Daily Archives: May 10, 2024

The CDC just announced that 107,941 people died from drug overdose in the United States in 2022. This continues a two-decade increase of drug overdoses. Most of these deaths involved illegal drugs such as opioids (fentanyl) or stimulants (methamphetamines).

An illicit drug transaction is simple: it involves, first, a choice by someone who wants to purchase the drugs, and, second, a willingness by someone to sell the drugs.

That choice/willingness is a crime.

The crime entails inevitable consequences for both parties. The user succumbs to a failed, miserable life that impacts everyone in their orbit with each swallow or injection of the drug which has the potential for fatal overdose. The seller lives in a world of constant stress and anxiety trying to maintain supply and demand knowing that death or prison are inevitable.

It is a sick marriage (much like incest, I suppose) between two individuals incapable of understanding the values it takes to live a decent, responsible life.

Will I shed a tear over the loss of those 107,941 drug-related deaths?

I think not … at least not at this point in our human existence.

The World Counts reports that a one child in this world dies every 10 seconds from hunger while another 13 million live in hunger each day.

I will shed countless tears for those lost lives and that human suffering.

The Catholic Connect Foundation reports 40 million people in the U.S. are hungry; that 3 million children don’t have breakfast before or at school.

With innocent babies and defenseless children—none of whom caused one ounce of harm in this life—dying from bombs, bullets, and starvation in Gaza, don’t expect any tears from me because some junkie in the dark side of a city or some rich suburban mom OD on illicit drugs.

Humans have just so many tears to shed in this life. The children among us should have the first—and perhaps the exclusive—shot at those tears. If there’s any left, I may shed one or two for that junkie and mom.

The Russian president, and dictator, just secured a corrupt fifth term in office.

In the weeks before the election, the little runt of a guy was saber-rattling about how Russia is prepared to use nuclear weapons to protect its territorial nterests. It was a direct shot at America and its NATO alliance.

But the nuclear saber-rattling was nothing more than a coward’s bluff—a little man’s fear of the dark, ghosts, goblins, and the like.

Putin, nor any other dictator with nuclear weapons, is going to unleash a nuclear war. They live and survive on power. A nuclear exchange with America would annihilate the little man’s power. His stolen wealth and luxury living would cease to exist. His kingdom would be a radiation contaminated rubble. Moscow would look like one of the thousands of cows that perished in the recent Texas wildfires.

Can you imagine little rootin-Putin climbing out of his nuclear protected bunker to find a wasteland like that left behind by those Texas wildfires with a few horribly burned Russian survivors ready to rip him apart before they die.

No, scared of his shadow Putin will never start a nuclear war. That’s why he was too afraid to even say Navalny’s name when the activist was alive and why his “super army” cannot even defeat little Ukraine.

In fact, I would be willing to wager two chocolate-covered donuts, and six donut holes, that our own South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham could beat Putin in a fist fight—and Lindsay can’t fight his way out of wet paper bag.

We do not ask for this life. It is given to us through procreation between a man and a woman. It can be produced by physical intercourse between a man and a woman or by any of the four methods of artificial insemination. Any other methods are beyond the pay grade of my understanding.

We come into this world crying and, more often than not, leave it regretting.

Life provides us with three parental paths: nurture, neglect, or brutality. Our lives are generally shaped by which of those paths life imposes on us. We have no choice over the initial path that ultimately leads to the next path in our individual journeys toward free will—choices in deciding what we want to do or become in life.

Roughly two-thirds of our lives are spent under the false pretense (illusion, if you will) that death will never come or it is too far in the future to demand much attention. The last third of our lives are spent preparing for the end of life: wills, preparing financial security, making funeral arrangements, and paying closer attention to things that once seemed so unimportant.

I sit on my porch, glass of ice tea in my hand, with Fred, my faithful dog lying beside my chair on point for any potential danger. I wonder what he is thinking or even if he is capable of thought. Is everything in his world controlled by instincts? Does he have a yesterday or can he conceive tomorrow?

There are more than 8 billion human lives on this planet. Fred’s dog life is better than the lives of three billion of these human lives. I treat Fred better than Vladimir Putin treats his human prisoners.

I saw a video the other day of a pack of hyenas attacking a single lion. The pack eventually killed the lion, of this I’m fairly certain, just as I know that the lion was more than likely once in a pack of lions that killed a lone hyena.

It struck me like a lightning bolt in the center of the brain that the pack attack is the essence of all life, human or animal: survival against all odds. There are patches of sunshine and green grass along life’s path but most of the path is desert dry, littered with the bones of lives senselessly and meaninglessly lost.

The violence shredding Haiti once again and the innocent children dying in Gaza because of some fucked up religious belief defines human life. There has not been a single moment since man left the tree and started walking straight up that they have not been killing each other in packs, all the while trying to devise more ways to take more human lives.

Someone said to me the other day in a Facebook comment that God’s tears are endless for the suffering.

I ask, why did God create suffering to begin with?

Man is now trying to build a space station on the moon so he can send man to Mars and beyond. His mission is to fuck up life on Mars and across this universe, and throughout all universes beyond just as he has fucked up this life here on Mother Earth.

That’s the message that Haiti, Gaza, and the recent hate crimes the girls’ basketball team faced in Idaho gives to us. And that is the message human life will take to Mars and beyond.

