All quiet on the geezer front. South Florida is at peace. Seems most of our senile snowbirds are crashing their way north right now, somehow finding their way back to Massachusetts, Michigan and New Jersey. I pity the younger folks up there. They must dread it. After five months of relative peace, now it’s their turn to deal with cane-waving complainers, irate "letters to the editor" and gray and white cars crashing through brick walls.
Great With Kids—A blond-headed little boy finally died of his wounds up in the Panhandle yesterday. While riding his bike last week, the child
was attacked by two “bull dogs” (pitbulls) and mauled savagely. Although the drug-dealing MF who owned the
dogs is charged with manslaughter and tampering with evidence (he tried to wash
the blood from his sweet-natured “best friends” before cops arrived), he should
be charged with capital murder, and in a civilized country, he would be. With a little luck and a lenient judge—aren’t
they all?—this individual will be back on the streets in a jiff, dealing more
dope and letting more pit bulls run loose.
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Soft Time on Life Row—Let’s
call it what it is—Life Row. So broken,
so shameless, so uncivilized has the American legal system become that when
someone is sentenced to what was once called “Death Row” it now amounts to a
life sentence on Life Row. Case in
point. . . .
More than thirty years ago,
ten-year-old Elisa Nelson of the Tampa area was riding her bike to school. Convicted sex offender, Larry Mann, was
running loose that day, free as a pitbull, and his penis was looking for
something to do. When the pervert saw
the child alone he had to have her.
Gaining control was an easy matter and when he finished with his
sickness, Mann took the child to an orange grove and cut her throat. Spotting a chunk of concrete attached to a
metal pole, the murdering monster then used it to beat the girl’s head to mush.
“She was what every parent would
want in a little girl,” remembered a grieving aunt. “Smart, very giving.”
Had she been allowed to live no
one can say what Elisa would be today—a mom, a doctor, a
teacher, an artist, maybe a smiling Salvation Army bell-ringer at Christmas time—but Elisa’s life was cut short in this, her only spin on this
planet, by a piece of garbage that should have been strangled with piano wire the day
the gavel fell and he was found guilty.
Had the crime been committed in a civilized country, Mann would have been
put to death long ago. But alas. . . .
Because of appeals, appeals,
appeals, justice (that mostly forgotten, muchly overlooked element in
post-modern Amerika) has been--ho-hum--put off for these past three decades. Thirty-two years, in fact! Now, with the execution set for tomorrow,
Mann’s attorney is once more trying to keep the murderer alive by insisting
that the governor’s signature on the death warrant is “arbitrary and
capricious” and that putting poor Mann to death “violates evolving standards of
decency.” Truly, America is “evolving” alright
. . . evolving backwards.
