Recently in Crime and punishment Category

I agree with Earl that the prohibition experience shows why it's pointless to ban certain substances. I often favor a society in which government allows people to do any thing, while culture encourages people to do the right thing.

I don't "get" pot and I never liked pot. But I've also seen, based on my Muslim teetotalling background, how counterproductive it is to ban a popular substance, since a) it pushes it underground, turning ordinary people into criminals, and b) it adds to its popularity by giving it a compellingly rogue quality.

It's the same reason I side with the Amethyst Initiative folks in seeking to lower the drinking age: Making something off limits often guarantees it'll be inordinately coveted by those who aren't given permission to have it. Hmm, maybe marriage falls in that category too....

John and Diane make some fascinating claims about how small town in Georgia became safer when officials forced everyone to keep a gun at home.

I'm puzzled that two people like them would be so willing to gloss over the government telling people what to do. But I'll let that pass. The truth is that the Kennesaw, Georgia law was a knee-jerk reaction to a handgun ban in Morton Grove, Ill.

Some have demonstrated that the evidence in favor of gun ownership in Kennesaw is lacking. It does seem that both sides have gamed the stats in their favor, which any intellectually honest person ought to be able to expect.

Given my own biases, I'll admit I'm not sure that you can get a good sense of the effect of gun laws by comparing crime in a 20,000-person town in Georgia to that in larger surrounding towns. It seems reasonable that burglary would go down when would-be-perpetrators realize that they could get shot; but I always figured that burglars tend to be sure that adults have left a house before breaking in.

And even if I concede those points to John and Diane, I'm curious if they're as resistant as the NRA is to at least banning the most dangerous assault-type weapons that clearly don't serve the immediate household needs of the Joneses or the Smiths.

John, as for my comment about an American overenthusiasm for turning people into criminals, I cite last week's Lexington column in the somewhat libertarian Economist, which argues, "America's incarceration habit is a disgrace, wasting resources at home and damaging the country abroad."

And this week's Lexington happens to ponder the Virginia Tech anniversary:

Advocates of gun control, such as The Economist, took the opportunity to reiterate their opposition to guns. Despite a history of mental illness, the killer had had no trouble buying two semi-automatic pistols and several kilos of ammunition. Had he been refused, innocent lives might have been spared. Not so, argued the pro-gun pundits: the real problem was that students were not allowed guns on campus to defend themselves....

Armed students do sometimes subdue school shooters. Ms Roy lists examples. Whether more guns on campus would lead to fewer deaths, as some claim, or more, as others insist, is impossible to prove. There are too many confounding factors, and too few school shootings, thank heavens. In any case, the gun nuts' thesis is unlikely to be tested. Few teachers would feel comfortable in a gun-filled classroom. How do you give an "F" grade to an armed adolescent?

That's what I like about the free-market crowd that's not drenched in American partisanship. There's some give and take there, on taxes, on regulations, on foreign policy. It's suppleness over dogma.

Gail-Tzipporah says she is "not in favor of gun control because I know that all the law-abiding citizens will be the ones holed up in their own homes while the all loose cannons will be out there shooting anything they can find."

But that's already the case, isn't it? I'm not aware of any mass-shootings that have been averted on account of a little old lady from Chatsworth whipping out her handgun and plugging a villain before he unleashes fury.

America is looser with gun controls and tighter with incarceration than other industrialized nations. We are unrivaled in turning ordinary citizens into criminals, and those folks are the ones most likely to get a gun, once they've been returned to a society that ruined their name. That does not help you or me or the little old lady in Chatsworth.

I'm fascinated by Earl seeing a link between politics Illinois-style and politics L.A.-style. At first I'm tempted to differentiate between a guy brazenly selling a seat for personal gain and a PAC giving money for influence. But the key here is that money and power and influence do go together.

We're okay with that, to an extent. The Supreme Court says that spending money on politics is a form of free speech, in many cases. But drawing the line is harder than it might seem.

