Death Penalty 101 - The Book

Those of you who aren't lawyers probably know that law school classes typically operate on what they call the "Socratic Method."  (It's a method that Socrates wouldn't recognize, but that's a different blog post.)  It's built around court opinions.  The idea (yes, I realize I'm oversimplifying to the point of being misleading; it doesn't matter here) is that by studying how judges reach explain their decisions, and by then exploring what would happen if the facts were a little different or if they created different rules, students will learn to think like a lawyer (which is sort of horrifying if you actually consider it).

The thing about court opinions, at least the ones that law students read, is that they're mostly stripped of life.  For one thing, the opinions as reproduced in case books (which are the typical law school texts) are edited to remove whatever doesn't advance the didactic points for which the books' editors chose those opinions.   For another, the opinions themselves, even unexpurgated, tend to rehearse only those facts ostensibly relevant to the decisions.
 
Martin Clancy and Tim O'Brien had a different idea.  TV news producer/writer and legal reporter (they are, or maybe were, long-time partners at ABC), they wanted to write about the Supreme Court's death penalty cases while also telling the stories of the crimes.  And they wanted to do it all in layman's language - the language they used standing up in front of the camera with the marble facade of the Court in the background.  And, because this is 2013 and these guys are television people (yeah, O'Brien's also a lawyer, but he's primarily a television person), the wanted to include video.  Which gets a little tricky in a hardcover book.  But they found a way.

The book is Murder at the Supreme Court: Lethal Crimes and Landmark Cases and it's surprisingly good.*   Surprising because Clancy and O'Brien do a far better job than I had expected (sorry guys) of actually getting the legal stuff right.  Yeah, there's a quibble here and there, but they're truly minor.

Anyway, roughly speaking, here's what they've done.

They start with the Court's temporary abolition in Furman and its determination four years later in Gregg that the states solved the problems that led to Furman.   Then it's on to mitigation (Lockett) and the peculiar story of California's effort to execute Robert Alton Harris and the squabble between the 9th Circuit and the Supreme Court that eventually let it happen.  Race and the Baldus study and McCleskey get their turn.Then there's retardation and juvenile killers and the shifts that led to Atkins and Simmons. and Kennedy.  Review of non-killers takes us through Coker and Kennedy and the curious cases of Earl Enmund and Ray and Ricky Tyson.  Victim impact comes next, followed by the sad tale (seriously truncated, really there's so much more worth saying) of Willie Francis.  Finally, they come to innocence and incompetence.  That's not Ford incompetence, it's the attorneys.  

That's a lot of material to cover what with the details of the crimes and all, but the legal analysis is bite sized, sound-bite sized actually.  As I said, it's remarkably good.  But there's no real depth to it.  And there are what seem to me odd gaps. Two are particularly striking.  While they write about Willie Francis and Louisiana's effort to electrocute him a second time after the first didn't take, they don't make even passing reference to the only other case where that's happened - Romell Broom here in Ohio (whose second execution remains in legal limbo after several years).  Nor, despite a chapter on race and the death penalty, do they mention the case of Duane Buck in Texas who's penalty phase was, pretty much everyone agrees, infected with racial stereotype and bias - exactly the same racial stereotype and bias that got six other men relief.  But not Buck who remains on the row.

And then there's the video.  Scattered throughout the book are those horrible QR code things that look like bad Rorschach test pictures that you can (in theory, I didn't try it) snap with a smart phone and be taken to a video report on a case or to an interview with someone.  (For the moderate luddites among their readers, they also provide URLs.)  Frankly, it's not my thing.  But then I'm old.  Still, I can see how some people might find the video links appealing.  

It's strange, though, that with all the whiz-bang flashiness of including links to video, the photos (and there are a lot of photos) are all in black and white and, mostly, grainily reproduced on the book's pulp paper.

