“On Saturday January 6, 2007 Hugh Christopher Newsom, age 23 and Channon Gail Christian, age 21, both students at the University of Tennessee went out on a date.” References were made to the 4Runner they were driving.

I realize that I was not clear, so permit me to clarify: Political moves like this tend to be less about race and more about money. And Ms. Christian and Mr. Newsom were not some poor kids from the ‘hood.

While poverty tends to run along racial lines, it’s the affluent folks (the voters) that the legislators care about when they talk about being tough on crime.

I’ll not comment anymore on this one. Over and out.

We can all point out specific instances of soft sentencing, and the injustices of it. And for every story like that, we can also point to stories like this, http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/272.php — where a man served more than sixteen years for a violent crime he didn’t commit. But such things miss the purpose of what Gideon was really saying. (At least that’s my sense of it; I’m sure he’ll correct me if I’m wrong.)

http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/2008/01/the_human_consequences_of_soft_1.html

How right you are, and on so many counts.

As a personal anecdote, when I left my last job, my boss at the time was on trial. I’m not super clear on the details, but here are the broad strokes: Turns out some kid had broken into a dwelling at night (which he allegedly knew to be occupied). When he got caught, he set fire to said dwelling, killing the couple who lived inside. Sad. Tragically so. The guy who did this was on either probation or parole (I don’t remember which).

But you never heard about it.

‘Cause it happened in a poor city and the victims were black.

The Petit murders demonstrated that a certain class of offenders, namely thouse who break into dwellings that have people in them, are dangerous. It takes a lot of balls to break into a house that you know people are in. And criminals like that need to be dealt with. Harshly.

In any event, the system that let the two animals free after their lives of crime does need fixing.

You know, it’s late, and I’ve had a few beers. You know, sometimes I wish that we could pick 100,000 prisoners, really bad guys, with long records and simply execute every last one of them. That, in Stalinistic fashion, would solve a lot of problems in America.