This post by Megan McCardle and the comments that follow fascinated me:
Yesterday, more than one commenter accused me of liberal bias in my suspicion that Rick Perry’s actions in the Willingham case smacked of trying to derail the investigation. The Dallas Morning News, hardly a liberal rag, is also suspicious….
This is fairly typical of the comments:
Well Megan, I really don’t see any smoking gun in this case. We know you’re anti death-penalty but this is grasping at straws.
There is no smoking gun that the guy is innocent, so the state was right to execute him.
I realize this is nut-picking but it blows my mind to think that now only hippies believe that we shouldn’t execute people unless we’re at least somewhat certain they’re guilty.
And kudos to McMegan for not being a glibertarian here.
geg6
The baby Jeebus will cry if you take away their right to have the state brutally kill anyone it wants. Damn, Doug. Don’t you pay any attention to the Bible? Conservapedia told me that Jeebus was pro-death penalty. Otherwise, what was the whole point of it?
beltane
Megan McArdle has a liberal bias? Wow, I’ve just learned something new.
The right’s next big idea will be to randomly execute a few citizens from each community in order to demonstrate the awesome power of the state, and to appease the angry wingnut gods. Has this been tried any place else? Did it work?
lyons
Yeah, why do you hate the baby Jeebus?
mclaren
We need to get tough on crime, you wimps. Police need to start shooting people at random on the street. Innocence? The hell with innocence! We need to set an example! We need to crack down hard on crime!
lyons
She always gives in to her right wing commenters. A while back she did a post condemning the Limbaugh statement about “Obama’s America,” and then the next day she took it back under pressure from her commenters and said that Limbaugh was just being “ironic” when he said that blacks will beat up whites in Obama’s America.
She’s got some seriously freaky people following her, and I think she just has to give in to them or she’ll have no one.
gnomedad
This is about lack, and active hostility to, any kind of empathy (ask Sonia Sotomayor). They are all for any kind of brutality they imagine couldn’t happen to “their kind of people”. See also: torture, war, warrentless surveillance, suspension of habeus corpus, etc.
John Cole
@lyons: Decimation, baby.
SprinkleCoveredTurd
glad the dallas morning news is looking at this, but when is a national outlet going to get curious? seems like there’s an awful lot going on in this story……
valdemar
Why are so many Americans in love with state-sanctioned killing? Here in evil socialist Darwinist Europe, we don’t execute people because they’ve been convicted of crimes by very fallible human beings running a very imperfect legal system. Is that because we’re sane or just plain decadent?
The Moar You Know
Kudos to McMegan as well.
The state of Texas put an innocent man to death and the governor is trying to cover it up. This should horrify anyone.
Zifnab
Fix’d!
They reviewed the case and basically concluded there was no arson. Without an arson, there is no murder. The board that Perry has been firing people from is barely a formality. The conclusion is forgone.
But by gutting the system, we preserve the barest modicum of an excuse for continued use of capital punishment. Now pro-capital punishment folks can continue to crow “You can’t PROVE we ever made a mistake! You can’t PROVE it!”
Ash
Does anyone know if Perry could face legal action over this? It’s blatantly obvious that he probably didn’t even look at the new evidence before signing the death warrant. Isn’t that negligence or SOMETHING? This whole thing is so fucking scary.
PeakVT
my suspicion that…
She’s only suspicious? How fair and balanced.
Zifnab
@Ash: But they were just serving at the pleasure of the
PresidentGovernor. Pleasure of thePresidentGovernor! Pleasure of thePresidentGovernor!ericblair
Conservatives believe in small government and that it should get out of your face. Therefore, they support the government’s power to kill people without worrying about stupid shit like whether they actually did anything wrong.
I’ll sit in the corner and hit myself on the head until this makes sense. Or maybe I’ll hit someone else instead.
Joshua
If Willingham was sentenced to life in prison instead, there is absolutely no way he would still be in jail today. None. Zero.
Problem is, he’s dead now. Which is the whole point.
beltane
@Ash: It is a form of malfeasance of duty. In law-abiding states there would be calls for resignation or impeachment, but I suspect this is not how things work in Texas.
Midnight Marauder
@Ash:
He absolutely could, on numerous accounts. I remember reading something on FDL a few weeks back discussing the various ways Perry could face legal action. One of them was that by interferring with the commission, which was a federally funded entity and had certain stipulations about how the commission had to handle its cases. Well, surely, jumping it two minutes to midnight to whitewash the whole thing isn’t in the charter.
