Media have no interest in the women of color exonerated by Trump
By TATIANA PROPHET
Chelsea Handler tweeted on Tuesday something about how Trump pardoned people of a certain color.
Then Twitter schooled her.
Handler tweeted: “While our president exonerates criminals and releases them from jail, notice what color they all are.”
Maybe Handler was confused because mainstream media has written very little about the four women of color who received clemency from President Donald Trump on Tuesday. TMZ and Newsmax wrote about Angela Stanton, who received a full pardon after serving a home confinement sentence in 2007 for involvement in a stolen-vehicle ring. She was also a cast member on Real Housewives of Atlanta (a really good version of that reality franchise). Tynice Hall was 19 when she “turned a blind eye” to her live-in boyfriend’s drug deal at her home.
Hall’s account on Change dot org of what happened to her case should make all of us shudder. She was sentenced as if she was the chief conspirator of the operation, not a nearly unwitting accomplice, she wrote. She was sentenced to 18 years in prison and served 14 of those.
Crystal Munoz played “a small role in a marijuana smuggling ring,” according to a White House press release. She had been behind bars for 12 years.
Judith Negron was 30 percent co-owner of a mental health facility that “engaged in a scheme to defraud the federal government,” also according to the White House. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison and had served eight of those.
Stanton was sponsored by Alveda King, while the other three women were supported by Alice Johnson, who famously was pardoned after a long campaign she waged from prison that caught the eye of celebrity Kim Kardashian, wife of Kanye West.
https://twitter.com/chelseahandler/status/1229916885275201537
While our president exonerates criminals and releases them from jail, notice what color they all are.
— Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) February 18, 2020
OMG y’all I can’t breathe!!!! I’m finally free 🙌🏽🙌🏽🙌🏽 @realDonaldTrump did it!!!https://t.co/6QfLIL5PDD
— Angela Stanton-King (@theangiestanton) February 18, 2020
And there is very little written about those three. Hall is black, Muñoz is Navajo, and Negron is Hispanic (see links on their photos).
Imagine that. The media is not interested in these women’s stories. A Mother Jones blog mentions all of the pardonees, but calls them all “people we’ve .never heard of” and calls their selection by Trump “random.”
Wrote political blogger Kevin Drum:
“I have no special opinion about whether any of these people deserve a pardon—though Kerik sure as hell seems an unlikely choice. What I do object to is the random pardoning of well-known people who happen to catch Trump’s eye. There are lots and lots of ordinary schlubs who deserve a pardon every bit as much as these more famous folks, but they’ll never get one.”
What about the First Step Act? This act has already resulted in the release of 3,100 people from prison, as well as reducing the sentences of more than a 1,691 still incarcerated (simply from “reducing the disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine threshold amounts triggering mandatory minimum sentences.” Justice is so jargony, even when it’s finally here! Yaay!
Is it that the media don’t understand the First Step Act? Or maybe they’re too busy. Either way, the curating and censorship of complete facts by the country’s most powerful media outlets is becoming a little strange. Shareholders, you need to hire more people. Yours are stretched too thin.
Another thing that’s very disappointing about media coverage of Trump’s recent pardons: They fail to give credit where credit is due: the hard work of each of these women, in spite of relatively little fame, to plead their own case.
