Warren Lee Hill was sentenced to death for bludgeoning Joseph Handspike with a nail-studded board.

Handspike, Hill's fellow inmate, had been sleeping and other prisoners begged Hill to stop. Hill "was already serving a life sentence for murder in the 1986 slaying of his girlfriend, Myra Wright, who had been shot 11 times."

The Handspike murder took place in 1990, 23 years ago, and just as Hill was being prepped for the lethal injection, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay, so that it may be determined, after all these years, whether Hill is — as his lawyer put it — "a person with mental retardation."

Hill has received support from various activists and from former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn.

"Georgia should not violate its own prohibition against executing individuals with serious diminished capacity," President Carter said in a statement....

Georgia passed a law in 1988 prohibiting the execution of mentally disabled death row inmates, and the U.S.Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that the execution of mentally disabled offenders is unconstitutional....

Before trial, Hill's family members described him as "the leader of the family" and "a father figure," the state notes. He was not in special education classes and served in the Navy, where he received promotions, the state said.

The incredible Pistorius story.

Incredible in the literal sense — not credible:

Mr. Pistorius said he and Ms. Steenkamp had gone to bed early on Wednesday night, but in the middle of the night he heard a noise from the bathroom and went to investigate on his stumps, not his artificial legs.

He was nervous, he said, because the bathroom window did not have burglar bars and contractors who had been working there had left ladders behind. The room was dark, he said, and he did not realize that Ms. Steenkamp was not in bed. He felt vulnerable and fearful without his prosthetics and opened fire at the door, he said, calling to Ms. Steenkamp to telephone the police.

Only then did he realize that she was not in bed, he said. He put on his artificial legs and tried to kick down the door before breaking it open with a cricket bat to discover Ms. Steenkamp.

He carried her downstairs, he said, and “she died in my arms.”

Even the fact that he carried her downstairs makes the story unbelievable. She was shot in the head and still alive. You don't pick someone up and move her around in that circumstance if you want her to live.

"Oscar Pistorius held his head in his hands and wept openly in court Friday as prosecutors said they would pursue a charge of premeditated murder..."

"Chief Magistrate Desmond Nasir delayed Pistorius' bail hearing until next Tuesday and Wednesday and ruled that the 26-year-old Pistorius would be held at a police station in Pretoria until then. Police have said they oppose the granting of bail."

Is it okay to make politically incorrect jokes about whether he's a flee risk? Are we now released from all the old restrictions of etiquette?

Too bad John Callahan isn't still around to make he won't get far on foot jokes.



Meanwhile, Nike's "I Am The Bullet In The Chamber" ad is shot to hell.

"What a liar" — famously muttered into an open mike.

It's the one thing I've always remembered about Daniel K. Inouye.

Dead now, at age 88.

Inouye was a World War II hero and Medal of Honor winner who lost an arm to a German hand grenade during a battle in Italy. He became the first Japanese-American to serve in Congress, when he was elected to the House in 1959, the year Hawaii became a state. He won election to the Senate three years later and served there longer than anyone in American history except Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who died in 2010 after 51 years in the Senate....

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson urged Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had won the Democratic nomination for president, to select Inouye as his running mate. Johnson told Humphrey that Inouye's World War II injuries would silence Humphrey's critics on the Vietnam War.

"He answers Vietnam with that empty sleeve. He answers your problems with (Republican presidential candidate Richard) Nixon with that empty sleeve," Johnson said.

But Inouye was not interested.

If the airline "managed to get her over there," was it "obligated to get her home"?

So says the lawyer for an obese woman who died after the airline could not get her onto a plane in Hungary.

They spent several relaxing weeks at a vacation home they owned in the Hungarian countryside. It was a trip they took almost every year....

How many weeks? Did her condition change over that time? The lawyer "is mulling a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the airlines accusing them of violating laws protecting the disabled."

On the plane, the crew, with help from the local fire department, was unable to move her from her wheelchair to the three seats assigned to her. The captain ordered them off after 30 minutes of no success.

