First Pearcy Massacre Trial Begins in Garland County, AR, for Samuel Lee Conway: Defender Pat Aydelott Leaves "Crazy Card" at Home, Instead Plays "Innocent-Bystander-Armed-Robber" Card
06/16/2011
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That Pat “Crazy Card”Aydelott always has a new trick up his sleeve. When his admission in the Mary Anderson case, via playing the “crazy card,”that his client, Samuel Lee Conway, is a mass murderer and serial killer, failed to win the hand, he came up with an equally inventive way to wear down the criminal law, by arguing that since no one can prove that Conway pulled the trigger, he’s just an innocent ”ol bystander at a robbery, guilty at most of aggravated armed robbery.

When I was a kid, back in the Dark Ages, we were taught in-for-a-dime, in-for-a-dollar jurisprudence: If you participated in a crime in which a victim ended up dead, you were guilty of murder, same as the shooter (or whatever), whether or not you pulled the trigger. The classic example was the getaway driver in a bank robbery. According to the law, thus, Pat Aydelott’s defense in the instant case is yet another implicit confession that his client, Samuel Lee Conway, is a mass murderer and serial killer.

Different states have different names for the same concept. In New York, it’s called “acting in concert”and, though it’s still on the books, amid “diversity’s”ongoing downward redefinition of the criminal law, it’s been disappeared, sort of like the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution which, last I noticed, had not been repealed. In Tennessee, whose criminal statutes regarding murder I have become somewhat familiar with in recent years, the concept is called, “criminal responsibility,”and as the Knoxville Horror’s George Thomas will tell you, it has not been completely retired.

However, things are much different, when whites are in the dock. Just ask Shawna Forde, who got the death penalty for two murders that her associates committed, while she was in another room. Forde’s sentence would make perfect sense in my childhood, but in a time in which a black man can murder a woman, and then four years later, murder another five people, and not be eligible for the death penalty?

I don’t know why the statutes on armed robbery (aggravated and otherwise) and murder even apply anymore, at least where blacks are concerned. Doesn’t Garland County Prosecuting Attorney Steve Oliver even know that those laws have a disparate impact on blacks, and thus are invalid? Maybe that’s why PA Oliver took the death penalty off the table.

Hey, that argument is no crazier than anything else that is being said and done in the name of diversity.

 

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