[The] educators were convicted April 1 of racketeering and other lesser crimes related to inflating test scores of children from struggling schools. One teacher was acquitted.
One by one, they stood, alongside their attorneys, before Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter....
...on Monday [the Judge]...decided to allow prosecutors to offer them deals that would have allowed them to avoid the possible 20-year sentence that racketeering carries.
Note that, so far as the story tells us, the prosecutors did not take the initiative to offer deals. They were encouraged to do so in order to allow the defendants to show at least a modicum of contrition so that the court might have a basis for leniency.
And that's why there were sparks when some of the educators, flanked by their attorneys, did not directly and readily admit their responsibility.
Baxter was not pleased. He raised his voice numerous times and shouted at attorneys. Some attorneys shouted back...
Why articulate a legal argument when you can shout at the judge?
"Everybody starts crying about these educators. This was not a victimless crime that occurred in this city!" Baxter said.
"Everybody knew cheating was going on and your client promoted it," Baxter said to an attorney representing Atlanta Public Schools educator Sharon Davis-Williams, who Baxter sentenced to seven years in prison.
Davis-Williams was ordered to perform 2,000 hours of community service and pay a $25,000 fine.
Repeatedly, Baxter appeared frustrated when more educators did not simply accept the deal and plainly vocalize their guilt.
"These stories are incredible. These kids can't read," he said.
"This is the time to search your soul," Baxter said. "It's just taking responsibility. ... No one has taken responsibility that I can see."
Actually, one might think an experienced judge would know better. Taking responsibility is just not what criminal defense is about. It's about cheating (in this instance, cheating children), trying to hoodwink the jury when you're caught, spinning a fabulist yarn that you knew nothin' about nothin', and then, when the jig is up, blaming -- ready now -- the people who caught you.
As for soul-searching -- please. Soul-searching, like trying to give kids an honest education, is for suckers.
The perfect intersection of two evils, defense attorneys and public education. Both overwhelmingly liberal and metaphorically standing in front of the schoolhouse door preventing minority kids from getting a better lot in life. Little has changed in 50 years. Heck, little has changed in 150 years as they attempt to keep these minority kids on their education plantation.
TarlsQtr --
When little black boys and girls were stopped at the schoolhouse door, it was one of the most shocking and galvanizing pictures of the Civil Rights Era. The moral force of it was overpowering to kids of the same age (or whom I was then one). The cruelty and wrongness of it all was as stark as any memory from my childhood.
What a grotesque irony it is today that the kids turned away would have received a better education at some run-down, all-black husk of a segregated school than they did in 21st Century "enlightened" Atlanta. At least back in the Fifties and Sixties, the teachers cared about them.
The defense bar's sneering braggadocio that they "are there for the little guy" has seldom been more thoroughly exposed than in this case.