A guy, in prison for four years for a rape he didn’t commit, is finally freed; the victim lied all along.

A young mother who falsely cried rape, sending an innocent man to prison for nearly four years, will experience firsthand what he suffered — she’ll spend one to three years behind bars for perjury.

“I wish her the best of luck,” said William McCaffrey last night of Biurny Peguero Gonzalez.

“Jail isn’t easy.”

McCaffrey, 33, of The Bronx, was locked up after Gonzalez accused him of raping her at knifepoint on a Bronx street back in 2005.

Ms. Gonzales, who concocted the story to explain to her idiot girlfriends why she ditched them while out clubbing, didn’t just lie once, either:

It was a lie she repeated to doctors, cops, prosecutors, a grand jury and the jury that convicted McCaffrey.h

The “rapist” McCaffrey didn’t have a great time of it in the joint, to say the least:

McCaffrey said he has some sympathy for Gonzalez and hopes she “doesn’t go through what I went though.

“I was an accused rapist in prison,” he said, adding that in prison, “rape is the worst crime possible.”

All is clearly not forgiven.

Nor should it be.  McCaffrey’s case seems to support the accusation that, when it comes to accusations of rape or domestic violence made by women, that men are innocent until proven guilty.

In the comment section, some say that the District Attorney should in in jail alongside Ms. Gonzalez.  Not sure about that – but if there’s evidence that the DA concealed exculpatory evidence, it would be a great idea.

Although I’m sure that the laws – largely written by lawyers including not a few former District Attorneys – shield them from exactly that.  (No, I don’t know it, but that’s the way things seem to work out).

Berg’s Seventh Law – when liberals defame conservatives, they’re projecting – just keeps gaining evidence.

Remember three years ago, when the wahabbi global warmingists were demanding “scientific Nuremberg trials” for global warming skeptics – as if belief in sound science were akin to a war crime?

Yep. Unethical.  And it should be investigated.  Not as a war crime, naturally; more like fraud, with the complicity of vast swathes of government, academia, the media and the UN:

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) today asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” — the actions of climate scientists revealed by the Climategate Files, and the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

Senator Inhofe also called for former Vice President Al Gore to be called back to the Senate to testify.

“In [Gore’s] science fiction movie, every assertion has been rebutted,” Inhofe said. He believes Vice President Gore should defend himself and his movie before Congress.

To be serious for a moment, I’m not sure Algore’s little flight of fancy – as damaging as it was – deserves criminal investigation.  Ignominy will do.

But for a bunch of “scientists” and politicians who tried to gin up a worldwide fraud to bring money and political power to themselves (allegedly)?

I think it’s worth a look.

Remember this past sixteen years, when the left stretched mightily to try to tie virtually every crime to “right-wing extremism”, or even just plain ol’ Rush Limbaugh or Rep. Michele Bachmann?

How everything from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Bill Sparkman “murder” were the fault of “extremist rhetoric” or mythical “climates of hatred” (Until debunked, anyway)?

Do you suppose this bit here…

A family source said Bishop, a mother of four children – the youngest a third-grade boy – was a far-left political extremist who was “obsessed” with President Obama to the point of being off-putting.

…will draw a concerned squint from Katie Couric?

Which is not to say that I believe that Bishop’s political beliefs had anything to do with last week’s mass-murder. I don’t want to go down that path where anything anyone says or believes that’s one degree outside whatever “the center” is in this country gets tied to one form of extremism or another.

But I’ve wondered at times if the apocalyptic rhetoric of the far left hasn’t twisted a few weak minds out of spec.  I wondered even more when Janet Napolitano started putting workadaddy, hugamommy conservative groups onto watchlists – given the “end justifies the means” attitude of so many on the left, I wondered if some crazy somewhere wouldn’t use it to justify some kind of ghastliness or another for their own ends.  Great, ghoulish example; Bill Sparkmann – the part-time teacher who killed himself in Kentucky last summer, prompting local bloggers to blame the death on Michele Bachmann’s anti-census rhetoric – chose, as his last act on this earth, to draw a message on his chest to essentially frame conservatives for his death.

David Kaplan, writing at the Daily Planet, is onto yet another mortgage modification scam:

With the foreclosure rate in the metro area still soaring, struggling homeowners face a new and more sinister threat – unscrupulous scam artists.  With ads claiming they can help you keep your home while eliminating your mortgage and property tax, a group calling themselves “Slavery to Sovereignty” is the latest in a long line to take advantage of residents who are desperate for help.

And yes, this one is aimed at the most scam-vulnerable:

At least one ad from the group ran in a newspaper that reaches a largely-immigrant audience, but the small group that gathered at Sabathani Center on January 9 appeared to be a mix of local African American residents as well as recent immigrants.

Perhaps worst of all?  The alleged scammers are retired “public servants”:

People listened eagerly and had many questions as Peter “PJ” Johnson, a retired Minneapolis Parks Police Officer, and his partner Abagail Conley spoke.

Johnson and Conley claimed they could eliminate participants’ mortgages and all tax liabilities in return for $12,500.  Mr. Johnson said the program would take anywhere from six months to three years, but was quick to point out that there were no guarantees.

Read the whole thing.

We in Minnesota have a perspective on Martha Coakley that most states don’t.

It’s been 25-odd years since an overzealous prosecutor in Jordan, MN tripped into a controversy over a pre-school, and pretty much invented the genre of the “entirely fantasy-based sex abuse case”; the conventional wisdom of the day was that children never, ever made up stories about abuse – so pre-schoolers, under questioning, pretty much let their little fantasy lives run amok, destroying not a few lives in the process and serving as the first of a wave of “satanic child abuse” cases that wracked the nation during the early eighties.

Including a similar, and at face value vastly more sickening, case in Massachusetts, involving a daycare run by the Amirault family.  Building on the same wave of suggested memories and childish fantasy that we saw in the Scott County case, the State of Massachusetts sent several of the Amiraults to jail – until it became clear that the procedures used to convict them were fatally flawed.  And so most of them were released.

Except for one of them:

In July 2001, the notoriously tough Massachusetts parole board voted unanimously to grant Gerald Amirault clemency. Although the parole board is not permitted to consider guilt or innocence, its recommendation said: “(I)t is clearly a matter of public knowledge that, at the minimum, real and substantial doubt exists concerning petitioner’s conviction.”

Immediately after the board’s recommendation, The Boston Globe reported that Gov. Jane Swift was leaning toward accepting the board’s recommendation and freeing Amirault.

So far, so good.

Enter Martha Coakley, Middlesex district attorney. Gerald Amirault had already spent 15 years in prison for crimes he no more committed than anyone reading this column did. But Coakley put on a full court press to keep Amirault in prison simply to further her political ambitions.

By then, every sentient person knew that Amirault was innocent. But instead of saying nothing, Coakley frantically lobbied Gov. Jane Swift to keep him in prison to show that she was a take-no-prisoners prosecutor, who stood up for “the children.” As a result of Coakley’s efforts — and her contagious ambition — Gov. Swift denied Amirault’s clemency.

