1977 murder suspect charged

Mark Shemukenas was murdered in 1977. It was a particularly brutal crime which received sensationalistic coverage and I am old enough to remember. There were those in the gay community at the time that law enforcement was not as concerned about the crime as they should have been.

While I doubt that, they may well have been right. But regardless, the crime seems to have been solved and Richard Hubert Ireland jr. is now in custody awaiting prosecution.

The victim’s sister was quoted in the Mpls. paper as saying, “[I]t is the family's hope that justice will prevail in the end."

When these long ago murderers are brought to trial there is always somebody saying that somebody is finally being brought to justice. But are they?

Richard Hubert Ireland, jr. is 59. In 1977 he would have been about 37. The sentence for the offense is life imprisonment. Even if conviction for the maximum charge is still possible [and we always hear about how much harder it is to prosecute old cases] the sentence Ireland will receive is 32 years less than it would have been had he been immediately caught and prosecuted. In other words, it might be 15 years instead of 47.

It seems that justice cannot be done, at least not completely. Time has made that so.

But [assuming of course, that they have arrested the right person] we still need to extend kudos to the Saint Paul Police and its Cold Crimes Unit and the BCA people involved and all others involved in cracking this case.

Mary Jo who? We don’t want to remember.

A sexual harasser who managed any jail or prison time after killing a woman in the course of his harassment has just died. [Don’t tell us that connections and/or wealth don’t help.] His passing probably won’t get the attention that the recent death of a child molester has received, but he is receiving a lot.

I remember when he spoke at the Civic Center in 1971 to raise money for the DFL Party and people who we would now call “abortion rights supporters” and/or “feminists” demonstrated against him, showing caricatures of the senior senator from Massachusetts pregnant captioned “if he were pregnant” and attacking him for his position on abortion. [In later years he almost looked the caricature, but I am confident that pregnancy was not the reason.]

Of course, this senator whose name I am withholding changed sides and the feminists made peace with him.

In 1980 the same senator whose name I am withholding challenged President Carter and helped bring on the Reagan era.

Yet Democrats continued to lionize him. And last year Senator Obama made an extra effort to enlist his support.

And I hear today that this guy who never saw combat is to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

To quote Yakov Smirnoff: “What a country!”

Held captive at Rochester

Nobody should feel good about what happened last weekend in Rochester when a few dozen people were kept prisoner in a plane on the tarmac at Rochester International Airport.


There are laws against kidnapping. Are they waived just because an airplane is involved. Why not prosecution in criminal court in addition to whatever civil action might arise from Continental's kidnapping at the Rochester airport.

This idea of using corporations to excuse the evils those involved conspire to do has to come to a stop.

Remembering the Mpls. Trucker Strike

Freedom is not always free. We hear that every time that somebody in our military dies.

But being killed in military service is not the only time that people die to make the rest of us free. This week marks the 75th anniversary of the massacre at the Mpls. Truckers Strike should again remind us that the things we take as givens in life were not always there.

This is a link to last year’s Minnesota Independent article on the matter.

http://www.minnpost.com/iricnathanson/2008/07/22/2643/remembering_the_truckers_strike_of_1934#62-2643

Diversity on the Supreme Court. Really?

Sonia Sotomayor has been named to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Obama. If confirmed and sworn, she will be the third woman and second Hispanic justice. [Many sources are saying she would be the first Hispanic, but they seem to have forgotten Justice Cardozo.]

Conservative types are aghast. The have found that she might think that a Latina woman would be wiser than a white male. I doubt that she really meant that, but I cannot help but think that she would bring differing perspectives than some of the more typical nominees might.

But how much diversity will she really bring?

All of the justices are lawyers and were chosen from federal appeals courts. This seems to have become normal procedure for choosing Supreme Court nominees since the Nixon days.

I really would like a really diverse court with most of the justices being non-lawyers, people more apt to have better common sense on what is right and what is wrong.

I do not suspect that I will ever see even one such justice.

But even if we continue to have lawyers for justices, maybe we could break the stranglehold that appeals courts justices seem to have on the position. Why not somebody who has practiced law and had clients of limited means or minority heritage? Or for the wrongly imprisoned? Why not somebody who has actual legislative or administrative service as something other than a lawyer? Why not somebody from a state trial court? Or even a law school professor?

