Last week, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld Willie Nash’s sentence: 12 years for possession.
Of a cellphone.
Read it twice, if you want. It won’t make any more sense the second time around.
Nash, it should go without saying, is African American. And his victimization by Mississippi “justice” lends a certain pungent perspective to an event that occurred simultaneously.
Meaning the wide-screen release of “Just Mercy,” the film adaptation of attorney Bryan Stevenson’s book by the same name. In it, Stevenson fights to free Walter McMillian, an African American man who spent six years on Alabama’s Death Row for the murder of a young white woman, convicted solely on the coerced testimony of a white jailhouse snitch whose story was far-fetched to the point of being comical. Never mind that well over a dozen black witnesses placed McMillian miles away at the time of the crime.
12-year sentence
If your temptation is to say that this situation was awful, but it happened 30 years ago and things have changed since then, well, tell it to Willie Nash. He’s a husband and father who, while confined to the Newton County Jail on a misdemeanor, passed his smartphone to a guard asking for “some juice,” i.e., a charge. The guard confiscated the device. It turned out that Nash, obviously unbeknownst to him, was not allowed to have it in jail. Whoever searched him had apparently missed it.
