Category: Justice

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Thomas Sophonow

Thomas Sophonow of Manitoba was convicted in 1981 of the murder of a 16-year-old Winnipeg waitress named Barbara Stoppel.

He spent four years in prison before the Manitoba Court of Appeal ordered him released. The Manitoba Court of Appeal said that the evidence against Sophonow was inadequate.

Did the police and prosecutors admit they might have made a mistake? Not for fifteen years. And no level of government involved appears eager to pay the $2.6 million compensation suggested by an inquiry into the affair.

How did it happen? How did the wrong mean end up in prison for four years?

Does this phrase ring a bell: jailhouse informant. Snitch. One man about to be deported to Hong Kong agreed to testify that Sophonow had confessed to him. All charges against the snitch and the deportation hearings were dropped. Two of the other snitches had lengthy resumes, performing the function regularly for the police in exchange for various favors.

Commissioner Peter Cory, investigating the miscarriage of justice, recommends that jailhouse snitches never be used again in criminal proceedings. That is NEVER.

There were three eye-witnesses. Three of the four could not identify the suspect in a police line-up, but they still testified that Sophonow was the man they saw leaving the crime-scene. Why? In all likelihood, the police assured them that he was the man, and that it would be a “crime” for him to walk free simply because there wasn’t any evidence. The police worked their witnesses into a state of absent compliance.

One remaining eye-witness insists that Sophonow is the man he saw leaving the donut shop where Stoppel was murdered. But more and more recent research– especially by Elizabeth Loftus– shows that eye-witnesses tend to blend the face of the accused with their memory of the person they actually saw at the time. They see the accused every day in court, for extended periods of time, whereas their original view of the suspect is fleeting and ephemeral. Memory is not reliable, and certainly not as reliable as DNA testing, which has excluded Sophonow from any further suspicion.

According to an American study released in June, juries make up their minds early in the trial– based, obviously, on anything but evidence– and then fit the facts presented to their prejudice.

After injustice, exploitation. Sophonow’s lawyer will be paid more than $800,000. Do lawyers work that hard? Are they that talented? That is more than a teacher makes over ten years.

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And Why Would the Police Lie

Why would the police lie about a thing like that?

Anyone who still believes in fairy tales might have a hard time explaining away the behavior of the Fort Lauderdale, Florida police and District Attorney’s office.

Chiquita Lowe claimed that she saw a man leaving the home of Shandra Whitehead in Fort Lauderdale on the night of April 14, 1985. Shandra had been raped and murdered. She was eight years old. Chiquita Lowe saw the man, she said in court.

The police had a suspect: he was Frank Lee Smith, a man with a criminal record. But they had no evidence linking Smith to the crime.

But they had Chiquita Lowe.

Chiquita saw Smith leave the house. The entire case– a capital case– sat on her testimony. Smith was convicted and sentenced to death. He remained on death row for eleven years, until he died, of cancer, in prison. He remained on death row for eleven years, even though Chiquita Lowe recanted her testimony. He remained on death row for eleven years while the prosecutors refused to do a DNA test to confirm or exclude his guilt.

Eventually, of course, the DNA test was done. Smith was categorically excluded. Not only was Smith exonerated, but another man, Eddie Lee Mosley, was matched to the DNA. Mosley is being held in psychiatric prisons after being found insane when he was brought up on two other murder charges.

Do the police go, “oops”?

Do they apologize?

And admit that the police can make mistakes?

Never!

Chiquita Lowe now says that the police pressured her to identify Smith. We now know enough about how the police work to imagine what they said to her.   We know the guy did it but we don’t exactly have the evidence. Do you want to be responsible for his next victim if he walks? It’s your duty to testify as to what we think you saw that night….

She also says the police never showed her a picture of Mosley though the police claim they did, and the police claim that she did not recognize him.

The police claim she did recognize Smith.

Who are you going to believe?

Lowe testified about all this at hearings to reopen the case in 1991 and 1998. The police and prosecutors said she was a liar and completely unreliable. The judge agreed. The judge didn’t seem to realize that he had just rejected as “unreliable” the only witness in support of the prosecution’s original case, a case so thin and insubstantial that it makes you wonder if there is any system at all to justice in America.

