The Massachusetts Criminal Justice System seems to be especially unclear on the idea that, if a career felon is in jail on “three concurrent life sentences,” you don’t let him out on parole. Their lack of clarity on that issue cost 35-year police veteran John “Jack” Maguire his life.
(Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
Following up on the previous post, Jules Crittenden suggests that it wasn’t Amy Bishop’s mother’s political connections that got her off, but merely the fact she lived in Massachusetts:
That kind of thing actually happens a lot around here. Killers and rapsists being let off, and going to to kill or rape again. It’s our special gift to the nation.
Updated: Of course, it could be both.
I’m not big on linking to The New York Times, and this is the sort of story that Dwight over at Whipped Cream Difficulties covers more than I, but this article reveals some pretty shocking details about the drug war going on in Juarez. Like the fact that Juarez had 250 homicides. Last month.
By contrast, in 2008 (the most recent year I was able to find annual figures for), El Paso proper had 17 murders (plus another two for “other reporting areas,” which I take to mean unincorporated parts of the county). While it’s possible that the drug war across the border has increased that some, it’s fairly shocking to find out that more people are killed in Jaurez in a week than are killed in El Paso in a year. (Indeed going through each of the individual zip codes here, it appears that there have been no homicides so far in El Paso this year.)
Why the vast difference? A few thoughts:
(Note that Reason (for which I’ve penned the occasional piece) covered this same paradox early last year, though I wasn’t aware of their article when I started working on this blog post. I do not agree with their conjecture that illegal immigration actually reduces crime, but pointing out problems with their reasoning would take a longer (and only tangentially related) blog post than I’m interested in penning to reply to a year-old piece.)
Further reading: Articles from The El Paso Times on the situation in Juarez.
So, let’s see if we can detect a pattern in the following events:
Following Scott Brown’s campaign victory, Delahunt was already considered vulnerable, but the timing on this seems just a little too convenient, don’t you think?
Then there’s this paragraph from that LA Times story about Bishop and her husband: “They were outspoken Northeastern liberals whose political yard signs stood out a little on their suburban lot.” If we were just discussing the Alabama shooting itself, i would call it dirty pool to bring that information up; I don’t think being a liberal makes you any more or less likely to become a spree killer; some people just snap, and politics has nothing to do with it. But I can’t help wondering whether politics may have played a role in her not being charged in 1986. Was she not charged because she, or more likely her relatives or friends, were somehow politically connected to Delahunt? Why is the case file missing, and who took it?
Why did William Delahunt let Amy Bishop get away with murder?
Updated: Belmont Club has more on the story, including links to the DA report in the comments sections, and critiques of same.