r/news • u/FreeChickenDinner • 4d ago

West Virginia couple charged with trafficking their adopted Black children to be used as ‘slaves,’ authorities allege

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/us/west-virginia-adopted-black-children-slaves-reaj/index.html
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u/braiser77 4d ago

They literally violated the United States Constitution.

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u/Past-Direction9145 4d ago

Everyone’s doing that lately. It’s trendy

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u/cayneloop 4d ago

i mean.. they didn't.

slavery still legal and it's used in prison labor

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u/DefinitelyNotAliens 4d ago

Technically speaking, the 13th Amendment actually legalized slavery on a federal level. The word slavery was never mentioned in any part of the Constitution until then.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction

Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted is the important part here. It actually lists when slavery is legal, whereas before, slavery was never mentioned.

Technically, then, holding the kids as slaves was illegal because they were never duly convicted.

What was sad was that line in the constitution was actually the reason a lot of loitering laws were passed, because they'd just go round up former slaves in the South and hit them with 'loitering' or anti-homeless laws and sentence them to hard labor and then sell that labor to plantation owners and those people would end up on the exact same plantations they were freed from.

Why we need to actually amend the US Constitution. We still sell prison labor to farms and it's super fucked up. Some of those places are horrifying. Get caught on a charge and are told one year and they get sent to prison farms or sold to private industry and get mangled by farm equipment the inmates don't know how to properly operate and there is basically zero recourse. It's super fucked up.

And legal, due the 13th Amendment making slavery legal under certain circumstances.

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u/enddream 3d ago

The kids here weren’t sentenced to prison….

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u/thedeuceisloose 3d ago

This wasn’t a punishment so it doesn’t fit the 13th. It is explicitly a denial of constitutional rights

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u/sacredblasphemies 4d ago

Tbf, this isn't much different than the literal slave-owners that WROTE the Constitution.

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u/braiser77 4d ago

One thing I've often thought of is that the people in the South that live near the coast are likely to be the descendants of actual pirates who murdered and stole their way to financial prominence. That bugs me.