If You Can Keep It

The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And the use, as evidence in a criminal proceeding, of facts ascertained by such intrusion must be deemed a violation of the Fifth.

Those are the stirring, and I'd submit self-evidently correct, words of Justice Louis Brandeis in Olmstead v. United States. 

Sadly, my submission is demonstrably wrong.  Indeed, it was wrong long before I offered it.  Brandeis penned those words in dissent from the Court's opinion written by the Chief Justice and (stick with me, this is relevant) former President William Howard Taft.  Or maybe it's not wrong.  Maybe it's right that what Brandeis said is self-evidently correct but that the powers that be don't give a shit and therefore regularly choose the incorrect over the correct. Of course, whether the Constitution is routinely misunderstood or ignored or intentionally violated, the effect is the same.

Sunday Barak Obama and Joe Biden swore to defend and protect the Constitution as they took the oaths of their offices and began their second terms as President and Veep.  Monday, they did it again, this time only ceremonially since it was the Sunday ones that counted.  I have no reason to believe that they lied.

Obama's speech was, as his best speeches are, soaring.  Evoking Jefferson and Lincoln and Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.  He offered a vision of alliterative inclusiveness referencing Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall.  He talked about all the things that government can and should do.  It was a solid, progressive, liberal agenda he set out.  He quoted the Declaration of Independence and its own statement of what is "self-evident":

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Yet he also omitted.

I'm not a governmental minimalist.  I believe in government.  I think the government can and should do much.  

But I believe, too, in what Brandeis recognized in Olmstead.  I was curious, so I checked and was surprised to discover that I'd only quoted that passage once before in this blog (here). At the time I was talking about balancing tests and how when freedom is put in the balance against much of anything else, freedom loses.  Which is why balancing tests are so pernicious.  They don't really balance.  They simply declare.

The reality, of course, is that all life is a balance.   Certainly all law is.  Forget absolute language.  It doesn't count. (Note that Brandeis spoke of "unjustifiable" intrusion violating the 4th Amendment, allowing a world of wiggle room.)

Yet the ideas, the absolutes of the ideas, that's something different.  And nowhere is the idea better set out than in one partial sentence from Olmstead:

[T]he right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. 

You can find recognition of some of that in what Obama said yesterday.  But you won't find much of it, or much support for anything in the Bill of Rights, in what he spoke about or what he advocates or what the agencies of his administration (or the one before or the one before that or the one before that - or, I regret to say, the ones that will follow).

We have decided, as a nation, that civil rights are a good thing (though how far to extend them is deeply contentious).  Civil liberties, on the other hand, are dangerous and can be rejected, ignored, crushed.  Or simply voted down, as the House did in 1995 when it voted against the text of the 4th Amendment 303-121.

Look, it's not absolute.  DOMA may really go down in flames this year.  Same Sex Marriage could become a constitutional right (don't go making wagers; I'm just saying those things are possible).  But if you want the government out of your computer, if you want to enforce the 4th Amendment or the 5th or the 6th or the 8th or the Establishment Clause or Free Press parts of the 1st - well, sure, maybe, if nobody much objects.  But then again, maybe not.  Just ask Bradley Manning.

As something of an aside, but not really, today marks 40 years to the day since the Supreme Court declared in Roe v. Wade that government had no right to prevent a woman from getting an abortion.  Roe was premised on the right to privacy implicit in the Bill of Rights. Or maybe it's properly seen, in Olmstead's terms as protecting against an "unjustifiable intrusion." Anti-abortion laws violate the 4th Amendment.  Either way, the states, the feds, and the courts have been backing away from the decision ever since.

Todd Akin: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

What I really wanted to write about was tribal law.
Honest.
My friend Nick F. was a public defender on a reservation.  From him I learned that the Bill of Rights does not apply on the rez.  At least, not in the tribal courts.  Of course, there's an argument (and not a frivolous one) that the Bill of Rights doesn't apply in any of our courts, but that's in practice.  In the tribal courts, it doesn't even apply in theory.  (I gather there may be an exception here or there for parts of the 6th Amendment, but that's getting way beyond my expertise.)
Anyhow, that's what I really wanted to write about.
One of these days.