Thanks to Martha Coakley, Gerald Amirault sat in prison for another three years.

There are few things in this world lower than fraudulently destroying another person’s life for your own gain.

Martha Coakley deserves defeat because she’s a tone-deaf political patrician who’s run the worst campaign in recent memory, anywhere.

She deserves ignominy and pointed scrutiny for what she did in the Amirault case.  An emphatic retiredment from public life seems a small price to pay.

For her, anyway.

The problem with “reporting” on drunk driving is that it is such a very, utterly, supremely emotional topic.  Most peoples’ exposure to the subject is intensely personal.  So too with Strib editor Nancy Barnes and her encounter with a drunk:

To this day, I can see the headlights of the old pickup bearing down on my side of the rural, two-lane highway in Pennsylvania.

Behind the wheel was a driver so drunk he had already passed out. I would later learn that he had so many drunken-driving convictions, his license had already been suspended for a decade. But there he was, driving again.

I was a young mother of 30, with two baby girls, driving home from a late-night editing shift. I can remember worrying about who was going to care for my babies as, terrified, I instinctively yanked the steering wheel to the right and ran off the road. His truck clocked my little Honda, swiping it all the way down the driver’s side, but leaving me physically unharmed. The police found him passed out in a ditch not too much farther down the road.

Many people, far too many people, are not as fortunate as I was that night.

Tha is, of course, tragically true.  And since it bleeds, it does indeed lead:

Every other day, someone in Minnesota is killed in a drunken-driving accident.

And that rate is broadly down over the past thirty years or so.  But it’s still a ghastly toll.

The Strib is starting a series purporting to examine drunk driving.  I’m going to examine the examination; that’s what mediabloggers do.

But first, a quick digression:

———-

Drugs cause immense  pain and dislocation in our society.  Thousands of people die of drug-related caues every year in the United States.  And so for generations now the United States Government has embarked on a “War on Drugs” to, ostensibly, eradicate the drug problem in the United States.

And yet, desipte the billions spent here and abroad every year to fight drugs, thousands die every year; gang members mowed down in drug-turf-related drive-by shootings; innocent bystanders to gang turf wars; dealers who hold out on their distributors; rivals gunned down over turf; cops shot intervening in drug-crimes; people killed in robberies as addicts try to get drug money…

…and even a few overdoses (one source put it at under 300 a year) and the usual pathologies related to long-term addiction, which are tragic, but fade int o the background compared to America’s other big addictions, food and cigarettes and alcohol.  Although, oddly, no American neighborhoods are being shot up by cigarette dealers, and the Mexican Army is not engaged in any long-term military actions against Big Mac traffickers.

IT doesn’t seem a huge leap that it’s the government prohibition that causes the biggest problems when it comes to drugs.  An that’s not a radical observation; an organization as big and stupid as the entire US Government realized much the same thing about its last attempt at social-engineering-by-prohibition, Prohibition.

Like the War on Drugs, the “solution” was a dismal failure at addressing the “problem”, much less solving it.

———-

Back to Barnes:

Now, on the surface, there’s nothing new about drunken driving; it’s been a scourge on the roads for decades. This state, like others, has responded with tougher laws and stiffer penalties for those who climb behind the wheel and drive while intoxicated. Those laws have had some impact: The actual number of deaths has trended down over the last quarter-century.

But last year, as one tragic example of a drunken-driving-related death after another made its way into the paper, the editors and reporters in the newsroom decided that it was time to take a fresh look at the depth of the toll on our state.

Cool.

But, unfortunately, when Barnes says “Fresh Look”, what she really means – possibly without realizing it – is “very, very stale look, probably through the same precise lense that caused the “problem” you’re purportedly trying to address”.

The numbers were startling, even to veteran journalists. They suggest that as a society, we still haven’t really come to grips with this.

We need to define what “grips” means with this issue.  Barnes has numbers, of course…:

Some 35,000 people are arrested for drunken driving in Minnesota each year. More than half a million Minnesotans have a DWI on their record. More than 100,000 have had three or more arrests. It begs the question: Why are so many people still driving while smashed in Minnesota?

…but does citing them lead to asking the right questions, much less getting the right answers?

Run the numbers in your head.  Ten percent of Minnesotans have a DWI of some sort or another.  Six tenths of a percent of Minnesotans are arrested every year – six out of every thousand.  That is an immense law-enforcement effort

A team of reporters is taking a sharp look at the stories behind those numbers, examining this issue from the highways, from the courtrooms and from the homes of grieving family members. In addition to these in-depth reports, we will highlight at least one drunken-driving case in print and online each week, and we will host an ongoing community discussion online about what can be done in Minnesota to make our roads safer.

I wonder if that “sharp look” is going to ask any of the following questions:

1. Of those 35,000 arrests a year, how many involve drivers whose drinking has been criminalized by the recent reduction of the legal Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) limit from .1% to .08%?
2. What percentage of fatalities were caused by drivers picked up with less than a .1% BAC?
3. Just as importantly, what was the average BAC involved in fatal “drunk driving accidents”?
4. What percentage of accidents and fatalities are caused by drivers with BACs less than .1%?
5. How many law enforcement resources are diverted to chasing people whose BAC is very, very low, and almost never cause accidents or fatalities?
6. How many fatalities might be averted if those resources were instead spent on keeping habitual drunks, and people arrested multiple times with BACs well above .12%, off the road?
7. If there is no plan to ask those questions – why?  Is it because Mothers Against Drunk Driving is the motivator for this “reporting”, and the answers wouldn’t fit their agenda?

I’d love to get that answer.

Let’s hope 2010 is a better year for local law-enforcement than last year.

Although the Minneapolis PD seems to be off to a rocky start; an MPD SWAT officer has been arrested as a suspect in a long string of robberies around the metro:

Minneapolis police officer Timothy Edward Carson’s shift on Wednesday started at 9 a.m. But he wasn’t there.

By the time he told a supervisor he was running late at 9:30, the FBI says, Carson had robbed an Apple Valley bank and was well on his way to getting caught.

The bad news?  Carson was one of the cops that the MPD gives the big guns to, to go after the toughest and most dangerous perps.

The good news?  He might not be the brightest alleged bank robber we’ve run into:

The criminal complaint outlining the bank robbery charge against Carson shows that the trail of clues leading to his arrest began minutes before he allegedly robbed the Wells Fargo Bank on Pilot Knob Road.

At 8:37 a.m., Apple Valley police officer Kurt Schultz pulled over Carson’s white Mitsubishi Galant because it lacked a front license plate. Carson identified himself as a Minneapolis police officer and was allowed to go on his way.

At 9:17 a.m., Schultz was called to the bank on the robbery report. A minute earlier, a man in a black jacket and ski mask had robbed the bank. Armed with a handgun, he had ordered the tellers to give him money, which he put in a backpack, before fleeing to a light-colored vehicle parked outside.