To judge from their "Closing Arguments," and though they studiously avoid saying so, my sense is that Clancy and O'Brien would support the death penalty if it could be this perfectly calibrated, mistake-free, engine of appropriate retributive justice.  They don't go there because, they say, it can't, and that lets them off the hook 

Our conclusion is that the system of capital punishment is broken and cannot be fixed.  That functional judgment makes it unnecessary for us to offer conclusions about what for many is the larger and more vexing question, whether the death penalty is immoral.

Murder at the Supreme Court isn't for specialists.  It's not a book for scholars or litigators or the full-time activists.  It won't answer all questions.  It pretty much completely ignores the real world consequences of the Supreme Court's death penalty rulings.**  And despite passing mentions, it basically buys into the idea that the Court (and by extension the courts) doesn't really reach decisions based on alleged principles which are really little more than policy preferences dressed in constitutional language.

But if you're just trying to get a grounding, a sort of constitutional death penalty 101, it's not a bad place to start.  Easy to read, easy to follow, remarkably accurate, and less-superficial than I'd expected.  It won't fill in all the blanks, and it certainly won't tell you anything useful about how any other case is likely to be resolved (don't be lulled into believing otherwise), but for the interested layman?  You bet.


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*Oddly the cover on the copy the publisher kindly sent me to review is slightly different than the cover I've reproduced here - from the publisher's web site.   Not so different that you wouldn't recognize it, but different.  My copy has a red banner across the top with a glowing blurb (is there another sort?) from Barbara Walters, and the subtitle is set off with a horizontal line and is printed in a single line.  Trivia, but curious.  If I were sufficiently energetic, I'd go to a bookstore and see which cover they carry - I'm thinking it's the one I've got and that the other was a mockup they changed at the last minute.

**I'm not talking here about how they've loosed killers on an unwitting public, or sent dozens of factually innocent men to their deaths - the parades of horribles declared with disingenuous if not downright dishonest certainty by retentionists and abolitionists who argue from scare tactics bearing only a tangential relationship to truth. I'm talking about how those decisions are applied, followed, twisted, disregarded and ignored by lower courts.

To Life

Here's to the land you've torn out the hear of.
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of.

That's the refrain of an old Phil Ochs song about the racism and corruption and general backwardness of the Magnolia State.  There's still much to complain of in that bit of the deep south.  In fact, just the other day, I pointed out that by a 5-4 vote the Mississippi Supreme Court was prepared to let Willie Manning be killed rather than order DNA and fingerprint testing and the like in a case riddled with uncertainty.

But that was so April 25th. 

And this is May. 

Same court.  8-1 vote.  Stay granted.

   Willie Manning - Stay

"There's Always Something Else You Can Do"

We fucked up.  We'll try and fix it if you give us a chance.

So says the FBI, though admittedly those are my words not the Bureau's.  You may remember that last year the FBI said it was going to review thousands of cases to see if its bullshit hair and fiber comparisons led to wrongful convictions.  

Enter Willie Jerome Manning (also known as "Fly").  Manning is on death row for the 1992 abduction and murder of Mississippi State University students Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller.  Manning says he didn't do it.  He's always said that.  He was convicted and sentenced to die anyway.  And while I wasn't at the trial and haven't read the transcript, it's not hard to see why.  Here's the evidence against him:

• In the days after the murder, Manning was seen with, and trying to sell, stuff that looked a lot like stuff stolen from the Steckler and Miller and from another car that was in the parking lot with Miller's car that night.
• Earl Jordan, Manning's cousin said Manning confessed to him.
• A jailhouse snitch said Manning confessed to him.
• Manning's girlfriend said that a few days before the killing, she saw Manning shoot a gun at a tree.  FBI experts said that the bullets in the tree came from the same gun as the bullets that killed Steckler and Miller and that it's impossible that they could be wrong.
• A bit of hair found in Miller's car came, testimony from another FBI "expert," came from a black person.  Manning's black, Steckler and Miller were white.

Like I said, you'd have convicted him, too.

Of course, there's the other side.

