So, this poor guy gets arrested for running a horse-racing operation (recall our earlier post about malum per se and malum prohibitum), and for his trouble gets 164 years, deferred.
I’ll repeat that.
164 years, deferred.
So, if he keeps his nose clean for the next 164 years, can he get his record expunged?
Or, if he should die, get reincarnated, and then get in trouble, will the state move for an accelerated sentence?
Just wonderin’, is all.
Absolutely NOT
Hillary: But only because she’s horrible in every conceivable way.
Edwards: Though I didn’t believe it was possible, nearly as bad as HRC.
Obama: Seems genuine and not power hungry. Like the current President, however, I don’t see that he has anything to commend him to the office, and he strikes me as just another ‘government is the solution’ democrat.
Huckabee: Potential health Nazi; Goofy last name.
Giuliani: He might fool the National Right-to-Life Committee, but not me. Fails the Walker Test.
Christopher Dodd: To his eternal credit, has a genuinely sharp sense of humor. On the downside, he’s just another (you should forgive the phrase) bullshit liberal.
Eh, Maybe
Bill Richardson: Seems to have a lot of non-political, real-live common sense. One of the few democrats in the race not fully committed to outdated, quasi-socialist economic policy. Wants to scrap NCLB, and isn’t anti second amendment. Not bad.
Mitt Romney: I don’t have a problem with the fact that he’s Mormon, but I’m a little disturbed that he’s named after athletic equipment.
John McCain: Clearly the best human being out of the whole bunch. Passes the Walker Test
Fred Thompson: A bit too ‘hardass conservative’ for me. But, if he gets Sam Waterston to run as his VP, I’m in.
Definitely
Stephen Colbert: Apparently not running though.
James Madison: Same problem.
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I like Justice O’Connor much better as a retired judge than a sitting one:
WASHINGTON (AP) – Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said Wednesday that she’d do away with electing judges and make prosecutors and defense lawyers interchangeable as a way of improving the U.S. justice system.
She’s absolutely right on both accounts. Running for office means accepting money from individuals and interest groups. Which can’t help but lead to judges who are not impartial. What a completely unacceptable way to run the courts. I can barely believe there is even any such thing as an elected judiciary anymore.
As for prosecutors and public defenders being interchangeable, it works for the Judge Advocate Corps in the military justice system, it would surely work in the civilian courts. Prosecutors tend to lose sight of the fact that their job is to procure justice, not to rack up as many convictions as possible; public defenders are the proverbial red-headed stepchild of the justice system – working with sub-standard budgets, while having to defend the poorest of the poor. How is this a fair system?
Let’s even the playing field by having one entity responsible for both sides of the courtroom. A well-funded, highly motivated group of competent attorneys who come to work every morning not knowing if their next assignment is prosecuting or defending. It’s brilliant.
Who do you think would have a tougher time with the change, by the way? The dedicated, idealistic public defender; or the hard-nosed, tough-on-crime prosecutor? it would be worth doing just for entertainment value, frankly. But more importantly it would make for a more equitable system.
I think Stephen Colbert is the only candidate for president who can pass the Walker Test.
The Walker Test, as you probably don’t know because I just now made it up, goes something like this:
“The more a candidate covets the office, the less qualified he or she is to hold that office”
According to the Walker Test, Stephen Colbert, who doesn’t really want to be president, is therefore perfectly qualified.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, should be impeached now.
I know this sounds terribly counter-intuitive, but I’m against compulsory education.
In fact I’ll go a step further, and posit that compulsory education is one of the key flaws that is ruining our educational system.
For starters, the very idea that you should have to compel someone to get an education is irrational. The idea that there is some danger that vast numbers of parents will decide they that don’t want their children to be educated is equally so. If their is one constant in human history, it is the desire of people to learn. If their is one constant in American culture, it is that people want their children to be educated.
Yet, despite these undeniable truths, our public schools are filled with an significant number of young people who show no desire to take part in the educational activities they are presented with on a daily basis. These children, being children, are almost sure to become bored, and when bored, disruptive. It’s just a child’s nature to be that way.
