"Don't Shoot Me, I'm a Lawyer"--Reprise

Return with me now to Main Street outside the Armstrong Hotel in Shelbyville, KY,  and the honor-vengeance killing of General  Henry H. Denhardt; also the echoing chorus of "don't shoot me, I'm a lawyer" (go here).  My new found Kentucky friend, Hugh "Uncledoc" Wilheight, who kindly furnished me with the lyrics to the commemorative ballad, has now served up an exhaustive account of the whole gory story from The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, vol. 84, pp 361-396, the work of one William E. Ellis, professor of history at Eastern Kentucky State (apparently this guy).

The story is easily told.  Verna Garr Taylor took a bullet.  General Denhardt said she shot herself.  The prosecutor said the General shot her.  The jury hung 7-5 for acquittal.  It was on the eve of a second that that her brothers gunned down the General, and the lawyer achieved fame in song and story for a one-liner he probably never uttered. 

Ellis speculates idly on the place of the account in the history of violence and vengeance particularly as practiced in the Bluegrass State but he doesn't go very far with it.  He directs most of his efforts to constructing an extended narrative chronicle. A modern reader will do well to restrain the impulse to  draw contemporary comparisons, not least on the phenom of the Denhardt trial as a media bacchanal.  

But the hung jury and the ensuent killing vengeance killing are not the end of it.  A prosecutor put the Garr brothers who shot Denhardt themselves on trial for murder. "I shot to protect my life," one of them testified.  Perhaps more remarkable--somehow, heaven knows how,   the defense persuaded the judge to allow evidence calculated to demonstrate what a rotter the victim was.  Ellis:

A number of military men paraded to the witness stand, all of whom soundly flayed the general. They alternately described him as 'domineering,' 'power-drunk,' 'officious,' and 'cruel and inhuman.'   Brigadier General Ellerbe W. Carter characterized Denhardt as 'one of the most violent, domineering and unscrupulous men I every knew.'  Two other witnesses claimed to have overheard the general threaten to shoot down the Garr brothers. 

 The prosecutor, per Ellis, "countered with the obvious: two men had shot down another man, who was unarmed.  Moreover, they shot him in the back."  The defense countered that the brothers had "a right to shoot a mad dog."  The jury deliberated for an hour and a quarter before bringing in a verdict of not guilty.  The audience erupted into a cheer and rushed to congratulate the accused..  Evidently (again), the rule is that "the boy needed killin.'"

Did I Destroy Cleveland? Not Entirely (An Update)

A few years back I regaled the faithful with my account of how I destroyed Cleveland.  When the news  broke last week about the house of horrors I naturally hightailed it to Google to see if I was responsible.  Answer: not really.  Target zero for the current gruesome story is about three miles away from the unspeakable Area B.  

But I'm not quite sure that's the end of it.  Like, I am sure, almost everybody else, I found myself wondering: what kind of a neighborhood is this, anyway?  Best I can tell, there are some longterm residents.  Isn't there anything by way of community surveillance that might have picked this up?  Slate picks up on the issue, with a different spin, reacting to a commenter in the Plain Dealer:

“At the moment, the hum of criticism on Seymour Avenue is about the subtle signs, such as the lowered shades or odd behavior of Castro and how he never entertained guests,” he writes. “These are the kinds of signs that police officers who patrol a specific beat over time might notice or hear about from neighbors. But that kind of patrol disappeared when community policing ended.”

That kind of patrol disappeared when community policing ended—that’s the line you should remember if you’re looking to criticize the cops here. Intuition is one of a police officer’s foremost assets. But missing persons and odd behavior become suspicious only when you are intimately familiar with a neighborhood, with what normalcy means and when normalcy is breached.

In Cleveland and elsewhere, that sort of hyperlocal knowledge is on the wane.

 Well yes, that's easy to latch onto.  Good morning, Mr. Policeman Brownbear.  Good morning, Johnny--shouldn't you be in school?   We all have that picture in our mind, and it is unfailingly filed under "ancient history."  As it happens, I live in a neighborhood that has all the old prelapsarian good order that you could possibly imagine--and I haven't seen a beat cop here in 30 years (cruiser did stop in my front yard the other evening and rousted an apparent drug suspect; they let him go).

