A Sarasota Military Academy student has been arrested in the shooting of another teenager in downtown Sarasota Friday night.
Police say Michael J. Mitchell, 18, shot Dan. A. Azeff, 18, in the chest at about 10:40 p.m. Friday in the 1900 block of Main Street. Azeff, a student at Sarasota High School, was flown to Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg, where he is listed in serious but stable condition.
According to police:
Mitchell and Azeff were walking down Main Street last night, both with separate groups of friends. The two did not know each other. Azeff was wearing a hat with a Confederate flag on it and carrying a Confederate flag. Mitchell confronted Azeff, reportedly asking him if he was a racist. The two got into an argument and Mitchell pulled out a gun and shot Azeff once in the chest.
Mitchell, of the 5300 block of Southerly Way, was arrested at his house early today on a charge of aggravated battery with a firearm.
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I am sure that his defense will be that he became uncontrollably enraged at the sight of a Confederate flag, and so could not stop himself from shooting the youngster. Randall Kennedy mentions several murder cases where the perpetrator's defense was that he heard a White person speak the word "nigger" and so he could not stop himself from murdering a White person. And I think someone mentioned the "Jena 6" case in another thread, where the defense to a charge of attempted murder was the claim that they had seen a noose in a tree several weeks earlier. It is odd how many people sincerely believe that murder, or the attempt, is a valid response to being offended.
I am sure that his defense will be that he became uncontrollably enraged at the sight of a Confederate flag, and so could not stop himself from shooting the youngster.
If someone cannot control himself, then he should be locked up because he is a danger to society.
Posted: Tue 28 Apr 2009 19:59 Post subject: Re: Sarasota teen shot over Confederate apparel
Flutterby wrote:
If someone cannot control himself, then he should be locked up because he is a danger to society.
Well, I did not mean to raise the question of whether society should punish violence (especially since "should" statements are not allowed in this forum). I was simply wondering about the the idea that: it is okay to launch a violent murderous physical attack if you feel offended by something. There seems to be a lot of this going around lately. Does anyone know: (1) Are incidents of physical attacks with the excuse of having been offended on the rise? (2) Has any jury ever accepted that excuse in a criminal trial (either finding the person not guilty or reducing the sentence) because the attacker felt offended?
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1829 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Tue 28 Apr 2009 22:00 Post subject:
This is a common defense in many nations, depending on what the person is offended by, usually in Middle Eastern or South Asian nations though and it usually involves religion or family honor.
I dont think this type of defense is normative in America, even when race is involved, but I seem to remember a case a few years ago. I will look around for it. I believe it was a black man who killed a few white people due to "rage".
I do know of a case where Muslims killed people and said they were enraged in Western nations (I believe in America as well) due to loss of family honor. Basically they were offended their sister or daughter had a boyfriend and decided to kill her or both of them, but I'm not sure this defense was actually used in court to try to get the person off.
I think we all know about honor killing so I won't post more on that...as in the countries where the "rage defense works" the men involved usually get no prison time or a very light sentence (like a year for brutally killing their wife, daughter, or sister).
Thank you very much. A fascinating and informative article written from the perspective of a defense attorney. I have made it permanently available at http://backintyme.com/rawdata/harris01.pdf.
There seem to be three different phenomena here.
First, is the defense that "honor" compels violence in response to a perceived insult (to the individual, the family, the clan, the tribe, etc.) Violence to defend honor seems common in societies that condone, encourage, or demand such retaliatory violence. Come to think of it, one of my former teachers at UFL suggested that this was one of the causes of the U.S. Civil War --southerners seeing Lincoln's election as an intolerable insult to their honor. See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford University, 1982). I suspect that this has become less acceptable to mainstream U.S. society over the past 150 years or so. (Although it apparently is acceptable in criminal gang subcultures.) Dueling, for example, is illegal in every state nowadays. I agree that this phenomenon does not seem to have a strong "racial" component, in the sense of the U.S. color line.
Second, is the defense that previous mistreatment to an individual can cause someone to "break" and react violently to "the last straw." As the article explains, this defense has been used successfully in spouse-murder cases where the killing was preceded by a history of spousal abuse of the murderer. (I believe that all such cases were of women spouse murderers claiming prior abuse by their husbands.) And, as the article shows, this defense has worked for murderers who were previously harrassed or tormented by their victim. This phenomenon also seems to lack a strong "racial" component, in the sense of the U.S. color line.