I worked a few years in the mortgage industry, where it was natural for lenders to competitively woo brokers through wine and song. In the legal profession, that sort of conduct would have been a scandalous conflict of interest. And looking back at how mortgages turned out, we should have been more like the lawyers. Our society is still rife with conflicts of interest, and we could all do well to see a little of ourselves in Blagovayovagebecic or whatzizname.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that some civil libertarians and legal experts believe that an L.A. jury's verdicts against Lori Drew will "chill" Internet speech.

I normally am all about the first amendment, but I think Internet speech can afford to be chilled. One expert says that this could dampen America's long history of anonymous free speech. But the Internet has taken it to a different level, making it easy for anyone around the world to harass someone else. There does have to be some accountability. And let's bear in mind that Drew wasn't found guilty of any felonies, just misdemeanors.

I credit Gail-Tzipporah for not trying to get people fired for bigotry, and I've written several op-eds in recent years decrying the overabundance of PC in our society. And yet...

Sarah Palin recently fumed that her own provocative "freedom of speech" about Obama being a terrorist-coddler was being threatened by journalists who called out her demagoguery. Nope. I'm just mirroring your "freedom of speech" with my freedom to shun you for what you speak. It works for both sides of the aisle, as when a San Francisco DJ was fired this week for a rant against Joe the Plumber.

I wrote a column several years ago in which I called for Muslims to drive out those who express hatred as vigorously as American society has begun to punish our own Marge Schotts for public bigotry. That column ran in the very conservative, very un-PC Wall Street Journal.

Again, I laud Gail-T's bigness about bigotry, and I think it's a good model for other minorities. But Buck Burnette crossed a line, yelling "N" at a virtual Klan rally. The Texas coaches weren't required to boot him, but they're certainly entitled to.

...for Obama. Yes, that amounts to an admission that I was wrong in my previous many months of predicting that McCain would win, despite polls and prevailing trends. I simply had felt that McCain would come across as a more reassuringly "American" candidate at a time that America is feeling anxious about its place in the world.

The economy's nose dive is helping Obama, as we all know. And in the pres and vp debates, he and Biden have outperformed Team GOP, laying waste to the notion that they are "wet behind the ears" novices.

The media seem oblivious to this fact, which is why their post-debate analysis is unwatchable. So cowed are they by conservative hammering of their biases that they can't call what the American public is calling in virtually every survey: Obama and Biden show the commanding presences and savvy intellects that instill confidence in most any species of mammal. I'm puzzled and amused by how media "experts" attempt to achieve balance by refusing to admit that the Dem candidates are winning these debates.

McCain needed to show that he was clearly in command to reverse the course of this campaign. That didn't happen.

I watched the debate at USC tonight, surrounded by undergraduates who were mostly positive about Obama. Most of them scoffed and chuckled at McCain throughout the evening, with some students groaning about "how old" he seems. What a change from when I was a USC undergrad, surrounded by conservative mobs who idolized an aging Ronald Reagan. Tonight, the few McCain candidates that I talked to afterward seemed to feel as outnumbered today as USC's liberals did in the mid-80s.

Consider terminating this pregancy, Bristol and Sarah Palin. Consider it prayerfully. Pray with earnestness and intellectual and emotional honesty, not with pure ideology or sentimentalism. Pass up the short-term emotional rewards of receiving praise from fellow evangelicals for allegedly protecting the sanctity of life, and accept the greater long-term rewards of affirming life in "a more excellent way."

Bristol's boyfriend is a self-proclaimed "f-ing redneck" who "doesn't want children." Yet political and ideological considerations are forcing two confused, hormonal teenagers to marry each other, even though they will most likely grow in entirely different directions. They will most likely come to resent one another and the demands that each placed on the other. Just look at how the divorce rate for evangelicals is no different than for the rest of society. I suspect the divorce rate is even higher for "bad-boy" Alaskan hockey teens forced into shotgun weddings.

So Gov. Palin's grandchild will grow up in a world with many of the worst disadvantages, including the ultimate disadvantage of a father who is not wired to care for him or her. The Palins will claim that their decisions are guided not by ideological rigidity, but by faithfulness to their Lord Jesus. But the paradox of the religious right is that they embody the very legalistic, ideological rigidity that Jesus criticized in the Pharisees of his day.

