Depraved-Heart Murder

A couple of years ago, I happened to see Fred Kaplan’s book 1959 on a display table at Barnes & Noble in downtown Minneapolis. It caught my eye because I was born in the year Kaplan takes for his title.

At last I’m reading the book, and am finding it thoroughly engrossing.

One figure from ’59 whom I wasn’t too familiar with before opening the book is William S. Burroughs. I certainly didn’t know the shocking story about his fatal game of “William Tell” with Joan Vollmer, his common-law wife.

Burroughs had fled to Mexico because he feared being sent to Louisiana’s Angola State Prison on marijuana charges. According to Wikipedia, he intended to stay in Mexico for five years, until the statute of limitations on the Louisiana charge expired.

One afternoon in 1951, however, Burroughs killed Vollmer in a drunken riff on William Tell. On Kaplan’s account, she had placed a champagne glass on her head and dared him to shoot.

Burroughs picked up his pistol and missed the glass. Instead, he shot and killed his wife.

Though Burroughs was jailed in Mexico City, he ended up serving only 13 days in jail. Wikipedia asserts that Burroughs’ brother bribed Mexican authorities to get him released on bail — and that Burroughs eventually absconded and left Mexico.

Reading about this case reminded me of studying criminal law with Prof. Bruce Berner in my first year at Valparaiso University School of Law. What common law concept did Burroughs’ behavior best illustrate? The phrase “depraved heart” comes to mind.

Bar Exam Journey II

As soon as the bar exam was over, at the end of July in 1986, I checked out of my motel in Jefferson City, Mo. and drove to Kansas City. Twenty-five years later, I don’t remember exactly where I parked when I got there.

My best guess is that it was in the parking lot of Rockhurst College, where I’d taken the bar review course and stayed in an on-campus dorm while doing so. But it could also have been at KCI airport.

In any case, I didn’t tarry long in KC. My parents were waiting for me in Valparaiso, Ind., where I’d graduated from law school at the end of May. They had driven out from Minnesota, out of the goodness of their hearts, to help me clean out my apartment and get packed up for my move to Kansas City.

Kansas City was where I was due to begin a judicial clerkship at the beginning of August with the Hon. Charles Shangler at the Missouri Court of Appeals.

A Bar Exam Journey

How in the world did I get back to Valparaiso, Ind., after taking the Missouri bar exam in Jefferson City, Mo?

Emotionally dazed and confused after a grueling two days of the highest-pressure exam I’d ever encountered, I left the motel in Jeff City and got into my 1980 Olds Omega. Though this car was only six years old, it had already seen better days. Thankfully, it had somehow gotten me to the exam site on the day before bar, huffing and puffing in the 100 degree heat.

Now it was time to head for Valparaiso, where my parents were waiting for me. I had graduated from law school there in May and left my stuff, such as it was, in the apartment I’d been renting. My folks were there to help me gather it all up and transport it to KC, where I was scheduled to begin a clerkship for the Hon. Charles Shangler of the Missouri Court of Appeals.

Part One of the Jefferson City-to-Valparaiso trip was to return to Kansas City, where I’d left said 1980 Olds Omega in a parking lot at Rockhurst College. Rockhurst had hosted the BAR/BRI bar review course, and I’d stayed in a dorm there in June and July, studying intensely.

Bruce Cockburn Music as Bar Exam Study Aid

Twenty-five years ago, I was studying for the Missouri bar exam. Even after all this time, it remains a touchstone experience for me.

My base of operations, from the beginning of June until the middle of July, was Rockhurst College in Kansas City, which was hosting the BAR/BRI review course. The exam was scheduled for the end of July in the state capital, Jefferson City. My judicial clerkship, with the Hon. Charles Shangler of the Missouri Court of Appeals, would follow in due course.

I had graduated from Valparaiso University School of Law in May, and my parents had given me a Sony Walkman to celebrate the occasion. That's right - a Sony Walkman. Strange as it may seem, in this I-pod / I-pad world, the Walkman was once a state-of-the-art way to play recorded music.

During breaks from bar exam study, I would listen over and over on my Walkman to Bruce Cockburn's latest album, World of Wonders. I'd purchased the cassette tape at a mall in Merrillville, Ind. before leaving Indiana for Kansas City.

Today, opening up my e-mail again after an off-the-grid vacation week, there were two messages that reminded me of the Bruce Cockburn backdrop for my bar studies. One was an e-vite to a 25th anniversary reunion of my law school class.

The other was a notification on Facebook that a friend had tagged me in a post about the Bruce Cockburn postage stamp recently issued in Canada.

Thanks, Rick, for the heads-up about the stamp!

What the Parole Board Had For Breakfast

The phrase "you are what you eat" has become drastically watered-down in contemporary American parlance. It is now more or less synonymous with "eat your vegetables."

But to materialist nineteenth-century thinkers, saying "you are what you eat" was like a call to arms against idealist mumbo-jumbo. "Mann ist was mann esst," went the play on words in German.

The idea was that even ideas themselves do not spring immaculately from an amorphous, pristine realm of spirit that humans access through their minds. Thoughts, the argument goes, are merely the by-products of purely physical processes, with each of us caught in an unbreakable causal chain.

Dostoevsky rightly railed against this type of deterministic, linear explanation of human behavior. For after all, to describe human actions as merely the inescapable consequences of external stimuli is to deny free will. Humans, in short, are not Pavlov's dogs.

