Family Wants Re-Trial Of Murderer Executed In 1944

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Afterwards, the system can revisit the issue of another heinous atrocity - the denial of Reparations to the descendents of Antebellum slaves.

Why would the descendants be owed reparations for what was done to their forefathers?

Why would the descendants of someone who was executed in 1945 be owed a new trial?

I meant it's hard to revisit cases in general, even ones where the accused are still alive. The supreme court ruled in 1993 that a guy "William Osbourne" could not have a DNA test that would've exhonerated him. Justice Roberts wrote that allowing it, would “unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice.” That's nuts. It's a quintessentially conservative view, that preserving order is more important than actual justice.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

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As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.

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England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia.

There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.

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But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.

One other thing about reparations for slavery: do these proposed reparations include reparations to whites? Or just blacks?