Ask any public school teacher you know, and they will tell you one of the top problems they have is the sheer number of disruptive students, over whom they have little to no control. It is impossible to educate a class of 25 children if two or three of those children are acting out and interrupting class.
Not difficult . . . impossible.
So, how do we go from a Universally acknowledged human characteristic like the unquenchable thirst for knowledge, all the way to kids who have no desire to pay attention in school who ruin things for everybody?
Really, how did we ever manage to turn education into something that is intolerable and burdensome to so many children?
First off, we’ve turned education into a right, instead of a privilege. This inherently changes the dynamic of going to school. Instead of education being something to aspire to, it is now seen as something to survive. Even for good students, school isn’t, normally speaking, the joyous experience it should be. It is rather a 12 year bootcamp that must be endured to get to all the ‘good stuff’ life has to offer, like college, a job, marriage, etc.
Well, sure, you would have to make something like that compulsory, wouldn’t you?
So I propose a two-pronged solution: First, a complete and thorough re-thinking of why and how we educate children. Probably the first thing we should examine is why we would ever in our right minds leave such a vital task in the hands of a government monopoly. A few moments reflection will leave most sensible people with the realization that this is nothing short of insane. If you need any proof at all, find out where the huge majority of top-level government officials send their children to school.
Washington DC Public schools? Not a chance. They go outside the monopoly, as only the elite can do, and send their children to places like Sidwell Friends School (Chelsea Clinton went there when she lived in the White House ,yet her parents are against school choice. Hmm….)
The second prong is to make education a privilege again. If we insist on making education public, then let the ‘public’ part end with providing the funds for education, not the education itself. Apart from that, don’t make it compulsory. Let parents and children decide when, where, and if they want to go to school. Do you honestly think there are many people who won’t jump at the chance to put their kids in school, rather than have them stay at home playing Nintendo? Do you really think there are any kids at all who won’t want to get an education, once we’ve abolished the ‘one size fits all’ model of traditional public schools?
I never met a student, in all my years of teaching, who really and truly didn’t want to learn. But I met many who just aren’t meant for the traditional classroom, with desks, and pencils, and no talking, and scantron tests. It’s a crime to make kids like that suffer through our public school system. Those kids aren’t’ stupid, and they’re not troublemakers. They’ve merely been betrayed by the system.
I’ve taught in plenty of classrooms where “those kids” made trouble. I know for a fact they’re smart, yet bored. They are ill-served by the schools they’re forced to attend, and until they are treated like individuals and not serial numbers, they’ll keep acting up and keep driving teachers crazy. But that won’t do anybody a bit of good.
Let’s explore different types of schooling, and serve all the kids out there, instead of only some. Then we’ll find that the idea of compulsory education was never needed in the first place.
I was discussing with a colleague today the proposition that there are too many good young lawyers and not enough good young teachers. The implication was that maybe some of the bright young people who become lawyers should instead become teachers.
I’d like to agree with that thought, but I can’t. Yet.
I taught in the public schools of Oklahoma for 14 years, and I counsel my former students not to go in to education as a career. I certainly couldn’t counsel them to choose a masters in education over a law degree.
I should be able to, but I can’t. Not in good conscience.
The reason isn’t that teaching isn’t an admirable, honorable profession. Of course it is. It’s probably the most admirable and honorable of all professions. But the way education is run in this country, at this point in our history, teachers are not only undervalued, they’re treated as little more than unskilled wage-slaves.
Ask many a good teacher what they hate most about the profession, and they’ll say “I don’t get to do much teaching anymore”. Most of my days were spent in some combination of crowd control, pointless meetings, and standardized test preparation. Very little actual teaching. In fact, for the two years I coached football, I did more pure teaching on the practice field than I ever did in the classroom.
