Free the MTA 9 - African Teens Wrongly Convicted in Baltimore

(get update on the case this Sunday on UhuruRadio.com at 1pm U.S. ET)

Baltimore, MD – On March 18, 2008, five African eighth-graders were convicted of assaulting two white adults, 26-year-old Sarah Kreager and her boyfriend, 30-year-old Troy Ennis on a Maryland Transit Authority (MTA) bus on December 4, 2007 in a dispute over a seat.

The African students maintain that Kreager started the fight by spitting on and punching them, while Ennis made racial slurs and threatened to stab them. One student filed counter assault charges against Kreager, but prosecutors quickly dropped that case.

“No grown person should be spitting on kids,” declared Quentin Whaley Sr., 54, the father of one of the teens. “This isn’t 1857. This is 2008. We won’t be chattel property.”

The Baltimore Branch of the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) denounces the conviction of the children and calls on the judge to release them without any further detainment or probation.

The state provided no evidence that linked any of these children to the beating. What is most certain is that the children on trial were the few remaining youth who did not run and were picked by the MTA police to be the fall guys.

InPDUM believes that the children were found guilty, not because of evidence of guilt but to relieve the fears of white people to live or visit the streets of Baltimore.

Nnamdi Lumumba, President of the Baltimore Branch of the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement says, “We’re tired of the word of a white person being considered more credible than the statements of a black person."

“The children reported that Kreager walked on the bus with her eye already bruised and damaged,” Lumumba said. “Yet it is the children who get dragged through the mud as the people who caused the damage to her face.”

Court records show that Kreager accused Ennis of domestic violence in 2006. On April 7, Kreager was found guilty of attempted drug distribution and possession in Baltimore City.

Lumumba charges, "This case is an obvious example of the assumption that the word of any white person is more credible than that of a Black person. This is an offense that the African community will not tolerate any longer. We understand that the attack on these children is a veiled attack on the democratic rights of the entire African community."

The International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement (http://www.inpdum.org) is a mass organization created to defend the democratic rights of the African community. Nationwide, InPDUM has worked to protect the rights of African working class and poor families in cases of police brutality and murder.