Travesty Optimization

Applying the proportionality test to both negative and positive rights may undermine any margin of appreciation of the [sic] state authorities.  This gives rise to the problem of over-determination.-- Dual authors Klatt and Meeter, The Constitutional Structure of Proportionality, p 86

How one views the Lionel Tate case, almost twenty years old, depends on your filter. Dana Canedy doesn't bother to cast doubt on the "wrestling defense," because The New York Times couldn't fathom how the prosecutor filed for premeditation, while it is overtly challenged by Bill Kurtis three years later. And then, true to form for troubled African American men, Tate engages in recidivism. It tempts reactions along the lines of dangerous eugenic fallacies, but ethnicity is not a meaningless term, certainly not in the medical field, and in jurisprudence, experts eradicate bias through pretense. Caste, social station, are irrelevant behind the shield of our systems process. Never mind that, according to accepted norms, if you baby sit a six year old and leave her with your son twice her size and hear cries of distress, you get yourself out of bed and check. Kathleen Grossett-Tate was culpable in the death of Tiffany Eunick, but what do we wind up with? Traumatized liberal attorneys, a besmirched ADA, a judge who couldn't craft an appropriate punishment because his hands were tied by state guidelines, a single mother scarred for life by the loss of her little girl, a governor currently limping along in the primaries who attempted to split the difference in a glaringly ineffectual fashion, and the United States once again exposes its bongo justice, during the Clinton years, to foreign ridicule.

At the time this case became one in a series of sensational events the state of Florida just keeps on giving, I was a fledgling journalist. The lesbian ADAPT activist gave me a byline, and the rest is moot, given present earnings capacity. I did not really understand search, and came late to Google, which is why I intuit a vague familiarity, at best, with the trial.

Similarly, during the last days in the life of David Koresh, I was a work incentives advocate due to the wide latitude of a Pew Charitable Trust grant, and Waco was for all intents and purposes a prelude to Xbox, where we begin to lose the ability to differentiate collateral damage. I accepted the concern for the welfare of the children as paramount over and above a radical sect to command adherents as it pleased. Against the stress of case management, it was dramatic entertainment which might have been negotiated better, but hardly a trigger for sedition, sans McVeigh. What created him, what created ISIS, isn't going to fizzle due to drone technology, especially when one's former youthful enthusiasm evaporates because a female feline dashes out in the hallway, gnaws neighbor's trash after you spent the holiday morning chasing cat chow, screaming "Get the fuck in the studio," and Tim opens his door, helping you reign in a spayed foster rescue little bigger than a football. She puked outside Jim's door, the brother with end stage renal disease. I wanted a writing studio exactly like that of Andre Dubus, and instead, I am like a samurai gutting her intestines, familial aspirations imploded, after a middle class life more affluent than this.

My father doesn't want to see me; the sister put him up to it. I don't want him in my unit. He should go back to die at Myrtle Beach, and I envision my own demise in a deportation cell outside of Paris, dreaming of a much more inclusive global conflict than that Niall Ferguson or Jennifer Rubin might see ahead.