Crime Victims Media Report will resume next week, with new topics:
Benjamin LaGuer, who became a cause celeb among the media and academic demigods of Boston until it turned out his DNA matched the crime scene(after faking his first DNA test by substituting another prisoner’s DNA), wants out of prison again (see here and here for earlier posts).
He has fewer supporters this time, but Noam Chomsky and John Silber are still ponying up. Most of his fan club went into hiding or mourning when it turned out that LaGuer’s DNA was indeed in the rape kit — rather than grope towards ethical consistency by apologizing to a rape victim they had viciously dragged through the mud. ...
In an absurd instance of partisanship disguised as criminology, the L.A. Times is laying blame for the future homicide rate on people’s dissatisfaction with President Obama:
The recent spike in violent political rhetoric coupled with last week’s arrest of two men who threatened the lives of two Democratic House members has a lot of commentators worried about a surge in domestic political terrorism. Those fears are misplaced. Not because there won’t be violence, but because politically inspired violence won’t necessarily be aimed at politicians. ...
Michael Harvey is now the third man found guilty of one or more murders of prostitutes and other women in southeast Atlanta in the early 1990’s. As I wrote last week (see here and here), the state missed at least two earlier chances to link Harvey to that crime and get him off the streets: once in 2003, when they were supposed to have taken DNA from him before he left prison for another sex crime, and again in 2005, when they (apparently) got around to testing his DNA and linked it to the murder of Valerie Payton — but then failed to charge him for three more years.
OK folks, the trial is over. When is somebody going to ask the GBI, and Fulton County D.A. Paul Howard, why it is that the rape kit of a women murdered by a probable serial killer, and a DNA sample they could have obtained as early as 1996? ...
Mbarek Lafrem
Take a good look at the face of hate. This is Mbarek Lafrem, a Moroccan citizen who nearly beat a pediatric nurse to death in a New York City nightclub last month after she had the temerity to refuse to dance with him. The nurse suffered multiple head wounds, including a skull fracture, broken eye socket, and shattered nose. She was beaten around the face. She was also attacked sexually: Lafrem is charged with attempted rape. And attempted murder, because the attack was so severe. ...
The print news coverage of the Michael Harvey trial continues to skirt important questions:
Meanwhile the AJC’s coverage is even more confusing today than it was a few days ago: ...
Some mornings, it’s pitifully easy to find something to write about.
Like, this morning. Back in the early 1990’s, a serial killer was stalking women in the Reynoldstown neighborhood in Atlanta. Reynoldstown was, in all senses of the term, crack-infested. There were a lot of drug-related deaths. There were a lot of prostitutes: the two go hand in hand. Men from all over metro Atlanta would drive there to get an extremely cheap woman, or girl. Or boy, I imagine. This was precisely the same area where little boys were disappearing during the Atlanta Child Murders in the 1980’s. It wasn’t a very long walk to some of the body dump sites. ...
Today, the lead story on all my local news stations was about a Schizu named Tuchi who saved his family from a house fire by barking incessantly at the flames. Dog-saves-family-from-fire stories are always popular.
Not so popular, at least to the media? Stories about how registering sex offenders saves lives. There is only one story to be told about sex offender registries, according to the fourth estate, and that story is how registries viciously destroy men’s lives when all they did was commit one little sex crime and must now live forever under the cold eye of the state. ...
Much is being made about Rodney Alcala’s allegedly superior intelligence. I don’t buy it any more than I buy it when defense attorneys wave a piece of paper in the courtroom and claim their client is mentally challenged and thus deserves a break. It’s just theater. Alcala’s a haircut with cheekbones: his IQ, whatever it might be, matters far less than the pro-offender sentiments of the era when he was first tried, and re-tried.
It certainly didn’t take a rocket scientist to play the California criminal justice system for a fool back in the 1970’s. Unfortunately, in many ways, the same is still true. ...