#investigating murderers and getting some of them convicted with a death penalty?

[spinner-of-yarns]

The hell is happening in the notes?

Yes, it’s a tragedy, yes it’s incomprehensible why someone would do it. But just because someone gets arrested doesn’t mean they did it! It definitely doesn’t mean you should wish the death penalty on them, what’s wrong with you?

This is one of the most photographed trees in the UK and some cunt has just went and cut it down in the middle of the night.

[bakafox]

Just... a brief case study of how the Death Penalty cannot trusted to be fair

The false conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas has lived rent free in my head since I saw an investigative reporting show talk about it- and y'know, I may have seen that show while he was even still appealing it on death row, IDK at this point, it's been a LONG time since I saw it, and the dude was killed in 2004.

But like, the dude was not only convicted in 1992 because of inaccurate arson forensics that had been debunked, but there were clips of him being painted as a satan worshipper and bad dude by law enforcement and prosecution because of a 'satanic' poster he had in his house.

Which the investigative journalists identified as a Led Zeppelin poster.

But it had a skull on it. And in a conservative area of Texas, to people ACTIVELY INVOLVED in investigating and prosecuting people, a scary skull meant it must be Satanic and meant that the person who had it on a wall was severely mentally disturbed and immoral. People were clutching their pearls over a Led Zeppelin poster and it helped get an apparently cis, definitely white man executed after a house fire killed his three kids.

Now, he may have been an unpleasant guy. There were reports of domestic abuse- but that is not what he was convicted and killed for. He was convicted and killed for murder and arson.

And his home decor and music taste was used as evidence against him along with outdated scientific theories about how fire spreads.

...And there are people who probably have never seen such a case of investigative reporting, (I hope,) or heard of groups like the Innocence Project, who somehow are certain that LGBT people or people who help with medical transitions have nothing to fear in Florida, and that the only people who will die are actual sexual predators and pedophiles.

When really, anyone who is inconvenient and easily blamed or is a little odd for the area or not conservative enough will have more to fear.

(On top of how the death penalty has never been proven by data to reduce crimes it applies to, and will yeah, actually put victims at more risk of being killed to silence them, and make people less likely to report possible cases of abuse, etc.)

The long list of other people that have very likely been murdered by the state for crimes they didn't commit is mostly black, with other POC- but even some cishet white dude can die, where conservatives hold sway in particular, and in some small but meaningful part the death can be because he liked a classic rock band that apparently no one in the local sheriff or police department heard of or approves of.

[virginiaprelawland]

Who Is Alex Murdaugh?

By Noreen Karam, University of Virginia Tech, Class of 2024

February 24, 2023

The tragic circumstances swirling around a lawyer and his family in South Carolina became only more perplexing over time, leading to several arrests, stunning twists — and now, one of the most closely-watched trials in the country. At its center is Alex Murdaugh, 54, whose family dominated the legal landscape in the southern part of the state for 100 years, and who now faces trial on two counts of murder. Prosecutors have accused him of killing his wife and son in a failed attempt to conceal his own financial crimes.

It all began on the night of June 7, 2021, when Alex Murdaugh, whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather all served as the top prosecutors across a wide area of the state, called 911 to report that his wife and one of their two sons had been shot to death. A sense of mystery enveloped the killings as more than a year passed without a suspect or motive identified. Then, on July 14, 2022, Mr. Murdaugh, was indicted on two counts of murder, with the authorities saying he fatally shot his wife with a rifle and his son with a shotgun. Mr. Murdaugh has been in jail since October 2021, when he was first charged with stealing from a former client, and prosecutors have since brought a wave of financial charges against him, saying he defrauded victims — many of whom were clients — out of about $8.8 million. Mr. Murdaugh has maintained his innocence in the killing of his wife and son, and his lawyers said before trial that he “looks forward to this opportunity to clear his name.”

 The trial began on Jan. 23, and was expected to wrap up by next week.The scrutiny on Mr. Murdaugh has spawned several more investigations into three previous deaths in proximity to the family, and Mr. Murdaugh has also been charged with scheming to stage his own suicide to look like a murder after being pushed out of his law firm. That case will go to trial later. If Mr. Murdaugh is convicted of murder, state law mandates that he be sentenced to at least 30 years in prison, and prosecutors have said they will seek a life sentence; they have chosen not to seek the death penalty. Jurors will also hear testimony on two charges that Mr. Murdaugh possessed a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.

The fatal shooting of Mr. Murdaugh’s wife, Maggie, 52, and their son Paul, a 22-year-old junior at the University of South Carolina, rocked the state’s Lowcountry region, where the family had established a legal dynasty. The killings began to be known as the Murdaugh murders. Mr. Murdaugh had told the authorities that he discovered their bodies near some dog kennels at the family’s isolated home in Islandton, a rural hamlet about 65 miles west of Charleston. Mr. Murdaugh had been at home with his wife and son earlier on the day that they died, but phone records indicate that he left to visit his mother around 9 p.m. He has said that he then returned home and found the bodies. Prosecutors have said that he killed Maggie and Paul before leaving, and then tried to create an alibi.

In audio of his call to 911, which he placed just after 10 p.m., a seemingly distraught Mr. Murdaugh said he had arrived home and found their bodies on the ground “out at my kennel.” “I’ve been up to it now, it’s bad,” Mr. Murdaugh told the dispatcher. He said that neither his wife nor his son was breathing, and he implored the emergency responders to hurry. “Are they close, ma’am?” After law enforcement officers arrived, Mr. Murdaugh told them that his son Paul had been getting threats because of a fatal boat wreck he had been involved in a couple of years earlier. (At the time of his death, Paul had been charged with felonies related to the crash.)

Officers with the Colleton County Sheriff’s Office wrote in reports that they had discovered several shell casings and had called a tow truck company to the scene. They also said they had looked for surveillance cameras from neighboring homes and businesses, though the heavily redacted police reports did not indicate whether they found any.

Prosecutors say that nearly three months after Mr. Murdaugh’s wife and son were killed, an employee at his law firm — which was founded by his great-grandfather more than a century ago — discovered a check that was supposed to be addressed to the firm but was instead made out to Mr. Murdaugh. That finding led the firm to investigate further and, when they discovered evidence of financial wrongdoing, to ask for his resignation, which he gave. The next day, Sept. 4, 2021, in another bizarre twist, Mr. Murdaugh claimed that he had been shot in the head on the side of a rural road by someone who drove by while he was changing a flat tire. He was taken to a hospital, but his story soon began to fall apart. It turned out that he had not been alone on the side of the road, as he had claimed, but was with a friend and distant cousin, Curtis Edward Smith.

Mr. Murdaugh soon admitted that he had asked Mr. Smith to shoot him in the head. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers said he had come up with a plan to make his suicide look like a murder because he believed it would help his older son, Buster Murdaugh, collect on his life insurance policy. Medical records showed that Mr. Murdaugh had been shot in the back of the head, but he had been able to call for help afterward. Two days later, Mr. Murdaugh issued a statement apologizing to his “family, friends and colleagues” and said he was entering rehab for an addiction to painkillers.

The incident ended in the arrest of both Mr. Murdaugh and his cousin. Mr. Smith was charged with aggravated assault, assisting in a suicide attempt and insurance fraud. He told the New York Times that he did not shoot Mr. Murdaugh and that the gun had gone off as he grabbed Mr. Murdaugh’s arm to stop him from shooting himself. Mr. Murdaugh turned himself in to the police on Sept. 16 and was charged with insurance fraud, conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and filing a false police report — all felonies. In July 2022, Mr. Murdaugh and Mr. Smith were indicted on conspiracy charges for what prosecutors said was years of money laundering related to distributing oxycodone.

The Murdaugh legal dynasty goes back to Randolph Murdaugh, who ran a one-man law office before he was elected, in 1920, as the first chief prosecutor for a five-county region that covers 3,200 square miles. He served in the position for two decades before he was killed in a train crash. Then his son, Randolph Murdaugh Jr., who was known as Buster, took over his father’s role in the 14th Circuit Solicitor’s Office. The younger Murdaugh was in the position for 46 years and, when he retired, his son, Randolph Murdaugh III, who was Alex Murdaugh’s father, was elected, serving until 2006. Alex Murdaugh never ran for the prosecutor job, but he did serve as a volunteer prosecutor and sometimes helped his father with cases. He was officially removed from that volunteer role in September.

When the trial began in January, defense lawyers for Mr. Murdaugh pointed to friendly family scenes that had been recorded on Paul’s cellphone not long before the murders. The lawyers suggested that Mr. Murdaugh could not have had the impulse — nor the time — to brutally execute his wife and son. Prosecutors argued that Mr. Murdaugh’s finances were under so much scrutiny — he is accused of embezzling millions of dollars — that he hatched a bizarre plan to kill his family members in order to gain sympathy, and to delay efforts to get him to divulge his personal financial information. Over the past several days, video recordings from law enforcement officials have been shared with the jury, showing more of what happened in the hours after Mr. Murdaugh’s 911 call.

The footage showed that Mr. Murdaugh, who was polite but sometimes distraught as he answered investigators’ questions, was wearing a white T-shirt that did not appear to be bloody. He could be heard saying that he had touched the bodies of his son and his wife, searching for a pulse, and that he had a “wonderful” marriage to Maggie and a good relationship with Paul.

______________________________________________________________

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/us/alex-murdaugh-murders-south-carolina.html

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/murdaugh-family-murder-trial-2-23-23/index.html

https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/alex-murdaugh-takes-stand-testify-double-murder-trial-97423414

https://www.foxnews.com/us/alex-murdaughs-slain-son-paul-allegedly-strangled-ex-girlfriend

[flock-of-cassowaries]

No, but seriously - as recently as the 90s, police used to call on psychics when they needed to manufacture the illusion of probable cause ‘break difficult cases’; now, criminal profilers seem to serve the same purpose.

There was a murder case in Canada when I was growing up that resulted in a wrongful conviction, and then an exoneration (based on DNA evidence).

And one of the recommendations from the subsequent official inquiry was:

“Limited Use of Criminal Profiling: Police should use [criminal profiling] as an investigative tool only.”*

*source: summary of the Kaufman Report on justice.gc.ca

(Full red-string-Charlie-Day post-fall-legal-aftermath headcannon under the cut.)

My headcannon / unfinished fanfiction premise is that if Will and Hannibal prove to be resilient to the effects of impact, some talented, professionally-disagreeable lawyer at the end of her career is going to take an interest in this case; a lawyer who despises the practice of “criminal profiling”, is very skeptical about the legitimacy of all “police use of force” incidences, vehemently opposes the concept of the death penalty, and who generally casts an extremely critical eye on the “unconventional approaches” sometimes employed by Canadian law enforcement in the pursuit of their chosen victims/suspects.

And she will maneuver herself into the position of being Mr. Lecter’s lawyer, with the specific intent of nailing to the wall everyone involved in the “use the incarcerated mental patient as bait for another serial killer!” scheme.

(Except, perhaps, Frederick Chilton; she’ll have to see if he comes out of his coma.)

But the rest of them? She is going to absolutely roast them in court. They are going to be crispier than the unfortunate Dr. Chilton when she’s through.

And not just the fucking cowboy behind both this “plan” and the shameful, stigmatizing display that is the ‘Evil Minds Museum’. No.

She’s also going for this Will Graham person. A former profiler who wasn’t even legally employed in law enforcement anymore, but who just somehow ended up in the middle of this operation, and just happened to find himself in a situation where he had “no choice” but to attend the extrajudicial execution of one suspect, and to attempt to enact the execution of another?

Oh. She will be following that lead. She can’t wait.

And once the SIU hearing are done, she’ll also be pursuing a College of Physicians and Surgeons complaint; it’s not her usual area of practice - she’ll need to go through her Rolodex and contract someone more experienced in that area to advise her - but if the doctor responsible for Lecter’s care thinks she’s getting out of this unscathed, she must be dreaming.

Honestly, it will be interesting to see what she says, because it’s hard to even conceive of a defence for “I failed to report that the patient in my custody was my ex-romantic partner, and I also entirely disregarded the advice of the court and failed to provide him with any kind of treatment while he was in my custody.”

You’re killing me with the foreshadowing here, Season 1 Hannibal.

[kiranatrix]

I feel like the nature of Light’s ideology and his methods get caricatured a great deal in the fandom (especially by those who only viewed the anime). I keep seeing popular memes about Light killing petty shoplifters who are only attempting to feed their family and I always get the sense that they’re largely inaccurate (for the most part). Light notices in the Yotsuba arc that Kira’s sentencing spares those: who’ve served their sentences and improved their ways, who committed justifiable crimes, and who have shown remorse. So it feels off to seeing portrayed that way, especially when Light’s elimination of innocents (such as the FBI agents, Naomi, etc...) are usually for strategic purposes, intended to help him progress ahead. Not to mention this pervasive belief that Light apparently didn’t know that he would be bound to sentence some innocents to death (with his large kill count per day). Wouldn’t it be more likely that Light knew that it was inevitable and was willing to sacrifice those lives for “the greater good,” in his view?

This is a doozy of an ask, anon. But it is GLORY bc these are all excellent things for me to ramble about Light (thank you!). I’ll take them point by point, strap in cause this is a bit long. *cracks knuckles*

You’re absolutely right that fandom often boils Light’s character and ideology down to a few basic elements that are distorted, mostly to drag him. Let’s be honest-- it’s fun to drag characters, even our favs-- and pretty much everyone in Death Note deserves it. But it does become annoying when its inaccurate, like with your example about who Kira focused on killing and some others I see. To be clear, this isn’t any kind of apology for the bastardly things Light DID do, but clarifying what he was and wasn’t about.

Did Light kill petty criminals?

The only time it is mentioned that Light kills criminals for non-serious crimes is when he was under surveillance by L (the infamous potato chip scene) and had to kill someone on the news right then, as well as the immediate coverup. In that circumstance, he couldn’t afford to be picky-- he needed L to see a signature Kira death (heart attack) when Light supposedly couldn’t be doing it. The crimes that appeared on the news that night (in his chip bag TV lol) ended up being non-serious criminals, and Light wasn’t so thrilled about this. 

Mainly because it meant he had to cover his tracks and kill a few more minor criminals so it really did look like Kira’s work. 

But his focus was putting himself in the clear with L; those minor criminals were incidental, and when he had choice/freedom again, he did not focus on them. The ruse didn’t completely work because L thought minor criminals dying was suspicious since it deviated from Kira’s usual MO. So, L knew the real focus.

This was a strategic move in service of, versus reflecting, Light’s ideology. This is something we see pop up again and again for Light. He is willing to do ‘wrong’ for the greater ‘good.’ We also see his distaste for killing petty criminals later when Light rebukes Mikami’s off-script killings in his thoughts. If Kira had been acting this way all along, then the Task Force wouldn’t have been surprised and Light wouldn’t have been pissed off that Mikami was doing it. 

Kira was looking for violent criminals who had escaped justice, that’s his main goal. He’s also disagreeing with Mikami’s methods of punishing wrong-doers who paid their debt to society (as opposed to the Death Row criminals I discuss below who haven’t ‘paid their debt’ yet). He doesn’t want people to fear Kira and thinks shooting fish in a barrel, so to speak, would do that. His ideology is not punitive; to him, its about prevention. Petty crime wasn’t on his radar until he had to make that a temporary focus for his safety.

