Texas executed David Lee Powell yesterday for the murder of police officer Ralph Ablanedo.
Ablanedo’s family has been waiting for Powell’s appeals to end for 32 years. They have endured a lifetime of watching Powell be cast as some type of especially sensitive, peace-loving man as he manipulated the legal system — a spectacle they were forced to subsidize with their taxes. ...
This is Wilbert Rideau, Academy Award nominee, George Polk award winner, George Soros grant recipient, Jimmy Carter Center honoree, American Bar Association Silver Gavel winner, Grand Jury prize winner at Sundance, NPR commentator, journalist, Random House author, Terry Gross pal, friend of the famous and the rich . . . you get the picture.
Oh yeah, he also kidnapped three innocent people during a bank robbery in 1961, shot them all, and then stabbed the one young woman who couldn’t escape him after he “ran out of bullets,” as the second victim played dead and the third hid in a swamp. He plunged a butcher knife into Julia Ferguson’s throat as she begged for her life. Rideau later went on to claim that she wasn’t technically begging for her life, as part of Johnny Cochran’s successful 2005 bid to get him out of prison, but in this conveniently forgotten video, he tells a very different — and shocking — story about the crime. ...
Ah yes, the silly season. Reporter claiming to be writing about solitary confinement jumps right into equating solitary confinement with “hard-line criminal justice polic[y]” instead. According to this view, solitary confinement is not, as one might think, a rational response to the dangers created by extremely violent offenders. Nor is it a way to protect prisoners who might be vulnerable to harm because of their appearance, orientation, or gang status. Nor even a response (one that ought to be appreciated) to the endless lawsuits filed against corrections facilities demanding protections for prisoners — protection from themselves, or others.
Nope, in the eyes of the media, every issue relating to incarceration and crime is just another opportunity to lash out at allegedly “draconian” sentencing policies. In this view, using less solitary confinement to address budget constraints isn’t a sign that prisons are having to deal with the financial downturn like everyone else. Using less solitary confinement is: ...
Robert Chatigny, whose controversial advocacy for serial killer Michael Ross may have inspired Obama to nominate him to the Circuit Court, advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote. I wrote here about the reasons why I think Obama would nominate someone like Chatigny:
Media coverage of executions used to be shameless. Reporters played advocate, inserting themselves and their inflamed sensibilities into the story, while victims’ families were ignored or accused of being “vengeful,” a crime apparently worse than murder itself.
Only victims’ families were thus demeaned: offenders, no matter the horror of their actual crimes, were depicted in only the most positive light. They were deemed specially sensitive, or dignified, or talented, or at least pitiful, as if playing up to (or merely embodying) the reporter’s sensibilities magically erased the profound harm these men had visited on others. ...
. . . walking past the men to shoot them.
Gerardo Regalado ...
You wouldn’t know it from the way many in the media cover crime, but recidivists with extremely violent records are still routinely cut loose from prison early, or allowed to stay free while awaiting trial.
Or allowed to attend high school with nobody knowing they’re sex offenders. ...
While investigative reporters and their academic mouthpieces busily crochet their latest screeds against the notion of putting criminals in prison, here’s a quick sampling of people who should have been behind bars, but weren’t. Of course, this isn’t a criminological study, because we’re going to actually mention the crimes these men committed, instead of just breathlessly envisioning the endless possibilities of their next “re-entry” into society.
It looks like the last re-entries were easy to a fault. ...
With a flick of public relations rhetoric, Texas has suddenly become a media darling to criminal justice journalists who previously viewed the state as mean and bloodthirsty. The sudden transformation of the Lone Star State into the South Massachusetts of empathetic corrections was accomplished entirely in the media, of course, where gaining good PR is as easy as clicking your heels and saying: “I think it’s time we considered alternatives to incarceration, Joe. This puttin’ people in jail just ain’t working.”
You don’t have to do it, you just have to say it. Then you hand out lollypops and watch the great reviews (oops, I mean newspaper stories) roll in. ...
These are unbearably dangerous times for police, and their families. In the last week, in two different tragedies, older officers witnessed the murder of their police officer sons, one in Chicago, one in West Memphis. The second officer killed in the Memphis shooting was the son and grandson of police officers as well.
Chicago: ...
This has been the unfortunate theme running through my head as I watched the “Poppa Love” Speights saga unfold in recent weeks on the Tampa news. Speights came to the attention of police years ago, when his young daughter reported being repeatedly raped — and threatened — by him. But despite his lengthy police record (30 arrests) and the young woman’s testimony, prosecutors felt they could not convict Speights at the time. A year later, the police had proof that Speights was a child rapist when another, even younger girl gave birth to his baby: she had been 12 at the time Speights impregnated her, and DNA matched him to the crime.