How can a judge, with a straight face, declare that a man’s life should be taken based almost entirely on the word of a single “unreliable” witness?

Well, now that the DNA evidence is in, what do the police have to say for themselves? You know what they say? You won’t believe it. They say that Smith must have been burglarizing the home at the same time that Mosley was raping and murdering little Shandra Whitehead. That’s why, they say, Lowe did see Smith fleeing the house. That’s why, they say, detectives really did overhear Smith say something incriminating as they were escorting him to jail. That’s why, they say, the police are really never wrong, though sometimes strange things happen… who knows?

The problem is not that the police occasionally make a mistake. The problem is that the police, encouraged by conservative law and order politicians and incompetent judges, have developed the habit of picking a likely suspect– preferably someone poor and uneducated and with a history of convictions– and then hanging a case on him.

It’s so much easier than investigating the crime and making a case against a real suspect.

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A Victory in the War of Drugs

Russell Eugene Weston Jr., 44 years old, walked into the Capitol Building in Washington DC on July 24th, 1998, in order to save the world from cannibals, and to retrieve top secret information from a satellite system that was capable of time-travel. I’m not sure why he thought the government would be of any use to him, but he did, and when the government didn’t listen he shot and killed two guards.

He is imprisoned in Butner, North Carolina, in solitary, because, after all, he is mad. In what used to be the civilized world, he would be in some kind of treatment program where smart people with degrees in psychology would be trying to help him recover his senses. But this is America of the 21st century and bloodlust over-rules compassion so the government wants very badly to put him on trial for murder and sentence him to death.

The trouble is, of course, that Mr. Weston appears to be insane. It is a well-established facet of the modern justice system that a person who is not responsible for his actions cannot be convicted of crimes committed while he was not responsible for his actions, ie., in possession of his faculties, his reason, his ability to discern right from wrong.

A small obstacle to be sure. In a new, significant skirmish in the real drug war– the war waged by pharmaceuticals to get everybody onto drugs– a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit ordered him to be medicated!

Mr. Weston’s lawyer– a public defender (and we all know how awesome public defenders are)– is considering an appeal. Of course, appeals ultimately end up in the hands of those robed dildos of Partisan Politics, the Supremes.

Well, what is wrong with medicating this guy so he can be ruled sane so he can be tried for murders committed while he was insane?  And then executed?   We need to provide a nice deterrent to all those crazy UFO-believers out there with guns.

Apart from the obvious– that just because medications can make him appear to be sane doesn’t mean he was sane at the time of the murders– there is the absurd circumstance of the government drugging people into certain specified conditions (guided by the high priests of mental sanitation, psychiatrists and psychologists) in order to obtain particular results from the justice system.

I know– it’s hard to wrap your mind around this issue, especially if it’s medicated. But break it down. The drugs in question are those very powerful psychotropic drugs the mission of which is to alter a person’s personality or emotions.

Is this allowed by the constitution? The very question is insane– of course not. The idea that a constitution that protects the right of privacy and freedom of speech and presumes innocence until proof of guilt is established and  validated by a duly constituted jury or judge, would permit any government body to forcibly alter a person’s mind with powerful psychotropic drugs— it’s absolutely outrageous.

But that’s not even the most objectionable part of it all. Of what use is this procedure to the prosecution? The man was probably insane when he shot the two guards. The prosecution wishes to argue that he was not insane. They are allowed to specify how his mind should be altered in order to present him as evidence in support of their view????

The precedent is shattering. With the pharmaceutical companies already revving up the corporate cheer-leaders, every prosecutor in the country will now consider the option of obtaining a court order to force prescribed personality alterations of defendants in criminal actions.

You think I’m getting carried away? What if I had told you 50 years ago that we were headed towards the kind of society in which people who are unhappy or dissatisfied with their lives in any form would go to their doctors and readily obtain prescriptions for powerful mood-altering substances that would help them cope with their terrible little lives?

You would have thought I was insane.