And here’s the article:
Texas Governor Rick Perry’s Crime
Martin
Shorter Texas wingnuts: The Rapture isn’t happening fast enough, pull the switch faster!
EconWatcher
The hamfisted cover-up will get Perry into more trouble. He could have claimed that he didn’t have enough information to see the problems with the case when he did his clemency review. But by trying to smother the investigation after the fact, he makes himself look much worse. This will get ugly. Keep digging, buddy.
Martin
Ah, see but he is out of jail now. Plus, since he was innocent, he’s now in heaven, so it all comes out right in the wash. Could say that the state did the guy a favor by eliminating the possibility that he’d fuck up later in life and go to the wrong place. Perry should have gotten the Nobel for that act!
El Cid
What kind of long-haired faggots would have forced our damned Founding Fathers to give a shit about evidence and trials and whatnot?
George Washington only had one standard — if’n he thought you was guilty, he shot ya. Square on the spot.
And Thomas Jefferson didn’t start off the Declaration of Independence with “When in the course of his wimpy gay European affairs, the damn King is going all ‘la la la, I gotta have trials for the damn murderers and criminal types’, sometimes we gotta rise up and kick some damn ass” for nothing.
Today’s modern conservative movement remembers, if everyone else is determined to forget, the lesson of Ben Franklin, who wrote, “To err is human, but that don’t mean you don’t hang a m***er f***er so as to teach people a god-damn lesson.”
Ash
@Martin: Your wingnut-voice is shockingly realistic.
Martin
I’m going to go with ‘cowardly and amoral’ for $1000, Alex.
Any good Christian would be unafraid to send a man to meet their maker. Kill ’em all and let God sort them out is our attitude.
El Cid
By the way, here too let me clarify myself as being thoroughly unconvinced that insisting that people be guilty of murder before being executed now counts as some sort of laudable feature in a supposed public intellectual.
That’s like saying that we should be proud of someone for continuing to use words in their writing.
Comrade Dread
I’m more and more convinced that Republican/conservative political philosophy is no longer based on Locke, the Founders, Burke, Oakenshott, Buckley, or any other one of those sissy types what talked like a fag with the long words and all.
No, the modern movement is defined entirely by bad 80’s movies.
Their foreign policy is based on Red Dawn.
And, despite all evidence to the contrary, their domestic policy with regard to crime is dominated by the mentality of a bad 80’s cop movie, whereby police departments are the one thing keeping coked up gangs of minorities from raping and pillaging us, and judges and politicians who want some accountability and adherence to the Constitution and law are meddling pansies who want to set the guilty free based on a technicality (such as there being no real evidence or state fabricated evidence).
Will
I’m glad to hear that Megan is against the death penalty and all, but I seriously cannot read anything she writes without feeling my brain shrink. Today, just after the Finance Committee voted out health care with Snowe on board, she took the opportunity to write a post titled “Is Health Care Reform Falling Apart?”
Wha..?
SpotWeld
I hate to sound like a broken record. But why was Clinton attached to a scandal with zero evidence of misbehavior (as govenor) and Perry seems to be floating above it all.
Is it because he’s armed and that’s keeping everyone polite?
Sue
Martin, you forgot to mention that he is now united with his children. So it’s all good.
beltane
@El Cid: Forget the Founding Fathers even. Today’s conservatives want to undo the reforms of Henry II (1133-1189). All this twaddle about juries, and evidence, and justice just gets in the way of their god-given right to form vigilante mobs. That whole state has gone rogue.
mak
The purest form of schadenfreude is that experienced when right wing crazies start directing their anger back on those who enabled, if not stoked the undirected rage in the first place. Just ask Megan and that half-sissy, Lindsey Graham.
JGabriel
Perhaps not, but evidence from the smoking house seems to indicate the guy was innocent.
Jackasses.
.
Napoleon
What was it they did during the Salem witch trials. Something like weight the alleged witch down with rocks, toss her in a lake and if she floated you knew she was a witch and burned her at the stake. If she sunk at least you knew she died innocently.
It is good to know we have progressed so much from those days.
JGabriel
valdemar:
Because they think it’s cheaper and safer.
It’s neither, but when has logic ever swayed the right wing?
.
Stefan
If Willingham was sentenced to life in prison instead, there is absolutely no way he would still be in jail today. None. Zero. Problem is, he’s dead now. Which is the whole point.
