Whackadamia Quote: University of Kansas Professor Shoots Mouth Off in Class

The blood is on the hands of the National Rifle Association. Next time, let it be your sons and daughters. Shame on you. May God damn you.

Journalism Professor David Guth in a tweet sent in wake of the Navy Yard shooting spree. [Guth's teaching duties were "reassigned," whatever that means. He remains on the payroll. Although the First Amendment gives the professor the right to say things like this, it would not be inappropriate for the university to fire him on the grounds of aggravated looniness. That, of course, won't happen. Colleges and Universities are hotbeds of looniness, lunacy, and loud-mouth idiocy. If they started firing professors like David Guth, half the classes would have to be cancelled.]    

Occidental College President Jonathan Veitch's Culture of Campus Rape

     In February 2012, Occidental College professors Caroline Heldman and Danielle Dirks publicly accused President Jonathan Veitch and his administration of discouraging campus rape victims from reporting the assaults to the police. The professors and students who supported their cause asserted that Veitch and his people not only suppressed crime reporting on the Los Angeles campus, they handed down weak sanctions against the students responsible for rapes and other sexual offenses. The activist professors and those who backed them also accused college administrators of retaliating against professors and students who publicly criticized the school's handling of sex crimes. According to the complainants, this malfeasance had been going on since 2009.

     As part of their effort to reform Occidental's campus sex crime policy, Professors Heldman and Dirks helped concerned students file federal complaints against the school that accused the administration of civil rights violations as well as violations of the Clery Act.

     Because colleges and university administrations across the country have a long history of under-reporting campus crime, congress passed the Clery Act. Under this law, colleges and universities that receive federal money are required to maintain and fully disclose campus and near-campus crime statistics. Institutions that do not comply with the Clery Act can be fined up to $35,000 per violation.

     College and university administrators hate the Clery Act and do whatever they can to get around it. Since crime is bad for business, it's still grossly under-reported on most campuses. Given the high cost of higher education and the fierce competition for students, a campus that is not perceived as an oasis of safety and luxury will lose out in the market place. Colleges and universities no longer sell education, they sell lifestyle.

     Following the filing of the federal complaints, President Veitch agreed to tighten the school's policy regarding the handling of campus rape. But in the summer of 2013, a student who said she had been raped on campus in February of that year, complained on television that the college had not honored its agreement to report these crimes and take aggressive action against perpetrators.

     Infuriated by this public accusation, President Veitch accused the complaining student and Professor Dirks of maliciously embarrassing him and the college on the evening news. The president's thin-skinned response drew public criticism. As a result, he was forced to apologize for taking out his anger on the wrong people. (College and University presidents, the kings and queens of academia, have huge egos and suffer from degrees of self-love that is borderline pathological. They therefore have no tolerance for people who criticize them.)

     On September 19, 2013, the Los Angeles Times reported that Occidental College had reached a confidential monetary settlement with at least ten students who had been raped on campus. In all of these cases, the college had either squelched or downplayed the crimes.

     On the day following the Times article, President Veitch, in an attempt to garner faculty support for his reappointment as president (his 5-year contract was up for renewal), gave a 20-minute, emotional speech at an all-faculty meeting. Now that the scandal was supposedly behind them, the president called for intra-campus civility. (In academia, "civility" is a codeword for speech suppression. There is more free speech in Russian than on an American college campus.)

     In his faculty address, rather than focus on how his administration had let down crime victims and misled the public, President Veitch talked about himself. He said he had been "shell-shocked" by the accusations, and that the "controversy" had taken a toll "on my health and my soul." (Outside of academia, who talks like that?) While the president admitted that mistakes had been made, he assured faculty members that Occidental College now had some of the strongest sexual assault policies in the country. (That might be true, but no thanks to him.)

     Occidental College is currently under federal investigation.

     In my opinion, President Veitch, when his 5-year contract runs out, should be shown the door. And he should be sent packing without one of those typically over-generaous severance packages. No golden parachute for this man. If he is one-tenth as great as I'm sure he thinks he is, getting a new job should be no problem. 

