“€œThey Was Scaring Me”€

If there is any justice in the world, Ricky Javon Gray has only six weeks left to live. On New Year's Day 2006, Gray and an accomplice tortured and murdered an entire family in ...

Washington D.C.

Pols on Patrol

2015 may be the last year when Americans think of Washington, D.C., as a safe city. Last June, a video of a brutal beating between two black men on the city's Metro line went ...

Oscar Pistorius

The Person Behind the Door

The verdicts in the case of Oscar Pistorius, and the reasoning behind them, seem to me curious. Either Pistorius was guilty of murdering his girlfriend or he was guilty of ...

Interview With a Drug Casualty

Of the 2.2 million Americans in prison right now, about half are there for drug-related offenses. It's a tricky number to determine because felonies such as murder, assault, ...

How to Hire Better Cops

With the Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O"€™Malley being shouted down at a progressive convention for not abasing themselves fully enough to a ...

Pistols at Dawn?

There is an English writer who is going around telling all and sundry that I made a pass at his wife. Now, Englishmen are known not to get too excited about such matters, but in ...

White Terrorists and Niggardly Limes

On June 24, NBC News prominently featured a story on its website headlined "€œWhite Americans Are Biggest Terror Threat in U.S.: Study."€ Clicking the link took readers to a ...

A Fireable Thought

When a Nobel Prize winner can be hounded from his university chair by the harridans of the Internet (or any other self-constituted group of fanatics), the outlook for freedom of ...

What if Those Bikers had Been, Like, Another Color?

Only in America can the media take a deadly shootout among white and Hispanic bikers and somehow make it all about black people. And only in America can these same media ...

Life Through Fisheyes

A single death, said Stalin, is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic. We know, alas, precisely what he meant by this cynical remark: it is beyond our human capacity to ...

Blood in Oklahoma

An almost botched execution in Oklahoma has revived a debate of sorts about capital punishment in America. After the failed injection of a lethal "€œcocktail,"€ a mix of ...

Robert H. Richards IV

Revenge of the Turds

On Monday, we learned of a DuPont heir who has been given nothing but parole for raping his daughter, because the judge felt he wouldn"€™t "€œfare well"€ in prison. It's ...

The Shame Sham

Like all societies before it, our society considers nothing more shameful than to be shameless. Thus, the Internet"€”which binds our society together like cheese binds a ...

Sour Thoughts From the Police Beat

Things don"€™t work like they spoza. A cause of this dysfunction is the notion that criminals can "€œpay their debt to society"€ and then be all better, as if crimes were ...

Unjust Crimes and Unjust Executions

Apart from pulp novels, airport bookshops often have an eccentric selection of books. A few years ago, for example, in the bookshop in the airport nearest my English home, I found ...

Woody Allen

Sacrificing Virgins to the Entertainment Gods

Raping a child can land you in prison for life"€”unless you"€™ve made some cool movies, in which case the penalty is a lifetime achievement award. In France, where they ...


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