I’m not so sure he’d be out of jail, given his lack of resources. A friend of mine used to do death penalty work, and told me of a client who’d refused to plead guilty with a deal a life in prison plea and had opted for a trial instead (and was then sentenced to death). His reasoning was that if he was on Death Row, then at least he’d have dedicated public interest lawyers working on his case, whereas if he was sentenced to life, he’d just be one more long-term inmate and everyone would forget about him.
It worked, in’shallah. Freed after about a dozen years after it came out that another guy had actually committed the murder. But, like he said, if he hadn’t been on Death Row no one would ever have taken another look at his case.
Makes you wonder about a system where you have to hope you’re sentenced to death in order to get competent legal representation…..
whetstone
@SpotWeld:
I’d like to “hope” it’s because Perry is still just the governor of Texas, and therefore it’s just a local issue.*
But the other guess I’d make is that it’s seen as an error of omission (i.e. omitting doing his job) and not one of commission.
*I mean, it’s not, but you know.
Delia
@Midnight Marauder:
This must be why Perry’s so hot for secession. If he could set up his own little Republic of Texas he wouldn’t have to worry about inconvenient things like federal laws.
Brachiator
But if Perry has nothing to hide, then he has nothing to fear, right? Right?
And, being concerned about justice is evidence of liberal bias to the wingnut fringe.
Amazing.
El Cid
@Stefan: Why was your friend so committed to preventing justice from being done? If he had just let them execute him, we would have saved a lot of time and stuff and still set a good example for all the criminals.
whetstone
Also from comments:
“FWIW, I’m anti-death penalty myself. I’ve seen too much overreaching (Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, Jamie Olis, others too numberous or anonymous to mention) to think that prosecutors aren’t as abusive as defense lawyers; or that rich people get more justice than poor people.”
Yeah.
Stefan
What was it they did during the Salem witch trials. Something like weight the alleged witch down with rocks, toss her in a lake and if she floated you knew she was a witch and burned her at the stake. If she sunk at least you knew she died innocently.
Sir Bedevere: Quiet, quiet, quiet, QUIET! There are ways of telling whether she is a witch!
Villagers: Are there? What? Tell us, then! Tell us!
B: Tell me. What do you do with witches?
V: BUUUURN!!!!! BUUUUUURRRRNN!!!!! You BURN them!!!! BURN!!
B: And what do you burn apart from witches?
Villager: More Witches!
Other Villager: Wood.
B: So. Why do witches burn?
(long silence)
(shuffling of feet by the villagers)
Villager: (tentatively) Because they’re made of…..wood?
B: Goooood!
Other Villagers: oh yeah… oh….
B: So. How do we tell whether she is made of wood?
One Villager: Build a bridge out of ‘er!
B: Aah. But can you not also make bridges out of stone?
Villagers: oh yeah. oh. umm…
B: Does wood sink in water?
One Villager: No! No, no, it floats!
Other Villager: Throw her into the pond!
Villagers: yaaaaaa!
B: What also floats in water?
Villager: Bread!
Another Villager: Apples!
Another Villager: Uh…very small rocks!
Another Villager: Cider!
Another Villager: Uh…great gravy!
Another Villager: Cherries!
Another Villager: Mud!
Another Villager: Churches! Churches!
Another Villager: Lead! Lead!
King Arthur: A Duck!
Villagers: (in amazement) ooooooh!
B: exACTly!
B: (to a villager) So, *logically*…
Villager: (very slowly, with pauses between each word) If…she…weighs the same as a duck……she’s made of wood.
B: and therefore…
(pause)
Villager: A Witch!
All Villagers: A WITCH!
(they do consequently weigh her across from a duck on Bedevere’s largest scale, and she does indeed weigh the same as the duck.)
Witch: It’s a fair cop.
Ash
This is true. The only reason someone started looking into the case is because of an organization against the death penalty. I’m not so sure there’s the same sympathy for people with life sentences.
JGabriel
SpotWeld:
Forget it, Jake, it’s
ChinatownTexas..
Ruckus
@valdemar:
Can’t it be both?
jibeaux
@Napoleon:
1) obligatory Monty Python reference…can’t think of much except that my four year old loves to give “very small rocks” as an answer whenever she can’t think of anything else…it has to do with a list game we were playing in which my husband went all Monty Python…anyway…
2) even further O/T, Neil Gaiman’s (yess! I have mastered the liberal blogosphere!) book The Graveyard Book has a really funny twist on this from a witch in the graveyard. That’s just a good book, actually.
