Thursday, October 18, 2007

October 18

Baltimore soldier Jerrell Hill, charged with shooting five people in a gang-related dispute last month, could be freed from an Oklahoma jail today, as Baltimore city prosecutors intend drop the case.

e first Kopera-related appeal (or the first one we know about) has come up and was denied.

In the county, sentencing was postponed for John A. Miller IV, convicted of killing 17-year-old Shen Poehlman. Miller withdrew his guilty plea, "effectively firing the public defenders who have represented him."

"For the second time in six days, a convicted sex offender was found to be accidentally left off the state's public registry Web site after his release from jail." But the Capitol won't say who he is "to protect the victims." Meanwhile Baltimore police say "Anne Arundel County is on the hook" for omitting rapist Eugene Waller, AAC says they notified the city that he lived here, but the city was unable to locate him.

Hey "Wire" fans, a nice long article on David Simon in this week's New Yorker. Spoilers: The fifth season is definitely the last, and "will be about 'perception versus reality'—in particular, what kind of reality newspapers can capture and what they can’t."
(More interesting David Simon-related reading: "Who Gets to Tell a Black Story?" the tale of Simon and Charles Dutton's experience on The Corner, from the NYT's "Race in America" series)

5 comments:

Sean said...

That Simon-Dutton article was pretty interesting. I read The Corner but never saw the miniseries (didn't have HBO yet).

burgersub said...

attn: ppatin

Supreme Court Halts Va. Inmate's Execution
Ruling Could Lead To National Hiatus In Lethal Injections

ppatin said...

I saw, I saw. A Nevada execution was also halted recently for the same reason, and that was a case where the inmate refused to appeal his sentence. That shows how out of control the death penalty appeals process is, even if the prisoner wants to be put to death that STILL doesn't stop the endless appeals.

BTW, VA still has a functional electric chair. I believe it was used about a year ago...

burgersub said...

if lethal injection is considered too painful i don't know how the hell they would be able to give anybody the chair.

ppatin said...

Well actually the electric chair should cause instant unconsciousness IF it works properly and the people who set it up aren't idiots. The problem is that the machinery is often at least several decades old, and the execution team is made up of borderline retards. Plus it's kind of messy, and you can't have a mess when you're killing someone, now can you?