Justice is done, for now. Personally, as I see it, this is just the first of many vindications to come. In the end, blood can only be cleansed by truth–and there’s plenty of cleaning up left to be done. But a sigh of relief for now. My congratulations to Scot, to his attorney Mark Eiglarsh, and to the entire team that supported him, including Kevin Bolling and Lydia Rodriguez, whom I know from afar, and so many people that I don’t. The verdict is what we all hoped for, an 11-0 win. It’s good to have some good news in a world where good news seems so rare.
Category Archives: The Parkland Shooting
The Parkland Trial (6): Awaiting a Verdict
Over a decade ago, I was given a ticket for a moving violation. I thought I was innocent, so I demanded a trial. I showed up in court on the relevant day, and went out of my way to construct what I regarded as a cogent defense based on the law. Most of it was disallowed as “irrelevant” by a judge who insisted that I was guilty because most people accused of my infraction were: why think I was any different? Having made my presentation, the judge asked whether I had any more to say. No, I replied, but I had some visuals–some photographs–to support my case. The introduction of the photos was disallowed on the grounds that I had failed to “introduce them into evidence” at the outset. And that was that. Continue reading
The Parkland Trial (5): An Orwellian Prosecution
In 1984, George Orwell described Newspeak, the language of the totalitarian regime depicted in the book, in this way:
Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English speaker of our own day (George Orwell, 1984, Signet Classics, p. 300).
It sounds like an exaggeration, but this is an exact description of the language spoken by the prosecution in the Scot Peterson case. Consider a few examples from a CNN story on closing arguments in the case. Ask yourself what language the prosecution and its witnesses are speaking. Whatever it is, it’s not intelligible as English or any other natural language. Continue reading
To Calvary and Back
I found myself thinking the other day of Peter Breughel the Younger’s 1564 painting, “The Procession to Calvary.” I used to teach it when I taught aesthetics in college. As is probably obvious, it’s a depiction of Christ’s being taken to be crucified. It reminds me of so many things happening now, and vice versa.
The Parkland Trial (4): If the Evidence Is Shit, You Must Acquit
The Scot Peterson trial has ended very quickly–far quicker than anyone thought it would, and too quickly, I think, to do justice to the real complexity of the issues involved. That said, the narrow issues raised by the criminal charges against Peterson are so obvious that there’s a sense in which the trial could reasonably have been shorter–by not happening at all. So from that perspective, a short trial may well be appropriate.
The case for acquittal is, in a certain sense, so simple and obvious that it can be stated fairly briefly. For Peterson to be found guilty of the main charges against him, it had to be proven that he was a “caretaker” in the legally relevant sense, that he knew where the shooter was, and that knowing where the shooter was, he failed to engage the shooter as he was (supposedly) required to do. To acquit, all that the jury needs is reasonable grounds to doubt any one of these claims. Continue reading
The Parkland Trial (3): The Hayden Report
In two previous posts (here and here), I’ve made reference to the report by police tactical expert Philip Hayden as the best written account of the events relevant to Scot Peterson’s actions at the Parkland Shooting. In the just previous-post, I raised some provisos and reservations about Hayden’s report, but (apart from Appendix A) those are all matters of omission and incompleteness, not of disagreement with anything Hayden says in the report. In fact, I fully agree with the contents of the report. I received the report in the form of two PDFs. Here is the first one, which I’ve called “Hayden 1,” about 53 pages long, and here is the second, which I’ve called “Hayden 2,” about 17 pages long.*
I highly suggest that anyone interested in this topic read the whole report in its entirety, from beginning to end. It’s somewhat long, about 41 single-spaced pages of text, and another five pages of appendices. But every sentence is worth reading. Continue reading
The Parkland Trial (2): Asking the Right Questions
In the five years since the Parkland shooting, I’ve read my fair share of books, reports, articles, and editorials regarding the charges made against Scot Peterson. Peterson, we’re told, was a coward, derelict in his duties, neglectful of the welfare of the children he was tasked with protecting, and, aside from Cruz himself, the fundamental cause of the carnage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Some of this material makes a valuable contribution in a narrowly limited way: it identifies facts relevant to reaching a verdict on Peterson’s actions. Read carefully, and taken cumulatively, I would say that at the very least, it exonerates Peterson of the criminal charges against him, and plausibly of all the others as well. But virtually none of it–literally none of the hundreds of pages I’ve read, the vast majority of the pages written on the subject–really drills down to ask the right questions, seek the right answers, or get the right answers. To read this literature is, for the most part, to drown in a sea of irrelevance. Continue reading
The Parkland Trial (1): In Defense of Scot Peterson
Since 2018, I’ve written ten posts here questioning the mainstream narrative on the so-called Parkland shooting–that is, the shooting, by Nikolas Cruz, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018.* The shooting left seventeen dead and seventeen injured. Cruz was arrested on the day of the shooting, charged with the murders, then tried and convicted, and eventually sentenced to life in prison. The shooting gave rise to a widely-publicized student movement in favor of gun control. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 