From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
February 13, 2010, 09:26 PM ET
Slain Department Head Supported Accused Killer’s Tenure Bid
By Thomas Bartlett
From the Chronicle of Higher Education
Huntsville, Ala.—The chairman of the biology department at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, Gopi K. Podila, had supported the tenure bid of Amy Bishop, the biology professor who has been accused of killing him and two other professors and critically injuring two more.
The whole thing lives here.
Charged in death of wife and unborn child.
Man charged with capital murder
By The Associated Press
February 5, 2010 – 8:48amOLATHE — An Overland Park man faces a capital murder charge in the death of his pregnant wife.
The Kansas City Stare [sic] reports that prosecutors filed the capital murder charge Thursday against 30-year-old Jason Cott. It is based on the deaths of Angela Cott and her unborn child.
Cott is accused of stangling his 29-year-old wife in January and dumping her body along a Miami County highway.
Thursday’s filing means Cott could face the death penalty. Or prosecutors could pursue two counts of first-degree murder, which is punishable by life without parole for 50 years.
The Kansas City Star reports that Mr. and Mrs. Cott had a difficult marriage, and Mrs. Cott obtained a protective order against her husband at one point. The judge in the case dismissed the order at the request of both parties after less than a month.
Kansas has something called Alexa’s Law, which makes it a capital offense to kill a pregnant woman. (A legislative summary lives here in .pdf form with the details.) Since the law puts two major progressive/leftist causes back in play, specifically the legal status of products of conception and the whole idea of executing criminals, we’re waiting to see who comes forward to say Mr. Cott should live out the remainder of his days at the expense of the taxpayers.
Incidentally, discerning readers will keep in mind that all persons mentioned as having been charged with crimes are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. That’s just how we do things around here.
The No Guns sticker is used to prevent firearms violence across the United States.
“Whatever the [Violence Policy Center]’s intent may be, the gun control group indirectly concludes that black communities must be disarmed” So says Bob Owen at Pajamas Media. He continues:
The VPC and the left-wing foundations that bankroll it have decided that black-on-black crime is unacceptably high, and they believe the best way to handle that is to make it more difficult for African-Americans to legally obtain handguns. The VPC refuses to even touch on the cultural issues that are the most significant variable in the massive discrepancy between the rate of black homicide victims (20.86 per 100,000) and white homicide victims (3.11 per 100,000). The VPC also won’t acknowledge that the vast majority of African-American homicide victims are murdered by young African-American men. Identifying, targeting, and removing the cultural factors that most specifically contribute to this problem would seem to be the most responsible way to decrease the excessive violence rates, but the VPC’s goal clearly isn’t problem resolution. … The goal of the Violence Policy Center in this report is the goal of the group in every report it has ever issued: an erosion of gun rights for all Americans, with the ultimate goal being the prohibition of all firearms save those under state control. Towards that totalitarian end, the VPC does not seem to have any qualms about advocating a return to racist policies that left African-American communities helpless targets for most of a century. Nor does Sugarman or his group explain how disarming law-abiding blacks will make them anything other than victims for those that refuse to follow existing prohibitions against murder.
More about the Violence Policy Center lives here.
We’ve believed for years that most of the really pernicious racism in this country comes from the progressive/left. It doesn’t get much notice, largely because it goes along with the elite’s general contempt for the masses and merges into a larger, misanthropic orientation. The conservative=racist trope is a convenient way of demonizing political opponents without having to bother with constitutional or factual niceties.
Kansas recently enacted concealed-carry legislation, which allows law-abiding citizens to get permits to carry firearms. Our Attorney General has information about the permits, along with a list of links to regulations and forms, here.
It took 12 of Scott Roeder’s peers 37 minutes to convict him of premeditated, first degree murder. The story will be all over the Internet in a few minutes, probably in variations of the Associated Press report in the New York Daily News:
WICHITA, Kan. – A man who said he killed prominent Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in order to save the lives of unborn children was convicted Friday of murder.
The jury deliberated for just 37 minutes before finding Scott Roeder, 51, of Kansas City, Mo., guilty of premeditated, first-degree murder in the May 31 shooting death.
He faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years when he is sentenced March 9. Prosecutor Nola Foulston said she would pursue a so-called “Hard 50″ sentence, which would require Roeder to serve at least 50 years before he can be considered for parole.
Tiller’s widow, Jeanne, and the rest of the family quickly exited the courtroom after the verdict. In a statement, Jeanne Tiller said “once again, a Sedwick County jury has reached a just verdict.”
We don’t argue with that. Mr. Roeder confessed to walking up to Dr. Tiller and shooting him in the head. Moreover, he did in front of multiple witnesses who testified to that effect during the trial. We’re not so sure about the part about his “legacy of service to women, the help he provided for those who needed it and the love and happiness he provided [the Tiller family]as a husband, father and grandfather.” But then, what else would they say? Our guess is that Saddam Hussein was saddened at the deaths of his sons.
Mr. Roeder will, of course, not be eligible for the death penalty. That would have required “aggravating circumstances” which were not found to be present, although we’re pretty sure that if they had been there the prosecutor would have found them. After 25 years, Mr. Roeder will be about 76 years old before he meets the parole board. If the judge imposes a “hard 50″ sentence, as the prosecutors have asked, he will be 101. Not that that is a comforting thought. Mr. James von Brunn was 89 years old when, the police tell us, he shot up the Holocaust Museum in Washington. He died in aFederal prison hospital in North Carolina, awaiting trial.
