We read:
"The arrest of two women teachers on charges of having sex with their male students has brought cries of lingering racism in one of South Carolina's most conservative counties and evoked some of the South's oldest and deepest-seated racial taboos. Both women are white. The boys, six in all, are black.
Some of the blacks who make up more than a quarter of Laurens County's 70,000 residents are upset over the handling of the two cases, particularly the release of the teachers on bail.
They say the cases reflect the way crimes by whites against blacks in the segregated South were treated less seriously than other offenses, and blacks who leveled accusations against whites were less likely to be believed. "If this had been black teachers, they would not be out of jail right now," said Corinnie Young, a 49-year-old bookstore employee who is black....
Jerry Peace, the county prosecutor and a white man, said that the teachers are wearing electronic tracking devices and that their release on bail, $125,000 for one, $110,000 for the other, was based not on race, but on the danger to the community and the likelihood that the defendants might flee.
In any case, it would be unusual for someone accused of such a crime to be held without bail. Deborah Ahrens, a visiting professor of criminal law at the University of South Carolina, said of the bail amounts for the two teachers: "For the clients that I've represented in the past that were up for similar offenses, that sounds about right."
Source
That the teachers should be presumed innocent until proven guilty is apparently not accepted by the protesting blacks. Why? Is that itself racist? One might have thought that the white teachers would be praised for their apparent lack of racial discrimination, though.
For another one of these absurd prosecutions, but one involving whites only, see here.
