WWTBAM Bored

OK, I put the "as sin" part in.

Aren't we glad we don't have the death penalty in Massachusetts; if we did, England would never have returned him here for trial.

The piece-of-*%&!! had his lawyers claim his wife shot their baby & killed herself, then magically caused the gun to disappear from the scene after she was dead.

Apparently, the jury wasn't as tuned in to post-life activity abilities as he & as lawyers were.

Note to self: scratch the "ghost" defense.

His lawyers seemed to be working toward an appeal by reason of incompetent defense. Expecting the jury to believe for an instant that his wife killed the baby and then committed suicide, without presenting any witnesses or a shred of corroborating evidence? I think the term is reasonable doubt, fellas.

ghostjmf wrote:OK, I put the "as sin" part in.

Aren't we glad we don't have the death penalty in Massachusetts; if we did, England would never have returned him here for trial.

The piece-of-*%&!! had his lawyers claim his wife shot their baby & killed herself, then magically caused the gun to disappear from the scene after she was dead.

Apparently, the jury wasn't as tuned in to post-life activity abilities as he & as lawyers were.

So was I the only one wondering how John Entwistle managed to pull this off?

I'm serious, btw. But, since others seem to know what she is talking about, I guess I'm just out of the loop on this one.

is in the loop on this one.

Reading between the lines, I'd guess the scum lawyers for the scum client wanted the jury to believe the wife's family spirited the gun away, but they never actually came out & said it. Nor did they produce any evidence of it.


Whereas the guilty guilty guilty husband ran away to England (where he's from). And was contacting call girls & such right away. I guess this is standard grieving husband behavior? Or not. And had a lot of financial problems the jury wasn't even allowed to hear about for some legal reason.

I'm pretty sure he forgot to report his dead wife and daughter before he boarded a plane back to England.

fantine33 wrote:

ghostjmf wrote:OK, I put the "as sin" part in.

Aren't we glad we don't have the death penalty in Massachusetts; if we did, England would never have returned him here for trial.

The piece-of-*%&!! had his lawyers claim his wife shot their baby & killed herself, then magically caused the gun to disappear from the scene after she was dead.

Apparently, the jury wasn't as tuned in to post-life activity abilities as he & as lawyers were.

So was I the only one wondering how John Entwistle managed to pull this off?

I'm serious, btw. But, since others seem to know what she is talking about, I guess I'm just out of the loop on this one.

I think what we have here is a failure to communicate.

Entwhistle was found guilty. His defense attorneys claimed that his wife had post-natal depression and shot her baby and herself while he was out doing errands. When he came home and found them, he supposedly wanted to preserve her memory as loving mother and so he covered them up, returned the gun to his father-in-law's house (somehow knowing that was where it belonged), and the next day bought tickets to England and went home to his parents without a word. The defense implied that the coroner and police jumped to conclusions and didn't follow up on some evidence that indicated it was a suicide, but rested without calling a single witness to back it up.

ghost's last comment was about the apparent ability of the mother to return the gun to its proper place after shooting herself ("post-life activity abilities").

gsabc wrote:

fantine33 wrote:

ghostjmf wrote:OK, I put the "as sin" part in.

Aren't we glad we don't have the death penalty in Massachusetts; if we did, England would never have returned him here for trial.

The piece-of-*%&!! had his lawyers claim his wife shot their baby & killed herself, then magically caused the gun to disappear from the scene after she was dead.

Apparently, the jury wasn't as tuned in to post-life activity abilities as he & as lawyers were.

So was I the only one wondering how John Entwistle managed to pull this off?

I'm serious, btw. But, since others seem to know what she is talking about, I guess I'm just out of the loop on this one.

I think what we have here is a failure to communicate.

Entwhistle was found guilty. His defense attorneys claimed that his wife had post-natal depression and shot her baby and herself while he was out doing errands. When he came home and found them, he supposedly wanted to preserve her memory as loving mother and so he covered them up, returned the gun to his father-in-law's house (somehow knowing that was where it belonged), and the next day bought tickets to England and went home to his parents without a word. The defense implied that the coroner and police jumped to conclusions and didn't follow up on some evidence that indicated it was a suicide, but rested without calling a single witness to back it up.

ghost's last comment was about the apparent ability of the mother to return the gun to its proper place after shooting herself ("post-life activity abilities").

Thanks, gs, I get what you're talking about now. I didn't even understand what ghost was talking about after her follow up post. And since I only had a (misspelled) last name to go on, even a (gasp!) Google search didn't answer any questions for me.

