Is Evil Impotent or Virile?

[Selene]

Carol:

Are these newspaper accounts a reasonable portrayal of the case?

http://www.montrealg...gedy/index.html

http://fullcomment.n...-afghan-wisdom/

Adam

Yes, I have followed the case in both the Post and the Star here (Christie Blatchford in the Post is a foremost columnist and crime writer here) and the Gazette is highly reliable.

Thanks. I want to bring myself up to date on this case.

These are the types of cases where folks who argue for special use of the death penalty have a solid case.

[caroljane]

Carol:

Are these newspaper accounts a reasonable portrayal of the case?

http://www.montrealg...gedy/index.html

http://fullcomment.n...-afghan-wisdom/

Adam

Yes, I have followed the case in both the Post and the Star here (Christie Blatchford in the Post is a foremost columnist and crime writer here) and the Gazette is highly reliable.

Thanks. I want to bring myself up to date on this case.

These are the types of cases where folks who argue for special use of the death penalty have a solid case.

I agree, except I don't support the death penalty, so in my case it is the "die in prison" penalty . I don't care how they die in there.

[caroljane]

Incidentally and counter to the evil we are discussing, in the Toronto Star there was a great story of one Mr. Beech, who years ago was up on serious criminal charges. He expected to get four years, which distressed him as he had a newborn son at the time - but he had done the crime.

The judge gave him a second chance, which he took. He straightened out, raised his son, and recently took an unprecedented opportunity to thank the judge in court . His impromptu speech had the courtroom in tears.

I try to balance these things against the the mercilessness of hatred and vengeance, because mercy and redemption are real too.

[Selene]

Carol:

Agreed. Redemption is very freeing in that it does not forget the offense, but it provides the foundational launching point for staying on a moral and ethical path.

Adam

Post Script:

Out of curiosity, Is there any transcript of that courtroom speech?

[caroljane]

Carol:

Agreed. Redemption is very freeing in that it does not forget the offense, but it provides the foundational launching point for staying on a moral and ethical path.

Adam

Post Script:

Out of curiosity, Is there any transcript of that courtroom speech?

I don't know It wasn/t part of the official proceedings - Beech just happened by and asked to speak to the judge ..so I don't think the court reporter would have transcribed it. Sorry I can't give a link to the story, it was in the TO star yesterday or the day before, and also in both the free dailies here/

[Peter]

Duance wrote in one post:

“ . . . in my case it is the "die in prison" penalty. I don't care how they die in there . . .”

and then in the next post something that conflicts with the first:

“I try to balance these things against the the mercilessness of hatred and vengeance, because mercy and redemption are real too.”

end quotes

Caligula: Let’s hear from the audience. When she says, I don’t care how they die in prison, how do you react?

Roman Coliseum Audience: YEAH, BABY! ROOF ROOF ROOF! BOOYA!

Caligula: Now let us play the second sound bite to the audience:

“I try to balance these things against the the mercilessness of hatred and vengeance, because mercy and redemption are real too.”

Roman Coliseum Audience: Boo! Sissy! Kill them all.

Caligula: You see? The audience knows justice. Cicero, what say you?

Cicero: That so many people can derive so much pleasure from such a revolting spectacle almost makes one doubt the very premise on which democracy is based.

Caligula: Carol, Cicero seems to agree with you. But how do you keep the peace or conquer Rome with no weapon other than your voice? Isn’t retributive violence needed? Should not the state enforce justice? Cicero, you have the final word.

Cicero: Sometimes, if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight – start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.

Caligula: So??? Cicero, are you saying that Carol is trying to start a fight?

Semper cogitans fidele,

Peter Taylor

[Dennis Hardin]

An interesting premise of Lee Harris in The Suicide of Reason is that the Western view of reason as inherent in all human beings is wrong—that our societal belief in the rule of reason has been bred into us through the cultural tradition inherited from the Renaissance and Enlightenment. In other words, rationality is as much nurture as it is nature, and, as a society, we make a huge mistake when we assume that backward nations are simply lagging behind in the inevitable progress toward a mythical modernity.

Before reason can become the dominant force in our lives, Harris says, years and years of gradual cultural evolution are required.

I think it is exaclty these years and years of cultural (and scientific) evolution which are the inevitable progress. And that process is irreversible. Once a certain stage of knowledge has been reached, there is no going back to a more ignorant stage.

As for the cultural evolution being gradual, imo the process will be accelerated considerably in our times of rapid access to information via the internet.

The point is that not all cultures partake in the progress—as with the examples given.

[bolding mine]

He [Lee Harris] points out that Aristotle sanctioned slavery because it seemed clear that not all people were capable of rationality.

Does Harris provide evidence (via direct quotes) that Aristotle actually stated what it says in the bolded part, or is this Harris' personal interpretation of Aristotle's sanctioning of slavery?

He doesn't cite any sources.

[Xray]

The point is that not all cultures partake in the progress—as with the examples given.

But in the course of time, more and more cultures will take part.