• The jailhouse snitch has recanted.
• Jordan had previously implicated two other men in the killings.  Finally, he said that Manning confessed, but said he didn't act alone.
• The hair sample?  The FBI has pretty much conceded that they didn't know what they were talking about.
• There's a fingerprint in the car that doesn't belong to Manning, Steckler, or Miller.  Nobody's bothered to run it against national databases in an effort to see whose it might be.
• Ballistics may not be completely worthless, but it ain't anywhere near that precise.  And oh, yeah, ballistics experts are, indeed, sometimes wrong.

Does that make Manning innocent?  No.  Is it enough to cast some doubt on his guilt?  On April 25th, a  5-4 majority of the Mississippi Supreme Court said no.

Our examination anew of the record reveals that conclusive, overwhelming evidence of guilt was presented to the jury. 

And since the jury heard such overwhelming evidence (even if much of it was bullshit), he shouldn't be allowed to have forensic testing before we kill him.

The dissenting 4 didn't say Manning's innocent.  They just said that his request for further forensic testing should have been granted.  If it happens to point to him, cool.  If it points to someone else?  Well, damn, we should know that and go after the guy.  And if it somehow exonerates him (DNA testing can be done now that simply couldn't have been done in 1994 when Manning was tried and convicted and sentenced to die), well, that's a good thing.  Justice Kitchens put it this way.

If the testing of biological material collected during the investigation proves that DNA in that material came from a donor or donors other than Manning, this would strongly suggest that someone besides Manning (or, possibly, someone in addition to Manning), was a perpetrator. The same can be said of further examination of the latent fingerprints lifted from the automobile of one of the victims, which have not been identified and have never been compared to the millions of known fingerprints contained in any of the state, local, and/or national databases.

Besides, 

The victims’ families and the public at large deserve to know whether another, or an additional, perpetrator was involved. If such a person can be identified, he or she should be prosecuted. Further examination of the fingerprints and biological evidence in this case could help achieve that end and/or significantly reinforce the basis for Manning’s conviction. Interests far beyond Manning’s are at stake, and whatever potential harm the denial seeks to avert is surely outweighed by the benefits of ensuring justice by the scientific analysis of all of the trace evidence that the authorities were able to collect from on or about the victims’ bodies. Unless and until that is done, the investigation of these horrible crimes will remain incomplete.

Which seems to make eminently good sense.  And which is why, sadly, it's in dissent.  On the other hand, the court's decision, recent though it is, predates the FBI's offer to do further testing.  The governor can grant a reprieve to make it happen.  And there's pressure on him to do that.  There's also, of course, pressure the other way, the voices calling for the killing.

There is, for instance, Oktibbeha County District Attorney Forrest R. Allgood.  According to Spencer S. Hsu  in the Washington Post, he 

said any reconsideration of the students’ case should include consultation with the victims’ families.

Because, you know, they're the ones who ought to decide how important it is to know whether Manning's guilty or whether he acted alone.   Or is it because they're looking forward to watching Manning die on Tuesday and don't want to be disappointed?  Or because they're actually forensic scientists themselves and can . . . . Oh, hell.  It's because that's an easy way for Allgood to do nothing.  Blame the victim's family for whatever.  Sure.

But then Allgood told the truth.

The bottom line is when you start looking at these things, there’s always something else you can do and it never ends.

 We're never really sure.  There's always more to do.  But damn, close enough for government work.

The governor says he's looking into it.

He doesn't have a lot of time.  Manning's due to be executed Tuesday.

They Could Just Choose To Do the Right Thing on Their Own

Really, it would have been a hell of a lot simpler if they'd just said to do it.

"It" is testing the DNA.  "They" is the esteemed Supreme Court of Ohio.  The subject is Tyrone Noling, about whom I've written before.

