Initially, the government planned to retry the Debelbots. But just a few weeks ago, District Attorney Mark Jones, who inherited the case, decided not to do that. He told the Supreme Court that there was "mounting medical evidence that says the child was born this way"—that is, with a fatal brain defect. Then he went a step further and apologized to the Debelbots, on behalf of his office, for "not getting a fair trial."
This seemed to shock Ashley Debelbot almost more than being freed from a life sentence. Asked in a press conference how she felt about the DA's apology, she replied, "I thought I would never hear that word being said to me, ever. Once you've been incarcerated, the word 'sorry' never comes to you at all."
She added, "I do not hold any bitterness toward anybody."
Her husband, Albert Debelbot, seemed a little less mellow. "I joined the Army protecting the same freedom that was taken from me. I lost a buddy in Iraq and [another] buddy lost his leg protecting the freedom we so believe in. We came home and the same system that we went to war to protect would never protect us."
'The demographic declines of the Rapa Nui are linked to the long-term effects of climate change on the island's capacity for the production of food...
'We did not find traces of an idyllic equilibrium with nature, and we did not find traces of a huge collapse. Instead, we found traces of interactions between three factors: Climate change, human population size, and changes in the ecosystem. The climate change manifests itself as a long-term pattern of changes in rainfall over some 400 years. The population grew during this same period, and the islanders also increased and changed their use of natural resources and agricultural methods...
'The islanders were not only aware of the changes, but they were also able to change the way the lived on the island. They gradually changed from the quite complex society that raised the marvelous moai statues, to a later and simpler agrarian society with reduced family sizes and a new way of producing food in stone gardens...
'These three factors affected the population on Rapa Nui, and they are also important on a global scale. We studied Rapa Nui and its history because we are trying to understand what is happening with the planet. Everybody talks about climate change and the resulting problems, but very few people are talking about the rising global population and the problems it causes.'
Father John A. Simes was starting
his day at Hiroshima when it happened, at about quarter past eight on 6 August
1945 http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Hiroshima/Hiroshima_Siemes.shtml
. He was up in the hills with the Jesuit Mission that had relocated there after
the gigantic fire-bombing of Tokyo in March by hundreds of American planes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo#Operation_Meetinghouse
. This time, incredibly, to inflict similar damage only needed a single bomb, a
weapon so different that it took Father Simes some time to piece together what
had happened. Conventional air raids in World War Two – yet how is napalming
civilians conventional? – claimed perhaps twice as many lives in Japan as
Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s victims combined; but ever since that day 75 years
ago, warfare’s potential has been on a new, even ghastlier level.
The British people’s reaction to
the radio news, first relayed on the Home Service at 6 p.m., was not unmixed
rejoicing, according to sources quoted by David Kynaston in his ‘Austerity
Britain’ (pp. 82-86). https://www.amazon.co.uk/Austerity-Britain-1945-1951-Tales-Jerusalem/dp/0747599238
The nine o’clock edition gave more details of the Bomb and its effects – still
hard to discern through the ‘pall of smoke and dust’ - on what had been a
Japanese ‘army base’ at six but three hours later was ‘a city of once over
300,000 inhabitants.’ There was ‘elation’ at the prospect of peace, but
‘terror’ at the scale of destruction; the novelist Ursula Bloom and her husband
were speechless with horror; the Dean of Oriel College abandoned any belief in
a Just War; J R R Tolkien wrote to his son deploring ‘the utter folly of these
lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes; calmly plotting
the destruction of the world’, especially while mankind’s ‘moral and
intellectual status is declining.’ A London schoolteacher noted the hypocrisy
of cheering the ‘Atomic bomb’ yet hating the Germans for their air raids on us;
a housewife in Cumbria worried whether Japan had the Bomb, too, and was merely
biding its time; a Scots engineer wrote in his diary, ‘There is no hope in man…
The end is near – perhaps some years only.’
Out East, the morale of the ‘Forgotten
Army’ had been low: they had learned of Victory in Europe, but had been
expecting perhaps another ten years of fighting the Japanese to the last ditch.
Instead, to their great relief, the conflict was to end in a few days. What,
however, did they make of the Bomb?
There are three books that taken
together serve as a trilogy describing the war in Burma at first hand and at
every level. The first, ‘Defeat Into Victory’ (1956) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Defeat-into-Victory-William-Slim/dp/0330509977
, is by the Fourteenth Army’s commander, Lieutenant General (later Field
Marshal and Viscount) William ‘Bill’ Slim. In the final chapter ‘Afterthoughts’
he saw that future armies, facing enemies in possession of battlefield nuclear
weapons that could wipe out whole units at a stroke, would have to fight in a
dispersed, semi-autonomous fashion in order to complete their campaigns.