That’s all I’m gonna say because the on-topic stuff is too freakin’ depressing. The fact that we actually have a guy whose title is the word “Justice” believing that a finding of innocence does not change anything as long as you had a fair trial just makes my ironymeter lie down and have a sad for a long, long time.
Rock
Wow. I would have thought that libertarians would be very anti-death penalty. You know, since being allowed to kill
peoplecitizens is a pretty big power to entrust to the government. I guess I need to read more Rand.Martin
@Sue:
Damn, you’re right. That was a major oversight on my part. Bonus feature!
gnomedad
@Brachiator:
No, no, no, he doesn’t want to waste the taxpayers’ money on a witchhunt. Get your memes straight.
Martin
Libertarians are purely theoretical constructs. They do not exist in a universe that contains both matter and energy.
Tim in SF
Perhaps, perhaps not. As a lifer, it is unlikely he would have had the same intense scrutiny of his case. It is, after all, nowhere near as glamorous or high-profile to rescue a man from prison as it is to rescue a man from death row, so all the focus is on death row.
Thus, no one gives much of a shit about lifers and I doubt anyone will until the death penalty is gone.
LD50
@Rock:
I guess maybe libertarians would be happier if it was private industry that was convicting people and executing them after shitty nonsensical trials. That way we’d know our freedoms weren’t being trampled on.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
Also, DougJ? Not to “nut-pick”, but the phrase is “nit-pick”.
trollhattan
Is our McMegan learnin’?
I doubt it.
Regardless of the painfully slow pivot of one Charles Johnson on whether to continue to front for and frolic with spittle-flecked wingers, McMegan seems incapable of learnin’ from her vast catalogue of errors and continual gathering of “evidence” to support her shiny set of beliefs and preconceptions. So very painful to watch her continued acceptance by folks who should know better.
Everytime Sully links to her an angel is crushed under a cinderblock.
jibeaux
@Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion:
You can lead a reverend to the lexicon, but you can’t make him read it…
El Cid
@beltane: The Reagan II / Bush Jr. enthusiasts were pretty het up to get rid of that newfangled gay “Magna Charta” shit too. We don’t need yer new 1215 AD ‘reforms’ with its pro-terrorist “habeas corpus” crap.
anonevent
@SprinkleCoveredTurd: The Chicago Tribune has been covering this story more than the Morning News. MSNBC has been covering it, and I believe CNN as well. Actually, living in Dallas, I’m surprised the Morning News is covering it at all.
Wag
Decadent.
And we’re jealous
tamied
@Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion: I think that was intentional, as in picking on the nuts.
Calouste
@Martin:
God kinda disagrees:
Exodus 23:7
Corey
What Cameron Todd Willingham needed to see was policemen going from house to house, from El Paso to Houston, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You think, you know, we care about due process, about the scientific method in forensic science? Well, Suck. On. This.”
Chuck Butcher
I had something to say about Perry and since a couple dozen will read it I give it to you.
Calouste
@Stefan:
So is that a sketch or an actual conversation you overheard in a restaurant in DC?
If I didn’t know any better, my money would be on the latter.
ericblair
@Calouste: God kinda disagrees:
This is a purely religious matter: let’s not drag God into it.
feebog
Is it just me, or did all those commenters seemed woefully unimformed about the case?
Comrade Dread
Depends on the libertarian. There are so many different breeds of us.
The libertarian equivalent of your DFH’s are anti-death penalty for that very reason. The government screws up enough crap to make us not trust it’s ‘Justice’ system.
The more conservative crew, IIRC, thinks it’s necessary to maintain law and order, but would object to an innocent man being put to death and demand more accountability.
The radical Randian/anarchists would probably want to hire this stuff all out to a private company or form a citizen’s coop and probably keep him in jail for life, where he would need to have a job to pay back what it cost for room and board at the jail.
But, then again, thanks to Wall St., I’m quickly sliding into liberaltarianism myself, so I’m not sure if I’m an adequate spokesperson any longer.
Silver Owl
It is quite easy to get away with a lot of heinous behavior with today’s conservatives. All one has to do is say one is a conservative and “christian”. Being white and rich while conservative is an added bonus for getting away with murder, torture, cover ups and just about any felony on the books.
