If someone had asked me last week who Kermit Gosnell was, I would have thought a distant, off-brand cousin of the frog Muppet. But now I know that Kermit Gosnell is accused of committing monstrous crimes, and the most terrifying part of his crimes is that the state did nothing to stop him. In a trial that began last month in Philadelphia, details began emerging about crimes...
Tag Archives: NYU
Last week, prosecutors in Colorado announced that they would be seeking the death penalty for James Holmes, the Aurora, Colo., theater gunman. Last July, Holmes opened fire on a crowded theater at a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises,” killing 12 and wounding 58. If ever there was someone who deserved the death penalty, it would be Holmes. He murdered...
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in two separate cases dealing with gay marriage. These cases dealt with the constitutionality of the federal government’s Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California’s Prop 8, both pieces of legislation that outlaw gay marriage. The decisions in these cases will be announced in June, and while it seems unlikely that either...
Between President Obama’s limited release of a memo outlining drone policy and John Brennan’s Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearings, drones are all over the news this week. Drones are unmanned aerial devices that allow for either targeted strikes or surveillance, and they have altered the way the war on terror has been fought. While drones have been newsworthy,...
When was the last time you saw a centaur roaming the streets of Oxford? Or a mermaid hanging out in the Grove? For anyone not on hallucinogens, the answer is never. However, that didn’t stop a Mississippi state lawmaker from introducing a piece of legislation last week that was straight out of a Syfy Channel original movie, a proposed ban on all human-animal hybrids. ...
The last months of the year are known for the release of a slew of Oscar-bait movies. One of the most buzzed-about movies going into this awards season was “Zero Dark Thirty,” director/producer Kathryn Bigelow’s vision of the 10-year manhunt for Osama bin Laden. Anyone not living in an isolated compound in Abbottabad will know how this movie ends. In addition to...
By and large, Amnesty International does good work. They represent the downtrodden and oppressed all over the world and bring attention to otherwise unknown human rights violations. Having said that, in a case currently before the Supreme Court, Amnesty International may have unintentionally blocked future plaintiffs from bringing cases about the U.S. government’s...
It was just your normal, everyday love story. Boy meets girl and they fall in love and get married. The boy is battling a gender identity disorder and murders his wife and goes to prison for the crime. There he, who now lives as a she, though biologically male, is put in with the male prison population. There she’s endured numerous sexual assaults at the hands of...
A Pennsylvania man is scheduled to die on Oct. 3 for the brutal murder of one man, and he has also been sentenced on third-degree murder charges in the death of another. Based on these simple facts, Terry Williams seems to be a prime candidate for the death penalty, and currently, the odds are that he will be the first person to be executed in the state of Pennsylvania...
When President George W. Bush began planning the war in Iraq, he must have known he would face vocal opposition. It’s unlikely that he thought he would be called to face criminal charges for those actions. This past week, Archbishop Desmond Tutu penned an editorial in the UK’s Observer newspaper calling for just that. The noted South African anti-apartheid...