Did Light focus on criminals already in prison? 

I’ve seen plenty of posts in the Death Note tag grousing about how Light was ‘dumb’ because he only focused on criminals in prison, but that’s not wholly accurate. The first two names he wrote were criminals he witnessed in the process of a crime with actual victims that needed help (a hostage scenario where the perp had already murdered people, and a man about to rape). Then he went for the Big Bads in the news- the most vicious criminals world-wide.

Other than criminals at large, he DID kill some criminals in prison. The times he did so were:

1) Killing criminals on Death Row who, in the eyes of law enforcement, “deserved the death penalty several times over.” These are criminals who had already been sentenced to die and Kira enacted the ‘justice.’

2) During Light’s ‘testing phase’ of the Death Note when he was trying to understand the rules in a population he could control 

3) When he was trying to be conspicuous about deaths for L’s benefit, like throwing off the assumption that Kira was a student. Light knew that those deaths would be found immediately and attributed to Kira. 

For 2 and 3, these criminals were likely to be on Death Row given what was said by INTERPOL about who Kira was killing behind bars. Ironically, even L thought Death Row criminals needed to die-- he chose Lind L Tailor from Death Row for his stunt, and said on TV he’d seek the death penalty for Kira. Hmm.

Why did Light kill innocent people?

The innocent people that Light killed include Raye Penber, the rest of the FBI agents in Japan investigating Kira, and Naomi Misora. L and Watari might be considered innocent per Kira’s ideology (Watari had probably murdered people but L had probably not, directly). Rem technically killed L and Watari, but Light certainly wanted them to die and orchestrated it that way. The innocent people that Light WOULD have killed include the Task Force (Mogi, Aizawa, Matsuda, Ide) and the SPK (Halle, Gevanni, Rester, Near,) if he’d won in the warehouse.

The main thread tying all these people together? They were all imminent threats to Light and were actively trying to stop and/or kill him. Killing them would never have crossed his mind if that hadn’t been the case. THAT DOESN’T MEAN HE DIDN’T ENJOY IT. Taking out his enemies was something Light did savor, he really loved that win. But it wasn’t like he wiped out the entire FBI or Japanese police force. Those were not his targets; these were individuals who threatened his goal and life, and he saw their killing as self-defense. 

Did Light kill any criminals who were innocent or wrongly convicted?

It’s certainly possible that he did but the manga never touches on it. Given that his MO for killing incarcerated criminals was limited to Death Row, he probably felt like those were safe bets (we know that’s not always the case in the real world, of course). But let’s say that Light, in canon, found out he’d killed someone wrongfully convicted. In the beginning of his journey as Kira (at 17-18), I honestly don’t think he’d given this a lot of thought. What’s funny is that Light was naively, and paradoxically, putting a lot of faith in the human justice system while simultaneously enacting his own justice that relied on having zero faith in the traditional channels. Makes my head spin, but Light is a fascinating character because of that kind of thinking. He championed sweeping ideals of right and wrong, but couldn’t be bothered with getting in the murky details. 

But by the time he’d grown up and matured some, especially after becoming part of the police force himself, he would have know it was a possibility. At that point, I agree that he’d view it as an inevitable sacrifice in service of, but not directly reflecting, his ‘greater good,’ like the previous choices he’d made. 

So why is Kira’s ideology so often distorted? For one thing, his thinking is kind of convoluted. The anime has less nuance about what Light’s about, and many people just watch that. Another common reason I see for this is that someone really, really hates Light for defeating L, and once we dislike someone it becomes easier to roll in more and more unlikeable qualities into a nasty villain pie. Any trait that is ‘bad’ can be overlaid onto Light because he is ‘bad,’ so it fits right?? Ha....no. He has plenty of bad traits and actions of his own to drag him for without inventing new ones. At the same time, I see L’s flaws and negative traits/actions being hand-waved away or justified because he is their fav. It happened with Minoru, too. 

[athenawasamerf]

I do believe it leads to deterrence, if it’s enforced. A lot of the time, especially in the US, death penalty prisoners go on to live out their natural life in prison. And a lot of the time in Egypt, what should be death penalty cases end up getting reduced sentences such as life with, umm, we call it ‘hard labour’. Which only goes to show violent men that they can get away with their depravity. But when they know for a fact there’s no wriggling their way out of a death sentence, the fear for their own lives stops them.

There was another case at the beginning of COVID, i don’t remember the names anymore, but a young married woman was murdered by a ‘home invader’ as he attempted to rape her. She struggled so much and screamed really loudly, so he panicked and strangled her to death (and still raped her corpse and got it on video). Investigation revealed he worked for her husband - and her husband paid him to rape her and get it on video, and gave him the house keys. The woman was home alone with their infant child. His reason? He wanted to take a second wife after she had their child because ‘her focus was all on the baby’, but his family and hers completely refused. He knew if he divorced her under those circumstances she’d be entitled to alimony and to keep the marital home while he’d have to move out, and she’d be able to keep her dowry and wedding gifts. So he wanted to have ‘proof’ of her ‘committing adultery’ to be able to divorce her, throw her out on her ass, and keep everything to himself by blackmailing her and her family. There was a lot of public debate about the husband’s legal responsibility for her death, and the public decided it wasn’t enough to charge him with accessory to murder or conspiracy or any such reduced charge. He thought he could get off with a short sentence because he let someone else do the physical work of violating his wife. I believe he was executed alongside his employee within 3 months of her death. Since then, there’s been a reduction in cases of men conspiring to violently ruin their wives’ lives for divorce proceedings, because there’s now precedent that they’ll be charged with, and convicted of, the full crime rather than conspiracy or whatever.

While deterrence would be far better achieved by stopping these men in their tracks before they commit any violations towards the women in their lives, that’s not what’s happening anywhere. I would be against the death penalty in an ideal society, which I put in the tags on my original response. I’m just a very realistic person, and it doesn’t look like we can have law enforcement that takes women’s reports of these men seriously within my lifetime. My other issue with this is - if we achieve this respect of women’s safety and law enforcement becomes invested in our lives and start taking us seriously, men will just learn to not give away their intentions. Some of them won’t be able to hide it, but many of them will just get better at attacking with no warning.

As for keeping violent men off the streets, I just don’t believe that’s possible in any other way than ending their lives. I don’t consider it an ‘easy’ out for them, I don’t care if they’re punished or if they suffer for their crimes via long prison sentences. I don’t care if they have a right to live. These men have proven time and time again that they’re not rehabitable. Therapy only serves to give them tools to become more abusive and better able to hide it. Prison sentences don’t affect their desire to be violent. They pick it right back up when they’re out of jail. Education and restorative justice do fuck all to stop them. Pedophiles, rapists, domestic abusers, incels, and stalkers do not stop, and they escalate to murder so often. What’s the point of putting men like these back in the community? I’ve known of rapists who pick up again after being released from prison in their 60’s, 70’s, 80’s. Pedophiles whose time in jail only made them better at hiding it. Stalkers who join networks of depraved men in prison and go on to shield each other from consequences. And if they’re no longer physically capable of rape, murder, and abuse themselves, they start teaching younger men how to do it and not get caught. It just never ends. The death penalty is the only sane alternative to vigilante justice for these men.

My conclusion being, in the case we ever achieve enforcement of laws that allow women to be taken seriously when they report men showing signs of escalating behaviour towards violence (which is not likely any time soon), I still believe the death penalty would be needed to keep the ones who do commit certain violent crimes out of the community for good. As long as they’re alive, they pose a risk to women, either via re-offending if they’re released, or by teaching others how to commit these crimes without getting caught.

The thing is, I used to be against the death penalty when I was a libfem. I’ve had to reassess that stance after discovering radical feminism, and I found it (imo) to be an opinion formed in a vacuum without considering the real life implications. When we achieve complete liberation and these generations of violent men have been wiped out, and replaced with a completely different model of socialisation of both sexes, then the death penalty would be unnecessary and can be safely done away with.

[13eyond13]

I'll try to keep it short because you're very kind but I'm becoming annoying... I actually like Soichiro. It's his morals I cannot stand. In fact, in line with his, I like Matsuda's and even Light's variations more, even with all the darkness they entail, because they're more critical. I adore L and find him relatable, but I'm not so sure if I'd like him as a person in real life, and yet I again like his morals more than Soichiro's. I still think Soichiro is generally a better person than any of the others. I still dislike his morals the most. When I say at the opposite end of Soichiro in the moral spectrum is where Near stands I'm not talking just about my personal liking, but as I interpret their views on morality. Maybe there's some detail of the manga I'm forgetting (I truly have to reread it), but Soichiro didn't seem very critical about... anything, while Near states something like "even if god came and told me this is good and this is bad and this is The Truth I'd still consider and come to my own conclusion". I like that. I care less about someone getting a moral with what I may consider a degree of grey if they do that. I myself have very strong morals that nonetheless have degrees of grey; strong doesn't mean pure. My grey and someone else's grey might be very different. But I've developed them, not accepted them blindly. Near of course, Mello, L, and even Light and Matsuda do this, but Soichiro generally doesn't. And I dislike that greatly. In fact, I think I'd find him kind in real life, and likeable, but I'd not really like him because I can't really bring myself to like someone like that even when they're kind and compassionate and good. I'm already talking more than I intended but I'll try to point out what bothers me of his attitude.

Soichiro is very very anti Kira, but he's working for a government with the death penalty and he doesn't seem to consider that even for a moment. For him, that the government does it is justifiable but monstrous if a person does it. He doesn't really have a justification, it's just like that because it's as it is. He's very against L's methods, buy L uses people who were going to die anyway at the very moment he uses them either way because of the death penalty, because of the government. From a government pov, if the government were to do what L does, it'd be something terrible. From an individual pov? Not so much. It's ugly, but it's beyond himself whether that people die or not, and his decisions are easily justifiable from an individual pov: they're going to die irrevocably, that very day at that very time, and he is using what he can to solve a very complicated case that is taking many lives, and he even might use the moral support of "I'm giving the prisoners the chance of choosing, with the potential reward of lifelong imprisonment instead of death". And again, while a government doing that is terrible, it's not as terrible for a person. L is a private detective, an individual. People can be fallible. Governments shouldn't. What L does might be justifiable, if ugly, for a person, but it would be unforgivable for the government to do. But the government lies on L and it's L who takes the slander of the rest of the Task Force. And that's what Soichiro doesn't see, and that's what bugs me. Soichiro sides with the government and the laws no matter what, no matter if they're terrible and are actually the cause if indirectly of the terrible things L is able to do (I'd have to reread to be completely comfortable affirming this, but Soichiro's attitude towards the government reminds me a bit of Mikami and Misa to some extent).

Soichiro hates Kira, and hates and criticises L's methods and his ruthlessness, but doesn't even consider for one moment the problem is not L. The problem is not the 24 yo boy/man, the problem is his government, that has the dead penalty and actually let's a private detective carry on with the investigation and do as he pleases (and I'm not even taking into consideration how L's upbringing and the lowkey if fun exploitation he was subrmited to have most probably influenced if not determined the way he acts in these cases, because while it's intriguing it'd feel like justifying L out of pity, and either way Soichiro doesn't know that; but I mention this because L's entire past at Wammy's, like the other children's, is another very terrible move from governments and adults in responsibility positions). The problem is Interpol, the governments in general, blatantly saying L is ruthless but not even setting rules when working with him. And I think it would actually have been very easy to stop L doing those things. Just change the rules of the game, tell him beforehand there are a few things he can't do. It's a game after all. Of course L would still exploit the moral and legal vacuums of the rules as he pleased, as one does when playing anything, but the government wouldn't have given him totally free way.

I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself very well. Years ago in a class I talked about the difference between personal vengeance and the death penalty. I feel this is similar. A person is fallible. A government should be able to stand over licit murder. L manipulating people to prove a point is ugly. A government doing that or letting someone free way to do whatever is terrible. L does whatever, and as an individual is not so horrible as it is that the governments internationally actually let him do whatever even knowing beforehand without setting rules. Soichiro sees this and it doesn't even cross his mind for a moment to criticise the government he's working with. Also, he considers his morals the best, which makes sense in a first person pov (why support x morals if you don't think they're the best? I'm not critisising this), but he's very... imposing about them, while as I say not being precisely the most critical thinker. That Soichiro is like this, morally (I'm not even talking about the policeman aspect though that's so often talked about in the fandom), makes a lot of sense to how Light ends up being Kira, and with how Matsuda thinks and acts. And I find that very intriguing, but I can't stand Soichiro's simplistic morals and his better-than-you attitude even though he's a generally good person. That's why I dislike his morals the most (of course you don't have to agree!). I don't stand by Near's morals either, but I like his "god could come and tell me and still I'd doubt" attitude. It's what makes gods mad in basically every mythology, but I love that kind of thought process. I'm very much like that too.

I'm so sorry this is so long. I tried to cut, but I got the impression it'd make it even less clear or more difficult to understand. Or maybe the lack of clarity lies precisely on how repetitive and long this is. I'd like to think English not being my first language has to do with this, but honestly the problem is most probably just me. I hope I made the point understandable enough, though. And thanks for your patience. I really liked that post of Near someone sent as an opinion and how you replied! Very interesting takes on both ends.

Hi again! You have some very thought-provoking points about it all, and don't worry, your English is excellent.

I loved Near's stance about these things as well, and that's something that really bothered me when growing up about some authority figures and institutions being really totalitarian and silencing of doubts or stances they deemed too negative or incorrect to voice aloud. I value having freedom of choice and the ability to think critically about everything immensely. Maybe it's because I went to a very strict and sheltering and weird little school as a child that tried very hard to indoctrinate me with a specific worldview, and always shamed and silenced anyone who disagreed or questioned them or felt like an outsider or wanted to have a different point of view. I remember relating the most to Matsuda on the task force when I first watched the show as a teen, because he was always speaking up with his devil's advocate questions or confusions. The way Soichiro and the others usually yell and scold and shame him for this bothered me a lot, because I wanted them to discuss things openly so I could see all the different sides of the arguments more clearly. Actually, I think this is a pretty culturally similar thing between Japan and Canada (where I am from). There's a strong emphasis on doing what's best for the entire group instead of just yourself, and being too controversial or outspoken or individualistic about certain things is often taboo and frowned upon as a big social faux pas. It's possibly quite a bit stronger pressure toward obedience and conformity and politeness in Japan in certain ways as well, but I don't know for sure as I haven't lived there myself.

I think Soichiro had a bit of nuance and flexibility with his morals and his stances in various instances throughout the plot, and to me he seemingly tries hard to see things from other angles during complicated moments in what must be one of the most difficult situations he could possibly face as both a police chief and a parent. But it's true he never seemed to doubt that upholding the laws already in place and the way his government punishes the convicted were the "correct" ways society should function. I think this series would be a really interesting one to discuss in a class that talks about stuff like justice and the death penalty and law and ethics and such for how many of these things it touches on in an entertaining and thought-provoking way!