An interesting premise of Lee Harris in The Suicide of Reason is that the Western view of reason as inherent in all human beings is wrong—that our societal belief in the rule of reason has been bred into us through the cultural tradition inherited from the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

The capacity for reason is inherent in all human beings; this does not mean it will automatically flourish like a plant acting on its biological program.

Our (modern, Western) societal belief in the rule of reason is so strong because we have experienced the immense benefits and advantages reasonable thinking and acting have given us. Our belief in the power reason therefore has a very strong empirical, factual basis.

[Brant Gaede]

An interesting premise of Lee Harris in The Suicide of Reason is that the Western view of reason as inherent in all human beings is wrong—that our societal belief in the rule of reason has been bred into us through the cultural tradition inherited from the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

The capacity for reason is inherent in all human beings; this does not mean it will automatically flourish like a plant acting on its biological program.

Our (modern, Western) societal belief in the rule of reason is so strong because we have experienced the immense benefits and advantages reasonable thinking and acting have given us. Our belief in the power reason therefore has a very strong empirical, factual basis.

Speaking generally, reference the material abundance that some societies have and other societies want: members of the wanting will have to become more rational to get more of what they want. Looting won't do it for it's not production nor the creation of wealth. Unfortunately, the irrational amongst the rational in affluent societies is more and more dominating and the West is being slowly supplanted by the East. However, long term, because of demographics, the United States, absent a devastating war, will likely emerge from this century as from the last as the world's greatest power. The question is whether the fascists will be running the place. I doubt it. (There may be political if not economic fragmentation.)

--Brant

[caroljane]

Duance wrote in one post:

“ . . . in my case it is the "die in prison" penalty. I don't care how they die in there . . .”

and then in the next post something that conflicts with the first:

“I try to balance these things against the the mercilessness of hatred and vengeance, because mercy and redemption are real too.”

end quotes

Caligula: Let’s hear from the audience. When she says, I don’t care how they die in prison, how do you react?

Roman Coliseum Audience: YEAH, BABY! ROOF ROOF ROOF! BOOYA!

Caligula: Now let us play the second sound bite to the audience:

“I try to balance these things against the the mercilessness of hatred and vengeance, because mercy and redemption are real too.”

Roman Coliseum Audience: Boo! Sissy! Kill them all.

Caligula: You see? The audience knows justice. Cicero, what say you?

Cicero: That so many people can derive so much pleasure from such a revolting spectacle almost makes one doubt the very premise on which democracy is based.

Caligula: Carol, Cicero seems to agree with you. But how do you keep the peace or conquer Rome with no weapon other than your voice? Isn’t retributive violence needed? Should not the state enforce justice? Cicero, you have the final word.

Cicero: Sometimes, if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight – start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.

Caligula: So??? Cicero, are you saying that Carol is trying to start a fight?

Semper cogitans fidele,

Peter Taylor

Huh? I have channeled my inner Caligula and my inner Cicero to see if they are fighting, and they aren't. Cicero has enough trouble with the would-be despots and Caligula ancestors besetting him, and Cal isn't interested in the ideas of some ancient windbag that his tutor made him study, but he got even with that tutor, oh yes he did.

BTW Peter, have you read Robert Harris's wonderful Cicero books? I gobbled up the first one, Imperium, and have recently started Lustrum. He's such a good historical writer, his Cicero is vivid and riveting.

[Peter]

A girls gotta Daunce, wrote:

BTW Peter, have you read Robert Harris's wonderful Cicero books? I gobbled up the first one, Imperium, and have recently started Lustrum. He's such a good historical writer, his Cicero is vivid and riveting.

End quote

“Imperium” of course. I did not know “Lustrum” existed. Thank you. I am still interested in your idea that you don’t care what happens to people in jail.

I am specifically wondering about a gladiator school, where hard core criminals can earn money for their families and the victims of their crimes.

Peter

[caroljane]

A girls gotta Daunce, wrote:

BTW Peter, have you read Robert Harris's wonderful Cicero books? I gobbled up the first one, Imperium, and have recently started Lustrum. He's such a good historical writer, his Cicero is vivid and riveting.

End quote

“Imperium” of course. I did not know “Lustrum” existed. Thank you. I am still interested in your idea that you don’t care what happens to people in jail.

I am specifically wondering about a gladiator school, where hard core criminals can earn money for their families and the victims of their crimes.

Peter

Are you saying that gladiator schools still exist? I did not say I don't care about what happens to people in jail. Quite the reverse.

My comment was on capital punishment. I don't support it. However heinous a crime, life in prison is the most I expect the state to impose. As a member of society I must make the choice of what I want the state to do on my behalf, and I do not want the state to execute anybody.

My comment was specific to the Shafias, who should get life in prison, hence die there. The manner of their eventual deaths, whether natural or at the hands of other inmates or through suicide, is not my choice to make and I do not feel obliged to speculate on it, and I don't want to. The case makes me soul-sick. I care passionately that they be punished to the maximum standards of a civilized society..