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Joyce Gilchrist Locks up a few Innocent Men

If you’re a regular visitor to these pages, I hope you’re not getting bored with the rants about false convictions. There are so many.

Joyce Gilchrist is a “forensic chemist” with a police crime laboratory in Oklahoma City. In 1986, she testified at the trial of Jeff Pierce who was charged with rape and robbery. Her testimony was decisive: she said that hairs found on the victim were “microscopically consistent” with samples taken from Pierce. He was sentenced to 65 years in prison. He served 15 before DNA testing– considered far more reliable than microscopic hair analysis– proved he could not have been the perpetrator.

I use the word “considered” with ambivalence.  The microscopic hair analysis was “considered”, in a manner of speaking, reliable at his first trial.  But it was not really “considered” at all: it was accepted with blind faith in this charade of forensic science.

You have to give credit to the police department here, where it is due. After an appeals court overturned several cases in which her testimony was pivotal, the police department ordered a review of other cases in which she had testified. (This may sound like something that should be automatic, but it isn’t. It is amazing how many police departments and prosecuting attorneys will refuse to admit they might have been wrong.)

At this stage, at least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work: the police are supposed to find out what actually happened. In the Pierce case, it looks like they simply picked a likely suspect (he happened to be working as a landscaper in the area in which the crime was committed) and then tried to muster the evidence necessary to convince a jury.

Gilchrist was regarded as a prosecution-friendly witness, who was likely to provide the police with evidence that would confirm their gut feelings about the suspect. She rarely testified for the defense, which should tell you something. She is supposed to be a scientist. She is supposed to testify for whichever side happens to have good science with them. If the science appears to always favor the prosecution, you have to ask yourself a few questions…

An FBI specialist, according to People Magazine, had problems figuring out what led Gilchrist to draw the conclusions she did about Pierce’s hair samples. In other words, she either grossly exaggerated or lied about the similarities. Do you want to know how many other cases she was involved with? Hundreds. No wait. 1,800! I’m not kidding. And an FBI chemist who reviewed four of Gilchrist’s cases said that in all four of them, hair or fibers had been misidentified. Twenty-three of the cases in which Gilchrist’s testimony played a part involved capital crimes. Eleven of the defendants have already been executed. In some cases, the police have destroyed the evidence, so we’ll never know if they were really guilty or not.

In another case, she testified that an FBI test of a semen sample could not exclude Alfred Mitchell from suspicions of rape, sodomy, and murder. In fact, the FBI lab clearly asserted that the one thing the sample did do was exclude Mitchell. He was convicted anyway, on Gilchrist’s “expert” testimony. In 1999, a federal district judge threw out the conviction because of her “errors”.

And another: Robert Miller was convicted of raping and murdering two elderly women, again, largely on the basis of Gilchrist’s “expert” testimony that hair samples found on the victims matched his. After seven years on death row, DNA evidence fingered someone else. As if that wasn’t enough, DNA evidence pointed to a man Gilchrist had explicitly cleared of the crime.

Even more disturbing: the police had the FBI’s exculpatory evidence in their hands before they brought Mitchell to trial, and did not provide the defense with copies of the reports. This is your police department, friends. These are the people in charge of enforcing the law. The appeal judge stated that the “State’s blatant withholding of unquestionably exculpatory evidence is absolutely indefensible.”

Gilchrist is on “paid administrative leave”. Did you know that the laws are written in such a way as to release the police and prosecution from all potential liability for financial compensation for the wrongly convicted? So what does Pierce get for his 15 years in prison? Unless the state gets generous voluntarily, nothing.

The case of Malcolm Rent Johnson is fascinating. He was convicted in 1982 of the rape and murder or Ura Alma Thompson, who was 76 years old. Johnson was executed in January, 2000.

The police found many of Thompson’s missing possessions in Johnson’s room. Johnson claimed that he received the stolen goods from a friend. Gilchrist testified that hairs found on the victim were compatible with Johnson’s hair, and that fibers from a shirt the police took from his apartment were similar to fibers found on the body, and that the semen found in the victim was compatible with Johnson’s blood type. When the police confronted Johnson with the semen evidence, Johnson, according to police, said that was impossible because he hadn’t ejaculated.