So he (allegedly) gets pulled over, plays the Thin Blue Get Out Of A Ticket Free card, and then robs a bank in the same jurisdiction not a few minutes later?

In the meantime, the Feds are taking the Gang Strike Force case to a grand jury.

A federal grand jury will hear evidence on the Strike Force in February, according to two sources familiar with the investigation. The evidence is expected to include testimony from former Strike Force police.

Former members of the Strike Force have been approached by federal investigators to provide information about wrongdoing in exchange for leniency, sources said.

The investigation timetable is not clear.

Here’s to a better 2010.

…then the Democrats can be assured to start trolling the prisons.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday tossed out Washington’s law banning incarcerated felons from voting, finding the state’s criminal-justice system is “infected” with racial discrimination.

In other words – because the system is discriminatory because it ostensibly jails too many minorities, the deprivation of voting rights to all convicts is wrong.

Who could possibly make such a ruling?  (emphasis added; listeners to Hugh Hewitt may recuse themselves from the question):

The surprising ruling, by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, said the law violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act by disenfranchising minority voters.

The decision is the first in the country’s federal appeals courts to equate a prohibition against voting by incarcerated felons with practices outlawed under the federal Voting Rights Act, such as poll taxes or literacy tests.

So – being convicted by a jury of one’s peers (or pleading out of one’s own volition) is the same as poll taxes and literacy tests imposed on the law-abiding?

The two-judge majority apparently was persuaded by the plaintiffs’ argument that reams of social-science data filed in the case showed minorities in Washington are stopped, arrested and convicted in such disproportionate rates that the ban on voting by incarcerated felons is inherently discriminatory.

In retrospect, I suppose we should be thankful they didn’t impose electoral affirmative action, giving two votes to every convict.

Patterico, from a larger analysis that you should read in its entirety:

To me, the biggest concern flowing from this decision is the precedent that federal courts can now make sweeping declarations about the discriminatory nature of the criminal justice system based on dubious studies by sociology professors. (More about that in the extended entry below.) The implications are potentially staggering and go far beyond felons’ right to vote. If federal courts can declare the entire system of criminal justice in a state (or the country!) to be racially discriminatory, you could see an invalidation of Three Strikes laws or any other recidivism statute. You could see a sweeping invalidation of laws prohibiting felons the right to possess firearms. And that could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Commenter carlitos points out another potentially disturbing impact of the decision: its potential effect on rural districts with big prisons. Given that the decision explicitly extends to currently incarcerated inmates, you’re potentially looking not just at a huge bump in the number of Democratic voters as a whole, but also very concentrated bumps in districts that otherwise would likely be reliably Republican.

On the upside, who needs ACORN when you can get the Aryan Nations to do your registration for you?

I’ON a more serious note, I’m curious; the lefty squawked like stuck cats when they thought (erroneously) that the Heller decision might be misconstrued to give firearms rights to convicts – but today, dead silence.  Although I’m happy to attribute the bliss to ignorance, I’m wondering what people actually thin about this…

…and hoping that Alito, Thomas, Roberts and Scalia stay very, very healthy until this one gets to the SCOTUS.

 …who the good guy and who the villains are in this story:

A robbery victim overpowered one of four attackers, took her gun and fatally shot her while the other three momentarily left to get food late Tuesday in the South Side’s Bronzeville neighborhood, according to sources.

A woman was found shot dead in an alley behind the 4700 block of South King Drive.

A robbery victim overpowered one of four attackers, took her gun and fatally shot her while the other three momentarily left to get food late Tuesday in the South Side’s Bronzeville neighborhood, according to sources.

The woman was found with multiple gunshot wounds about 11:15 p.m. in an alley behind 4708 S. King Dr., police said.

The four robbers had a gun?  Whew.  Good thing that the City Of Chicago bans handguns in the hands of the law-abiding.  No telling how bad this crime might have been.

The robbery victim was inside a four-door Ford Escort with four suspects inside, including the woman who was killed, according to a law enforcement source.

The woman was told to “guard” the victim while the other three left the car to go get food. While they were gone, the man overpowered the woman, took her gun and shot her with it, and fled the scene on foot, according to the source.

While taking a human life, even in self-defense, is usually a harrowing experience that deeply scars the intended victim, you have to be alive to feel remorse.  And so for what it’s worth, I salute the victim-turned-survivor in this case.

Glenn and Holmes [two Chicago Transit workers] were at a restaurant near the scene when they saw two men –allegedly two of the other robbers– come in the restaurant to use an ATM machine, according to Glenn.

When Glenn and Holmes went back to their truck, they heard shots fired. The shooter then emerged from the alley where the shooting happened and said to Glenn and Holmes, “Call the police; four guys just robbed me.” The shooter was hysterical, Glenn said:

It’s worth noting exactly what a bunch of helpless babe-in-the-woods victims we’re talking about here:

About three hours before the woman was shot or about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, a similar Escort been reported in the area as a “suspicious auto” with four suspects inside who were driving around “yelling at people about how they were going to rob them,” according to the source.

This being Chicago, of course, “self-defense” is no guarantee.  According to Chicago’s integrity-sotted government, the law-abiding citizen (as opposed to City Councilcritters in more ways than one) isn’t supposed to need to defend themselves.

It has not been learned whether the man who was robbed will face any charges.

Just a reminder:  we’re under three months away from arguments in McDowell Vs. Chicago.

It can’t come soon enough.

I know this story’s been making the rounds, but I had to get in on it; a Brit Anglican priest is urging the poor to shoplift:

‘My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift,’ [Father Tim Jones] told his stunned congregation at St Lawrence and St Hilda in York.

‘I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.

That’s right.  There’s nuance!  More later.

Father Jones does have scruples, though:

‘I would ask that they do not steal from small family businesses, but from large national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices.

In other words – “pass a tax on the rest of society without bothering to go through the government”.

It’s the ultimate manifestation of “hope and change”; it’s Chicago politics taken to the streets.  Er, aisles.

‘I would ask them not to take any more than they need. I offer the advice with a heavy heart. Let my words not be misrepresented as a simplistic call for people to shoplift.

Oh, heavens no.  It’s a simplistic call to for people to shoplift wrapped in a tortilla of demented pseudo-religion.

‘The observation that shoplifting is the best option that some people are left with is a grim indictment of who we are.

Depends on what the definition of the word “we” is.

‘Rather, this is a call for our society no longer to treat its most vulnerable people with indifference and contempt.

‘When people are released from prison, or find themselves suddenly without work or family support, then to leave them for weeks with inadequate or clumsy social support is monumental, catastrophic folly.

Er, yeah.  Perhaps the Anglican Church could, y’know, help people?

You might have heard the radio ads:  the Minneapolis Police Federation has taken out commercials pointing out Minneapolis mayor and DFL gubernatorial candidate R.T. Rybak’s record on crime.