[conradscrime]

Ray and Faye Copeland: Oldest Couple on Death Row

May 04, 2021

Ray Copeland was born on December 30, 1914 in Oklahoma. Ray’s family growing up moved around a lot, until his parents Jess and Laney settled in the town of Ozark Hills, Arkansas. Ray eventually had a younger brother and sister. However, when the Great Depression hit Ray had to help support his family during this tough time where most families were struggling to make ends meet. 

Ray began a life of petty crime as a young man. At the age of 20 he committed his first crime, stealing two hogs from his family farm and selling them in another town. His father found out but no charges were filed. He was often stealing livestock and forging checks and was eventually caught for this in 1936 and served a year in prison. 

In 1940 Ray went to a routine checkup at a physician’s office met a 19 year old woman named Faye Wilson. Faye Della Wilson was born on August 4, 1921 in Arkansas. Faye’s parents Rufus and Gladys Wilson were very hard working people from Harrison, Arkansas and Faye was one of 7 children, growing up in a dirt floor cabin. The two began dating and 6 months later got married and had five children together. Their first child was a boy named Everett, born a year after they got married. Then two years later they had another son named Billy Ray. 

In 1944 Ray and Faye moved to Fresno County, California and had another child, a girl named Betty Lou the following year. After that they had a son named Alvia and in 1949 they had their final child, William Wayne. That same year Ray had been accused of stealing horses from a local farmer. No charges were filed but Ray had to leave the area because his reputation was damaged, so the Copeland’s moved back to Arkansas.

It didn’t take long for Ray to get arrested again, being found guilty of grand larceny and sentenced to another year in jail. Once released Ray moved his family to Rocky Comfort, Missouri where he was arrested for cattle theft again. He was sentenced to complete labour at a judge’s farm.

In 1953 Ray moved his family from town to town quite frequently, and was arrested at least 5 times for writing forged checks. In 1966 (some sources say 1967) the couple bought a 40 acre farm in Mooresville, Missouri. A lot of the Copeland neighbours did not like Ray, thinking he was a bitter elderly man who physically abused his family, though Faye and the children denied this.

 Ray was unable to buy and sell cattle due to his criminal record and being known as a fraud so he would pick up drifters and hitchhikers and employ them to work as farmhands on his and Faye’s property. Ray would take his employees to the market, they would use his bad checks to buy cattle and then Ray would sell the cattle quickly. The farmhands would never been seen again after the transaction. This plan worked for a period of time before one of the scam victims, Gerald Perkins exposed the scheme. Ray was caught once again and sent to jail for two years for check forgery.

When Ray was released he continued on with this plan, but tweaked it a little bit, making sure his farmhands couldn’t be as easily connected to him. Again, this worked for a little while until a previous employee named Jack McCormick called the Crime Stoppers hotline on August 20, 1989. 

Jack told them that Ray had tried to kill him and that he also had seen human bones on their farm while he was working for the Copelands. The police weren’t sure if they could believe Jack but because Ray had a lengthy criminal history they investigated further into this claim. 

In October 1989 they searched the Copeland farm with a search warrant but did not find any incriminating evidence at first. After they searched further, however, they did come across the bodies of three young men found in a nearby barn. As they continued searching they found many more bodies, all had been killed with a .22 caliber Marlin rifle found in the Copeland home. They also found a quilt made out of clothes worn by the victims.

Ray had been caught killing his employees to gain money and in November 1990, Faye also went to trial with the jury convicting her of four counts of murder and one count of manslaughter. She was given four death sentences and life without parole for the manslaughter. They offered Faye a plea deal, telling her that if she showed them where more bodies were buried they would only charge her with conspiracy to commit murder, a lesser charge. Faye covered for her husband. 

On March 7 1991, Ray Copeland went on trial and was convicted of 5 counts of murder and sentenced to death. When Ray heard that his wife Faye had also been sentenced to death he said, “Well, those things happen to some, you know.” He showed no emotion. 

Ray and Faye Copeland were the oldest people to ever receive the death penalty, with Ray being 75 and Faye being 69 at the time of their sentencing. Both were sentenced to die by lethal injection.

Ray died of natural causes on October 19, 1993 at the age of 78. Faye’s attorneys appealed her conviction, saying that the jury had not been allowed to hear of evidence that Ray had abused her. On August 6, 1999 a judge overturned the death sentence, commuting her sentence to 5 consecutive life sentences without parole. 

On August 10, 2002, Faye had a stroke which left her partially paralyzed and unable to speak. In September 2002, Governor Bob Holden gave permission for Faye to have a medical parole, that is she would not die in prison but rather be sent to a nursing home in Chillicothe, Missouri. Faye Copeland died of natural causes on December 23, 2003 at the age of 82.

All of the Copeland’s victims had been shot execution style and all of them had either been buried on the property or on another property where Ray used a barn. One victim, Dennis Murphy, was dumped in a well. Faye had kept track of all the victims, writing their names on a list and if they had murdered the man there would be an X written beside his name. 

Here is a list of the known victims of the Copeland’s:

Paul Jason Cowart, aged 21 - killed on October 17, 1986

John Freeman, aged 27 - killed on November 19, 1986

Jimmie Dale Harvey, aged 27 - killed on October 25, 1988

Wayne Warner, unknown age - killed on December 8, 1988

Dennis Murphy, aged 27 - killed on May 1, 1989

Jack McCormick, aged 57 - attempted murder on August 20, 1989

The Copeland’s have been suspected in murdering 7 additional drifters.

[tipsycad147]

Pendle witches

The trials of the Pendle witches in 1612 are among the most famous witch trials in English history, and some of the best recorded of the 17th century. The twelve accused lived in the area surrounding Pendle Hill in Lancashire, and were charged with the murders of ten people by the use of witchcraft. All but two were tried at Lancaster Assizes on 18–19 August 1612, along with the Samlesbury witches and others, in a series of trials that have become known as the Lancashire witch trials. One was tried at York Assizes on 27 July 1612, and another died in prison. Of the eleven who went to trial – nine women and two men – ten were found guilty and executed by hanging; one was found not guilty.

The official publication of the proceedings by the clerk to the court, Thomas Potts, in his The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, and the number of witches hanged together – nine at Lancaster and one at York – make the trials unusual for England at that time. It has been estimated that all the English witch trials between the early 15th and early 18th centuries resulted in fewer than 500 executions; this series of trials accounts for more than two per cent of that total.

Six of the Pendle witches came from one of two families, each at the time headed by a woman in her eighties: Elizabeth Southerns (a.k.a. Demdike[a]), her daughter Elizabeth Device, and her grandchildren James and Alizon Device; Anne Whittle (a.k.a. Chattox), and her daughter Anne Redferne. The others accused were Jane Bulcock and her son John Bulcock, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, Alice Grey, and Jennet Preston. The outbreaks of witchcraft in and around Pendle may demonstrate the extent to which people could make a living by posing as witches. Many of the allegations resulted from accusations that members of the Demdike and Chattox families made against each other, perhaps because they were in competition, both trying to make a living from healing, begging, and extortion.

Religious and political background

The accused witches lived in the area around Pendle Hill in Lancashire, a county which, at the end of the 16th century, was regarded by the authorities as a wild and lawless region: an area "fabled for its theft, violence and sexual laxity, where the church was honoured without much understanding of its doctrines by the common people". The nearby Cistercian abbey at Whalley had been dissolved by Henry VIII in 1537, a move strongly resisted by the local people, over whose lives the abbey had until then exerted a powerful influence. Despite the abbey's closure, and the execution of its abbot, the people of Pendle remained largely faithful to their Roman Catholic beliefs and were quick to revert to Catholicism on Queen Mary's accession to the throne in 1553.

When Mary's Protestant half-sister Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 Catholic priests once again had to go into hiding, but in remote areas such as Pendle they continued to celebrate Mass in secret.[3] In 1562, early in her reign, Elizabeth passed a law in the form of An Act Against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts (5 Eliz. I c. 16). This demanded the death penalty, but only where harm had been caused; lesser offences were punishable by a term of imprisonment. The Act provided that anyone who should "use, practise, or exercise any Witchcraft, Enchantment, Charm, or Sorcery, whereby any person shall happen to be killed or destroyed", was guilty of a felony without benefit of clergy, and was to be put to death.

On Elizabeth's death in 1603 she was succeeded by James I. Strongly influenced by Scotland's separation from the Catholic Church during the Scottish Reformation, James was intensely interested in Protestant theology, focusing much of his curiosity on the theology of witchcraft. By the early 1590s he had become convinced that he was being plotted against by Scottish witches.After a visit to Denmark, he had attended the trial in 1590 of the North Berwick witches, who were convicted of using witchcraft to send a storm against the ship that carried James and his wife Anne back to Scotland. In 1597 he wrote a book, Daemonologie, instructing his followers that they must denounce and prosecute any supporters or practitioners of witchcraft. One year after James acceded to the English throne, a law was enacted imposing the death penalty in cases where it was proven that harm had been caused through the use of magic, or corpses had been exhumed for magical purposes James was, however, sceptical of the evidence presented in witch trials, even to the extent of personally exposing discrepancies in the testimonies presented against some accused witches

In early 1612, the year of the trials, every justice of the peace (JP) in Lancashire was ordered to compile a list of recusants in their area, i.e. those who refused to attend the English Church and to take communion, a criminal offence at that time. Roger Nowell of Read Hall, on the edge of Pendle Forest, was the JP for Pendle. It was against this background of seeking out religious nonconformists that, in March 1612, Nowell investigated a complaint made to him by the family of John Law, a pedlar, who claimed to have been injured by witchcraft.[9] Many of those who subsequently became implicated as the investigation progressed did indeed consider themselves to be witches, in the sense of being village healers who practised magic, probably in return for payment, but such men and women were common in 16th-century rural England, an accepted part of village life.

It was perhaps difficult for the judges charged with hearing the trials – Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley – to understand King James's attitude towards witchcraft. The king was head of the judiciary, and Bromley was hoping for promotion to a circuit nearer London. Altham was nearing the end of his judicial career, but he had recently been accused of a miscarriage of justice at the York Assizes, which had resulted in a woman being sentenced to death by hanging for witchcraft. The judges may have been uncertain whether the best way to gain the King's favour was by encouraging convictions, or by "sceptically testing the witnesses to destruction"

Events leading up to the trials

One of the accused, Demdike, had been regarded in the area as a witch for fifty years, and some of the deaths the witches were accused of had happened many years before Roger Nowell started to take an interest in 1612.The event that seems to have triggered Nowell's investigation, culminating in the Pendle witch trials, occurred on 21 March 1612.

On her way to Trawden Forest, Demdike's granddaughter, Alizon Device, encountered John Law, a pedlar from Halifax, and asked him for some pins. Seventeenth-century metal pins were handmade and relatively expensive, but they were frequently needed for magical purposes, such as in healing – particularly for treating warts – divination, and for love magic, which may have been why Alizon was so keen to get hold of them and why Law was so reluctant to sell them to her.  Whether she meant to buy them, as she claimed, and Law refused to undo his pack for such a small transaction, or whether she had no money and was begging for them, as Law's son Abraham claimed, is unclear. A few minutes after their encounter Alizon saw Law stumble and fall, perhaps because he suffered a stroke; he managed to regain his feet and reach a nearby inn.  Initially Law made no accusations against Alizon,[19] but she appears to have been convinced of her own powers; when Abraham Law took her to visit his father a few days after the incident, she reportedly confessed, and asked for his forgiveness

Alizon Device, her mother Elizabeth, and her brother James were summoned to appear before Nowell on 30 March 1612. Alizon confessed that she had sold her soul to the Devil, and that she had told him to lame John Law after he had called her a thief. Her brother, James, stated that his sister had also confessed to bewitching a local child. Elizabeth was more reticent, admitting only that her mother, Demdike, had a mark on her body, something that many, including Nowell, would have regarded as having been left by the Devil after he had sucked her blood.When questioned about Anne Whittle (Chattox), the matriarch of the other family reputedly involved in witchcraft in and around Pendle, Alizon perhaps saw an opportunity for revenge. There may have been bad blood between the two families, possibly dating from 1601, when a member of Chattox's family broke into Malkin Tower, the home of the Devices, and stole goods worth about £1,equivalent to about £117 as of 2018.  Alizon accused Chattox of murdering four men by witchcraft, and of killing her father, John Device, who had died in 1601. She claimed that her father had been so frightened of Old Chattox that he had agreed to give her 8 pounds (3.6 kg) of oatmeal each year in return for her promise not to hurt his family. The meal was handed over annually until the year before John's death; on his deathbed John claimed that his sickness had been caused by Chattox because they had not paid for protection.

On 2 April 1612, Demdike, Chattox, and Chattox's daughter Anne Redferne, were summoned to appear before Nowell. Both Demdike and Chattox were by then blind and in their eighties, and both provided Nowell with damaging confessions. Demdike claimed that she had given her soul to the Devil 20 years previously, and Chattox that she had given her soul to "a Thing like a Christian man", on his promise that "she would not lack anything and would get any revenge she desired".Although Anne Redferne made no confession, Demdike said that she had seen her making clay figures. Margaret Crooke, another witness seen by Nowell that day, claimed that her brother had fallen sick and died after having had a disagreement with Redferne, and that he had frequently blamed her for his illness.Based on the evidence and confessions he had obtained, Nowell committed Demdike, Chattox, Anne Redferne and Alizon Device to Lancaster Gaol, to be tried for maleficium – causing harm by witchcraft – at the next assizes

Meeting at Malkin Tower

The committal and subsequent trial of the four women might have been the end of the matter, had it not been for a meeting organised by Elizabeth Device at Malkin Tower, the home of the Demdikes  held on Good Friday 10 April 1612. To feed the party, James Device stole a neighbour's sheep.

Friends and others sympathetic to the family attended, and when word of it reached Roger Nowell, he decided to investigate. On 27 April 1612, an inquiry was held before Nowell and another magistrate, Nicholas Bannister, to determine the purpose of the meeting at Malkin Tower, who had attended, and what had happened there. As a result of the inquiry, eight more people were accused of witchcraft and committed for trial: Elizabeth Device, James Device, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John Bulcock, Jane Bulcock, Alice Grey and Jennet Preston. Preston lived across the border in Yorkshire, so she was sent for trial at York Assizes; the others were sent to Lancaster Gaol, to join the four already imprisoned there.

Malkin Tower is believed to have been near the village of Newchurch in Pendle,or possibly in Blacko on the site of present-day Malkin Tower Farm  and to have been demolished soon after the trials.

Trials

The Pendle witches were tried in a group that also included the Samlesbury witches, Jane Southworth, Jennet Brierley, and Ellen Brierley, the charges against whom included child murder, cannibalism; Margaret Pearson, the so-called Padiham witch, who was facing her third trial for witchcraft, this time for killing a horse; and Isobel Robey from Windle, accused of using witchcraft to cause sickness

Some of the accused Pendle witches, such as Alizon Device, seem to have genuinely believed in their guilt, but others protested their innocence to the end. Jennet Preston was the first to be tried, at York Assizes.