* * * * *

Then I wanted to write about the quest of 82 year old Bernice Mable Graham Telian.  Seems that her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Barnes, was hanged by the Godfearing paranoids lunatics friends and neighbors who populated Hartford, Connecticut in 1663.  They having concluded that she was a witch, you see.  Bernice wants to clear her name.
Mary Barnes was just one of 11 purported witches hanged in Connecticut between 1647 and 1663, and Bernice is trying to clear them all.  Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, they've all admitted they screwed up and killing innocent folk.  Not so much in the Land of Steady Habits. 
Bernice is aided in her quest to get the Connecticut legislature to act by the ACLU, NRA, Communist Party, Taliban Connecticut Wiccan & Pagan Network.
Ann Marie Somma of Religion News Network, in the Washington Post.

Now members of the Connecticut Wiccan & Pagan Network are pushing Gov. Dannel Malloy to sign a proclamation to clear the names of the victims. Supporters are asked to send Malloy a postcard that reads: “I am a Pagan/Witch and I vote. Clear the names of Connecticut’s eleven accused and executed witches.”
Anthony Griego, who is heading the effort, said the proclamation is nonbinding and doesn’t open up the door for lawsuits.
“The witch hunts were about fear and intolerance,” said Griego. His group even wrote to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II seeking a pardon for the accused. The queen’s office wrote back, denying the request.

Drat that Queen.

Look, I tend to be wary of innocence claims, but I think we have a good one here.  Just ask no les an authority than Frank Kirkpatrick (that's him on the right).  He's the Ellsworth Morton Tracy Lecturer and Professor of Religion at Trinity college in Hartford.  He told Somma that

the evidence presented during the trials was flimsy at best. 

You think?
But no, I don't really have anything to say about that.

* * * * *

And anyway, Todd Akin's back.

You remember Todd Akin?  He of the claim that women don't get pregnant when their rapes are legitimate because they have a legitimate-rape-detecting somethingorother that stops those legitimately raping little spermies from interacting with their virginal ova. 

It turns out that Todd's been medically misinformed for a while.  It was back in 2008, we now know (and would have known sooner if we'd paid more attention to C-Span) that he explained how doctors perform abortions on women who aren't pregnant.  Commonly.

Don't want to watch the whole thing?  Here's the money quote.

You find that along with the culture of death go all kinds of other lawbreaking. The not following good sanitary procedure, giving abortions to women who are not actually pregnant, cheating on taxes, all these kinds of things. The misuse of anesthetics so that people die or almost die. All of these things are common practice, and all that information is available for America.

Put aside Todd's medically improper language.  (If there's no pregnancy, there's nothing to abort.  If there's nothing to abort, it's not an abortion.)  I mean, it's possible to do a procedure that would cause an abortion if only the woman were pregnant.  Presumably, that's what he had in what passes for his mind. The man is, after all, a mere lawmaker, charged with writing laws with such precision that the court's cannot misinterpret them.  We can't expect him to use words properly.
Instead, consider the claim that it's "common practice."  You know, like it happens all the time.

• You have the flu?  Get lots of rest and then come in for a D & C.
• Broken arm?  Let me just get that splint on and then we'll do a D & C.
• Heart palpitations?  Let's just do a D & C.
• Hey, maybe a hysterectomy while we're at it?  Or would prefer a mastectomy?
• Oh, and may I recommend a fatal dose of anesthesia?
• By the way, if you pay in cash, I won't have to report it.

h/t Gideon (for Bernice Telian) & Turley (for the latest on Akin)

Doubling Down

"What do you read, my lord?" asks Polonius of Hamlet who accurately but mockingly replies

Words, words, words.

The thing is, Hamlet is mocking both himself and Polonius.

The prince has been charged by the ghost of his father, old King Hamlet, to kill his uncle Claudius, brother of the old king, successor king himself, and stepfather to the prince having married the old king's wife. (A too long and cluttered sentence, but I assume you know the plot, so it doesn't really matter.) Polonius, pompous busybody and courtier (and father of Hamlet's girlfriend), isn't exactly ignored, but is put in place for his nosiness.  And Hamlet himself, why, all for him is words.  He hems back and forth.  He cannot decide. 

