Bloodless Coup

after skimming the louisiana crimes code, i find that the behavior does not qualify as "terrorizing," because that requires a degree of directedness facially absent from the cross-burning incident. i see nothing else in louisiana's fairly broad, old-school criminal code. that said, and interestingly, La. law does criminalize "burning cross on property of another." the absence of a noose provision might just be an oversight, but i think the response to that would be cross-burning is more imminently dangerous to others, as an expressive act, than hanging nooses from a tree.

(also interesting, if not a propos and vaguely bizarre, La. has criminalized, inter alia, "assault by drive-by shooting" (this has always been illegal, of course; what's odd is that it's its own crime in La.), "unlawful use of a laser on a police officer," "intimidation buy officers," and cyberstalking.)

(all La. provisions cited found in 14 La. Stat. sections 37.1-40.1)

for purposes of comparison, pennsylvania law almost certainly would not recognize the noose incident as "harassment" because the only non-direct-threatening ways to offend the statute require a course of conduct, not a single incident. it might qualify as "terroristic threats," but it's a bit of a stretch. ironically, the actions in question might not qualify under pennsylvania law as "ethnic intimidation" because that provision because that is an add-on offense that requires qualification for another "offense involving danger to the person." if terroristic threats were implicated, however, ethnic intimidation would be able to piggyback on that. also, there's another call out in ethnic intimidation to predicate crimes of trespass, which would appear to qualify inasmuch as the nooses were probably hung by persons as to whom, or at a time when access to school grounds amounted to trespass. the problem is, the property trespassed upon, for purposes of ethnic intimidation, must be that of the people claimed to be intimidated. yes, in some vague sense, a public school belongs to the people, but they're not really owners in any legally meaningful sense.

"buy"? oy, the Louisiana legislature ...

well what i was thinking of was a simple disturbing the peace kind of sanction. is that rather minor, sure - but it's a reaction. and yeah without "directedness" other charges would be problematic. so this couldn't fall under anything like that?

perhaps the reason the nooses evoked the nothing-to-be-done aw shucks response isn't so much because disturbing the peace wouldn't lie, but rather because a) that's surely a misdemeanor, technically speaking, and b) that's not the sort of thing prosecutors really file (at least if it's not manifestly clear who did it, since it's hardly worth the investigatory, prosecutorial and court resources) -- so it might have been more of a pragmatic comment than one to be read literally.

as for directedness, that's usually a feature of harassment-type statutes, an element of the crime being that someONE is being harassed. these days, there are laws that also punish actions clearly group-directed, and to some extent the Louisiana cross-burning provision suggests that they're not completely immune to that tendency. absent some sort of provision permitting punishment for the group-directed activity in question, it's more than a little problematic to find a crime, under the La. provisions i looked at, worth charging as an institutional matter.

and if all this talk of resources puts you off, remember, DA's are political animals, and their constituents aren't going to be big fans of an office that spends weeks investigating a case that, at most, can result in the sort of minor fines and perhaps minimal probation that noose-hanging might qualify for under a disturbing the peace sort of charge.

p.s. since i wasn't copying and pasting, and since the "buy" misspelling is a species of typo i've been very prone to of late, i think it's charitable and apt to assume i screwed up on basic literacy, not the La. legislature.