York Assizes, 27 July 1612

Jennet Preston lived in Gisburn, which was then in Yorkshire, so she was sent to York Assizes for trial. Her judges were Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley. Jennet was charged with the murder by witchcraft of a local landowner, Thomas Lister of Westby Hall, to which she pleaded not guilty. She had already appeared before Bromley in 1611, accused of murdering a child by witchcraft, but had been found not guilty. The most damning evidence given against her was that when she had been taken to see Lister's body, the corpse "bled fresh bloud presently, in the presence of all that were there present" after she touched it.  According to a statement made to Nowell by James Device on 27 April, Jennet had attended the Malkin Tower meeting to seek help with Lister's murder. She was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging;  her execution took place on 29 July on the Knavesmire, the present site of York Racecourse.

Lancaster Castle, where the Lancaster Assizes of 1612 took place

Lancaster Assizes, 18–19 August 1612

All the other accused lived in Lancashire, so they were sent to Lancaster Assizes for trial, where the judges were once again Altham and Bromley. The prosecutor was local magistrate Roger Nowell, who had been responsible for collecting the various statements and confessions from the accused. Nine-year-old Jennet Device was a key witness for the prosecution, something that would not have been permitted in many other 17th-century criminal trials. However, King James had made a case for suspending the normal rules of evidence for witchcraft trials in his Daemonologie. As well as identifying those who had attended the Malkin Tower meeting, Jennet also gave evidence against her mother, brother, and sister.

Nine of the accused – Alizon Device, Elizabeth Device, James Device, Anne Whittle, Anne Redferne, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John Bulcock and Jane Bulcock – were found guilty during the two-day trial and hanged at Gallows Hill  in Lancaster on 20 August 1612; Elizabeth Southerns died while awaiting trial. Only one of the accused, Alice Grey, was found not guilty

18 August

Anne Whittle (Chattox) was accused of the murder of Robert Nutter. She pleaded not guilty, but the confession she had made to Roger Nowell—likely under torture—was read out in court, and evidence against her was presented by James Robinson, who had lived with the Chattox family 20 years earlier. He claimed to remember that Nutter had accused Chattox of turning his beer sour, and that she was commonly believed to be a witch. Chattox broke down and admitted her guilt, calling on God for forgiveness and the judges to be merciful to her daughter, Anne Redferne.

Elizabeth Device was charged with the murders of James Robinson, John Robinson and, together with Alice Nutter and Demdike, the murder of Henry Mitton. Elizabeth Device vehemently maintained her innocence. Potts records that "this odious witch"[ suffered from a facial deformity resulting in her left eye being set lower than her right. The main witness against Device was her daughter, Jennet, who was about nine years old. When Jennet was brought into the courtroom and asked to stand up and give evidence against her mother, Elizabeth, confronted with her own child making accusations that would lead to her execution, began to curse and scream at her daughter, forcing the judges to have her removed from the courtroom before the evidence could be heard Jennet was placed on a table and stated that she believed her mother had been a witch for three or four years. She also said her mother had a familiar called Ball, who appeared in the shape of a brown dog. Jennet claimed to have witnessed conversations between Ball and her mother, in which Ball had been asked to help with various murders. James Device also gave evidence against his mother, saying he had seen her making a clay figure of one of her victims, John Robinson. Elizabeth Device was found guilty.

Statue of Alice Nutter in Roughlee

James Device pleaded not guilty to the murders by witchcraft of Anne Townley and John Duckworth. However he, like Chattox, had earlier made a confession to Nowell, which was read out in court. That, and the evidence presented against him by his sister Jennet, who said that she had seen her brother asking a black dog he had conjured up to help him kill Townley, was sufficient to persuade the jury to find him guilty

19 August

The trials of the three Samlesbury witches were heard before Anne Redferne's first appearance in court, late in the afternoon, charged with the murder of Robert Nutter. The evidence against her was considered unsatisfactory, and she was acquitted

Anne Redferne was not so fortunate the following day, when she faced her second trial, for the murder of Robert Nutter's father, Christopher, to which she pleaded not guilty. Demdike's statement to Nowell, which accused Anne of having made clay figures of the Nutter family, was read out in court. Witnesses were called to testify that Anne was a witch "more dangerous than her Mother". But she refused to admit her guilt to the end, and had given no evidence against any others of the accused.Anne Redferne was found guilty.

Jane Bulcock and her son John Bulcock, both from Newchurch in Pendle, were accused and found guilty of the murder by witchcraft of Jennet Deane. Both denied that they had attended the meeting at Malkin Tower, but Jennet Device identified Jane as having been one of those present, and John as having turned the spit to roast the stolen sheep, the centrepiece of the Good Friday meeting at the Demdike's home

Alice Nutter was unusual among the accused in being comparatively wealthy, the widow of a tenant yeoman farmer. She made no statement either before or during her trial, except to enter her plea of not guilty to the charge of murdering Henry Mitton by witchcraft. The prosecution alleged that she, together with Demdike and Elizabeth Device, had caused Mitton's death after he had refused to give Demdike a penny she had begged from him. The only evidence against Alice seems to have been that James Device claimed Demdike had told him of the murder, and Jennet Device in her statement said that Alice had been present at the Malkin Tower meeting.Alice may have called in on the meeting at Malkin Tower on her way to a secret (and illegal) Good Friday Catholic service, and refused to speak for fear of incriminating her fellow Catholics. Many of the Nutter family were Catholics, and two had been executed as Jesuit priests, John Nutter in 1584 and his brother Robert in 1600. Alice Nutter was found guilty

Katherine Hewitt (a.k.a. Mould-Heeles) was charged and found guilty of the murder of Anne Foulds. She was the wife of a clothier from Colne,and had attended the meeting at Malkin Tower with Alice Grey. According to the evidence given by James Device, both Hewitt and Grey told the others at that meeting that they had killed a child from Colne, Anne Foulds. Jennet Device also picked Katherine out of a line-up, and confirmed her attendance at the Malkin Tower meeting.

Alice Grey was accused with Katherine Hewitt of the murder of Anne Foulds. Potts does not provide an account of Alice Grey's trial, simply recording her as one of the Samlesbury witches – which she was not, as she was one of those identified as having been at the Malkin Tower meeting – and naming her in the list of those found not guilty

Alizon Device, whose encounter with John Law had triggered the events leading up to the trials, was charged with causing harm by witchcraft. Uniquely among the accused, Alizon was confronted in court by her alleged victim, John Law. She seems to have genuinely believed in her own guilt; when Law was brought into court Alizon fell to her knees in tears and confessed She was found guilty.[

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Pendle_witches

[keepyourpantsongohan]

Ayesha Liveblogs Death Note

I’m watching this show specifically because of that text post that said, “Watch how quickly this one guy decides to be the worst person ever” and he has killed two people in the first ten minutes

Though 2 be fair he’s killing people to save people so it’s a trolley problem kind of thing for now

“In fact I’ve been waiting for you... Ryuk” ok weird flex Light but u do u

“You’re the first one to use to this extent in five days” WAIT DID HE MURDER ALL THOSE PEOPLE IN FIVE DAYS I THOUGHT HE WAS JUST LOOKING AT A LIST OH MY GOD??

“So there isn’t a price to using Death Note?” said Light, as if killing people is just a normal thing that we all do

Fhkjfhfkjb Ryuk really went ‘u used the book so we’re friends now’ 

I was wondering why the book was in English, and I guess that makes sense British and American imperialism really Did That

“I can write down the names of criminals, and slowly reduce the number of evil people” uhhhh doesn’t u being a Book Murderer also make you a criminal Light

“Human lives shouldn’t be taken so lightly” bah dum tss

Also I guess that revelation lasted about thirty seconds for you huh

Update from 15 seconds later: Even less than that

“I would create a world of earnest, kind humans” really because I don’t think places that allow the death penalty are generally nicer societies 

It’s interesting that they use English in the classes and the notebook but the conversation at Interpol takes place in Japanese (despite the implied internationality and Ryuk’s aforementioned claim about English being most common) 

Huh I won’t lie I do think it’s confusing that the main characters are L and Light, which also starts with L

“I am justice” I mean if anything this show just proves that no one should be allowed to use the death penalty on apprehended suspects in criminal justice cases ever 

OH SHIT PLOT TWIST HIS DAD’S A COP (IT WAS IN THE TEXT POST I THINK BUT I FORGOT)

Wow this show is full of mind games already I guess I can see why like, crime show fans would dig it

“But I’m going to say this as your roommate” OH MY GOD THEY WERE ROOMMATES KJHRGKJHKJHG

Interesting that someone is following Light specifically already

I mean not to poke too many holes in your plan Light but wouldn’t it clash with your plan to become God if you die at like 35 or smth 

“You’re already much more of a shinigami than they are” Ryuk said my friends are BORING I want to hang out with this MURDER TEEN

“I may not look it, but I’m pretty popular” Light is exactly the kind of guy who ends up in a true crime special where a bunch of people say he seemed like a nice, charismatic young man

Man this poor girl that Light brought on this date is going to be straight traumatized after this

I mean isn’t it MORE suspicious if someone dies around someone with direct ties to the police even if it’s not a heart attack

“You were indeed a brilliant FBI agent once, but now you’re my fiancée” kjhfkjhg WHAT FBI AGENTS CAN’T BE MARRIED 

“Once we have a family, you’ll be so busy that you’ll forget that you were an agent” I’m not a fan of Raye Penber 

What’s the point in killing Raye at all???? He told you he was part of a special investigation so clearly he’s not that suspicious of you

Light sure is bold to announce his Killing People Experiments in the middle of a busy sidewalk 

Incredible that consistently no one notices Light’s increasingly threatening declarations????

Fjkfkfhk these five cops finding out their Hail Mary is this strange little goblin man,,,, wow

This woman has really pushed Light to the brink just by giving a fake name, I admire her tenacity

Cops wearing fake IDs really did not age well oh boy

SERIOUSLY HOW DOES NO ONE EVER HEAR LIGHT SAYING SUSPICIOUS THINGS IN PUBLIC THOROUGHFARES HE LITERALLY JUST SAID “I AM KIRA” AS A DETECTIVE WALKED BY, WHILE HE WAS TALKING TO SOMEONE HE KILLED IMMEDIATELY AFTER

Wow it really took only eight episodes for L to track Light as close as one of two families

“You have a wife and daughter, right?” “I know!” I mean..... not 2 be that guy but... cops

 “To me, apples are like... Well, like cigarettes and liquor to humans” Vcvhcjhj every once in a while Ryuk says something that really tickles me

I know the word sociopath is kind of outdated but man does Light have actual interests outside of school or does he just do stuff to fill the void of his lack of interests (outside of murder)

JKHGKJHGKJHKJHG I cannot believe that this has turned into a fake classmate situation first of all 1) are you going to become friends and 2) How old are you Ryuzaki/L?

“Where is that rich kid from? And he’s even at the top of his class? What a jerk” honestly a mood

I DESPERATELY want Light’s mother or sister to overhear his evil cackling will someone finally eavesdrop on this god complex

“If I sit normally, my reasoning skills drop by 40%” weird flex but same 

Sidenote: I can’t believe how many episodes of this show I already have watched

Ngl I was VERY shook that Mr. Yagami had a heart attack. Also does Light care if his family lives or dies or is he kind of neutral on the subject? 

“If Kira is an ordinary person who gained this power, then he is a very unlucky person” Dad and L said ‘if u ARE Kira could you please stop murdering thank you <3′ 

Light really underestimated how much cops hate anyone who has killed a cop oops

OH SO IT’S NOT LIGHT I WAS WONDERING WHY HE HAD NOT MADE AN APPEARANCE THIS WHOLE EPISODE U MEAN THERE ARE TWO GUYS WITH THIS EXACT SAME IDEOLOGY AND PLAN? INCREDIBLE

Update from ten seconds later: Two people, I guess

Well this explains the girl in the short dress which serves as the Netflix thumbnail of this show I was wondering when she would show up 

Also she sounds like she’s very young? Clearly Shinigami don’t have a minimum age of informed consent when it comes to their Murder Eyes Contract 

Hahah I bet Light didn’t imagine that his petty and fucked up apple joke would bite him so quickly in the ass

Dhkjdhdkjhd Misa is so bold dropping her Death God deets in a video for anyone to see 

“The way to kill a Shinigami, is to make them fall in love with a human” does this mean that Ryuk is going to fall in love with Light or Misa? Both would make me uncomfortable

Oh wild guess Misa became a Death Note Wielder through the Power of Unreciprocated Voyeuristic Love

“Yeah, I have a girlfriend now,” said Light, after a girl contacted him through a series of anonymous video tapes implicitly vowing to be his disciple 

“No one could tell who he’s attached to if I’m with this many people” [20 seconds pass] “Found him!” HAHAHA the funniest part of this show is consistently watch Light going “got ‘em” before it immediately is revealed that he doesn’t got ‘em 

Why is Light so incredibly searchable??? I think the only way people people could find my height online is if I happened to answer it for one of those Facebook note memes in 2007 lmaoooo

“There are many places that will go and sell your personal records” ah, data breaches; a problem that has not gotten any better in the last 15 years since this anime came out

HKJHFHKJFHF Light immediately jumping into fake-dating his weird disciple in front of his mom... what is this show

“Please make me your girlfriend” OH MY GOOOOOD

This is one of the weirdest romantic dynamics I’ve seen in recent memory but you know what? Whatever, at least it’s not Anxiety and Murder

“Does that mean I’ll have to deal with her until she dies?” Light is truly exuding some Ladybird Book of Dating Energy rn: 

The fact that to kill L all Light had to do was get an obsessive girlfriend... astounding

Beautiful that it took Misa less than a week of knowing Light to ruin his whole 15 episode game plan and also life

“I think I may be Kira” Well this show keeps taking one escalation after another this is exhausting why can’t Light just be a normal person who found it, tried it out of interest in the occult, discovered he’d committed a horrible atrocity and then went to therapy for the rest of his life only to confess to Magical Murder on his deathbed while his family goes, ‘Wow, Grandpa’s crazy’

Does L not think that keeping three different people imprisoned for days on end will lead to some psychological repercussions for him

FOR WEEKS ON END????? OH MY GOD???? The fuck L, I know two of these people are murderers but there are some minimum conditions of correctional facilities and this seems a little Stanford PE

THE DRAMA OF THIS EPISODE I KNEW IT WAS GONNA BE A BLANK BUT HOW FUCKED UP TO PUT EVERYONE THROUGH THIS L I THINK YOU NEED THERAPY!!!!!!! I MEAN LIGHT AND MISA ARE MURDERERS BUT FORCING A MAN TO HOLD HIS SON AT GUNPOINT AFTER IMPRISONING THEM FOR OVER A MONTH IS REALLY A REFLECTION OF A COMPLETE LACK OF EMPATHY (especially when you think that this version of Misa and Light don’t know anything!!! Oh my god!! The fuck)

“I will make arrangements so you and I are together 24 hours a day” call me crazy but I would not want to spend 24/7 with the man who imprisoned me for over a month while playing cruel psychological games all the while

“I’m one of those people who’ll accept Kira, I’d think of ways I could help him” Misa said Bimbo Rights

“I could never toy with a woman’s emotions like that” Light’s dating life and personality has gotten a LOT funnier since he forgot he was a murderer I kind of wish THIS could be the whole show 

Also: Nice to know Light USED to have standards of how to treat women

Honestly fair play to both L and Light they both deserved to be punched and it’s funny to see eighteen episodes of mind games culminate in punching and kicking each other in the face

“Matsuda’s being an idiot again” “Well, Matsuda is a natural at that” wghkjhgkj what has Matsuda done to any of you

"He’s punishing criminals as a front, and killing people for the benefit of this company” is Light unknowingly going to solve the murder chain he himself started... inspiring

“I was testing you” this is why Light is your only friend, L, Aizawa has kids and it’s a dick move to ask him to put his convictions before them

Poor Matsuda realizing he’s got the least to offer to their team... me in high school science labs 

I understand Aizawa’s moral crisis but why do NONE of these cops care about their wives or daughters they’re just kind of like, ‘I will provide for you but I have no interest in or fulfillment from being part of your life’ (ACAB)

Matsuda is truly about to die for being dumb and eager to help 😔 Rest in Pieces

“We must not allow Yotsuba to figure out that we are investigating them,” said L, just after it cut from Matsuda being obvious about investigating them. Oh Matsuda 😔 you’re so bad at your job 😔

MATSUDAAAAAAAA oh thank goodness; Bimbo Rights save the day

“I can’t go along with your idea, it’s wrong!” said Light, despite the fact it took him 15 seconds to get over murder the first couple of times he did it 

Staaaaaaaaay Good Light, I don’t want ur Deathnotesona I want this young man with moral convictions!!

