1432 The Physics of Law

The words in the title are not out of order. Lawyers are among the leading physicists in America.  They take atomic and subatomic particles, rearrange them and turn lead into gold.

Eat your hearts out, alchemists.

Here’s what happens.

“A” is murdered.  “B” is suspected, arrested and charged.  Then the lawyers get to work.

You know how these cases go.  The defense makes a monster of someone who may have been the killer. Man into monster alchemy.

The defense admits “B” is not a saint, but is good to his children or his mother or was almost an Eagle Scout or worked in the soup kitchen and therefore couldn’t possibly have committed murder.

The prosecution will produce a fingerprint.  More magic.  The defense will say it’s only a 70% match.  The magic of diminished science.

The prosecution will use security cam video and the accused will suddenly appear at the crime scene.

The defense will say the videos have been altered.

This magic show will continue until half the jurors believe one side or the other has turned lead into gold.

Like modern day physicists, modern day lawyers work in the world of atomic and subatomic particles.  

Instead of cyclotrons and colliders, they use human powered wind machines, themselves.

Members of the jury are the peer reviewers academics depend on for reputation and confirmation.  Except the jury doesn’t have the credentials of a scholarly journal so they have to go on belief, the most volatile and unstable element on the periodic table.

Maybe the trial judge dozes off for ten seconds every once in awhile or is caught texting while the alchemists are on stage.  Grounds for appeal if “B” is convicted?

After a not guilty verdict, the defense alchemist passes out business cards.  “Hey! Let Whiplash Willie turn your lead rump into gold, too! Call 1800-4 Magic2.

At his sentencing, “B” will invoke the national anthem of the convicted, telling judge Snoozy: “I’m not a bad person.”

Yeah, probably, you are.  Not-bad-persons don’t commit murder.

Okay, alchemists, line up those protons and neutrons.  There’s always room for the wind accelerator at the appeals court.  

Shrapnel:

--Speaking of magic, the NYPD has made thousands of arrests and tickets disappear.  But they’ll soon tire of it.  So don’t try going 90 on 92nd street.

--Turning potential tickets into antimatter is the beat cops’ way of Charlie Hebdo-ing the mayor whom they believe is a key player in the Great Anti Police Conspiracy.  He isn’t.  He’s just taken too many public foot in mouth lessons from Biden or Bush.

--Cop wannabe George Zimmerman has been arrested again, this time for aggravated assault.  Police say he flung a wine bottle at his girlfriend in Seminole County, Florida.  Possibly after draining it mouthward.

Grapeshot:

-Question for Chris Christie: did you think you looked good in that orange sweater at the Cowboys game or are you just picking out a color for your minimum security jump suit.

-Question for the AP writer of this headline SEARCHERS HONE IN ON BLACK BOXES FROM AIRASIA PLANE: will you please learn the difference between “hone” and “home?”

-Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like hone.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1425 Walk Up to the Kind Policemen

Unruly minds make odd connections.

News item: Two cops are sitting in their prowl car in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.  It’s a chilly December day, but the window is open.

Guy ambles up, leans down a bit. Pulls out a gun.  Shoots the men dead.

And this brings to mind… what?

Irving Caesar, the songwriter whose Broadway credits include “No, No Nanette.”  

Huh?

Caesar wrote songs for children, too.  One of them was about remembering their names and addresses.

And a line went:

“... if some day, you lose your way

You know just what to do.

Walk up to the kind police man

The very first one you meet…

And simply say

You’ve lost your way

I cannot find my street…”

Walk up to the kind policeman, the very first one you meet.  And pull out your silver colored Taurus pistol with the nice caramel colored grips and get off a couple of rounds.

“Giving pigs wings,” is what vigilante Ismaaiyl Brinsley called it on Instagram, some days or hours before he pulled the trigger, bolted for the subway and once on the platform killed himself, saving the citizens of New York the fuss, muss and expense of a trial.

Revenge, he’d said, for the killing by police of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island.

Two dead cops.  Wenjian Liu, 32, a newlywed and Rafael Ramos, 40, a husband and father.

You want to try to explain this stuff to the widows and Ramos’ 13 year old son?  There is no way.

You want to try to explain this to the other 50 thousand cops and their support workers in the city?

They need no explanation.  They know what happened.

Fifty thousand men and women, equal to the entire population of Binghamton.  And every one of them thought and still is thinking the same thing: “That could have been me.” And all 50-thousand of them were right, it could have been.

Walk up to the kind policemen, the very first ones you meet and “avenge” the deaths of two other people you never heard of until the other day, didn’t know, wouldn’t have cared about if you did.

There’s a certain energy that happens after a crime that stuns.  Usually, it’s directed toward finding the stunner, arresting him and putting him on trial.

That usually is followed by rivers of speculation about how it could have happened and what to do to prevent repetition.

But this time, we know the shooter and he’s taken care of that first problem by eliminating it and himself.

The speculation is there, but not so much as it might be.  We know plenty about Brinsley’s background, his history, his test firing into the abdomen of his girlfriend a day before.

So where does the bottled up public energy go?  To finger pointing.

The head of the police union is out there on the streets blaming the people who demonstrated against cops after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. And he’s out there blaming the mayor.

The demonstrators caused a fracture behind the cozy relations between civilians and the kind policeman?

Wrong.  Bad blood between cop and civilian has been there for all time.  Everywhere.  Every. Where.