[Xray]

I don't think anything is inevitable. Who holds that cultural and scientific knowledge, but human beings.

That knowledge is a not a disconnected abstraction locked in a room somewhere. Every generation has to start all over again.

But every generation starts with the aquired knowledge already available.

Rapid access to information via the internet" is a double-edged sword, to me. As much able to propagate harm

It is a double-edged sword, no doubt. but the sheer public transparency of the internet will make it more and more difficult for dictatoral regimes to slaughter their people, when they know the whole world is watching.

I am rather floored by your hopeful idealism, almost Utopianism, Xray.

In reality, do you seriously believe another Dark Age is an impossibility?

I don't want come across as the residient Polyanna here , therefore basing my concivtions on pure belief won't do of course.

The empirical evidence is the documented historical record: when looking back in history, over the millenia, there is a continuing movement toward more freedom, more democracy, more human rights, etc.

Even with the danger of relapses always present - I don't think that such a horrific relapse of a civilized nation like Germany into the abyss of cruelty and irrationality which was the Third Reich would be possible today anymore.

This does not mean that the grailkeepers of dogma and dictatorship are going to surrender to reason and freedom without a fight, as evidenced in the current 'culture struggle' between dogmatic religionists (whose ideal is a 'theocracy') and democratic secularists.

But in the long run, dogmatic religion does not have chance of survival. There is going to come a point when the vast majority of people just won't believe unscientific absurdities anymore.

All this is going to take time of course, but the more educated the world population becomes, the more this process is going to be accelerated.

[Selene]

Carol:

I am in general agreement with you on the death penalty for a number of reasons:

1) the potential of executing an innocent individual;

2) the unequal application of the death penalty with racial, ethnic and economic factors creating the potential misapplication; and

3) it is not a power that the state should arbitrarily possess.

However, a case can be made for exceptions and your case in Canada could be considered as the exception. I think a solid argument can be made.

As you know, we have a provision for the death penalty for treason in the US Constitution.

I would seriously consider the death penalty for child crimes.

It is a difficult issue though.

Adam

[Peter]

Nathaniel Branden wrote in THE OBJECTIVIST NEWSLETTER January 1963, page three:

"What is the Objectivist stand on capital punishment?

In considering this issue, two separate aspects must be distinguished: the ~moral~ and the ~legal~.

The moral question is: Does the man who commits willful murder, in the absence of any extenuating circumstances, ~deserve~ to have his own life forfeited? Here, the answer is unequivocally: ~Yes~. Such a man deserves to die -- not as "social revenge" or as an "example" to future potential murderers -- but as the logical and just consequence of his own act: as an expression of the moral principle that no man may take the life of another and still retain the right to his own, that no man may profit from an evil of this kind or escape the consequences of having committed it.

However, the ~legal question~: Should a legal system employ capital punishment? -- is of a different order. There are grounds for debate -- though ~not~ out of sympathy or pity for murderers.

If it were possible to be fully and irrevocably certain, beyond any possibility of error, that a man were guilty, then capital punishment for murder would be appropriate and just. But men are not infallible; juries make mistakes; ~that~ is the problem. There have been instances recorded where all the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to a man's guilt, and the man was convicted, and then subsequently discovered to be innocent. It is the possibility of executing an ~innocent~ man that raises doubt about the legal advisability of capital

punishment. It is preferable to sentence ten murderers to life imprisonment, rather than sentence one innocent man to death. If a man is unjustly imprisoned and subsequently proven to be innocent, some form of restitution is still possible: none is possible if he is dead.

The problem involved is that of establishing criteria of proof so rationally stringent as to forbid the possibility of convicting an innocent man.

It should be noted that the legal question of capital punishment is outside the sphere of philosophy proper: it is to be resolved by a special, separate discipline: the philosophy of law."

end quote

That is my position in general but I agree that there may be specific cases where the guilt of the perpetrator of a crime is provable beyond a reasonable doubt, and the crime involved treason, or as someone mentioned, crimes against children.

Michael Miller wrote on OWL:

Absolute certainty of guilt. The standards for certainty would vary according to the efficacy of technologies available. That would be weighed by the citizenry against their long-term confidence in the probable future objectivity of their Constitution, government, and each other. As with all other issues, the dominant assessment of that confidence would define the standards to be met, and the government would succeed or fail in this portion of their task per the accuracy of that assessment.

Whenever all four criteria are met, the State would have no alternative but to allow (starvation), facilitate (cup of hemlock), or execute (lethal injection) the death of the criminal. If at that time any debt is still owed to the victim(s), the State would be required to effect the death of the criminal in a way to maximize the value of his remains (particularly the viable organs), which would become part of the criminal's estate and thence the property of the victim(s).

This is a benevolent scheme for after-the-fact retaliatory force. It is more protective of society, more mitigating for the victim, and more judicious to the criminal than others I have encountered.

end quote

It may be moral and logical, but the idea of harvesting the organs of an executed felon does not seem ethical. Islamic methods of execution are cruel and dehumanizing to society as a whole. In spite of my joking about it I do not think gladiator schools for prisoners is a good or civilizing idea. Some oldsters here in America, remember going to public hangings as late as the 1930’s. Let us not return to those days.