The level of hubris it takes to answer a phone call during your secret Murder Meeting while people continue to talk about their Murder Plans is just out of this world

“If I die, you could probably become the successor to the ‘L‘ name,” said L, to the person he has been trying to catch for twenty episodes 

“I won’t say anything under any kind of torture” “Yes that’s true” Which he knows because he tortured her for six weeks!! You see that that’s fucked up, L, right? RIGHT??? RIIIIIIIIGHT? (LIIIIIIIGHT???)

Seriously not to beat a dead Shinigami but Light is so much better like this. He doesn’t want to throw people’s lives away for the investigation! He wants to protect Misa! He thinks Kira is wrong! Why does he have to be a murderer!!! Why can’t this show be about a nice young man!!!!

“Hey Ryuzaki, that’s messed up!” THANK YOU LIGHT AGAIN I KNOW YOU BOTH HAVE KILLED PEOPLE BUT YOU DON’T KNOW THAT RIGHT NOW SO FOR ALL MISA KNOWS HE’S JUST A GUY WHO TORTURES HER AND TELLS HER CRUSH WILL DIE IF SHE DOESN’T HELP

Wow Rem is so ride or die for Misa protecting Misa from creepy Higuchi, giving her info and telling her to trust Light, that’s love bitch

Props to Misa for getting a confession out of Higuchi after one (1) car ride 

Why do I feel like L is going to be responsible for reawakening Bad Light is it because he psychologically tortured him for six weeks? Had his dad hold him at gunpoint? Forced Misa to investigate on his behalf? Constantly and unerringly presses him on what Kira would be thinking as he’s handcuffed to him 24 hours a day? Maybe!! This is like Build-a-Bear but he’s customizing his Teen Murder Friend 

“Only Mr. Matsuda can do [the mission to lure out Higuchi!Kira]” Death Note really said the Himbos, Herbos and Thembos shall inherit the Earth 

They keep saying they don’t know how he kills but it seems pretty obvious that he writes down their names to kill, they literally saw him do it

I really don’t want any of the investigation team to die but things are not looking hot :(

“Ryuzaki, I never knew you could fly a helicopter” “It’s just intuition” what does that MEAN

“Those aren’t allowed in Japan,” said Light, about a gun, as if he had not killed probably thousands of people without one 

In spite of this fact I really do want Good Light to stay 😔 Why! Can’t! This! Show! Be! About! A! Nice! Young! Man!

Also they really are playing into this father-and-son duo I will be very sad when the dad inevitably dies as I’m sure he will 

Family side note: I’ve been wondering this since the prison ep but where do Light’s mom and sister think he IS now that he’s dropped out of first year uni to be a teen criminal investigator handcuffed to a maladjusted homebody private eye

AIZAWAAA and also the other two guys I guess there was a plot relevant reason for him to rejoin the police huh

Well what a clean ending to this Kira arc. No one died and the killer was caught! Yikes that the next ep is called ‘Revival’ tho 😔 Rest in pieces Good Light

Also a new and very threatening intro???? What happened to the Twilight Apple Hands 

BOOOO I knew Light would get his memory back but I was hoping it would at least fuck him up for a while he sorted out his two personas but I guess all roads eventually lead to Bad Light 

Full disclosure I stopped watching for a few days just after Light got his memory back and let me tell u coming back later hasn’t made it any more tolerable I am truly not built for this EUGH

“Do you really want to halve your life a second time” “Well, that can’t be helped” REALLY???? CAN’T IT BE HELPED MISA??? WHY ARE YOU AND LIGHT SO CRAZY

Oh I guess we’re back to Light saying incredibly suspicious things right near the investigators lmao what if those cameras secretly had audio or you know, L simply knew how to read lips 

“Misa, let’s make a new world together” Remember a bunch of episodes ago when Good Light was all ‘I could never toy with a woman’s emotions’?? What was the reason!!!

“Have you ever told the truth at any point in your entire life” L cutting straight to the core lmao (also the answer is obviously ‘no’)

This show has taken a jarring tonal shift why are they having a post-rain-confrontation massage and towelling each other off this is a level of intimacy I was not prepared for I NEED PEOPLE TOOK LOOK AT THIS:

OKAY OKAY OKAY I KNOW THAT IT WAS PROBABLY NOT THEIR INTENTION BUT THE ONLY WAY I CAN READ THIS SCENE IS AS “Don’t kill me Light~ 🥰 I’ll fuck you~ 🥰” 

I guess L knew he was forcing Rem’s hand to kill him if he disproved the rules written in the book?? But to what end omg how does this help anyone 

“In April 2012, Light Yagami, age 23, joins the National Police Agency” should’ve known we’d land here eventually (ACAB)

Ah, I see another person who doesn’t know how to sit, clearly they will inherit the L title next lmao

Update from the first few mins of the next ep: “Near should succeed L” told you

“There’s no way I’m letting Sayu marry a detective” ahjfkhkjf he’s a little old for her I think but it wouldn’t be the worst thing this show has done romantically lmao; maybe Sayu would get to investigate her brother

“I might’ve considered going out with you, if you were a little younger” HA GOOD FOR HER

“[...] the Japanese police are unreliable. In order to solve this case, we want you to hand over the notebook to our country.” Of all the Japanese-speaking Americans in this show, this is the most accurate jkhfkhf the US government really is Like That 

Ah, so that’s where Mello’s gone, oh how the turn tables 

Also way to sell your subordinates out immediately, NPA Director, will you give them the Kira task force’s home addresses too

The real question is if Light actually cares about his sister enough to prioritize her over the notebook

“Call me... N” Oh my good L... M(ello)... N(ear)... Oooooooooooooooo

It’s my saving grace that I only need to get through 9 more eps but as always I must wonder where this is going will Light just die and end up in Shinigami purgatory while the people who knew him after the fact go, ‘hey, that guy was fucked up’

“If things get bad, I’ll have to kill Sayu” well I guess that answers that question, my expectations of Light are so low and yet he continues to find new ways to be awful

Good for Mr. Yagami and Sayu for getting out of that alive I guess but hoo boy I think this is going to have some psychological repercussions for both of them 

Uh oh this episode is called ‘Father’ I’ve been dreading this one bc I think that means Mr. Yagami is about to die 😭😭😭

“It was an institution for brilliant children, to raise them to become L‘s successor” okay calm down Professor Xatari that’s not what children are for lmao 

Well I guess it’s a lot easier to track down info about these two guys than it was to figure out L lmao

HAHAHA Sidoh haunting Ryuk to ask for his stuff is a fun addition to this madness  

“He’s scary for a human” jkhhfjh how unhinged does Mello have to be to threaten a literal Shinigami 

I truly don’t understand the logistics of how they revealed Ryuk to the police force isn’t the second Kira notebook supposed to belong to Actual Kira, in the police force’s eyes????? I do not understand how Light can just turn up with another notebook and everyone’s like ‘sure cool’ did I miss something 

Mr. Yagami killed for being unable to take human life ugh this is the worst 

“You’re not Kira. I’m really glad.” WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH THIS IS SO SAD MR. YAGAMI NOOOOOOOOOO THAT’S WHY HE RENOUNCED OWNERSHIP OF THE NOTEBOOK 

Neither Mello nor Near seem overly concerned with the lives of people around them does being a Super Genius Investigator also mean you have to be a dick (is this Benadryl Coddleswab Sherlock syndrome)

Lmaooo genuinely love how it’s constantly apparent that Light is the least smart of all of the smart people Light spent five years working on his reputation and it took Near one (1) phone call to destroy it 

Ghjkhgkhgkgjh Light outsmarted by Near yet again never think people will prioritize principles over money

Lol yeah Aizawa needn’t have given a name after he said the “Deputy Director Yagami would kill Kira and then himself” thing, you don’t do that just for anyone who was he fooling 

How does Light keep track of all the renunciations and notebooks bc I certainly can’t 

Ffhkfjhfj Mikami truly looks like the son of L and Light it’s like Light missed him and was like, “Miss u boo :( (even tho I kinda killed u) I’ll adopt An Evil 27-year-old in ur honour :)”

Is Mikami’s story really, ‘I got bullied in high school and have mommy issues so now I think people I don’t like should die’ ok Shonen Snape 

“I just want you to meet with me and hear me out” Light really proving to Aizawa that he can lie AND manipulate people’s feelings 

“The truth is, she’s not smart enough to be my partner” first of all Light I think this show has proven you’re not that smart, and Misa’s Herbo Energy is effervescent and will outlast you, and third of all go to jail

“He’ll look suspicious if he doesn’t say something soon” “Ide, have you ever been in love” Matsuda continues to be the only good part of this show

“You’re the only man I’ve ever respected and admired in my life” GET SOME THERAPY KIYOMI

“You’re going to be the goddess of the new world” so it’s not enough for Light to be a murderer he must also be a cheater

Lmao Near’s powers of perception do seem a little B/BC S/herlock because L tried for literally months to work out the possibilities and Near is just like ‘I KNOW IT NOW’

“The only thing I can deduce from this is that Light Yagami is popular with the ladies” HEAVEN KNOWS WHY (PUN NOT INTENDED)

Every moment Aizawa gets closer to proving Light is Kira is another step closer to death 😔

“This is definitely Mikami’s handwriting” Not to be a know-it-all, Near, but handwriting analysis has been proven faulty many times in multiple courts of law

This truly is a game of Cat and Cat. All these hidden plans give me a headache fkjhkfjh call me Misa-Misa and spin me sideways I don’t have the braincells to spare

Well this is definitely some kind of s*xual assault absolutely fucking hate it wow this show truly just drains the life out of you 

“Matt, I never thought you would be killed” why wouldn’t you think that at this point anyone who comes close to this investigation eventually dies (also wjkhkjhgk why is Matt special didn’t you kill all those thugs you had before -- Mello said ‘the lives of my allies are only important if they are drawn in handsome protag style’) 

As of yet I haven’t really talked about Near’s wild toymaking but hoo boy is that L finger puppet something to observe

“Everyone who knows about the existence of the notebook will die” I’m still pulling for their survival, particularly Matsuda (himbo rights!!!)

Imagine if they just shot Light Yagami on sight how ironic would that conclusion to all these mind games be 

“I’m waiting, for the one who will solve everything, to arrive” Lmao if it turns out L is alive I’ll pee laughing this show is so fucking stupid 

Take a shot every time there is a Humpty-Dumpty-in-Puss-in-Boots style explanation about how everything actually happened

“I’ve won, Near” I bet/hope what gets Light caught is his inability to hold in his hubris for one (1) minute

Although the last episode is called New World, in which case maybe he wins in a very weird ending to a very weird show

Sjkfhkjhfkhfkjhf well I guess what gets Light caught is that the person he invited to be his murderous disciple keeps calling him God

“A second ago, you said ‘I win.’ That’s as good a confession as any” HA hubris strikes again also bold of Aizawa to clap Light on the shoulder knowing he is a mass murderer

Ohhh Matsuda he’s so nice and believed the best of Light :((((((((((((

Watching Light become increasingly desperate and crazed is very uncomfortable give it up dude u’ve been beat (though I suppose there is time for everyone here to be murdered still lmao)

LMAO LIGHT SAID “IF YOU CAN’T BEAT ‘EM, CONVERT ‘EM”

Yeah I figured if one of them was gonna shoot it would be Matsuda :( :( Good for him for not killing Light tho!!

Huh I guess that’s the end of the show I thought Light would die but I did think we’d at least get to see him in Shinigami Purgatory or smth... what a wild ride. This certainly was a show.

[doctordeath]

Michael Swango

“ From a young age, Swango showed an unusual interest in violent deaths, as well as the Holocaust. In fact, he kept scrap books of gruesome pictures of fatal car wrecks and crimes. During his senior year in college, Swango wrote his chemistry thesis on the poisoning death of Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov, and since that time, became obsessed with poisons, especially those that could be used as silent killers. 

During Swango’s third year of medical school, at least five patients died shortly after being seen by him. Classmates called him “Double-O,” referring to James Bond and the “license to kill” slogan. At the same time, Swango took a job as an ambulance driver but was soon not allowed direct contact with patients for an unknown reason. He secured a neurosurgery residency but was failed in his last 8 weeks of medical school when he failed to show up. Upon Swango hiring a lawyer, the school feared litigation, allowed him to postpone his graduation for 1 year, but gave him a strict set of rules to follow. 

Swango buckled down and graduated with residency positions secured in surgery and then neurosurgery to follow. Shortly after graduation, he was fired from the ambulance company after he told a man in the midst of a heart attack to walk to his car and have his wife drive him. 

Shortly after starting his internship, a series of unexplained deaths among healthy patients occurred on the wing to which he was assigned. One who survived reported to the nurses that Swango injected him with medication just minutes before she started having seizures. An investigation was started, but he was exonerated as the hospital aimed to minimize any fall-out. 

Swango was moved to a new wing, where a series of unexplained deaths soon followed. Additionally, fellow residents fell violently ill after he brought in fried chicken for everyone. Swango was not invited back for his second year. Instead, he attained a license to practice medicine in Ohio in 1984 and took a job with an ambulance company that did not check his background. He exhibited odd behavior, including frequently showing of his macabre scrapbooks, inappropriate and strange comments about death and dying, and being unusually excited by CNN news regarding mass killings and horrific accidents. 

Again, Swango brought food to his co-workers (this time, doughnuts), who became violently ill, requiring several to seek medical care at the hospital. People became suspicious when a series of similar episodes followed and decided to get tested; several tested positive for poison. Swango was arrested, sentenced to 5 years, and had his license revoked. He was released after 2 years, moved to Virginia, and took a job as a career counselor. 

Soon, co-workers suddenly began suffering severe nausea and headaches. Swango was fired in 1989 and then took a job as a lab tech, but quit after a wave of illnesses among his co-workers occurred, leaving an executive in a near comatose state. 