Not so, says Rybak (via MPR-via-MDE):

I have focused like a laser [Note:  I think I’ve found a closet Michael Medved listener! – Ed.] on making Minneapolis a safe place to call home, and we’ve had some great success: in the last three years, we’ve cut violent crime by 39%, violent crime by juveniles is down 47% and murders are at the lowest level in decades. The work of Chief Tim Dolan and officers of the Minneapolis Police Department, combined with that of neighbors across our city, have made Minneapolis safer by almost every measure. These facts are indisputable.

Unfortunately, the Federation’s ad is about politics, not policing.

[Note to Mayor Rybak:  Next time you or some other gun controlbot wants flog another national police chiefs’ association’s endorsement of gun control, I’ll be there to remind you you just said that.  But I digress]

I’ve made a practice of focusing on getting results for the people of Minneapolis and not focusing on predictably misleading ads from the Police Federation. That’s not going to change.

Luke Hellier at MDE notes that while crime has dropped from a very dismal peak three years ago – when Minneapolis was flirting with re-achieving its “Murderapolis” label from the nineties – it still hasn’t dropped to the same level as when he was elected:

Rybak’s First Year As Mayor 2002:

Murder – 31

Rape – 254

Assault – 1184

Most Recent Full Year 2008:

Murder – 39

Rape – 327

Assault – 1977

As with Luke, I’ll direction you to check out the facts yourselves.

The Supreme Court of Minnesota (hereafter referred to as SCOM) says “didn’t actually drive drunk?  Tough –  W your wife did, so the police get a shiny new Tahoe!“.

An “innocent owner” cannot avoid forfeiture of a vehicle when it is jointly owned with the offender in the case, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in a split decision published Thursday.

The case involved a Cambridge man whose wife was cited for drunken driving while driving their 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe. The vehicle was seized from owner David Lee Laase. He argued in district court that the SUV should not have been taken away because he was an “innocent owner” under state law.

“This is really a major, major decision,” said Isanti County Attorney Jeffrey Edblad, who credited Assistant County Attorney Shila Walek Hooper for her work. “This is a case that obviously has statewide impact as it relates to being able to keep motor vehicles out of the hands of drunk drivers.”

Laase’s attorney, Brian Karalus, of St. Paul, disagreed.

“This opens up the floodgates for the government to come in and seize property of a 100 percent, completely innocent person,” he said. “It’s mind-boggling.”

Now, as I’ve pointed out many times to people who get overheated about court decisions, “the law means what it says it means” (which is partly false; it means what it and related case law say it means – which is why our society is all clogged with lawyers, who are the only people who can untangle it reliably, since the system was built by lawyers to be completely inscrutable to all the rest of us.  But I digress).

So what does the law say?

Under state law, a vehicle cannot be seized “if its owner can demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that the owner did not have actual or constructive knowledge that the vehicle would be used or operated in any manner contrary to law or that the owner took reasonable steps to prevent the use of the vehicle by the offender.”

The district court and Court of Appeals agreed that Laase qualified.

But the Supreme Court reversed the appeals court’s ruling, saying that “while Mr. Laase may be an innocent owner, Ms. Laase is not.”

Now, I’m going to suspect there may well be a little bit of backstory there that didn’t make it into the story (inasmuch as the story was likely written by a non-lawyer), but I’m thinking there’s substantial grounds here for a…

{{facepalm}}

“Ms. Laase is not” the innocent owner.  Right. Got that, SCOM.

But if one owner’s guilt is enough to void the whole “innocent owner” law, then there’s no such thing as an innocent owner, is there?   There’s only “owners who don’t co-own things with anyone accused of anything”, and “guilty owners and their victims”.

The SCOM: working to make government richer, more powerful and more stupid for over 150 years.

Andy DeLigio, ace investigative reporter, has gone farther inside the Norwegian Mob than anyone who’s lived to tell the tale.

Let’s pick up with part one of the story.

Inside The Norwegian Mob

Andy DiLigio

“Your people are  from what part of Norway, then?”

Jeff Hartelowen looks at me with a focused but blank concentration as I sit across the table from him at the Ace Cafe in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota.  In his early fifties, with thin, graying blond hair and ruddy red cheeks over a beard that needs trimming, he looks like he could be any of the other farmers sitting around the cafe, drinking his Folgers and eating krumkakke. Indeed, he is one of the farmers.

But he’s more than that.  He’s known by a name that’s never, ever said in public, and almost never in private; De Godenfar.  “The Godfather”.   And from this cafe in rural Minnesota, he runs the biggest, most powerful – and yet most secretive – syndicate in the history of organized crime.  A syndicate that is so powerful it manipulates the other crime syndicates at will – and yet remains not only unknown, but its very concept sparks derision at the very idea.

Hartelowen is sitting at a table with his Rådgiver (Norwegian for Consigliere), Art Yetterboe, and Hartelowen’s oldest son Chuck, a beefy 6’4 inch guy with a light blond mullet, leaning back in his chair, his sorel boots tapping nervously on the cement floor, cradling a Big Gulp mug he’s just filled with Folgers.

“Finnmark”, I respond.  “They were Saani”, I add, to account for my swarthy, Mediterranean features.

“Reindeer herders, then?” Yetterboe asks.

“Oh, yah”, I answer, adopting the local patois.

“Hm. Interesting” the elder Hartelowen  respondes.  “OK, then”.

And he starts to tell me the story.

———-

The tale of the Norwegian Mob started in 1891, when a 15 year old boy, Bjørn Knudsson, from the village of  Hjerteløven in Sør-Trøndelag, landed at Ellis Island.  His backstory was unclear – his father, Knud, had apparently been ostracized for applauding after the special music in church – but the clerks at the Immigration station, mistaking his naming his hometown for his last name, entered him in the record as Bjørn Hjerteløven, the name he carried until his death and gave to his family.

The ferry carried him from Ellis to the teeming, reeking streets of the Lower East Side, where young Bjørn took a job delivering ice.

It didn’t take long to figure out where the power was on the Lower East Side; his boss paid protection to the Scunzillis, the Italian gang that ran the local cartage rackets, while the landlord of the sleazy tenement he lived in paid protection to the Fitzpatrick gang of Irish thugs.   

Being neither Irish nor Italian, Hjerteløven was not welcome to join either gang; being Norwegian, he had no desire to.  But he noted and processed two key facts about these gangs as he went through his days and observed their actions, their comings and goings throughout the neighborhood.   

• Being aggressive people from demonstrative ethnic groups, they resorted to violence on the drop of a pin.
• Their gangs were “secret societies” in the sense that Nicole Ritchie is “garboesque”.

Hjerteløven hatched his plan.

———-

On a hot July day in 1892, Bart Sklopnik, another ice deliverer, called in sick.  He complained of stomach pains after having had a traditional dinner of Lutefisk and  Rømmegrøt at the apartment of his co-worker Hjerteløven.  Being a stolid, thrifty Scandinavian, Hjerteløven volunteered to cover his route. 