The short version for those who don't recall and aren't inclined to follow the link to catch up:  Noling's on death row for a double murder he claims he didn't commit.  The evidence against Noling has mostly evaporated, but still he's on death row and they still want to kill him.  DNA from a cigarette butt found in the driveway of the house where the killings happened was tested.  It didn't come from Noling or his co-defendant, which proves nothing.  Noling thinks, though, that it might have DNA from a guy named Daniel Wilson.  Wilson was executed in 2009 for another killing, and there's lots of reason to think he may have done this one.  If the cigarette butt has his DNA, and given the other evidence, that's pretty compelling evidence that Wilson was the killer and Noling was not.

Got that?  Good.

The prosecutors, of course, oppose the DNA testing.  They've been opposing it for years.  They just want to get on with the execution.  There's no point, they say.  We know it isn't Noling, so who cares if it belongs to Wilson who allegedly confessed?  Noling was convicted.  Convicted is better than confessed.  Anyway, there's a technical, statutory argument against the testing.  A trial court bought that technical argument.  DNA testing had been previously done and proved nothing so Noling cannot ask again.  So sayeth the law.

Except, no.  The law doesn't sayeth that.  It once did, but no longer.  So sayeth, this morning, the Ohio Supreme Court.  If the DNA testing could point to the actual bad guy, courts can order more testing.  In this case it could.  The trial court applied the wrong law.

OK, that's cool.  So let's just test the fucking DNA and see what happens, right?

Dreamer.  You haven't been paying attention.  Remember how this post began?  Here, I'll copy the first sentence.

Really, it would have been a hell of a lot simpler if they'd just said to do it.

"Would have been" are the key words here.  Instead of ordering the testing, the court ordered the trial court to decide if the testing would be "definitive."  If so, the trial court should order the testing.  If not, it'll be OK to get on with the business of killing Noling.

Which means, of course, years more of litigation.  You know, argue before the trial court.  Wait for a decision.  Whoever loses, appeals.  More waiting.  Until, eventually, either they test the DNA on that Butt or they don't.  And if they do, and if it's Wilson's, Noling will fight and fight and eventually get out of prison, another Ohio death row exoneree.  And if it's not Wilson's DNA, then they can kill Noling with a conscience as clear as it will be.  Or, of course, they could not test it.  Because they'd rather not know, and then they wouldn't.

It's worth noting that, the Portage County prosecutor could just agree to the testing.  He won't.  Instead, he fights it tooth and nail, hammer and tongs, foot and hoof, pencil and paper, spider and fly, duke and duchess.  Because . . . . Damned if I know.

Regardless, Tyrone Noling remains on death row for a crime he may or may not have committed.  One of these days it seems likely the Ohio Supreme Court will suck it up and order the DNA testing.  Or maybe not.  And if they do order it, either it will go a long way toward showing Noling innocent, or it won't be meaningful at all.  Which could all have been discovered several years ago, but will instead wait several more years.  Cause why not.

At the end of an extraordinary proceeding, a court of inquiry as it's known, Ken Anderson, formerly the District Attorney of Williamson County, Texas and now a judge in that county, was criminally charged with Criminal Contempt of Court, Tampering with Evidence, and Tampering with Government Records in relation to his prosecution of Michael Morton.  Anderson's hiding evidence and lying about it led to Morton's conviction and his 25 years on death row for a crime he did not commit.  Anderson concedes that he had a legal duty, a constitutional obligation to give the defense exculpatory evidence.  He didn't fulfill that duty, though he says it was the system's fault, not his.

And there was this, from the Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law issued by Judge Louis Sturns:

Additionally, as Mr. Anderson explained during the Court of Inquiry, although Brady requires prosecutors to release exculpatory evidence to the defense, as an attorney and fonner prosecutor, he does not believe in the release of such evidence if it may result in freeing an individual that he believes is guilty.

Really, these guys could just suck it up and do the right thing.  You know - Anderson could have obeyed the law and his duty.  The prosecutor in Portage County could just test the fucking DNA.

And, of course, the Supreme Court of Ohio could have saved everyone a repeat trip there in a year or so.

Nah.  What's the point?  Morton got exonerated off death row.  Noling might.  The system clearly works just fine.  All those years?  Piffle.  Cry babies.