The second, John Masters’ ‘The
Road Past Mandalay’ (1961) https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-road-past-mandalay/author/masters-john/
, is by one of Slim’s military planners who for a time took command of a Gurkha
Brigade dropped behind the Japanese lines, initiating a ferocious battle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Masters#Life
and ultimately forced to retreat. When he returned to HQ he resumed the heavy
burden of intricate planning and towards the conclusion of the Burmese campaign
became so exhausted that he was in danger of making fatal errors. Granted
leave, he set off to walk the Himalayas with his new wife. Near the end, they
came to the Rest House in Joshimath where the resident priest remarked that he
was glad the fighting was over. This made no sense until His Holiness showed
him a newspaper over two weeks old, with the splash headline ‘ATOMIC BOMB
DROPPED ON JAPAN.’ The couple had started on their mountain journey, cut off
from communication with the outside world, on the morning of 6 August.
‘I believed with instant conviction that there could
be no more war. No more tactics, no more strategy, only total destruction – or
peace. The training and experience of a lifetime had vanished into the thin
Himalayan air, and I was happy.
‘I took my wife in my arms and kissed her. His
Holiness said, in Hindi, ‘May God bless you, in peace.’
1992 saw the appearance of
‘Quartered Safe Out Here’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quartered-Safe-George-MacDonald-Fraser/dp/0007105932
, George MacDonald Fraser’s celebrated vivid account of his part in the Burma
Campaign, serving as a private in Cumbria’s Border Regiment. Many years after
the war, he argued with a man who was denouncing the nuclear bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki as obscene, monstrous and barbarous. Fraser reflected on
what other and how many more lives would have been lost had the war continued;
possibly his own, in which case his three children and six grandchildren would
never have been born:
‘And that, I’m afraid, is where all discussion of
pros and cons evaporates and becomes meaningless, because for those nine lives
I would pull the plug on the whole Japanese nation and never even blink. And
so, I dare suggest, would you. And if you wouldn’t, you may be nearer to the
divine than I am but you sure as hell aren’t fit to be parents or
grandparents.’
Here we are now, with these
horrors sitting in their silos and launch tubes, plus chemical weapons and vile
diseases carefully crafted by laboratory white-coats. Which of the above
witnesses are right? Among the military, the tactician, the idealist, the
balance-of-terror-ist? For the civilians, the elated, the horrified, the
triumphant, the bleak pessimist?
How can we get rid of such dark
toys? For surely, we’re not fit to play with them.
______________________________ Suggested further reading:
UPDATE: A GoFundMe page has been set up for Ashley Debelbot, who was released on bail from Muskogee County Jail on 2 July. The purpose is to help with Ashley's expenses to restart her life: https://www.gofundme.com/f/Ashley-Debelbot
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A Palauan man and his wife are to be re-tried more than 10 years after being found guilty of the murder of their newborn child, McKenzy. Their original trial and their first unsuccessful appeal raise questions about the quality of the justice system and its preparedness to address its own possible errors.
Born in hospital on 29 May 2008, the baby was taken home May 31 and died early the morning after. The couple, Albert and Ashley Debelbot, were convicted of malice murder in 2009, but eventually had their appeal heard in 2017, in which they claimed that their respective attorneys had not defended them effectively.
There are concerns about the conduct not only of the original trial but also of the appeal, which was denied. A further appeal to Georgia's Supreme Court succeeded and the convictions were 'vacated' on 28 February 2020 and a new trial ordered. https://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/local/crime/article240737036.html 'Their conviction was based on a testimony of the State assistant medical examiner whose opinion is based on an autopsy report. The State gave no evidence tying the couple to their daughter’s death and the couple’s lawyer did not offer any alternative explanation or evidence or witnesses on how the baby died,' reports the Island Times. The defence attorneys at the original trial had offered no alternative explanation of the child's injuries, even though the hospital had recorded the birth as a 'rough, atypical delivery.' https://islandtimes.org/palauan-man-imprisoned-unjustly-for-12-years-in-us/
At the 2017 appeal four medical experts giving evidence for the defence 'opined that the trauma of the birthing process caused the additional and more acute fracturing to the left side of McKenzy’s skull, and denied that post-birth trauma caused McKenzy’s injuries' but 'the court concluded in one sentence that all the Debelbots’witnesses, expert and otherwise, were not credible' and went on further to rule out their evidence as not legally admissible. https://law.justia.com/cases/georgia/supreme-court/2019/she defence18a1073.html
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the 2009 trial was the way that the Assistant District Attorney chose to define the 'reasonable doubt' in the presumption of innocence that a jury should extend to defendants:
In explaining the concept of “reasonable doubt,” which in a juror’s mind would justify a vote to acquit, Assistant District Attorney Sadhana Dailey said it “does not mean beyond all doubt,” and added: “It does not mean to a mathematical certainty. Which means we don’t have to prove that 90 percent. You don’t have to be 90 percent sure. You don’t have to be 80 percent sure. You don’t have to be 51 percent sure.” https://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/local/crime/article240737036.html
It seems reasonable to interpret that last sentence as implying that if it's down to tossing a coin, it's okay to find the defendant guilty. As the Supreme Court said, 'We cannot conceive of any good reason that a competent criminal defense attorney could have to fail to object to such an egregious misstatement of the law.'
