I met her in a bus station.
She was tired.
And hiding.
I tried to make small talk.
And succeeded.
Until I asked where she was going.
“Home,” she whispered. READ MORE
“Hedonic Engineer” Brian Jordan has wandered off the straight path and is nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita (midway along the journey of life), when he falls madly in love with the luscious Rachel, a woman who should have a warning sign stamped on her gorgeous behind that reads Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate: Abandon all hope ye who enter here! Upon her tail hangs the tale of MacSheoinin’s wildly-word-rich, rollicking satire. READ MORE
As soon as I read Susan Faludi’s essay American Electra: Feminism’s Ritual Matricide (Harpers Oct 2010) I felt a little uncomfortable bunching in my undergarments. Faludi tells a lamentable tale concerning the history of the feminist movement where every succeeding generation denounces those that went before. Her premise is that there have been three significant “waves” of feminist activity and thought: the First Wave who were truly hardcore and suffered incarceration, force-feeding and widespread derision to win the vote for women: the Second Wave who emerged in the ‘60s and ‘70s and worked to establish sexual equality, sexual liberation and rights for women and children: finally the Third Wave who have championed gender issues and delved into race, gender and pop culture studies and scandalized their predessessors by proclaiming Lady Gaga as the future of feminism. READ MORE
Since the night the Tunisian people forced their dictator to flee the North African country, I’ve been hearing people anticipating that the same fate would fall on the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. In fact, the similarities abound between the situation in Tunisia and in Egypt: Tunisia’s Zain Bin Ali ruled for 23 years, Mubarak has been in power for 29, both of them amassed enormous fortunes, both have created “royal families” that rule so-called republics, both of them have been indifferent to the high level of unemployment (especially among highly qualified people and university graduates), and, finally, both had governments which for years have been described as “governments of businessmen.”
It is also worth mentioning that Egypt and Tunisia are countries that have well developed civil societies that are politically mature. This is important because these ingredients could mean the difference between the establishment of more democratic societies and utter chaos. READ MORE
If Hosni Mubarak vacates his Presidential seat to make way for free elections in Egypt, what would a new government look like?
At the moment the figures most likely to capture a leadership position in such a scenario are Omar Suleiman and Mohamed El Baradei. Suleiman is an old hat, Mubarak just made him Vice-President (a post that did not previously exist) in the hope to appease the massive protesting crowds. People like him, he has the reputation of a moral man, and before these demonstrations he was considered a possibility for succession, he or the son Gamal Mubarak. But as recently as this was, it was another time. In the past two weeks the social and political climate in Egypt has changed dramatically. READ MORE
Sin’s Fatal Taint: the Felony Murder Rule and its Discontents
by Okla Elliott
We’ve all heard of outdated laws that remain on the books from earlier times — such as laws about how many pigs are allowed inside a house or those defining a pickle by means of a bounce test — many of which are good for a few laughs, given their perfect absurdity. There are untold numbers of such laws, and most of them are harmless enough, worthy of little more than a shrug of amazement at what people will make law. Unfortunately, not all outdated laws are so harmless. The felony murder rule dates back to sixteenth century Common Law in England, was adopted by America in the nineteenth century, and is all but entirely unknown, except of course to those who have been affected by it directly. The felony murder rule has at its heart a noble goal: to punish a murderer more severely if the murder is committed during a burglary, kidnapping, rape, or other such felonious offense. Why then did England repeal the rule entirely in 1957? Why would anyone want to see such a noble-spirited rule repealed? The reasons are numerous, but before we discuss what’s wrong with the rule, we should properly define it.
The felony murder rule, as defined by The Social Law Library of Massachusetts, states that “the defendant is guilty of first degree murder if the Commonwealth has proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the deceased was unlawfully killed during the defendant’s commission or attempted commission of a felony.” Sounds okay so far. Now let’s take a look at the definition of first-degree murder: “Murder committed with deliberate premeditation and malice is murder in the first degree.” First-degree murder is the most heinous of crimes, requiring the most vicious mens rea (the “mental state” of the perpetrator at the time of the crime, used as the means to determine the degree of legal culpability). It requires a truly cruel person to extensively plan and execute the malicious demise of another. Aside from child molestation or brutal rape, most of us would agree that there is no worse crime imaginable, and we would agree also that the worst punishment should be reserved for the perpetrators of such crimes. It is for this reason that first-degree murder has such a specific and unambiguous definition. And it is for this reason, coupled with the ambiguities inherent in the felony murder rule, that the rule must be repealed or, minimally, amended to allow for consideration of mens rea.