To be or not to be.

It's all words.

But, of course, they're powerful things words.  I've observed that before about them.  They matter.

As lawyers, they're the tools we use.

Politicians, too.  

But with great power comes great opportunities for fuck ups.  Consider Fukushima or Chernobyl.

Take Todd Akin. Please.

Unless you've spent the last 72 hours or so in a cave, you know the basic plot.  Asked on TV about abortions in cases of rape, Todd explained that he's talked to lots of doctors and learned that there are two kinds of rape (at least) and that women's bodies have a magic contraceptive agent that can tell the different sorts and work whenever the rape is the "legitimate" sort.

If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

You know.

Now, Todd Akin is a deeply religious man as well as being an idiot. 

And it came to pass that upon his spewing of offensive shit and stupid shit both, there arose a great cackling among his opponents and a great consternation among his fellow believers who are a shade too smart to get caught actually saying anything as dumb as he did.

"Quit the campaign" came the voices from those supporters of science and evidence except when it involves actual science and evidence.  John Cornyn, Karl Rove, John Ashcroft, Mitt Romney (one waits in vain to hear from Sarah Palin) all said Akin must quit.  The party will no longer fund his campaign.  Rove's super PAC will no longer fund his campaign.

They did not know the sort of man with whom they were dealing.

Yes, he said those things.  But he has deep empathy for rape victims (at least the legitimate ones), rape being a horrible crime and all.

I used the wrong words in the wrong way, and for that I apologize.

Those wrong words, he said, were

ill-conceived

"A bit like a rapist's child, perhaps," as my friend Hilary said.  (Really.  He said that. You can't make this shit up.  Though you can set it off and print it in boldface.) 

Of course, it's not just that the words were wrong.

That's what happens when you say dessert instead of desert or when autocomplete changes enemy to enema.

Todd's problem wasn't poor word choice.  I mean what would the right words have been?

OK, I know.  He didn't mean "legitimate" rape.  He meant "forcible" rape.  (He's tried that tack before - as has Paul Ryan, by the way, who's on the Romney express now insisting he's never said any such thing, just as he also insists he was for the stimulus before he was against it  But I digress.)

But see, "forcible" really isn't much better.  It just tries to define those rapes that are "legitimate."  Because, one assumes, statutory rape is OK.  And date rape is OK.  Rape only counts, is only really really wrong if the victim also gets the shit beaten out of her.

Which is, apparently, what releases the magic contraceptive.

Timex Todd has taken a lickin' but keeps on tickin'.  He says he's in for long haul.  Has a new ad out called "Forgiveness" that apologizes for using those "wrong words." And that says he really does care deeply and that illegitimate rape isn't a mitzvah.  But the baby is and mom should be honored to have the chance to carry the legitimate rapist's child to term if she should be fortunate enough not to have the spermicidal gene.

Todd's is the great American moment. He won't be swayed by party elders or wiser heads.

(Nearly all heads are wiser, but I'm digressing again.) He told Mike Huckabee,

I believe the defense of the unborn and a deep respect for life, which underlie all of America, those are important parts of who we are. And they’re not things to run away from.

Now you may not have known that "the defense of the unborn" is what "underlie[s] all of America."  But then you, unlike Todd, aren't channeling God. John Eligon in the Times.

It was “appropriate to recognize a creator, God, whose blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the very source of American freedom,” Mr. Akin, 65, said in a radio interview. “And that part of the message I feel is missing” from the campaign, he said, adding, “That’s the reason why we’re going to continue. Because I believe there is a cause here.”

And you didn't get the Republican nomination for Senate in Missouri.

Out of Time

Really, he's not the only idiot in Congress.  There is, for instance, John Fleming (R. Louisiana) who, as I've noted before, is

deeply concerned about the "Abortionplex" Planned Parenthood just opened in central Kansas.

