MASSACHUSETTS MADNESS

How the mighty have fallen.  Massachusetts, once the home of John Adams, the “Atlas of American independence” and future President of the United States, is now led by Maura Healey, the state’s first lesbian governor and the chief executive who recently signed a bill protecting a woman’s right to abort her baby up to the point of birth.  At the signing ceremony a gaggle of females standing behind her desk applauded enthusiastically.  Meanwhile in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a crowd of ladies in pink voiced their enthusiastic support for Lindsay Clancy, who was on trial for strangling the life out of her three children -- Cora, Dawson, and Callan.   

Thirty years earlier the distinguished Democrat New York Senator and former Harvard Professor Patrick Moynihan, who was not a pro-life warrior, compared partial birth abortion to infanticide.  One can only imagine Abigail Adams cringing at the thought of her “remember the ladies” request to John being invoked by twenty-first century feminists to cheer unrestricted abortion as health care and to invoke inadequate medical treatment plus postpartum psychosis as a legal excuse for a mom carefully planning and carrying out the extermination of her three children over the span of eighteen minutes.

It at least makes sense that the same state that elected a governor who supports unrestricted abortion also devised an insanity defense putting the burden of proof on the prosecution rather than the defense.  In addition, Bay State prosecutors must prove not only that defendants know the difference between right and wrong but also that they can control their actions.  This virtually insuperable standard unique to Massachusetts resembles the obligation to prove a negative, to prove it twice, and to prove it “beyond a reasonable doubt.”  She’s “not” cognitively unaware of standards of right and wrong, and she’s “not” unable to control her actions.  Throw in the fact that the criminal act concerns killing three kids, and the prosecution’s task becomes akin to climbing Mt. Everest.

Governor Healey also recently signed the mendaciously labeled “Protect Act,” a law that further limits the sanctuary state’s cooperation with ICE and guarantees that illegal aliens are protected, as much as reasonably possible, from deportation.  Even before Healey’s new law the police department of Boston’s super-Woke Mayor Michelle Wu, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, ignored ICE detainers on scores of illegals, among them aliens accused of arson, child abuse, assault, and drug dealing. 

Then there’s Ed Markey, the state’s octogenarian senator who proclaimed his support for a transgender bill of rights after easily defeating his forty-seven-year-old primary opponent with similar leftist credentials.  This eccentric topic became a campaign issue for Democrats thanks to Congressman Moulton’s ill-advised statement in 2024, "I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”  He added that “as a Democrat I'm supposed to be afraid to say that.”  Even after offering a groveling apology of sorts, the former marine would discover that fear was, indeed, warranted for his perfectly sensible statement in madly blue Massachusetts, a locale where “gender-affirming care” for minors is already a state constitutional right that extends to youngsters from other states who seek to cure their anxieties by mutilating their bodies.

One should remember that Massachusetts is also the state that continued to reelect Ted Kennedy to the Senate seven times even after the senator abandoned a car he had driven off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, a car that still contained a woman who was not his then-pregnant wife.  Mary Jo Kopechne likely died of suffocation while Kennedy returned to the party cottage from which the two had left late that night.  The police were contacted approximately ten hours later, giving Kennedy time, if needed, to sober up, though he was never given an alcohol test.  The judicial slap on the wrist that followed for abandoning the scene of the accident didn’t deter the state’s highly educated residents from sending Ted back to the Senate a year later in 1970 with 62% of the vote.  A blow by blow recounting of the incident can be found in this 2018 Politico review of the film “Chappaquiddick.” 

Massachusetts lawmakers are currently considering a bill that would give Muslims a greater voice in state government and address areas of discrimination presumably perpetrated against that community.  The bill would create an eleven-member commission to work with state officials on areas of concern to Muslims such as education, civil rights, health care, employment, and, of course, Islamophobia.   When those familiar topics inevitably morph into madrasa lessons, community cutouts for sharia law, and employment standards  that reflect Muslim mores vis-à-vis pork, dogs, female attire, and the like, one wonders if even inveterate Bay State virtue signalers might find such concessions to “an oppressed minority” a “bridge too far.”

Recently a woman in Illinois who closely followed the Clancy trial has allegedly killed her two-year-old child by ligature compression of the neck in her basement, the same method and location of Clancy’s acknowledged victims.  Following the homicide the accused killer also inflicted on herself some perfunctory suicide cuts.  Fortunately, Illinois doesn’t require the state to prove what should be the defense’s burden, though the defense only needs “clear and convincing” evidence, not evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that a perpetrator doesn’t know right from wrong.  While Massachusetts boasts that almost half its adults have college degrees and likely takes pride in the fact that it’s the most secular state in the union, perhaps a less ideologically enthralled and more religiously grounded jury pool in the Midwest might find it possible to believe a mother can actually be held legally culpable for strangling her child to death.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

 

Is Anyone Really Guilty Anymore?