A Stray Bullet in Brooklyn: A Cripts Gang Member Shoots a Toddler to Death

     Anthony Hennis, a member of the notorious Cripts street gang with 25 arrests for drug and gun possession as well as car theft and assault, lived in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. The Brownsville neighborhood, with a high concentration of public housing and violent crime, is one of the most dangerous places in America.

     At seven in the evening of Sunday, September 1, 2013, Anthony had picked up his 16-month-old son Antiq from the boy's mother's apartment. The father told Cherise Miller that he and the toddler would be visiting his grandmother that evening.

     As Anthony Hennis pushed his son's stroller across the street about a block from the mother's place of residence, the 21-year-old father was approached by two men. One of these men pulled out a handgun and fired four shots at Anthony. Three bullets missed their target. The fourth slug struck Antiq in the head. The shooter, as he fled from the scene on foot, yelled, "I shot the motherf--er!" (The assailant apparently didn't realize he'd missed Anthony and hit the boy.)

     An hour after the stray bullet entered the left side of Antiq's head, he died at a nearby hospital. He became the 16th murder victim this year in New York City who was under the age of sixteen.

     It didn't take New York City detectives very long to identify the child killer as a 23-year-old Cripts gangster named De Quan Breland. Breland had been accompanied by 19-year-old De Quan Wright, another member of the gang. Investigators traced the two fugitives to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania where Breland was visiting his girlfriend who happened to be Wright's sister.

     De Quan Breland, on parole from a 2011 armed robbery conviction in upstate New York, had an extensive criminal record that included robbery, assault, drug dealing, and weapons possession. (Why was this man out on parole?)

     On Friday, September 6, police officers arrested Breland and Wright at an apartment in Wilkes-Barre rented by De Quan Wright's cousin. When Breland learned he had shot and killed a boy in a stroller instead of the fellow gangster with whom he had a beef, he reportedly broke down and cried.

     Two days following their arrests in Pennsylvania, Breland and Wright were arraigned in New York City. After pleading not guilty to the homicide charges, the judge denied the prisoners bail.   

Lower Education in America: Teacher Dress Codes

     At one time in America, doctors, lawyers, business people, members of the clergy, and school teachers adhered to the unwritten rule that practitioners in these and other fields should at least look professional. Today, in the general population at large, people are less inclined to dress for anything including restaurants, church, weddings, funerals, or their white-collar jobs. At one time people got dressed up when they traveled by air, or went to the supermarket. We have become, by comparison, a nation of slobs. What is the reason behind this trend, and what does it say generally about our culture? Beats me.

     Many public school students, perhaps inspired by their parents, go to class, the prom, and other school events inappropriately attired. Fine. A lot of kids are idiots who need to be told how to dress for school. Since many parents can't or won't supervise this aspect of their children's lives, school authorities have been forced to impose strict dress codes. The fact we have student dress codes is not a good reflection on modern parenting or society.

     Having solved the problem of how kids dress for school, what about their teachers? Apparently many public school educators don't know how to dress for school either. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the district superintendent recently had to establish a dress code for teachers. These rules will be enforced starting in the fall of 2014.

     Based upon the letter sent to all of the employees in the Little Rock School District, classes are being taught by teachers who are either dressed for Walmart, an afternoon on the couch watching TV, or ladies' night at the local bar.

     Female teachers in Little Rock have to be told to wear panties and bras, and to avoid "see-through or shear clothing." It has also become necessary to remind these women that the showing of skin between pants and skirts and blouses is inappropriate for work. Also verboten are "cut-off jeans with ragged edges, cut-out dresses, and spaghetti-straps." Oh--and no spandex. Good heavens.

     Male teachers in Little Rock had to be told not to wear "t-shirts, patches and other clothing containing slogans for beer, alcohol, drugs, gangs or sex." (I guess they can still wear t-shirts to work as long as they are otherwise appropriate. I can't imagine being taught by a guy in a t-shirt.) All Little Rock educators will also have to cover their tattoos, and refrain from wearing jogging suits or flip-flops.

     If a school teacher in spandex, no underwear, and flip-flops refuses to go home and change into clothing more suitable for a quasi-professinal, this employee could be labelled insubordinate, and as such, risk losing their job. Although everyone knows how difficult it is to fire a public school teacher, the teacher's union in Little Rock is up in arms over the superintendent's dress code. What right does the superintendent have to tell teachers how to dress for school? Outrageous.