“We had 140 passengers on board, and they had connections and needed to travel,” said Lufthansa spokesman Nils Haupt. “The question was never the seat belt. The question was the mobility of the passenger.”

“She was very ill and did not trust that the hospitals in former communist Hungary could attend to her needs,” [the lawyer] said.

I'm sorry but this is a lawsuit I hope will fail. If you are that sick and that mobility-impaired and you insist on treatment only from your doctors in the United States, don't leave the country.

"It just doesn't make sense to be walking around on your day legs at one height and then you're six inches or so taller on your running prostheses."

"You don't want the sport turning into a circus where, you know, doubles walk in with barely any training under their belt and they are running able-bod (able-bodied) qualification times."

Is Oscar Pistorius a hypocrite?

A Drudgetaposition.

This line-up at Drudge (right now) is no accident. Obviously — don't bore me with disagreement — Obama making the teeny tiny gesture next to the missile launch is a small penis/large penis visual joke. Next to that we see the double-amputee with highly effective prostheses. (Olympics spoiler alert.) It's a challenge to complete the implied statement, but we can see the relationship.


(Click to enlarge.)

The Obama pic goes with "8.254%" and the linked story is about Obama saying, essentially, it's smaller than you think. He's referring to the unemployment rate, which was announced as 8.3%, but if you take it out to another decimal or two, you can see that the rounding, though conventional, makes it look bigger than it really is.

The missile pic goes to a story about Iran test-firing a long-range missile. And the amputee picture is "Legless Pistorius makes Olympic history; Qualifies for 400-meter dash...."

So... at the visual/subliminal level, at Drudge today, it's all about... what can I say? I'll say: masculine power.

Inclusion of Oscar Pistorius in the Olympics - "political correctness gone mad or an inspiring human story"?

That question was asked of Michael Johnson — who has twice won an Olympic gold medal in the event that will include Pistorius, the 400 meter:

“I think it is both. I know Oscar well, and he knows my position; my position is that because we don’t know for sure whether he gets an advantage from the prosthetics that he wears it is unfair to the able-bodied competitors.

"That is hard for a lot of people to take and to understand when you are talking about an athlete and an individual who has a disability. It is a great story, he is a great individual and he has been a great ambassador for athletes with a disability and for people, and how to overcome [that] and continue to strive."

Should Pistorius be allowed to compete?
	He's not that much better/worse than the others, so let's have the spectacle and inspiration.
	Yes. This is great. Even if he could spring way ahead of the others.
	No. Whatever he's doing, it's a different event for him, and this doesn't belong.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Poll results:

"Pakistani police have arrested a man accused of burying his newborn daughter alive because she was physically deformed."

"Mohammed Farooq, a doctor at al-Shifa hospital, says he saw the child after her birth on Thursday and that she was healthy and alive but had a fairly large head and 'abnormal' features."

Mr Farooq said: 'I am a doctor at the same hospital where this child was born. This man came to me yesterday with a request that I should do something to dispose of his child, but I snubbed him and said get out.

'No one has the right to kill anyone because of his or her physical deformity.'

"A former law student has won a bid in bankruptcy court to discharge nearly $340,000 in education debt..."

"... because her diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome rendered her unable to repay the loans."

[Carol] Todd, who received her high school general equivalency diploma during the late 1980s, at the age of 39, began attending law school in 1992 but did not finish, according to the opinion. She went on to obtain a master's degree from Towson University and a Ph.D. from an unaccredited online school in 2007. She filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2009. At the time of her trial, she was 63 and owed $339,361 to three student loan creditors....

"[T]o expect Ms. Todd to ever break the grip of Autism and meaningfully channel her energies toward tasks that are not in some way either dictated, or circumscribed, by the demands of her disorder would be to dream the impossible dream," [wrote U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Gordon.

It's extremely unusual for student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy. This is one individual's case, but it makes me wonder about the many people with mental disabilities who take on education debt. Does the judge mean to send them the message that they are dreaming an impossible dream?