It’s going to be a long, cold winter.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1418 Choke Hold Justice

The cops’ lament: “If I did that, I’d be pounding a beat in Staten Island.”  

The Superior Officer version: “Keep it up, Bozo, and you’ll be pounding a beat in Staten Island.”

Never was much of an assignment. Still isn’t.

Does the white cop’s killing of a 350-400 pound asthmatic black man by using the departmentally banned choke hold rise to the level of the Ferguson shooting death? Or is it even worse?  Doesn’t matter.  Each is bad enough.

After three months of testimony, a grand jury elected Wednesday not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo who has something of a history of not being indicted in lesser but similar cases.

Eric Garner, 43,  was accused of selling single untaxed cigarettes --  they call them loosies on the street -- at a Staten Island corner.  Others say he was breaking up a fight.  Garner is forever unavailable for comment.

Here’s the video .

So, how long before the character assassinations begin?  Was Garner really a “gentle giant” and neighborhood peacemaker who was selling loosies to people who can’t afford to pay retail at New York’s outrageous $12 to $14 a pack? A Pack?!  The city tax is higher than the cost of cigarettes.

But the penalty for unauthorized untaxed sales at street level usually is a fine, not death.

There are demonstrations from coast to coast and there will be more.  So far it doesn’t look like anyone’s looting or burning.  Probably by the time it all ends, there will be a few new unpaid for TV sets and iPods and maybe some canned goods in a few homes.

But New York, Los Angeles and Seattle are not some no-horse town in the Low IQ belt.

Here, we find demonstrations from the Brooklyn Bridge and Staten Island to midtown at the Rock Center Christmas tree lighting and Grand Central to the West Side Highway and up to Harlem.

As well we should.

The mayor, with a multi-racial family, gets up and speaks with great passion and love, but without condemning the grand jury action.

Huckster Al Sharpton seems legit for ten minutes.

Attorney General Holder announces a federal civil rights investigation.

Wrongful death lawyers gather, salivating.

And the defense?  If Garner had been shot dead, the officer’s would be “I was just cleaning the gun and it went off.” or “I didn’t know it was loaded.”

But there was no gun.  So the defense becomes “I meant him no harm.”  Say what?  One guy, piled on by a bunch of cops one of whom has him in a choke hold?  For selling cigarettes on a street corner?

If he even was doing that.

There’s strong evidence the cops in the incident and Garner knew each other.  If so, the police knew they could have talked down the situation instead of piling on.

You -- whoever you are, wherever you are -- could have talked things down.

The choke hold around the neck of justice.

Shrapnel:

--Note to squeegee men: if Garner’s offense was the kind of crime Bratton’s NYPD is focused on as it was in the Giuliani days, take a few weeks off.  Same goes for you, turnstile jumpers.  And jaywalkers.

--RIP Herman Badillo who has died of congestive heart failure at age 85.  He was the first Puerto Rican- born member of congress among much else.  But he never managed to realize his dream: becoming Mayor.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1406 A Speed Limit to Die For

Okay, please take a seat because you’re not going to believe this when you read it.  And it’s possible you’ll fall over when you do.

All set?

Good.

As of today, the speed limit on the streets of New York has been reduced to 25 miles an hour from 30.

Take some time to finish laughing.

All done?  Good.

Now, when was the last time you managed to go 25, let alone 30?

Right:  It was when you took your spouse, nearly 10-months pregnant, to the maternity ward at 3 on a Monday morning in 1968.  Or when you drove your thoroughly soused husband home to Bayside at about the same time the same number of years ago.

The de Blasio administration wants to reduce pedestrian accidents.  Failing to convince people to not cross in front of oncoming buses, they’ve done the next best thing.

On those rare moments that you can do 30, you’re going to do it.  And that includes times when there is a police cruiser directly behind you.

Granted, there are streets of death in every borough.  But did it ever occur to the Lords of Traffic “Control” to reduce the speed limit on those roads, while leaving the rest alone?

Queens Boulevard.  Flatbush Avenue.  Pelham Parkway.  Places where you actually can take your foot off the brake for 10 or 15 seconds at a time.  That’s where they should be reducing speed.

Even Park Avenue in Midtown or any other really really wide street would make sense, though not between 6am and midnight on weekdays.

You could raise the speed limit to 80 on any side street in Manhattan and it would make no difference.

And that includes even the big ones… 14th, 34th, 42nd, 57th, 72nd, all the way up to 125th.

How about some of the curvaceous streets or the ones that make odd bends or go off into unexpected directions?

Trying to save the lives of unwitting bus magnet pedestrians makes perfect sense, even if for no other reason that accidents slow things at street level.  But lowering the speed limit on practically any road in the five boroughs doesn’t.

Note, this does not affect the highways.

But it’s almost as dumb as minimum speed limits on the Long Island Expressway.  “Minimum Speed 40 MPH,” the signs say.  They could write them in tiny type because chances are you’ll be stalled next to one long enough to read it thoroughly.  Maybe even twice.

Shrapnel:

--There are 13-thousand signaled intersections in New York City.  Many of them have timed traffic lights which theoretically -- and even sometimes even actually -- allow you to travel the avenues without stopping.  The new speed limit will mean they’ll have to reprogram all the lights and you can bet that’s not going to be done in any kind of a hurry.

--The timed lights work for you at the speed limit.  They work at double the speed limit.  But do they work at half?

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014