Actually, I do wish Judge Sotomayor luck in her confirmation hearings. She will indeed bring a new element to the highest court.

But it really doesn’t add much diversity.

When are you too old for us but not for Lauderdale?

I have always felt that mandatory retirement ages are unfair. As I age, I probably think so even more.

I cannot imagine why anybody would want to be a police officer after age 65, but I have wondered why anybody would want to be one at 25 also.

But per this morning’s DPP one local police officer is being forced to retire later this month. Chief Harrington [or presumably the Mayor or anybody else] cannot help him, it seems, since the matter is determined by statute, a law which apparently only refers to police and fire employees in cities of the first class.

I don’t believe that I have met John Morrow who has been with the department since 1967, longer than anybody else now on the department, but it would seem unlikely that I will now, and all because of a law that makes no sense.

If the newspaper coverage is correct, the statue applies to all employees in the P.D., not just officers. And it only applies to cities of the first class [us, Minneapolis, and Duluth].

Translated it means that anybody who works for the department has to be under 65, even if the job does not involve any special risk or physical activity. I don’t know how the people who maintain police equipment and facilities are employed, but this would seem to include people who file paperwork, repair the vehicles, and mop the floors as well as John Morrow. And it means that Maplewood or Hilltop or Landfall or Coates could hire somebody over 65 to be on their police department, but Saint Paul cannot. We keep forgetting that “suburb” begins with “sub-“ indicating something less. Yet somehow a lesser government has more rights than a real city.

It would seem that although it would be too late for Mr. Morrow, that our legislators should address this at its next opportunity. [Of course, some of our legislators are busy doing their own law enforcement work, already. See post below.]

Need a cop? Call a pol?

We are having cuts in LGA and other challenges to keeping enough police and other public servants working for us.

But we seem to have found a new source of public safety employment: Elected officials.

Yesterday’s paper told how Councilmember Melvin Carter III helped make a bust on an alleged pimp. Mayor Coleman the Second did a stint as a traffic cop a three years ago and Dan Bostrom [who is a retired cop] helped with an apprehension of a gun-toter a couple of years ago. And the late Councilmember Jim Reiter rode around in a retired police car looking to help out.

And today we learn how Senator Ellen Anderson became a bicycle theft detective.

Mayors used to have badge #1 and councilmembers also carried badges. Charlie McCarty used his enough to break up fights in the downtown White Castle and interfere [help?] in a hostage situation in the Hamline-Midway area [the same incident for which retired officer James Mann was belatedly honored earlier this year].

I don’t think councilmember are allowed to carry badges anymore and I don’t know if our mayor does.

But maybe we should look into it.

The pols who cannot buckle down want you to buckle up

kThe legislative session is over. We await unknown budgetary confusion or chaos at all levels of government for the foreseeable future.

But somehow, despite all this the legislature and Commissar Pawlenty [thanks to the anonymous commenter who suggested the title – it’s the best I’ve had] managed to agree on something, the totally unneeded bill to make seat belt violations primary offenses.

Although I generally use my seat belt, I am too pro-choice to believe in seat belt legislation and think that any legislator who voted for this bill has given his/her electorate one more reason to reject him/her in future elections.

But, truth be told, I never felt protected by the old law. If I was unbuckled I did not feel that there was really any reason to feel protected by the knowledge that the police had to find some other reason to stop me. There is always a reason.

But the bill [now act] is still meddlesome intervention into other people’s personal decisions.

Pelosi was not alone

I am getting confused and tired by the revelations, accusations, and counter-accusations arising about what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it. She is, unfortunately, no different from a lot of other politicians of both parties when it comes to keeping what is important in perspective.

Leonard Pitts, jr. has noted, [link to article from which this was lifted]

In those days of heat, fear and panic, many of us — including, apparently, Nancy Pelosi — failed to consider what should be ever obvious: Our national identity is the one thing that makes us worth attacking or defending. We are a nation of laws, not men, we are better than those who attacked us, we are America and that has to mean something, even — "especially" — in days of heat, panic and fear.

The sad truth is that almost all of our national leaders, regardless of party, turn politically yellow when big national traumas arrive. Whether it be Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, the whole Congress after Pearl Harbor and the incarceration of American citizens of Japanese ancestry, the Oklahoma City bombing which prompted a GOP-run Congress [including the sainted Paul Wellstone] and Bill Clinton to create whole new categories of capital offenses, or the excesses of the PATRIOT Act after 9/11/2001, too many of them cower and stay silent. Willingness to stand up for what really should be considered our national principles is way too rare.