IN THE COMMENTS: Patrick answers my question:

No, but it sends the banks a message that they risk losing their money if they don't discriminate against people with mental illness.

"Japanese researchers have created a hand-held gun... that can jam the words of speakers who are more than 30 meters... away."

"... At its most basic, this gun could be used in libraries and other quiet spaces to stop people from speaking — but its second application is a lot more chilling."

The researchers were looking for a way to stop “louder, stronger” voices from saying more than their fair share in conversation. The paper reads: “We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking. However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions.  Furthermore, some people tend to jeer at speakers to invalidate their speech.” In other words, this speech-jamming gun was built to enforce “proper” conversations....

Admit it: You just thought of somebody you know. Oh, it's chilling all right. And yet....

At a political rally, an audience member could completely lock down Santorum, Romney, Paul, or Obama from speaking. On the flip side, a totalitarian state could point the speech jammers at the audience to shut them up. Likewise, when a celebrity or public figure appears on a live TV show, his contract could read “the audience must be silenced with speech jammers.”

Once you silence the crowd, what do you want them for?
Why go out at all? Now, as you know, I actually think the President should never leave the White House. But if they're not going to take my advice, and they decide to go and do the big cult-of-personality thing, they're going to want to hear that crowd noise. But the speech jammer might be laser-focused on an individual heckler. It's a much nicer image — as long as we're aiming guns — than don't tase me, bro.

Then there’s Harrison Bergeron, one of my favorite short stories by Kurt Vonnegut.

Ha. I thought of Harrison Bergeron too. (If you want to read it, it's in "Welcome to the Monkey House."

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

Read the whole thing! Or hang out here and talk about speech jammers and other ways we might create a better, fairer world.

"And when people would stare, Christian would start giggling..."

"... and they would giggle too. People started finding me on Facebook... or recognizing Christian from hearing about him... People started telling me how Christian inspired them."

"Podium teaching."

Have you seen this term? I'm not finding it on Google, but I'm hearing it used as if it's a standard term. It's a retronym, like "acoustic guitar," invented to distinguish traditional classroom teaching (in law school) from the clinics.

I'm trying to examine why I find the term so annoying. It's not just that I don't want the thing I do to be the retronym. It's that I hear something insulting in the word, as if we who are planted in the classroom are pod people, to be distinguished from the real people out in the real world doing real things.

And then it's the fact that we do not have podia at the law school. (Don't confuse "podium" with "lectern.") Every elevated platform for a teacher to stand on was ripped out long ago because it was seen as noncompliant with the Americans for Disabilities Act. So every classroom that had seats configured with sightlines designed for a professor on a podium got a flattened front end in case there might be a teacher in a wheelchair. That means there are some rooms that are utterly surrealistic from the teacher's point of view. You feel like you are down in a well with the students banked up to the ceiling. You have to keep reminding yourself to crank your head up now and then to make eye contact with the students in the back couple of rows.

To call me a podium teacher and deny me a podium....

Ah, well, all in the name of leveling.



You've got to worry about "the ways in which legal education contributes to the reproduction of illegitimate hierarchy in the bar and in society," don't you? That quote is from Duncan Kennedy's "Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System." An absolute must-read from the 1980s. Here's more:

[E]verything taught [in law school], except the formal rules themselves and the argumentative techniques for manipulating them, is policy and nothing more. It follows that the classroom distinction between the unproblematic legal case and the policy oriented case is a mere artifact: each could as well be taught in the opposite way. And the curricular distinction between the “nature” of contract law as highly legal and technical by contrast, say, with environmental law, is equally a mystification.

These errors have a bias in favor of the center-liberal program of limited reform of the market economy and pro forma gestures toward racial and sexual equality. The bias arises because law school teaching makes the choice of hierarchy and domination, which is implicit in the adoption of the rules of property, contract and tort, look as though it flows from legal reasoning, rather than from politics and economics. The bias is reenforced when the center-liberal reformist program of regulation is presented as equally authoritative, but somehow more policy oriented, and therefore less fundamental.

