Nov 2, 2023
Riverboat Brawl Suspect Sentenced To Anger Management
- 8 minutes
The riverboat brawl that happened
back in Alabama, Montgomery, Alabama.
So we've moved it to the point where now
people are being charged and arrested.
Two of the five defendants arrested in
connection with the riverboat brawl in
Montgomery, Alabama in August have pled
guilty in court on October the 27th.
[00:00:17]
48 year old, Richard Roberts pled guilty
to two misdemeanor assault charges and
will serve 32 days of a four
month suspended sentence.
He will serve time on the weekend
at a Perry County facility and
perform 100 hours of community survey for
assaulting 16-year-old
[00:00:33]
deckhand Daniel Warren and Harriet II
riverboat co-captain Damien Pickett.
Roberts will have to serve his full
sentence if he violates the terms of his
plea, which he begins
serving on November the 4th.
Listen, before we carry on,
we should acknowledge that this person
[00:00:52]
assaulted a minor, and his sentence
was only four months suspended.
He'll do 32 days, and he'll have
the luxury of doing them on the weekend,
basically saying,
we're not gonna interrupt your income.
We're gonna allow you
to live the same life,
that you're gonna have the same luxuries
that you've always had beyond this happen.
[00:01:09]
And then the racist people that you
hang out with will celebrate you for
being a hero, a local hero, for hitting or
standing up to Black people who
are defending another Black person.
This is tragic because we know so
many people in that very state.
Montgomery is less than 2
hours away from Selma, and
[00:01:26]
when I was doing organizing work in Selma,
Alabama, there were young men,
17-year-old young men who had
been locked up without bail.
And when I say out without bail,
it's not really without bail,
they don't have the funds
to make $100 bail.
So they've spent two years
in jail waiting on trial for
[00:01:44]
a crime that probably wouldn't
have got them two years anyway.
So this is disgusting that he
gets the luxury of going home
after touching a minor in this manner.
I'm frustrated beyond belief about this,
and that sentence is so light, Yasmin?
[00:02:02]
>> Speaker 2: Yeah, that riverboat brawl,
we all remember that one.
So, we love to see justice happen when
it happens, but as you pointed out,
I don't know if this is enough.
And enough would be defined as
a punishment that actually would deter
future crimes like this
one from taking place.
It would deter this man from committing
an act like he did in the future, and
[00:02:21]
it would deter others like him from
also committing a similar act.
And whenever we see these people get off
so easily, it really doesn't do that.
And as you pointed out,
sometimes it has the opposite effect,
sometimes people say, look, I can do
these things and get away with it.
I might have to pay a small fine, I might
have a little bit of inconvenience in my
[00:02:40]
life as a result, but it'll be worth it.
And not only that, but
this guy went viral, we all know his name,
we're talking about him on
shows like this right now.
Sometimes when these incidents go viral,
it does help in that sometimes the county
or the state, whoever will say, you know
what, just book them with something to
[00:02:58]
know all of America off of our backs
just to show that we did something.
But who's to say,
if this hadn't gone viral,
if this wasn't recorded the way it was,
who's to say that he would have gotten
this much of a punishment
in the first place?
We don't know, and
we can't really speculate about that.
But it is interesting to see how
easily people get off with things,
[00:03:16]
even though, as you pointed out,
this is a minor,
this is a crime in most places and
would be regardless of race.
Even just that in and
of itself should have been punished more
severely than what we're seeing here.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, we know that doing
harm to Black minors does not carry
[00:03:32]
the same weight.
A cop killed Tamir Rice, 12-year-old
playing in the park with a toy,
and then a few years later got another
job as a police officer in another state.
>> Speaker 2: And
that's the precedent that's set, yeah.
>> It is, you're absolutely right.
Let's talk about the second sentence.
A judge also sentenced 21-year-old,
Mary Todd to complete anger
[00:03:51]
management classes after she
pled guilty to harassment.
According to WSA News,
Todd was the first to enter a guilty plea.
The third defendant that's been sentenced,
42-year-old Reggie Ray,
inspired an array of memes and
social media
[00:04:07]
commentary after he grabbed a folding
chair to defend himself against the mob.
Here are some of those memes.
[MUSIC]
[00:05:08]
>> Speaker 1: For those of you all that
don't know that these songs are remade in
the harmony and the melody and
the rhythm of the national Negro anthem.
Lift every voice and sing and
people that don't know about that song,
that song was not originally written
as the National Negro Anthem.
[00:05:24]
Johnson wrote that song in response to
what were the top songs in America at
that time.
Some of those songs were The N Word, Don't
Have a Flag, and some other songs that
were bashing Black people for
not having a nation to call their own.
This is when that song was written,
that was the turn of the 20th century,
[00:05:43]
right after slavery ended and
the Civil War was over.
We saw a lot of songs being popular in
American culture that were anti-Black,
and the song was written to counter that.
Now it's being used to say fight back.
In a rare change for
GoFundMe, we see that Ray,
[00:06:00]
who was charged with the chair
disorderly conduct, and
his arrest prompted a GoFundMe that has
raised $296,675 to cover his court costs.
His case was also
continued until November.
Usually the GoFundMe case, GoFundMe
are for people like Carl Rittenhouse,
[00:06:18]
who raised an ungodly amount of
money after he murdered two people.
Like I said, the case of Alan Tod,
24-year-old and
26-year-old Zacharyman Shipman, who
were charged with third degree assault,
were also continued to November the 16th.
[00:06:34]
So that's just around a week from now or
a couple of weeks from now.
And I'm willing to bet they too will
be doing nothing, maybe parole,
maybe community service, they will not
spend significant time in this case.
When we saw, first of all, it wasn't just
if the charges was against Black people,
[00:06:51]
they wouldn't have just been charged for
the attack on the white person.
Like these people, when they attacked him,
they sat there for
a long time blocking a city
riverboat from being able to park.
That would have been a part of the crime
that Black people would have been
tacked on too.
We don't see this, and I keep talking
about Black people because it's important
[00:07:09]
that we remember what happened here.
And how the legacy of these spaces,
Mississippi and
now Alabama are still playing out and
it's not too far or
white supremacy is still souped as
you're in these spaces, Jasmine?
>> Yeah, and I think the reason,
why this all went so
[00:07:27]
viral is obviously it was very meme
worthy and that was really a lot of fun.
But it's also an instance of Black
people fighting back, right?
And I think in this country, Black people,
minorities, but specifically Black people,
especially Black people, have been so
repressed by the government and
[00:07:45]
by the cops and police forces and
things like that,
that over time they just stop
fighting back as much, right?
If the cops are there in your face, you're
told to just comply, just cooperate,
be cooperative.
And sometimes even that
doesn't go in your favor,
sometimes even that goes very wrong.
[00:08:01]
And at some point, people are gonna be
tired of just trying to be placated and
trying to comply and
trying to be cooperative,
because if you hold a man down long
enough, he's going to fight back.
And so I think that this whole
moment was so indicative of that,
it was a celebration of that moment.
[00:08:17]
And I'm not a part of the Black community,
so
though I can't really speak
from that perspective, but
I can say from an outsider's perspective,
it was good to see.
>> I'm on the inside of that community,
and you're damn right it was good to see.
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