Letters to the Editor: Find the audio leakers and give them a reward
I’ve received a few letters this week — letters that deserve their own blog post — and, unfortunately, I don’t have time to repot them all into this one.
Instead, I’m taking the opportunity to reprint a few that I found particularly noteworthy, whether I agree or disagree with their sentiments. Perhaps we will never know whether these letters represented a conspiracy to keep the name of the accused killer off the death penalty roster, or whether they were an aberrancy of public opinion. But at least they were a testament to the willingness to act on principle that’s often missing from letters to the editor.
I also don’t know whether the state capital punishment system has improved over the years. But when I hear claims that a particular sentence is too harsh, or that someone is being punished too much for something he didn’t do, I’m reminded of those who protested the slave trade, and the hundreds of thousands who suffered and died at the hands of the British Empire.
I’m also reminded of those who challenged the Vietnam War, and the millions who died. So it’s not surprising, when I hear that a particular group of people is being treated unfairly, I think it’s worth examining the evidence.
I received a letter of inquiry from a reader who said she wanted to know who was “trying (to) hide the name of the killer.” She said she had been contacted by several people who claimed to speak to “high level sources in the CIA, FBI and DEA” and ask why the name of the killer was being concealed.
I contacted the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration Intelligence Section, and no one said anything about such efforts, nor offered any suggestion that they were even occurring. (I also called the FBI, and they had nothing to say on the subject either. And I called the CIA, and their main interest was the Iran-Contra affair, which may or may not have involved the CIA