The inference might be that community policing works if and only if there is a community.  So, wasn't there something by way of community on Seymour Avenue to pick up the slack?  In his justly admired backgrounder, Robert L. Smith sketches a response:

This stretch of Seymour Avenue is near the historic heart of Cleveland's Puerto Rican community but it's no bustling barrio. Yards tend to be fenced with rusty chain-link  on a block of long, narrow lots running between West 25th Street and Scranton Road, just south of Interstate 90 and Scranton Cemetery. Several houses, like the one next door to Castro's, are boarded up and abandoned.

Residents say the neighborhood feels safer since police chased away drug dealers a few years ago, but they learned to keep to themselves and to avoid asking too many questions. "Beware of Dog" and "Keep Out" signs are prevalent.

The block is anchored at its eastern end by a stately, red-brick church, Immanuel Lutheran. At the west end, across West 25th street, is the venerable neighborhood bodega, Caribe Grocery, which has been owned for decades by Ariel Castro's uncle, Julio "Cesi" Castro, and which closed after the media descended.

The industrious Castro family has a long history in Cleveland...

 Well--no, not a response, for with all his best efforts,he doesn't seem to be able to put his finger on the question of why the neighborhood is not a barrio, why it is a ghostly cardboard cutout of what you would want it to be.

Boy I wish I had the answer to that one.  I don't, and I'm sure it is above my pay grade.  But I am willing to shake down at least one possible culprit: It's those %$#@! expressways.  Way I read Google, ground zero is tucked into an armpit (I choose my words with care) formed by I-90 and I-71.  Now just about anybody with any on-the-ground knowledge agrees these days that urban freeways are, in retrospect, a dreadful mistake: that they provided no really adequate solution to urban traffic problems and far worse, they tended to suck the lifeblood out of any community that suffered their depredations.

Yes I know, I know, there are a thousand objections.  Some neighborhoods suffered without any expressway in earshot (actually, that would be my in-laws'),.  Some survived the expressway (Really?  Where?).  I can think of any number of other possible causal factors that would have to be plugged into the equation.  

Still, you imagine yourself at 2207 Seymour and you breath in the exhaust fumes and you listen to the hum-thrum of the traffic every hour, every day, every year, and you have to wonder.

De-Mirandizing: Not a Bug, but a Feature

Emily Bazelon does a superb job of explaining a(t least one) good reason why we should be reading young Dzhokhar his Miranda rights, but I think she may be talking past the important issue.  She might want to consider the point that for some people, depriving defendants of fundamental human rights is not just a practical compromise, it an urgent principled necessity: necessity because the goal of the whole process is to strip them of their human dignity.  It's the same reason why, for example, not many people get worked up over the victims of prison rape.

Consider: if we acknowledge their human dignity, we are admitting they are "like us," which would imply that people "like us" can do dreadful thing, which would imply--oh, dear,, let's not go there, but I do recall Goethe (yes?) saying there was no crime he couldn't imagine himself committing.  For folk with this attitude, refusing to grant fundamental rights is not a bug but a feature, and "necessity" is quite beside the point.  Emily argues that if they can do it to people like young Dzhokhar, then maybe they can do it to you, or her.  Quite right, Emily, and that may be just the point.

For extra credit:  the proposition set forth here is independent from the proposition that people enjoy torturing others because they enjoy seeing them suffer.  But they overlap.  If we (for example) send Christians into the  arena to be torn to shreds by lions, it may be because we enjoy seeing them suffer.  It may also be be because we don't recognize them as "like us."  Yet if they are not "like us," why do we get such enjoyment out of seeing them suffer?

Sharia Law Comes to Kentucky

Link.  But cf.  link.

But Do They Have One for Bankers?

A town near Fort Benning, GA, has set up a special jail for veterans. 

H/T Margaret.

...and Speaking of Community Policing

On the towel dispenser in the rest room at Palookaville's finest student joint:

David Lat is Not Sold

Fascinating maybe-he-didn't story over at Above the Law.  A stretch, but David Lat will look like a hero if it turns out to be true.  Remember Gary Condit?  Remember Richard Jewell?   Lat may have discovered a nifty way to gain a reputation as a defender of the accused, without having to do the actual heavy lifting at trial.

What's Different About Rape?

Here's one that intrigues me, although I suppose it is old stuff to the experts.  That is: I'm looking at data on the incidence of crime, state by state and I think I'm seeing a huge difference between all other crimes and rape.  I haven't done any real stats, but I think I'm looking at a very low correlation, perhaps negative.


Example: here I am scanning the list of the 15 most high-crime states in the country.  Nevada laps the field again, a veritable East Germany in the crime Olympics.   But--well, first a technical point.  Specifically: the overall rankings go from one (safest) to 50 (least safe).  But on the specific crime numbers, it's just the reverse--a low number (e.g. "1")  means a lot of crime; high (e.g., "50") means not a lot of crime).  Got that?  Good; then ere's Louisiana, number three most unsafe overall, first in murder and fourth in assault.  But Louisiana's rape ranking is just 33, i.e. pretty safe.  Or even more, Maryland: number eight overall, number two (nasty)  in murder and robbery, number 45 (safe) in rape.  Alaska, fourteenth most unsafe safe, is number one (most unsafe of all) in rape  (also an unsafe number three in assault, but that's another story).  Meanwhile California, fifteenth most unsafe, but a relatively safe 41 in rape.


Works the same way at the other end of the scale, too.  Here's New Hampshire, first over all, but only 29 in rape, worse than Louisiana and much worse than Maryland.  South Dakota, ninth safest overall, number three (very, very unsafe) in rape


What's going on here?  Just on a skim, I get the impression that a lot (not all) of high-rape states comprise vast open spaces (Alaska, South Dakota, etc.)--something about propinquity, or the absence thereof?  Or are there some states where men are more likely to regard women as sexual conveniences?  Or am I just data-mining, or are my thumbnail guesses wrong or, or, or...

Jail and Criminal Elites

The usually-right Glenn Greenwald has an overwhelmingly right piece up this morning about double vision at The Washington Post over criminal law: one law for us, the political elites, another for them, the great unwashed who deal dime bags in the 'hood.   Or perhaps I should say no law for the elites who in the eyes of the post ought to be able to do pretty much what they damn please.

A skeptic will say--well, what about DSK, the uber-elite who spent at least a few hours at Rikers on his rush trip to ignominy?  It's an interesting question and strictly speaking, I don't know whether the Post has weighed in on it or not--though from what we hear, the French establishment seems to be taking the Post-like view that you just don't do such things to such a (nice) (powerful) (well-dressed) man.

But here is a possible distinction: DSK's offense looks like a crime.  As the old Kingston Trio song goes: I don't know whether to hang you or not but thisshere shootin' o' deputy sheriffs has just naturally got to stop.  Trying to inflict yourself on an African maid is uncool, at least the new uncool.  At least in the case of white-collar crime, that might be one reason for the iconic American perp walk: you want to make em look like criminals, for those citizens who simply cannot make head or tail out of the actual charge.

Flipside: it is very hard to tell the difference between aggravated criminal politics (or banking) from what they appear to do every day.  Let me think about that...

Afterthought: this is perhaps what the Post editors don't want to put their friends through.  Or anyone else, you would think.

Finally, We Have Identified Something Worse than Torture ...

Littering.

Or, as Arlo Guthrie would have said, "litterin'."

Enough with the Victimhood

About one of the defining crimes in modern Britain, Andrew O'Hagan speaks the unspeakable:

Denise Fergus, the mother of James Bulger, is being paraded as the proper arbiter of justice: as if the mother of a murdered child should call the shots, should be the one to decide what ought to be done with the killers. She is not to be challenged: who in their right mind would seek to challenge a grieving parent?

Yet we need to challenge her, because that also means challenging the moral stupidity the media’s use of her represents, the urge towards counter-violence that always seems to make sense to the mind of the average working-class Briton. Of course she wants the boys behind bars for ever. She wants their rights taken away. Which of us, given the horror, would never be tempted down that road? No matter what the law says, a sense of entitlement nowadays devolves to the families of murder victims. The tabloids and not just the tabloids like it that way. Among the tabloids I include the Today programme.

This case has, from the beginning, involved the need to say that grief is not an achievement, doesn’t confer power, and Denise Fergus should have no say at all in the fate of the boys who killed her son.

For a powerful exercise in the theatre of "there but for the grace of God," go here.