A 10-year-old boy who was arrested by police for urinating behind his mother's car while waiting for her in a public parking lot received a three-month suspended sentence Tuesday, which fortunately does not appear in his case.
“He did what any sensible person would do: he urinated next to the car behind the door – without exposing himself to anyone. “He would not have been arrested, prosecuted or convicted if he had been any color or race other than black,” the family’s attorney, Carlos Moore, lamented to NBC News.
On Tuesday, 10-year-old Quantavious Eason appeared in Tate County Juvenile Court in Mississippi on charges he secretly urinated behind his mother's car in a public parking lot last August while waiting for her.
According to this, the boy would have received a suspended sentence of three months, during which he would have to meet monthly with a probation officer, as well as a two-page reading assignment about the basketball player Kobe Bryant, who died in 2020, to be given to the British media.
“We will not appeal. He will have no criminal record, it is on probation. And since he's a Kobe Bryant fan, he doesn't mind writing this two-page report. But the principle remains: he should have nothing to do,” his lawyer insisted.
But it's clear to his mother, LaTonya Eason, that her son was mistreated by the system during the trial.
“My son has been through enough getting arrested and then having to see a probation officer and then write an essay. I don’t think that’s fair or just,” she told NBC News on Wednesday.
Within a week of the controversial incident, the officer behind the decision to arrest him and take him to the police station was fired, the Senatobia Police Department said.
“The officers’ decisions violated our written policies and contradicted our previous training on how to handle such situations […] We will also conduct mandatory training [interventions avec les] like young people across the department every year,” police said, according to CNN.