     Even at Walmart and McDonalds employees conform to dress codes. The fact that a dress code is even needed for school teachers reflects how far the teaching vocation has sunk. 

Criminal Justice Quote: Why Cops Are So Hard to Fire

      [Police officers accused of serious misconduct including physical abuse are] able to keep their jobs and benefits--sometimes only temporarily, but always longer than they should have--thanks to legislation written and lobbied for by well-funded police unions. That legislation is called the "Law Enforcement Bill of Rights," and its sole purpose is to shield cops from the laws they are paid to enforce....

     The rights created by these bills differ from state to state, but here's how a typical police misconduct investigation works in states that have a law enforcement bill of rights in place:

     A complaint is filed against an officer by a member of the pubic or fellow officer. Police department leadership reviews the complaint and decides whether to investigate. If the department decides to pursue the complaint, it must inform the officer and his union. That's where the special treatment begins, but it doesn't end there.

     Unlike a member of the pubic, the officer gets a "cooling off" period before he has to respond to any questions. Unlike a member of the public, the officer under investigation is privy to the names of his complainants and their testimony against him before he is ever interrogated. Unlike a member of the public, the officer under investigation is to be interrogated "at a reasonable hour," with a union member present. Unlike a member of the pubic, the officer can only be questioned by one person during his interrogation. Unlike a member of the public, the officer can be interrogated for only "reasonable periods," which "shall be timed to allow for such personal necessities and rest periods as are reasonably necessary." Unlike a member of the pubic, the officer under investigation cannot be "threatened with disciplinary action" at any point during his interrogation. If he is threatened with punishment, whatever he says following the threat cannot be used against him.

     What happens after the interrogation again varies from state to state. But under nearly every law enforcement bill of rights, the following additional privileges are granted to officers: Their departments cannot publicly acknowledge that the officer is under investigation; if the officer is cleared of wrongdoing or the charges are dropped, the department may not publicly acknowledge that the investigation ever took place, or reveal the nature of the complaint. The officer cannot be questioned or investigated by "non-goverment agents," which means no civilian review boards. If the officer is suspended as a result of the investigation, he must continue to receive full pay and benefits until his case is resolved. In most states, the charging department must subsidize the accused officer's legal defense....

Mike Riggs, "Why Firing a Bad Cop is Damn Near Impossible," reason.com, October 19, 2002

Letting the Kids Sweat it Out in Chicago

    In August it can get real hot in Chicago. Last week the temperatures in that city rose to 100 degrees. This was bad news for hundreds of elementary students in dozens of suburban schools that do not have central air conditioning.

     Students at five Lake Zurich Unit District 95 schools took turns cooling off in the schools' air conditioned libraries. At Our Lady of the Wayside Catholic School in Arlington Heights, students in the building that didn't have air conditioning were rotated through the cooler buildings. In the schools that don't have any air conditioned buildings or rooms, teachers switched off the lights, organized water breaks, and turned on window fans. Sitting in a darkened classroom with hot air being blown on you must have been nice. Students were told to dress lightly. Classes in other schools were canceled, and in some districts, the kids were sent home early.

     Perhaps the schools that can't afford central air conditioning should stay closed until mid-September. It's not fun having a crayon melt in your hand. 

Criminal Justice Quote: Militaristic Policing

There's now a dominant military culture within modern police agencies. Go to one of many SWAT conferences and SWAT team competitions held throughout the year and you'll find exhibit halls teeming with military weapons, gear, clothing and imagery. The vendors at these events know their market. They use war imagery to ply their goods because that's what makes cops and police departments want to buy them. Many sell the same products to both the military and civilian police agencies. In the 1990s  and 2000s, the company Heckler and Koch marketed its MP 5 semiautomatic weapon with the slogan "From the Gulf War to the Drug War--Battle Proven." Publications like Larry Flynt's SWAT magazine feature ads that emphasize knocking heads and kicking ass, and print articles with headlines like "Go for the Throat" and "Warrior Mindset."

Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop, 2013

Recreational Murder: Killing For Fun

     No society has been free of criminal homicide. People have always murdered for sex, money, and revenge. While deviant and unlawful, this form of homicidal behavior is at least human. However, murdering a total stranger for the thrill and power of taking a life reflects a form of moral depravity that borders on inhuman. In the United States recently, in three separate cases, three white people have been murdered in cold blood by black teenage boys who didn't know their victims and had no reason whatsoever to kill them. If these senseless, random black on white killings mark the beginning of a criminal trend, America is in trouble. No one will be safe, and race relations will deteriorate.

The Murder of Christopher Lane

     On Friday, August 16, 2013, Christopher Lane, an Australian who attended Oklahoma's East Central University, was in the town of Duncan visiting his girlfriend. That afternoon, while jogging along Country Club Road, Lane caught the attention of three black teenagers as he ran passed the place where they were hanging out. One of the boys said, "There's our target."

     The trio piled into a black vehicle with 17-year-old Michael Dewayne Jones behind the wheel. James Francis Edwards, Jr., 15, climbed into the front passenger seat. Chancy Luna, a 16-year-old, sat in the back of the car armed with a .22-caliber handgun. As the vehicle pulled up behind the college baseball player, Luna shot him in the back. As the car sped off, Lane staggered then collapsed on the side of the road.

     Witnesses who heard the gunshot saw a black vehicle drive away as Lane staggered and collapsed. Several people ran to Lane's aid. As a woman called 911, another bystander performed CPR on the fallen student. Christopher Lane died on the side of the road.

     A few hours after the shooting, detectives, while reviewing surveillance camera footage, noticed a black vehicle pull in behind a hotel shortly after the murder. Eleven minutes later the car drove off. Three hours after the murder, a police officer spotted the car in front of a house on Country Club Road. This led to the arrests of Jones, Edwards, and Luna.

     According to reports, Edward and Luna, when questioned by detectives, denied any knowledge of the murder. Michael Jones, the 17-year-old driver, confessed. "We were bored," he said, "and didn't have anything to do so we decided to kill somebody."

     Prosecutor Jason Hicks charged Edwards and Luna with first-degree murder. Michael Jones has been charged as an accessory to the murder. On August 20, a judge denied Edwards and Luna bail. Jones is being held on $1 million bond. At the arraignment, prosecutor Hicks said, "I'm appalled. This is not supposed to happen in this community."

     Earlier in the year, James Edwards tweeted that "90 % of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM." A few days after the George Zimmerman acquittal, the 15-year-old tweeted, "Ayeee I knocced out 5 woods" (a derogatory word for white people).

The Murder of Baby West

     On Thursday morning, March 21, 2013, in the small southeastern Georgia coastal town of Brunswick, Sherry West pushed her 13-month-old son in a stroller not far from her house in the Old Town historic district. Two young black males approached the 41-year-old mother and her child a quarter after nine that morning. The older kid, described by Sherry West as between 13 and 15-years-old, pulled a handgun and demanded money. The robber's companion, as described by the victim, looked to be between 10 and 12-years old. The older boy, who was wearing a red shirt, when told by the mother that she didn't have any money, said, "Well, I'm going to kill your baby."

     The terrified mother tried to use her body to protect her son. "Please don't kill my baby," she pleaded.

     The  young robber, after pushing the mother aside, shot the sleeping child in the face. Before fleeing on foot, the gunman shot Sherry West in the leg. A second bullet grazed her head. As the boys ran off, the wounded mother called 911, and tried in vain to save her baby by administering CPR.

     The next day, police arrested 17-year-old DeMarquis Elkins on charges of aggravated assault, robbery, and murder. The prosecutor charged his 15-year-old friend, Dominique Lang, with felony-murder.

     Following a change of venue, DeMarquis Elkins is currently on trial for murder in Cobb County north of Atlanta. Dominique Lang is the state's star witness.

The Murder of Delbert Belton

     On Wednesday evening, August 21, 2013, 88-year-old World War II veteran Delbert Belton was waiting for a friend in the parking lot outside of the Eagles Lodge in Spokane, Washington. Two black teenagers approached the elderly man and began hitting him in the head with heavy flashlights. The young men, both dressed entirely in black, fled the scene with the old man dying on the lot. Mr. Belton, who had been shot on the beaches of Okinawa in 1945, died later that night. His friends had called him "Shorty."

