I just came across this article via a commenter on Cobb‘s site.
Court discrepancy revealed
“Let her out of TYC,” said Allan Hubbard, spokesman for Lamar County District Atty. Gary Young. “Hell, she’s done a year for pushing a teacher. That’s too long.”
Hubbard also backed away from claims he and Young made this week in numerous media interviews that the judge in the case, Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville, had had no choice but to send the youth to prison because her mother had testified that she would not cooperate with probation officials had the judge sentenced the teen to probation.
On Thursday, Young’s official Web site contained this assertion: “This juvenile’s mother (Creola Cotton) told the judge she would not comply with conditions of probation.”
But a review of the full court transcript shows no such testimony. In fact, Creola Cotton repeatedly answered “yes” when asked in court whether she would comply with any conditions of probation that the judge might impose.
On Friday morning, after an inquiry about this discrepancy by the Tribune, the district attorney’s Web site was altered to read: “Through her actions of non-cooperation, Ms. Cotton told the judge she would not comply with conditions of probation.” (source)
After I read this article, I decided to try to make contact with Hubbard via e-mail. Here is what I sent this evening:
Good day,
My name is Duane Brayboy and I am the main contributor for the website blackinformant.com. If you check out this site you will see that we have made every attempt to remain objective to this story. This latest article
by Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune does have me a little puzzled on what Shaquanda Cotton’s mother agreed or did not agree to during her day in court. I would like to know this information because I noticed that at
one point the D.A.’s statement listed each item as FACT. Today I notice that the word “FACT” has been removed with a slight change to the assessment of the mother. Could you please clarify? This will greatly help me and my thousands of readers to better understand the situation.
Thanks!
Duane
www.blackinformant.com
So now the ball is in his court with this as the beat goes on with this case. It will be difficult for him to explain away the missing “FACTS” in bold as I mentioned in my e-mail (I posted what the D.A. had on their site prior to this article here). In the meantime I hope that more attention will now be focused on the overall corruption in the Juvenile justice system down there.
