*** Scroll down for updates ***
The bond for Collin Finnerty, dangerous “rapist,” has been reduced from $400,000 to $100,000, according to The News & Observer.
In other news, Durham County Commissioner Lewis Cheek, another Democrat, has obtained enough signatures to challenge DA Mike Nifong on the November ballot.
Reade Seligmann’s attorney, Kirk Osborn, filled two motions last week:
1) Second Motion For Specific Discovery (PDF): The defense requests access to the accuser’s computer, Durham Access Center records, Duke University Hospital records, and other information. See this op-ed for background.
2) Motion For Bill Of Particulars (PDF): Reade Seligmann offers a “complete alibi” to the charges. According to the motion, the defense carefully reviewed Nifong’s discovery and claims it consists “mainly of extraneous, irrelevant material.” (Hence, the term “document dump.”) According to the discovery, no crime occurred, claims defense.
Continue reading Duke Rape Case: Reduced Bond, New Candidate, Etc.
Thursday, July 13: This post is old news. Read the latest.
Tuesday, July 5: A belated “Happy Independence Day” to all the left-leaning (and sometimes vulgar) bloggers linking to this wonderfully controversial post! From the bottom of my heart, I thank you for all the links, which have caused this blog to rise in the TTLB Ecosystem (#22 out of 50,000+ registered blogs ain’t bad!).
And the traffic meter is looking good, too. I’m touched. Really. If this post has your knickers in a wad, you should read some of my earlier stuff (est. November 2003). Grab a feed, sign up for e-mail updates, and keep checking LBC because controversy is my life. 
Update II (7/4): A sharp and well-meaning commenter wants to make sure I’m not sued for libel, so here’s a correction: I wrote that the NAACP gave out awards to pedophiles, plural. That’s not true. The dinosaur nominated a pedophile, singular, for an Image Award, but the pedophile didn’t win the award. Sorry for the confusion.
Update: You should see the kind of trolls trying to get through the spam filter. It is unfitting for a black person to write about such things, they imply (with the usual name-calling)…which only encourages me. When racial double standards are dismantled (as well as archaic ideas about what blacks should or shouldn’t write) I’ll change the subject. (Tip: If you can refrain from ad hominem, I’ll approve your comments.)
What do you think is motivating black liberals’ animosity toward me? Could it have something to do with “racial pride?” Do they consider me a “race traitor” because I seem to lack racial pride? I say that blacks can succeed without skin color preferences; they say otherwise. But I am the traitor, the one who lacks pride in my race? If that’s how their mental processes work, perhaps they’re right and I’m wrong. 
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Stop the presses! Jewish World Review columnist Julia Gorin defends white racialists, tongue-in-cheek, in her latest column, Razablanca.
And I agree with her wholeheartedly.
Filed under: Cultural Decline, Illegal Aliens
J.K. Rowling (in blue on the right), author of the popular Harry Potter series (+ Book 6), revealed on a British talk show that at least two characters will die in Book 7.
We already know more characters will die, but the question is, which ones?
Diehard fans know Rowling mapped out the seven-book series and wrote the final chapter of Book 7 before she sold the first book. But something changed while she was writing the final book, and she had to alter the final chapter (which is locked away somewhere) slightly. Rowling said, “One character got a reprieve, but I have to say two die that I didn’t intend to die,” she said.
If you want to talk about your who-dies theories, click over to my other blog, Fantasy Fiction for Christians. You’ll find links to MP3s of Rowling’s interview and other good stuff.
Update (6:08 p.m.): I just realized this post is very similar to the second half of Roger Clegg’s article, which I read only 10 minutes ago. I admit to reading only the first half before I published this post, so the similarities are coincidental, in a way. Since conservatives tend to see through special interest props and racial group entitlements like Section 203, we tend to hold the same opinions about them and express those opinions in a similar way.
Update II (7/1): I can’t wait to read this series.
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I have a feeling the average person doesn’t really care about maintaining a cohesive nation. By that I mean borders, language, and culture, a refrain uttered often by Michael Savage, one of my favorite radio talk show hosts. (I was on his show a couple of years ago.)
Come election time, the average American will vote for the party that closely matches his beliefs and interests. The rest of the time he couldn’t care less that his country is becoming a balkanized, socialistic, and indebted mess, or that his fundamental rights as an American citizen are rapidly diminishing, as long as his TiVo is working.