It’s time to rethink public education from the ground up. We’re stuck with the system we’ve inherited, not the one we would choose. What needs to be done is a total reboot of the system. Let’s sit down and ask ourselves “If we could design an educational system from step one, what would it look like?” Then, we need to build that system. It may not be the same for everyone. In fact I would hope it would end up as a system of vastly different types of schools. Children are not interchangeable, yet every town in every state has schools that are essentially identical, as if there were really one model of education that is appropriate for all. That’s nonsense. If we could do that, then I’d beg my former students, and anyone else who would listen, to go into education.
And, the same thing goes for the way we train teachers. Schools of education are anything but. I’m not completely sure we need education degrees for teachers. Rather, I think we need teachers with good educations, in whatever discipline. If that was the requirement, then we’d have as many qualified teachers than we could ever need or want. It matters very little whether an educated person has ever taken a course in Audio/Visuals or Unit Preparation.
Think of the smartest person you know. If a university wanted them to teach, they would have but to hire them. But if a local high school wanted the same thing . . . no luck. Unless the smartest person you know just happens to have a teaching degree and a license from the state. There’s no sense in that.
Next post, I’ll talk about the one thing I think we could do with the current system that would help immeasurably to salvage many a school. It’s probably not what you’re guessing, either.
(Getty Images)
This is a photo of a Pakistani lawyer being beaten by police for protesting the imposition of Emergency Rule by President Musharraf.
It’s not a photo of some random lawyer who got mad and decided to protest. Rather, the first line of protest to what amounts to Martial Law in Pakistan has been from the Legal Community. Lawyers are out there in numbers, protesting.
Not college students. Not legislators. Not housewives.
Lawyers. On the first wave.
I wonder if we in the Oklahoma Bar would do the same under similar circumstances.
Not that I envy the guy catching a beating like that, but, I hope we would.
I actually have first hand knowledge of this case, as I was a juror in the original trial, not the second trial referred to in Mr. Autry’s contempt case.
The defendant, Ben Crider, murdered his step-daughter, Crystal Dittmeyer, and disposed of the body, which to this day has never been found. The guilty verdict decided by myself and the other jurors was subsequently overturned in a horrible decision by the Court of Criminal Appeals, citing the use of novel scientific evidence by the prosecution. For some reason the Court’s decision was deemed “not for publication”, but here it is anyway, thanks to the good folks at the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System.
The scientific evidence, used to identify a bite mark on Crider’s arm, may have been novel, but it certainly wasn’t reversible error. Everyone on the jury, indeed, everyone in the courtroom knew it was bite mark, and everyone knew who made it. From a juror’s view it was harmless error, if it really was error at all.
So, after Mr. Autry torpedoed Crider’s second trial, the then-District Attorney, Wes Lane, decided not to pursue a new trial, citing inconsistency in one of his key witness’s testimony. Mr. Lane got Crider to plead guilty to 2nd degree manslaughter, and he was set free after being sentenced to time served.
You might think that Mr. Lane would have insisted that Crider tell authorities where Crystal’s body is, so the poor girl could have a decent Christian burial after all these years of being stuffed in a hole somewhere. Mr. Lane didn’t.
So, to sum up: Crystal’s body is still out there somewhere; Ben Crider is free as a bird, somewhere in Kentucky; and David Autry owes the the State of Oklahoma 500 bucks.
It’s a funny old system of justice, ain’t it?
David Autry, by the way, is an absolutely brilliant defense attorney. If I was accused of murder, he’s the guy I would want sitting at the table with me at trial. Ben Crider was guilty as hell, but David Autry, eventually, got him off the hook.
Crystal Dittmeyer was unavailable for comment.
Add me to the list of people who have no intention of obeying Oklahoma’s new draconian, racist immigration law. What, you think I’m going to start asking people for their papers? Like this was North Korea, or China, or Cuba?
Thank you, but no.
I may actually go out and FIND illegal immigrants, and give them a ride wherever they want to go, or let them stay at the house for a few months, just to stick it to the man.
Further, I’m going to write my state representative and urge him to introduce a bill, making it legal for any American citizen of Hispanic heritage, if asked for proof of citizenship, to kick the person who asks square in the nuts.
I’m going to call it the “Citizenship Verification Act of 2007″.
