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Politics : Right Wing Extremist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (10165)	6/17/2001 2:36:05 PM
From: Father Terrence	Respond to of 59480

DNA Evidence Clears Man After 22 Years In Prison For Murder 6-17-1 LAUDERDALE, Florida (AFP) - A mentally disabled man who served almost 22 years in prison for six murders and a rape, none of which he had committed, walked out of prison a free man Saturday after officials dropped all charges against him. Jerry Frank Townsend, 49, had been ordered released from prison the previous day by Judge Scott Silverman, just 24 hours after the district attorney of Miami-Dade County dropped charges against him in the murder of two women and the rape of a third in the late 1970s. Townsend, who functions mentally as an eight-year old, had already been cleared in May of four other murders in Florida's Broward County. In two of those cases, DNA testing established his innocence, while in two others it was found that police had induced his video-taped confession. Attorney Bruce Little, who more than 20 years ago had defended Townsend, an African American, in court, said the confessions were coerced by police eager for convictions in the highly publicized cases. "He had a childlike demeanor," Little said. "He'd do anything to be someone's friend, even telling them he did things that he really didn't do." Townsend was to spend a few days in a central Florida hotel with his mother, sister and daughter before making any permanent plans, said his uncle, Frank Jones. In Miami-Dade, he had entered guilty pleas for the two murders and the rape after his attorneys told him he could avoid the death penalty if he did so. The Broward convictions were dropped by prosecutors in April after DNA tests linked two of the murders to another man, Eddie Lee Mosley, who has been in a state psychiatric hospital since 1988. The cases against Townsend, who was once thought to be a prolific serial killer, began to fall apart last year when a Florida police detective discovered DNA evidence in one of the cases, the rape and murder of Sonja Yvette Marion, 13. The tests found the DNA was not Townsend's. The exoneration cast doubt on the rest of his convictions, and further investigation indicated Townsend was led by detectives to make his confessions. As a result of the controversy over how police and prosecutors obtained guilty pleas or verdicts against Townsend, a review has been ordered of the cases of all 29 Death Row inmates from Broward County. In May, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, brother of US President George W. Bush, signed a law allowing convicted criminals to request DNA testing. California, Oklahoma, Arizona and New York already have similar laws.

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (10165)	6/17/2001 2:39:55 PM
From: Father Terrence	Respond to of 59480

Here's a nicely controversial piece... McVeigh Took Lessons From US Foreign Policy By Howard Zinn tompaine.com Howard Zinn is an historian and author of A People's History of the United States. 6-17-1 Now that Timothy McVeigh has been put to death, and some people's need for revenge or punishment may be satisfied, we can begin to think calmly of how he learned his twisted sense of right and wrong from the government that executed him. No one with an ounce of moral understanding can justify the bombing of a building which resulted in the deaths of 168 people. But McVeigh didn't have to look far to find that the United States government had done just that, but on a larger scale. In the war against Iraq, of which McVeigh was a decorated veteran, on February 15, 1991, the U.S. Air Force dropped a bomb on an air raid shelter in Baghdad, killing over 600 people, many of them women and children. There had been many bombings, of buses, trains, highways, hospitals, neighborhoods, in which civilians were killed, and where the government described them as accidents. Of course, they were not quite accidents, because if you drop huge numbers of bombs on a city, it is inevitable that innocent people will die. However, in the case of the air raid shelter, the United States conceded that the bombing was deliberate. and justified this by the claim that the air raid shelter was a "communications" site. Reporters going into the rubble immediately after the bombing found not the slightest evidence of that. And even if it were, would that justify a massacre (there's no other name for it) of hundreds of men, women and children? If McVeigh had not been in the infantry but in the Air Force, and had dropped that bomb, killing more than twice the number he killed in Oklahoma, he would be alive and perhaps have another medal pinned to his chest. In defending his bombing of the federal building, with all those dead and wounded, McVeigh used the term "collateral damage", exactly the words used by our government to describe the deaths of civilians in our bombing of various countries, whether Iraq or Panama or Yugoslavia. My Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines "collateral" as "accompanying or related, but secondary or subordinate". Both McVeigh and the leaders of the United States government considered the toll of human life secondary to whatever else was destroyed, and therefore acceptable. McVeigh is no longer able to let his demented notion of morality lead to any more deaths. The United States government, on the other hand, is very much alive, and capable of more and more bombings -- like the ones taking place almost every day in Iraq -- and the civilian deaths will be justified once more as "collateral" damage. The day after Timothy McVeigh's execution, the Boston Herald ran a banner headline on its front page: "IT'S OVER!" But it is not over. Terrorism is the killing of innocent people in order "to send a message" (those are McVeigh's words and also the words of government spokesmen when our planes have bombed some foreign city). So long as our government engages in terrorism, claiming always that it is done for "democracy" or "freedom" or "to send a message" to some other government, there will be more Timothy McVeighs, following the example. No, it is not over. Individual acts of terrorism will continue, and that will be called -- rightly -- fanaticism. Government terrorism, on a much larger scale, will continue, and will be called "foreign policy". That is the perverted sense of morality which now rules and will go on ruling, until Americans decide that all terrorism is wrong and will not be tolerated.