He probably doesn’t care that some liberal columnist misrepresents the intent of the Voting Rights Act and compares its nonrenewal — because of a bilingual ballots provision— to southern Democrats making up requirements to keep blacks from voting.
It seems like only yesterday when I was agreeing with Earl Ofari Hutchinson, left-leaning journalist. His column about blacks holding themselves to higher standards reminded me of the old-school “working twice as hard” axiom that blacks in my generation and older heard growing up. Now he’s back on the usual liberal warpath, accusing Republicans of pandering to white voters by delaying a vote to renew the Voter Rights Act of 1965.
Rob Smith, aka Acidman, was a plainspoken and prolific blogger out in the ’sphere since 2002 (with close to three million visitors). Rob was a recovering alcoholic who had some health problems recently.
Gut Rumbles was a blog I read through Bloglines, and Rob made me laugh most of the time. One thing was apparent from his posts: he loved to blog.
Thanks for the contribution, Rob.
Other blogging “old heads” (in blog time) remember Rob: Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Baldilocks, Hog on Ice, The Other Side of Kim, Smoke on the Water, John of Argghhh!…
Update (1:41 p.m.): Rod Nichols, an information officer for the Oregon Department of Forestry, responded to the e-mail I sent Jim Walker. He said the story I linked to is inaccurate. The main points:
1) There is no Spanish language requirement for private firefighting crews or supervisors. The department relies heavily on private contractors, who make their own decisions about how to meet the department’s requirements. Nichols said the deparment has “found it necessary to require that all crewmembers speak English. The requirement that leadership positions - crew boss and squad boss - speak English is sufficient.”
2) No Oregon Department of Forestry employees have been fired or demoted because they can’t speak Spanish. The person who made the claim in the article, Jaime Pickering, isn’t and has never been a department employee, and isn’t a certified fire crew boss, according to the department’s records.
However, this doesn’t preclude Pickering’s employment with a private contractor.
3) I asked if the department checks employees’ immigration status. Nichols said the contractors have the “primary responsibility” to check status of its employees, and the department believes “most” of the crew are in the United States legally. In adherence to federal law, the department records and files I-9 info on everyone hired, including temporary employees for emergencies.
Wednesday, August 16: Welcome, searchers. There’s been an arrest in this case. Read and discuss the latest.
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Ten years after the death of her slain daughter, Patsy Ramsey is dead of cancer. She leaves behind husband John Bennett Ramsey and son Burke Ramsey (who’s probably in college by now).
When I first heard about the death of six-year-old JonBenet, found dead in her home on December 26, 1996, I suspected the parents knew more than they were letting on.
I theorized that Patsy must have hit the child too hard, killing her accidentally on Christmas night. At this point, two possibilities emerge in my theory: 1) Patsy panicked and tried to make the death look like a murder by taking JonBenet’s body, on her own, to the basement and staging a sexual assault; 2) Patsy panicked, woke her husband, and told him what happened. They both went into action to stage a murder scene.
My theory is based on opinions of detectives who worked the case, handwriting experts, known evidence, and other factors, including, once again, my gut.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence against Patsy is the so-called ransom note. She said that on the morning of December 26, 1996, she found the note on the back stairs leading to the kitchen. The placement of the note was suspicious, and the note itself was obviously phony. Some experts contend, and I agree, that a woman wrote the note, and the most likely woman was Patsy.
(I remember reading somewhere that Patsy sometimes used the phrase “good, Southern common sense,” also found in the note. Steve Thomas, a detective who worked on the case, said whoever wrote the three-page ransom note practiced writing it. The person also used a pen from a pencil cup that was in the kitchen, and returned the pen to the same place after writing the note.)
As a “juror” in the court of public opinion, I think JonBenet Ramsey’s death was accidental and that Patsy Ramsey killed her. JonBenet’s death is still unsolved, and unless John knows something and talks, it will probably remained unsolved. In 2004, John ran for office in Michigan. I blogged about the news and laid out my theory of the case in more detail.
Reams have been written about the case, so I won’t reinvent the microchip. Check out the sources below.
Sources:
- Patsy Ramsey Dies Of Cancer
- JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation by Steve Thomas
- Crime Library: Murder of JonBenet Ramsey
- The Smoking Gun: JonBenet Ramsey Case Documents
- Does ‘JonBenet: Inside The Ramsey Murder Investigation’ Reveal the True Killer?