The message is that the system is basically OK, since we have patched up the few areas open to abuse, and that it has a limited but important place for value-oriented debate about further change and improvement. If there is to be more fundamental questioning, it is relegated to the periphery of history or philosophy. The real world is kept at bay by treating clinical legal education, which might bring in a lot of information threatening to the cosy [sic] liberal consensus, as free legal drudge work for the local bar or as mere skills training.

"Rick Santorum is suspending his campaign..."

In the email. He's about to speak.

I hope he goes out well, with grace. And I hope this doesn't mean there is sad news about his daughter.

ADDED, watching the speech: He never looks like he's lost any sleep. After spending the weekend with his daughter in the hospital, he still has a well-rested look, which I take to mean that his religion is sincere. He's talking first about his daughter and the disabled and "the least among us" (which invokes the same words of Jesus that were the basis of the Jeremiah Wright preaching we were talking about earlier this morning).

AND: "That's what our campaign was about: What made us Americans — how we built this country from the bottom up and how, if we are going to be successful, how we must believe in ourselves and believe in that ability to go forward and do the same thing."

Dyslexia — "a bias in favor of the visual periphery" — is also an aptitude at grasping the whole picture quickly.

But:

Whatever special abilities dyslexia may bestow, difficulty with reading still imposes a handicap. Glib talk about appreciating dyslexia as a “gift” is unhelpful at best and patronizing at worst.

So then... the expression "differently abled" can only be used patronizingly. Because if you really meant it, that would be patronizing!

An amazing paradox!

"When Iyal is distressed, Chancer is distressed. Unlike Iyal, Chancer knows what to do about it."

"Iyal rages by crossing his arms, sitting down hard on the floor and screaming and kicking. Chancer unknots the crossed arms by inserting his wide muzzle through the locked arms from below, opening them up and nuzzling toward Iyal’s face, licking and slobbering, until the boy’s screams turn to tears of remorse or to laughter.... Chancer doesn’t know that Iyal is cognitively impaired. What he knows is that Iyal is his boy."

A dog and his boy.

There will be a lot less autism...

... now that the experts are redefining autism to include less.

At a time when school budgets for special education are stretched, the new diagnosis could herald more pitched battles. Tens of thousands of people receive state-backed services to help offset the disorders’ disabling effects, which include sometimes severe learning and social problems, and the diagnosis is in many ways central to their lives. Close networks of parents have bonded over common experiences with children; and the children, too, may grow to find a sense of their own identity in their struggle with the disorder.

Is the controversy really about how much money the government must spend? Or is it really about helping people with their feelings about their children? Or... I know this seems really weird... could it be... I'm afraid to say it!... could it be that there really is a specific disease and scientists want to be rigorously scientific about what the disease is?

"The Supreme Court ruled for the first time Wednesday that federal discrimination laws do not protect employees of religious organizations who perform 'ministerial' duties."

"The court ruled unanimously that the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion dictates the organizations 'be free to choose those who will guide it on its way.'"

The case involved a Michigan schoolteacher who said Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church violated the Americans with Disability Act in 2005 when it fired her after she tried to return to work after being diagnosed with narcolepsy.

"Lawsuit for ADA violations and wrongful seizure. The plaintiff's four service monkeys..."

"... were taken from her as she attempted to change their diapers and feed them on Bourbon Street."

From "Today in Pro Se Litigation," noting a lawsuit against the Louisiana State Department of Wildlife & Fishery, and the fact that these monkeys on Bourbon Street were dressed up as pirates.

(Via Boing Boing.)

"Greatest Living American: A Children’s Treasury of Trig Crap On His Birthday."

Wonkette did this, and as my mother used to say, "He's just trying to get a rise out of you." The point was: IGNORE! But you did not ignore. As my mother would say: "You're only encouraging him."