Third, is the defense that "my people" have been oppressed and so I must kill to avenge their past suffering. This differs from the prior phenomenon in that the justification in this case is not injustice (or even fear of injustice, as in the Ossian Sweet case) to the individual who kills, but injustice to the person's clan or tribe. It resembles the first phenomenon (honor killing) but differs in being presented as justifiable within mainstream U.S. society today. In fact, the main flaw in the Harris article is that Harris fails to distinguish between a defense alleging prior injustice inflicted upon the defendant and a defense alleging injustice by proxy (oppression of the defendant's tribe, clan, or ethnopolitical community). This phenomenon does seem to carry a strong "racial" component, in the sense of the U.S. color line.
Two Theories On Criminal Violence In All God’s Children
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David Zimet
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In giving an in-depth history of the Bosket family, the book All God’s Children by Fox Butterfield gives the reader a perspective into how a legacy of violent men began, and how the tradition of street toughness was passed down through four generations. The book also takes a brief survey of crime and punishment in the black community, and looks into the circumstances surrounding several criminal incidents. In the context of this paper, I will examine the roots and foreground causes for the criminal behavior of Pud, James, Butch, and Willie Bosket, as well as the other criminals discussed in the book, using two theories of criminology. One of the theories I will use is the one proposed by Jack Katz regarding the seductive quality of crime, while the other is the Differential Association theory developed by Edwin Sutherland.
In his theory, Katz talks about two different situations that can be found many times in the actions and motivations of the four Bosket men. One is the situation of the badass, who feels he must fight and be violent to earn respect and maintain his reputation. This reputation of being a badass was something that became very important to the Bosket men, becoming over time something similar to a family trade. The other is the situation of the righteous criminal, who is seduced into breaking the law by a belief that he holds the higher moral ground through his criminal actions.
Sutherland’s theory explains how criminals come to learn their criminal behavior through a learning process not unlike one that would transpire at a school, and then the lessons they learn are reinforced through direct observations of the values they learned being played out in the street by their peers. These two theories are not really at contrast with one another, but rather complement each other to give a more complete analysis of the crimes recounted in the course of the book.
The first theory I will examine is that from Katz’s book Seductions of Crime. Katz’s theory can be shown to apply well to the Boskets and other criminals in All God’s Children. His description of the way of the badass is straight to the heart of Butterfield’s assessment of many of the situations that arise throughout the Boskets’ careers. Katz claims that, “[o]ne can develop a systematic understanding of the ways of the badass by distinguishing among three levels or degrees of intimidating aggression.” Katz claims that the badass is, "someone who is “real bad” must be tough, not easily influenced, highly impressionable, or anxious about the opinions that others hold of him; in a phrase, he must not be morally malleable.” This is illustrated in several instances by Butch and Willie. One example is when Willie writes his father for the first time, his father responded with the advice that, “[s]cholarship, reason, and control…were absolutely essential to preventing a violent outburst that could result in more time in prison.” Instead of heeding his father’s advice, Willie discarded his former opinions of his father as a role model, and chose remain on his path of conflict with the system.
According to Katz, the second stage in becoming a badass is the construction of alien aspects in oneself. He claims that one way of doing this is to be “bad” in the street sense, which he says is “a collectively celebrated way of being that transcends good and evil.” This is the rationale that Katz uses to explain the badass’ need for a brutal reputation. This reputation is something that nearly all the Bosket’s consciously sought to cultivate.
Pud Bosket, is the great-grandfather of Willie, lived by the ruffian code that Katz ascribes to being a part of the badass persona. His brother Dandy said of Pud, “’He didn’t bother nobody, but if you pushed him, you had to beat him…[s]tep on his foot, at a dance or walking by, just brush him, and there’d be a fight. He wasn’t never scared.” After beating a man who had come to fight with Dandy over his sister (Dandy’s wife), Pud said, “Don’t step on my reputation. My name is all I got, so I got to keep it. I’m a man of respect.” This statement reveals that part of the reason behind Pud’s violence is his need to maintain his tough-guy image.
Willie, Pud’s great-grandson, also felt strongly about being known as a badass. Even when he was very young, he was so concerned with being tough that it got to the point where, “…teachers often told him he was crazy right to his face…On the street, being called a “crazy nigger” was high praise. A “crazy nigger” was someone who developed a reputation for being unpredictably violent and aggressive.” Butterfield himself here argues the same point as Katz, saying that Willie felt that there was an attitude towards a “crazy nigger” on the street that compelled people to, “…show deference to a person like that.”