Either Johnson was a complete fool– and victims of prosecution misconduct seem to be disproportionately poor and uneducated– or he meant to say that he wasn’t the one who raped Thompson and therefore couldn’t have been the one who ejaculated. It’s a strange statement to make, but even stranger that the police would regard a statement like that as believable enough to be incriminating but not believable enough to contradict Gilchrist’s findings that the semen matched Johnson’s blood type. If he inadvertently told the truth– that he raped Thompson but didn’t ejaculate– then the police should offer that as evidence that he committed the rape and murder, and Gilchrist’s evidence should have been thrown out. Instead, the police had it both ways. He is guilty because he told the truth when he implied he had sex with Johnson but didn’t ejaculate, and besides, the semen was compatible with his blood type.

Or, did Johnson receive the stolen goods from a friend who actually committed the robbery and rape and then “tipped” the police off to Johnson?

Gilchrist isn’t the only incompetent police expert around. In Randall County, Texas, a forensic pathologist named Ralph Erdmann was convicted in 1994 of falsifying evidence on at least six occasions, including at least one capital case. In that one case, an off-duty police officer, James D. Mitchell, approached a car that had skidded off the road and was shot by one of the occupants who claimed that he fired in self-defense. No one disputes who shot who, but the question of whether it is a capital offense hinges on whether the defendant, Randal Wayne Hafdahl, believed he was being threatened or not, and that determination was based on Erdmann’s evidence.

In New York, a former detective named Michael S. Race has made it his mission to re-examine some old criminal cases. He is already responsible for five men being released from prison, including Anthony Faison and Charles Shepherd, who were charged with the murder of a cabby. Some say that Race is trying to assuage his own guilt– he was involved in some these questionable cases as a homicide detective in Brooklyn. In some of these cases, a rather shady witness provided the only compelling evidence. It is clear that the police and district attorneys were derelict in their obligations to ensure that such witnesses were reliable and credible. It didn’t matter: the juries bought it. Innocent men went to jail. In the “tough on crime era”, few people cared.

What all of this means is that the criminal justice system in the U.S. is in a crisis. There is a drug crisis and a medical crisis and an education crisis. Why doesn’t anyone step up and announce that they will make criminal justice an issue in the next campaign? Because conventional political wisdom is that Americans want politicians and judges to be “tough on crime”. But I’ll bet that a lot of Americans are slowly becoming convinced that there is a difference between “toughness” and fairness.

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Eula Boola!

A woman, Brenda Avery, in rural New Brunswick, was charged by the police with piracy after Microsoft spies claimed to have found pirated disks of their applications in her computer store.

The RCMP entered her home and arrested her and her husband even though he had no involvement in the computer store. Brenda Avery defended herself in court and won. The article in the Canadian Press does not describe her defense. Was the software not pirated after all, or was she unaware of the illegitimate source of the disk? It doesn’t say.

But the Crown urged her to plead guilty. Why?

Because it’s more efficient that way. The RCMP charged her in the first place at the request of Microsoft. What I want to know is, if I charge Microsoft with marketing defective products and, through their negligence and incompetence, costing me hours and hours and hours of work, and possible job promotions, and money– can I get the RCMP to burst into Microsoft headquarters and seize the relevant documents and arrest Belinda Gates?

Well, maybe if I wear a suit and wave around some documents.

Why is it that the police didn’t investigate the issue? They didn’t– obviously. They simply took Microsoft’s word for it. That’s outrageous.

In any case, I took note of the case because I have said here before that the standard End User License Agreement that we all pretend to assent to when we install software is worthless and unenforceable and this looked, at first, as if it might prove me wrong. It didn’t. First of all, the charges were laid against a store, not an “End User”.

Secondly, the charges failed.

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Harold Shipman

In Great Britain, if you took a sampling of 1000 women between the ages of 65 and 74 who see a doctor regularly, you would normally find a death rate of 4.5 per year.