Sklopnik’s route included the home of both Don Guiseppe Scunzilli, capo of the gang that bore his family name.  And his regular route included the home of Dougall Fitzpatrick, head of the Fitzpatrick gang.

He stopped at the Fitzpatrick’s brownstone on Delancy Street. 

“Top ‘o the mornin'”, said Colleen Fitzpatrick, answering the service door.  “Fifty pounds, lad”.

“Oh, yah”, Hjerteløven responded.   He hauled his load into the house – and then, as planned, stop and did a theatrical double take at the photograph of Dougall Fitzpatrick.  “Oh, it’s a small world, aint it?”

“What fer ya be sayin’ that missus?” Mrs. Fitzpatarick asked, as if on cue.

“Oh, nuttin”, Hjerteløven responded.  “He just ordered some ice from me yesterday, for some drinks he was making.  Over at dat Italian lady’s place…”.

“Scunzilli?” Mr.s Fitzpatrick asked, her face already during redder.

“Is dat the name?  Could be”, Hjerteløven replied.  “Probably weren’t nuttin”. 

He left the house.

Four hours later, at the Scunzilli brownstone in the middle of Sklopnik’s route, while putting a fifty pound block into the icebox in the kitchen, he waited for Antonia Scunzilli, the wife of the clan’s leader Guiseppe, to strike up the inevitable conversation the damn always-talking Italians wanted to have.

Sure enough…

“So youse ain’t da regular ice guy?”

“Nope”.   Two beats of silence.  “I’m Bjørn Hjerteløven”

“Antonia Scunzilli”.

Hjerteløven looked at Scunzilli, feigning surprise.  “Oh, wow.  Well, dat’s a surprise then”.

“What?” Scunzilli asked, in that way people ask when they’re used to getting their answers right way.

“Oh, it’s just dat you look like a regular lady”.

“What’s ‘dat supposed to mean?”  Scunzilli asked, getting red under the collar.

“Oh, it’s just dat dat Fitzwhatsis guy said you was…y’know…a little butch, if you know what I mean.  But he’s obviously mistaken”.  Hjerteløven paused for a brief rhetorical flourish.  “Very mistaken”.

Mrs. Scunzilli paused from her building rage for a moment to thank Hjerteløven for the compliment, as he excused himself.

———-

The New York papers over the next few weeks were filled with stories of inter-gang warfare, as the Irish and Italian gangs slaughtered each other in the streets. And then, a week later, as quickly as the violence had started, it ended.

Bjørn Hjerteløven moved into a town house on Park Avenue three weeks later.  And for the next several years, an uneasy peace reigned between New York’s gangs – one that neither the police nor the newspapers could explain.

In 1895, Hjerteløven married Gerda Tørstensdottir.  In short order, they had four children; Lars, Berndt, Knud, and the youngest, daughter Ingrid.

And it’s there that the next generation of the story picks up.

More soon.

So what we have here are “Scientists”, caught red-handed trying to doctor data, jiggle the “Peer Review” process and defame rather than scientifically refute their critics, in a scam whose goal was to secure their funding and, by the way, bring epic and unprecedented political power to their (inevitably liberal) political benefactors – which is, by any measure, fraud.  Which is a crime.

But Barbara Boxer – the stupidest person ever to serve as a US Senator – knows who the real enemies are:

“You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate,'” she said during a committee meeting. “Whatever it is, the main issue is, Are we facing global warming or are we not? I’m looking at these e-mails, that, even though they were stolen, are now out in the public.”

The e-mails, from scientists at the University of East Anglia, were obtained through hacking.

That seems an odd thing to state as a conclusion; I’ve heard that it’s equally likely they were obtained from a conscientious whistle-blower.

At any rate,  Boxer seems to be serving the dictates of her lord and master Rahm Emanual, and is putting this crisis to good use:

Boxer said her committee may hold hearings into the matter as its top Republican, Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.), has asked for, but that a criminal probe would be part of any such hearings.

“We may well have a hearing on this, we may not. We may have a briefing for senators, we may not,” Boxer said. “Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated.

“This is a crime,” Boxer said.

The biggest crime of all is that Barbara Boxer has a job more responsible than serving burgers at a truck stop.

Everyone’s heard of “The Mob”.  The “Cosa Nostra”.  The “Mafia”.  The Italian organized crime syndicate, ostensibly established on the principles of Omerta, the fabled, iron-clad code of silence, is ironically the most famous, best-publicized organized crime syndicate in the world.  The “secret brotherhood” of the Mob has been the subject of hundreds of movies, many of them Oscar-winners.  It’s been immortalized in thousands of books, TV shows and other staples of popular culture.

In short, the Mafia is about as “secret” as Linday Lohan’s battle with substance abuse.  And a big part of this immense, society-choking wave of publicity comes at the hands of Italians – Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, Robert Di Niro, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Joe Pesci, James Gandolfini…

There are, of course, other ethnic organized crime outfits; Jewish and Irish syndicates were once very powerful in the US; the Russian, Japanese, Albanian and Vietnamese syndicates are visible and brutal.  The Armenian mob dominates Twin Cities business radio on Saturdays.  They all have one thing in common; someone talks about them – to cops, prosecutors, the media, writers, producers or whatever.  There is always some body of knowledge out there about each of these organizations.

But there is one organized crime syndicate that dwarfs all the others in terms of reach, power, brutality and especially secrecy.  And nobody knows about it.

———-

In the movie The Usual Suspects, the ubervillain Keyser Soze is a human macguffin, a supercriminal whose power and menace is multiplied by the fact that nobody has ever seen him and lived; that nobody knows if he really even exists. He is, one character says, “a story mothers tell their kids when they misbehave; like Keyser Soze will get you in the night”.

Soze is fictional.

But there’s a syndicate that’s all too real – rendered all the more sinister by the fact that it has mastered the key to secrecy; make denying its very existence less a matter of fear than utter putative preposterousness.

It hides in plain sight, behind a cloak of its utter improbability

———-

Reporter Anthony DiLigio has undertaken one of the most daunting feats in the history of investigative reporting.  I’m going to quote his piece pretty much in full, as he goes…

…Inside the Norwegian Mob.

The story begins Friday in Shot In The Dark.

I was pulling out of the Rainbow parking lot on Universityi around 6:30 last night, and noticed a small clutch of Saint Paul cops pulled up at the corner of Pascal and University.

“Nothing new there”, I thought.  It’s not uncommon to see the cops pulling over drunk drivers, thieves, footpads and petty thugs up and down Uni after dark; it’s common enough in broad daylight in fact.  I started filing it away…

…until I heard a “THUMP THUMP THUMP” sound through my open window, along with the kind of aggressive barking that doesn’t come from taking Fido out for a walk.