Cruelty is also expressive of Katz’s third element of the badass persona, that of meanness. Katz describes this element of being a badass, saying that, “[e]ither alone or in combination with a posture of toughness, the perfection of an alien way is not sufficient to achieve the awesomely deviant presence of the badass,” and that in addition to being merely tough, “…the would-be badass must add a measure of meanness.” The author of All God’s Children relates the following anecdote regarding Willie, writing, “There was one wino on the block whom the boys liked to tease. They urinated in a wine bottle, then gave it to him to drink when he woke up. In the highly charged atmosphere of the street, Willie always tried to outdo the other boys, who were bigger than he was. It was a matter of preserving his respect. So he took penny nails and stuck them in the man’s bare feet.” This illustrates how Willie consciously tried to cultivate the mean reputation that Katz claims is a key part of the badass persona.
Another seduction of crime that Katz mentions is that of righteous slaughter. Sadly, with all the violence described in the book, there are several examples of this attitude that can be found as well. One example of this attitude of morally righteous killing can be found in chapter four of Butterfield’s book. In this chapter he relates the story of Will Herrin, a sharecropper on a white landowner’s farm in Saluda, South Carolina. Butterfield describes how Herrin had worked his farm year after year, only to be told by the landowner that the expenses incurred during the season accounted for any profit that might have been made from the crop. In this way, the landlord was able to scam Herrin out of all the profits from his hard work.
Herrin found the landowner’s annual thievery intolerable, and after one particularly excellent crop, he could take no more. His honor had been unforgivably offended by the landlord, and he went into the field and shot the man, Emanuel Carver, who died from the wound. Herrin had come to think of the situation between the landowner and himself as a struggle between good and evil, and felt that he was fighting for the side of good. Therefore he was able to justify his crime as a righteous killing that set to order the injustice that had been taking place. While most people today would agree that Herrin had been wronged and was morally justified in wishing to take revenge, and also that he had no means of legally getting compensation, it is still true that his crime was a wrong act. He was seduced by the framing of the situation into believing that murder would be the right and just action.
The other theory that I will use to analyze the criminal behavior in All God’s Children is Differential Association theory. This theory is a subset of the category of theories known as Social Learning, and it is very involved with learning’s role as an important cause of criminal activity. Differential association defines learning as involving the application of rewards and punishments, and claims that people tend to associate with groups or individuals that reward their behavior. According to the theory, people learn to define those behaviors that are rewarded as positive behaviors, and learn to repeat these behaviors. Sutherland’s definition of the theory states that when criminal behavior is learned, the learning can include techniques to use in committing a given crime, as well as attitudes, motives, drives, and rationalizations for the criminal activity. This last assertion is key to understanding how Differential Association applies to All God’s Children.
One example in the text is that of James Bosket, Pud’s son. Butterfield writes that James followed by learning from his father’s example, much as those who become lawyers or doctors after their father’s example. He claims that, “James was pursuing the old dream. It was just that his father had beaten and robbed people,” and that James had, “…told his relatives, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a bad man, just like my father.’” Like his father before him, James took to carrying a knife with him at all times, and would sharpen it wherever he was, regardless of company. While his habit was not directly criminal, it shows that the traditions associated with Pud’s deviant tendencies towards violence were learned successfully by the son from the father.
Butch, James’ son, learned some of his violent behavior from life in the streets. Butterfield’s belief that Butch learned behaviors from what took place in his environment in the following passage:
One day, Butch saw two men get into a fight, after an exchange of insults. Each with one hand locked to the other’s and a knife in the free hand, they fought it out. They kept cutting each other until one fell down dead in a pool of blood. Butch was not learning reading, writing, or arithmetic in school, but he was carefully absorbing the lessons of the street. Nothing was more strongly impressed upon him than the need for a boy to fight, and that fighting was socially approved. It was the way the adults he knew lived, and they encouraged the little boys to fight, too.
Butterfield himself concurs here that a learning principle like that of Differential Association is in action here, by claiming that Butch absorbed these examples as he would have a lesson in a classroom. Certainly Butch’s later behavior, including that of stabbing two men to death, shows that this may have had some sort of impact on his values.
Willie grew up idolizing his father Butch for his criminal past. Rose Niles, one of Willie’s teachers at the correctional facility called Wiltwyck, related that when once, after she told Willie that he would be a doctor or lawyer someday, he told her about his father. She came to realize that Willie idolized his father, and he was always saying how great Butch was. According to Butterfield, Willie told Niles, “’He’s in jail for killing two men,” Willie told her. “When I grow up, I want to be just like him.’ This scared Niles. She surmised that Willie believed violence was a way to get close to his father, to get in prison like him.” These feelings indicate that through learning about his father, and during his time in correctional facilities, Willie had learned that criminal behavior was a positive and rewarding path to choose.
