This Is Our Country

LEONARD PITTS | Another lesson in our country's 'class'

Consider two recent examples of American justice.

In 2009, after a night of bar hopping, a man named Ryan LeVin plowed his speeding Porsche into two British tourists in Fort Lauderdale, killing them. He fled the scene, lied to the cops, tried to pin the crime on someone else.

About three weeks ago, Tyell Morton, a kid from Rushville, Ind., sneaked into his school wearing a hooded sweatshirt and left a mysterious package in the girl's restroom. It turned out to be a blowup doll.

LeVin was recently sentenced: he got house arrest at his oceanfront condo. Morton, who is 18, was jailed with a $30,000 bond and faces trial on charges that could put him away for eight years. Morton has no record. LeVin was on probation, has a string of traffic violations and a cocaine conviction. It ought not surprise you to learn that LeVin is white and fabulously wealthy, while Morton is black, and not.

Jaye Davis would reject the implications of that observation. She wrote a letter to the editor of the Rushville Republican that said in part, "I want and need someone to PLEASE tell me this case is not going to become a huge deal because of RACE! I feel very strongly that skin color had nothing to do with these charges ..."

Morton's father doesn't want it to be about race, either. Several times during a telephone conversation with me, Walter Nelson, a barber who owns a shop near Joliet, Ill., repeated that he does not want to "cloud" matters by framing his son's experience in racial terms.

Rushville, he explained, is a small, predominantly white town. Most of his son's homeboys are white. Many of those who contributed to pay his son's bond are also white. "My son's life is more important than some racial issue that people can't seem to get over. That's what I want to focus on, man."

Tyell, he said, is a good kid who brings home A's and B's and the occasional C. He dreams of going to college. He wants to be a doctor — or a video game tester.

"He's a teenager," his dad said. "He's a young man trying to find his way in life."

Nelson knows Tyell pulled a knuckleheaded stunt. But the overreaction to that stunt frustrates him. Once upon a time, a Tyell Morton might have suffered only a chewing out by the cops and his folks. But, said one official, things are different post-Columbine. Indeed, the initial charge was "terroristic mischief."

"They labeled my son as a terrorist," Nelson said. "They referenced Columbine with my son. Columbine, those guys had intent to harm. My son did not have any intent to harm anybody at all. That's what angers me." He wonders how six days spent in shackles with car thieves and drug dealers might scar his child.

Shame on our country: the complete answers to the Miss USA ...

Watch the entire 14.5-minute clip.  For the record, I present a video of all 51 Miss USA contestants answering the question, “Should evolution be taught in schools?”  They’re in alphabetical order by state, and, as I noted before , Miss California, Alyssa Campanella, was the winner.  Below the video I’ve listed all the contestants who espoused at least a moderate pro-evolution stance, as well as some of the denialists and the funny waffles and hedges.

Clearly the frightened women had talked to each other before the question, for their answers are simply too similar to be independent.  By far the most common was “We should teach different points of view” (a funny variant of this was “We should teach everything sides,” and of course the other side is religiously-based creationism.  Only a few contestants (Miss Alabama, for instance) said simply “no”.  Endorsement of evolution as a viable school subject was, however, far more prevalent than reported in the press.