The most striking illustration of how these ambiguities can lead to a first degree murder charge which jars rational sensibilities and flies in the face of common sense is the 1997 case of Lisl Auman in Colorado. Auman and three friends drove from Denver to Buffalo Creek to retrieve some of her belongings from a lodge she had shared with an ex-boyfriend. They took her things, and the friends, in what can only be described as childishness, stole some of her ex’s belongings. So, now we have the requisite felony: burglary. Auman and friends drove back to Denver in separate cars, Auman ending up with Matthaeus Jaehnig, whom she had met that day for the first time. Before they reached Denver several cops, alerted of the break-in, tried to pull them over. Auman urged Jaehnig to pull over, but he refused. A chase ensued. Jaehnig, at one point in the chase, produced a gun and fired at the police. When Jaehnig stopped the car in front of Auman’s new apartment in Denver, Auman ran to the police and gave herself up, wanting nothing to do with Jaehnig, and attempted to warn them of what sort of gun he had. Jaehnig ran and, before the events were over, had killed a cop and then himself. Now we have a death connected with the commission of a felony.
Auman was safely handcuffed in the back of a police car when Jaehnig shot and killed a police officer. The felony occurred miles away in a different city. She was later convicted of first-degree murder by strength of the felony murder rule. According to my count, she was guilty of, at most, breaking-and-entering and burglary, crimes I feel she should pay for (though perhaps not too harshly considering how romantic break-ups and domestic squabbles tend to go). Yet she was found guilty of one of the worst, if not the worst, crime imaginable and was sentenced to life in prison as though she had committed murder “with deliberate premeditation and malice,” when in fact she committed no murder at all. (Fortunately, in 2005, her sentence was overturned after much lobbying by the likes of Johnny Depp and Hunter S Thompson, but not every victim of this outdated law is so lucky.)
Judge Rudolph Gerber suggests, in his book Cruel and Usual: Our Criminal Injustice System, that the origins of the felony murder rule may date back to medieval times when “sinful tainting” was still a popular notion. A person was tainted with the crime, even if she didn’t commit the crime herself. This was doubly true of Auman’s case, since Jaehnig was vaguely connected with a neo-Nazi group and the cop he shot was black. Jaehnig—not Auman—was vaguely connected with a neo-Nazi group, and Jaehnig—not Auman—shot a police officer, yet during her trial Auman was accused of being a white supremacist and was, as I’ve stated, convicted of first degree murder. In effect, her few hours of acquaintanceship with Jaehnig so tainted her that she must now serve life in prison without parole in order to atone. (The suggestion of racism was not ultimately necessary to convict her of first-degree murder. I mention it here only to illustrate the psychology of “sinful tainting” still in our legal practices.)
There are of course less morally clear cases, such as Janet Danahey’s in Greensboro, NC. Danahey, as a valentine prank on an ex-boyfriend, set fire to a futon on the balcony of his apartment. The fire grew beyond her expectations and set the entire building ablaze. In her panic she fled to her parents’ house in the nearby city of Weddington without calling the fire department. Four people died, several others were injured when they leapt from second- and third-story windows, and the property damages for both the building owner and tenants were tremendous. Here we have an emotionally electrified case in which four innocents, all young adults striving to achieve careers or college degrees, died in a painful and horribly frightening way. Some (though not all) of their family members were, rightly, so angered that they demanded the harshest punishment possible against Danahey, who had done them irreparable emotional and psychological damage. The community was—again, rightly—outraged.
In court, District Attorney Stuart Albright chose to use the felony murder rule, and Danahey was charged and convicted with four counts of first degree murder and one count of arson (the felony necessary to invoke the powers of the felony murder rule); all of which earning her life in prison with no chance of parole. Without the felony murder rule, Danahey could have been convicted of four counts of involuntary manslaughter and one count of arson which could have earned her anywhere between 30-120 years in prison with a chance for parole after 10-30 years, depending on the judge. It is therefore possible that Danahey would have remained imprisoned until her death.
“But what if she didn’t?” an angered voice from the back of the room yells. “She deserves the worst she can get for what she did.” And though I am sympathetic to this call of outrage, it strikes me that she doesn’t deserve the worst punishment possible. As mentioned earlier, the worst punishment should be reserved for the worst crime. Imagine now the case of a person who set the same fire in the same apartment building “with malice and deliberate premeditation” to kill those four people and harm the others, as opposed to a prank gone horribly awry. We would all make a moral distinction between the person who maliciously planned to kill people and the person who—stupidly and childishly, though not cruelly and bloodthirstily—played a prank that ended up killing people. The mens rea of these two persons would be radically different. The felony murder rule, however, with its brutal ambiguity, does not distinguish between these two cases. Both perpetrators would be convicted of four counts of first-degree murder and one count of arson. It doesn’t require a lawyer or professor of ethics to see that there is a clear moral difference, yet the only option in most states, when the felony murder rule is invoked, is a charge of first-degree murder.