Semper cogitans fidele,

Peter Taylor

[anthony]

I don't think anything is inevitable. Who holds that cultural and scientific knowledge, but human beings. That knowledge is a not a disconnected abstraction locked in a room somewhere. Every generation has to start all over again.

But every generation starts with the aquired knowledge already available.

Rapid access to information via the internet" is a double-edged sword, to me. As much able to propagate harm

It is a double-edged sword, no doubt. but the sheer public transparency of the internet will make it more and more difficult for dictatoral regimes to slaughter their people, when they know the whole world is watching.

I am rather floored by your hopeful idealism, almost Utopianism, Xray. In reality, do you seriously believe another Dark Age is an impossibility?

I don't want come across as the residient Polyanna here , therefore basing my concivtions on pure belief won't do of course. The empirical evidence is the documented historical record: when looking back in history, over the millenia, there is a continuing movement toward more freedom, more democracy, more human rights, etc. Even with the danger of relapses always present - I don't think that such a horrific relapse of a civilized nation like Germany into the abyss of cruelty and irrationality which was the Third Reich would be possible today anymore. This does not mean that the grailkeepers of dogma and dictatorship are going to surrender to reason and freedom without a fight, as evidenced in the current 'culture struggle' between dogmatic religionists (whose ideal is a 'theocracy') and democratic secularists. But in the long run, dogmatic religion does not have chance of survival. There is going to come a point when the vast majority of people just won't believe unscientific absurdities anymore. All this is going to take time of course, but the more educated the world population becomes, the more this process is going to be accelerated.

"...the empirical evidence [of]the documented historical record" shows me nothing hopeful. Unless your

sampling is reduced to a short period of 60 years,and a tiny geographic area - which it must be.

I don't even have to produce a litany of potential flash-points around the globe to prove it, do I?

"Dogmatic religionists" happen to be on the rise; the potential of dictators as great as always.

The peoples and cultures you speak of have been 'collectivised' and controlled (even tamed) by the rise of Statism in every part of the world. Which is where I believe your unrealistic optimism come from.

"Peace in our time" ... at all costs, including appeasement, compromise, and totalitarian power..

What you and I are observing is the same thing; you see it as "the continuing movement toward more freedom";

I see the opposite. Who is right?

And everywhere there are the signs of populaces growing accustomed to taking - and the growth of entitlement, and expectations of them demanding to be given more, are overwhelmingly obvious.

A collective has 'one neck, ready for one leash', and it can only require one evil idea, from one man, to set loose the mobs.

Rights and law without individualism are unjust. Empiricism without principle, is dangerous. Science without objective philosophy, is insane. Education by the State stifles

independent minds. Obviously, I don't see these as the panaceas you do.

The complacency and irrational faith in fellow man (and 'democracy') I think, is a pipe dream, which if shared by a majority, could only make it easier for the despots to enter.

[seymourblogger]

Evil is Toohey's little talk to Keating in Fountainhead. To erase the distinction between greatness and mediocrity. To elevate mediocrity while ridiculing and/or defaming greatness. To smooth out the soup so there are no lumps or differentiations. What Toohey was doing at the Banner as he shaped the mind and feelings of the masses.

In this way no one will know any differences at all. This will be Virtual Reality when simulated reality becomes total.

The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact - by Jean Baudrillard (from Nietzsche of course)

[william.scherk]

I would seriously consider the death penalty for child crimes.

It is a difficult issue though.

I vote with Carol. What makes me stumble over any firing squad or hangman or conscientious injector or electric chair or gas chamber or torture chamber or any power of the state to take a life is that there will be mistakes made. Mistakes will be made.

In Canada, after we stopped the habit of the hangman (the only option up here), four major shocking cases of innocence played out in the media over the years. I won't name them, but these four would have long since been bones in a prison cemetery or crypt.

Think of Damien Echols and the two other West Memphis Three. They were convicted fair and square, Adam. They satanically tortured and killed young boys, a savage, evil act. Whoever did that crime deserved to dangle, to have forfeited the right to live further (or that is what I say in my Death Penalty Nutcase voice), but they got the wrong guys.

American justice can still go all snaky. We know this from Abu Graib to yesterday's news. It is pretty tough to know that you kill innocent people. It is something that made me loathe the Texas-style politics of pandering to death and horror through toughness and The Injection. and I just can't get over. Mistakes were made..

[Selene]

I would seriously consider the death penalty for child crimes.

It is a difficult issue though.

Think of Damien Echols and the two other West Memphis Three. They were convicted fair and square, Adam. They satanically tortured and killed young boys, a savage, evil act. Whoever did that crime deserved to dangle, to have forfeited the right to live further (or that is what I say in my Death Penalty Nutcase voice), but they got the wrong guys.

