That's Driving While Black. He has been in prison for ten years and is scheduled to be executed on August 30, 2007. He watches his daughter Nydes grow up from behind bullet proof glass.
Ten years ago, Kenneth was a young college student, a music lover, and recent father. Born in Austin, Texas, he spent his high school years working for several small record companies in the area. In 1995 he began his first year at St. Phillips College majoring in sociology, and less than a year later, in May of ‘96, he started his own label, Tribulation Records. Kenneth had a bright future ahead of him, no doubt.
But a year later, Kenneth was convicted of murder. The previous August, he had been driving a car with three friends in the San Antonio area. One of those riding in the car, Mauriceo Brown, got out in front of a party to talk to a woman, Mary Patrick. While Kenneth and his other two friends were eighty feet away, waiting in the car, they heard a gunshot. Brown had shot Patrick's boyfriend, Michael LaHood.
Kenneth never had a gun in his hand, never saw, let alone aimed at LaHood, and never he pulled the trigger. Even the prosecution admits this. And he did not know anyone was going to be shot that night.
But according to Texas' "law of parties," Kenneth should have anticipated the loss of life that was to come that night because he was in the same car as Brown. It's a law straight out of a Franz Kafka novel, where the accused are expected to have an almost psychic ability to predict when a crime is going to happen.
Kenneth's execution has been set for August 30th, 2007. He is guilty of nothing except driving a car.
Read the rest of Alexander Billet's article
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