And in Jena, Louisiana, attorneys for the jailed black teen Mychal Bell say he is close to reaching a plea deal that would avoid a second trial. The seventeen-year-old Bell has already served nearly a year in prison for a schoolyard fight in which Bell and five others were charged with beating up a white student. Bell and the others came to be known as the Jena Six. The fight occurred several months after white students hung nooses from a tree under which black students had sat. An all-white jury convicted Bell of aggravated second-degree battery. Bell was set free on bail in September after an appeals court found he had been improperly tried as an adult. But weeks later, the same judge who wrongly tried him sentenced him to eighteen months in prison on charges pending from another case before the fight occurred. The case of the Jena Six has triggered one of the nation’s largest civil rights protests in years. Bell is scheduled to go on trial this coming Thursday.