American justice can still go all snaky. We know this from Abu Graib to yesterday's news. It is pretty tough to know that you kill innocent people. It is something that made me loathe the Texas-style politics of pandering to death and horror through toughness and The Injection. and I just can't get over. Mistakes were made..

William:

Interesting case. American justice released them with Alford pleas on August 19, 2011.

This case, having no conclusive DNA evidence, would not qualify for consideration for a special sentencing of death in my approach to considering the death penalty being on the table for this type of heinous child crime.

The "eye witness" had recanted his testimony, yet they still got convicted. There was no conclusive DNA evidence. But there is a love story that arose out of his eighteen (18) years on death row.

October 13, 2011

A Death-Row Love Story

By GEOFFREY GRAY

The letter came through a slot in the cell door. It was early 1996. Damien Echols looked at the postmark — Brooklyn, N.Y. — and the name on the return address: Lorri Davis. He opened the envelope and examined the messy handwriting.

“Damien, I can’t say that I believe in ‘God,’ but something has brought you into my life,” Davis wrote. “As daunting as that is to me sometimes, I know it is a good thing.”

She had seen him on a film screen in New York. “I don’t see many documentaries, but a friend of mine had tickets to see ‘Paradise Lost,’ and for some reason I really wanted to see it.”

“Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills”

follows the case of three young boys who went missing from West Memphis, Ark. The boys were second graders, Cub Scouts, and their bodies were found naked and hogtied in a drainage ditch. The police believed a satanic cult was responsible because of all the strange wounds and markings. The investigation floundered. Then a teenager, Jessie Misskelley Jr., told the police that he saw his friend, Jason Baldwin, and another teenager, Damien Echols, go into the woods with the boys and rape them. Misskelley later recanted, claiming that the police coerced the confession. But the West Memphis Three, as they became known, were convicted of the crimes. Misskelley, 18, and Baldwin, 16, were given life sentences. Echols, who was deemed the ringleader, was sentenced to death. He was 19.

“They had a question-and-answer session after the movie, and everyone more or less voiced the same opinion: How could this happen?” Davis wrote him. “I came home that night and couldn’t sleep.”

She was adamant.

“Damien, I’m prone to being maybe a bit obsessive, maybe a bit too idealistic, definitely too sensitive, but . . . I couldn’t stop thinking of you in that place — knowing — it was all so very wrong. . . . It breaks my heart that you are where you are and forced to endure it, so I am committed to doing whatever I can to make your life a little more bearable. ”

She was optimistic.

“Damien, I honestly believe that undying hope can do wonders in this world. Now, I see and hear and read about injustices all the time. . . . And yes, I hate it — but nothing has ever gotten through to me like you did. Maybe it’s because you remind me a little about myself, maybe growing up the way we did.”

Davis and Echols were each from a small town, but Davis grew up middle class in West Virginia, while Echols lived in poverty. One of his early homes was a rusted-out sharecropper shack with an outhouse. He spent days walking along the highway and the train tracks, lingering in cemeteries or abandoned warehouses. He dropped out of high school after his freshman year. He wore his hair long, wore eye shadow, dressed in black and was interested in witchcraft. He spent his afternoons in the West Memphis Public Library, reading about religion, spirits and sorcerers, magical characters that could transport him out of his home in Lake Shore Trailer Park.

When Davis contacted Echols, she was living in Park Slope and working as a landscape architect for a firm in Manhattan. Her free time was filled with yoga, after-work drinks, film festivals and gallery openings. After an amicable divorce, she had a few relationships, and photographs show her happily posing on vacations in Paris and on the beach with her jeans rolled up. But she often felt alone, even in the company of others.

“No one really knows what to say to me,” she would later write. “I’ve always been really quiet around them. . . . Last year someone called me a kite without a string.”

Soon enough,

an envelope from the penitentiary appeared in her mailbox. The handwriting was styled like old Gothic print, the kind you’d find on a Halloween greeting card. Before she opened the envelope, Davis made sure she was alone.

“I’ve been waiting,” Echols wrote her. “I knew that sooner or later someone would take notice. . . . Do you have any idea how it feels to be called a killer by everyone who sees you, even though you know you’re innocent? I go through hell every day, sitting here waiting to die for something I didn’t do. It’s a nightmare. . . .”

She wrote back immediately. “Please excuse my ignorance,” she wrote, “I just want a semblance of what your life is like presently.”

The fluorescent lights in his cell came on for breakfast at 2:30 a.m.; lunch was at 9:30 a.m., dinner at 2:30 p.m. He rarely ate, and he’d lost some 50 pounds, going down to 130. There was a small television inside his cell.

“I’ve taken the habit of watching ‘The Price Is Right’ in the mornings,” he wrote. “Sometimes I even talk to Bob.”

She sent more letters, often twice a day, stuffing them with surprises.

“I just got . . . the basil leaf,” he wrote. “That thing sure is stinky.”

Soon there were so many letters going back and forth between them that it was hard to keep the conversation straight.

“My favorite color is blue,” she wrote.