Justice is an elusive concept, difficult to pin down with a precise definition. It is so much more than accountability for a wrong. It is also the collective need to serve the interests of right. But even these basic social notions get murky at times when right and wrong seem to conflict because there is as much right as wrong in some given life situations.

And that’s the troubling thing about two recent cases involving criminal justice—one in Missouri, the other in Louisiana.

The Missouri case involves the April 9, 2024 execution of Brian Dorsey who, admittedly, murdered his cousin and her husband in 2006 while addicted to drugs.

The Louisiana case involves the April 22, 2024 parole of Warren Harris, Jr. who, admittedly, murdered three homosexual men on different occasions in 1977 in New Orleans while addicted to drugs.

The difference in the two crimes:

Dorsey killed his cousin after she and her husband took him in their home to protect him from drug dealers. He robbed and killed them with their own shotgun to support a drug habit. He was 35 years of age. He suffered from drug addiction psychosis at the time.

Harris killed three men who took him to their residences for a paid-for-sex encounter by stabbing them to death. He said he “hated homosexuals” and killed and robbed them to support a drug habit. He was 16 years of age. He also suffered from drug addiction psychosis at the time.

Both Dorsey and Harris compiled impressive records of individual rehabilitation during their incarceration. In short, both men were not the same individuals at the time of their execution and parole as they were when they committed their crimes. This was acknowledged by both penal systems that incarcerated them.

Dorsey’s execution was endorsed by members of his victims’ families while no one from Harris’ victims’ families offered any opposition to his parole.

Dorsey’s execution was advocated by the Attorney General of Missouri while the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office did not express any position on Harris’ parole efforts.

So were these the reasons why an admitted double murderer was executed and an admitted triple murderer was paroled?

Dorsey’s victims said “justice was served” by his execution while Harris’ supporters said “justice was served” by his parole.

Was it?

That’s the dilemma in both cases.

One thing is certain. Louisiana’s new governor, Jeff Landry, was elected on the promise that he would restore the state’s death penalty to an active status. He will have to deal with that dilemma in determining who and how many people on death row must die. There are dozens of inmates on Louisiana’s death row that have credible evidence of innocence or compelling mitigating evidence about how and why their crimes occurred.

The Dorsey/Harris cases inevitably raise this question:

Is it “justice” to execute or keep people forever incarcerated that have victim opposition while sparing or freeing others similarly situated that do not have victim opposition?

If so, that sort of seems like modernized lynch justice to me.

The State of Missouri executed 52-year-old Brian Dorsey on April 10, 2024. Dorsey had been convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his cousin and her husband in December 2006.

Dorsey’s stands out because scores of current and former prison officials, including guards and wardens, endorsed his plea for executive clemency. These officials believed strongly in Dorsey’s rehabilitation.

Condemned inmates in Missouri are not housed on a traditional death row in individual cells. They are housed in a 92-bed, two-wing unit at the Potosi Correctional Center. Prison officials assign these inmates to classification statuses from minimum, medium, close custody, and administrative segregation. Minimum custody condemned inmates live in an “honor” dormitory while disciplinary condemned inmates are kept in “admin seg” cells.

In other words, good behavior and cooperation with penal management translates into improved custody status with the pinnacle status being an “honor dorm” assignment. Inmates assigned to the honor dorm are going to have more direct contact with staff and wardens given the level of trust they develop within this cloistered penal system.

Dorsey was a barber assigned in the honor dorm. He cut the hair of staff and upper echelon prison officials. It is an up-close personal type of relationship between keeper and kept. The barber learns a lot about the personal lives of the officials—their families, personal & professional problems, likes & dislikes, political inclinations, and life objectives. This official intimacy between keeper and kept translates into a confined power for the barber. The barber can use the power for either good or bad reasons.

From all public reports, Dorsey used his job position, and the power it accrued to him, for good, positive things. He got along with everyone, keeper and kept. He was just a nice, good guy who tried to help both staff and inmates alike in any way he could. He was content with just being a prison barber. He was prepared to spend the rest of his life in prison cutting hair and being a “pleasant peasant” inmate.

Brian Dorsey posed no threat to anyone, either inside the prison community or the outside free community. Prison staff and officials got to know and trust him through his nearly two-decade confinement. They were more than willing to let him finish out the rest of his life in their care and custody, benefitting from the tradeoff between his skills and their needs.

There are four historical purposes for punishment: deterrence, incapacitation, retribution, and rehabilitation. Dorsey’s execution served only one of those purposes—retribution. And that was only in a miniscule kind of way. The execution made a few people feel good—a few members of the victims’ families and friends.

Society would have benefitted far more than the victims “feel good” moment had Dorsey spent the rest of his life in prison. The other three purposes of punishment would have been fulfilled far more with a life time in prison than by the singular retribution purpose his execution fulfilled.

There are roughly 2300 people on death rows throughout the nation. Two-thirds of them would become inmates like Brian Dorsey in the prison community given the opportunity.

Why not given them the opportunity?

The fiscal costs benefits to society would be tremendous and the presence of the former death row inmates in the general prison population would contribute to those communities.

There are more than 200,000 people serving life sentences in U.S.—more than 50,000 of them are life without parole sentences. Virtually all of the without parole lifers will die in prison. Hospice care has become an industry within the prison industrial complex. Most of those without parole lifers live and die as “model” inmates, just like Brian Dorsey.

The death penalty is a barbaric “feel good” punishment established and maintained to punish people of color, people without resources and means, and people who do not count for much in the societal scheme of things.

At least let some condemned inmates live.