In 1990, he legally changed his name and forged documents about his conviction. Eventually, he landed a residency position in internal medicine in South Dakota in 1992. Things were going well until he decided to join the AMA. Someone was a friend of the dean at the University of South Dakota and informed him of the truth of Swango’s background. At the same time, the Justice Files aired a 20/20 interview he had done while in prison. He was asked to resign. 

His girlfriend was shocked and soon began to suffer violent headaches until she separated from Swango. He then lied his way into a psychiatry program at the University of NY at Stony Brook. On his internal medicine rotations, patients again began to mysteriously die. Swango’s girlfriend kept in communication with him until she discovered that he had emptied her checking account; she committed suicide by shooting herself in the chest the next day. Her mother took revenge on Swango by sending a letter to his dean, getting him fired. The dean then sent a letter to every medical school and over a thousand teaching hospitals in the US, warning them of Swango’s past and his deception. 

After being fired, Swango went underground with the FBI searching for him. He resurfaced in 1994 as Jack Kirk, working at a company in Atlanta that allowed him access to all the city’s water supply. The FBI contacted them, he was fired, and then vanished again. He soon showed up in Africa, taking a job in Zimbabwe as a doctor. It was soon apparent that he was untrained to perform some basic procedures. Patients again began mysteriously dying. Police turned up hundreds of various drugs and poisons in his home. Swango eventually fled, when it was apparent that evidence was mounting against him. 

In 1997, he entered the US enroute to Saudi Arabia, where he was arrested by immigration officials and sent to NY to remain in prison until his trial. He pled guilty to fraud. Just before he was released, he was charged with murder and fraud. Knowing that Zimbabwe was fighting to have him extradited and he would face the death penalty there, he pled guilty. He is currently serving three consecutive life sentences at ADX Supermax Federal Prison.”

https://www.physiciansweekly.com/top-14-most-evil-doctors-of-the-last-two-centuries/

Also see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Swango

[frowzyspeaks]

Dear Police Officers

Dear Police Officers,

When Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man, he was speaking for a community of people whose voice had been excluded from history for far too long. His novel depicts the black experience as a nightmare, which is essentially still our cruel reality today. Progress is the ultimate goal of the United States of America, and it has been since the day the land was stolen from the Native Americans (but that’s not my point today). To progress, one must change, and to change, one must understand the wrong doings they have done so that they can further themselves into a better them. Invisible Man is a depiction of Ellison’s time, the civil rights era. Not much progress has been made since then, and it has been almost 70 years. Where is the change?

Tod Clifton. He was dead before he even realized it. His name literally means death, which was a clever use of word manipulation on Ellison’s part. Clifton was murdered after he struck an officer, which is an undebatable sign of a resisting of arrest. But is resisting the loss of freedom over a doll probable cause to be shot down in the middle of a Harlem street? Although he is a fictional character, his presence in the novel represents a much bigger picture than merely just a character in a book that Ellison made up. To blacks, this is a reality.

Tod Clifton was breaking the law. He was selling Sambo dolls on the street without a permit, resisted arrest, and got shot. He was not even given medical attention after he was shot—he was left laying for all to see. He deserved to be charged criminally in court. However, he never made it to a trial or even to the back of a police cruiser. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, it is your duty as an officer to “[maintain] public order and safety, [enforce] the law, and [prevent, detect], and [investigate] criminal activities.” When do you officers decide that it is also your responsibility to convict a man and give him the death penalty—to assign yourself as the judge and the jury? To become an officer, one must attend a police academy, where the correct way to deal with assault and other unarmed situations is taught and engraved. Yet and still, many officers choose the quick route when it comes to black men, and shoot when the situation gets even just a little bit out of hand. Are there no more batons? Tasers? Stun guns? Bean bag rounds? What about the black man has inflicted fear upon officers? Blackness is not incriminating nor intimidating, yet it has been depicted that way for quite a while.

Eric Garner. He was a black man in Staten Island arrested for illegally selling cigarettes, soon put in a chokehold as he begged for breath almost a dozen times, and let out his final words: “I can’t breathe.” This happened in 2014. Why have we not progressed since Ellison’s era? Do we not strive for progress anymore? Are officers becoming more and more incompetent for their jobs, or are black men becoming more threatening? Garner’s murderer was convicted of homicide eventually, but that was only a small step forward in the corruption that is the law enforcement system. Most officers are not convicted, simply because you all are often given the benefit of the doubt before the case is even explained to its fullest extent. This is done by posing black men as an immediate threat, a sort of threat that cannot be dealt with by the court system. You all are painted as the victims because you put your life on the line every day to ensure the safety of the community, but no one seems to think about us. You chose to be an officer and risk losing your life every time you put on that badge and uniform. Our blackness is not something that we chose. We cannot go home at the end of the day and take it off—it’s something we are born with and are forced to live with. Our blackness puts us at risk every moment of our lives, and we cannot even be given the benefit of the doubt when we are dead. This causes our community to live in constant fear that we can die at the hands of anyone and our murders will get away with it, especially if our murderers are the ones who are supposed to ensure our safety—you.

But what is police brutality? Some officers seem to believe that since they are the image of the law to ordinary civilians, that they are above the law. This leads to them acting out of impulse rather than logic, and results in an excessive use of force and sometimes death when dealing with people who are not even posing an immediate threat. Police brutality has been a major theme of the black experience in the 20th century and seems to have carried itself into the 21st century with an alarming amount of cases. When the ones who are supposed to be protecting us are the same people who harm us, who do we turn to? Distrust in the police departments sprung about organizations during the Civil Rights Movement like the Black Panthers, an organization designed to police the police. In modern times, we have formed the movement #Blacklivesmatter. Since then, black bodies have been put on display as examples of how not to deal with the police, yet we seem to do all the other things that white men do when handling police officers. To debate this, police officers usually point out that whites are murdered by officers far more often than blacks and other minority groups, but we only compose a small percent of the population compared to our white counterparts. If blacks and other minority groups were to be murdered at the same rates as that of whites, we would eventually be wiped out.

Learn how to deal with us when we are angry. We are not angry simply because you are a police officer; we are angry because we fear every encounter with you. Rather it is for a broken tail light or a routine traffic stop, we become alarmed every time we are near you. We should not have to tell our loved ones to keep their hands on the steering wheel when being pulled over or to warn you about where we keep our registration and insurance papers so that we will not be shot. Talking back is not us “asking for it,” it is simply us exercising our rights and letting you as an officer know that we have had enough of the injustices and that we are tired of living in fear that our black skin will get us killed. We should be able to have faith that our law enforcement system will protect us, not harm us.

But don’t get me wrong, for every corrupt officer, there are plenty of officers who carry out their duties exactly as they are supposed to. However, we cannot praise cops for not killing; we have to penalize cops who are not correctly carrying out their duties to promote a healthier relationship between the black community and the police force. As blacks, we often believe that you all treat us all the same due to the color of our skin, so in turn, we tend to assume that all cops are going to treat us as if we are criminals. As a community, yes we do have room to improve, but as an officer, it is your responsibility to ease us away from this stereotype. Prove us wrong.

Sincerely,

A Sister

[blackkudos]

Rubin Carter

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (May 6, 1937 – April 20, 2014) was an American-Canadian middleweight boxer who was wrongfully convicted of murder and later released following a petition of habeas corpus after serving almost 20 years in prison.

In 1966, police arrested Carter and acquaintance John Artis for a triple homicide committed at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey. Police stopped Carter's car and brought him and Artis, also in the car, to the scene of the crime. Carter and Artis were tried twice for the murders in 1967 and 1976 and convicted; both served time in Rahway State Prison. After the second conviction was overturned in 1985, prosecutors chose not to try the case for a third time.

Carter's autobiography, titled The Sixteenth Round, written while he was in prison, was published in 1975 by Warner Books. The story inspired the 1975 Bob Dylan song "Hurricane" and the 1999 film The Hurricane (with Denzel Washington playing Carter). From 1993 to 2005, Carter served as executive director of Innocence Canada (Formerly the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted).

Early life

Carter was born in Clifton, New Jersey, the fourth of seven children. He acquired a criminal record and was sentenced to a juvenile reformatory for assault, having stabbed a man in self defense when he was 11. Carter escaped from the reformatory in 1954 and joined the United States Army. A few months after completing infantry basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he was sent to West Germany. While in Germany, Carter began to box for the Army. He was later discharged in 1956 as unfit for service, after four courts-martial. Shortly after his discharge, he was convicted of two muggings and sent to prison.

Boxing career

After his release from prison in September 1961, Carter became a professional boxer. At 5 ft 8 in (1.73 m), Carter was shorter than the average middleweight, but he fought all of his professional career at 155–160 lb (70–72.6 kg). His aggressive style and punching power (resulting in many early-round knockouts) drew attention, establishing him as a crowd favorite and earning him the nickname "Hurricane." After he defeated a number of middleweight contenders—such as Florentino Fernandez, Holley Mims, Gomeo Brennan, and George Benton—the boxing world took notice. The Ring first listed him as one of its "Top 10" middleweight contenders in July 1963. At the end of 1965, they ranked him as the number five middleweight.

He fought six times in 1963, winning four bouts and losing two. He remained ranked in the lower part of the top 10 until December 20, when he surprised the boxing world by flooring past and future world champion Emile Griffith twice in the first round and scoring a technical knockout. That win resulted in The Ring's ranking of Carter as the number three contender for Joey Giardello's world middleweight title. Carter won two more fights (one a decision over future heavyweight champion Jimmy Ellis) in 1964, before meeting Giardello in Philadelphia for a 15-round championship match on December 14. Carter landed a few solid rights to the head in the fourth that left Giardello staggering, but was unable to follow them up, and Giardello took control of the fight in the fifth round. The judges awarded Giardello a unanimous decision.

After that fight, Carter's ranking in The Ring began to decline. He fought nine times in 1965, winning five but losing three of four against contenders Luis Manuel Rodríguez, Dick Tiger, and Harry Scott. Tiger, in particular, floored Carter three times in their match. "It was", Carter said, "the worst beating that I took in my life—inside or outside the ring". During his visit to London (to fight Scott) Carter was involved in an incident in which a shot was fired in his hotel room.

Carter's career record in boxing was 27 wins, 12 losses, and one draw in 40 fights, with 19 total knockouts (8 KOs and 11 TKOs). He received an honorary championship title belt from the World Boxing Council in 1993 (as did Joey Giardello at the same banquet) and was later inducted into the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame.

Homicides

At approximately 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1966, two men entered the Lafayette Bar and Grill at East 18th Street at Lafayette Street in Paterson, New Jersey, and began shooting. The bartender, James Oliver, and a customer, Fred Nauyoks, were killed immediately. A severely wounded customer, Hazel Tanis, died almost a month later, having been shot in the throat, stomach, intestine, spleen and left lung, and having had her arm shattered by shotgun pellets. A third customer, Willie Marins, survived the attack, despite a gunshot wound to the head that cost him the sight in one eye. During questioning, both Marins and Tanis told police that the shooters had been black males, though neither identified Carter or John Artis.Petty criminal Alfred Bello, who had been near the Lafayette that night to burgle a factory, was an eyewitness. Bello later testified that he was approaching the Lafayette when two black males—one carrying a shotgun, the other a pistol—came around the corner walking towards him. He ran from them, and they got into a white car that was double-parked near the Lafayette.

Bello was one of the first people on the scene of the shootings, as was Patricia (Patty) Valentine, a resident on the second floor (above the Lafayette Bar and Grill). Valentine told the police that she saw two black males get into a white car and drive off. Another neighbor, Ronald Ruggiero, also heard the shots, and said that, from his window, he saw Alfred Bello running west on Lafayette Street toward 16th Street. He then heard the screech of tires and saw a white car shoot past, heading west, with two black males in the front seat.Both Bello and Valentine gave police a description of the car that was the same. Valentine's testimony, in which she initially stated that the car had rear lights which lit up completely like butterflies, changed when she testified during the second trial to an accurate description of Carter's car, which had conventional taillights with aluminum decoration in a butterfly shape. The prosecution theorized that the dissimilarity in Valentine's description was the result of a misreading of a court transcript by the defense.

Investigation, indictment and first conviction

Hours before the triple murder, Carter was searching for guns that he had lost a year earlier. Carter was driving a white Dodge Polara, which was notable for its out-of-state license plate with blue background and gold lettering and taillights with butterfly-shaped aluminium decoration. Ten minutes after the murder, police stopped Carter's car. The police, who were searching for a vehicle with three occupants, let Carter go.Minutes later, the same police officers solicited a description of the getaway car from eyewitness Al Bello. He described the car as white with "a geometric design, sort of a butterfly type design in the back of the car", and as bearing out-of-state license plates with blue background and orange lettering. On hearing this description, the police realized that Al Bello was describing a car similar to the one that they had only moments earlier let go.

When police found Carter's car they stopped it and brought Carter and another occupant, John Artis, to the scene about 31 minutes after the incident. The police took no fingerprints at the crime scene, and lacked the facilities to test Carter and Artis for gunshot residue.

On searching the car about 45 minutes later, Detective Emil DiRobbio found a live .32 caliber pistol round under the front passenger seat and a 12-gauge shotgun shell in the trunk. Firearms Identification later established that the murder weapons had been a .32 caliber pistol and a 12-gauge shotgun. The defense later raised questions about this evidence, as it was not logged with a property clerk until five days after the murders. The prosecution responded to this line of questioning by producing a report lodged 75 minutes after the murders that documented the presence of the .32 caliber pistol round and 12-gauge shotgun shell. The defense was able to show that the bullet found in the Carter car was brass cased, rather than copper coated like those found at the Lafayette Bar, and that the shotgun shell found in the Carter car was an older model, with a different wad and color. In response, the prosecution argued that the metal and make of the retrieved ammunition was meaningless because the ammunition found at the crime scene was also dissimilar. Furthermore, the ammunition found in the car was usable by the murder weapons.

The police took Carter and Artis to police headquarters and questioned them. Witnesses did not identify them as the killers and they were released. Carter and Artis voluntarily appeared before a grand jury, which did not return an indictment.

Several months later, Bello disclosed to the police that he had an accomplice during the attempted burglary, one Arthur Dexter Bradley. On further questioning, Bello and Bradley both identified Carter as one of the two males they had seen carrying weapons outside the bar on the night of the murders. Bello also identified Artis as the other. Based on this additional evidence, Carter and Artis were arrested and indicted.

At the 1967 trial, Carter was represented by well-known attorney Raymond A. Brown. Brown focused on inconsistencies in some of the descriptions given by eyewitnesses Marins and Bello. The defense also produced a number of alibi witnesses who testified that Carter and Artis had been in the Nite Spot (a nearby bar) at about the time of the shootings. Both men were convicted. Prosecutors sought the death penalty, but jurors recommended that each defendant receive a life sentence for each murder. Judge Samuel Larner imposed two consecutive and one concurrent life sentence on Carter, and three concurrent life sentences on Artis.

In 1974, Bello and Bradley recanted their identifications of Carter and Artis, and these recantations were used as the basis for a motion for a new trial. Judge Samuel Larner denied the motion on December 11, saying that the recantations "lacked the ring of truth."

