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A View from the Cheap Seats by Garren Shipley
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Long-time readers of this blog know I'll be leaving the Cheap Seats briefly later this week for a rather significant appointment.
I've been chosen to be one of three media witnesses to the execution of Edward N. Bell, the Jamaican national who was convicted in 2001 of the 1999 murder of Winchester police Sgt. Ricky L. Timbrook.
Unless Gov. Tim Kaine intervenes in the next few hours, Bell will die by lethal injection on Thursday at 9 p.m., just a few feet away from me and a handful of other witnesses on the other side of a glass window.
Despite the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Bell's case, more than a few people are still trying to get his death sentence commuted to life in prison. While most make an appeal on humanitarian grounds, a significant number argue that Bell is actually innocent of the crime.
I've heard some truly vile stuff from some of those people in the past 48 hours -- vile in both the sense that they're vicious rumors if they're not true, and awful examples of corruption if they are true.
Rumors in my inbox place the blame for Officer Timbrook's death on law enforcement, shady dealings in a prosecutor's office, or other conspiracies that strain credulity.
I've talked about these theories with Bell's legal team at length. They've tried to run them to ground, as have I. And without fail, when someone turns a bright light on these shadowy rumors, they tend to melt away as if there was nothing there in the first place.
That's not to say Bell's arrest and trial were perfect. Far from it, at least according to one federal judge who heard the case and delivered a tongue-lashing extraordinaire from the bench to his trial lawyers.
For all the inconsistencies and problems in the trial, I've yet to see anything that supports any of these scurrilous (and frankly unprintable, due to libel laws) rumors that keep filling up voice mail.
The idea of a conspiracy is an attractive one. Shadowy conspiracies give us room to accommodate all the fuzzy, inconsistent details that grow out of our incomplete knowledge of events.
I've spent a lot of time in these Cheap Seats and other chairs watching human nature, and I've noticed two consistent facts: Human beings like digital results.
Yes or no. Right or wrong. Guilty or not guilty. Winner or loser.
But we live in an analog world, where digital results are rare and unnatural.
When does the sun rise? It all depends on how sharp your vision is and where you're standing. In all but the rarest of cases, there's always some sort of gray area caused either by incomplete knowledge of events or the limits of our perception.
The desire for digital results in an analog world are the reason we have artificial constructs like juries, home plate umpires and the Electoral College.
All of those things take a set of events that can be contested and make digital pronouncements as to their outcome. It's either a ball or a strike, guilty or not guilty. One candidate gets the majority and becomes president, and the other doesn't.
Such is the case with Ed Bell. People naturally want death penalty cases to be digital. But they're not, and they rarely are.
What we do know is that Bell was found guilty by a jury of his peers and sentenced to death.
And for everyone who was not standing in that alley in October 1999, that's probably all we ever will know.
I've been chosen to be one of three media witnesses to the execution of Edward N. Bell, the Jamaican national who was convicted in 2001 of the 1999 murder of Winchester police Sgt. Ricky L. Timbrook.
Unless Gov. Tim Kaine intervenes in the next few hours, Bell will die by lethal injection on Thursday at 9 p.m., just a few feet away from me and a handful of other witnesses on the other side of a glass window.
Despite the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Bell's case, more than a few people are still trying to get his death sentence commuted to life in prison. While most make an appeal on humanitarian grounds, a significant number argue that Bell is actually innocent of the crime.
I've heard some truly vile stuff from some of those people in the past 48 hours -- vile in both the sense that they're vicious rumors if they're not true, and awful examples of corruption if they are true.
Rumors in my inbox place the blame for Officer Timbrook's death on law enforcement, shady dealings in a prosecutor's office, or other conspiracies that strain credulity.
I've talked about these theories with Bell's legal team at length. They've tried to run them to ground, as have I. And without fail, when someone turns a bright light on these shadowy rumors, they tend to melt away as if there was nothing there in the first place.
That's not to say Bell's arrest and trial were perfect. Far from it, at least according to one federal judge who heard the case and delivered a tongue-lashing extraordinaire from the bench to his trial lawyers.
For all the inconsistencies and problems in the trial, I've yet to see anything that supports any of these scurrilous (and frankly unprintable, due to libel laws) rumors that keep filling up voice mail.
The idea of a conspiracy is an attractive one. Shadowy conspiracies give us room to accommodate all the fuzzy, inconsistent details that grow out of our incomplete knowledge of events.
I've spent a lot of time in these Cheap Seats and other chairs watching human nature, and I've noticed two consistent facts: Human beings like digital results.
Yes or no. Right or wrong. Guilty or not guilty. Winner or loser.
But we live in an analog world, where digital results are rare and unnatural.
When does the sun rise? It all depends on how sharp your vision is and where you're standing. In all but the rarest of cases, there's always some sort of gray area caused either by incomplete knowledge of events or the limits of our perception.
The desire for digital results in an analog world are the reason we have artificial constructs like juries, home plate umpires and the Electoral College.
All of those things take a set of events that can be contested and make digital pronouncements as to their outcome. It's either a ball or a strike, guilty or not guilty. One candidate gets the majority and becomes president, and the other doesn't.
Such is the case with Ed Bell. People naturally want death penalty cases to be digital. But they're not, and they rarely are.
What we do know is that Bell was found guilty by a jury of his peers and sentenced to death.
And for everyone who was not standing in that alley in October 1999, that's probably all we ever will know.
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