The Island Times article cited above says'.. the DA for Muscogee County has announced that she will retry the case despite Georgia Supreme Court saying the government evidence is very thin. Debelbot will be represented in the new trial pro bono by the top rated Civil Defense and Criminal Defense New York Attorney Earl Ward.'
If that Ward is the 'Earl S. Ward' described here, the prosecution will have a fight on its hands; and if Ward succeeds, his pro bono work may be followed by a big compensation fight - he 'secured a $6.7 million settlement for the widow of Israel Vasquez, who was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for more than 12 years for a 1995 homicide he did not commit.' Twelve years: the same period Debelbot has spent in jail, so far; twelve of his wife's child-bearing years, of their potential family life together. https://ecbawm.com/our-people/earl-s-ward/
Let's turn our eyes away from money and consider a legal system that negligently sics a jury onto the defendants with a wildly wrong definition of reasonable doubt, lets them be found guilty of murder on the basis of an autopsy and accompanying assertions of a single expert (that did not directly connect the alleged offence with the defendants), and brushes away expert witnesses for the defence at appeal.
Not everyone would expect to receive such sub-standard service from the justice system. Is money, or the lack of it, a factor? Any other factors?
A study published a few days ago* reports large-scale illegal fishing in North Korean waters by Chinese ships that harvested more than 160,000 tons of Pacific flying squid in 2017 and 2018.
According to the article, squid hauls have dropped since 2003 in South Korea and Japan, and 'unable to compete with the more technologically advanced Chinese vessels, which use powerful lights and other technologies to maximize the size of their catch, some North Koreans have resorted to fishing illegally in faraway Russian waters.' International cooperation in managing fish stocks is breaking down.
This reminds us of comments made on Youtube five months ago by a South African-born businessman and vlogger who has worked and lived in China for years. 'Serpentza' (Winston Sterzel) says (starting 6:56 in the video below):
"China has completely outfished the waters off the coast of China and so their fishing trawlers must seek alternatives and the alternatives are: the rest of the entire world. "Clandestine Chinese fishing has decimated the fish stocks off the coast of South Africa, my country, and most of the African coast, where corrupt leaders are easily bribed to turn a blind eye while local fishermen and communities suffer greatly [...] "There is no catch-and-release or sustainable fishing in the modern Chinese mentality. As a nation who recently experienced devastating famine, it's a 'take now before it's all gone' mentality."
He also talks about Chinese economic activity that damages the environment, wildlife (e.g. by unrestricted hunting in Africa*) and people's health, while Chinese officialdom has great difficulty in enforcing laws that could prevent this.
A couple of months later he was on Instagram, reporting : "Chinese fishing ships off the coast of South Africa are illegally stripping the ocean of fish at an alarming rate yet nothing is being done, many people speculate that the South African government has been paid to turn a blind eye the same as what happened in Namibia":
A report last month on Maritime Executive says that China plans two closed seasons on squid fishing in the Pacific and Atlantic, to help stocks recover:
"The closed seasons cover what are believed to be the main spawning grounds of the Humboldt squid, in waters to the west of Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, from July to September, and of the Argentine shortfin squid, off Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, from September to November."
We shall see whether this is enforceable, and what other measures need to be and will be taken. The magazine also links to a site called 'China Dialogue Ocean', saying 'China Dialogue Ocean (https://chinadialogueocean.net) is dedicated to illuminating, analyzing and helping to resolve our ocean crisis.' We hope this is more than merely PR in these difficult times for international diplomacy.
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*Not to mention the involvement of China (among other nations) in the illegal wildlife trade in the Amazon: https://news.mongabay.com/2020/07/brazilian-amazon-drained-of-millions-of-wild-animals-by-criminal-networks-report/
Our ramble begins with an internet writer's reference to an Australian comedy book from the Seventies, The Outcasts Of Foolgarah. Surfing the reviews, I came across a Depression-era larrikin Oz classic, Here's Luck, by journo and rake Lennie Lower, which is now making us laugh.
But Outcasts, by Frank Hardy, was far from the author's most significant work. His most notorious was one that got him in court for criminal libel - the last case of its kind in Victoria; but that's not where this journey leads us. The experiences of the Depression that gave Lower his comic material had radicalised Hardy, as they did so many others, prompting him to join the Communist Party and use his talents to fight the Establishment.
