as chief judge for the District of Montana since 2008.

I'm not surprised. Bush had a way of picking his people.

Imagine you live in a not-so-great neighborhood and you wake up to find your truck's been stolen. And like any other civil-minded and law-abiding person, you pick up the phone and report it to the police.

Now imagine that, instead of taking a report and hopefully getting down to the bottom of who did it, they place you under arrest on the basis of you having the same first name as someone who was wanted on an aggravated assault charge.

That happened to Teresa Culpepper, and she ended up spending 53 days in county lockup before her publicly-appointed lawyer brought the victim of the assault in to clear the innocent Teresa's name.

Teresa Culpepper says she called police to report that her truck had been stolen in August. But when they showed up at her home, they arrested her for aggravated assault committed by another Teresa.

"All she has is the same first name. The only descriptions that match are 'Teresa' and 'black female,'" Culpepper's attorney, Ashleigh Merchant told The Lookout. Culpepper, who is 47, didn't have the same address, birth date, height, or weight as the Teresa who was supposed to be arrested.

Merchant says Culpepper, who was legitimately convicted of a misdemeanor in the 90s but otherwise has no criminal record, lives in a rough neighborhood where police are frequently on patrol. She and her family were unable to post the $12,000 bond to get her out of jail, so she wasn't released until her public defender found the victim of the assault and brought him to the court to say Culpepper was not the "Teresa" he had accused.

Wrong address, wrong birth date, wrong height and weight. Was this the case of lazy police work, with the arresting officers and administrative staff figuring it didn't matter who they brought in since they all look alike and did the same things? Keeping the wrong person locked up for 53 days is a sign of a systemic failure of process and procedures. Then again, we execute the wrong people on a regular basis in this country.

Anyone remember Alabama's House Bill 56? It's the infamous state-enacted immigration law written to target "illegal immigration," only to open the doors to the specter of increased ethnic profiling of the state's Latino population. Arizona's SB 1070 has nothing on what the folks on Goat Hill cooked up:

The Alabama state legislature passed a controversial new immigration bill on June 9 that requires public schools to check students’ immigration status, criminalizes giving an undocumented immigrant a ride, requires employers to use E-Verify to check potential employees’ status, and instructs police to check the immigration status of anyone they stop if they suspect the person of being an undocumented immigrant.

The law is alarmingly tough, eclipsing Arizona's SB 1070 by several measures—including, among other punishments, incarceration and fines for anyone who knowingly employs, harbors, or transports illegal immigrants. Giving an undocumented immigrant a ride to work, offering them shelter, offering them sacrament: All of these acts are, with just the slightest interpretation, criminalized in the bill.

A federal judge is set to rule on the validity of the law today, as the order set down to block Alabama's enforcement of the law expires tomorrow.

As it stands, the law's had a pretty big economic impact on the farming industry in Alabama and other states that enacted similar laws. Latino workers, illegal or not, have pulled up stakes and left for elsewhere, leaving farmers in a jam when it comes to finding cheap labor. Apparently, the natives aren't up to 12 to 14 hours of back-breaking sunup-to-sundown labor for $7.50/hr, at least not without adding an extra $10/hr to that figure. Even the convicts and probationers aren't up to the job.

EDIT: Judge allows key parts of immigration law to stand:

A federal judge refused Wednesday to block key parts of Alabama's new law targeting illegal immigrants, including its requirements to check the immigration status of juvenile students in public schools and for police to verify the status of those they suspect of being in the county illegally.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Blackburn blocked some other parts of the law, which both supporters and critics say is the nation's toughest clampdown on illegal immigration by a state.

Blackburn wrote in her ruling that federal law doesn't prohibit the law's provisions on students or suspects pulled over by police. She didn't say when those and other parts of the law could take effect, but her previous order blocking enforcement expires on Thursday.