Such evangelicals proudly proclaim that Jesus is "Lord of the universe and of history." Yet this lord of history has apparently built spontaneous abortion into the everyday fabric of the species, releasing embryos and fetuses when they face obstacles to their development. This is a mystery, and it reminds us that the real world is far hazier than the moral black-white world that George Bush and Pat Robertson inhabit.

Life begins at conception, say the conservative evangelicals. God, then, would often be a murderer in their own view. But perhaps Heaven sees a greater good for all involved.

Evangelicals often emphasize how God has called us, who are made in his image, to roles of creative and moral responsibility. That is why you cannot rule out the possibility that a pregnant woman exercise the same difficult choices that Heaven seems to. Abortion is an awful thing whether done by divine or human hand, but it is a reality and apparently a necessity.

To utterly deny this reality in the name of "sancity of life" is actually a legalistic game, one that has become a crazy game due to some accidents of politics in recent days. It has ruined our politics and it will ruin the life of Bristol and of many within in her sphere.

Bristol is a child bravely wanting to have a child -- a 17-year-old who is most likely incapable of balancing future demands, even with the best efforts of her family, already swamped with the needs of a Downs child. The dreams that God implanted in her, even more deeply than he implanted a fertilized egg, will die. Her child may live and her new family may stay intact for a season, but theirs will not be a life-affirming existence in the end. Sometimes the best way to affirm life is to acknowledge that even Heaven itself sometimes releases a new life from a difficult journey ahead.

Los Angeles City Councilman Jose Huizar was fined more than $14,000 by the City Ethics Commission today for misusing his office-holder accounts to investigate former LAUSD school board member David Tokofsky. Is it creepy he used these funds to gather intel on another politician? Heck yeah. That money is supposed to pay for constituent things. Only a devious mind could interpret that to mean investigating a politician for another political entity.

Butt what's creepier is that this fine is barely a slap on the wrist to a tied-in politico like Huizar. A fine like that would sink me and many of us working schlubs (these days even the DWP's s $2.50-a-month surcharge for a bin I don't have has got me worried). But it won't even cause a ripple in Huizar's life. He's already gathering donations for defense funds. You can bet he will get them.

What we really need are punishments for politicians that work: Imagine how a ban on holding or attending a press conference for six months might put the fear of the Ethics Commission into a publicity-minded pol. Or no legislation for a year. How about they lose their city-owned car?

Reader Dante asked:

Once Alvarez was found guilty why should he not be immediately executed? What is the cost of an execution? What is the cost to keep this criminal alive for the rest of his life? Who is paying for all this and who is going to make money on this?

Good questions. Let's take them one at a time.

1.Why should Alvarez not be immediately executed? Because convictions can be wrong, and are oftentimes overturned. Our justice system guarantees everyone the right to an appeal -- especially when that which is being appealed is a death sentence.

When I wrote a column on this subject in 2003, I discovered this haunting statistic: For the 11 inmates the state had executed between 1978 and 2003, 62 others were released, resentenced or had their sentences overturned. Those numbers probably need a little updating now, but the central truth still stands -- if we executed people immediately upon conviction, we would be putting numerous innocent or otherwise undeserving people to death.

2. What is the cost of an execution? What is the cost to keep this criminal alive for the rest of his life? The cost of an execution is a fortune if you include the price of all the legal appeals -- which are necessary, unless you are unconcerned with executing innocent people. It's estimated that the total cost of trying, housing and executing a Death Row inmate can run more than 40 percent higher than that of simply sticking him behind bars for the rest of his natural life.

Back in 2003, I learned that California's then-25-year history of capital punishment -- which had thus far yielded just 11 executions -- had cost roughly $2 billion.

3. Who is paying for this? You and I are -- and every other taxpayer, too.

4. Who is going to make money on this? Under the death-penalty system, a lot of lawyers, that's who.