Of 1000 patients of Dr. Harold Frederick Shipman, the death rate was 45 per year. He began his own practice in Hyde in 1992. He was caught this year.

Uh yes… the numbers are not the result of chance or coincidence. Dr. Shipman has been injecting some of his patients with a fatal dose of diamorphine. He seems to have murdered 300 this way. Yes, does seem like it took a little while for anyone to notice.

Sometimes he would go into a patient’s file and alter significant facts, in order to establish the “illness” of which the patient died at his hands. No one noticed because the families of deceased patients do not get access to the deceased’s medical records.

A few people over the years became suspicious. The police were even called. But when the police went to the General Medical Council, which oversees doctors in Great Britain, they told them that unless an official complaint was received they could do nothing.

Since Dr. Shipman never summoned an ambulance or called for a coroner after any of the suspicious deaths, there were no records except his own, and therefore, no details about the exact circumstances of death, except those which he provided.

The local health authority investigated and found nothing suspicious. Again, it appears that they relied on Dr. Shipman’s records to verify Dr. Shipman’s performance. There is no system in place to monitor the performance of doctors. Think about that. There is no system in place to monitor the performance of doctors. In other words, a doctor could kill 300 patients and no one would be the wiser. Well, yes. That’s what happened.

The first public reports of the investigation of Dr. Shipman were met with outrage by the citizens of Hyde who felt that a good doctor was being tarred with a broad brushstroke. Obviously, the good citizens of Hyde hadn’t noticed anything odd either. Here was a doctor who murdered patients with great frequency. The patient’s families were notified of the death. The bodies were cremated or buried. Nobody kept score.

The police finally seized Dr. Shipman’s medical records. Ah, but they didn’t obtain the proper paperwork beforehand and had to return them. Imagine the police seizing a knife or a gun from a suspected murderer, and then being ordered to return it to the suspect because they hadn’t said “may I”? To get around this little technicality, the police charged him with homicide. Then they were permitted to investigate.

Altogether, as I said, Dr. Shipman may have killed more than 300 women.

Sometimes he did the killing in his office and saw several more patients before reporting the death.

Now this may sound like a bit of stretch, but ask yourself this, in connection with Dr. Shipman’s offenses: how do you know that your doctor is doing a good job? I’m serious. I mean, you know that your doctor is not likely to inject fatal quantities of diamorphine into your veins, but if a doctor in a developed country can get away with doing this to hundreds of women over a period of ten years, how much less likely is it that your own doctor can get away with being completely incompetent?

In other words, who is keeping score?

You can read the sports pages every day to find out if Delgado is earning his millions for the Blue Jays. How many home runs did he hit? What’s his batting average? Is he making a lot of errors over there at first base?

Why don’t we have the same thing for doctors? It doesn’t have to be ridiculously detailed. Just a simple table of visits, total number of operations, drugs prescribed, x-rays, cures, improvements, and… deaths.

There were signs of trouble with Dr. Shipman back in 1976 when he was convicted of stealing drugs and issuing fake prescriptions. But he was able to pay a modest little fine and move on. This was his minor league record. Mediocre. Not expected to make the big leagues.

But he worked at it and re-established himself and went on to establish a new record: 300 murders. That’s about 287 more than Klebold and Harris at Columbine. How many Nightlines do you think they’ll devote to this story? How many Newsweek Covers?

How many people are going to throw up their hands and scream, “What’s happening to our society! We should have zero-tolerance for deaths at the hands of doctors!”

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The Irvings Sink a Ship

There is a myth out there that a lot of your tax money goes to welfare cheats. True. Here’s one of them:

About 30 years ago, the Irving Corporation (a big Maritime oil company owned by the Irving family) accidentally sunk a barge loaded with PCBs in the St. Laurence River. When government scientists discovered that it was leaking deadly PCBs, the Irvings said, “surely you don’t expect us to pay for it?”.

The government raised the vessel for $45 million, cleaned up the PCB’s, then gave it back to the Irvings for a pittance, $5 million.

Why has no one been arrested? Why aren’t the Irvings sitting in jail? Why haven’t the RCMP seized the Irvings’ assets in order to sell them to pay the bill?

