I’ve stayed out of this controversy, because every time I’ve tied to examine the facts the incident seems more and more muddied. After all, something is clearly wrong in Jena, Louisiana – but the facts underlying the incident are often obscured by the haze induced by the heated racial rhetoric (often amazingly fact-free) surrounding the incident.

The district attorney offers an explanation of why he brought the serious charges he did in this case. The heart of his argument is compelling, when one considers what actually happened last December at the high school.

Last week, a reporter asked me whether, if I had it to do over, I would do anything differently. I didn’t think of it at the time, but the answer is yes. I would have done a better job of explaining that the offenses of Dec. 4, 2006, did not stem from a “schoolyard fight” as it has been commonly described in the news media and by critics.

Conjure the image of schoolboys fighting: they exchange words, clench fists, throw punches, wrestle in the dirt until classmates or teachers pull them apart. Of course that would not be aggravated second-degree battery, which is what the attackers are now charged with. (Five of the defendants were originally charged with attempted second-degree murder.) But thatÂ’s not what happened at Jena High School.

The victim in this crime, who has been all but forgotten amid the focus on the defendants, was a young man named Justin Barker, who was not involved in the nooses incident three months earlier. According to all the credible evidence I am aware of, after lunch, he walked to his next class. As he passed through the gymnasium door to the outside, he was blindsided and knocked unconscious by a vicious blow to the head thrown by Mychal Bell. While lying on the ground unaware of what was happening to him, he was brutally kicked by at least six people.

Imagine you were walking down a city street, and someone leapt from behind a tree and hit you so hard that you fell to the sidewalk unconscious. Would you later describe that as a fight?

Only the intervention of an uninvolved student protected Mr. Barker from severe injury or death. There was serious bodily harm inflicted with a dangerous weapon — the definition of aggravated second-degree battery. Mr. Bell’s conviction on that charge as an adult has been overturned, but I considered adult status appropriate because of his role as the instigator of the attack, the seriousness of the charge and his prior criminal record.

So what we have here is an attack on a kid completely uninvolved in the noose incident. It was unprovoked, with six young thugs kicking and stomping their unconscious victim. That isn’t a fight – it is an ambush designed to maim (and perhaps kill) a defenseless individual based, it would appear, solely upon race. Frankly, I’m disturbed that there is no hate-crime enhancement to these charges, just as I would expect there to be if a group of white kids did the same to a black kid. As a result, I think those aggravated battery charges are appropriate – and one could argue (as does prosecutor Reed Walters) that the adult charges against Bell were not unreasonable in light of his previous criminal record.

Where I disagree with Walters is his assessment of the criminality of the original noose incident. Surely there was some aspect of civil rights law, either state or federal, that might apply to what happened that day. The “prank” was clearly designed to discourage students from fully and freely exercising their civil rights at the high school, and as an incident taking place on public property ought to be treated in precisely the same manner as a cross-burning would have. But even if my position is wrong on this point, there is no possible way of justifying the assault on Justin Barker – which might best be described as an attempted lynching of an innocent man in the “best” race-hating tradition of the KKK.

Now do I fault people who have been outraged over the situation in Jena? No, I don’t – given the amount of misinformation out there it is hard to drill down to the facts. I wish the media had done a better job of reporting on this, and that the blogosphere had exercised a little more restraint before buying in to all the claims being made about the case by one side. This isn’t Selma, and it isn’t Scottsboro – let’s quit pretending it is.

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