Death's a funny thing. And I don't mean ha-ha funny (though which of us could stifle a laugh when James Cameron inflicted blunt emotional trauma on a computer-generated passenger in Titanic by having her fall onto one of that grand ship's propellers and tumble end over end to her icy demise?). I mean it makes people act funny in that crazy-if-poor/eccentric-if-rich kind of way.
Take the case of Michael Bruce Ross, a Connecticutian condemned to die. He has decided to stop appealing and face his punishment. Sounds reasonable enough, but it has spun up positively a tizzy in this small state already rocked by gubernatorial resignations and cancer.
Catch-22: some people think he's stopping his appeals not out of a recognition of guilt, but a desire to commit suicide by bureaucracy. Of course, suicide is illegal, so if this is why he's doing it, then we can't kill him.
Catch-23: Apparently T.R. Paulding (a man I can only imagine, from his name, resembles an egg in shape and gait), Mr. Ross's lawyer, is not a good attorney. You see, a good attorney would have exhausted all his appeals, done research, established his client's sanity before this point, and so Mr. Ross could be executed without hold-up. But the chief federal judge in Connecticut chewed out Mr. Paulding for errors that I'm guessing are legalistic and mundane in detail. This means that Mr. Paulding can no longer represent the dead man walking. Which means Ross has no counsel. And so can't be executed. The end result being that the only kind of lawyer who can save your life is not a Harvard Law, Yale undergrad lawyer. Instead, if you want to get off scot-free, you should hire an alcoholic child-beater with a sub-clinical case of kleptomania who is more likely to be passed out in a bar than to pass the bar exam.
No comments:
Post a Comment