Law Day USA

Tomorrow morning, Governor O'Malley is finally going to sign the bill abolishing the death penalty in Maryland.  It's about time.  I mean, the guy pushed and pushed for the law, finally got it enacted, and now he's waited more than a month to sign the thing.  (OK, I know absolutely nothing about Maryland's legislative procedure - maybe he was required to wait this long, but I doubt it.) 

It's prospective only, which means the bill doesn't actually take anyone off Maryland's death row who's currently there, though O'Malley has the authority to commute all their sentences.  Abolition laws in New Mexico and Connecticut were also prospective only.  Last week, the Connecticut Supreme Court heard oral argument on whether the law must also apply to the 11 men on death row there at the time the law was enacted.  You can watch the argument here.

Anyway, Maryland will end it, and thereby become the sixth state in six years to abolish the death penalty.  The others are New York, New Jersey, New Mexico (the fourth new, New Hampshire, has come close but hasn't made it), Illinois, and Connecticut.  And it's at least possible that Delaware will join that crowd this year.  Hell, they're actually going to have a hearing in the Texas House on an abolition bill.  It won't go anywhere, of course, but this is the fourth time the bill's been introduced and the first time it's gotten this far.

Of course, we're still killin' folks.  Through the end of April there have been 9 executions around the country this year (4 of them in Texas).  And Florida just passed a bill that, if the governor signs it, would put executions on a super-fast track.

In that spirit, and today, which is Law Day USA (so named by presidential proclamation in 1958 and congressional action in 1961 in response to May Day celebrations by godless communists and their ilk), the State of Ohio has this morning executed Steven Smith.  Earlier this morning, our state Public Defender, Tim Young, put out this statement.

Today Ohio will execute Steven Smith. And after the state kills Mr. Smith there will be “no winners here tonight”. This is the title of a 2009 book by Andrew Welsh-Huggins that examines the death penalty in Ohio. The title says all that needs to be said. Ohio will not be a better place tonight for Steven Smith’s execution. Ohio will have not reduced crime, murder rates will not go down, and Ohio will have one more death rather than fewer. And even the victim’s family, who want closure, will still grieve.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear

I did not write about the government's announcement (and why, by the way, did they announce it?) that it intended to question Dzhokhar Tsarnaev without first informing him of his Miranda rights. I didn't write about how the so-called "public-safety" exception made up by the Supremes in New York v. Quarles was, at the time it was invented, intended to be narrow and limited.  Nor did I write about how it happened (and somewhat oddly, I should perhaps add) that when he was given Miranda warnings he took them seriously and decided to shut up.

I didn't write about turning greater Boston into a police state, ordering the populace to stay home (except for the part of the populace that operates Dunkin Donuts), conducting door-to-door suspicionless warrantless searches which at least sometimes seem to have involved forcing the homeowners out of their homes and holding them at gunpoint.

I haven't written about Lindsey Graham and John McCain and Rudy Giuliani and all the whack jobs who haunt Fox news (brilliantly eviscerated by Jon Stewart here) are convinced it's time to take a red pencil to the Bill of Rights, saving only the Second Amendment and the part of the First that calls for the Free Exercise of Christianity (and maybe of Judaism in Israel) but prohibits all other religions.

For that, you can read Bennett and Horowitz and Greenfield and Gideon and Kennedy and . . . .  Enough.

Look, the bombing at the Boston marathon and all that followed scared folks shitless.  Scared them more, in many respects, than did the planes on 9/11.  But they're of a piece.  And when we get scared - that's when we name laws after children or lock people up at Gitmo (including the ones we agree don't need to be there, don't need to be locked up at all, but who we're still keeping imprisoned there for years, proably forever).  

Ahmed Ressam, the "Millennium Bomber," was part of a terrorist cell operating out of Canada.  He was arrested by customs inspectors  when he tried to drive a car carrying explosives from Canada to the U.S.  His intention was to blow up Los Angeles International Airport as the millennium turned.  He turned down a plea offer that would have had him in prison for 25 years, went to trial, and was convicted by a jury of nine counts.  