We might wish to remember one of Martin Luther King, jr.'s less-quoted statements, which Pitts used a week earlier on a different subject: [link]

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

Right is right and wrong is wrong and torture is the latter

In recent years the DPP [Dispatch Pioneer Press for those who were wondering] has reduced its editorial and opinion section considerably, in editorials, syndicated columnists, and letters to the editor. However, they sometimes do obtain good guest columnists and certainly A. L. Brown’s occasional contributions qualify.

Since KSTP radio has shelved Mr. Brown from his Sunday afternoon spot again, it is indeed fortuitous that his work shows up once in a while in the DPP and yesterday’s column is indeed edifying.

Brown is a lawyer. After distinguishing between legal advise and legal counsel, he identifies the poor counsel given by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, particularly the work of Jay Bybee who is now a federal judge.

But his primary point is the indefensibility of the use of torture by a free people. He notes

“The American standard is clear: Torture is always morally and legally wrong. This standard is a strength, not a vulnerability. It deprives our enemies of a rationale or moral standing while providing both to those who work on our behalf.”

I fear that he errs in writing this in present tense. I suspect that under the misdirection of the Bush administration that we have already gone too far in the wrong direction. And I doubt that Bybee’s counsel probably made much of a difference, because I suspect that if he had not given them such counsel that [although it might have taken some doing] they would have found an lawyer who would.

But Brown points out that each person who tortured or helped make the torture possible, needs to have his/her case examined.

President Obama seems to have been less than clearly decisive on this. But we still need vigilance on this matter and ought not let it be forgotten. And maybe we will learn from our inexcusable mistakes.

NOTE: I suppose that we should not view Brown’s departure from KSTP with alarm. This seems to be a seasonal thing, since the station commandeered the Twins from their age-old home with the Good Neighbor and they no longer need him to fill in that slot during spring and summer, but it is still a shame. While KSTP seems to have made some moves lately to move a little bit away from its right-wing base, eliminating Willie Clark and [apparently] all three faces of ThompsonO’BrienDavis and replacing them with Pat Reusse [whom it looks like is being played as the new in-house “liberal”], a couple of guys from Wisconsin who don’t seem to think that political topics are the only topics to cover, and WCCO discard Smarmy Al Malmberg [who seems, however, to have made a transition from simply smarmy to smarmy and pandering with the pseudo-conservative, anti-tax constituency his new station has given him], they really should have more room for Brown. I think it would be interesting if he could fill in for Joe Soucheray sometime, but I imagine that it would be too much shock for Garage Logicians.

Link to the DPP column

Inland grandstanding on open-seas piracy

I once thought that Marty Seifert was one of the reasonable Republicans but that misconception disappeared quite a while back. There is a shortage of reasonable people in both parties in our legislature at this time.

He got so far out in right field, especially in his immigrant-baiting that Rubén Rosario of the DPP called him “Sir Punisher.” He could not wait to try to make an issue of it when an immigrant here illegally was charged with vehicular homicide after last year’s school bus accident near Marshall.

And even though the most extensive ballot recount in Minnesota history has failed to deduce any evidence of voter fraud, he is leading the state push for the national GOP goal of requiring photo identification for all voters.

[Click the label “Marty Seifert” on the right side of this page for earlier Marty Seiffert articles.]

Now, he apparently wants to take on organizations which attempt to make sure that non-citizen defendants in criminal cases receive full legal protection and the presumption of innocence that comes with it, specifically by denying public grants and tax-exempt status to such organizations.

This seems to have been triggered by the case of Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, alleged to be the only surviving hijack attempter on the Maersk Alabama, who was arraigned in Federal Court in New York yesterday. Seifert’s target is assumed to be the Minneapolis-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center, whose director has stated that his organization has no position on the guilt or innocence of Mr. Muse, that his organization had been contacted Muse’s family and that his organization is merely trying to help the family understand the US legal system.

Seifert seems to be one of those who think that if people cannot pronounce the prevailing language that they shouldn’t be here. We might infer that being haled into federal court is not sufficient reason to accommodate a failure to speak the prevailing language.

