#wednesday finding out tyler died in prison

[remusjohnslupin]

@realmermaid333: I'm a Dementor. Misery makes me stronger.

[avaduvernayfans]

How Queen Sugar Turns the Stereotype of the Drug-Addicted Black Mother on Its Head By Jonita Davis | July 11, 2017 | 12:00pm Queen Sugar embodies many of the elements of a real black family in the Bordelon siblings, Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe), Charlie (Dawn-Lyen Gardener) and Nova (Rutina Wesley)—elements that I can identify with, or thought I could until I encountered Darla (Bianca Lawson), Ralph Angel’s ex. She’s introduced in the pilot episode, when Ralph Angel calls her after his father (Glynn Turman) dies. She talks nervously about a job and wanting to see her son, Blue (Ethan Hutchison). We learn later that Darla is an ex-addict and ex-prostitute. I instantly didn’t like her, and I’m not alone: From the beginning, even Twitter was lit with doubt about her. We wait for her to flake on her responsibilities, stab the Bordelon family in the back, steal, get high. But Darla does none of this; about halfway through Season One, I figured out that Darla was an unfamiliar figure. Through her, Queen Sugar upends the dangerous stereotype of the drug-addicted black mother, which not only appears in film and on TV, but also shapes the way these women are treated in the world. Darla’s arc works to restore humanity to the character, showing addiction as an illness and the addict as a human being struggling against that illness and the reputation—the stigma—she carries as a result of it. The pilot’s introduction of Darla also reveals that she and Ralph Angel are estranged, and that it’s probably her fault: By this time, we know that Ralph Angel raises Blue with the help of his Aunt Violet (Tina Lifford) and her boyfriend, Hollywood (Omar J. Dorsey). The call is probably a moment of weakness on Ralph Angel’s part, but for Darla it’s a way, finally, to prove herself. She has a new job, earning steady money and benefits. She can finally help with Blue. But for some reason, we don’t trust her. After all, the TV series that depicts the black mother as an addict usually makes her the villain: The woman is a train wreck, finding drama in everything she does. She schemes and breaks her family’s hearts, especially those of her children. She undermines the family’s success, their happiness, their very togetherness, and is often sent packing by the other characters simply to maintain stability, to prevent separation, which has always been the destruction of the black family. The type often turns up in dramas about black families. The constant plotting, the disappearances, the betrayals, the neglectful attitude toward her children are all typical moves for the drug-addicted black mom in popular culture. When we see one, we’re already predisposed to distrust her. Consider Empire, in which Cookie Lyon’s (Taraji P. Henson) sister, Carol (Tasha Smith), is a recovering addict and mom. Carol often abandons her kids with her other sister, Candace (Vivica A. Fox); she’s stolen from Cookie, brought legal trouble down upon the Lyons’ record label, and allowed an FBI agent investigating the Lyons to potentially find enough evidence enough to destroy the Lyons’ record label and send Cookie back to jail. Even in Empire’s most recent season, the series’ third, we don’t trust Carol, despite the fact that she’s gotten clean and is eager to help Cookie—always plotting herself—stop Empire’s Vegas expansion. Despite its reputation for progressive casting and storytelling, the same stereotypical traits appear in Orange is the New Black, too: Season Two’s Vee (Lorraine Toussaint), a former drug dealer, is a perfect example. Vee takes her former foster daughter, Taystee (Tasha Jefferson), under her wing once again, along with Taystee’s fellow inmates. Vee does so to manipulate them into starting a rivalry against the white and Hispanic women, where there previously was (relative) harmony. Although her addiction is to selling the drugs, not to using them, the result is the same: Her entire arc is permeated by her need to run Litchfield’s drug trade, exploit the girls who’ve become her “family,” and wreak havoc throughout the prison. Vee’s operation even convinces the inmates to reuse tampon tubes in order to smuggle cigarettes, forcing them to forgo their own dignity to help Vee turn a profit. You can never trust “mom,” in this rendering, because her selfish desires transcend the familial bond. There are other examples. In