- JonBenet Ramsey Case
- True Crime
- The Ransom Note Probability
Update (1:44 p.m.): Durham Investigator Linwood Wilson criticized the defense for asserting that the accuser’s story was inconsistent, and he asked for proof. In response, Joseph Cheshire, Dave Evans’s attorney, sent Wilson a letter (PDF) with the proof attached.
Now that Nifong has muzzled himself, he’d be wise to muzzle his people, too.
I don’t have time today to look for others blogging about the case, so if you are, let me know. See Robert KC Johnson’s latest post, Turning on Nifong.
Independent Conservative: “536 Pages. 5 Rapists. 4 Dancers. No Toxicology Report. No Payoff From Defense and No Plea Deal Requested.”
Commenter Beth Taylor writes:
LaShawn - You probably need to be careful! You’re going to end up getting called as an expert witness in this case for one side or the other…
“Ms. Barber, On March 26th did Attorney Nifong say that this is an act of rape made with racial epithets?â€
“No. He did not. He said that on March 27th.â€
Thanks for the Friday afternoon laugh, Beth. 
Rest easy, everybody. See you Monday.
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Scottsboro Boys
Click over to Townhall.com and read my column, Scottsboro Revisited, which discusses a few similarities between the “Scottsboro Boys” case from 1931 and the Duke case. A wonderful site called Famous Trials was one of the sources.
Lessons from the New York Times
[Update @ 10:22 a.m.: The misspelled name has been corrected, but this section contains good advice for writers and would-be writers, including my enemies. I wouldn’t wish a published typo on anyone. … And the term “radioed ahead” is anachronistic, but hey, whatever.]
As one whose name is often misspelled, I should know better. But, alas, things happen. For the record, the researcher’s name is Douglas O. Linder, not David, as I wrote in the column. (Sorry, Douglas!) A correction is pending. Knowing how tense I get about typos, you’d think I’d have learned to be extremely careful about proofreading. But I can be as careless as the next person. Strangely enough, though, whoever edited the piece didn’t catch that but removed several commas. If you notice places where there should be a comma, there probably was one in my version.
The reason I’m so hard on myself is that it’s good practice to be hard on myself. I anticipate bigger things in my career, and the vultures will be circling, waiting for a fall. A small typo is a small typo, but one day, if I’m not careful, I’ll commit an egregious error…perhaps even a career-ending one.
Dramatic, yes, but who wants to be like the New York Times, with its typically long Corrections page? Fortunately, Townhall is online, so corrections can be made fairly quickly, or sometime today. Blogging is different, of course. You have the tools to correct typos in seconds.
Advice: Always, without exception, proofread your work very carefully. Triple-check facts. Do this even if you’re submitting an article to a publication with the world’s best fact-checkers and copy editors. Assume that you are the final editor. Your nerves will thank you.
Hauntings
If you followed the Duke case early on, you may remember some of Mike Nifong’s pre-media moratorium statements. LBC reader Nancy Kidder fact-checked his recent e-mail (PDF) to Newsweek and compiled and sent a list of contradictory statements. First, the relevant portion of the e-mail. Nifong wrote:
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s police force can’t police, so he called in state troopers and the National Guard. The spate of crime in the Big Easy has been in majority-black communities. Nagin waxed sentimentally about bringing back a “chocolate” New Orleans earlier this year. I doubt this is what he had in mind, though. Let the good times roll…
Today we learn that the police in Jackson, Mississippi, can’t police, either. Mayor Frank Melton declared a state of emergency and seeks to impose earlier curfews on minors. Jackson, by the way, is an overwhelmingly black city, so don’t cramp your brains trying to figure out who’s committing crimes.
To hear some people tell it, enslaved forefathers, Jim Crow (that their great-grandparents lived through), “institutional racism,” dirty looks from bigots, and too few federal dollars for government schools are the reasons why black youth are out of control, along with the out-of-wedlock birth rate.
No fathers at home to head families physically and spiritually, instill discipline, teach children to be honorable men and women, and to convey the importance of decent living has nothing to do with it, I suppose.
Update (6/23): Read about the biological importance of biological fathers. It seems that God knew what he was doing after all when he decreed the marital union and units of biologically related people.