Ressam asked for a prison sentence of 12 1/2 years.  The government asked that he be locked up for 35.  The judge gave him 22. Appeal, much folderol, back for resentencing.  This time the government asked for 45 years.  Again the judge gave him 22.  Appeal, much folderol, the 9th Circuit told the judge it wasn't nearly enough time.

Back for a third sentence.  Probation services says that Ressam's Guideline sentence falls anywhere between 65 years and life.  (The judge's caclulation puts the Guideline range between 42 and 44 years.) The government this time asked for life.  The judge, and it's been the same judge every time, gave him 37 years to be followed by 5 years of supervised release.

Yawn.  I mean, really, who gives a shit about this stuff, Gamso?

You can, if you're inclined, read the 18 page Sentencing Order here.  If you do federal criminal defense, you probably want to.  (Hell, if you do a lot of it, you probably already have.) 

Yawn, yawn.  Have you got a point?  Are you ever going to get there?
 

See, the judge (he's the Honorable John C. Coughenour, by the way, appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan) thought some preliminary remarks were in order.  So he blathered a bit about his gratitude to the 9th Circuit for setting him straight by twice reversing Ressam's sentence. And he talked about the heavy burden of figuring out what the right sentence is in a case and how he's been wrong and how "mistakes have left scars."

Yawn. Yawn.  Yawn.  Please, Gamso, get on with it.

OK, here it is.  The judge then wrote this paragraph (emphasis mine).

This case provokes our greatest fears. In the late 1990s, Mr. Ressam plotted a terrorist
attack against the United States with the potential to kill and injure a large number of people. Because Mr. Ressam planned this act of violence and took steps to carry it out, many, including the federal government, believe that Mr. Ressam is a continuing threat and he should never see freedom again. But fear is not, nor has it ever been, the guide for a federal sentencing judge. It is a foul ingredient for the sentencing calculus.

I want to be very clear about this.  There's nothing generous in the sentence.  Judge Coughenour shows no spectacular courage in imposing a sentence 2 years longer than the one the government originally asked him to impose (although considerably shorter than what the government now wanted).

But if the sentence is no bonus, the warning is.  For judges imposing sentence (or deciding whether to expand the public-safety exception to cover all information the cops would like to know), for legislators looking for more ways to write laws so that the protections of the Bill of Rights will only be available to those who have no need for or interest in them, and for all of us inclined to buckle with fear and say "how far" when some government worker says to strip and bend over and pull apart the cheeks.

In 1933, in his first inaugural address, FDR said

Of course, he forgot it when he thought it would be a good idea to act upon "fear itself" when he ordered Japanese-Americans into concentration camps.
Thing is, he was right at the inaugural. He should have been paying attention.

Innocent People Will Always Be Singled Out

Clarence Thomas, let me direct your attention to Salah Eddin Barhoum.

You think you had it tough when Anita Hill said that you sexually harassed her, talked about pubic hair on a Coke can and mentioned Long Dong Silver. A "high tech lynching," you called it. Feh.

'Tweren't nothing (even if all that stuff about your behavior and predilections weren't true).

You want to talk about "high tech lynching"? As I said, direct your attention to Salah Eddin Barhoum: suspect.

Let's be clear. A "suspect" is a person who's suspected. Suspicion can dissipate. Sometimes suspects are charged. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes suspects are ultimately found to be legally guilty. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes suspects are factually guilty. Sometimes (despite what Ed Meese said) they're not.

Because suspicion isn't the same as guilt. That's absolutely fundamental to our system of justice and to principles of fair play and decency. It's also a basic fact.

Alas, we live in a world where those things often don't much matter. Which brings me back to young Mr. Barhoum. He's 17 years old, a high school student, a runner on the track team. He lives in Revere, Massachusetts just outside Boston. Yesterday, his picture was on the front page of the New York Post.

He was identified as a suspect in the Boston marathon bombings.