Being liberal seems to mean being aware and paying attention to the wingnuts today. They take being lazy to new level. lol
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@jibeaux: Dang. I sit corrected, and humbly implore the forgiveness of DougJ for my BJ illiteracy. (begins flagellation)@tamied: jibeaux beat you to it (and with a link to prove it, no less).
Notorious P.A.T.
I don’t know, maybe because Mr Willingham wasn’t the owner of a big business then he didn’t matter?
Jack
With all due respect, I think it’s a lot simpler (especially in this case) than speculated above.
It’s the persistence of blood magic, the ancient and nearly perennial belief that the spilling of blood expiates crime.
It’s literally magical thinking – that the past can be redeemed or altered, and that epiphenomena can be animated, by the doing of current deeds.
Legalize
This is just another argument against big government. Why let the state execute an innocent man (at great cost to the taxpayer I might add) when the private sector can do it more efficiently and without all that bureaucratic red tape?
Bruce Webb
“The state of Texas put an innocent man to death and the governor is trying to cover it up. This should horrify anyone.”
Well the main difference here is that the executed man is white.
Texas and the South and I am afraid all too many big cities in the North operate on the principle of collective guilt, that even if the black kid you arrest or shoot was not actually guilty of that particular crime he was probably guilty of something. That during the course of this people who were never actually criminals at all get killed or executed being kind of a feature and not a bug. It is like that scene in ‘Apocalypse Now’ “it scares the hell out of the slopes”.
When I was visiting my brother in Texas thirty years ago, who was at that point a cop in Beaumont, there was a big local story that got national attention. Cops in Houston were alleged to have just snatched up a Hispanic kid, beat him up and thrown him still hand-cuffed into the Ship Canal. They reported that when they last saw him he was swimming.
My brother said no Houston cop would do that. Sure they would randomly pick up some kid and beat him, and maybe throw him half-conscious in the water but there was no way in hell they would have left the handcuffs on him. Because they would have to pay out of pocket to replace them. No brown or black kid was worth $20 docked from their pay.
Texas has sent people to the death chamber based on an eye-witness id’ing a guy sitting in a dark car at night from across a parking lot in the rain. And sure enough the guy was black, good enough match for Texas justice.
Anyone who read Molly Ivin’s Shrub came away pretty convinced that Bush almost certainly let innocent people and people whose guilt was at least doubtful to be executed. By the end of his governorship he was spending an average of 15 minutes per death penalty case, and this from his own reporting, knowing Uncurious George that probably included 14 minutes of video game playing.
Perry’s mistake was to let a white family man with Christmas pictures with his kids get killed. If Willingham’s first name would have been Demetrius or Ignacio, Perry could have probably slid by just as Bush did.
John S.
So…glibertarians are part of the Q Continuum?
tripletee
I can’t believe you moonbats are obsessing over this when our halfrican commie “President” received an undeserved Nobel Prize just last week. Your priorities are as loony as your belief in “due process” and “innocent until proven guilty.”
Anne Laurie
The last administration tried this in both Afghanistan and New Orleans, with decidedly unsatisfactory results. Defenders of the Preemptive Decimation Theory claim this just proves the C-Plus Augustus wasn’t a real conservative.
@Jack:
Very true, but especially for “libertarians”, there’s also a form of primitive economic reasoning. Little white girls are a valuable commodity, and allowing their future economic potential to be wasted is a
sincrime against Donald Trump’s media outlets. Since death does not happen to modern white Americans except by moral failure, somebody must be punished for the tragic waste of future beauty pageant contestants, and the progenitor of the wasted resources, I mean children, is the obvious target. Foolish progressives have mentioned that many, many people die in trailer fires every year, quite a few of them children, but most of those deaths are off-brand not-white commodity units so it’s not worth punishing anybody in those cases — in the libertarian worldview, it’s the difference between dumping trash on the village green and setting fire to it.esposito
If there were any justice, travesties like “numberous,” “approbrium,” and “infammitory” would be capital offenses. Good god, what nice reminders of the quality of mind behind McCardle’s commenters.
AnotherBruce
“Liberal Bias” translated from wingnut means “Anything I don’t agree with but can’t actually make a reasonable argument for.”
Gwangung
Guilty till proven innocent is Napoleanic justice.
How French of Texas.
Batocchio
I’m amazed anyone following the news on Perry could claim he’s not “trying to derail the investigation.” At the very least, it’s hardly a wacky theory to claim he’s working to do so. I’m wondering how closely the DOJ is following all of this.
