RIP, James Q. Wilson

A scholar who revolutionized our thinking about crime control.

The Tolerant Left

A story which, if it had been a teen girl professing her support of homosexual marriage, would be well-known by now.

But threatening to kill 14 year old girls only gets traction when it's "right-wing extremists" doing the treatening.

Law and Economics

Nancy Pelosi is having hearings about the woes inflicted on women who work for Catholic institutions and therefore suffer the intense scourge of unsubsidized birth control. At one such hearing, we learned that we should be paying for Georgetown law coeds' contraceptives, according to law student Sandra Fluke's testimony before the committee.

This guy does the math:

It costs a female student $3,000 to have protected sex over the course of her three-year stint in law school, according to her calculations.
"Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school," Fluke told the hearing.
$3,000 for birth control in three years? That’s a thousand dollars a year of sex – and, she wants us to pay for it.
Yes, us. Where do you think the insurance companies forced to cover this cost get the money to pay for these co-eds to have sex? It comes from the health care insurance premiums you and I pay.
But, back to this woman’s complaint that she’s spending $3,000 for birth control during her time in college....
At a dollar a condom if she shops at CVS pharmacy’s website, that $3,000 would buy her 3,000 condoms – or, 1,000 a year.... Assuming it’s not a leap year, that’s 1,000 divided by 365 – or having sex 2.74 times a day, every day, for three straight years. And, I thought Georgetown was a Catholic university where women might be prone to shun casual, unmarried sex. At least its health insurance doesn't cover contraception (that which you subsidize, you get more of, you know). And, that’s not even considering that there are Planned Parenthood clinics in her neighborhood that give condoms away and sell them at a discount, which could help make her sexual zeal more economical.
Besides, maybe, these female law students could cut back on some other expenses to make room for more birth control in their budgets, instead of making us pick up the tab. With classes and studying and all that sex, who's got time for cable?
And, let's not forget about these deadbeat boyfriends (or random hook-ups?) who are having sex 2.74 times a day. If Fluke's going to ask the government to force anyone to foot the bill for her friends' birth control, shouldn't it be these guys?

Hmm, and I always did wonder why Bill Clinton chose to go to grad school at Georgetown.

A New Focus for Criminals

Well, I still get amazed every now and then at the ingenuity of the criminal classes. A case came across my desk recently involving a very sophisticated interstate burglary/theft operation. What was unusual was what these thieves were stealing:

Contact lenses.

Just contact lenses. As in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of them, apparently destined for ultimate sale overseas.

I can just imagine the prison conversation:
"Whatcha in for?"
"Robbery--you??"
"Contact lenses."

Who Would You Rather Believe?

Listening to an Evangelical preacher, Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas on my way to work this morning, I was a little surprised to hear him talking about Joseph Story, he of the famous Constitutional commentary and an early Supreme Court Justice.

I only caught the tail end of Jeffress' talk, which was apparently an argument that the First Amendment has been twisted beyond recognition, and that in fact the US is a Christian nation. Jeffress cited Story as holding that

The real object of the First Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance Mohammedanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects [denominations] and to prevent any national ecclesiastical patronage of the national government.

What I found interesting was not so much the obvious fact that the founders considered this a Christian nation, and in no way intended the First Amendment to become a weapon against public, even government-sponsored expressions in favor of Christianity, forbidding only the "establishment" of any particular denomination.

No, what made my Catholic ears perk up was Jeffress' argument to his congregation, which was (in close paraphrase): who would you rather accept as an authority in figuring out what the Constitution means, and what its framers intended--a Supreme Court Justice and scholar who was only twenty years out from the passage of the Bill of Rights, and personally knew the Framers of the First Amendment; or the ACLU?

Now the answer to that question is self-evident.

But the mode of argumentation directly echoes St. Thomas More in his writings against the heretics of his day, which was (again paraphrasing):

who should one accept as a sure authority in controversies about doctrinal matters and the deposit of the Faith-- the Holy Fathers who were living and writing in first years after Christ, some of whom knew the Apostles themselves; or Martin Luther and his like, who after 1500 years now purport to have discovered "true Christianity"?

