Annals of Injustice
Richard Rosario is in year 18 of a 25-to-life sentence for murder, even though 13 alibi witnesses have tried to tell authorities that he was with them—1,000 miles away—at the time of the crime. (Among the 13 are a sheriff’s deputy, a pastor and a federal corrections officer.) The “evidence” against him: Two “eyewitnesses” in New York City had picked him out of a mug shot book. Rosario had given police names, addresses and phone numbers of the 13 people in Florida, but so far, everyone (except NBC’s “Dateline”) has ignored the list, including Rosario's court-appointed lawyers. As is often the case, appeals court judges (state and federal) have trusted the eyewitnesses and the “process.” (In November, “Dateline” located nine of the 13, who are still positive Rosario was in Deltona, Fla., on the day of the murder.)
The Continuing Crisis
■ Disappointed: (1) Cornelius Jefferson, 33, was arrested for assaulting a woman in Laurel County, Ky., in October after he had moved there from Georgia to be with her following an online relationship. Jefferson explained that he was frustrated that the woman was not “like she was on the Internet.” (2) In November, an unnamed groom in Medinah, Saudi Arabia, leaped to his feet at the close of the wedding, shocked at his first glimpse of his new bride with her veil pulled back. Said he (according to the daily Okaz), “You are not the girl I had imagined. I am sorry, but I divorce you.”
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■ The recovery rate is about 70% for the 1,200 injured birds brought for treatment each year to the Brinzal owl-rescue park near Madrid, Spain—with acupuncture as the center’s specialty treatment. Brinzal provides “physical and psychological rehabilitation” so that eagle owls, tawny owls and the rest can return to the wild, avoiding predators by being taught, through recordings of various wild screeches, which animals are enemies. However, the signature therapy remains the 10 weekly pressure-point sessions of acupuncture.
Suspicions Confirmed
Even though one state requires 400 hours of training just to become a professional manicurist, for instance, most states do not demand nearly such effort to become armed security guards, according to a CNN/Center for Investigative Reporting analysis released in December. Fifteen states require no firearms training at all; 46 ignore mental health status; nine do not check the FBI’s criminal background database; and 27 states fail to ascertain whether an applicant is banned by federal law from even carrying a gun. (After an ugly incident in Arizona in which a juvenile gun offender was hired as a guard, the state added a box on its form for applicants to “self-report” the federal ban—but still refuses to use the FBI database.)
People Different From Us
Cry for Help: Calvin Nicol, 31, complained that he was obviously the victim of a “hate crime” when thugs beat him up in Ottawa, Ontario, on Nov. 1—just because he is intensely tattooed and pierced, with black-inked eyes, a split tongue and implanted silicone horns on his forehead. (Though “hate” may have been involved, so far “body modification” is not usually covered in anti-discrimination laws. However, Nicol suggested one legal angle when he explained that “piercing myself and changing my appearance, and making me look like the person I want to look like is almost a religious experience to me.”)
Least Competent Criminals
(1) Three women, whose ages ranged from 24 to 41, were charged with larceny on Black Friday in Hadley, Mass., when they were caught in the Walmart parking lot loaded down with about $2,700 worth of allegedly shoplifted goods. The women had moments earlier begged a Walmart employee for help getting into their car—because they had locked themselves out. (2) Michael Rochefort, 38, and Daniel Gargiulo, 39, were merely burglary suspects in Palm Beach County, Fla., on Sept. 25, but sheriff’s deputies’ case against them soon strengthened. While being detained in the back seat of a patrol car (and despite a video camera pointed at them), they conversed uninhibitedly about getting their alibis straight.
© 2014 CHUCK SHEPHERD