“As we spend time, as we did in the Dover case, debating what to put in the science curriculum in our schools,” said Pennsylvania U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III (who after striking down intelligent design in public schools received not just criticism but death threats) “we had better start paying attention to the curriculum of civics and government, as well as history.”
Today, it seems, is Ask a Stupid Question Day. So here’s your question: What the bloody fuck just happened to this country?
Bonus question: Just how big are the balls of Republicans that on this day of all days, the website of their party’s United States Senate dares to tout the words “Celebrating the Constitution”?
The temperature at which nads burn! Which isn’t true, although I rather suspect that they’d burn at a much lower temperature than that, so it’s technically true.
But the point is that I’d forgotten that it’s Banned Books Week. Yes, I work at a bookstore and forgot that it’s banned books week. Chalk that up to the fact that we’re more of an “open warehouse” than a “retail location”.
Anyway, Metroblogging Portland didn’t forget, and points out that Google put up a Celebrate Your Freedom to Read page within their book search service.
So after performing a bunch of server upgrades, finally getting MySQL to run (it never did on the server’s previous pre-crash incarnation), and mucking about to make sure that PHP was speaking to it properly, I spent much of last night and some time this morning trying to get WordPress installed.
Unfortunately, I only ended up encountering what (judging by the support forums) appears to be an infamous “blank install page” problem, and none of the support threads seem to get me anywhere.
The stupid part is this was all because I wanted to use the Hemingway theme, which doesn’t appear to have been ported to Movable Type.
Well, except that this MT blog is using it. But the owner’s email address bounces back as undeliverable, and a comment to his blog doesn’t appear to have drawn any attention, nor been posted. So I have no idea if he found an MT port of Hemingway or rolled his own.
Keep an eye on Talking Points Memo today. It turns out that there’s another National Intelligence Estimate (“it’s not been given the ‘NIE’ label because that would trigger reporting requirements to congress that the adminsitration has wanted to avoid”), in addition to the one that says invading Iraq has made things less secure and less safe, this one describing as “bleak” the situation in Iraq.
Before I catch up a bit, Jack of course has been tracking the Chasse death more frequently, most recently here and here. Here, I want to come back again to the determination as to the manner of death.
There’s a Trib item from earlier today with further comments from the medical examiner.
Oregon State Medical Examiner Karin Gunson released her findings in the case late Friday, finding that his death was “accidental.”
Under Oregon law, the manner of death selected by the M.E.’s office may include “natural, accidental, suicidal, homicidal, legal intervention or undetermined.” The law defines “legal intervention” as the “legal use of force” by law enforcement officers, “resulting in death.”
Steenson said the family questions how the death could be considered “accidental.” Gunson, however, told the Tribune that the death clearly was not intentional. The finding, she added, “is for the death certificate, and it’s a medical issue only — it has nothing to do with what happens in court. For instance, when someone is dead from a drunk driver, we’ll call that an accident, and that person gets manslaughter.”
I covered the distinction between terms used when determining manner of death and those used in criminal proceedings previously. But note how Gunson sort of twists it around.
Rather than explaining why Chasse’s death wasn’t ruled a “homicide” — which in the manner of death context simply means a death caused by another person or persons — she tries to weasel out by arguing that ruling the death “accidental” doesn’t mean anything.
One problem has already been covered: The manner of death determination isn’t supposed to be about intent (or, as Jack put it, “the officers’ state of mind”). It’s simply supposed to indicate whether the person died at their own hand, that of someone else, or as the result of the equivalent of falling off a ladder while stringing Christmas lights.
Motive is irrelevant in this context, and in fact one has to wonder how Gunson knew anything one way or the other about motive or intent simply as a result of examining Chasse’s body. Or, rather, one doesn’t have to wonder because the obvious answer is that Gunson didn’t learn a single damned thing about motive or intent from simply examining the body.
But, again, even if she were basing her comments on motive or intent on statements by the officers in question, it continues to be irrelevant. Motive and intent is for the criminal process to determine.
Going back once more to the jury of inquest into the officer-involved shooting death of James Jahar Perez, that panel did not have to conclude that there was a murderous intent on the part of the officers when it ruled that shooting a “homicide” for manner of death purposes.
So, simply, Gunson shouldn’t be opening her mouth about motive or intent at all.
Interestingly, the above quote from the Trib makes clear that despite the stunted list of options on the medical examiner’s own website, state law governing manner of death determinations includes “legal intervention” — in other words, a legal use of force from which the person dies.
Gunson’s comparison, quoted above, doesn’t even hold up to scrutiny. When a drunk driver kills someone, it might be tragic and it might be an accident and it might be manslaughter. But typically speaking, the drunk driver wasn’t deliberately driving into someone. In this incident, the officers were deliberately using force against Chasse.
What seems rather clear from reports thus far is that the officers involved in this incident knocked Chasse to the ground, kicked and punched him, and tasered him. In other words, they used force against Chasse.
That force led to Chasse’s death. That leaves only two options for Gunson for the purposes of determining the cause of death: It’s either homicide or legal intervention.
And yet Gunson did not rule this “legal intervention” either. Not “homicide” and not “legal intervention” — the two options which would implicate the officers’ actions in Chasse’s death.
Ultimately, it’s as if Gunson went out of her way to choose the only other option available to her in this situation which would remove the officers from the equation. To protect the officers involved, Gunson couldn’t choose “suicide” or “natural causes”.
To protect the officers involved, she had to rule the death the equivalent of falling of a ladder while stringing Christmas lights.
There’s really only one thing left to watch: Whether or not the District Attorney brings the matter before a grand jury and/or a jury of inquest, and if so, whether or not he skews the information presented to those juries to favor the officers, as he did in the case of James Jahar Perez.
That would be the running time of tonight’s Keith Olbermann commentary on the GOPresident, prompted by Bill Clinton’s smackdown of FOX News monkeyboy Chris Wallace over the weekend.