Despite Larner's ruling, Madison Avenue advertising executive George Lois organized a campaign on Carter's behalf, which led to increasing public support for a retrial or pardon. Muhammad Ali lent his support to the campaign (including publicly wishing Carter good luck on his appeal during the airing of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on September 7, 1973). Bob Dylan co-wrote (with Jacques Levy) and performed a song called "Hurricane" (1975), which declared that Carter was innocent. On December 7, 1975, Dylan performed the song at a concert at Trenton State Prison, where Carter was temporarily an inmate.

However, during the hearing on the recantations, defense attorneys also argued that Bello and Bradley had lied during the 1967 trial, telling the jurors that they had made only certain narrow, limited deals with prosecutors in exchange for their trial testimony. A detective taped one interrogation of Bello in 1966, and when it was played during the recantation hearing, defense attorneys argued that the tape revealed promises beyond what Bello had testified to. If so, prosecutors had either had a Brady obligation to disclose this additional exculpatory evidence, or a duty to disclose the fact that their witnesses had lied on the stand.

Larner denied this second argument as well, but the New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously held that the evidence of various deals made between the prosecution and witnesses Bello and Bradley should have been disclosed to the defense before or during the 1967 trial as this could have "affected the jury's evaluation of the credibility" of the eyewitnesses. "The defendants' right to a fair trial was substantially prejudiced", said Justice Mark Sullivan. The court set aside the original convictions and granted Carter and Artis a new trial.

Despite the difficulties of prosecuting a ten-year-old case, Prosecutor Burrell Ives Humphreys decided to try Carter and Artis again. To ensure, as best he could, that he did not use perjured testimony to obtain a conviction, Humphreys had Bello polygraphed—once by Leonard H. Harrelson and a second time by Richard Arther, both well-known and respected experts in the field. Both men concluded that Bello was telling the truth when he said that he had seen Carter outside the Lafayette immediately after the murders.

However, Harrelson also reported orally that Bello had been inside the bar shortly before and at the time of the shooting, a conclusion that contradicted Bello's 1967 trial testimony wherein he had said that he had been on the street at the time of the shooting. Despite this oral report, Harrelson's subsequent written report stated that Bello's 1967 testimony had been truthful.

Second conviction and appeal

During the new trial in 1976, Alfred Bello repeated his 1967 testimony, identifying Carter and Artis as the two armed men he had seen outside the Lafayette Grill. Bradley refused to cooperate with prosecutors, and neither prosecution nor defense called him as a witness.

The defense responded with testimony from multiple witnesses who identified Carter at the locations he claimed to be at when the murders happened. Investigator Fred Hogan, whose efforts had led to the recantations of Bello and Bradley, appeared as a defense witness. Hogan was asked on cross examinations whether any bribes or inducements were offered to Bello to secure his recantation, which Hogan denied. His original handwritten notes on his conversations with Bello were entered into evidence. The defense also pointed out the inconsistencies in the testimony of Patricia Valentine, and read the 1967 testimony of William Marins, who had died in 1973, noting that his descriptions of the shooters were drastically different from Artis and Carter's actual appearances.

The court also heard testimony from a Carter associate that Passaic County prosecutors had tried to pressure her into testifying against Carter. Prosecutors denied the charge. After deliberating for almost nine hours, the jury again found Carter and Artis guilty of the murders. Judge Leopizzi re-imposed the same sentences on both men: a double life sentence for Carter, a single life sentence for Artis.

Artis was paroled in 1981. Carter's attorneys continued to appeal. In 1982, the Supreme Court of New Jersey affirmed his convictions (4–3). Although the justices felt that the prosecutors should have disclosed Harrelson's oral opinion (about Bello's location at the time of the murders) to the defense, only a minority thought this was material. The majority thus concluded that the prosecution had not withheld information the Brady disclosure law required them to provide to the defense.

According to bail bondswoman Carolyn Kelley, in 1975–1976 she helped raise funds to win a second trial for Carter, which resulted in his release on bail in March 1976. On a fund-raising trip the following month, Kelley said the boxer beat her severely over a disputed hotel bill. The Philadelphia Daily News reported the alleged beating in a front-page story several weeks later, and celebrity support for Carter quickly eroded, though Carter denied the accusation and there was insufficient evidence for legal prosecution. Mae Thelma Basket, whom Carter had married in 1963, divorced him after their second child was born, because she found out that he had been unfaithful to her.

Federal court action

In 1985, Carter's attorneys filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court. Later that year, Judge Haddon Lee Sarokin of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey granted the writ, noting that the prosecution had been "predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure," and set aside the convictions. Carter, 48 years old, was freed without bail in November 1985.

Prosecutors appealed Sarokin's ruling to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and filed a motion with the court to return Carter to prison pending the outcome of the appeal. The court denied this motion and eventually upheld Sarokin's opinion, affirming his Brady analysis without commenting on his other rationale.

The prosecutors appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

Prosecutors therefore could have tried Carter (and Artis) a third time, but decided not to, and filed a motion to dismiss the original indictments. "It is just not legally feasible to sustain a prosecution, and not practical after almost 22 years to be trying anyone," said New Jersey Attorney General W. Cary Edwards. Acting Passaic County Prosecutor John P. Goceljak said several factors made a retrial impossible, including Bello's "current unreliability" as a witness and the unavailability of other witnesses. Goceljak also doubted whether the prosecution could reintroduce the racially motivated crime theory due to the federal court rulings. A judge granted the motion to dismiss, bringing an end to the legal proceedings.

Post emancipation

Carter lived in Toronto, Ontario, where he became a Canadian citizen, and was executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC) from 1993 until 2005. Carter resigned when the AIDWYC declined to support Carter's protest of the appointment (to a judgeship) of Susan MacLean, who was the prosecutor of Canadian Guy Paul Morin, who served over eighteen months in prison for rape and murder until exonerated by DNA evidence.

Carter's second marriage was to Lisa Peters. The couple separated later.

In 1996, Carter, then 59, was arrested when Toronto police mistakenly identified him as a suspect in his thirties believed to have sold drugs to an undercover officer. He was released after the police realized their error.

Carter often served as a motivational speaker. On October 14, 2005, he received two honorary Doctorates of Law, one from York University (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) and one from Griffith University (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia), in recognition of his work with AIDWYC and the Innocence Project. Carter received the Abolition Award from Death Penalty Focus in 1996.

Prostate cancer and death

In March 2012, while attending the International Justice Conference in Burswood, Western Australia, Carter revealed that he had terminal prostate cancer. At the time, doctors gave him between three and six months to live. Beginning shortly after that time, John Artis lived with and cared for Carter, and on April 20, 2014, he confirmed that Carter had succumbed to his illness. He was afterwards cremated and his ashes were scattered in part over Cape Cod and in part at a horse farm in Kentucky.

In the months leading up to his death, Carter worked for the exoneration of David McCallum, a Brooklyn man who has been incarcerated since 1985 on charges of murder. Two months before his death, Carter published "Hurricane Carter's Dying Wish," an opinion piece in the New York Daily News, in which he asked for an independent review of McCallum's conviction. "I request only that McCallum be granted a full hearing by the Brooklyn conviction integrity unit, now under the auspices of the new district attorney, Ken Thompson. Knowing what I do, I am certain that when the facts are brought to light, Thompson will recommend his immediate release ... Just as my own verdict 'was predicated on racism rather than reason and on concealment rather than disclosure,' as Sarokin wrote, so too was McCallum's," Carter wrote. On Wednesday, October 15, 2014, McCallum was exonerated.

In popular culture

Carter's story inspired:

The 1975 Bob Dylan song "Hurricane" proclaimed that Carter was innocent. Carter appeared as himself in Dylan's 1978 movie Renaldo and Clara. In the 2019 film Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, Dylan talked about his involvement with the Carter case and Carter was also interviewed in the film, describing his relationship with Dylan.

Norman Jewison's 1999 feature film The Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington in the lead role. The film is about Rubin Carter's accusation, trials, and time spent in prison. Carter later discussed at a lecture how he fell in love with Washington's portrayal of him during auditions for The Hurricane, noting that boxer Marvelous Marvin Hagler and actors Wesley Snipes and Samuel L. Jackson all vied for the role. Washington was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance at the 72nd Academy Awards.

[thegrandimago]

Four people die defending planet Earth every week, a new Global Witness study finds.

The year 2019 was the most dangerous on record for environmental activists, a new report says.

Every day around the world, people stand up to companies exploiting land for profit, felling trees, damming and polluting waterways, displacing ancestral homes and destroying wildlife habitats. Every week, an average of four of these defenders are killed. 

The Global Witness Defending Tomorrow report, released Tuesday, counted 212 people killed last year for their efforts to protect the Earth from the destructive effects of development for oil and gas, mineral extraction, agriculture, logging and other practices.

“Our figures are almost certainly an underestimate,” the authors write, and they don’t include people who were attacked, intimidated, unjustly imprisoned or otherwise silenced for protesting industrial encroachment on nature and ancestral lands. “Our data on killings will never accurately capture the true scale of the problem.”

The violence is especially high against Indigenous people, who accounted for 40% of land defenders killed in 2019, Global Witness found, though they make up only about 5% of the world’s population.

The impacts on indigenous populations around the world are starkly disproportionate, said Chris Madden, lead author on the Global Witness report.

“On the flip side, there is the growing recognition that to be able to deal with the climate crisis we must listen to indigenous people and we must protect their way of life to protect vital climate-critical forests and ecosystems that are essential to fend off the climate crisis.”

Indigenous people are exceptionally effective stewards of nature. Deforestation is twice as high in non-Native-managed territories. Indigenous lands comprise less than 20% of the Earth and 80% of its biodiversity, according to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. But Indigenous communities legally own a mere tenth of the lands they claim. Even where their land rights are recognized, roads, dams, pipelines and industrial operations are often carried out without their informed consent, leading to displacement, relocation, forced removal or worse.

Violence against activists is greatest in Central and South America — and getting worse. In Honduras, 14 environmental defenders were killed last year, more than triple the year before, making it the most dangerous country per capita. Colombia topped the Global Witness list with 64 deaths recorded in 2019, two and a half times the number a year earlier. Half were of indigenous people.

Indigenous human rights defenders in Colombia increasingly have been targeted by violence and harassment since a 2016 peace agreement between the government and FARC rebels left formerly FARC-controlled regions open to competition between armed criminal and paramilitary groups.

The peace agreement in Colombia was also supposed to help tens of thousands of farmers transition from illegal coca cultivation to growing cacao and coffee. But the program has been ineffective, and participants are being targeted by criminal and militia groups with vested interest in the continuation of the drug trade.

The Global Witness report counted some 33 people killed defending the Amazon, a vital but threatened repository for atmospheric carbon. Escalating deforestation from logging, mining, fires (natural and manmade) and agriculture — actions supported and encouraged by Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro — threaten the forest, indigenous people who live there, and the global climate. In November, 26-year-old Paulo Paulino Guajajara was ambushed and fatally shot by a group of illegal loggers in his people’s territory. He was a member of one of Brazil’s grassroots groups called Guardians of the Forest.

The struggles of the Indigenous communities against destructive development is an existential issue, said María Martín Quintana, advocacy coordinator for the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders (IM-Defensoras), impacting “their ways of life and the survival of life in their territories.” Violence is also “classist, racist and misogynist,” she added.

Women are increasingly at risk of murder, harassment, imprisonment and sexual violence in Latin America. Killings of women human rights defenders in Colombia rose nearly 50% in 2019 over the year before, a U.N. human rights council report found. In Mexico and Central America, attacks against female activists — especially those defending land, water and natural resources — doubled between 2015 and 2018, according to IM-Defensoras.

In December, and in part due to pressure from Global Witness to investigate, seven people were sentenced for the 2016 murder of Guatemalan activist Berta Caceres. Caceres was shot dead in her home after helping stop the building of a major hydroelectric dam that would have flooded land inhabited by the indigenous Lenca people.

Many of the people killed in South and Central America were fighting the mining of coal, copper, gold and other materials, which degrades soil, pollutes water systems, fuels deforestation and forces people out of their homes. As in years past, mining is responsible for the greatest number of defender deaths recorded in the Global Witness report.

But industrial cultivation — of products such as palm oil (which is in half of what you buy at the drug store and supermarket and destroys forests), soy, sugar, coffee and tropical fruits — is an increasing threat. Deaths associated with agriculture were up more than 60% in the last year, to a total of 34. Most of these were in Asia, concentrated mainly in the Philippines, where land rights are sketchy, and where human rights advocates are “red-tagged” as terrorists by the government.

Last spring and summer, amid escalating violence between the government and militant communist insurgents, more than a dozen small-scale farmers, as well as human rights lawyers and others, were killed in conflicts related to the massive sugar plantations on the island of Negros. 

A Global Witness investigation last year uncovered suppliers for major international food brands who had run people off their land — threatening them and burning their houses to the ground — in order to plant bananas and pineapples. 

In its defenders report, Global Witness called on companies and their investors to take responsibility for harm to land and environmental defenders along the length of their supply chains, up through operations and investments.

“The numbers are rising and clearly there’s a failure in responses from both governments and businesses,” said Madden.

The report looked not just at the violent submission of environmental activism, but also subtler methods for quashing opposition, such as legal snares meant to quell peaceful protest. 

In South Dakota, penalties for inciting riots, knocked down by a federal judge last year for apparently targeting opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline, were passed into law this March. 

In a troubling first, a trio of U.K. protesters who locked themselves to the entrance of a fracking site were convicted of breaching an injunction obtained by the shale gas company Cuadrilla to bar trespassers. (The ruling came down in June of last year; their sentences were suspended in September.)

In Canada, a court injunction barred members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation Indigenous group from protesting at the proposed construction site of a gas pipeline on their own land. More than a dozen people were arrested. Officers were authorized to use lethal force, The Guardian reported.

In the months since the report was compiled, the pandemic has provided cover and an excuse for anti-environmental policy around the world. In Brazil and Cambodia, there has been a marked uptick in logging, Madden noted. Meanwhile in the U.S., President Donald Trump’s administration, which has been systematically unraveling climate protections, has been further emboldened to weaken environmental regulations and push through energy and infrastructure projects in the name of economic recovery. 

Governments around the world “are using the current COVID-19 crisis to roll back environmental protections when we need them most,” Madden said

At the intersection of concurrent threats to the climate, and in the face of opposition and intimidation, land defenders continue to hold the front lines.

[cheese-knife]

A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing

Chapter One: The End.

Hello everyone! I know I’m not exactly know for writing fanfiction, but this is the newest project im working on. Its a bit strange, as it is a crossover between BNHA and The Wolf Among Us/ Fables Universe. But this AU is starting to dig a precious place in my heart, and I’d love it if you checked it out.

Rating: Teens and Up

Pairings: (Eventual) Bigby Wolf/Snow White

Read it on Ao3

The room was nothing special, a plain grey room built like a brick shithouse, meant to house and contain some of the most dangerous criminals in New York for questioning. The only things furnishing the room were two chairs, a table, and a single light without a cover. One of the walls had a rectangle of dark glass inlaid into the brick.

Bigby Wolf sat unnaturally still in the uncomfortable metal chair, greasy, unkempt hair hanging in a curtain around his head as he stared a hole into the table in front of him. His hands were latched to the table by heavy cuffs, kept well apart so there was no way he could rip the hand cuffs off without doing significant damage to himself. Even then, the small red lights blinking on the cuffs showed that they were actively suppressing his quirk so its not like he would get very far.