I was waiting to pull onto northbound Pascal to get home when I heard it, and sensed more than saw some kind of frenzied activity through the brightly-lit windows of an office space upstairs – a “computer repair shop and mini-arcade” that always seemed to be in the exact wrong location for either business, above an auto garage and a vacant former clothing store.  Then I heard something new – a bright splintering sound.  I focused on the office, as the big picture window overlooking University shattered, and a black-clad figure tumbled out in a welter of glass, landing on the sidewalk ten feet below on  his side.  He was instantly surrounded by cops, although the cars between the scene and I, fifty yards away, obscured the action.

I pulled out onto Pascal, and noticed that my way home was blocked by a couple of big, black police vans – SWAT trucks.  I wheeled over onto University, parked in front of a vacant building, and walked over as close as I could get to the scene.  The jumper, not apparently bad-enough-for-wear to rate an ambulance, was being led away.  Two or three early twenty-something Afro-American men were sitting, sullen and uncomfortable-looking, in chairs visible through the window, surrounded by officers in kevlar “Fritz” helmets and flak jackets.

It appeared to be a drug raid, but of course nobody was talking.

Observation:  Don’t know if I want to hear anymore how “outgunned” the police are on the street these days.  Every single officer I saw was carrying an M4 carbine, not one degree behind the current special operations fashion curve;

Here’s one for the Hall of Shame.

A few months ago, US Census worker Bill Sparkman was found dead.  The death was suspicious – he was found hanging, with anti-government graffiti scrawled on his chest.

This happened not long after Rep. Michele Bachmann spoke about her ambivalence about cooperating with a census that, at the time, the Obama Administration was overtly politicizing.

The Sorosphere leapt into action.  To pick three examples:

• The direly-misnamed “Thinkprogress” took all of a day to conjure up a mythical right-wing terror movement  based on the death.
• City Pages generic angst-filled hYpStR Matt Hoffman went all CSI on us before the police were even done at the crime scene:  “Now a census worker has been found in what appears to be an anti-government lynching. Does Bachmann own some responsibility?
• Dusty “The Michael Brodkorb Of Snark” Trice delivered a verdict before they’d actually cut Sparkman’s body down: “I’m going to say it again because sadly I feel it bears repeating. I strongly believe that the inflammatory rhetoric Rep. Michele Bachmann thinks passes for policy debate is going to end in violence. “

“Inflammatory rhetoric”.  Heh. 

Heh.  Heh.

Oh, yeah.  It’s official; they were full of s**t (emphases added by me):

A part-time U.S. Census worker found dead near a secluded Clay County cemetery killed himself but tried to make the death look like a murder, authorities have concluded.

Bill Sparkman, 51, of London, apparently was trying to preserve payments under life insurance policies he had taken out, one as recently as May, which paid benefits if he died as a result of murder or accident, but not suicide or natural causes, police said.

Sparkman had survived a bout with cancer a few years ago, but he told a friend he believed the cancer had returned and that he would die, police said.

In a two-month investigation, police marshaled a number of reasons to conclude Sparkman ended his own life. Among other things, only Sparkman’s DNA was found on evidence at the scene, and he had told a friend details of his plan that matched what happened, police said at a news conference Tuesday.

And when, not if, some leftyblogging hamster tries to equivocate on this result, let it be repeated:

Police interviewed potential homicide suspects but ruled them out and found no evidence pointing to any conclusion except that Sparkman killed himself.

Matt?  Dusty?  “Think?” 

All of you leftyblog hamsters?

Do you have something to tell all the sane, responsible people?

Followup question:  Sparkman could have chosen many, many ways to cover up his suicide.  But as his last act on this earth, Sparkman apparently chose to go out in a way that, he would seem to have known, would implicate in his death a whole lot of peaceable, law-abiding people whose only “crime” is distrusting government; people like Rep. Bachmann and, incidentally, me (in addition to committing fraud).  Question:  Whose rhetoric is really doing the harm, here?

…and I have only followed the Petters trial in the most cursory possible depth. 

But I suspect that…

Petters said two top executives of Petters Co. Inc. (PCI), Deanna Coleman and Robert White, filled the company’s balance sheet with constantly maturing promissory notes that eventually broke the company and cost investors $3.65 billion.

Coleman and White generated bogus merchandise transactions as Petters worked on other elements of his conglomerate, Petters Group Worldwide, and grieved over the 2004 murder of his son John in Italy, Petters told jurors.

A tearful Petters recounted at his fraud trial that he paid “little, if any” attention to PCI after his son’s death.

PCI was the main vehicle in the scheme aby the government. Petters said he thought the company was doing “a few deals here and there,” and that it was “tremendously profitable.”

…”the dog ate my homework” is not much of a legal defense.

Just saying.

This story passed almost un-noticed in the past three weeks:  John Evander Couey is dead.  He passed away due to complications from anal cancer on September 30.

Couey was convicted of kidnapping nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford and burying her alive.

Couey took Jessica from her bedroom to his nearby trailer in February 2005, triggering a massive search. The third-grader’s body was found about three weeks later in a grave in Couey’s yard, only about 150 yards from her home.

Her body was found under a foot of dirt wrapped in two garbage bags. She had poked holes through the bags with her fingers, although her hands were bound with wire. She was still clutching her favorite stuffed animal, a purple dolphin.

While I’ve written that I oppose the death penalty for the solitary principle that executing the innocent is far worse than letting the guilty sit in jail for life, there was no doubt whatsoever about Couey’s guilt.   I had planned, in all sincerity, to host a party on Couey’s execution date.   I’ll confess to hoping that his execution would have been botched very, very badly.

God forgives.  So I hope He’ll forgive me for hoping that there’s a Hell, and that Couey is getting signed up for their 401K right now.

In this past month, we’ve seen amply on display the left’s forbearance at jumping to conclusions…

…at anyone who’s not a conservative.

Chicago mayor Richard Daley – mayor of the city with the toughest gun control laws and among the highest gun crime and murder rates in the US – on Fort Hood:

“Unfortunately, America loves Guns. We love guns to a point where that uh we see devastation on a daily basis. You don’t blame a group.”

Unless that group is law-abiding gun owners and the NRA, of course.  Or talk radio, or Michele Bachmann or Michael Savage or Glenn Beck or Karl rove or “neocons” or “teabaggers” or Christians or pro-lifers.   Other than that, you don’t blame a group.

It should go without saying that not only is Chicago a “gun free zone” (for the law-abiding) but so was Fort Hood; the Army doesn’t allow private carry of firearms on base.  A base full of soldiers who’ve not only trained to use firearms under excruciating pressure, but have largely done so through multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, had no more means to protect themselves from Hasan’s alleged onslaught than a bunch of high school kids or Chicago shoppers or anyone unlucky enough to live in a place throttled by wahhabi liberalism that values ideology over human life.

The legitimacy of any government body that tries to thwart your absolute human right to defend yourself and your family should be questioned.

I was thinking the other day that, in the Twin Cities’ leftymedia, many of the same people who last month were ready to indict Rep. Michele Bachmann for “aiding and abetting” in the death of census worker Bill Sparkman are the exact same people who are demanding absolute forbearance in the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan; one tried to conclude on Sunday that the investigators had determined terrorism wasn’t involved at all.

