Kwon Bill > Recent Status Updates

“A caller complained that looters were ravaging New Orleans. She didn't say how she knew this, but the host amplified her outrage to thousands of listeners. "If someone is breaking into businesses and looting merchandise, these people should be shot," he said. "We're under martial law here.”

Another example of misreporting causing issues and stirring things up.

Dr. Horace Baltz engaged in spirited debates over coffee with colleagues who believed excessive resources were being poured into LifeCare's typically elderly, infirm patient popula-tion. "We spend too much on these turkeys," one of them said.
"We ought to let them go." "You have no right to decide who lives and who dies," Baltz would answer.

Dr. Leon R. Kass, who suggested that even healthy life extension could strain society and deprive the young of jobs. "We've got a duty to die," Lamm said, "and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.

A year before Katrina, when "Hurricane Ivan knocked, Memo. rial stood ready." As Cathy Green, a nurse in the surgical intensive car unit, told her worried adult daughter when Katrina there. ened: "If I'm in trouble at Baptist Hospital, if Baptist Hospital fails, it means the entire city would be destroyed."

"There was no justice in that courtroom that day," he said. "As long as these laws are on the books, there never will be.”

room except for the defense attorney. 'Give me something, I told her. 'Give me something so I don't have to sit here and do this. She had nothing. None of us had anything. I was a federal judge with a lifetime appointment and I was completely powerless." Sunny Koshy's sole discretion to levy the 851 enhancement had essen-tally bound Judge Sharp's hands. His next words were emphatic, spoken with utter conviction:

One of the things that shocks me in this book is how many judges said they agreed that sentences were not fair or too long. Due to the mandates, they had to give people long sentences because of the war on drugs. I actually give some of the judges major credit who chose to right letters for clemency for people who they knew didn’t deserve life in prison.

A professor was representing on someone who who thought she was picking up money for her boyfriend from a Western Union. She didn’t know it was drug money and was caught in the conspiracy. Now she is being charged. It doesn’t matter how minor, if they can link it whether you are aware or not, they will.

The conspiracy charge is made to catch kingpins but usually never rides. It catches people lower on the totem pole and that’s what happened to Sharanda.

A federal drug conspiracy has just three simple elements: (1) an agreement to traffic drugs in any amount (2) between two or more people who (3) join the agreement voluntarily. The government did not need to prove that Sharanda knew all the details of the conspiracy or even that she knew all the other people involved.

Later I would learn that I'd witnessed a Hoe Squad, a common labor practice for prisoners under the age of forty in Gatesville prisons since the 1950s. Women and men cropped all day in the fields, despite temperatures averaging ninety-six degrees. If a prisoner fell out of plantation rhythm, she risked being written up for an infraction.