the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode “Dolls,” Gloria Reuben plays Violet, an ex-addict whose child is found mummified in a dumpster. (Violet is initially blamed for the death because “junkies lie all the time,” a refrain that Detective Tutuola, played by Ice-T, repeats like a broken record.) Columnist Charles M. Blow has accused Tyler Perry of building a career on the backs of stereotypical “crack mothers.” Seeing black moms who are also addicts portrayed as the villains in so many films and TV series then becomes the way we see and treat these mothers in real life. We criminalize addiction though it’s an illness. We rip mothers who are addicts from their children before offering support, making the journey to family reunification even more arduous. We accept the dearth of resources devoted to stabilizing the home environment. Distrust of addicts and ex-addicts thins out their job prospects. Add in systemic racism, which exacerbates all of the aforementioned challenges for black women, and the result is a mother doomed before she even begins recovery. This is why Queen Sugar’s Darla is so important. The series plays on the audience’s prejudice in the beginning, only to slap us in the face with it as Darla proves herself to be everything but the stereotypical addict. Darla is human, of course, struggling to right her wrongs despite the world being dead-set against her: At the outset, we see that Darla’s boss is a jackass who waves her ex-addict status over her head every time she tries to do good; she has to flake on watching Blue during Ralph Angel’s father’s funeral because the employer forces her to stay for a longer shift than promised. She can’t call because customers are honking and screaming at her to do her job. The girl is losing every way she turns. Later, when Darla shows up at the funeral, Ralph Angel tries to get up to stop her, thinking she’s up to something. Is she showing up in such a public place because she knows he can’t make a scene without disgracing the family? No. She’s just trying to make up for the earlier mess. Darla is trying to make things right. But we see this and still don’t trust her. During the hurricane that makes landfall in the second half of Season One, we find out why the family despises her so much: Hollywood once found infant Blue and drugged-out Darla in a trashy motel room, on a dirty bed. Darla was having sex with a john for money. This is the experience that the family has to go on, so it’s no wonder that Violet takes so long to forgive Darla, even after she stands in front of the woman, tears in her eyes, and says, “I want… to thank you.” Vi is as shocked as the audience at this, but Darla goes on, talking about how she never got a chance to thank Violet and Hollywood for rescuing her baby. She told them that she didn’t want to live, and Hollywood came, took baby Blue “gently” and kicked out the john. He then covered Darla’s naked body and told her, “God bless you, girl.” “When he left, I thought, ‘Thank God. Thank God Blue will be okay.’” This is the speech of a woman who’s selfless, and sincere about her quest for forgiveness. She ends with, “I want to pay back my debts and bring goodness where I once brought discord. I hope you see fit to let me.” How many Queen Sugar fans still didn’t trust Darla even after this affecting sequence, after all that we had seen in her story? I must admit that I continued to have reservations as well. It was only after the season ended—with no Darla-ignited sparks—that I had to ask myself why I didn’t trust her in the first place. The answer is that we, as viewers, have been conditioned by popular culture, in particular TV dramas, to see drug-addicted black mothers only one way, even if they’ve in recovery and are no longer under the influence. No matter how these black mothers atone, they are forever the villains. The depiction of Darla in Queen Sugar not only changes how addiction is portrayed on the small screen; the character challenges the real-life stereotype as well. In the hands of creator Ava DuVernay, Lawson, and the series’ writers and directors, Darla dismantles our impulse to prejudge and mistreat black mothers and addicts as they work to reform their lives and their families. If we can get past the stereotype to see Darla’s humanity, humility and sincerity, the same must be true of women off-screen as well—women who’ve been cast as villains for far too long. Queen Sugar airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on OWN. Read Paste’s episodic reviews here.