But the ones who say “if they’re going to be here they better speak our language” and who have little but contempt for those who don’t really do not have much argument here, anyway, since Muse only came here as a prisoner. We brought him and we are not in a position to let him have time to learn US language, law, and judicial processes, so maybe Rep. Seifert and those who think like him need to back off on this one, anyway.

DPP article [from AP]

Minnesota lawmaker: No funds to pirate lovers

What do you do with a juvenile hijacker?

Anytime a juvenile gets arrested for something particularly notorious, there are screams by those who presume to have the interests of victims and society at heart to have the young person get the maximum penalty allowed.

And most of the time there are a fewer, quieter, do-gooders who note that the criminal is young, perhaps too young to understand what he/she did or was perhaps under the influence/control of an older, corrupting influence.

Most of these cases fall under state jurisdiction. Few of them fall under federal jurisdiction.

Now the federal government has to figure out how to handle a 16-year-old boy who was involved in an attempted hijacking of a ship in open sea.

The Obama government needs to show that it is tough on crime and actively combating hijacking, yet it has its share of people who will want mercy for the young man.

Of course, this all supposes that “juvenile justice” and “standing tough on crime” are mutually incompatible. That often is not the case, but few concede this.

Could be interesting.

Goings on for and about the County Attorney's office

I know neither Dave Pinto nor Cory Tennison, but they seem to be the first two people in the race for Ramsey County Attorney to replace Susan Gaertner who is seeking her newly-adopted party’s endorsement/nomination for governor.  There will be more.

 

In the meantime, Ms.Gaertner who probably cannot afford to alienate any of the trendy left, has told former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer that Kathleen Soliah cannot be prosecuted for voting under her alias of Sara Jane Olson.

 

There can be little doubt that Ms. Kiffmeyer resents her removal from her constitutional office and is merely posturing here and one suspects that there is little point in prosecuting Ms. Soliah for these relatively minor offenses at this late date, but Gaertner’s rationale is disturbing.  It may be good law.  I don’t know about that, but it doesn’t make sense.

 

I understand that marriage allows for name changes.  Changing name at marriage is an old tradition in many communities.  But to call Ms. Soliah’s use of an alias on her wedding license, made necessary by her status as a fugitive, to a name neither hers nor her husband’s a legal name change seems strange.

Observations on forgiveness and parole

Doug Grow of MinnPost has written about the release of Kathleen Soliah to parole in Saint Paul.  In the course of this, he has talked with Harry Flynn, the retired Catholic Archbishop of Saint Paul about the release of Kathleen Soliah and the idea of forgiveness.  [link] [link]

 

I have not been entirely comfortable with some who agree with me that Ms. Soliah, a California person, should serve California time in California.  I have suspected that the police organizations in both states would not have taken this position if police had not been the target of one of her crimes.  And I imagine that Pawlenty’s tepid request to Schwarzenegger was pure grandstanding.  [Yes, politicians do that.]

 

But as much as I think that Soliah’s parole should be served in California, I have never said that what she did was beyond forgiveness, either divine or personal.  I do not know Rep. Laura Brod and while at least one legislator/clergyperson has labeled her statement a call for “retribution,” I cannot guess the motive for her statement, but she noted,

"Forgiveness is a separate issue from where she serves her time.  …This case is different because it involves domestic terrorism and threats to law enforcement. Minnesota is not her home.  Minnesota is where she hid from justice."

 

Grow’s coverage of the matter shows a distinctive bend in favor of the parolee.  Eric Ostermeier, posting in Smart Politics, takes a distinctively different position.  He notes that Soliah’s crimes do not make her the “ordinary” parolee and suggests that her “exemplary” live while here seem less distinctive when one remembers that she was a fugitive the whole time.

Archbishop Flynn notes [per Grow]

Repentence is to look in a new direction. It is to hear with new ears, see with new eyes. … Has she repented? She certainly had taken on a different life [when she began a new life in St. Paul]. Has she made public statements [of remorse]?  I don't think so. But I don't think she'd do today what she did then

But, as the archbishop notes, forgiveness is a part of most traditions, that it does not require remorse, and forgiveness frees us.

Serve California time in California

Our local police federation does not want Kathleen Soliah [aka Sara Jane Olson] to serve her parole time in our state.  The Los Angeles police agree.  I wonder whether their opposition might not happen or be made known if one of the crimes for which Ms. Soliah was sentenced after her guilty pleas was not the attempted bombing of a police car and I question the federation’s fear that Ms. Soliah’s neighbors might not report any violations or irregularities since they had said nothing before her arrest.  After all, that would presume that they knew who she was while she lived among them with a phony identity, but the suggestion that she finish her sentence in California seems to make sense.