Zifnab
@Bruce Webb:
If there’s one world that defines the current southern conservatives from their predecessors, it’s “Sloppy”.
Nim, ham hock of liberty
It’s not entirely clear, but to my eyes the “no smoking gun” comment at McMegan’s site was about a Perry ham-fisted coverup by cleaning house at the commission – not Willingham’s innocence.
The wingers are apparently willing to shrug their shoulders and say, yeah, it looks like there were some issues with the evidence, but who can really say? Opinions differ.
They’re very VERY upset, however, about allegations against Governor Perry that aren’t supported by ironclad, irrefutable evidence.
SenyorDave
Can we hope that through some bizarre twist of fate, Rick Perry one day gets framed for murder and ends up on death row in Texas? Would make a fantastic Twilight Zone episode.
tc125231
DougJ:
–Don’t go all mush about McArdle. A broken clock is right twice a day.
HumboldtBlue
Yeah, and this morning I gave my kitty a treat because she shit in the box and not on the floor.
demimondian
Not to defend the execution of Todd Willingham, but there’s a legal point here: at this point, his innocence must be supported by clear and convincing evidence in most states in order to reopen the case even when he’s alive — and this is Texas, where that means “pictures of the judge lighting the fire which killed his kids.”
Texans doesn’t like it when anything gets in the way of their right to whack off to the sounds of prisoners being offed.
ksmiami
The more the Right exposes themselves, the less chance they have for obtaining real power. Bunch of neo-fascist authoritarian bullies. No effin way, not ever
Zifnab
@SenyorDave:
He’d OJ his way to freedom. Hell, for all we know Rick Perry might have a body trail a mile long and Texas just isn’t interested in investigating it because the Austin PD is too busy cracking jokes about some 6th street club that’s on fire.
Rekster
@Midnight Marauder:
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/politics/entries/2009/10/14/with_vigor_perry_defends_willi.html
Here is Governor Goodhair’s response today.
Brachiator
@whetstone:
Well, at least Bernie Madoff is having fun in prison, if some reports are to be believed:
http://www.investmentnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091013/FREE/910139988/0/Topic01
jenniebee
Look, there was a fire. If he was innocent, he’d have died in the fire like a decent Christian. The fact that he survived it proves that he’s a witch.
We all know that witches can survive burning, dunking, falls off of cliffs, being pressed between two huge rocks, and smallpox. What they don’t survive, their Achilles heel so to speak, is hanging, lethal injection, and ok, sometimes also burning. Burning is tricky.
I’m going to hell now for making light of an innocent man’s murder by the state. See y’all around, peace out!
Midnight Marauder
@Rekster:
Except for the fact that when a fire science professional looked at “the record,” he exorciated the state of Texas, and that’s what led to your ham-fisted whitewashing job (if there’s one good thing Governor Goodhair has done, it’s sparking a revival in usage of “ham-fisted”). I mean, really, are you even trying any more, Governor Goodhair? Because I thought you weren’t with your grossly obvious cover-up, but that quote…surely, he cannot think the entire country to be so foolish as to fall for that nonsense “defense” of his actions.
And then when an independent commission was going to have a hearing about the so-called “facts of this case,” you, Governor Goodhair, decided to effectively abolish the commission in the hopes that no one with a fucking brain was paying attention.
I’m going to let Dylan take care of my thoughts on this one:
And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead
bellatrys
The thing that crops up in old border ballads about corrupt courts setting the clocks ahead when they knew a pardon was about to be issued so that they could hang someone anyways occurs to my mind, but I cannot google up a citation at present, so this bit from 1840 will have to suffice:
bellatrys
All of that from the blockquoted para is supposed to be inside the blockquote, but oh well, lovely lovely wordpress… The relevance of this is that Courvoisier’s trial was considered suspect even at the time as the police “discovered” bloody clothing that they had somehow “missed” in the first searches of his rooms. He may or may not have been guilty, but the evidence was definitely contaminated.
kormgar
In fairness to Megan and glibertarians…the ones who actually have real libertarian leanings do tend to oppose certain things dear to the shriveled little conservative heart…the drug war, the militarization of civilian police forces, the prison-industrial complex, death penalty, etc…
MikeBoyScout
Fire Meg McCardle
neil
I’m probably late to this point, but isn’t it a libertarian view that the government shouldn’t have the power to kill people?