The door to the room opened with a slam as two stern looking officers entered the room, one carrying a significantly thick file folder under his arm. One stood at the door, and the one with the folder sat down across from Bigby at the table.

“Fifty-Six confirmed counts of murder.”

The folder was slammed down onto the table,

“Sixty-One counts of property destruction.”

Dozens of photos of the were laid out before the wolf, each a snapshot moment from his rampage.

“An an association with an unknown number of missing persons. Their bodies were never recovered.”

He didn’t move as the officer spoke. He didn’t even acknowledge that he was there.

“The list goes on and on. You know what this means, don’t you Mr. Wolf?”

Nothing. The three in the room sat in uncomfortable silence for several minutes.

“Damnit-”

Bigby didn’t even flinch as the hand cracked across his face, hard enough to break the skin over his cheekbone. Definitely a strength quirk behind that.

“-You know what this means right?” The officer was in his face now. “We have enough shit on you to put you away for a *thousand* lifetimes, and to kill you a hundred times more. Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”

Bigby finally looked up, furious, wild yellow eyes digging into the frustrated lawman. In this moment, it was clear that he was more animal than man. He had the physicality of a caged feral animal.

In the years after his mother passed away, Bigby let himself slip into the pitfalls of his powerful quirk; in fact, he welcomed it. He welcomed the separation from the world and his humanity, fully embodying the once silly nickname his brothers used to tease him with. The Big Bad Wolf.

The trial went unsurprisingly smoothly. There was no question of what his verdict would be as he stood in front of the judge, still an overwhelming presence in the courtroom despite his restraints.

”Members of the Jury, in the case of Wolf vs. New York, what do you say?”

A small, timid woman stood and cleared her throat.

“Your honor, the members of this Jury finds the defendant wholly GUILTY of his crimes.”

The jury filed out of the courtroom as the judge dismissed them, all more than ready to leave the presence of the newly convicted felon. Bigby could smell the fear-tinged pride on each and every one of them.

The judge looked down on him.

“Bigby Wolf, it is the judgement and sentence of this court that the charged information is true, and the jury having found that the penalty shall be death. It is the order of this court that you shall suffer death, said penalty to be inflicted in Southport Correctional Facility in the manner prescribed by the law, the date later to be fixed by the Court in warrant of execution. You are remanded to the custody of the warden of Southport, it is so ordered. In witness whereof, I have hereon set my hand as Judge of this Superior Court, and I have caused the seal of this Court to be affixed thereto.”

“May God have mercy on your soul.”

He could see the pure joy in the Judge’s eyes as he delivered the sentencing.

It was five years he spent in prison. Each one hammering in the point that the law was making a mockery of him. Everyday, the guards got a little worse, a little more teasing and pushed the limits of what they could do to him without him fighting back. The bastards got comfortable around him, and there was nothing he could do about it.

They treated him like a sad dog doing tricks just for the pleasure of a shitty treat, only to be denied even after groveling at their feet.

Five. Fucking. Years.

At this point he was just craving some sort of relief. He even welcomed death, and despite the judge’s promise all those five years ago, the court seemed determined to draw out his torment for as long as possible before sending him to the slaughterhouse.

Bigby blearily opened his eyes, never getting enough sleep these days, involuntarily flinching at the sharp sound of metal banging against metal. Though the cuff permanently clamped to his wrist prevented him from transforming, its not like they could cancel out his quirk entirely. Enhanced hearing had its downfalls, and every morning he woke up to the same three scents. Sweat, shit, and corruption.

But anyway, apparently he had a visitor. Which was strange, considering Bigby’s family was either gone, or dead, and he never made any friends. So who the fuck could possibly want to see him?

Only after having shackles firmly attached to his wrists and ankles, he was led into the surprisingly private- well, as private as you could get in a supermax prison- and was forced into a rusting metal chair in front of a booth comprised of two phones and bullet proof glass. And on the other side, politely escorted by guards to the seat in front of him, was a woman with skin like porcelain and hair blacker than coal; none other than the Princess Hero herself: Miss Snow Fucking White.

Real cute fucking name there, right?

She picked up the phone on her end, staring down Bigby with her calm, cold stare until he did the same.

“Mr. Wolf-“

“Listen, Miss White, I’m not in the fuckin’ mood to be berated by one of the top heroes in New York, so cut the shit and get outta here. Whatever you have to say, I’m not interested.” Bigby nothing but growled into his phone, nearly hanging up then and there and dragging is own ass back to his cell.

Miss White simply let him calm down, cleared her throat and continued.

“Mr. Wolf, I am here to inform you, in association with the Fables Hero Agency, that the state of New York is willing to grant you amnesty for your past crimes:”

That got Bigby’s attention. It wasn’t obvious, but there was a certain way his eyes widened just a touch, his body tensed and leaned just a hair in towards Snow that let her know that he was interested, very interested.

“Why should I trust you?” And. Twice as skeptical.

“Because, put plainly, I am your last chance at you living past 35. My agency has been interested in your case for a long time, and your time is running short. The court has scheduled a date for your execution, the end of this month. In 2 weeks exactly.”

Sounded good enough- except it didn’t. Bigby couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out of him mouth, regretting them as soon as they hit the air. Why would he be actively trying to fuck up what’s already secured for him.

“Why the hell would you be interested in a serial killer with a knack for tearing people limb from limb?”

Snow leaned in towards the glass, hovering just a few inches from the glass.

“Because, you’re not as bad as everyone says you are.”

“Seven years ago, you broke into and killed six men in the basement of the Geppetto Casino, all wealthy and well know celebrities, CEOs and millionaires. These men were preparing to rape, torment, and humiliate the three women they were holding captive, including myself and my sister, before auctioning us off to the next highest biding sick perverted fuck.

But you showed up before any of that could happen. You gave those men what they deserved and you let us go without so much as a scratch before you nearly destroyed the whole building. The world mourned the death of those truly evil men, never acknowledging their heinous crimes, while insisting that you were the true monster. But I know the truth. At least in that moment, you were a hero.”

“...I’m not always like that, you know. I’ve killed innocent people.”

“We have one of the best investigative teams at the agency, I think we both know that isn’t entirely true. At points, yes. You were a villain through and through, but you’re not a bad person, Mr. Wolf.”

“Right... so where the hell do I sign up for this pardon thing?”

Snow produced a large envelope from a bag sitting at her feet and removed a few legal documents from it and handed them to a guard to present to Bigby.

“You should know that this doesn’t come without heavy restrictions. You’ll be under twenty-four observation, as well as required therapy, and extremely strict parol. You will also be required to study and work at the hero agency, and acquire a hero license at some point in the next 2 years. If you breech any terms of the contract, you’ll be arrested and sent back here to await execution again. But, if you manage to survive all of this, you’ll be relatively free within ten years. Reduced to five on good behavior.”

Bigby nodded, soaking up the information Snow was giving him while he looked over the several contracts placed in front of him. It was a lot of legal jargon, but it was easier to understand than he thought it would be. Well that, and he also spent the little free time he did have studying up on legal practices, curiosity pushing him to figure out just how fucked the system was right now.

“One problem, I can’t sign this. They don’t really let me use pens.”

Snow almost looked like she smiled at that. And it seems like she thought ahead, producing a pad of ink from the bag and passed it along to Bigby’s side of the glass.

“Don’t worry, your fingerprint makes a good replacement.”

There were ten pages in total, and each page was stamped with Bigby Wolf’s fingerprint black swirling ink. The pages were handed back to Miss White as she now truly smiled and looked at Bigby.

“I’ll need to send the paperwork in to be finalized, but you should be released within forty-eight hours, we’ll send a car to bring you to the agency do that you can see where you’ll be staying for the next few years. I look forward to working with you, Mr. Wolf.”

She returned her phone to its place and turned to leave, but he reached out and tapped loudly on the glass. Snow looked back and picked up her phone again.

“Bigby.”

“Mr. Wolf I-“

“Just call me Bigby.”

Next>

[warp6]

Rocky Myers, an intellectually disabled black man, is on death row in Alabama, even though the facts of his case suggest that he is innocent.

(Image description: Photo of Rocky Myers. End id. Photo source - Nation article, courtesy Kacey Keeton)

Sign the ACLU petition to Governor Kay Ivey

Rocky Myers, a 53-year-old father and grandfather, remains on death row in Alabama for a crime that evidence suggests he did not commit.

Rocky’s neighbor, Ludie Mae Tucker, was murdered in her home in 1991. Before she died from her injuries, she described her attacker to the police as a black man wearing a light-colored shirt.

Ludie Mae and Rocky knew each other; Ludie Mae’s cousin Mamie Dutton told a lawyer that, earlier that day, Ludie May had seen Rocky across the street and mentioned to Mamie that he sometimes came to her house to borrow ice. But when she spoke with the police, Ludie Mae did not identify her attacker as having been someone she knew. Rocky was described by multiple witnesses as wearing a dark shirt on the night of the murder, not a light one, and no fingerprints or other physical evidence connected him to the scene of the crime.

Another local man, Anthony “Cool Breeze” Ballentine, was originally implicated in the murder after multiple witness statements, until a longtime friend of his implicated Rocky after the police offered a reward for information.

Eleven of the twelve jurors in Rocky’s trial were white, and one of them openly called Rocky the n-word in an interview. While several jurors believed that Rocky was innocent, the majority wanted to convict.

(Image description: Stills of Mae Puckett, a juror on the Rocky Myers case who believed that Rocky was innocent, saying “Going into the deliberation room kind of had a cloud hanging over it already, because you knew you couldn’t – it didn’t matter what you said – you couldn’t get anywhere with certain people. They weren’t going to listen to anything.” End id. Stills taken from ACLU YouTube documentary)

Afraid that a hung jury would result in a retrial that could have fewer sympathetic jurors, the jurors who believed in Rocky’s innocence came up with a compromise to save his life: the jury would convict him and recommend a life sentence.

“The verdict came as a stunning blow to Rocky, who’d been convinced that the trial would end with his acquittal. “I was very surprised,” he said in a phone interview. “I thought I was going to go back to New Jersey.” - Nation article

However, the Alabama judge, who was up for reelection that year, then sentenced him to death instead using a now-illegal option called judicial override.

“In Alabama, state judges are elected by popular vote, and they often emphasize their “tough-on-crime” record while campaigning. According to another Equal Justice Initiative study, the use of judicial overrides to dole out death sentences in Alabama often spiked during election years. (…) In Rocky’s case, the judge who imposed his sentence was facing reelection the next year.

“Although the practice is now no longer permitted in Alabama, the law passed by the Legislature wasn’t retroactive—which means that anyone put on death row by judicial override stayed there despite the Legislature’s tacit acknowledgement that the practice was unjust.” - Nation article

Rocky remains on death row – despite more evidence pointing to his innocence that has come to light since his trial – because the lawyer representing him dropped him as a client without telling him or anyone else, causing him to miss the crucial deadline to file a federal habeas corpus petition after his appeal was denied.

“In 2003, [attorney Earle J. Schwarz] received notice that Rocky’s petition for a post-conviction appeal had been denied by the state. The next step was to prepare to file a federal habeas petition. “Federal habeas corpus review is a critical stage in a death-penalty case, because it allows death row prisoners to bring federal constitutional claims that were heard in state court but were not successful,” said Anna Arceneaux, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project. (…) “And federal court—where judges are appointed and not elected—is a very different atmosphere for a prisoner.”

“But by then, Schwarz had begun working at a new law firm, and inexplicably, he didn’t tell Rocky that his state appeal had been denied. (…) A year later, Rocky received a letter from the state attorney general’s office saying that he’d missed the deadline to file any further habeas corpus petitions and notifying him that Alabama would be moving to set an execution date. Rocky, who could only read at a third-grade level, had to ask another prisoner to read the letter aloud to him.

“In a recent interview, Rocky said when he realized what the letter meant, “It scared the hell out of me. I mean literally, I didn’t know what to do. I was shaking and I couldn’t breathe. A couple of guys calmed me down and told me what to do.” (…) “Schwarz later signed a declaration admitting that he “did not tell Mr. Myers I was no longer representing him,” and that he “did not inform Mr. Myers that I would not pursue relief on his behalf in federal court.” The Board of Professional Responsibility of the Supreme Court of Tennessee issued a public censure to him in 2005, saying that he “willfully neglected his representation of his client.” - Nation article

This means that Rocky’s current legal team has never had a chance to raise the evidence that surfaced in 2004 that local police, who had ties to the first suspect considered in the investigation, had bribed one of the witnesses against Rocky.

“The evidence that police in Decatur tampered with at least one witness was a bombshell. (…) In federal court, Marzell [Ewing]’s declaration along with Puckett’s account of the jury’s compromise verdict might at a minimum have called his death sentence into question, if not the conviction itself. But it still wasn’t enough. A federal judge ruled that Marzell’s new statement didn’t override Rocky’s failure to meet the habeas corpus deadline; even with the new evidence, the case was effectively closed. With the door to judicial review shut, the only remaining relief was—and still is—intervention by Alabama’s Governor Kay Ivey.” - Nation article

As of August 24, 2019, Rocky Myers remains on death row in Alabama.

‘“When I’m praying, I tell the Lord I’m terrified,” Rocky said. “I just don’t show it because it don’t do any good to other people. But inside in my mind and heart and stomach, I’m scared.”

“A former church drummer, Rocky attends services regularly, singing in a choir that meets once a week. His children are now grown, with children of their own, some of whom he met during a visit for the first time last year. Rocky says that being separated from his family has taken a toll: “It’s one of the worst things that I’m going through. I have grandkids that are growing up without me.” (…) “The only chance for Rocky to avoid execution now is a grant of clemency from Governor Kay Ivey. Both he and [attorney Kasey] Keeton know it’s a long shot, and initially he told her not to pursue it. “I didn’t want to be over here begging for my life and stuff like that,” he said. But Keeton persisted. “The fact that we are potentially executing a man who did not have his day in court because an attorney screwed up should give everybody pause,” Keeton said.” - Nation article

Nation article by Ashoka Mukpo

ACLU podcast episode on Rocky Myers (with transcript)

ACLU documentary “Rocky Myers Doesn’t Belong On Death Row” (6 min 18 sec)

“We were trying to get school records for him, and went to the Orange County school system several times. They told me there were no records – literally gave us a document that stated that after a thorough and, you know, absolute search of all records there was nothing for Rocky Myers.

“I happened to get a bit of a relationship with some of the office workers there and they ended up telling me that there was a place where they had just, like, thrown old filing cabinets in a storehouse. And those two women met me on their day off, on the weekend, to go through these filing cabinets and one of those women found Rocky’s school records. And it showed that – back then, the term was mental retardation, so it showed that he was in MR classes.

“She was jumping for joy. They were crying. We were so excited because it’s like, here’s the proof. And there’s a Supreme Court decision that says you can’t execute someone who is intellectually disabled. So we thought we had a win. And I was floored to learn that we weren’t going to win Rocky’s case on that.”

- Sara Romano, investigator on Rocky’s case, on the ACLU podcast episode on Rocky Myers

Sign the ACLU petition to Governor Kay Ivey here.