The 900,000-square-foot facility has more than 2,000 rooms dedicated to the abortion procedure. The abundance of surgical space, Richards said, will ensure that women visiting the facility can be quickly fitted into stirrups without pausing to second-guess their decision or consider alternatives such as adoption. Hundreds of on-site counselors are also available to meet with clients free of charge and go over the many ways that carrying a child to term will burden them and very likely ruin their lives.

Of course, they had to make the facility appealing so everyone would want to go.  So there are also

coffee shops, bars, dozens of restaurants and retail outlets, a three-story nightclub, and a 10-screen multiplex theater—features intended not only to help clients relax, but to foster a sense of community and make abortion more of a social event.

Did I mention that the abortionplex that so concerns Fleming is an invention of the Onion, a satirical publication that covers fake news? As I said, John Fleming is an idiot.  It seems like the sort of thing he has nightmares about, so it must be true.

That's a different sort of credulity than we find in the folks who don't believe in evolution because it's icky and anyway the Bible says that man wasn't made from genetic material and natural selection but from dirt (Genesis 1:7), which is a whole lot more appealing - or maybe not.  And science be damned 'cause there's a book they believe.

And that's a different sort of credulity than we find in the folks who don't believe in global warming because they don't wanna and because it's a favorite thing of scientists (who are liberals, after all, not believing in the American dream and thinking that maybe that evolution thingy is right).

As an aside, a criminalist (that's a CSI guy) for the Toledo Police Department was once asked if they did DNA testing on a baggie of drugs that, it was alleged, a woman smuggled into the local lockup in her vagina and would have given to her boyfriend/inmate if only the deputies at the jail hadn't noticed it first.  The criminalist told her that there was no reason because DNA could only have been found in her secretions, and women only secrete during "that time of the month."  (Honest.  He said that.  You can't make this shit up.)

Anyway, this is about Todd Akin, Republican (which is not quite irrelevant as you'll see in a bit) Congressman representing Missouri's 2nd Congressional District.

 

Looking at the pictures, it appears those "timeless principles" were actually developed in the late 18th Century.  By a bunch of white guys who hung out together near the Mississippi and deduced that, well, whatever white guys in the late 18th Century who hung out together near the Mississippi deduced.

Apparently that included stuff like how there's two kinds of rape.

• "Legitimate" rape.
• Other rape.

Now, you may be wondering how these guys knew that. Todd doesn't tell us.  But he did explain an absolutely essential difference.  Women don't get pregnant from the legitimate kind.  He explained to KTVI-TV

If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

Sigh.

Akin went on to explain that he's all for punishing rapists (I assume that's only the legitimate ones) but that on the off chance the legitimate-rapist-spermicidal-hormone all women have should fail, well, tough nuggies.

(He did later say that he "misspoke" and is really sympathetic to rape victims.  He said nothing about being an idiot who gets his medical knowledge from pictures of white guys traveling down the Mississippi on a raft.)

OK, there's a couple of things here.  First, as I said, Akin's a Republican, which wouldn't be of any particular interest (idiocy is not partisan) except that he won the Republican primary in Missouri and is running for Senate now.  And even his fellow Republicans are telling him to bail.

John Paul Jones

Scott Brown of Massachusetts says he should step aside. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said so. John Cornyn of Texas, one of the most conservative members of the Senate said so.

Akin, though, says he's not going anywhere.  He told Mike Huckabee:

I’m not a quitter. My belief is we’re going to move this thing forward. To quote my friend John Paul Jones, I’ve not yet begun to fight.

One might note, if one were so inclined, that his "friend" John Paul Jones died in 1792. You know, when Akin was developing his "timeless principles."
I've noted before that there's no inherent relationship between certainty and truth.  I probably haven't mentioned, though, that Socrates was always explaining how little he knew and trying to learn more. 
Here's the other thing. In the House, Akin sits on the Science and Technology Committee.


h/t the Dictators (you know who you are)
 

The Humanity of the Monster

Sometimes it's counter-intuitive.

Gallup has been doing polling on the death penalty for about 70 years. This year's report was just released. One of the questions they've asked for at least the last few years is whether people think a factually innocent person has been executed. You can see how the answer comes out - 59% say that it's happened within the last five years.