[theconservativebrief]

One day after finding former Texas police officer Roy Oliver guilty of murder in the 2017 shooting of 15 year-old Jordan Edwards, a Texas jury has sentenced Oliver to 15 years in prison.

The sentence was announced on Wednesday evening after several hours of deliberation, according to CNN. The jury also fined Oliver $10,000 for the incident.

On Tuesday, the same jury convicted Oliver on murder charges stemming from Edwards’s death, which occurred after Oliver fired into a car of teenagers. Edwards, a black high school freshman, was trying to leave a house party with friends at the time. He was sitting in the passenger’s seat when the shooting occurred. Edwards’s brothers were also in the car at the time of the shooting.

Oliver, who was fired from his position with the Balch Springs Police Department for violating department policy, was also found not guilty on two charges of aggravated assault.

The conviction came on the second day of jury deliberations. As the murder trial continued last week, Oliver testified that he had no choice but to open fire, saying that the teens’ car was moving toward his partner. But his former partner, Tyler Gross, testified that he did not believe he was in any danger at the time. According to the Associated Press, a prosecutor also referred to Oliver as “trigger-happy” during the trial, with one prosecutor noting that only nine seconds passed between Oliver drawing his weapon and opening fire.

The shooting drew national attention, with Edwards’s death at the hands of law enforcement becoming another high-profile example of the racial disparities in police use of force that have fueled a national conversation about race and policing after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

Police in Balch Springs, Texas, a majority-minority Dallas suburb, originally claimed there was an altercation with the vehicle. Edwards, who was unarmed, was sitting in the front passenger’s seat of the car, which held four other unarmed teens, including Edwards’s brother, according to family attorney Lee Merritt.

Oliver shot at the car with a rifle. A bullet broke through the front passenger’s window and hit Edwards. Shortly after, Edwards was rushed to a hospital, where he died from gunshot injuries. No officers were injured in the incident.

Balch Springs Police Chief Jonathan Haber at first said the car backed up toward responding officers “in an aggressive manner.”

After his original statement, however, Haber said he “misspoke.” He clarified that the car was in fact driving away from officers, not toward them. He added, “After reviewing video, I don’t believe that it [the shooting] met our core values.”

Neighbors told local reporter Gabriel Roxas that the party Edwards left was crowded, with unsupervised, drunk teens fighting before gunshots were fired. According to the family attorney, Edwards “was leaving a house party because he thought it was getting dangerous.”

Mesquite Independent School District, where Edwards was a freshman in high school, said in a statement that he was “a good student who was very well liked by his teachers, coaches, and his fellow students.” Edwards played football at the school, and one of his teammates called him “the best running back I ever played with.”

“It’s not a fairy tale. He really was that great,” prosecutor Mike Snipes said during the trial. “He really did have a 3.5 GPA, he really did want to go to Alabama to play football for them, he really did work out every day, he really did have a million friends, he really did have a nickname ‘Smiley.’ He was the real deal.”

What stands out about the verdict in the Edwards case is that police are very rarely prosecuted for shootings — and not just because the law allows them wide latitude to use force on the job. Sometimes the investigations fall onto the same police department the officer is from, which creates major conflicts of interest. Other times the only available evidence comes from eyewitnesses, who may not be as trustworthy in the public eye as a police officer.

“There is a tendency to believe an officer over a civilian, in terms of credibility,” David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer who co-wrote Prosecuting Misconduct: Law and Litigation, previously told Amanda Taub for Vox. “And when an officer is on trial, reasonable doubt has a lot of bite. A prosecutor needs a very strong case before a jury will say that somebody who we generally trust to protect us has so seriously crossed the line as to be subject to a conviction.”

If police are charged, they’re very rarely convicted. The National Police Misconduct Reporting Project analyzed 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from April 2009 through December 2010. They found that only 33 percent were convicted, and only 36 percent of officers who were convicted ended up serving prison sentences. Both of those are about half the rate at which members of the public are convicted or incarcerated.

The statistics suggest it would be a truly rare situation for Oliver to be charged and convicted of a crime in the wake of Edwards’s death. But in this case, that’s exactly what happened.

But news of the sentencing also proved frustrating for Edwards’s family. Prosecutors sought a sentence of at least 60 years, CNN notes, while the defense pushed for a sentence between two and 20 years.

“He actually can see life again after 15 years,” Charmaine Edwards, Jordan’s mother, said when speaking about the sentence. “And that’s not enough because Jordan can’t see life again.”

“Although we wanted more years, this is a start for us,” she added.

Original Source -> Former Texas police officer sentenced to 15 years for 2017 shooting of Jordan Edwards

via The Conservative Brief

[stopthefeeling]

What’d Neighbours do?

First I’m gonna deeply apologise for taking a few days to answer this, I wanted to wait a bit until people had seen it then… got busy and kinda forgot about it sorry!

So in around November time last year (fireworks night I’m pretty sure) a guy called Hamish got killed, ended up face down in a hot tub. He was a bad guy, emotionally manipulated and used everyone, especially his newfound son, Tyler. He isolated him from his family, turned him against them, broke him and his long-term girlfriend apart… all so he could go on the run with Tyler and use Tyler’s boat he’d just inherited from the dude he thought was his father, who’d just died. Anyway, nasty dude, fucked over everyone, a cheat a liar and all round piece of shit.

That turned into a whodunit, they teased the killer would be revealed at Christmas… Tyler was arrested for it, turns out he’d hit Hamish over the head with a garden gnome in a moment of anger and left him there. Everyone decided Hamish must have ended up unconscious, fell into the hot tub and drowned. Easy enough, he tried to go on the run with his girlfriend who he’d got back with, got caught, ended up in prison and left the show around February.

Storyline ended and it all focused on Piper’s grief over the end of their relationship (the girlfriend, who he ended it with while he was in prison so she didn’t wait for him).