Because the Irvings are not like you or me, my friend. They are rich. They know politicians on a first-name basis.

Now that’s the way to do business! Thank you Mr. Chretien, now we’ll just resume our profiteering, if you don’t mind…

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Bob Kerrey’s Burden

If you haven’t already read Bob Kerrey’s “confessions” to the New York Times and CBS’ 60 Minutes by now, you owe it to yourself. It is a stirring, compelling story.

It seems unfair to summarize this riveting account, but the basic facts are important. In February 1969, Bob Kerrey, a Lieutenant, the commander of a Navy Seals Squad, led his men into the village of Thanh Phong in the Mekong Delta. Shots were fired. “Thirteen to twenty” unarmed women and children were dead.

That’s really all there is. Well, you know, there is of course a long story with it. No one can live with himself having murdered twenty women and children without have a long story about it. And I don’t necessarily mean that Kerrey excuses his actions. But I do mean that when you add a long story and you admit that you are confessing a terrible secret and the secret is that you murdered twenty women and children, the truth is that you believe that what you did was different in some way from what a cold-blooded murderer does but very, very awful, but different, but awful… well, how far back can you step, from the basic facts? On my first reading of the account published in the New York Times, it certainly struck me that Bob Kerrey was confessing to a very serious crime. Just above his confession is a link to a story about attempts to prosecute the men who set a bomb off at a church in 1963 in Alabama which killed four children. You understand: we are trying to prosecute these men. And I had to wonder, of course, if anyone is going to try to prosecute Bob Kerrey.

Kerrey tells us that the women and children were killed because someone fired upon them and his men returned fire, and when they examined the bodies, they found only women and children. But he admits that before they returned fire, and before someone allegedly fired upon them, they had already murdered an old man and an old woman and three children in a hut on the outskirts of the village. If there is ambiguity about what happened to the people in the village proper, there is no ambiguity about the actions of the men earlier. They were afraid that these villagers would reveal their presence to the others.  They were not soldiers: they were civilians.  They had to be silenced. They were murdered.

Gerhard Klann, who was with Kerrey that night, doesn’t agree with Kerrey’s version. Neither does Mike Ambrose, who was also there, nor a Viet Namese woman who claimed to have witnessed the incident. Pham Tri Lahn.

Klann says they were never fired upon. Instead, they rounded up the women and children and when they realized that the man they were looking for, a Viet Cong officer, was not present, they decided to kill the villagers. They did not want to leave witnesses to the earlier murder of the grandparents and three children, and they did not want any enemy in the area to know they were there. Of course, as the Times points out, firing your weapons would certainly give away some information about yourself.

Now, there are a lot of people out there who will immediately object to my use of the word “murder”. I would expect they would argue all or any of the following:

1. “civilians”– women and children included– were known to operate as part of the Viet Cong and sometimes killed unsuspecting U.S. soldiers, therefore, Kerrey was justified in treating them as a threat to their lives.

2. This was war, after all, so you have to accept civilian casualties. The normal rules don’t apply.

3. It was all a regrettable mistake, but not something you could compare to a deliberate act under entirely different circumstances. The men were justifiably frightened.

The trouble is that all Western nations agree that, even in hostile territory, the deliberate murder of unarmed civilians is not permitted. This is the military speaking– not some pie-in-the-sky liberal pacifist. This is the standard that German officers were held to at Nuremberg. This is the standard that the U.S. has publicly agreed to in treaties and protocols signed and ratified by the government. This is the standard we are holding above the thugs and murderers of Kosovo and Serbia.

The trouble is, the civilians were unarmed. They did not attack the soldiers. They did not call out for help from hiding Viet Cong commandos. They did as they were told. They waited for the men to complete their search. Then they were shot in cold blood.

The trouble is that even if Kerrey’s account is to be believed– that they were fired upon first and that they returned fire in self-defense– they still murdered the old couple and three children in the first “hooch” in cold blood. That is a war crime. That is cold-blooded murder.

