The woman, Adriana Torres-Flores, 38, a longtime illegal immigrant from Mexico, slept on the floor with only a shoe for a pillow, and with nothing to drink except her own urine, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. There was no bathroom in the cell.
A bailiff had apparently forgotten that he placed Ms. Torres-Flores, a mother of three, in the cell last Thursday, and simply left her in the empty courthouse, in Fayetteville, over the weekend
...“He just flat forgot about her,” Mr. Cantrell said, adding that the bailiff, Jarrod Hankins, had been placed on administrative leave, having been on the job a few months. “It was just a horrible mistake,” Mr. Cantrell said. (NYT)
Is it just a coincidence that bailiff Jarrod Hankins so easily forgot about the existence of an undocumented woman or is it a metaphor for a whole class of people?
Found via Shakesville and Citizen Orange
2 comments:
Why is this article tabbed "arkansas bigots"? I mean if all other facts were equal, and the defendant happened to be a white male, this article would have never found its way into a blog. In that case, who's the bigot?
I mean the bailiff was a guy who wasn't even done with his probationary period, he had a good job, he's probably going to lose it now, he wasn't actively abusive, he was simply incompetant. That behavior seems too irresponsible and thoughtless to be bigoted, in my opinion. The guy was just an idiot who didn't do his job the way he was supposed to.
I honestly doubt that he's sitting at home now on his unemployed, bigoted ass thinking "gee I can't pay the rent but at least I got that illegal immigrant good! hehehe"
I guess because of this part of the article:
"In Little Rock, Rita Sklar, executive director of the A.C.L.U. of Arkansas, said the organization was very concerned.
“There certainly have been a lot of problems in that corner of the state, in terms of police treatment of Latinos and bigoted statements by government officials,” Ms. Sklar said. “We’re looking into the general problem in northwest Arkansas of racial profiling and abuse of power.”"
but point taken
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