Mississippi
Mississippi man gets 42 months in prison for cross burning – WTOP News
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi man who burned a cross in his entrance yard to intimidate his Black neighbors…
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi man who burned a cross in his entrance yard to intimidate his Black neighbors was sentenced Thursday to 42 months in jail.
U.S. Southern District of Mississippi Choose Sul Ozerden handed down the sentence after Axel Cox, 24, pleaded responsible to a federal hate crime in December.
Cox, of Gulfport, was charged with violating the Truthful Housing Act over a December 2020 incident through which he put collectively a wood cross in his entrance yard and propped it up so his Black neighbors may see it. He then doused it with motor oil and lit it on hearth. He additionally addressed the household with racially derogatory language, information say.
“This cross burning was an abhorrent act that used a conventional image of hatred and violence to stoke worry and drive a Black household out of their residence,” mentioned Assistant Lawyer Common Kristen Clarke of the Justice Division’s Civil Rights Division.
Clarke added, “Whereas one may assume cross-burnings and white supremacist threats and violence are issues of the previous, the unlucky actuality is that these incidents proceed as we speak.”
The Ku Klux Klan and different white supremacist teams traditionally practiced cross burnings to intimidate Black and Jewish individuals.
A grand jury indicted Cox in September 2022. His legal professional, Jim Davis, filed a discover of intent for him to plead responsible to the cross burning in November. Davis didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark Thursday.
Davis advised the Biloxi Solar Herald that Cox was reacting to his neighbors allegedly capturing and killing his canine. He added that his consumer acted “completely inappropriately.”
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This story has been up to date to right that Cox was sentenced to 42 months in jail, not 42 years as an preliminary Justice Division information launch said. The departed has corrected the sentence size. With AP Photograph.
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Michael Goldberg is a corps member for the Related Press/Report for America Statehouse Information Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit nationwide service program that locations journalists in native newsrooms to report on undercovered points. Observe him on Twitter at twitter.com/mikergoldberg.
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