Word: murder
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...back into the paramilitary drug world after pledging to give it up. By night, around 10:30 p.m., police were hauling a dead body into their "necro-mobile" - a truck that collects bodies - and remarking how light a night it had been so far. It was only the second murder of the night...
Deborah Blum knows so much about poison that even her husband sometimes shies away from her. In her new book, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer profiles the two men, New York City chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler, who pioneered forensic medicine in the U.S. between 1915 and 1936. Blum talks to TIME about how the U.S. government took to poisoning its own citizens during Prohibition and why poisoners are the most frightening murderers...
...call the capital-punishment system "racist, classist [and] unprincipled," but say you feel sympathy for people who support the death penalty. How can the two coexist? On a regular basis, I'm sitting face to face with murderers. When I imagine sitting face to face with somebody who might have injured somebody I love or care about, I can imagine wanting to injure that person myself. I used to support the death penalty. [But] once I started doing the work, I became aware of the inequalities. I tell people that if you're going to commit murder, you want...
...there a particularly egregious case that helped you come to that conclusion? It was incremental. Almost everybody I represented actually committed the murder that he was sent to death row for committing. But what I noticed is that they were committing murders that were not, in any meaningful sense, different from the thousands of other murders that occur where the person isn't on death row. You have about 15,000 homicides a year in the U.S. And you might have 60 executions. There wasn't any rhyme or reason to which crimes were resulting in executions, other than...
This lack of consequences for failures among senior officers is particularly profound in cases of extreme malfeasance and war crimes. Whether it is the behavior of prison guards at Abu Ghraib in Iraq or less publicized - but sadly numerous - cases of murder and brutality committed by soldiers and Marines, the military has punished, often severely, those who committed crimes. But it has spent little energy examining the leadership and command failures that created a climate in which such crimes could occur in the first place. (See pictures of the Fort Hood shootings...