But that was two years ago: since then, a judge granted Speights bail to await his trial for child rape, and he apparently returned to the household where he had raped and impregnated the young girl and where a dozen or more other minor children still resided. His mother, wife, aunt, and several of his own children supported Speights, so it is reasonable to assume that he remained in contact with many other potential child victims, either with or without the permission of child protection authorities. His bail was not repealed when his trial began, and Speights absconded two weeks ago when it began to dawn on him that he might not walk away from the latest charges, as he had done literally dozens of times after arrests in the past. He was convicted in absentia and recaptured after an expensive manhunt. ...
Now that fugitive child rapist “Poppa Love” Speights has been tracked down by the police (for the second time — after a Tampa judge actually cut him loose on bail despite his flight from the law on child-rape charges in 2008), maybe more of his victims will come forward.
Then again, that’s what was said the last time, too. ...
That’s Garry McCarthy, Police Director of Newark, New Jersey, where the city’s murder rate has declined 25% under a new police administration and a zero-tolerance attitude towards crime. CBS News compares Newark’s success with Chicago’s failure to quell violent crime.
Why doesn’t every Chief of Police sound like McCarthy? If you can’t count on the head of the police to insist that crime is unacceptable, who can you count on? ...
This is John Speights. He strolled out of a Tampa courthouse last week during his trial for raping a 12-year old child and disappeared. The sheriff couldn’t stop him because a judge had let him bond out back in 2008, when he was originally charged with ten counts of child rape. And, oh yeah, he’s been arrested at least 30 other times in Tampa alone for charges including battery, bigamy, aggravated assault, cruelty to a child and domestic violence, yet he has no state prison record, which means that prosecutors had to drop some or all of those charges, or other judges cut him serial breaks for multiple violent crimes . . . or all of these things happened, enabling him to remain free to rape children.
The police catch ’em and the courts let ’em go: ...
Recently, the death of former L.A.P.D. chief Daryl Gates inspired a smattering of recollections of the Rodney King riots, in which 53 people died. That loss of life, which included horrific murders of good samaritans trying to save others, is largely forgotten in favor of a narrative that exculpates — even celebrates — the rioters, while blaming police for both causing the violence and failing to quell it once it started.
In other words, the police were guilty because they used too much force against King after he weaponized his car, but they were also guilty because they didn’t use enough force against the rioters, though they would have been just as guilty had they used more force to stop the rioters. The police are guilty no matter what they do, not just in America, but everywhere. And in this strange rubric of culpability, they are deemed more guilty when the crime rate increases but also more guilty when the crime rate decreases. ...
More paperwork to leave paradise than I’d thought. Crime Victims Media Report will resume on May 10.
Goodbye backyard: ...
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. ...
Yesterday, serial killer Rodney Alcala was sentenced to death for the third time for the 1979 murder of 12-year old Robin Samsoe. He was also sentenced for the torture-killings of four other women.
Today, the media is reporting brief, painful snippets about the five victims. Many other victims are believed to exist. ...
Occasionally, in response to something I write, I receive an e-mail advising me that, for the good of my soul, I had better stop judging criminals (or criticizing, or even joking about them) and train myself to vigilantly “forgive” them instead. For example:
Life is too short to walk around with this kind of hate inside. Anger and bitterness is a poison that destroys the pot it is kept in. ...
Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys
The Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, with hands together, at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Wisconsin in 1960.By LAURIE GOODSTEIN ...
Why does it seem like the people who commit the most heinous sex crimes are the ones getting multiple breaks from the courts? Apparently, I’m not the only person wondering. I certainly hope the Washington Examiner doesn’t mind that I’m copying their article in its entirety. It’s so staggeringly rare to find stories outside the “Hooray, We’re Emptying the Prisons” media drumbeat these days:
Freed criminals prey on public
By: Scott McCabe
Examiner Staff Writer
March 21, 2010
From left: Darryl Hazel, Robert Joseph Williams and Virgilio Nunez
Cops hunt felons turned loose by system ...
The good news: U.S. Marshals in Houston caught violent serial rapist Ali Reza Nejad after he slipped off his ankle monitor and fled Georgia upon hearing that the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed his conviction and 35-year sentence last week.
Nejad, Before and After Dye Job ...