"I could end your lives with the stroke of a pen."

Not long after LaSalle Parish District Attorney J. Reed Walters said these words to black students at Jena High School in central Louisiana to make them think twice about unlawful retaliations, he tried to do just that.

Last September Walters addressed an emergency assembly of the students following a protest sparked by the hanging of three nooses from a schoolyard tree understood to be for white students only. The nooses flaunting the school's colors appeared the day after a black student asked school officials for permission to sit under the tree, received no opposition and then actually sat there.

The white students responsible for the nooses were briefly suspended, their action dismissed as a "harmless prank." Fighting along racial lines ensued in Jena, a small lumber and oil town of about 3,000 people, 85 percent of whom are white and 12 percent black.

News reports say that a white teen in Jena who fought a black party crasher was charged with simple battery, and a white youth who pulled a shotgun on some black teens was never charged. But in December when six black teens, ages 15 to 17, attacked a white student allegedly taunting them with racial slurs, they were expelled.

Five of them were charged by Walters with attempted second-degree murder and other crimes, including assault with a deadly weapon (reported to be a pair of tennis shoes). They faced up to 100 years in jail without parole; a sixth youth will be tried as a juvenile.

The assaulted teen reportedly spent three hours in the hospital and then attended a party later that night.

In June, one of the "Jena Six," as the arrested black youths are now known, was convicted of aggravated battery and conspiracy charges, and faces up to 22 years in prison. Amid outcries of unjust treatment and the descent on Jena by nationally renowned civil rights activists, prosecutors have reduced the attempted murder charges against some of the other youths.

This story is not just about racial tensions and stiff penalties not commensurate with the crime; it is about a tolerated blatant abuse of authority. Walters should be fired!

Children who become involved in school fights regardless of the motivations must be disciplined, not destroyed along with their families.

The National Association of Black Journalists, which I am a member of, says the case "has the potential to be ground-breaking and shift attitudes about race and justice in the United States. It is critical that news organizations cover this court proceeding."

An editor of an archdiocesan newspaper in Louisiana observed that national media have been more focused on this than local outlets.

While Jena is in a largely non-Catholic area, boasting only one small Catholic parish, it is located in the Diocese of Alexandria, La., ranked earlier this year by researchers among the top five dioceses in the United States in terms of growth and vibrancy. What an opportunity, therefore, for this troubled little town to benefit from even a minority of Catholics witnessing to the church's dynamic teaching on social justice.

My thoughts on the Jena Six case are similar to those of a blogger who said the injustice of it made him recall an excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 "Letter From a Birmingham Jail." Said King:

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.... We will have to repent in this generation ... for the appalling silence of the good people."

Carole Norris Greene is a columnist with Catholic News Service.