“I knew you were going to say your favorite color is blue,” he wrote. “It belongs to you. My favorite colors are black and crimson. I love deep, dark red things made of red velvet.”

“It’s great, isn’t it?” she wrote. “Getting to know someone by writing. It’s quite wonderful and mysterious. . . . Could you try and explain what your beliefs are? . . . I was raised in a family of Southern Baptist born-again Christians, but no one could answer my questions. . . .”

“I wanted to be a priest,” he wrote. “All my entire life all I’ve ever had were questions that no one could ever answer. . . . I began to look at other religions, searching for something I could believe in and put faith in. That’s how I became a Wiccan. We believe in the creative force of life, which we call the mother goddess.”

When his letters arrived, she tore the envelopes open in the same place on the left, then sniffed. The air inside smelled like cloves.

Echols tried to pick up her scent on the paper too. To him she smelled like the sun does, like honey, like warmth.

“Still can’t get over the fact that you try to smell me,” she wrote. “It’s so, so lovely to me — lovelier than anything you could have told me.”

The first time

they met in person, they stared at each other through the glass partition in the prison visiting room. It had been five months since the first letter. To him she did not look too different from the pictures she’d sent: pretty, with light brown hair and blue-green eyes. He had changed since the documentary, his skin even paler from the lack of sunlight and his frame more gaunt.

Under the glass, there was a mesh net. He put his fingers there. She blew on them.

“I’ve never seen a more beautiful creature,” he wrote after that. “I wanted to hold my breath every time you moved. The only reason your age ‘freaked me out’ is because I feel so much older than you.” Davis was then 33, Echols 21.

“I now firmly believe with all my being that I had to come here to find you,” he wrote. “Your words are like a million tiny spider legs tickling their way across my brain. . . . It’s frightening to think that any one person could have such power over me . . . you are forcing me to feel. .

. . You are dragging me (kicking and screaming) back into life. . . . I’ve become utterly intoxicated by you. . . . I never want it to end.” In another letter he wrote: “I feel as if I am hanging over an abyss by a thread. Sometimes I feel that you are the abyss into which I will fall forever, and other times it’s as if you are the thread, the only thing that keeps me from falling into the abyss.”

He decided to quit his two-and-a-half-pack-a-day smoking habit, to remove all the toxins from his body. “I have to purify myself in every way, because I would never want to stain you or defile you in any way.”

“I’m glad I’ve never done drugs,” she wrote, equating her love for him to an addiction. “I would have never realized how wonderful the real thing is.”

“You were talking about falling in love. I’ve been steadily falling deeply in love with you ever since you asked me about chastity belts, whirling dervishes, 17-year locusts, and Paganini. . . . The only thing I ever want to do anymore is disappear inside your head and heart, to live there. . . . I’m falling apart, but at the same time being reconstructed into something new. ‘Damien’ doesn’t exist anymore.”

“My Dearest Damien,” she wrote. “You are safe now, here inside me, where you will be from here on.”

She wanted to

get closer. In 1998, she quit her job in New York and moved to Little Rock, only an hour from his prison. For work, she designed parks and bicycle paths for the city.

“Wow,” she wrote. “I haven’t been poor in such a long time. It’s time to face up to it. It is. I’m poor. I’m poor. I’m poor. There. Is that so bad? I’ll get used to it, I will.”

She lived as he did. She did not decorate her small apartment. She did not socialize often. For solidarity, they meditated at the same times. Soon their schedules were synchronized.

“I am shedding the old life for you,” she wrote.

The only way to be closer still, they decided, was to marry: a husband and wife would be allowed “contact visits.” The ceremony, held in the prison visiting room on Dec. 3, 1999, was the first time they had been together without the glass between them. At a reception in Little Rock, Davis carried a framed picture of Echols to remind her friends and family for whom she was fighting.

By this time Davis had begun to manage Echols’s legal efforts and to coordinate the movement dedicated to his release. One early supporter was Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, who offered the assistance of his lawyers and started visiting Echols in prison. Johnny Depp, Patti Smith and Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks offered financial support, too, and gave interviews about his case. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, the New Zealand-based filmmakers behind “The Lord of the Rings,” would also spend years bankrolling his defense.

All the attention turned Echols into a celebrity himself. One day, he received 180 letters from supporters. Another time, he was summoned to the warden’s office after women’s underwear was found in a letter sent to him.

Some of the attention made Davis jealous. With her letters, she had created a world for the two of them to live in together. Now it felt compromised.

“My love. . . . I cannot do this anymore,” she wrote. “I must stop before irreparable damage is done. . . . I cannot have these people in here anymore. . . . If I don’t stop I’m going to break, I am going to crack in more places than one.”

“I’ve been pushed, and I’ve pushed myself, as far as I can go,” he wrote her. “I’m on the edge of a cliff, tired, worn out, fed up, running on pain, hatred, anxiety, fury, rage, paranoia and contempt. . . . Sometimes lately I want to start screaming so loud you have no choice but to hear — WAKE UP! WAKE UP! — I see me screaming so loud it looks like the wind is blowing through your hair.”