     The next day police officers arrested a juvenile who turned himself in. On August 26, the police arrested 16-year-old Kenan D. Adams-Kinard. 

Discovery ID's "Murder in Amish County" to be Rebroadcast

     On Sunday, August 18 at 11:00PM, the Discovery ID channel is rebroadcasting, as part of their Deadly Devotions series, Murder in Amish County. The episode features scenes from my book, Crimson Stain. The new, expanded edition of Crimson Stain is available from:

1. CreateSpace, and

2. Amazon.com.

A Kindle edition of the book will also be available soon.

Crimson Stain tells the true story of a tragic and brutal murder in an Old-Order Amish community in rural Pennsylvania.

The new edition of Crimson Stain includes an extensive epilogue featuring developments in this true-life Amish murder drama to the present time. 

Lethal Injections: The History of Death House Pharmacology

     By 2010, 35 states still impose the death penalty in cases involving inmates who have committed the most heinous murders. Not all of these states, however, actually carry out the executions. In the states that do, the mode of execution is lethal injection. The electric chair has been replaced by chemicals. Inmates are no longer electrocuted, they are poisoned to death.

     Death house executioners, in dispatching the condemned, administer a lethal cocktail comprised of three drugs. The first drug to go in--sodium thiopental--renders the recipient unconscious. The second chemical paralyzes the inmate while the third stops his heart. The key ingredient in the cocktail, the vodka in the screwdriver as it were, is the sodium thiopental, a drug used by all of the states where death row prisoners are actually executed.

     Late in 2010, the only company that manufactured sodium thiopental--mainly used as an anesthesia, and to induce medical comas--announced a shortage of the drug. A spokesperson for the Hospira company blamed the scarcity on a problem with the manufacturer's raw material suppliers. Cut off from the drug, executions in California, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Maryland were delayed.

     In December 2010, the executioner in Oklahoma who sent 58-year-old John David Duty to his grave for killing a cellmate, substituted sodium thiopental with a sedative used to treat severe epilepsy. The drug, pentobarbital, sold under the brand name Nembutal, was manufactured by a Danish company called Lundbeck. The pharmaceutical was also used to put down animals.

     In August 2011, an executioner in Virginia used pentobarbital as part of the lethal mix to kill a 30-year-old inmate named Jerry Jackson. Jackson had been convicted in 2002 for breaking into 88-year-old Ruth Phillips' house where he raped and murdered the woman. Phillips woke up to find him burglarizing the place. When she confronted the intruder, he sexually assaulted, then killed her. Following the Jackson execution, the Lundbeck company, objecting to one of its products being used to kill inmates, restricted the drug's distribution in an effort to keep it out of America's execution chambers.

     In 2011, 23 death row prisoners in the United States were either buried or cremated with pentobarbital in their blood. In Ohio that year, for the first time in the nation, an executioner dispatched a prisoner by using pentobarbital only. Death penalty opponents, claiming that the one-drug method caused inmates to die more slowly, objected to the procedure.

     In March 2012, with the cost of pentobarbital going through the roof, the state of Texas spent $1,200 on the deadly cocktail used to kill 52-year-old Keith Thurmond. The condemned man had been convicted in 2002 of murdering his estranged wife and her lover during an argument over child custody.

     Texas prison administrators, in July 2012, adopted Ohio's one-drug policy in an effort to save taxpayers' money. The executioner injected pentobarbital into 33-year-old Yokamon Hearn fourteen years after he had murdered a Dallas stockbroker. A death chamber physician pronounced the prisoner dead 25 minutes following his lethal injection.

     In 2012, the states of Arizona, Washington, Idaho, and Georgia also began executing inmates with pentobarbital only.

     Correction officials in Texas, in July 2013, announced that they were running out of pentobarbital. Because the European Commission, in December 2011, had ordered companies in the European Union to stop exporting the drug to the United States for execution, states had no way of replenishing their supply of the drug. Because several prisoners were scheduled to die during the second half of 2013, this was a problem for the people tasked to kill them.

     Execution states will either have to find another lethal drug that's available on the market, dust off their old electric chairs, or stop executing prisoners. I'm sure they'll find another drug.