It's depressing to see that the data also shows that 57% of those who think that an innocent person has been executed within the last five years also support the death penalty.

It's at least partly because of those sorts of numbers that Walter Reeves, Jr., Cameron Todd Willingham's appellate lawyer (not the sleazebag trial lawyer who turned on Willingham on Anderson Cooper, see here), just doesn't believe that the execution of his former, and likely innocent, client will make much difference. He writes in his blog that we need a sea change in public attitude. ("Sea change" isn't Reeves; it's Shakespeare, from The Tempest.)

I think the problem is that we have lost the sense that human life is sacred. The majority of anti-death penalty supporters are just as guilty as everyone else. My sense is that most in the anti-death penalty camp don't believe human life is sacred from the moment of conception. On the other hand, the majority in the anti-abortion camp have no problem with the death penalty, and often times are its most ardent supporters.

Almost 30 years ago (1968 to be exact), Pope John Paul II authored an encyclical - In Humanae Vitae. In that document he made a number of predictions, many of which have been proven to be true. Pope John Paul II also coined the phrase "culture of death". His theory was that we live in a culture of death because we no longer value human life - which is a reflection of the divine.

I think he was right on. You don't have to be Catholic - or even religious - to recognize the problem. In my opinion, beliefs about the death penalty are not going to change until peoples beliefs about the sacredness life change. I'm not knocking the anti-death penalty crowds - I admire their passion, which is something missing from far too many people. I simply believe that is going to take more than proving an innocent person was executed to cause a change in attitudes.

I don't want to wade into the thicket of seamless garments and the relationship between abortion and the death penalty. I'm all for getting sidetracked, but that's not just a side path, it's a whole other highway. Still, and for the record, I'm one of those folks who supports the right to abortion absolutely and also absolutely opposes the death penalty. I see no inconsistency. But I'm far from convinced that most abolitionists share my perspective.

What I want to say, instead, is that there's something to be said for the idea that this is a "culture of death." Except I don't think it's a change. Reeves says (channelling Pope John Paul II), that "we no longer value human life." That's either wrong on its face (of course we do) or false in its implication that we once did. (You know, back in the day when everyone was opposed to the death penalty and there were no wars - that would be in Eden.)

But it's true that we don't, as a society, take the position that no blood can ever properly be shed. Someone suggested that the first rule for the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize should be that the winner should not be leading a nation in military action. That seems reasonable to me, and would require taking back a lot of those prizes. And while it's a fair guess that most pacifists are abolitionists, I'm pretty sure that most abolitionists aren't pacifists. Still, respect for human life, even pretty wretched human life, isn't a bad thing. And those who take on the mantle of peacemaker might think carefully about taking on the mantle, too, of localized killer.

But the real point here is something different, something I've spoken about before. It looks back to the Gallup data and Reeve's claim that proof of an innocent dead guy won't make much difference.

I don't know that the dead innocent guy wins the day. I don't think it does. Attitudes are more complex than that. But I think the dead innocent guy matters a lot, and in precisely the ways that dead innocent folks don't matter. Stalin understood it well.

A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic.

The importance of the dead innocent guy is the personalization. He gives a name, a voice, a face to the fact that the death penalty is simply murder.

Think, for a moment, about a death penalty trial. It begins with the question of whether the accused will be found guilty or not guilty. That trial proceeding is about the monstrous act. There was a killing (or more than one), and the person sitting in the chair over there did it. It was a horrible crime, and the defendant is a monster. If the defendant is found guilty of the crime, that's where the jury is. They've convicted a monster. The second part of the trial, the mitigation phase, is about making the monster human.

One of the brilliant things about the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf is that the monsters, Grendel and Grendel's mother, while never less than monstrous, have discernible, understandable, motivation. Beneath the monster lurks the soul. If you miss that in the original, it's unmistakable in John Gardner's novel, Grendel.

The innocent guy, the particular innocent guy, he's the one to whom we can give a soul. He's the person they killed. Not the monster. That's someone else - or in Willingham's case, nobody at all. There is no monster. Just a horrible mistake. And that makes us the monsters.

