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Stephen Cain
- Sandymush
- Leicester (Asheville), North Carolina, United States
- I'm a retired investigative reporter -- a Yankee by most of my upbringing living in the southern mountains. I still write (it clarifies thinking), make jewelry that my wife helps design and that we sell at craft shows, at the Kress Emporium in downtown Asheville, and on Etsy. I am also a woodworker, stoneworker, and stained glass artisan. My wife Pat and I have seven children who we put through college -- then I went back for my bachelor's and master's -- four grandchildren and two more due this summer.
Wrong bite of the apple
ReplyDeleteThe national conference for investigative reporting had just concluded, and I was in the second floor hallway of a downtown Philadelphia hotel, waiting for my editor, who was in the bathroom. I heard what sounded like a baby screaming but was actually two women being attacked.
A man burst from the bathroom carrying a purse and ran down the hall. I blocked his path to the lobby and raced after him down the hall. He stopped to open a fire door. I ran into him at full speed, bouncing him off the door jam. I weighted 220. He weighed about 160. I picked up the stunned man in a full nelson, locked my hands, and carried him toward the lobby. He was trying furiously to kick me in the groin, but I had his back draped over my left hip.
I could have broken his neck with ease, put him across a wooden arm chair with my weight breaking ribs, or smashed his face and head into a marble pillar, fracturing either his skull, cheekbone or nose -- particularly tempting when I saw my editor emerge, her face filled with blood from turned out to be a split eyebrow. I could have justified any one of these as a consequence of subduing a struggling felon. I carried him into the lobby, put him down on the carpet, and tightened my grip enough to pain him but not cause permanent injury.
When I got home the next day, all my boys wanted to know was whether I had hurt him or not. They had been divided and arguing furiously.
I told them the story of a young black man who had helped kill two Detroit undercover policemen during a gun battle following a traffic stop. The officers apparently had not identified themselves, and the jury concluded that the young black man and his companions legitimately feared for their lives.
In subsequent years, the young black man was arrested on burglary charges, for firebombing a Planned Parenthood clinic, possession of narcotics, and one other instance that eludes me. Four times, the police beat the crap out of him. Four times, juries let him go. You get one bite of the apple. You can go for street justice or courtroom justice, not both. The man who beat and robbed my editor got 7-1/2 to 10 years.
What brought this to mind was a great piece Mark Danner wrote for the New York Times Sunday opinion pages based on the previously confidential Red Cross interviews with 14 “high value detainees” that the CIA had questioned at overeseas “black sites” before shipping them to Guantanamo for trial.
All 14 -- including the key planner of the 9/11 attacks -- were tortured so extensively and brutally that it is now clear that they cannot be put on trial under U.S. law. The Bush Administration took the wrong bite of the apple, and the families of a couple thousand murdered Americans have been denied justice.