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I’m going to be monitoring Kansas v. Roeder, because I have ties to the place. I’m a New Mexican now, but I lived on my own for the first time there in the buckle on the bible belt.
Today, we learned that the Sedgwick County DA is not going to seek the death penalty for Scott Roeder.
I have mixed feelings on the matter: I oppose the death penalty as a matter of principle. If we have proven anything at all, it’s that we can screw up applying the death penalty in apparently infinitely many ways.
And yet, and yet… Kansas Statutes approve capital punishment in cases of
premeditated murder with special circumstances. The circumstances include:
A: Murder in the course of a kidnapping
B: Murder for hire or agreement
C: Murder by a prison inmate
D: Murder in the course of sexual assault
E: Murder of a law enforcement officer
F: Multiple murder
G: Murder of a minor under 14 in the course of kidnapping during a sexual assault.
Have I mentioned that in Kansas you often see people wearing belts and suspenders (note that special circumstance G is both A and D)? According to Sedgwick County DA Foulston Tiller’s murder doesn’t meet any of these criteria. I suppose the only criterion that might fit is B, murder for hire or agreement. I guess that there wasn’t an explicit enough agreement between Roeder and the Operation Rescue people. And yet, while you can lower charges, it’s much tougher to up the ante. So DA Foulston has apparently ruled it out.
Roeder’s attorney filed for bond today. Hearing on the matter is scheduled for tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM CDT. A Kansas Supreme Court decision says that only capital murder suspects can be held without bail. So you can expect bail to be set at some unreachable number. Previous Wichita cases have set bail in the 7 to 8 figure range.
In other news, Roeder told the AP today that he is being treated as a criminal, even though he hasn’t been convicted of anything. He seems to be forgetting that he pled guilty to having bomb-making materials a few years ago…
And in the immortal words of Porky Pig, a-bee, a-beee, a-beee… That’s all folks!
6 Comments
What did he expect, tea and crumpets?
heh. Dr. Tiller wasn’t convicted of anything either.
Thanks for offering to do the heavy lifting on this story, BC. Please post often.
And that (Tiller’s acquital on the AG’s trumped-up charges) may be why Roeder was driven to murder him.
Right now, it looks like the Wichita Eagle-Beacon is going to be the go-to source. The Topeka Capital-Journal doesn’t seem to be doing much, and the Kansas City Star is doing less.
I really expect to see this mostly buried by the MSM. The Eagle-Beacon will cover it because it’s local. The rest of the nation, not so much, I’m guessing. The Muslim convert in Little Rock, though. We’ll know all about him all the time.
Just remember the GOoPer mantra: Be afraid, be very, very afraid o’ them terrists. But Randall Terry and his ilk aren’t terrists, don’cha know. They’re just Amurkin Patri’ts frustrated by our judicial system and its inability to stop physicians from practicing medicine according to State and Federal Law. Ya gotta wear a turban or a kaffiyeh to be a terrist.
Have I mentioned how much I dislike these people lately?
Alex Koppelman reports in today’s “War Room” in Salon.com:
Head of pro-life group gets job at HHS
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has picked the former head of a pro-life Catholic organization to run faith-based and community outreach programs at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Alexia Kelley, co-founder of the liberal group Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, was appointed Thursday to run HHS’s Center for Faith-based and Community Initiatives. (The administration wouldn’t immediately confirm that, but the Catholic Reporter published a press release from Catholics in Alliance trumpeting the announcement.) Catholics in Alliance’s main goal since Kelley helped found it in 2005 has been to emphasize the Catholic Church’s social justice teachings in the political sphere; like other progressive religious groups, it lines up with Democratic positions on health care, poverty, labor and other issues.
On abortion, the group has mostly worked to find ways to reduce demand, rather than to push laws aimed at curtailing the availability of the procedure. But its Web site makes clear that it isn’t pro-choice. “Catholics in Alliance believes in the sanctity of all human life — from conception until natural death,” says a frequently asked questions page.
Pro-choice activists weren’t happy: HHS oversees health care, including abortion policy, for much of the federal government. Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, called it “a defeat for reason and logic.” “The administration has talked a lot about reducing the need for abortion, and progressive groups like my own are totally with the administration in doing that,” he told Salon. But “to have someone working in HHS who oversaw an organization that is anti-abortion… really beggars belief.” The timing of the appointment — just days after abortion provider George Tiller was murdered in his Wichita, Kan., church — is likely to aggravate pro-choice groups even more. (Anti-choice organizations, though, have criticized Catholics in Alliance for giving cover to pro-choice Democrats, by attempting to shift the debate from banning abortion to simply reducing it.)
I had something of an epiphany on capital punishment after the OKC bombing in which I lost several friends. I ultimately came to a place where I would have rather seen McVeigh put in a plastic cage that traveled from shopping mall to shopping mall.
I see the DOJ is finally getting in on the investigation. I guess they want us all to forget how dismally they, in the form of the FBI, failed to perform their job when it mattered.