Not by the police or the FBI or any other government agency, it seems. No, they were busy sifting evidence and looking for, and then identifying as suspects the brothers Tsarnaev who, it must be said, remain only suspects at this point despite the hype and the news reports and the apparent fact that one of them has now been killed and so will never stand trial.  

But this isn't about the late Tameralan and his not-yet-late brother Dzhokhar. This is about Salah Bharoum and how he ended up on the front page of the Post, identified as a suspect.

He got there because of you and me.  (Well, not literally.  That's a metaphorical you and me.)  He was a victim of the internet age and social media.  From the Dave Lee at the BBC.

For the past 48 hours, internet users have been working with each other to piece together clues about the culprits of the Boston bombings. The result? They got it wrong - and left innocent people fearing for their safety. Many are now asking: should "crowd-sourced investigations" be stopped?

Thousands have been tirelessly picking through the evidence - every piece of video footage, every photo, every eyewitness account they can get their hands on.

But this investigation wasn't within the confidential confines of the FBI or local police.

No, these sleuths were working in public - discussing their theories and "leads" within massive communities such as Reddit, 4Chan, Facebook and Twitter.

First they accused Sunil Tripathi.  He's 22 and he's been missing since mid-March.  Ooops.  Now the Reddit police have apologized.  Gee, sorry we named this guy, who had nothing to do with it.  We know we brought shame and pain to his family.  But golly, as people who troll the internet and think we're all Sherlock Holmes, we were just doing our job.

And then it was Salah Bharoum.  He's not missing.  He's hiding, afraid for his safety.

Joshua Miller in the Boston Globe.

The teenager later told ABC News that when he saw the Post’s front page, “It’s the worst feeling that I can possibly feel. . . . I’m only 17.”

Outside the family’s apartment building on Thursday, a man who indicated he was ­Barhoum’s father, but declined to give his name, told a Globe reporter and other members of the press in broken English that reporters had been hounding his family all day Thursday and they had been afraid to leave.

“From one o’clock in the morning till now, we [ate] nothing,” he said. “Please, can you respect my family?”

“The picture of my son on the Internet, [he] is now skewered,” the man said.

I've had plenty of negative things to say about law enforcement.  The cops aren't immune to mistake. They beat and taze and killing innocent people.  They lie on the witness stand.  They get tunnel vision and go after the wrong folks.  They hide evidence or shitcan it.  Not always, maybe not most of the time.  But they do it.  Too often. (Once is too often.)  At least in theory, though, they have constraints.  They're not supposed to, if you'll excuse the expression, shoot from the hip.  And we can at least hope that they don't publicly announce that it looks like so and so killed three, injured 170 some others, and terrorized a city just 'cause some guy with a laptop says he's found a picture that he finds suspicious and that he thinks kind of looks like this other guy.


And this other guy just happened to be Mr. Bharoum.  Who had nothing to do with anything.  Though you couldn't tell that from the Post that figured he belonged on the front page.

Which brings us to this next part.  There are those who will forever believe that Salah Bharoum was involved in setting those bombs.  Because he was accused.  Because Ed Meese was wrong, but the public doesn't think so.  And because the internet is forever.
Dave Lee, again.

"This subreddit has been a disaster that has done more harm than good," wrote Reddit user DarrenGrey.

"It ended up an epicentre of unstoppable finger-pointing and wild conjecture.

"And worst of all the mainstream media leapt on the information here like hungry hyenas.

"Unreliable crowd-sourced material plus the media's ravenous desire for fresh information has proved a disgusting mix. Let's never ever do this again."

Which is a nice sentiment, but not universally held.

But one Reddit user, who has spent the past two days posting minute-by-minute updates on the police investigation, defended the actions of those on the site.

"Innocent people will always be singled out," said Joseph Stuhr in an email to the BBC.

"That's why we have police. We can give them leads and they will figure everything out using facts and clues."

No flies on us.  No lessons learned.  One more time:

Innocent people will always be singled out.

Now that, Justice Thomas, is high tech lynching.