Jeff Goldberg notes that it’s not just a local thing:

Remember when Andrew Sullivan fretted about “Southern populist terrorism” in the death of Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman? (Investigators now believe it to have been suicide.) Remember how Frank Rich interpreted the NY23 special election as “nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war,” demonstrating how “the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult”?

The tendency of elites to leap to hysterical, far-fetched interpretations when dealing with phenomena associated (rightly or wrongly) with the Right is counterbalanced by their “nothing to see here” reaction when confronted with events that implicate pet causes of the Left.

The nature of elite reaction is not strictly a matter of the potential political ramifications of events. There is also the matter of complexity and nuance, which are specialties of the intelligentsia. When events seem to teach a simplistic liberal lesson, there is no need to seek out any mitigating factors. Yet when the simple lesson would seem to favor a conservative argument, there is a frantic search for mitigation, or else the event is dismissed as meaningless.

See:  all of the hoax “hate crimes” that swept college campuses, the Duke Rape Case, the implication of talk radio in the Oklahoma City bombing…

The murder of Matthew Shepard was interpreted as evidence of mass homophobia induced by Christian conservatism, even though the murderers were a couple of two-bit hoodlums with no known ties to the Religious Right. Yet here we have Nidal Malik Hasan reportedly screaming “Allahu Akbar” while gunning down U.S. troops and . . . well, this means nothing.

On Twitter yesterday, I watched, somewhat slack-jawed, as a couple of reporters argued about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin debated exactly how unconfirmed the “Allahu Akbar” rumors really were.  Neither had heard anything about Hasan’s alleged links to radical clerics who’ s been linked with Al Quaeda, or had at least neither had opted to address them.  We’ll see if that ever fits into the template.

One of the irritating realities about the law, the part that most vexes us non-lawyers, is that laws pretty much mean what they say they mean, word for word, letter for letter.

Which isn’t, in and of itself, a bad thing; once you learn to read a statute, you get a pretty clear idea of what the “law” actually is (barring “case law”, or other courts’ decisions which bear on the law you’re reading, which is one of those things you need to hire a lawyer for, since finding cases is one of those things that is pretty much designed to be impenetrable to people who haven’t been to law school.  And it’s designed that way by the people who write and pass the laws, most of whom have been to law school.  Connect the dots, people.  Connect the dots).   And this can be enlightening; for starters, I’m able to tell people who say “if someone breaks into my house, I’m gonna shoot ’em, and nobody’s gonna do anything about it!” to “shut up and quit being an ignorant effing cracker” with some authority.  (These people are never Minnesota carry permit holders, by the way). 

I’ve digressed a bit, here.

The problem, of course, is that often the law is ambiguous.  This is partly due to the fact that many legislators are idiots.  It’s even more due to the fact that no legislator can anticipate all the possible implications of the law he/she is trying to write.  This, indeed, is usually a good thing; would we want a clairvoyant legislature?  Would it be a good thing if Phyllis Kahn could predict your future? 

Again, I’ve digressed.

It’s when you mix vague, inconsistent, ambiguous laws with big, ugly, emotional topics – in this case, the “war on drugs”, which a third of Americans believe to be a quagmire, a third believe to be a righteous holy war, and a third of Americans don’t care about because they’re tweaking, jonesing, baked, zoobed out or bombed out of their minds?

Well, then you get decisions like this one from the Supreme Court of Minnesota:

In a 4-3 decision Thursday, the state’s highest court said a person can be prosecuted for a first-degree drug crime for 25 grams or more of bong water that tests positive for a controlled substance.

The decision, which reverses two lower court rulings, came in the case of Sara Peck. Items seized during a search of her Rice County home in 2007 included a glass bong — a type of water pipe often used to smoke drugs — that contained 37 grams — about 2 1/2 tablespoons — of a liquid that tested positive for the presence of methamphetamine.

Note that this decision reverses two lower court rulings – which means that some county attorney spent tons and tons of taxpayer money to appeal the ruling all the way to the SCOM.

Over two teapoons of meth-infused bong spew.

The Supreme Court said that unambiguously counts as a drug “mixture” under the wording of state law and sent the case back to Rice County District Court for further proceedings. The decision, authored by Justice G. Barry Anderson, noted that the liquid wasn’t plain clear water, but had a pink color and fruity odor, and that a narcotics officer had testified that drug users sometimes keep bong water to drink or inject later.

The statute defines a drug “mixture” as “a preparation, compound, mixture, or substance containing a controlled substance, regardless of purity.” When the language of a statute is unambiguous, the high court said, precedents prohibit courts from disregarding the letter of the law under the pretext of pursuing the letter of the law.

The possibilities are endless.  If you have a roommate/spouse/family member who smokes a lot of pot, and the the smoke collects on the ceiling, and some narcotics officer testifies that sometimes stoners will lick residue off of ceilings for a cheap buzz, then is your paint-job a “drug mixture?”

If you snort some coke, and then blow your nose and toss the kleenex, could your host be prosecuted over your snot being in their wastebasket?

In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Paul Anderson said the majority’s decision “does not make sense, and borders on the absurd.”

Paul Anderson is the hero of the day.

This post is an expansion of a comment in a thread way down below.  Partly because my monkeying with my code this morning put a crimp in my morning blogging schedule.  Partly because the subject deserves it.

I oppose the death penalty, not because I break with most conservatives on the issue, but  because I am a conservative.

Stay with me on this one.

Conservatism is about upholding time-honored truths.

One of those truths is that the individual – one of the “Free Association of Equals” that our society is supposed to be, in the conservative view of things – is of supreme importance, and should be protected from the excesses of government. It’s why we conservative natter on about things like the Tenth Amendment – because we uphold the worth of the individual; there are some things that, to protect the individual, the government should just stay out of.

This directly contradicts the notion that individuals are “eggs” to be broken in the interest of the state’s convenience to make a social “omelet”. Frequent liberal commenter “RickDFL”’s left a remark in the comment section yesterday, that actually sent me looking for a remark about eggs and omelets that I coulda sworn Lenin or Stalin or Mao or Hitler made. No dice – the closest I got was Stalin’s “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic” – but Rick (I puke in my mouth a little bit in writing this) is right; it’s something one of them would say.

Conservatives do believe that the pursuit of good requires sacrifice; the Americans who died at Omaha Beach and Gettysburg and Chosin Reservoir were also of incalculable value, and they did nothing to deserve what happened except serving their country, and their loss was a tragedy for all of us. But they died (most of us believe) for a greater good, in a time and a place and for a cause for which there was no alternative, and which helped bring immense good as a result.

Killing an innocent person to “deter” the guilty? It brings no good (the guilty party goes free forever!) (I mean, what DA is going to say “oops – killed the wrong guy the first time! Let’s try this again!”), there is an alternative, and, lest we forget, it kills an individual who did no wrong – which is exactly who this society is supposed to protect.