And Kerrey’s account is troubling. If they were fired upon first and returned fire in a random, panicked spree of self-defense… why were all of the civilians killed? Were none wounded?

In the movie, “The Great Escape”, a German officer informs an American commander that a group of the escapees were killed while fleeing their pursuers. “How many,” asks the American, “were wounded”. The German officer, whom we are given to understand is a honorable man fighting for the wrong side (a typical myth of militarists everywhere: that honorable men can fight for evil causes and still be “honorable”) painfully admits, “none”.

We know exactly what he means. And we know why it is so troubling that Kerrey tells us that none of the unarmed villagers were “wounded”. This is the part of the evening that Kerrey, while claiming to have made a damning confession, refuses to discuss.

There are strange ambiguities in the world. We still prosecute Nazi war criminals when we find them. We’re trying to prosecute the murderers of those four black girls in Alabama in 1963. An international tribunal in Holland is trying to bring Milosevic and his cronies to justice for similar crimes.

We throw children and young adults into brutal prisons for long terms for smoking a harmless weed. We try to impeach presidents for having sex with women they are not married to. We ruin the lives of athletes and politicians and business executives who lie or cheat or harass.

In Viet Nam, on a dark night thirty years ago, a group of American men entered a village and murdered 20 civilians. I think Kerrey is genuinely sorry it happened. But so is everybody.

Why did Kerrey do it? Why is he talking about this now?

His given reason is the usual rationale for salacious talk-shows: to advance healing. To bring closure, of course. Peace of mind. You know. And prevent if from ever happening again. But one has to consider that Kerrey ran for the Democratic nomination for President once upon a time and, with Bush not doing anything to dispel the notion that he is the country’s luckiest bozo, might run again. Suppose he was considering running in 2004. Suppose he was worried about the scrutiny his war record would have received had he become the Democratic nominee. Suppose he thought it might be smarter to get it all out now. It’s never a scandal if it’s already public knowledge (Clinton’s stupid mistake was, of course, lying about Lewinski– not the sex itself). Heck, it might even help him. He would have his war record credentials (he served, didn’t defer, didn’t dodge) front and centre, and the confessional aspect of it all might have endeared him to the public I don’t know if that’s what Kerrey is thinking, but you’d be a fool to not tuck this possibility into the back of your mind somewhere and save it for 2004..

In an eerie echo of Viet Nam era propaganda battles, Kerrey now accuses CBS and the New York Times with “collaboration” with the enemy. Uh, Bob, this is 2001…. And Bob, it doesn’t dignify you to sling mud no matter how much you disagree with the information posted in the New York Times or on “60 Minutes”

Has the story taken an even uglier turn? Kerrey met with six of the seven members of his commando team on April 27th for a long, evening meeting. The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to get their stories straight. The six emerged from the meeting all agreeing that they had been fired upon first by the enemy before returning fire. They all denied that villagers had been rounded up and shot.

What is kind of strange here is this: Kerrey has admitted to an act that certainly should raise questions about criminal prosecution. Then he held a meeting with all the American witnesses– except for Gerhard Klann, who denies that shots were fired at the commandos– to coordinate their stories. If Kerrey had been charged, it would be illegal, of course, for witnesses to gather together to “get their story straight”.

Kerrey and the six commandos then issued a press release insisting that they had been fired upon first. Why should we believe this account? To contradict this story would be to admit to cold-blooded murder, and the six ex-commandos would not likely embrace any other alternative. I’m not saying that we know their statement is false. But no court of law in America would accept or even allow the testimony of six witnesses who met together prior to giving testimony in order to coordinate their stories.

It should be noted that there are problems with this story in any case. First of all, none of Kerrey’s men were wounded. Secondly, all of the villagers died in the first hail of bullets, according to Kerrey. They all died? Not a single survivor? Not a single wounded? This strains credulity.

Kerrey also initially denied that he had anything to do with the murder of an old man at a “hooch” (hut) at the outskirts of the village. Now he admits, “we used lethal methods to keep our presence from being detected”. Oh the euphemisms! This one smells. Try “we killed several villagers at the outskirts of Thanh Phong so they wouldn’t give us away.”

