Justice Denied

Fox News reporter Jason Overstreet said it well. “Michael Blair is guilty, but how guilty and of what?” Blair has been on death row twelve years now for the abduction and murder of Ashley Estell. It is becoming increasingly apparent he may not be guilty of that. It’s been more than four years since DNA testing eliminated what little scientific evidence ever tied him to the crime. More DNA testing now points to new as yet unidentified suspects. Prosecutors cling stubbornly to a dwindling pool of evidence, insisting there is more than enough there to justify a conviction despite the lack of forensic connections. Defense attorneys want a new trial. Judge Nathan White defends interminable delays saying “Michael Blair isn’t going anywhere.” White and Overstreet are both right of course. Blair has confessed to a series of sex crimes involving children, though not this particular crime, and is serving three consecutive life terms. He will never leave prison.

Judge White misses the point on at least two counts. One: life in prison is one thing, living under a death sentence is quite another. Death row is a most unpleasant place to be. It costs taxpayers quite a lot to keep someone on it and if Blair is not guilty of a capital crime he shouldn’t be there. Two: somebody killed that little girl. If it wasn’t Blair then whoever it was would appear to have been free all these years, perhaps to do it again, maybe even multiple times. White is well aware of that. More, he presided over the original trial. If a serious miscarriage of justice happened on his watch all those years ago I should think he of all people would want to see things put right. He complains with some justification that he isn’t the only one dragging his feet. Defense and prosecution are both equally to blame for different reasons but the judge would never have tolerated such blatant procrastination a dozen years ago and he shouldn’t have tolerated it for the past four.

I can understand Judge White at some level. Nobody likes to be proved wrong, especially not when someone else’s life is at stake. I can understand defense lawyers too. Their client is and will remain alive as long as his appeals are pending. If he was wrongly convicted on flimsy evidence once there is no guarantee he won’t be wrongly convicted again. It is not unreasonable to expect they might play for time, hoping that eventually some incontrovertible proof might emerge exonerating Blair once and for all. I can even understand prosecutors, though they are left appearing to be less than open to the truth. They face challenges on old cases all the time, most of them unwarranted. It is their job to resist. Else no verdict would ever be final.

There is an undercurrent here though that I find disturbing. It’s a sense that because Blair is guilty of one crime, several crimes in fact, crimes most of us find particularly abhorrent, it is then ok that he be punished for one he may not have committed. Since he is destined to rot in jail in any case, what difference does it make if he rots for an extra crime? It makes a difference because it is wrong. Even our criminals are entitled to justice. It is unjust to be punished for someone else’s wrongdoing. It is not enough that one is guilty. One must be guilty as charged. Michael Blair’s jury reached a verdict based at least in part on misinformation. The conviction should be overturned, now.

Why Catholic?

Good question. Why am I Catholic? I think the answer is as much a coming of age story as it is one of faith. If you are reading this and aren’t Catholic, don’t worry. I don’t intend to proselytize. The issue isn’t why you should be Catholic. It’s why am I. I wasn’t born into a Catholic family. I married into one. It wasn’t exactly a happy union with my in-laws either. They weren’t at all pleased with their daughter dating a Protestant let alone marrying one but I wanted her and wouldn’t have cared if she had been a Martian. In the end her parents relented and we were married in her parish church, though they kept us outside the rail and wouldn’t celebrate Mass. That was the rule in those days.

Another one was that I had to agree that any children would be brought up Catholic. I attended a required series of classes (instructions) so I would know what that meant. I didn’t tell anybody at the time, not even Lynne, but that’s when I first started to think about converting. It wasn’t just her, though I confess the sight of her wearing a mantilla in church was a factor, but that’s another story. Part of it was the priest giving instructions. We met once a week for several months in a small group, six Protestant guys about to marry Catholic girls. The priest had done this before and knew a lot more about our faiths than we knew about his so he was able to point out similarities as well as differences.

I was surprised at some of the things I learned. Many of the essentials were the same. Some differences were more style and emphasis than substance but others went much further, Papal Authority and the Latin Mass not the least of them. We all professed the same creeds, both the Apostle’s Creed and the longer Nicene version. The Lord’s Prayer omitted the Protestant conclusion (we added it after Vatican II) and the Old Testament has a couple of extra books. I think the biggest difference is in the sacraments. Catholics have more of them than I was accustomed to and place a lot more emphasis on them, especially the Eucharist. It is the focus of every Mass. We use real wine and take it from a common cup. It doesn’t just represent the body and blood of Christ; it is the body and blood of Christ.

None of the questions I had as a Methodist got cleared up. I just added a few more. The catechism explains the central mysteries of the faith in exquisite detail but they only get deeper. The words catechists like to use don’t help. Often they are simply obscure. It isn’t unusual for a common word to be used an odd context. Sometimes Webster’s Unabridged offers no definition that fits. I find myself feeling like a perplexed Alice from Through the Looking Glass on hearing Lewis Carroll’s immortal line. “When I choose a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

So why am I Catholic? Why do I insist on believing bread and wine have been transformed when any fool can see nothing has changed? Maybe it’s because I need to. I want to believe life has meaning beyond what my five senses can explain; that some good will come of all this. The rituals I once found odd and awkward I now find comforting. I’m Catholic because we have the Mass.