Many passages in All God’s Children directly describe Butch and Willie learning violent behaviors from their guardians, both through instruction and from beatings. Many of Willie’s lessons on violence as a method of resolution came from his mother Laura, who had a hard time keeping him under control. In the book, it says that when problems arose, “…she slapped him around… or she would give him a whipping with a belt.” These beatings only reinforced Willie’s belief that the best way to settle problem situations was through physical violence.
One example of one of the Boskets learning positive incentives for violence was the time that Butch was faced with conflict in his neighborhood. Butterfield recounts:
One time, Percy said to Butch, “There’s a boy from King Street, and I know you can kick his ass. Here’s a dollar if you do it.” Butch was afraid at first. The other boy was bigger than he was, two years older, and everyone knew he was mean. Percy sensed Butch’s reluctance and gave him a pep talk. “If you want to be a man, you got to fight to get respect. Now people know me, and they know I don’t take no shit from nobody. But if anyone bothers me, I’d shoot them in a heartbeat.” To demonstrate, Percy snapped his fingers. “Just like that, bam. Better them dead than me.” Even Butch’s grandmother supported his fighting when challenged. “I tell my children to fight it out,” she told her neighbors. “If Butch don’t fight, I’m gonna beat him myself.” So Butch, more afraid not to fight, fought the other boy.
This example shows Butch being taught that violence is the most acceptable means of solving a conflict. Percy’s offering him money gives Butch a positive reward, while his grandmother’s admonitory threats provide reinforcement through the absence of punishment for violent behavior. These lessons teach Butch that violence, although it is criminal behavior, is actually socially acceptable.
There are some situations in which both of these theories can be seen to accurately describe part of what is happening in a situation. There are several in the book, but there are two that one that best shows both theories determining a man’s behavior.
One transpired as Willie went out to the yard to fight another boy who had threatened to sodomize him. As he went out to the yard, another juvenile at Wiltwyck said to him, “’What are you doing, man? Richard will kill you. He’s much bigger than you.’” Drawing on information gathered during his interviews with Willie, Butterfield writes that, “…Willie remembered the the rules of the street and what his mother had taught him. ‘Don’t be bullied,’ she had said. ‘Hit back. To get respect, you’ve got to be the toughest.’” Willie’s righteous anger in response to the other boy’s attempt to violate and psychologically emasculate him combined with his mother’s lessons, and he went out and beat the other boy to the point of needing medical treatment.
The clearest example of all, however, is the moment at which Butch decides to kill the two men in the pawnshop. Both of the theories stand out in Butterfield’s prose, which follows below:
Just at that moment, Butch happened to glimpse [the stolen] photographs behind the cash register. He reached around to reclaim them, and Hurwitz started pushing and grabbing him, to get him out of the shop. Now everything in Butch’s life came together at once. Here was a man calling him a liar, and trying to hustle him, of all people, and flinging insults at him. From the time he was a small boy, he had learned that disrespect was the worst thing a man could do to you. He had been taught to fight, to use physical violence to meet a threat. It was a tradition as old as the country his family came from, as old as Edgefield. “This man is just trying to take advantage of me,” was the thought racing through Butch’s mind. “He’s disrespecting me.”
The next thing Butch can clearly recall is standing in front of the two bodies, covered in blood from the knife wounds he has inflicted. A lifetime of reinforcement towards violent behavior, and the need to defend his self-image as a badass and a man deserving respect had become so integrated into his psyche that his actions came almost as though reflexive. He had been trained all his life to use violence to resolve conflict, and so the passions of the moment were able to overwhelm and seduce him into following through with the murders.
While recounting the violent history of the Bosket family, Fox Butterfield recounts gives the reader look into how the Bosket men came to value a reputation of being tough and mean, as well as how they came to pass these values down to their children through four generations. Using this case study, as well as cases covered in a brief survey of crime throughout the black community, All God’s Children gives the reader a good look at what factors are influential and causative in several kinds of violent crimes. Throughout the book, the roots and foreground causes can be well explained using the two theories of criminology I have chosen to analyze. If one considers the seductive quality of violent crime as a righteous killer or badass protecting one’s reputation, and the repeated lessons in many neighborhoods on the value of violence as a means of setting disputes, it becomes much easier to understand how Butterfield’s subjects came to commit the crimes they did.
Posted: Thu 30 Apr 2009 03:09 Post subject: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence
Quote:
January 26, 1996
NY Times
BOOKS OF THE TIMES;Many Faces of Honor, From Plantation to Ghetto
By PETER DAVIS
ALL GOD'S CHILDREN The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence By Fox Butterfield 389 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.50
Shortly after Lincoln's election in 1860, when South Carolina took the lead in secession and briefly stood alone as an independent republic, one of its eminent judges dissented with the remark that the province was too small for a country, too large for a lunatic asylum. Fox Butterfield might disagree. The South Carolina he illuminates in his history of the Bosket family has spawned violence, sociopathic behavior and general irrationality in quantities that would be the envy of lunatics everywhere.
