Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Wednesday, September 2, 2009

This Guy Was Lucky

Commentary By Ron Beasley


Yes, this guy was lucky - he's still alive.


DNA to free another inmate



A 49-year-old man who has served more than 14 years of a life sentence for raping two teenage sisters will be released today after DNA tests determined that he wasn't the attacker.


Joseph Lamont Abbitt of Winston-Salem was convicted on June 22, 1995, of two counts of first-degree rape, one count of first-degree burglary and two counts of first-degree kidnapping in connection with the 1991 sexual assaults of a 15-year-old girl and her 13-year-old sister.


A joint motion to vacate the convictions against Abbitt filed by the Forsyth County District Attorney's Office and the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence is scheduled to be heard at noon today by Judge A. Moses Massey in Forsyth Superior Court.


"I'm very pleased for him," said Nancy Wooten, Abbitt's original defense attorney. "I'm surprised. The evidence was strong against him."


The decision to file the motion to set aside the convictions came quickly after DNA evidence collected in the case was retested by the State Bureau of Investigation and LabCorp of Research Triangle Park. The genetic profile the scientists generated "conclusively eliminated the defendant as the offender."


Someone who was not so lucky is Cameron Todd Willingham.  He had the misfortune to live in Texas and in spite of evidence he was innocent he was executed in 2004.  Bob Herbert explains:



There is a long and remarkable article in the current New Yorker about a man who was executed in Texas in 2004 for deliberately setting a fire that killed his three small children. Rigorous scientific analysis has since shown that there was no evidence that the fire in a one-story, wood frame house in Corsicana was the result of arson, as the authorities had alleged.


In other words, it was an accident. No crime had occurred.


Cameron Todd Willingham, who refused to accept a guilty plea that would have spared his life, and who insisted until his last painful breath that he was innocent, had in fact been telling the truth all along.


It was inevitable that some case in which a clearly innocent person had been put to death would come to light. It was far from inevitable that this case would be the one. �I was extremely skeptical in the beginning,� said the New Yorker reporter, David Grann, who began investigating the case last December.


Herbert gets his information from this long piece of investigating journalism in The New Yorker, Trial By Fire. Governor Rick Perry and the State of Texas murdered an innocent man.  No amount of evidence can bring him back to life.  As long as this sort of injustice continues the United States of America is in no position to be critical of any other country.  Perhaps the United States would be a better place if Texas did secede. 



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2 comments:

  1. geoffSeptember 2, 2009 at 4:26 PM

    Ron you might be interested in Liz Loftus's little chit chat re memory and bearing witness. I'm wondering how many innocents have been killed over the ages after listening to her talk.
    http://fora.tv/2009/07/14/Elizabeth_Loftus_Whats_the_Matter_with_Memory

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  2. Don SinFaltaSeptember 3, 2009 at 5:12 AM

    Perhaps the United States would be a better place if Texas did secede.
    Most of us who live in Austin certainly wouldn't be better off.

    ReplyDelete

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