[Dg] Provocative editorial dealing with issues of law and justice (oh, and a member of the fraternity)

[Stephen Bianchi]

Brothers,
As a member of the law enforcement community, I felt it was necessary to chime in on this topic.  While I don't know ALL the facts of this matter, (nor do I have the desire to know the intimate facts) I'm sure the police didn't snag Craig for simply "stretching his leg."  There has to be some overt act which implied sexual consent.  And it s my belief that if someone is truly innocent, and have the funds and contacts to defend themselves in a court of law (and I am assuming a state senator would have both at his disposal) then why would he plead guilty to ANYTHING?  Besides being gullible to think it would simply "go away" without the public finding out, he lacks the common sense to be discreet about his "activity," choosing a public place.  Sorry, but the days of bright lights and finger torture to elicit a confession are long gone from police work, and I'm sure Mr. Craig was read his Miranda warnings which advise him of his right to remain silent.  Too bad he didn't exercise that instead of his leg.

That's my $0.02 on the matter.

Steve Bianchi
Northeastern University '79
ABT President, Univ of Rhode Island
"A", Metro Boston Alumni Chapter
Vice Regent, Region 7
  
 |  On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:48:31 -0400
 |  Bill Tallman <btall95 at hotmail.com> wrote:
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 |  Brothers,
 |  A friend of mine (who doesn't happen to know that Sen. Craig and I are members of the same fraternity) passed this editorial along to me, and I was struck by it.  Not because of the red herrings of "gay/not-gay-not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-that" and "conservative/liberal bluster" and "Hey, this guy is criticizing one of our own" -- but because in my mind, it echoes the lessons of the Ritual. (That's about as specific as I can be in "mixed" company).
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 |  Look, set all the other garbage aside.  Either the Senator is being truthful about what happened, or he's not.  Right?  
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 |  So, let's assume that he is being truthful with his version of events. How can he fail to speak out to prevent what happened to him (i.e., an innocent man being coerced to confess) from happening to others?
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 |  As Coke wrote, "The Law is the Safest Shield" -- and if Brother Craig had availed himself of its protections -- e.g., refusing to speak to the officer after he was detained, insisting on having his attorney present -- things might have turned out differently.  But unfortunately for him, we live in a time where we believe that only "guilty" people invoke those protections, and so, as he tells it, he confessed to make this embarrassing incident go away quietly, rather than risk his case in the court of public opinon.  In retrospect, a perhaps understandable, but grave, mistake.
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 |  What do you think?
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 |  I think it's a good thing that the fraternity (and this DG at times) makes us stop and really think every once in awhile.  It makes us smarter, stronger, better men.  So, at the risk of igniting a firestorm, I pass it along for your consideration.
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 |  ITB,
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 |  Bill Tallman
 |  Embry-Riddle '95
 |  Delta Chi Ritual Committee
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 |  Posted on Wed, Oct. 10, 2007 
 |  When a person is arrested and coerced to confess
 |  By RICHARD COHEN
 |  I don't know whether Larry Craig, the senator with an apparent case of restless leg syndrome (as seen on TV commercials), is gay or hetero or bi or whatever. I do know, though, that he is incapable of learning. Having been arrested in a Minneapolis airport men's room, having been compelled (or so he says) into a false confession, having been roundly ridiculed and ostracized by many of his colleagues -- et tu, McCain? -- he has neither the gumption nor the integrity nor the wit to question some of his former positions that made him, without a doubt, a law-and-order conservative par excellence. Craig wasn't exposed as gay. He was exposed as uneducable. 
 |  No crime committed 
 |  Along with almost everyone else outside the Republican Senate Caucus -- when the door opens the blast of toxic hypocrisy is enough to deck the average person -- I can see no crime that Craig committed. At worst, he came on a bit to an undercover cop who spends his days protecting the public while seated on a commode and who, dollars to doughnuts, gave Craig a wink or the equivalent thereof. No cop is going to risk hemorrhoids and not come back with some arrests. He does what he needs to do, believing all the time that he is all that stands between Sodom, Gomorrah and the nearby Mall of America. 
 |  But Craig says none of that happened. He didn't do what the cop said he did, and what he did do (that stretch of the leg) was an innocent act. I don't believe him. But I do believe he was set up and then coerced into pleading to a misdemeanor. If that's the case -- if things went as he says -- why doesn't he say he learned something from the incident? Maybe he wants to reconsider his votes in favor of restricting death-penalty appeals because he now knows that the cops can arrest the wrong person and get him to confess. Look, it happened to him. 
 |  It has happened to others as well.
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 |  • Start with the approximately 124 people who have been freed from Death Row since 1973, some on account of DNA testing -- about one-quarter of whom had confessed.
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 |  • Go on to John Mark Karr, who proved with his confession last year to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey that some confessions are nothing more than proof of delusion.
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 |  • Proceed to the famous Central Park jogger case in which five young men confessed to the rape and brutal beating of a young woman. Years later, a totally different person not only confessed to the crime, but supplied DNA matching the sample taken from the victim. If this had been a murder, or a black on white rape in the old days, the accused might already have been executed. In this case, the five young men were released from prison. 
 |  Such cases are not legion, but they happen. Why they happen is often a mystery, but surely if a three-term U.S. senator can be pressured into confessing to a crime that he insists he did not commit, then something similar can happen to a rattled, undereducated kid who thinks the deck is stacked and is promised a reduced sentence. Cops, prosecutors and defense attorneys know that these things happen -- and they know, too, about the occasional rogue prosecutor who, for whatever reason, will send an innocent person to jail. Maybe Craig should read ''Until Proven Innocent,'' an account of the railroading of three Duke University lacrosse players by a despicable prosecutor and, truth be told, an intellectually lazy media as well. If three affluent college kids can be so victimized, think of what could happen -- indeed, happens -- to impoverished people all the time. 
 |  The so-called war on crime is not really a war. In war, the innocent inevitably get killed -- collateral damage, it is obscenely called. But collateral damage in the war on crime, while still inevitable, can at least be rectified -- unless, of course, the ''damaged'' person is executed. 
 |  Craig and others who voted to restrict penalty appeals and for mandatory sentences and for one penalty for crack and another for cocaine ought to ponder what happened to him -- what he said happened and what actually might have happened. Either way, it was an abuse of police power and, possibly, the coercion of a false confession. We await Larry Craig's ringing speech on the matter. I shall write it for him. It's the one in which he says that if a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, then a liberal is a conservative who has been busted in a men's room. 
 |  ©2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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 |  © 2007 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.http://www.miamiherald.com 
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