Willie Bosket, a felon so precocious he was mugging old ladies at the age of 5 and murdering men on subways at 15, has been called the most dangerous and violent criminal in the history of New York State. He is currently held in isolation upstate with a series of padlocking devices that remind his occasional visitors of the way Hannibal Lecter was restrained in "Silence of the Lambs." Mr. Bosket, an African-American who like the fictional Lecter has a genius I.Q., excuses himself on the ground that "I'm only a monster that the system created."
Mr. Butterfield, a reporter for The New York Times, set out to trace precisely what his protagonist means by "the system." Mr. Bosket, now 33, has been in a reformatory or prison since he was 9, except for short periods on the street that he used as opportunities to extend his rap sheet. Though capable of charm and insight, he has continued to commit assaults in penitentiaries and, on one occasion, even in a courtroom. But the system has been carving its designs on the Bosket family for far longer than Willie Bosket's stunted lifetime.
The first Boskets were white South Carolinians, and they owned the black Bosketp. A white Bosket once pledged 138 of his slaves as collateral for a small loan. He later sold many of them, including a field hand named Ruben Bosket, to a rising politician, Francis Pickens, a cousin of the Southern statesman John C. Calhoun. Pickens eventually became the fiercely secessionist Governor of South Carolina.
In chronicling the antebellum Boskets and their owners as elegantly as he does, Mr. Butterfield is after far bigger game than the dramatic contrasts between slaves and masters. Indeed, he is thinking more about similarities, imitations and inherited values than he is about differences. The heart of his thesis is that white Southerners used the concept of honor as an excuse for violence and vigilantism, from duels with each other to postwar lynchings of former slaves, whenever they felt the law was inadequate to their impulses or purposes. While honor was honored among whites, they felt threatened by it and condemned it when blacks aspired to the same goal. Blacks, however, learned scrupulously from their masters. "Honor" on the plantation became "respect" on the streets; in the ghettos where the Bosket family has lived during the 20th century, it is a capital offense for one man to "diss" another.
"Pickens and his fellow Carolina cavaliers had acted in character," Mr. Butterfield tells us. "They had been bold, touchy and violent, and had moved without weighing the consequences. This was the nature of honor. Honor did not calculate risks; it was an ancient warriors' code. Honor was reputation. But in time, this mentality would spread to others in South Carolina, to the Boskets, and in them it would not always be deemed glorious."
The quest for respect among freedmen led to a cycle of dysfunction in the Boskets that Mr. Butterfield follows resourcefully. Unable to provide for their families, the Bosket men sought respect outside their wretched homes -- and outside the law. They scarcely found a law they couldn't break. Like their spiritual progenitors, they became "bold, touchy and violent." Eventually, the Boskets did not so much migrate to Harlem as come to earth there, blown north by tornadoes of racism and poverty. Both Willie Bosket and his father were judged geniuses by the same authorities who were putting them away, first in reformatories, later in prisons. Mr. Bosket's father, Butch, earned his B.A. while in Leavenworth and became the only prisoner in history ever to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He also became a vegetarian and a devotee of yoga, preaching gentleness and peace. "I've literally learned to internalize discipline to levels that approach asceticism," he wrote to a friend. Yet he also wrote, "Man is at essence an atavistic beast . . . a savage primitive child incapable of surviving in the absence of a directly exerted social force."
Prison was the only social force Butch Bosket could recognize for long. Within 10 days after his release from a halfway house, he raped a 6-year-old girl. A few months later he killed himself during a shootout with the police.
Willie Bosket, who never met his father since Butch was in prison for a double murder by the time Willie was born, took over the family business with a vengeance. He claims responsibility for 2,000 crimes, including 200 armed robberies and 25 stabbings, by the time he was 15, the age at which he committed two murders. Mr. Butterfield's story ends with polite society safe from the incarcerated Willie Bosket, but in the lineal heritage from plantation to street, the leveraged transactions involving honor and respect are paid out daily.
Mr. Butterfield's research is so creative, his narrative so compelling, that it would be interesting to know what happened to the white Boskets. Are they still adhering to their ancient codes? Have they died out? Are they corporate cogs in the new South? That is a minor complaint; the book's excellence is present on every page.
Mr. Butterfield, himself a son of the South, straddles the culture with a fitting skepticism where our proclaimed pirtues are concerned. D. H. Lawrence once mused that "the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer." With that observation, Mr. Butterfield might well agree.
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