The chair is bolted to the floor near the back of a 12-ft. by 18-ft. room. You sit on a seat of cracked rubber secured by rows of copper tacks. Your ankles are strapped into half-moon-shaped foot cuffs lined with canvas. A 2-in.-wide greasy leather belt with 28 buckle holes and worn grooves where it […]
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Posted inNonfiction
Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats
Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words) 1st Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training. Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the […]
Posted inUncategorized
On the Death Sentence
On the Death Sentence Similarly, local elections affect decisions of state prosecutors to seek the death penalty and of state judges to impose it. “In states where judges were until recently empowered to override jury sentences,” Garland explains, “elected judges typically used this power to impose death rather than life. In Alabama the death-to-life ratio […]
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Skies Belong to Us: How Hijackers Created an Airline Crisis in the 1970s
Brendan I. Koerner | The Skies Belong to Us | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,186 words) ‘There Is No Way to Tell a Hijacker by Looking At Him’ When the FAA’s antihijacking task force first convened in February 1969, its ten members knew they faced a daunting challenge—not only because of the severity of the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats
Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words) 1st Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training. Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the […]
Posted inUncategorized
On the Death Sentence
On the Death Sentence Similarly, local elections affect decisions of state prosecutors to seek the death penalty and of state judges to impose it. “In states where judges were until recently empowered to override jury sentences,” Garland explains, “elected judges typically used this power to impose death rather than life. In Alabama the death-to-life ratio […]
Posted inUncategorized
Part One of “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer.” But big-time hockey has a unique side entrance. Boogaard could fight his way there with his bare knuckles, his stick dropped, the game paused and the crowd on its feet. And he did, all the way until he became the Boogeyman, the […]
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Ruby Session was shaking as she read on. The year was 2007, and the letter was addressed to her son Timothy Cole. “I have been trying to locate you since 1995 to tell you I wish to confess I did in fact commit the rape Lubbock wrongly convicted you of.” Ruby sat down, stood up. […]
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Inside the groundbreaking investigation by Columbia professor James Liebman, on the case of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed in 1989 for a crime he didn’t commit: At the trial, DeLuna’s defence team told the jury that Carlos Hernandez, not DeLuna, was the murderer. But the prosecutors ridiculed that suggestion. They told the jury that police […]
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Greg Ousley murdered his parents when he was 14, and is now serving a 60-year sentence. A look at the debate over how we should punish minors for committing violent crimes: Today there are well more than 2,500 juveniles serving time in adult prisons in the United States — enough, in Indiana’s case, to fill […]
