A US judge ordered the release Thursday of one of the six black teenagers whose arrest in Louisiana sparked a protest over perceived racial discrimination in the US judicial system.
Mychal Bell, 17, had been jailed since December when he and five other black students, who became known as the "Jena Six," beat up a white student at school following months of racial tension in the small town of Jena.
The tension was sparked when a black student tried to cross the schoolyard's invisible color line and sit under a "white tree."
Students arrived at school the next day to see three nooses hung from the tree, a stark symbol of the lynching which once terrorized southern blacks.
A series of interracial fights broke out after the school's administrator dismissed the nooses as an "adolescent prank."
Tensions were raised even higher in December when the white district attorney charged Bell and the others with attempted murder. While badly hurt, the student they attacked was able to attend a school function that night.
Although those charges were eventually reduced, they were controversial because white students escaped serious criminal charges in two earlier fights they initiated.
Bell's conviction for aggravated second-degree battery was vacated on September 14 by an appeals court which ruled he should have been charged as a juvenile.
Last week, a district court judge refused to release bell in a hearing held a day after 20,000 people took part in a protest in Jena to denounce the case and what they see as racial discrimination in the US justice system.
Civil rights leader Reverend Al Sharpton hailed the demonstration, which recalled civil rights protests of the 1960s, as the beginning of a movement to protest racial inequalities in the US criminal justice system.
A juvenile court judge released Bell on 45,000 dollar bail Thursday, Sharpton said at a press conference.
Bell was the only member of the Jena Six who remained in jail because his parents had been unable to post a previous 90,000 dollar bail.
