So reports the Chicago Tribune:
Getaway driver in Hadiya Pendleton slaying sentenced to 42 years in prison
Cleopatra Cowley spoke at the sentencing hearing of the final defendant convicted in the shooting of her daughter, more than eight years after the 15-year-old honor student’s slaying sparked a national outcry against Chicago’s gun violence.
“Kenneth Williams is equally responsible for the physical death of our daughter, Hadiya Pendleton, the death of her dreams and the generational deaths of her children and grandchildren,” Cowley said at the hearing.
After more than an hour of testimony on Tuesday afternoon, a judge sentenced the getaway driver to 42 years in prison.
Cook County Judge Diana Kenworthy ordered Kenneth Williams, 29, to serve 35 years for a first-degree murder conviction along with an additional seven years for aggravated battery convictions.
“I cannot take responsibility for something I had no active participation, no inactive participation,” [Williams] said.
"Progressive" activists here in the Bay Area argue that felony murder charges are unfair, racist etc. A leading spokesman for this cause is the San Francisco DA, Chesa Boudin. Of course he has a certain ax to grind on this subject as his parents who were members of the Weatherman faction of SDS were convicted of murder for the killing of two policemen and a security guard in a failed robbery. It was not uncommon for SDS splinter groups that embraced violence to have African American career criminals do the dirty work while the white radicals waited in the car to drive them away.
There is an abundance of confusion and error in this comment by Paul B.: "It was not uncommon for SDS splinter groups that embraced violence to have African American career criminals do the dirty work while the white radicals waited in the car to drive them away."
The Weather Underground had broken up and was not in existence when the Brink's truck was held up … by members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) (they took 1.6 million from the truck). Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert were accomplices who were former members of the Weather Underground. One of the Black men involved, Sam Brown, "had recently hooked up with some former Black Panthers." Judith Clark, was briefly associated with the the Weather Underground in 1969-70, but at the time "was an above-ground organizer and leader of the May 19th Communist Organization." Three days later two BLA militants, Sekou Odinga and Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata, were being pursued by police which resulted in a "running gunfight:" "Sundiata, former head of the Brooklyn chapter of the Republic of New Afrika, was shot and killed as he tried to scale a fence. After his gun jammed, Odinga threw it down and surrendered." The attempt at "expropriation" or robbery for political purposes was, in Gilbert's words, "under the leadership of the Black Liberation Army with white revolutionaries participating in alliance with them." The account of what happened to Gilbert Brown and Odinga (especially the latter two) after they were arrested is chilling because barbaric (torture by police). For several months, many others were arrested from the New York metropolitan era "as well as on a farm in Mississippi associated with the Republic of New Afrika." The quoted material taken from the account provided by Dan Berger in his book, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (AK Press, 2006): 245-249.
PaulB
i.e., your comment was spot on.
And, still true.