He shaved his head like a monk and began studying Buddhism. His letters grew distant.

“I just want you back,” she wrote. “I don’t want the Buddha. I just want you to look at me. My name is Lorri and I am your wife, and you fell in love with me a long time ago with such passion.”

“My love. . . . You and I both know that the letter I got from you today was nothing but [expletive],” he wrote. “You keep saying you’re not a part of this world, but you’re far more attached to it than I’ve ever been. . . . I have no use for this world. . . . I have no place in it. I want to crush it, erase it. . . . It amazes me that you love it so much.”

The letter-writing

eventually slowed down. She was visiting him in prison on such a regular basis that she would often arrive before her letters would. Grateful as he was for the support, Echols tired of corresponding with so many people. “I swear that I hate having to pick up this pen,” Echols wrote. “I’ve been writing letters seemingly nonstop, and it never, ever ends. I believe it would be worth it to break my hands just so I wouldn’t have to do so much as think about writing for a couple of months.”

The focus was now on his legal appeals.

Scientists hired by his defense team could find no DNA evidence linking Echols or his co-defendants to either the victims or the crime scene. Other experts for the defense analyzed the wounds and markings found on the children and concluded they had come not from humans but from animals. The entire theory of the murders as a satanic ritual was now open to challenge.

In prison, Echols entertained the possibility of his release. He thought about standing in the rain and feeling the water on his skin. Or watching the Red Sox take the field at Fenway Park. He’d never driven a car, flown in an airplane. Now 36, he’d spent half his life on death row.

As the defense prepared for a hearing last December, an unusual deal was struck: If Echols and his co-defendants pleaded guilty — while being permitted to maintain their innocence — and if they agreed not to sue the state for financial damages, they would be released from prison. Echols considered fighting for full exoneration, but he and Davis and his co-defendants believed it was too risky, and they ultimately accepted the bargain.

The week before Echols got out of prison was the hardest stretch. He couldn’t sleep, petrified that somehow the deal would fall through. But on Aug. 19, Echols and his co-defendants appeared before a judge, issued their pleas and walked out of the courtroom. The next day, Echols and Davis flew on Eddie Vedder’s private jet to Seattle for a weekend celebration. Then it was off to Manhattan, where they now live.

“What’s a tuna burger?”

Echols asked a week after his release. It was the first time I saw him as a free man. Over the summer we met several times in prison, and I read the voluminous correspondence between him and Davis, who shared the letters with me.

Now sitting in a banquette in a TriBeCa bistro, he contemplated this exotic sandwich. When the tuna burger came, he put it close to his nose and sniffed it. Same with a stalk of grilled asparagus. He eyed the crèmelike substance in the silver cup next to the tuna burger suspiciously. “What’s this?”

“Wasabi,” Davis said. “It’s like a spicy mustard sauce.”

He sniffed, dipped a finger in to taste.

“I’m trying not to coddle him too much,” she said. “It’s like ‘E.T.’ — everything is so new, it’s so much fun.”

As a couple, they are still adjusting to being together. She has learned to tolerate some of his passions (“I’m eating pizza every day”) and the occasional violation of etiquette.

“I’m not used to eating with utensils,” he said.

He hoped they would spend more time alone together, just absorbing each other up close. But there were so many things to do. Adventures. Errands. Japanese food. That Red Sox game.

They talked about seeing a movie later that evening. “I want to see ‘Fright Night,’ ” he said. “They’re rereleasing it in 3-D!”

Davis gave him a look. “ ‘

Fright Night

?’ ”

“She tries to introduce me to all these highbrow novels and these foreign films and stuff — and

Woody Allen

,” he complained. “You know, these stories that are all about the human condition and slices of life. They’re so boring! No wonder everyone in New York is depressed!”

“Listen,” she said. “You better get this stuff out of your system. I’m giving you a grace period. You have a couple weeks, then. . . .”

He still had yet to venture out alone. “I’m almost ready,” he said, and reached under the table to hold Davis’s hand.

They still write. One of Echols’s favorite places­ in New York is Gothic Renaissance, a costume shop in the East Village. Davis goes with him, and sometimes they get separated. One day recently, amid the Halloween masks, Davis noticed that she had received another note from him. It was a text message.

“Where are u? I’m near the front.”

Geoffrey Gray

is the author of "Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper," which was published in August.

Editor:

Lauren Kern

Now, I grant you that him being a Red Sox fan would still qualify for consideration as a potential death penalty punishment, but short of that, I agree that a death penalty would have to have an extremely specific set of concrete and verifiable evidence to even make it to that stage of possible action.

The Illinois initiative which established that close to fifty (50%) of the death row inmates were falsely convicted is clear proof of how rare a death penalty should be meted out.

Adam

[Peter]

Tony asked Xray:

In reality, do you seriously believe another Dark Age is an impossibility?

end quote

In some ways a “Dark Age” already exists in those parts of the world which are deliberately violent, and ignorant. Civilizing influences are available for emulation in Africa but frequently ignored. The rulers of China and North Korea understand that freedom equals prosperity but choose to keep their aristocracy in power.