“Justice delayed is justice denied.”  “The wheels of justice grind slowly but ever so fine.”  “Better that one-hundred guilty persons go free than one innocent person should suffer.”  These are incompatible aphorisms that at various times have been asserted about the American justice system.  

The first was clearly employed when William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.  The President died on September 14, and his killer was executed a month and a half later.  As a Facebook contributor noted, “If the justice system worked the way it did for McKinley, [Tyler] Robinson would have been dead by December, 2025.”  More accurately, Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer would have exited this life by Halloween last year.  

The assertion that “justice delayed is justice denied,” despite its frequent repetition, is a concept honored more in the breach than in the observance.  Tyler Robinson’s preliminary hearing, for example, won’t be concluded until September, almost a year after Kirk’s murder.  Karmelo Anthony’s trial took over fourteen months after the knife-totting youngster stabbed and killed Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet.  Recently Anthony’s hearing for a retrial was denied.  Appeals will doubtless follow.    

That the wheels of modern American justice “grind slowly” is obvious, but the “ever so fine” conclusion is risible.  Jury or judge politicization is clear in cases involving, for example, O.J. Simpson, Donald Trump, and thousands of January 6 defendants.  Meanwhile, we wait without much hope for justice to be “ground out” for the high-profile criminals involved in Crossfire Hurricane and Arctic Frost. 

Surprisingly, Benjamin Franklin embraced the hundred-to-one, guilty-to-innocent cliché, an exaggeration of the figure previously articulated by England’s PM William Blackstone who put the ratio at a more modest ten to one.  Practically speaking, anyone who touts Franklin’s formula effectively washes his hands of blood shed on the streets by the scores of criminals who evade punishment for the sake of an unreasonable legal scorecard.  Moreover, since criminals tend to reoffend and do so more frequently if the odds of being punished are slight, the number of innocent victims quickly grows to multiples of the initial figure.  In short, the assertion of a hundred to one standard is a form of “suicidal empathy” or, more accurately, “narcissistic empathy”-- i.e. a statement that flatters the speaker’s ego and overlooks victims actually sacrificed for the sake of a rhetorical yardstick.   

Of course law enforcement and the system of justice should be structured to avoid sending innocent people to prison, but the modern fixation on one side of the judicial and law enforcement equation has devastating consequences.  Here’s an alternate aphorism that should gain traction:  “The fewer criminals caught and expeditiously punished, the more innocents will be harmed by criminals.”  Conversely, the more criminals caught and swiftly punished, the fewer innocent victims will be harmed.  This inverse correlation is all the more relevant since it’s widely conceded that crime, especially violent crime, is largely concentrated in a small portion of the population, typically estimated at five percent or less.  El Salvador’s President Bukele, much vilified abroad but adored at home, totally transformed his country from a gang-ruled hellhole to a playground sanctuary for children by imprisoning one percent of the population.     

So why has our judicial system changed so much from the days of McKinley’s assassination when swift justice was the order of the day to the present where a plethora of “safeguards” have been placed on law enforcement and within the judicial system to prevent innocent individuals from being falsely convicted of a crime and guilty persons from being convicted based on faulty procedures?   The “not one innocent” mentality is largely the product, I believe, of a therapeutic culture in which the idea of personal responsibility has been drastically attenuated.  Villainy has been scaled down to reduced mental capacity or unfortunate environmental circumstances as the psychiatrist Karl Menninger noted a half-century ago in his book Whatever Happened to Sin.  

That’s not to say that such factors are totally irrelevant, but our obsessive desire for non-volitional explanations arises alongside an even deeper desire to deny the reality of evil.  Accordingly, those hundred guilty persons theoretically going free are vaguely felt to be victims of biology or society.  More specifically, for many females demonstrating outside the Clancy trial in Massachusetts it’s inconceivable that a woman would knowingly strangle her three young children.  It’s just too evil.  Thus, the heinous act becomes itself an argument against her criminal culpability and diffuse responsibility falls instead on medical practitioners and the pharmaceutical industry.  

In short, according to this perspective evil doesn’t really exist in individuals but rather in institutions and persons directing those institutions.  It’s a fantasy touted by Rousseau who claimed people are born good but are corrupted by society, a belief that leaves hanging a basic question:  How does a corrupt society arise from naturally good humans?  That’s not a problem faced by those who believe evil lies within the human heart and that, as Immanuel Kant asserted (albeit in German), “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”  It’s a thought that at least helps explain the legal and human foibles discussed above. 

 Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.