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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!mcnc!bch
From: bch@mcnc.UUCP (Byron Howes)
Newsgroups: net.flame,net.politics
Subject: Re: Bastille mentality alive and well in USA
Message-ID: <2339@mcnc.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 7-Nov-84 00:51:12 EST
Article-I.D.: mcnc.2339
Posted: Wed Nov  7 00:51:12 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 8-Nov-84 07:21:13 EST
References: 
Reply-To: bch@mcnc.UUCP (Byron Howes)
Distribution: net
Organization: North Carolina Educational Computing Service
Lines: 27
Summary: 

In article  moriarty@fluke.UUCP (The Napoleon of Crime) writes:
>Well, folks, I can understand people waiting outside a prison where a man or
>woman is about to be executed and holding a vigil because they object to
>capital punishment.
>
>I can also understand people who would stand outside the same prison, also
>holding vigil, to show their support of capital punishment (equal time &
>all).
>
>But the behaviour of a mob outside of the place where a man was executed in
>North Carolina (I think -- I was just catching the end of the news -- please
>correct me if I'm wrong about the location) makes me wonder about the state
>of the state.  People were cheering and celebrating the criminals execution,
>chanting, and, in general, acting like it was homecoming.  One woman even
>held a giant paper-mache hyperdermic needle aloft (used to represent the
>method of execution) like some kind of team penant.

Yup.  It was North Carolina all right.  The saddest part is there is some
possibility that Velma Barfield's sentence might have been commuted had
it not been in the middle of this down-and-dirty Senate race we've just been
through.  Well, there's little these days to testify to the sanity of the
general populace in N.C.  I think we're just a little burnt out...

-- 

						Byron C. Howes
				      ...!{decvax,akgua}!mcnc!ecsvax!bch