Currently, almost every state has the felony murder rule still in place. Twelve of the thirty-eight states that have capital punishment allow for no charge other than first degree murder when the rule is invoked, and even in states such as Arizona, where a defendant can no longer be sentenced to death by strength of the rule, life sentences are the most common punishment doled out in felony murder cases.
I will now turn around an earlier question: Why wouldn’t anyone want the felony murder rule repealed? There are two groups of people who generally object to repealing the rule, DAs and the families of victims. The emotional anguish and urge for revenge on the latter’s part is understandable (though it’s that natural tendency to over-punish personal offenses that caused Hobbes, and the whole of the civilized world, to put faith in an objective, third-party judicial system). Many DAs, however, enjoy the existence of the felony murder rule, because it makes their jobs easier. In order to win a first-degree murder conviction (which, coincidentally, looks very good for their track records), they only have to prove intention to commit the felony and that a death occurred somehow connected—however loosely—with said felony, and the defendant is automatically found guilty of first-degree murder. I would like to think that the DAs who fight to keep the felony murder rule on the books are doing so out of a misguided sense of justice, though I have my doubts.
Our laws should adhere to a rational sense of moral rightness, whereby the degree of the crime and the mens rea of the perpetrator determine the degree of the punishment. The cases cited in this essay illustrate how the felony murder rule can lead to a conviction of first-degree murder when the defendant killed no one, and how it fails to make clear and obvious moral distinctions. The felony murder rule is therefore neither rational nor morally sound, and should for these reasons be repealed unequivocally. Our justice system should busy itself with discovering the guilt or innocence of a defendant and then—if she’s found guilty—punishing her for the crimes she’s committed, not the crimes of others; and her sentencing should be equal to her crime. If a DA wants to win a first-degree murder conviction, then she should be required to prove that the death was caused with “deliberate premeditation and malice,” which is the defining quality of first-degree murder. The felony murder rule is a throwback to an outdated and overly ambiguous law that has been repealed in its native country. If our justice system is meant to serve justice—as its name implies—it must rid itself of this fatally antiquated legacy.
Editor’s Note: Today’s poem exemplifies the efficient beauty of simplicity. Using few words in four brief stanzas, Ms. Roberts clearly conveys her message as effectively as she might have in a more verbose poem, perhaps more so. Tackling a concept as large as the heavy weight of burden one carries in life, this poem masterfully takes metaphor by the reigns, leaving the reader thinking of much more than math, “the weight bending your frame.”
Agrarian Socialism In America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920. By Jim Bissett (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.)
Most Americans are unaware of the fact that the rural state of Oklahoma supported the strongest socialist movement that any American State ever produced. This apparently anomalous development has been chronicled by a number of scholars over the past 40 years. The first modern study was Howard L. Meredith’s 1969 Ph.D. dissertation “A History of the Socialist Party in Oklahoma, ” which was soon followed by Garin Burbank’s When Farmers Voted Red and James R. Green’s Grassroots Socialism in 1976 and 1978 respectively.(1) While all three are excellent studies, a more recent book, Jim Bissett’s Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920 (1999), covers the same ground most successfully to date through clear arguments and an energetic and sympathetic point of view. READ MORE
John at the piano, a few years before beginning lessons.
Music Lessons
By John Unger Zussman
Last month, I wrote about a misguided art lesson that undermined my creativity as a child. Here I recall my early music lessons—with a decidedly different result.
“Sing!” commanded my piano teacher, Mrs. Maas, at my very first lesson. Even at seven, I understood that she did not want me to vocalize along with those first simple explorations of the notes around middle C. No, she meant make the piano sing. But what did that mean? And how to do it? I had no idea, and apparently it was too obvious to ask.
Whatever she had in mind, I somehow had a talent for it. I practiced diligently and progressed quickly, encouraged by the lavish praise of my parents and teachers. At my first-year recital, Mrs. Maas practically had to drag me off the stage as I played, from memory, every piece in the Bernice Frost first-year method book READ MORE
While I had already begun writing a piece on the looming 2011 food crisis, in lieu of my birthday, I decided to shelve it for this month. Instead, I felt the words of Wendell Berry offered more on the subject of food, hope and the future than I could possibly say. I know heroes are supposed to have feet of clay, but few people inspire me more than this man. Enjoy. …READ MORE
As It Ought To Be 