We have since learned what Communism did; but the instincts that it exploited - compassion for the poor, and vicarious indignation - are valid. In our secular age, they inform ecological panic and adolescent self-loathing, an opportunity for ostentatious do-gooders to secure bossy, well-upholstered sinecures for themselves.
In Australia, they take us to the aboriginals.
Twenty thousand years before Neanderthals recolonised an unpeopled Ice Age Britain, forty thousand before modern man supplanted them in Europe, even longer before humans saw the Americas, the first Australians came to their island continent. Early agriculture? The cities of China and Mesopotamia, Egypt and Mohenjo Daro, the stones of Wiltshire and Giza? Last week's news.
For them, time had no meaning, as is so with all of us, our past always fading into dream, driving us to build, write, record images; futile attempts to preserve our intangible selves in something that endures forever, though nothing will.
Where are their monuments? In their minds, and in their tongues. In their myths of creation and arrival, in the songman's store of rhymes that give life-saving directions for nomads in a pitiless land; an inconceivably long heirloom of songs, some maybe stretching back to the birth of language itself. Old to young, old to young, the chain continued, handing on words and skills that gave them their law and culture; the policeman and warrior, the getter of food and drink, the builder of shelters contained in their skins and carried within their hands and brains wherever they went.
Until the last link broke.
Dispossession, displacement, disrespect; opium via the Oriental trading in Port Darwin; alcohol everywhere, ruining the young as it did their counterparts in America, where sometimes crazy-drunk First Nation kids hang out of cars as they tear around settlement lands which they cannot sell or mortgage.
Instead of the remorseless pressure of daily survival, jobs: money, enough to get by and for some, to dream the modern dreams of easy intoxication. And since the young stopped listening to the old, the elders (some, at least) shut their lips. One by one, the guiding stars of the aboriginal are winking out of existence, taking their knowledge with them.
Materially, a little is done to compensate material wrongs, some in response to action by the victims themselves. Following a walkout in 1966 by mistreated Gurindji aboriginal workers at the vast Wave Hill cattle station, a small portion of their traditional lands were eventually restored to them, and the law has begun to address past injustices. Frank Hardy helped to publicise the issues in his book The Unlucky Australians, and a TV documentary followed.
What can make up for the vast, invisible vandalism of an ancient way of life? Like all humanity, the original Australians have always known war and crime, but what they carried in them was no less precious and far older than the historical relics over which we wonder and grieve in museums.
Still, many times older is the history of humanoids written into all our genes, itself dwarfed by the general relay of life that began billions of years ago. It is fleeting life that endures.
"Easter Islanders never cut their palm trees at all! According to their cultural legends, when the Polynesians’ canoes reached Easter about 1000 AD, the island was covered in grasses. There were only a few palms. Modern pollen studies confirm this, showing that the island did have palm trees in the ancient past – but most died in the cold droughts of the Dark Ages (600–950 AD). The few surviving palms died during the Little Ice Age after the Polynesians colonized the island. The last palm died about 1650."
Google is not only tailoring a biased version of its search engine for Communist China, but blocking its own employees' access to the relevant documents:
Apparently, last year Chinese parties nearly defenestrated an Australian MP in a key Sidney constituency, which could have wiped out the wafer-thin Parliamentary majority of the current Liberal government.
Elsewhere, Chinese individuals abroad may still be kept under close surveillance:
"Stalking of expat dissidents is facilitated by digital technology. Activity on Facebook (a website blocked in China) is monitored, but it doesn’t stop there. Western governments have shown unbelievable lack of caution in giving contracts to Chinese firms for sensitive work such as surveillance systems. Advanced internet-linked CCTV cameras with face-tracking capacity in use on the London Underground and Gatwick Airport are supplied by Hangzhou Hikvision, a company under Chinese state control. Potentially the data may be sent to Chinese servers, allowing agents to track people wherever they go, recording them visiting church or holding a copy of Epoch Times."
Imposing a way of life can have terrible consequences. This story has a universal feel to it, about the dangers of trying to dam natural drives:
I well remember an aboriginal couple who were married "Christian way in church". The woman was not aware that the union was a fixed one - not as in the tribe, where the people can become divorced by mutual consent.
The marriage irked her so much that she decided to break it up and take to herself another man of the tribe. Her method was simple and ingenious.
She became the friend of another native man I knew and, unknown to him, used him as a means of arousing her husband to such a jealous madness that he crept upon the man, who he thought was his wife's lover, and killed him with a spear.
I found it all out too late, and even then I could not stop the self-satisfied smile on the real killer's face, as her husband went to jail whilst she returned to her true lover. From "Life among the aborigines" by W E Harney, Robert Hale, 1957 (pp. 31-32)
Image: NASA (from UNESCO page: http://www.environment.com.au/?p=229)
The Australian Government's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority lists 45 tribes and groups that assert an interest in the world's greatest living natural formation:
