Category Archives: Criminal Injustice

UPDATED: Gray Snapped His Own Spine. Yeah. Right.

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Race

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, who when calm speaks in CAPS, was super-excited tonight. The cause for her excitement was a stupid report released by the Washington Post, according to which Freddie Gray appears to have broken his own neck and spinal column. Ridiculous.

The source of this nonsense was a “prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray,” and who was “separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him.”

That settles it, then. Mr. Gray severed his own spinal column.

“We disagree with any implication that Freddie Gray severed his own spinal cord,” said Jason Downs, one of the attorneys for the Gray family. “We question the accuracy of the police reports we’ve seen thus far, including the police report that says Mr. Gray was arrested without force or incident.”

I believe it is as I had surmised: The oafs likely dug their knees into the spinal column and snapped it.

The video “shot by several bystanders …shows two officers on top of Gray, their knees in his back, and then dragging his seemingly limp body to the van as he cried out.”

UPDATE (4/30): NO RESOLUTION, YET.

“Baltimore police,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “… have concluded their investigation into the death of Freddie Gray and turned the results over to the city’s chief prosecutor.”

Police officials also revealed that the police van carrying Mr. Gray after his arrest made a previously undisclosed stop before he reached the Western District police station and was taken to a hospital. Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said a privately owned surveillance camera captured the stop. He offered no additional details, and it was unclear if that stop shed any new light on Mr. Gray’s injuries.

Based on an earlier police timeline, this stop occurred after one where Mr. Gray was placed in leg shackles because he was acting “irate” and before another where police moved Mr. Gray off the van floor and placed him in a seat. At a fourth stop, police picked up an additional prisoner before reaching the station.

Mr. Gray wasn’t buckled into his seat and wasn’t offered medical attention he requested, police have said.

MORE.

Waiting To Exhale In Baltimore

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Critique, Race

After waiting on the signal from Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, finally called up the National Guard, late Monday, to deal with the “Black Lives Matter” riot that is “convulsing” the city. This time, on account of the murder of Freddie Gray, earlier this month.

Had he failed to wait that period of grace for an OK from the black mayor, the white governor would have probably been called a rrrrrrrrrracist.

Officials like the governor continue to renounce the connection between the ubiquitous gangs—on this occasion, the Black Gorilla Family, Bloods and Crips—and rioters who put the finishing touches to each “Black Lives Matter” protest. The protest is 95 percent peaceful, promised the governor of Maryland, today. The looting, arson, rock-lobbing, robberies and assaults are executed by an element separate from the peace lovers.

Whatever you say, Gov.

Yawn.

One suggestion to liven things up a bit more: When addressing the media, Baltimore officials should consider hiring the sign-language guy who rocked Nelson Mandela’s funeral, instead of the stuffy woman who currently gesticulates for them. The South African was the coolest, most creative and original act at the funeral. All the more so considering he didn’t even know sign-language.

Freddie Gray’s Arrest Conjures Carol Anne Gotbaum’s

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, The State

Freddie Gray, whose fatal injury in police custody led to his death, was clearly manhandled by the officers. Three to 4 oafs likely dug their knees into the spinal column of this slim man. Something bad happened to the vertebrae. The arresting oafs failed to immobilize Gray’s neck in the patrol wagon, even though he was already limp and listless. The affected vertebrae could have further snapped or moved by the van’s motion, resulting in the injury that killed Gray.

The reports on Gray’s injury conjure Carol Anne Gotbaum’s trauma. The petite 45-year-old who weighed 105 pounds was scrummed by meaty policemen in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor, tackled to the ground, and a knee jabbed into her skinny spine. She was then thrown in a holding cell, where she was shackled and chained to a bench. Minutes later Carol Anne Gotbaum was dead.

What a shame that nobody marched for Mrs. Gotbaum, too.

Cameron Todd Willingham & The Witchdoctors Who Killed Him

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Law, Pseudoscience

As it has been practiced for decades, arson investigations were more voodoo than science, and “arson sleuths” were often dabblers; “old-timers” who lay claim to a “a body of wisdom,” passed down from one old timer to the next arson investigator. The problem? An innocent individual, Cameron Todd Willingham, was “executed for the arson murder of his three young daughters,” in Texas, in 2004, based on this hocus-pocus.

Many arson investigators, it turned out, had only a high-school education. In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s training came on the job, learning from “old-timers” in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.”

In 1992, the National Fire Protection Association, which promotes fire prevention and safety, published its first scientifically based guidelines to arson investigation. Still, many arson investigators believed that what they did was more an art than a science—a blend of experience and intuition. In 1997, the International Association of Arson Investigators filed a legal brief arguing that arson sleuths should not be bound by a 1993 Supreme Court decision requiring experts who testified at trials to adhere to the scientific method. What arson sleuths did, the brief claimed, was “less scientific.” By 2000, after the courts had rejected such claims, arson investigators increasingly recognized the scientific method, but there remained great variance in the field, with many practitioners still relying on the unverified techniques that had been used for generations. “People investigated fire largely with a flat-earth approach,” Hurst told me. “It looks like arson—therefore, it’s arson.” He went on, “My view is you have to have a scientific basis. Otherwise, it’s no different than witch-hunting.”

On September 7, 2009, the New Yorker’s David Grann wrote a lengthy expose, “Trial by Fire,” in which he asked, “Did Texas execute an innocent man?”

On March 9, this year, Maurice Possley, of The Marshall Project, all but confirmed that yes, Texas executed an innocent man.

Read the horror story of Cameron Todd Willingham, who “insisted upon his innocence in the deaths of his children and refused an offer to plead guilty in return for a life sentence.”

And the update.