There’s a strange, one-sided approach to memorials in Jacksonville.

The City Council approved a memorial for Johnnie Mae Chappell, who was shot and killed on Soutel Road 60 years ago. They also approved one near a Dollar General store where several people were slain.

In those cases, the victims had black skin and the perpetrators had white skin.

But the council has ignored one of the most blood-chilling murders in the city’s history. It involved the deliberate, brutal torture and murder of a teenage boy kidnapped off the city’s streets.

In that case, the victim’s skin was white and the killers’ skins were black.

Justice was done in the first two cases. Justice has not been done in the latter case.

Fifty years after the killing of Stephen Orlando, 18, the leader of a gang that killed Orlando still is alive and playing the legal system.

We tried to find out from the State Attorney’s Office why they haven’t been able to bring the case to an end in 50 years, but they refused to talk about it.

In the Chappell case, the four youths involved were arrested and the shooter was sent to prison. In the Dollar General Case the shooter killed three people and then himself.

But the case of Jacob John Dougan has slogged on through the justice system for half a century. Page after page shows hearings, trials, appeals, motions, etc. Judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys have come and gone but Dougan remains housed at the county jail, eating three squares a day and sleeping comfortably at night.

Court records show that the murder of Orlando was deliberate and based on his race. Dougan has been sentenced to death three times – the first when Gerald Ford was president — but remains alive.

Why doesn’t the Jacksonville City Council care about Orlando or his family?