Draw a kidney and got out of prison. So you play a scowling "Monopoly" of justice in the State which was the most racist and segregated of America, Mississippi, where a kidney is the paper that the Scott sisters, for robbery convicts, will fall by order of the governor if they want to return free.Sentenced to two life sentences for each will be commuted to probation if Gladys Scott will donate a kidney to her older sister Jamie suffering from chronic renal failure. Not for justice, humanity, or because at last the judges and the Mississippi Governor Hailey Barbour will be convinced that two life terms each for robbing $ 11 in 1993 were worth a little too much for two girls with no criminal record.
But because in these times of tightened belts in the state budgets and fiscal deficits and unrealistic tax increases, those $ 150,000 per year spent on dialysis Jamie were too many. If the solution of the transplant in exchange for his freedom seems grotesque, the "pound of flesh" that the thirty-six Gladys pay to go out and will give Jamie the thirty-eight is the stroke of genius that Governor Barbour, a Republican Southerner with a few hard and pure presidential ambition in 2012, had to get rid of this bulky case.
The life sentence meted out to Gladys and Jamie in the 1994 trial had been seen, mainly from African communities in Mississippi, as a legal monstrosity, another, another example of how justice in the southern United States is still the heir to the darkest times in such as civil rights activists could be killed and buried in pits with impunity, for the only reason you want to enroll blacks to vote.
The two sisters had participated in the robbery of a motorist passing, along with three accomplices, had yielded a hit that $ 11 and had left the victim unharmed. The three accomplices if they got away with five years. The two women were found to be the "gang boss", had received life sentences.
The news that the eldest, Jamie, a girl of 21 at the time of the crime, had begun to suffer from renal dialysis and was sentenced to life without the transplant, had rekindled the anger of the organizations for civil rights and justice right. In Mississippi, where a history of segregation, discrimination, racial hatred, the galloping of the 'Invisible Empire, "the Ku Klux Klan, is yesterday's story, if not today, the cold crust of social peace is always very thin.
Pickets and marches were reformed and fiery when the governor Barbour, former chairman of the Republican Party, now the governor and president of the U.S. government, he explained in an interview with a right-wing weekly, The Weekly Standard, that the inhabitants whites of his hometown, Yazoo, had chosen the segregation and separation of the schools not to racism but as a way to avoid violence and to control the KKK.
KKK A "good". Barbour was in hot water, heated not only by his defense of "Civic Committees" were organized against the threat that "black" with brutal methods thinner than those of the Klan, even some sticky suspected to have pocketed several million from the reconstruction of coasts of Mississippi distorted by Hurricane Katrina.
To get it back again from the pot, here are two sisters working in two kidneys, Gladys and Jamie. Both could not have been released from prison "on the word", ie in the form of conditioning, and their release in 2014, including in Mississippi, it was inevitable given the enormity of the initial penalty.
So why not take advantage and use the human case to free himself from a political case? "I think they paid enough of their debt to society" ... "no longer presents the risk of repeating the crime." Provided that the earliest possible transplant, will be released.
"The prison health facilities did not ensure the sterility of the dialysis procedure and put at risk of serious infections to the detainees." All applauded the move by the governor, including the NAACP, the largest African American organization. While the two women come out of prison thanks to a healthy kidney (but who will pay for the expensive transplant surgical procedure and postoperative care remains vague), the governor will come out from the corner where the interview ended with reckless.
Happy ending transplant in the U.S. state that has - and for some it is still a source of pride - the record of "rebellious Negroes" tortured, lynched and killed after the end of slavery in 1865, 538 victims, more than 490 of Georgia and 335 Louisiana. But Gladys and Jamie, a kidney patient tore the legalized lynching.
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