Beyond the Pale

In Czarist Russia the pale was the region where Jews were legally allowed to live. If a hapless Jew were found outside it he was in serious trouble, subject to whatever abuse his discoverer might decide to inflict. Not that life inside the pale was all that secure. The pograms that drove Tevye and his family from their home in Fiddler on the Roof were common occurrences throughout Eastern Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nor were Jews the only people who often found themselves with few legal rights. Peter I (the Great, a title he effectively bestowed on himself) changed the status of Russian serfs so that they were tied not to the land but to the landlord. In effect he made them slaves who could be and often were bought and sold, though technically only as family units. In turn the lords were taxed on the number of “souls” they possessed. Tax cheaters were placed outside the law and like the Jew outside the pale could be robbed or killed with impunity.

American law has progressed so that even those accused of the most serious crimes are afforded legal protections including the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, at least in theory. There seems to be a growing class of offenses where the punishment is more in the spirit of Peter the Great, in particular sex offenses. The modern Jew, I mean sex offender, is restricted to where he can live too. Unlike the Jew of old he is not required to wear identifying clothing but is required to register, today’s equivalent of the scarlet letter. It is often not the pervert of our imagination who is caught in that web but the unfortunate teenager who got his under age girlfriend pregnant and then finds himself branded for life (along with the girlfriend and child if they marry.)

Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst cruised to reelection on a platform calling for harsher penalties for child molesters, a minimum 25 year sentence for a first offence and the death penalty for repeaters, defining a child as anyone under age 14. He doesn’t say what he would do when the molester is also under age, nor does he allow for degrees of abuse, at least not in his stump speech. Presumably fondling or inappropriate touching would qualify since I should think anything beyond that would already constitute rape under existing laws. He also doesn’t say what should happen in a case involving an under cover police agent where the culprit merely thought his intended victim was a child, or to the congressman whose offense is restricted to sending lascivious instant messages to the objects of his perverted desires.

Could we all just take a deep breath? We are disturbingly close to returning to a society where guilt does not even have to be proved, particularly in sex crimes involving children. Sometimes there doesn’t have to be a crime. We have police departments cooperating with TV scandal programs to film and expose men soliciting phony prostitutes, or being lured into set up liaisons with supposed adolescents. We have prosecutors coaxing day care children into concocting the most bizarre stories, convincing shocked jurors that the stories are true, and then sending innocent men and women to prison. Reputations, careers, and even lives (sometimes literally) are being destroyed on the flimsiest evidence, maybe even without trial.

There are reasons for our constitutional rights. Someday we might find ourselves on the wrong side of an unfair accusation. I think it’s time we calmed down and remembered that.

Party Politics

I’m about to do something I have never done before, cast a straight democratic ballot. In 1964 I was a Goldwater republican. It was my first vote. Down through the years I have consistently voted republican, usually on a straight ticket, sometimes while holding my nose. My theory has been that on balance the party offered the best choice on issues important to me. This year I’m going to change my vote, for the same reason, and still holding my nose.

First of all, party matters. Not so much on the local level maybe but at gubernatorial and presidential levels it is very important and at legislative levels it is crucial. Easily the most significant vote an elected representative casts in either house of congress or state legislature is in the party caucus. It determines not just party leadership but control. A vote for a democrat or republican is a vote for or against every committee chairman, speaker, and majority leader. These are the people who set the agenda, determine what issues are brought up and go forward, even in large degree whose voice is heard and for how long. An individual may agree or not on particular items but it is often the give and take of parliamentary procedure that matters most. The personal views of Governors and Presidents carry more weight but they too have their constituencies to consider.

It is in the nature of politics that both parties carry a lot of baggage. They often give outsized influence to the most extreme elements from either side. That is often distasteful but in our system one must make choices, even if the choice is to not vote. I try to take a reasoned look at what I think is most important. The specifics change but the same things come up year after year. This time I am particularly concerned about regional issues, especially electrical power generation, clean air, adequate water supplies, and transportation. All of these have been around long enough for incumbents to bear some responsibility, and for challengers to offer alternative approaches. My five year old grandson has autism and so I have a personal interest in government sponsored research into its cause and potential remedies. That a republican congressional committee head has been blocking some of that research doesn’t help the party’s cause in retaining my good graces. Our air is so brown I can often see it but the Governor is “fast tracking” dirty coal power plants without adequately considering alternatives. My city came dangerously close to serious water rationing last summer and there isn’t a politician in sight to address it. Traffic congestion in North Texas has been an approaching train wreck for at least thirty years. Local authorities are left to immobilize themselves in provincial squabbles over toll road and mass transit priorities. It doesn’t get any better at the state or national level. The politicians who I expect to represent my interests have been too often silent, or on the wrong side altogether.

I live in a safe republican congressional district and for some years now every office that counts from city all the way up through the state to the national government has been controlled by the same party. I don’t think that’s a healthy thing, so add “throw the rascals out” to my list of arguments. I grant that particularly at the national level neither party’s leadership is inspiring. In the past I have rejected the “it’s time for a change” argument as too simplistic. This year I’ve changed my mind. Just call me an old curmudgeon.