It's a lot. Worked out right it can move us many steps forward. But it's likely not enough.

And that, as Captain Hook says in the Broadway musical of Peter Pan, is where "the canker gnaws."

Who you gonna blame?

George Tiller, one of the few doctors willing to perform late-term abortions and the operator of one of only three clinics in the nation that perform them, was shot and killed this morning while handing out programs in the foyer of his church in Wichita, Kansas.

This is what we know:

• In 1985, his clinic was bombed.
• In 1991, thousands of anti-abortion protesters descended on Wichita and blocked off his clinic.
• In 1993, he was shot in both arms.
• In March of this year, after a five-day trial, a jury took less than one hour to find him not guilty of performing late term abortions without the oversight required under Kansas law.
• The day the verdict was announced, the Kansas Board of Health Examiners said that it would begin proceedings to revoke his license to practice medicine.
• His clinic has been vandalized repeatedly.
• A man named Scott Roeder has been arrested and will, according to authorities, be charged on Monday with the killing.

It seems a fair inference that Tiller was killed for being an abortion provider. Certainly, it's an inference that pretty much everyone from the NARAL which has honored him to Operation Rescue which has tried to shut him down. Still, it's worth remembering that when the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, authorities immediately began looking for men from the Middle East. The usual suspects are often guilty, but not always. Major anti-abortion groups have been quick to attempt to distance themselves from the killing and the killer insisting that they are all absolutely devoted to life and would never support any killing (though I haven't seen most of them joining in the struggles against the Iraq war or the death penalty). Still, some can't seem to muster the proper level of outrage. Case in point, this note from an article on the killing in USA Today (here):

The Rev. Flip Benham, director of Operation Save America, which calls itself the national successor to Operation Rescue, said he had been confronting Tiller over abortion since meeting him in 1991 during their "Summer of Mercy" protests outside Tiller's clinic.

"He has shed the blood of countless thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of little baby boys and girls and burned them up in his on-premises incinerator," Benham, a Concord, N.C., preacher, said. "Now this thing has come home to him."

But if the Reverend Bentham thinks the chickens have come home that's mild, here's what Operation Rescue's founder is quoted as saying:

Randall Terry, a veteran anti-abortion activist whose protests have often targeted Tiller. "George Tiller was a mass murderer and we cannot stop saying that," Terry said. "He was an evil man - his hands were covered with blood."

And, of course, followers of Fred Phelps from the Westboro Baptist Church )the ones who show up at military funerals to explain that god wanted this or that death because the US isn't sufficiently anti-gay) showed up to protest at a vigil for Tiller's memory holding "signs emblazoned with such messages as 'Abortion is bloody murder' and 'Baby killer in hell.'" (Story here.)

But for all those who may rejoice at the killing of one they describe as a killer, there's another group quick to label the rejoicers themselves as killers.

A tweet from Markos Moulitsas of The Daily Kos wonders "Who'll be the next target of O'Reilly's and Beck's ire to get gunned down by domestic conservative terrorist?" Adele Stan has a blog entry on The Huffington Post captioned, "Tiller Murder: Ann Coulter's Happy Day?" And from David Zephyr at DemocraticUnderground.com, "Bill O'Reilly is Responsible for Tiller's Murder. The blood is on his hands."

Perhaps it's not too much to suggest a pause in the vitriol.

A man is dead. Whoever killed him, and whatever drove the killer to it, that's a salient fact, and one about which we ought to reflect.

In an altogether different murder case, many years ago, the evidence was overwhelming that the defendant was guilty of killing his ex-wife in front of something like seven young children. It was a horrible case. The community was outraged.

The young prosecutor, new to the job and sensing a winner, jumped up for closing argument, "Ladies and Gentlemen," he chirped to the jury, "We have terrific facts." He explained the evidence, how the jury had but one choice.

Defense counsel stood and walked slowly toward the jury. He looked down. He looked at his client. He looked at the jurors. "These aren't terrific facts. These are tragic facts."

They were. And they are.