According to the Hood Book of Etiquette, a plea deal is the same as snitchin’.
Via NOLA Com
As the trial date approached for the two men accused of murdering her daughter, Margaret Washington decided to seek some small measure of mercy for them. She knew that if 28-year-old Myron Jackson and 23-year-old Jeffrey Washington were convicted as charged they’d never come home again.
What she wanted, she said in a New Orleans coffee shop Wednesday afternoon, was 20 years for the two men accused of killing her “princess,” Marguerite La Joy Washington, an 18-year-old freshman at Dillard University. Margaret Washington imagined that with a finite prison sentence the two defendants could get an education, learn a trade and be released in time for them to “possibly do something with (their) life.”
After she expressed her feelings to prosecutors in District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office, here’s what they came up with: The defendants could plead guilty to manslaughter and get 27 years. Subtracting the time they’d get for good behavior and the time they’d already served, they’d be left with the 20 years Margaret Washington sought.
But as my colleague Helen Freund reported, Jackson noisily rejected the offer from the defendants’ table in Judge Keva Landrum-Johnson’s courtroom. “We ain’t do that! We ain’t do that!” he yelled. Freund wrote that Jeffrey Washington, no relation to the victim or her mother, appeared to be close to signing the deal — until his co-defendant talked him out of it.
Margaret Washington thought that Jeffrey Washington let himself be persuaded by Jackson, too. She also described pressure from the defendants’ supporters. She said they yelled “Don’t let them do that to y’all!” Thus, they mischaracterized an offer of mercy as a snare.
Margaret Washington sat in the courtroom thinking, “Well, I’ll be doggone.” And days after both men were found guilty of second-degree murder, she was still shaking her head at what she called “the stupidity of it all.”