Btw, I'm not bitching about the last name being misspelled, only that it was a main reason why I couldn't figure out wtf even when I tried.

I suspect Fanny and I are in the same boat. I don't recall hearing about "the Entwhistle case." Its coverage has been usurped by murders closer to home.

fantine33 wrote:And since I only had a (misspelled) last name to go on, even a (gasp!) Google search didn't answer any questions for me.

Oops. Sorry about propagating the error. Try the website for one of the Boston television stations for more information.

silvercamaro wrote:I suspect Fanny and I are in the same boat. I don't recall hearing about "the Entwhistle case." Its coverage has been usurped by murders closer to home.

Well, if Sliver's aboard the SS Clueless as well, then it's a fine place to be. Fosse Marathon on the Lido Deck tonight, I'll save you a good seat!

fantine33 wrote:

ghostjmf wrote:OK, I put the "as sin" part in.

Aren't we glad we don't have the death penalty in Massachusetts; if we did, England would never have returned him here for trial.

The piece-of-*%&!! had his lawyers claim his wife shot their baby & killed herself, then magically caused the gun to disappear from the scene after she was dead.

Apparently, the jury wasn't as tuned in to post-life activity abilities as he & as lawyers were.

So was I the only one wondering how John Entwistle managed to pull this off?

I'm serious, btw. But, since others seem to know what she is talking about, I guess I'm just out of the loop on this one.

You're not the only one - I was thinking, "Why don't they just leave the poor dead bass player alone!"

I guess because I'd never heard of this case before, and I am a bigtime Who fan.

trevor_macfee wrote:

fantine33 wrote:

ghostjmf wrote:OK, I put the "as sin" part in.

Aren't we glad we don't have the death penalty in Massachusetts; if we did, England would never have returned him here for trial.

The piece-of-*%&!! had his lawyers claim his wife shot their baby & killed herself, then magically caused the gun to disappear from the scene after she was dead.

Apparently, the jury wasn't as tuned in to post-life activity abilities as he & as lawyers were.

So was I the only one wondering how John Entwistle managed to pull this off?

I'm serious, btw. But, since others seem to know what she is talking about, I guess I'm just out of the loop on this one.

You're not the only one - I was thinking, "Why don't they just leave the poor dead bass player alone!"

I guess because I'd never heard of this case before, and I am a bigtime Who fan.

Yeah, they always blame the bass player....

Btw, VH1 Rock Honours this year is showcasing the Who. Not sure when it's on, but it must be soon because they're showing lots of adverts for it lately. I'm pretty sure that Daltrey and Townshend will both be there.

fantine33 wrote: Yeah, they always blame the bass player....

Btw, VH1 Rock Honours this year is showcasing the Who. Not sure when it's on, but it must be soon because they're showing lots of adverts for it lately. I'm pretty sure that Daltrey and Townshend will both be there.

I even looked up the link for you!

http://www.vh1.com/shows/events/rock_honors/_2008/

Why, yes, I do have VH1 bookmarked, why do you ask? Ha!

Excellent! Another big Who fan here. I'll tune in to the Rock Honors show also because the Flaming Lips (who scare me) are local boys. At any rate, the originals were, if the band's personnel has turned over greatly through the years.

Flipping through the channel guide, I see that Dateline is having a story on this guy tonight. I'll watch and see what's what and this will all make sense (maybe).

This dude's story is as poorly planned and ridiculous as that of a Judge Judy litigant.

What a dumdum. He obviously doesn't watch very many crime procedurals or Discovery ID. The porn and search engine queries on the computer gets 'em every time!

And how did they get such a toney house for $2700/mo outside of Boston?

I think returning the gun and failure to report his wife and daughter's bodies would have been the kicker for me.

A lot of people don't realize that guaranteeing a defendant a fair trial with competent counsel is one way for the state to demonstrate that guilty people really are guilty, that a defendant's out-of-court self-serving statements which can sometimes seem convincing to a public prone to being suspicious of police just do not hold up when examined in the cold hard light of a courtroom. We would never have known how twisted and depraved charismatic defendants like Ted Bundy and Charles Manson were for sure had they not gone to trial. The full guilt of Nazi war criminals would never have been made apparent to a skeptical public without the Nuremberg trials.

Yes, trials do result in defendants beating the rap and miscarriages of justice do occur, but in the vast majority of cases, the right decision is made. Each trial of an obviously guilty defendant that results in a guilty verdict helps establish public faith in our justice system.

