Thursday, January 27, 2011

They only ever play the one note, and it's sounding ♭.

So some guy named Thomas Hardy is out of prison on parole, gets picked up on theft charges, is released on bond(!), and then gets pulled over while driving a hot car and shoots the officer in the face. The police officer subsequently dies of his wounds and the finger-pointing in the halls of government has barely gotten started.

Meanwhile, the local professional hand-wringers are blaming the gun, of course. I guess the pistol must have messed up the Department of Corrections computers before secreting itself in the goblin's pocket...

18 comments:

Alan J. said...

I'm so sick of hearing this song and dance. Once again it's the cops paying the price for the decisions made by the idiots in the Court House. We all could add a lot more invective to this mess, but it's all been said before. The bottom line for me is, "Can't these people just learn to keep criminals locked up?"

Anonymous said...

Well, I read the comments in the linked article and discovered it wasn't juts the bad gun, but budget cuts implemented trying to balance the budget. In the words of The Mogambo Guru "MORONS".

Was this gun stolen like the ones in Fl? (Miami and Tampa/St. Pete)

Terry

Anonymous said...

just, not juts. Learn to preview when using the iThingy.

Or is it iThingie?

Anonymous said...

I'm reluctant to depend on a media account of anything for even a moderate level of accuracy, but if half the story is close to true, this incident has "designed-in process failure" engraved on its forehead.

"...every month an agent is supposed to check police databases and determine if there have been any new arrests of their offenders." Where I live there are 15 local LE agencies (16 if you count the Metro Bureau of Investigation as one) and 3 state on top of that. All of them have their own computer systems, none of them share data very well, some not at all, and the County Corrections folks run their own separate IT shop inside the county's IT operation; the Clerk's Office, which issues criminal court case numbers subsequent to every arrest, is another totally separate IT entity. Given that these are secure data silos accessible only by some within each LE agency, and very few outside, lack of data sharing isn't a surprise. Other than most jails being the purview of the county Sheriff rather than a separate county department, I suspect this is fairly typical of LE/Jail/Court operations everywhere.

When I was involved with all this I was surprised that we didn't make more mistakes on prisoner retention than the very few, and random, ones that did occur.

Depending on manual operation - the agent checking databases thing - as a primary function, rather than a backstop to an automated, double blind process that is based on positive identification, sort of guarantees this kind of failure.

It would be interested to see how many people are incorrectly let go about whom you hear nothing at all because they're smart enough to keep their heads down or head out of the area. If Indy has any journalists that would be an opportunity for a pretty good investigative report.

theirritablearchitect said...

Some might consider it poor form for me to be sitting over here, in an almost uncontrollable laugh. Not about the subject, but how you managed to put it.

Seriously, that was the best explanation that I've ever read of how a weak and confused mind works...or doesn't.

Seth from Massachusetts said...

Same thing happened in Massachusetts last month. The perp had been paroled from three life sentences!

aczarnowski said...

Maybe Il Duce will eventually find his way to the street and help us out.

Dwight Brown said...

"...is released on bond(!)"

I admit to being boggled by that as well. Surely, "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" was enough to justify 25 to life, and don't get me started on "Jude the Obscure".

Michael said...

Amen, Brother Dwight.

Fellow Lit Major, I presume?

Kristophr said...

Imagine letting a puppy crap where it wants, and then announcing to the dog that it's an adult, it will get put down for crapping in the house.

Now substitute "puppy" with "criminal", and substitute "an adult" with "got media attention".

Steve Skubinna said...

"Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir."

- Gen. Buck Turgidson

Dwight Brown said...

Elloit:

"Fellow Lit Major, I presume?"

Would you believe I did my thesis on "The Homespun Humor of Henry James"?

Yeah, I wouldn't believe that either.

Actually, I have no degree, but am working towards one (not in literature, but in "Computer Systems Management'). I'm just widely and weirdly read.

tgace said...

"Same thing happened in Massachusetts last month. The perp had been paroled from three life sentences!"

You beat me to it. The day after Christmas 2010, Dominic Cinelli shot and killed Woburn police officer John Maguire during a robbery attempt at a Kohl's department store. Cinelli had been paroled by the state two years earlier from 3 "life sentences".

At least Cinelli was killed too.

Tam said...

tgace,

Unfortunately Hardy is still wasting oxygen. Even if they do pursue the death penalty, at his age, he'll likely die of old age before exhausting the appeals process.

tgace said...

PS- Our country doesn't have a "gun problem". We have a "criminal problem"...or maybe more accurately a "justice system" problem that will lock up a Bernie Madoff for life but lets a Dominic Cinelli out on 3 life sentences based on violent crime.

mariner said...

I expect he'll be kept far from the madding crowd a little while longer.

rickn8or said...

And it gets worse, Tam.

Evidently the manufacturer of the main chemical used in lethal injections is taking it off the market.

You know, the one that almost every state jumped on the bandwagon for and codified into law.

Left to me, I'd play "Victim's Garage Roulette". This involves going to the victim's garage and picking three containers while blindfolded.

"Uh, lessee here. Turpentine, 5W-30 Synthetic and Miracle Gro. Yup, that works."

K. Vanover said...

Guns are sneaky like that. They sneak into people's hands and make them do bad things. I can't be held accountable for what this inanimate object made me do!