And it echoes Andrea Dworkin (or Catherine McKinnon?  Jeff Fecke?  I get confused) who said it’d be “good” if men got falsely imprisoned for rape, to make all the real rapists a little more afraid. It’s an idea straight out of the worst of the French Revolution (which had no problem executing the innocent “pour l’encourager les autres“), carried on via Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot.

Hypothetically, if the system could be “perfected”, would I support it? Sure. But that’s another tenet of conservatism; mankind can never be perfected; the hypothetical is pointless. And to a conservative, protecting people from the problems that human imperfection brings to government drives what government is supposed to do – including impelling government to back out of big parts of our society.

So since…

1. Mankind – including prosecutors and the police – can never be perfected, and…
2. these imperfections kill the innocent, and…
3.  killing the innocent is immeasurably evil, and…
4.  since a foolproof alternative exists that surely and swiftly punishes the guilty (remember – life in supermax without parole begins at sentencing; death takes an average of 12 years) while protecting the innocent, and…
5. protecting the innocent is one of society’s supreme goods, then…

…abolishing the death penalty is supremely conservative.

To me, the logic of my stance depends on the five interconnected points above – all drawn from orthodox conservative beliefs to a finely-polished “t”.  If you want to disagree, by all means do it in the comment section.  But if you can’t successfully attack that five-point chain of logic, I’m not sure you’ll get a lot of traction with me.

While I’m a firebreathing libertarian-conservative with a few touches of paleocon mixed in for good measure, I break with conservatives on a couple of issues.

The big one is capital punishment.

Don’t get me wrong – I support capital punishment for every reason there is…

…except one; the simple fact that people, science, procedure and law are all imperfect, and that until they are it is inevitable that we will execute an innocent person.  And executing the innocent is a double crime; it kills an innocent person for a crime he didn’t commit, and it virtually ensures the guilty will go forever free.

Now, Laura Ingraham is almost right; modern science has, theoretically, made it much more difficult to execute an innocent person.  But in some cases, modern, exculpatory science has gotten hindered by police and prosecutorial misconduct. 

And in others – including, it seems, at least one execution that looks increasingly likely to have killed an innocent man – science looks to have evolved enough to have made a verdict look very sketchy:

[Cameron Todd] Willingham was executed for the 1991 arson murders of his three children. The Chicago Tribune investigated the case in December 2004 and found that the fire investigation was flawed, with the local investigators relying on indicators of arson that had been disproved by advances in fire science.That does not mean Willingham was innocent. But in the absence of other evidence, it shows that he was executed for a fire that might well have been accidental.

A very, very long article in New Yorker, however, makes a pretty compelling case that Willingham was innocent, and that the Texas state government, including governor Rick Perry, would rather not examine the possibility.

There are people out there who deserve to die for their crimes.  But that must never trump the right of the innocent to live.

Never.

Even if the absolutely guilty pay for their crimes with the dubiously-better option of life in a Supermax with no possibility of parole – barring, of course, reversal of their convictions.

The Willingham case adds to a growing body of evidence that the only morally acceptable means of capital punishment is legally-justified self-defense.

The Strib has been covering the twentieth anniversary of the kidnapping of Jacob Wetterling. 

Today, they interview Aaron Larson, the boy who went walking to store with Jacob Wetterling and his brother on that Sunday night.

I was a little less than two years away from having kids myself, back then.  And Wetterling’s was one of a series of kidnappings that shocked the region at the time; Jeanne North disappeared in Fargo; a young girl was kidnapped, molested and murdered in a Northeast Minneapolis second-hand store by a fat, long-haired loser who canoodled with Satanism and whose mug shot alone could have been used as dispositive evidence that he was a child-rapist/murderer; another little girl in Cottage Grove was abducted and killed by his mother’s boyfriend.

And as they got older, the examples didn’t get any less fresh; Dru Sjodin was abducted and killed about the time my kids got into their teenage years, tempering my joy about their growing independence and giving me a date to take a quick vacation from my opposition to the death penalty for the party I’ll throw the day they finally stick a needle in Alejandro Rodriguez’ arm.

The story stuck with me as a new parent – especially stopping by Saint Joseph almost exactly a year later, when the posters were still up and the place still oozed hope for the boy.

“The first thing I remember was the flash of the gun, and a guy saying, ‘Stop, I have a gun,'” Larson recalled. “I caught my breath. I thought it was a high school kid pulling a joke on us. … Then it hits you: this is happening, it’s no joke.”

The man ordered them to lie face-down in the roadside ditch.

Larson remembers his heart “going 1,000 beats a minute,” but having no clue what was happening. “You didn’t hear about people being kidnapped or abducted. It didn’t cross my mind.”

The man asked Trevor to look at him, then asked his age. He did the same with Aaron, then Jacob.

“Then he told Trevor to run as fast as he can to the woods. Trevor was not gone that long, maybe 10 seconds, and he said the same to me or he’d shoot,” Larson said. “I ran as fast as I could to catch up to Trevor.”

After running 100 yards, Larson looked back — and saw nothing but darkness.

Frantic, the boys ran to the Wetterling house. The baby sitter called her father, who called 911. Within minutes, the cul-de-sac lit up with squad cars.

Petrified, Larson looked out a living room window and kept telling himself he would see Jacob again. “Sooner or later, he’s going to come and he’s going to get out of the car and this will all be over.”

Twenty years later, there’s a part of him still looking out the window, waiting for his friend.

It seemed incredible at the time; kidnappings, especially in little towns like Saint Joseph, just didn’t happen as bolts from the blue.

The kidnapping popped an awful lot of bubbles. 

I’ve told my kids ever since then; if someone pulls a gun on you, run; moving targets are harder to hit; a 9mm slug has about a 17% chance of killing you even if it does hit you, even if the shooter does opt to shoot (because nothing screws up a hush-hush stealth crime like ekidnapping like, y’know, gunfire).  That’s an 83%-plus chance to survive if you run and run fast, as opposed to about a .1% chance of surviving at a secondary crime scene.

Kids disappear every day, of course.  Most of them turn up again.  The Wetterling case swept Minnesota 20 years ago, and is still virtually synonymous with “kidnapping” in the minds of most Minnesotans old enough to remember the case.  It was especially traumatic in rural Minnesota, which got dragged out of the world of Laura Ingalls Wilder and into the cold, windy real world. 

The case still reverberates, of course.  Some good did come of it; it launched a raft of child safety legislation; Patty Wetterling went on to found the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is the single most important group on the issue.  And the realization that Minnesota, even its vast hinterland, wasn’t as safe as it used to be helped erode support for the DFL’s traditional “catch and release” policies, and built support for reform of Minnesota’s paternalistic, racist handgun permit laws over the following decade.  Being a child molester got a little more dangerous in Minnesota after the Wetterling kidnapping.

I do urge you to read the interview with Aaron Larson.  He’s 31, now; it’s a fascinating look at a survivor, and what that means.