Found A Familiar Face In The News
For 21 years, Me Officer Dino counted this inmate during counts, push button buzzed open doors as he left and returned to this or that cell block, patted him down coming out of the chow hall, made sure he swallowed whatever the nurse gave him during pill calls, watched him eat, watched him sleep, watched him sweep, watched him mop, watched him watch TV, even watched him take showers and watched him on the yard from this or that guard tower. Have a fuzzy recollection of mentioning his name in an incident report during the Eighties when the place was rough and tumble.
A photo of the front of the prison where I worked and he lived is located at the bottom of the article.
A photo of the front of the prison where I worked and he lived is located at the bottom of the article.
He was sent from the cell blocks to the dorms where the less troublesome inmates were "warehoused" among rows of "racks" (what we called their bunks there).
Inmates also called the Alabama felony "three strikes your out" law "the bitch law."
How does his disproportionately strong punishment compare with those sentences the court hands out to murderers, in the name of Sanctuary Laws, in San Francisco?
Dino, is the facility you worked the one on the photo? Impressive building.
Donaldson was among those who relieved the officers I happened to be with that day in an Administrative Segregation Unit where really bad boys are housed,
Donaldson did not leave that post alive. He was escorting a nurse performing pill call from cell to cell when an inmate tossed coffee on the nurse.
Donaldson and whoever was operating doors in the cubicle became so angry they forgot the dang rules. Donaldson should have had at least one officer wit him when that cell door was opened. Donaldson charged in baton in hand.
The inmate was waiting with a shank and stabbed him in the heart. Because the prison is a half hour out in the boonies from Bessemer a rescue chopper was sent for but it was already too late. Learned the murderer was already a cop killer. This was before the future Donaldson prison picked up a third of death row. So why that inmate was not on death row down at a prison in south Alabama I have no idea.
It is good to know that the facility was named after him.
It could have been that the attacker would have been elevated to hero status as it is the SOP these days.
What happened to the murderer?
https://www.al.com/spotnews/2010/01/a...
could be naive.....
I'll only claim expertise in what I was trained to know and gained experience at, acknowledging that some supervisors and coworkers were brighter than me way back when.
On the other hand, some of both in a variety of forms were for really real jerks if not just plain evil.
I can get along with anyone who has a good heart and basic common sense.
Her position was that fallibility in legal proof of guilt precludes the death penalty because of the risk to the innocent improperly found guilty. A murderer morally deserves the death penalty, but not at the risk of the innocent falsely accused. The legal principle for what to do must be based on both the guilty and the innocent. (The Objectivist Newsletter January 1963)
That is not situational ethics or arguing both ends against a middle.
If you want to read the original The Objectivist Newsletter article I can scan it for you (it's a brief article), or The Objectivist Newsletter (1962-1965) is sold at https://estore.aynrand.org/p/210/the-... but is currently back ordered. Higher priced used copies are at amazon, with bookfinder.com better https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac...
The original article is longer than what I wrote above and does make a distinction between the legal process and its moral base, but not in terms of something the TAS article called "practical epistemology" (whatever that is intended to mean) . The moral base begins with consideration of the criminal himself, but also includes the affect on the innocent. The legal process could sweep up the innocent in false convictions (as it is known to do) because it does not operate with full certainty. How to formulate and implement legal processes concerns philosophy of law as a specialty, including standards of legal proof, and is not part of general philosophy.
The TAS article went on say that the issue is "in debate in Objectivist circles", but that isn't about Ayn Rand and her definitive position, and it did not invoke anything about arguing both sides against the middle and didn't say there is no answer.
I have no pity for someone like that. It used to be that a person like that would be expelled from the country into some remote place like Australia and left to fend for himself. Unfortunately, the liberals would never allow that now.
Now if your third felony was stealing $50, it's supposed to be nice that you would not have to worry about death row while you rotted away in prison for the rest of your life never tasting steak, baked potatoes and fried chicken ever, ever again. Watermelon? Forget about it. Lobster? Don't make me laugh!
OH...PS...MEMES UP!
In our local area a man tried to steal from an old lady for whom he done yard work. She trusted him because she knew him. But she didn't have any money at all that day, so he stabbed her, killing her. Robbery turned murder netted zero dollars.
Early on during my career I was riding unarmed in an ambulance transporting an inmate, having given my .38 to another officer following in a van. Or sometimes I was the doubly armed guy following the ambulance in the van.
Years later on there were two officers who specialized in doing just that. Me dino was content to work at the prison, especially when I was on the back gate tower lowering those .38s in a bucket.
On the back gate tower I had six .38s to check in and out as needed. There were a lot more weapons in the prison armory that was located down a ladder below my feet.
How does imprisonment teach him to love liberty and fear losing it? I have never seen that happen from taking away one's liberty.
Asked if he would order that, the Alabama governor at that time said, "Not on my watch."
The end result? No more chain gangs.
A serial thief would have continued to rob other inmates. Recall chasing such a thief out of a cell block and across the east yard.
He had a bit of a head start, but a shouting officer on a tower pointed him out to a sergeant that the thief ran straight into as he rounded another cell block.
Then he cried with tears on his face. LOL!
Thirty days disciplinary segregation. Isolation with a cot but only two hots. Actually, that "cot" is a concrete slab with a thin mattress on it.
Out for good behavior after some period of time? Maybe, with both evidence that he can be trusted to be back in public and sufficient punishment for the sequence of accumulating crimes, but restitution is not the primary purpose of sentencing for a crime. But we can be thankful that his later better behavior at least reduced the risk to dino.
Just having fun here.
Why? Why not?