Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Criminal Law

: The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Commonwealth v. Vassell---finally "justice" after 2 1/2 years of injustice

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

In Our Opinion: Commonwealth v. Vassell By Daily Hampshire Gazette 06/09/2010 The most talked-about criminal case in Hampshire County reached its "disposition" last week not with decades of threatened prison time for defendant Jason Vassell but the legal dialing down that should have come two years ago. Very late one night in early February 2008, three young men who had been drinking clashed in the lobby of a University of Massachusetts dorm. For the first time, we can look in on that dismal scene, through surveillance video released by prosecutors on Friday and available at GazetteNET. We see a lurching choreography: two visitors who arrived at the dorm together, both white, tangling with a resident, Vassell, who is black. Race is hard to detect on the video; this is meaningless violence - shoves, punches, jabs with a pocketknife - enacted by people who should have been asleep hours earlier...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on June 10, 2010 (boomark / email).