Fast forward a few months, a new guy comes onto the show, Cassius. He’s a gardener, latest eye candy, everyone ogles him, I roll my eyes. Turns out he’s this super sweet book lover on the inside, Piper realises she maybe can move on from Tyler, it’s a will they won’t they for aages then about a month ago??? They got together. Then it’s shown Cassius is secretive and having hushed phone calls, is freaked out by spending time in the garden with the hot tub so we’re all ?????

It builds in intensity and in flashbacks we find out he was involved in Piper’s life before we ever met him… her sister’s baby had been kidnapped and it turned out Cassius had been the one to find the baby and put him on her doorstep, and when Piper got stranded on an island for days he rescued her and took her back to the mainland. These two incidents were both related to Hamish’s girlfriend/partner in crime Louise, she kidnapped the baby and she tried to flee on the boat Piper had accidently fallen asleep on… hence Louise putting Piper on the island, fleeing alone and leaving her stranded. Then we find out Cassius is talking to his mum… his big secret has gotta be that his mum is Louise???

But no, we found out on Wednesday that he’s Hamish’s son! And not just that, he was there the night Hamish was killed! After Tyler hit Hamish, Cassius came onto the scene and yelled at Hamish a lot basically, then in a moment of madness decided a little dunking his head under the water would be fun. Oops, he just killed his dad!

Turns out all along it wasn’t Tyler who was the killer, neighbours were playing the long game and making us think it was Tyler, writing him out of the show, all to lull us into a false sense of security, only to pull the rug from under us 8 MONTHS after the killer was supposedly revealed. It was shocking, and it was fucking brilliant. It was never leaked or anything either, one of soaps best kept secrets. Just astonishing and captivating and so bloody clever (Also it means my favourite character didn’t commit murder so it makes me very happy)

ETA: Should also point out the reason Cassius came to the suburb and posed as a gardener was because he's an idiot and left a gold medallion with his name on it at the scene of the crime and needed an excuse to dig up gardens to try and find it!

[helloworlddemo1122-yahoopar-blog]

'Criminal Minds' Boss on Plans for 300th Episode and Finale Twist: There's No Winning (Exclusive)

Warning: Spoiler alert! Do not proceed if you have not watched Wednesday's two-hour finale of Criminal Minds.

We're officially worried.

On Wednesday's finale of Criminal Minds, titled "Believer," the BAU team members discovered that Agent Owen Quinn (guest star James Urbaniak) wasn't the agent they should've been worried about during his year as a hostage. It was Special Agent Mary Meadows (guest star Karen David) who turned out to be a member of the cult led by The Messiah, currently locked up by the BAU.

The final scene ended on a cliffhanger when Agent Meadows pulled out her gun and pointed it at Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), who had put the pieces together a minute too late, and gave him an ultimatum: Join them and help get The Messiah out or Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness), being held hostage by The Messiah's followers at gunpoint, dies. So what is Reid's next move?

"He probably has five game plans happening in his head in that moment, as he's holding the gun at Meadows," showrunner Erica Messer tells ET of the season 13-ending cliffhanger. "Because what he won't do is anything jeopardizing Garcia, losing her life and being hurt in any way. He's trying to figure out 'What do I do? What is the bigger plan here? Why do you need The Messiah out?'"

With Reid faced with making a difficult decision, there's a very good chance that "given that choice, we know what Reid's going to do because he's certainly not going to let Garcia die," she says. "The argument is still there that he's there holding a gun on Meadows, who's holding a gun on him, and there's somebody else holding a gun on Garcia. There's no win right there if everybody pulled the trigger. It would be horrific."

In the finale, Special Agent Mary Meadows (Karen David, center) is revealed to be the agent who's turned and part of The Messiah.

CBS

Though Criminal Minds has yet to be officially renewed for a 14th season by CBS, Messer revealed that the writers are already "talking about what that next episode would be," which would mark the series' landmark 300th episode.

"There are many different ways to go, but, obviously, we want our wonderful heroes to be in the 300th episode," she hinted of the upcoming premiere, if the show earns a renewal. "It would probably be a matter of our team trying to solve one of the biggest cases they've ever seen without two of the most important players on their team."

Messer addressed potential worries that Reid could find his way back down the rabbit hole, if Meadows lures him into the cult with an intriguing enough offer.

"It's not about Reid joining the cult as a cult member, it's more helping Meadows release the leader," Messer says. "I don't think we would ever believe that Reid would ever sacrifice his belief system to be a part of a cult, but if he feels like, 'I'm doing the wrong for the right reason,' that's something that he's justified before in his time away in prison, even. Sometimes you have to bend the rules to do the right thing."

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