Justice Story, of course, is a more authoritative voice for discerning the view and intent of the drafters of the Bill of Rights, than the ACLU (who, in addition to being 200 years after the event have an ideological ax to grind) for the exact same reason the Church Fathers are more authoritative sources for the meaning and understanding of Christian doctrine and practice than a Luther and other "reformers" (who, in addition to being 1500 years after the event had personal, moral, or intellectual axes to grind).

Independence Day, Mississippi-style

Outgoing Dem Republican governor of Mississippi pardons four, yes four, murderers on way out of office.

The inmates are David Gatlin, convicted of killing his estranged wife in 1993; Joseph Ozment, convicted in 1994 of killing a man during a robbery; Anthony McCray, convicted in 2001 of killing his wife; Charles Hooker, sentenced to life in 1992 for murder; and Nathan Kern, sentenced to life in 1982 for burglary after at least two prior convictions.

Mark McAbee said Barbour pardoned the man who killed his uncle, Ricky Montgomery. McAbee said Ozment was sentenced to life in 1994 after robbing the store with several other men.
"One of the other ones shot my uncle three times. He was crawling toward Joseph Ozment for help. He didn't know Joseph Ozment was involved. He was crawling to him for help. Joseph Ozment put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger twice," McAbee said.
He called the pardon "a slap in the face."

Indeed.

Executive clemency: an often under-appreciated aspect over the debate as to whether imprisonment ultimately renders offenders harmless.

Christmas

A couple of Christmas selections from the Clancy Brothers:

Rare, If Not Non-Existent

So we learn that the death penalty is being resorted to even more "rarely." 78 death sentences to date in 2011 have been imposed.

While the DPIC, an abolitionist advocacy group, reporting these figures, wants to portray the drop off in the DP rate as a function of decreased support for the DP, there are many factors at work in the decline, including most prominently in my view the declining overall homicide rate. ("The homicide rate declined sharply from 9.3 homicides per 100,000 in 1992 to 4.8 homicides per 100,000 in 2010."). Broadly speaking, the fewer number of murders, the fewer expected death sentences imposed.

As far as I know, there are no reported year-to-date murder numbers officially reported, but the number in the last couple of years has been around 15,000.

If that number holds true for 2011, then the death penalty is imposed in a miniscule 0.52% of cases.

Yet again, we can truly say of the death penalty in the United States, that it is imposed "rarely" and certainly only in heinous cases and after exhaustive appellate review of not just the facts and evidence, but the competency of defense counsel. All of which should give comfort to those Catholics who accept the position of the new Cathechism of the Catholic Church that recourse to the death penalty ought to be limited to "rare" cases.

After that, Something Pleasant for the Weekend

Connecticut Metes Out Justice

Death for co-defendant in Connecticut rape-torture-muder. Joshua Komisarjevsky and an associate commited a triple murder of a suburban Connecticut woman and her two daughters. Komisarjevsky was also convicted of sexually assaulting 11 year old Michaela.

I wrote about the first conviction in this case, in which

After assaulting and tying up the husband and father, Dr. William Petit, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky forced his wife to withdraw money from a bank and then sexually assaulted and strangled her to death.Then, turning to the 11 and 17 year old daughters of the family, the two men repeatedly raped them, then tied them both up, doused them with gasoline, and torched the house with the girls still alive inside."A medical examiner described a painful and panic-stricken smoke inhalation death likely suffered by Michaela. Seventeen-year-old Hayley's injuries suggested she was burned as she tried to flee.

This horrific crime reminded the people of Connecticut that sometimes the death penalty is necessary to address the heinousness of a crime and to protect society from vicious offenders. An abolitionist effort to abolish capital punishment in Connecticut which earlier this year had seemed certain of victory could not survive the common sense response of normal people to a crime of this magnitude. Sadly, the abolitionist are right back at it, pledging to ignore the community voice expressed by the jury in this case and seek the end of capital punishment in Connecticut.