This is why the people being held in Guantanamo need to be brought before a public tribunal, not a secret military court, and have their guilt established. I don't doubt that many of them, perhaps even all of them, are guilty of crimes against the United States and humanity. However, whenever we allow our military or any branch of our government to sweep up a large number of people and hold them for years in a U.S. facility based solely on unsubstantiated claims that they are "terrorists," we open ourselves to worldwide criticism.

Whenever I get into an argument with someone who claims that we shouldn't coddle "terrorists," I always ask, how do you know they are terrorists? Do we want to be in a position where our government can arbitrarily choose who it whisks off into a jail and holds incommunicado for years? And how would our right wing friends on this Bored feel if a President Obama started to do the same thing and hauling away people he felt were "terrorists"?

Some people say they are "enemy combatants" and don't have rights under international law. How do we know they really are combatants and not some poor schnooks that just happened to be caught up when the military started clearing areas of anyone they thought might pose a threat?

Holding public hearings for these people may result in a few being released. It will probably result in the public being made aware of the full extent of the crimes that they have committed and the need to get them off the world's streets.

Our founding fathers knew about terrorists. The British considered them terrorists and many of them would have been summarily executed if they had been caught. They lived in an era in which there was a very real possibility that the country might be literally threatened with destruction by a foreign power, not a few swarthy looking guys with bombs but the assembled military might of the most powerful nations of the era, England, France or Spain. And there were also a lot of people in this country who would probably have welcomed an invading force with open arms and given them material assistance. In fact, less than thirty years after the Constitution became law, our capital was burned to the ground by the English.

So these men knew what was at stake when they wrote the Constitution, at a time when the United States faced a very real threat, not to thousands of people as terrorists pose today, but to our very continued existence as a nation. But they also knew what happens when the government is free to take whatever measures it may, in secret, deem necessary in order to protect itself from these threats. They adopted the Constitution with the Bill of Rights in its present form to come down on the side of guaranteed personal rights as opposed to ephemeral aids to governmental security. It's a choice we should honor today.

WTF did the terrorist diatribe come from? You didn't have to think up a weak little connecting paragraph to get your screed on, you have the right to start a whole new post with a subject like "Keeping Terrorists in Guantanamo is Wrong and Here's Why" and just go wild. Because this is, you know, America and all.

When I want to read political crap (no matter what end of the spectrum viewpoint), I go to the political crap threads.

fantine33 wrote:

ghostjmf wrote:OK, I put the "as sin" part in.

Aren't we glad we don't have the death penalty in Massachusetts; if we did, England would never have returned him here for trial.

The piece-of-*%&!! had his lawyers claim his wife shot their baby & killed herself, then magically caused the gun to disappear from the scene after she was dead.

Apparently, the jury wasn't as tuned in to post-life activity abilities as he & as lawyers were.

So was I the only one wondering how John Entwistle managed to pull this off?

He was who I thought of when I saw the subject line since he's the only Entwhistle I'm aware of, though when I read the post, I knew what was being talked about, if not the specifics of the case....

lb13

kayrharris wrote:I think returning the gun and failure to report his wife and daughter's bodies would have been the kicker for me.

Here was the fun part of the piece. The guy with the monkey face whose name I can never remember was interviewing Dumdum's lawyer. Semi-grilling him about "Why didn't he call 911?", the lawyer's answer was (paraphrased), "Well, obviously because when you call 911 the police show up." Pause, stutter.... "And when that happens they start looking around." Yeah, obviously.

I was waiting for the interviewer to ask why he just happened to have his passport on him as he drove over to his in-laws' house to kill himself, but apparently the incongruity of that only occurred to me, as they never mentioned the passport deal.

Of course, I don't have a passport. Is it normal to carry it with you at all times, just like your id, a pocket comb and an emergency condom, just in case a bout of homesickness for ol' Blighty breaks out?

His parents really pissed me off, though. His mom gives some halting, stilted, emotionless speech after the verdict. She could barely get out that he was innocent, it was like the words were so ridiculous that they were sticking in her throat, and ends up with some mean words about Rachel killing her granddaughter. That's kind of pouring salt in the wounds.

Meanwhile, the victim's mother and stepdad were so eloquent and heartfelt whenever they spoke, and their after verdict speech had me in tears.

Here's Fanny! wrote:WTF did the terrorist diatribe come from?

Spoiler

Fooled ya, didn't I?

Ha

silverscreenselect wrote:

Here's Fanny! wrote:WTF did the terrorist diatribe come from?

Spoiler

Fooled ya, didn't I?

Ha

Spoiler

Ha! You don't provoke that from me very often, but you did today!