The Dark Side isn’t real. There are no elements called *evil* or *good,* on the Periodic Table. It is a euphemism or an allusion pertaining to human action. The concept of evil is not ignorance, but it is evasion. The concept of Evil is not indifference, or blind causality. Evil is what we call human action which deliberately and actively worsens or destroys life. It is Darwinian in that sense. “The Survival of the Fittest” is another way of saying good extends survival and evil eventually shortens life or the quality of life.

We have many repositories for knowledge. The knowledge from “The Library of Alexandria” was burned but now there are thousands of scattered “libraries.” So, the bright side of me answers the possibility of another Dark Age by saying, “Never!”

I wonder though. What bothers me is that we have so much knowledge only stored electronically, and that electronic-only trend is accelerating. If the machines or electricity to run those machines is lost, the knowledge is lost. Physical books crumble, but many have lasted for a thousand years. E-books could be lost in the blink of a solar burst from a faraway neutron star.

We have depositories for seeds that are helpful to humans. Are there places, other than The Smithsonian, or other libraries that store human knowledge for the ages, in easily accessible, physical form?

Semper cogitans fidele,

Peter Taylor

[Xray]

"...the empirical evidence [of]the documented historical record" shows me nothing hopeful. Unless your

sampling is reduced to a short period of 60 years,and a tiny geographic area - which it must be.

I don't even have to produce a litany of potential flash-points around the globe to prove it, do I?

On another thread, I just mentioned Steven Pinker's very interesting TED talk on the decline of violence. Past times were definitely more violent.

http://video.google....959887856210325

[anthony]

"...the empirical evidence [of]the documented historical record" shows me nothing hopeful. Unless your sampling is reduced to a short period of 60 years,and a tiny geographic area - which it must be. I don't even have to produce a litany of potential flash-points around the globe to prove it, do I?

On another thread, I just mentioned Steven Pinker's very interesting TED talk on the decline of violence. Past times were definitely more violent. http://video.google....959887856210325

Pinker goes to completely the other extreme, of a sampling from Early Man onwards.

That in some parts, a man was 60% likely to die by another man, back then. Some base to work from!

He shows that the "Age of Reason" brought about a major change, though. Why then, must be asked,

hasn't that long intervening period, since then, brought us to near-zero massacres and 'unrest' - now??

That should be the effect of any steady-growth theory, surely.

Why?

a. Because 'Reason' has been fluctuating during those long periods.

b. Reason alone wasn't the full story: with reason, also came individualism.

Individualism is what brought new respect for life to men.

We are presently fluctuating into collectivism (again), which is an indicator that individualism (and reason) is declining.

For the time being, collectivism's partner-in-crime, Statism, has kept the lid on the pressure-cooker - in some places - and also where the populace is more civilized, self-disciplined...or docile - and where mixed economies have made an uneasy balance. That imposed 'peace' is what I think has led to present ignorant smug security .

Where there exists any force, even benign-seeming force - reason dies out.

I don't agree with Pinker's wide-ranging historical assertions, particularly with violence from the Age of Reason, onward.

If he were right, we would be a perfectly rational, civilized bunch by now.

[BaalChatzaf]

I don't agree with Pinker's wide-ranging historical assertions, particularly with violence from the Age of Reason, onward.

If he were right, we would be a perfectly rational, civilized bunch by now.

Who is "we". Does that include the Third World?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[anthony]

I don't agree with Pinker's wide-ranging historical assertions, particularly with violence from the Age of Reason, onward. If he were right, we would be a perfectly rational, civilized bunch by now.

Who is "we". Does that include the Third World? Ba'al Chatzaf

I don't agree with Pinker's wide-ranging historical assertions, particularly with violence from the Age of Reason, onward. If he were right, we would be a perfectly rational, civilized bunch by now.

Who is "we". Does that include the Third World? Ba'al Chatzaf

Oh, no! I haven't even got started on the Third World. Only 'Free' Europe.

[seymourblogger]

Baudrillard:

The Intelligence of Evil

The Transparency of Evil

Good is not the opposite of Evil. All of the above are arguments within the Discourse of the dialectic. Baudrilard argues that Evil is necessary. When Toohey wins, when distinctions are leveled, when nothing can be distinguished, that is what Evil is. It is transparent.

Classic old-fashioned Evil is necessary. Toni Morrison fictionalizes this in her novel Sula who is reagarded as Evil by the town when she is young and when she returns. Why? Because as a child she watches her mother burn to death without doidng anything, not that she could have anyway. But she was fascinated by the flames, her mother's contortions and the theatre of the Event. She was labeled Evil. She continued in her non-conformist ways, and reinforced their notion of her Evilness. She affected their behavior to each other and when she died, they did not have a place to project their own Evil, and began to dislay it again in their daily lives. Sula was a Nietzschean character. She couldn't be put in a box labeled psychology study.

I am at a point in a story about this and I haven't figured out a way to resolve it yet.