 

Ms. Soliah apparently wants to serve her sentence here because she has family here.  I do not want to be anti-family, but we should note that Ms. Soliah is a product of the West Coast who had no connection to our state or city until she happened here while on the lam and who had no family here until she married and started one here while a fugitive.

 

In other words, why should a California person who commits crimes in California not serve her sentence in California?

 

Any adult United States citizen who wishes [and there are a lot who do although I wonder why] can live in California.  If Ms. Soliah and her family cannot tolerate any longer a separation, he husband and daughters are all free to relocate there.  It would not be California or Minnesota which has forced the separation.  It would be the Soliah-Peterson family which is forcing the situation on themselves.

 

We have enough of our own crooks among us.  We do not need California'a also.  Governor Pawlenty says that he cannot keep her out.  Governor Schwarzenegger can keep her there.  I doubt whether he reads this, but it would not be bad if he is able to read things similar to this.

 

Should prosecutors and sheriffs choose judges?

There may be several small posts in the next few days dealing with post-election and post-campaign matters. There is not shortage of places to read pontifications on some of the big things, so I will try to get light on some of the things few others seem to notice.

From a MinnPost article by Joe Kimball on the election of Gail Chang Bohr to a Ramsey County judgeship we are reminded that she had the endorsements of many big names. Names like Mondale and McCollum are one thing, but doesn’t anybody get just a little queasy at seeing the names of the county attorney and the sheriff on there. We are entering a new era of political involvement on judicial elections and we don’t always know how we will always navigate the new waters, but involving officials so close to the operation of the court system in this process can create a few questions.

Just some post-convention thoughts

Our local political and business leaders were exultant when it was announced that the GOP convention was coming to town. They are all educated and plugged-in men and women who should have known what all was involved.

There are things that we all should have known the day that announcement was made.

> There would be extensive media present, both traditional and non-traditional.

> There would be protesters, both traditional and confrontational.

> There would be police action required both to make the site secure and to observe the protesters and take whatever action needed to be taken.

> There would be confrontations and post-convention second-guessing about everything, including the degree and type of police involvement. Security concerns would entail street and sidewalk closings and making innocent people of whom nothing evil could be reasonably inferred subject to stops, searches, and even seizures.

> While some businesses in the host city would see improvement in their business climate, others would suffer.

.

Every city which was trying to get the convention knew these things and yet they tried to get the convention anyway. We were the winners who of course received no victory. [And in our case since we had a larger city immediately adjacent, we didn’t even get our name on many of the stories.]

Now our leaders are telling us how well we [and they] handled it all. Well, we did get through things relatively well, but there were problems. We knew that would happen too when we learned that we were the winners in the contest to host. Neither protesters nor police nor anybody else always act in the best and most professional manner even in the most normal and sedate circumstances, so mistakes were inevitable. Nobody is perfect. So now we are going to have second guessing ad infinitum about whether the reaction of our police and the officers from other cities who came to help handled things well or whether they may have overreacted.

I have heard from both protesters and people sympathetic to the police regarding the events of the first four days of this month. I am unsure who deserves the most blame and even more unsure that we can ever know and wonder why we really want to put up our own tally sheets on these things.

We do need to have our political and police leaders check into what happened to find out where they erred so that they can take action against appropriate parties and adopt measures to avoid repeat behavior, but they need to be doing that all the time anyway. And we can hope that the protesters and “anarchists” do similar introspections.

And, unfortunately, we know that some of the same things will happen again, here and elsewhere, no matter what approach we take.

And we might consider removing a sheriff who believes in holding people until a warrant can be obtained. O.J. Simpson is on trial right now for doing pretty much the same thing, but for him they call it “kidnapping.”

Phalen Park Crime Meeting

I am much more likely to attend meetings that communities call and have public officials come to than I am those which are called by the authorities [often without checking on what else may be simultaneously happening in the community] for the public to attend. That was not the primary reason that I did not attend last night’s meeting at the Phalen Recreation Center dealing with three recent Phalen Park crimes, but I have to admit that I was not there and am relying on what other have said about the meeting.