From our 21st-century vantage point, however, it would be naive to deny that those external stimuli can play a powerful role in affecting decisions. As Al Gore pointed out in The Assault on Reason, there are numerous factors that can get in the way of rational decision making.

For legal decisions, the "legal realists" who came on the scene in the 1930s asserted that those factors often include a judge's personality.  The notion was that "law is what the judge had for breakfast,"as one of my law professors put it to me at Valparaiso in the mid-80s.

I was reminded of this two weeks ago, when a newspaper columnist named Chuck Shepherd reported on a recently released research study of parole decisions.  According to the lead researcher, Prof. Jonathan Levav of Columbia University, there are spikes in the granting of parole after lunch or snack breaks. But parole gets harder and harder to get as morning or afternoon sessions grind on.

Humans aren't Pavlov's dogs, but food does influence people's moods - and that cannot help but affect decisions at times. To say that isn't to accept hardcore nineteenth materialism; it's simply to acknowledge human limits.

The Hinckley Case, Still Unfolding

On March 30, 1981, a disturbed man named John Hinckley Jr. shot and wounded President Ronald Reagan, as well as Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady. Thirty years later, the case continues to influence debate about the insanity defense and gun control.

President Reagan survived the assassination attempt, and eventually recovered from the stomach wound he received.

James Brady was paralyzed after being shot in the head. He and his wife Sarah became passionate advocates for gun control. With remarkable perseverance, they are still at it, three decades later.

A Secret Service agent and a District of Columbia police officer were also wounded by Hinckley’s attack.

Today, at age 70, Mr. Brady appeared at a news conference on Capitol Hill. From his wheelchair, with Sarah beside him, he called once again for more effective gun control legislation. The Bradys also met with President Obama at the White House, seeking to enlist his support.

Hinckley was found to be mentally ill and remains in a mental facility in Washington. Now 55, he is permitted by the court to take fairly frequent furloughs from the mental facility to visit his mother in Williamsburg, Va. In the last year and a half, he has been granted a dozen furloughs, during which is monitored via a GPS-equipped cell phone.

Even more controversial than the furloughs was the verdict at Hinckley’s trial in 1982. The jury found him not-guilty by reason of insanity. This led to a furious debate in legal circles and the public at large about the legitimacy (or not) of the insanity defense.

In my first-year criminal law class at Valparaiso University School of Law, Prof.Bruce Berner used the case as an example of how seriously juries tend to take their work. In the abstract, it may be easy to dismiss the insanity defense as hokum. It’s quite another, however, to be there in the jury box, with someone’s life in your hands.

Sting Sets Sail for Valparaiso

Valparaiso University School of Law, a highly respectable midwestern law school, and Sting, the rock n' roll god.

Not a common combination, to be sure. But I can bridge the two.

In 1985-86, during my third year at said school, I walked over to a theater from my apartment on Cumberland Avenue, on the north end of Valparaiso. The movie flick I saw featured Sting as Dr. Frankenstein opposite Jennifer Beals (she of Flashdance fame) in a mostly forgettable version of the Mary Shelley tale.

The twist on the familiar story turend on gender. Sting's mad, passionate doctor was intent not on creating a Boris Karloff-life male, but, as IMBD puts it, "the perfect woman" - Eva. Update your Netflix queue if you are curious to know how that quixotic project turned out.

Right now, however, listen to Sting sing of Valparaiso (Chile, that is):

A Shot Rang Out in the Memphis Sky

Switching on the car radio while running an errand, I happened to hear Pride in the Name of Love, U-2's stirring song about Martin Luther King Jr.

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

When Bono sang these lines, it reminded me of a conversation I'd had with Chris Hunt, a Minneapolis attorney with whom I serve on the Twin Cities area alumni/ae council for Valparaiso University School of Law Twin. Last spring, Chris happened to mention to me that he and his family had been in Memphis on a spring break trip at the time of MLK's assassination.

With the attention to detail you'd expect of a successful lawyer, Chris commented that the U-2 song contains a clear factual error. The shots did not ring out early in the morning, as Bono's song suggests, but at 6:01 p.m.

Why Bono's song contains this obvious factual error, I do not know. He could have written "not yet twilight, April 4," but he didn't.

Still, the song's power remains undeniable, a generation after it was written. Listen:

Mens Rea

"Mens rea" is Latin for mental state. I learned the term from Professor Bruce Berner at Valparaiso University School of Law in my first-year criminal law class. In the law, he taught, punishment typically depends on an actor's degree of culpability - and culpability in turn depends on an actor's mental state.

Prof. Berner was masterful in explicating the implications of this. The hypotheticals were of this type: Which would be worse?

(1) Planning to kill someone by shooting them and doing so; or
(2) Cleaning your gun while preparing for a hunting trip and handling it so carelessly that it went off and killed someone in the room

Many students would say (1), but Berner pointed out that, in important respects, the second scenario is the scarier one. At least in the first, the person knew what he or she was doing. In the second, the incompetence is so extreme that no one is really safe.

My courses with Prof. Berner were in 1984 and 1985, before mandatory minimum sentences became so prevalent. It would have been interesting to study with him in more recent years, to see how he may have attempted to integrate those into his traditional common law schema.