“The unanimous view of the six was that we were young men and we did what was right and what was necessary”. The defendants have spoken: they’re not guilty. Think about it. He can’t have it both ways. Either the civilians were killed in cold blood or you were shot at and there is no need for the “we were young” and the “right and necessary”. No need at all.

What has being “young” to do with it? What is he trying to excuse, for which we would be less forgiving if they had been “old”? 2008-05

One last note: Kerrey received a medal for this action. Think about that. No Viet Cong were killed. No military objectives were achieved. The raid was not even successful in any sense at all. But, by golly, you get medals for failure in the army.

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Satirical Misappropriation: Gone With the Wind

Randall said she did not know about any of that. “It was just my simple understanding that I thought you were allowed to write parodies in America,” she said, “I have read parodies, and I wanted to write one.” NY Times, April 26, 2001

Alice Randall, a black country and western song-writer, has written a novel called “The Wind Done Gone” which sounds like it might be a wonderful parody of “Gone With the Wind”. But the soul-less Scarlet police who guard the “legacy” (ha ha ha) of Margaret Mitchell’s ridiculous novel have taken Randall to court to prevent her novel from being published by Houghton-Mifflin (preview copies now fetch $250 each on eBay). They have argued that the novel is an infringement of copyright because she uses characters and settings from the original Mitchell novel.

Well, duh.

Exactly how would you do a parody without referencing the subject of the parody?

A Federal District Court in Atlanta decided that Randall would just have to do her parody without the subject. It ruled that Houghton-Mifflin could not publish and sell her book. The ruling is being appealed.

And it should be. It’s a dumb ruling.

Update – May 25, 2001: A higher court has just ruled that publication of the book can proceed, because the lower court’s ruling makes too great an infringement on the right of free speech, because it is “prior restraint”.

Interesting note: Microsoft, Dow Jones & Company, and AOL Time Warner have filed briefs in support of Ms. Randall. I’m not sure why, but it’s curious.

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Three Bad Stories

The four officers were found to be defending themselves when they fired 41 shots at the West African immigrant, striking him 19 times, two police sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press.

The four officers — Kenneth Boss, Sean Carroll, Edward McMellon and Richard Murphy — encountered Diallo in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building on Feb. 4, 1999, while searching for a rape suspect. They opened fire when they saw what they thought was a gun; it turned out to be his wallet. All four were acquitted of criminal charges last year. New York Times, Thursday, April 26, 2001

Sometimes a story hardly needs comment. The seeds of it’s own outrageous absurdity are already planted, in all their imminent glory, in the very words that tell the tale. In this case– “41 shots”. The only thing left to comment on is the bizarre distortion applied to an issue like the Diallo case because the bar of absurdity has been raised so high. Those who defend the police argue that because Diallo was reaching for his wallet– which some reasonable people might regard as a rather foolish thing to do with a number of New York’s finest closing in aggressively– the police are justified in applying lethal force. The argument appears to be that the police, given their dangerous occupation, can’t afford to wait to see if it really is a wallet. Thus if they win the point that the officers thought it might have been a gun, which is the only point they have a chance of winning, they would seem to prevail and the officers would get off scot free.

But the real issue is the 41 shots. There were four officers. If they had each fired once or twice, you could argue that they were jittery and too quick and maybe even incompetent. If that had been the case, they should simply have been fired. In a dream world, good heavens, they might even have been charged with criminal negligence. But the fact that each officer fired and fired and continued to fire can only be explained by one thing, and that is that they wanted to make sure that nobody was going to survive to go to court and testify that four big, mighty, manly New York police officers went ballistic and fired their guns at him for no good reason at all.

In reality, even if Diallo had been reaching for a gun, the officers, by any reasonable standard, should still have been charged with murder, because there were four of them, and because they obviously had no intention of arresting or disabling or wounding Diallo: they fully intended to kill him.

As it turns out, they may have correctly surmised that a dead Diallo would be easier to deal with than a living witness to their actions, since Diallo, of course, is not available to deny that he even reached for his wallet.