I have read the newspaper coverage and saw some of the local television coverage. It looked like a meeting attended by the usual people and quite a few more [Laura Pabst of MS-J&T estimates attendance at 200] . It seems that those present learned that the mayor, councilmember, and police chief are against crime and that the three crimes seem to have no common factor except for geography.

In general, crime is down. The stats are supposed to make us feel more comfortable. Having been the uninjured victim of a statistically rare but violent crime myself [not on the East Side], I do not find this much of an answer. Victims don’t care about the numbers.

I have often questioned what meetings like this accomplish. It’s kind of like the righteous in the world meeting in church, shouting Hallelujahs and thanking the Lord that they aren’t like those people.

But, based on what I have picked up from other sources, there may have been some gains from the meeting. It does appear that some linking of community organizations in crime prevention and neighborhood nuisance work has been accelerated by more people getting together at the same time and place.

Media links:

DPP, MS-J&T, KAAL

Watch where you are walking

Let me see if I have this straight. The police are allowed to picket right up next to the Xcel/NSP Arena, but next month they’re going to be in charge of making sure that nobody else does [under penalty of arrest, punishment, and/or injury. Seem strange?

More about the jury system OR And justice for all -- the low-cost way

I wrote about our jury system a bit recently when I posted on the forthcoming reduction of pay for jurors in Minnesota District Courts.

We all know that the jury system is not perfect and I suppose that this reduction will not make it any more perfect.

I recently had the opportunity [??] of serving as a juror in the Second Judicial District [i.e., Ramsey County]. I was not selected to be on any jury.

I did get to fill out a questionnaire for the Foster case, but they managed to select a jury before they got around to interviewing me. It is probably just as well as I suspect that I knew [or at least thought I knew] too much before hand to be a fair and impartial juror.

Now a jury has been impaneled in Kandiyohi County to hear the case against Olga Franco for the accident with the school bus which killed four children and unleashed the expected bigotry from Governor Plenty and Marty Seifert. [Previous posts: first, second]

I wish them well.

When I was in college I studied both American History and American Government and we learned about the various checks and balances in our system. Two of the lesser mentioned ones are the executive pardon and jury nullification. The former usually does not get much mention until January 21 of presidential inauguration years [Scooter Libby, Alfredo Gonzalez and who else next year? Cheney?] and I would bet that many people had never heard of the latter before the O.J. Simpson case. But they are important.

A jury returned what probably was the only verdict it could in the Foster case. Those who are convinced that justice was served poorly can only hope that there will be a Higher Court later on.

Jim Ragsdale of the DPP wrote about the Foster case on Sunday’s editorial page. I commend it to your attention. As he noted,

Aaron Foster was found "not guilty" of third-degree, unintentional murder. That is not the verdict Barbara Winn's relatives wanted, and they understandably erupted after it was read in court. Nor did it fit the "cold-case" narrative the Winn-Foster matter had acquired in the media, including a moving program on "Dateline NBC" in May titled "Justice for Barbara."

But it was a reasonable verdict based on the remaining evidence of Winn's death in her Maplewood home in 1981. It was a splash of cold water on our faces, reminding us the courtroom has its own rules and ethics, chief among them that the prevailing narrative doesn't matter. What matters is the evidence; the presumption of innocence for anyone charged of a crime; and the need to prove a crime "beyond a reasonable doubt" before sending a defendant off to prison.

Those standards protect us all but do little to assuage the pain felt by children who lost a mother and who feel her killer got off.

Some people suspected that the whole matter was brought up so late as a result of Bill Finney challenging Lord Fletcher for sheriff two years ago. There is not doubt that Finney’s reputation has been smirched and this verdict will not clear that up. Ragsdale notes that Finney has said that he feels damaged and that he did nothing wrong.

The final paragraph of Ragsdale’s column seems a fair summary of the whole matter, at least as far as judicial matters are concerned,

That is where the story begins and ends — with the tragic death of Barbara Winn. The cold-case narrative did not end where the momentum was pushing it — to a conviction. But the jury was not part of a TV program. They made a tough call based on the facts presented to them, and that's why we stand when they walk past us.

We can only hope that the folks in Willmar can reach the right conclusion about Ms. Franco.

Of course they won’t be able to do that unless the lawyers on both sides give their best efforts and the judge keeps things fair.

And those $10/day jurors will be earning their pay.