By Jeffrey Page

According to a breathtaking story in The Times, Philip Morris International is suing the nation of Brazil because the government had the temerity to take measures to protect the health of its people.

Brazil did this by requiring that cigarette manufacturers print stark illustrations of the effects of smoking. Where? Right on the outside of the package where smokers could get a good look at what they inflict on themselves.

PMI contends that this serves to “vilify” – their word, The Times reported – it and other cigarette makers.

Smoking has decreased markedly in the United States and Western Europe, and to make up for their losses in those markets, Philip Morris International and other manufacturers are bringing legal actions against nations whose rules make it difficult to sell tobacco products.

Uruguay, for example, has a regulation that health warnings must cover 80 percent of the exterior of a pack of cigarettes. Other nations have rules governing the advertising and promotion of cigarettes.

I think back several years to when it was revealed that some cigarette makers boosted the nicotine level in their product as a means of hooking people more quickly and effectively, and I congratulate myself on breaking my nicotine addiction.

How insidious Big Tobacco has been. How devious.

 I remember when the maker of Camels used to advertise that a survey – did such a survey really exist? I have no idea – indicated that more doctors smoked Camels than any other brand.

The Old Gold brand used to bill its line as “a treat instead of a treatment,” and I wonder how many Old Gold smokers over the years have had to undergo treatments such as chemo, surgical and radiation. I wonder how many have died before their time.

I remember the line “Luckies taste better. Cleaner, fresher, smoother,” and the invitation “Light up a Lucky. It’s light-up time.”

The ads were happy, colorful portrayals of life in post war America. Everything was clean, everything was sparkly. And just to make it perfect, we were advised to light up, sit back and enjoy life. We were killing ourselves of course, aided every inch of the way by the cigarette makers.

And thus, getting back to Philip Morris International’s weepy complaint that it is being vilified by having to follow certain rules, let it be noted that to vilify is to defame, to revile, to speak contemptuously, to speak ill.

Was there ever an industry more deserving of vilification than one that sells a product it knows to be lethal?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

The Republican victory was not yet two days old when Michele Bachmann informed the House GOP leadership that she wants a piece of the pie by being named the party’s conference chairwoman when the 112th Congress convenes in January.

In most other countries – with the possible exception of Saturn – Bachmann’s ambition would be considered a joke. Bachmann is the Minnesota backbencher whose brain and mouth have never quite connected as evidenced by her bizarre request to the press a few years ago. “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?” she said. Listen carefully and you can hear Joe McCarthy whispering, “That’s my girl.”

Bachmann, a two-term member of the House, is a favorite of the Tea Party movement and thus has some clout. Many Tea Partiers believe – with good reason – that they helped make the difference on Election Day and that because of them, the Republicans have the House. (Of course, they don’t talk much about their failure – Angle, O’Donnell, possibly Miller in Alaska, et al. – to take over the Senate.)

Maybe the Tea Party people have a legitimate claim to a place in the House GOP leadership. But Michele Bachmann? Michele Bachmann, who informed CNN listeners last week that President Obama’s Asian trip is costing $200 million – a day. That Michele Bachmann?

John Boehner, the next Speaker of the House, has a problem with her that rivals the Democrats’ dilemma of 2000. Ten years ago Democrats watched as many of their members gave up on Al Gore and cast their lots with Ralph Nader. As a result, we got two wars and lost several thousand of our young men and women. We watched New Orleans nearly float off and sink. We got Rumsfeld and Cheney and their idiotic mission to find Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. We got Chief Justice John Roberts.

Good old St. Ralph.

And now, Boehner must deal with his fringe, which, like Ivory soap and the Gore defectors, considers itself 99 and 44/100 percent pure. And he must be careful. Never forget that during the campaign, any number of Tea Party activists were quoted as saying they may despise the Democratic Party, but they’re not at all crazy about the GOP either.

Message to Boehner: Watch your back because here comes Bachmann and her demand for respectability, and here’s Boehner who understands he’s got to do something to calm her down. But he can’t hand the GOP over to her and her Tea Party allies. How about a committee chairmanship? Then again, maybe not. The heads of congressional committees must at least pretend that they’re listening to the minority. But it was Bachmann last year who declared: “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama; I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”

How about an interesting lie? Because you know damn well that Bachmann knows damn well that the president at the time of the flu outbreak of 1976 wasn’t Carter the Democrat but Ford the un-Democrat. And of course she blames the more recent flu outbreak on President Obama.

How can House Republicans ever be thought of as anything but the Party of No if Michele Bachmann gets a leadership position? After all, it was Bachmann, speaking on health care, who said, “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.”

So far, Boehner is resisting Bachmann’s demands It will be interesting to see how long he can ignore her once the Tea Party activists organize around her.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

I may be the only person who actually bet on George McGovern in 1972 – $5 down the drain – so you can believe me when I say I’m familiar with hope, naïveté and disappointment. I’m sitting here looking over the Times on the morning after the elections. I’m looking for assurance. It’s there, but in extremely small measure.

–With a little luck, we’ve seen the last of Carl Paladino. In New York we don’t abide Paladino’s threatening to have a reporter killed for raising troublesome questions. And we don’t tolerate his sending emails showing African tribesmen dancing outside a grass hut with the caption “Obama Inaugural Rehearsal.” We don’t accept Paladino’s pornographic emails. Nor do we accept his referring to former Governor George Pataki as “a degenerate idiot.” Maybe Carl Paladino will do New York a favor and just disappear.

–How did anyone in Connecticut decide whom to support for Chris Dodd’s Senate seat? On one hand was Linda McMahon whose claim to fame is her association with World Wrestling Entertainment, which has as much to do with wrestling as Carl Paladino has to do with good taste. WWE is about sex and violence. McMahon’s opponent was Richard Blumenthal, the state attorney general, whose war record is exemplary but for one fact: It doesn’t exist. Not just once or twice but on several occasions Blumenthal claimed to have served in Vietnam and even suggested that he got a hostile reception when he returned. In fact he never set foot in Vietnam. This is called lying, right? Never mind finding the lesser of two evils; I couldn’t have voted for either one.

–In losing a bid for Joe Biden’s old Senate seat in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell actually conned 123,000 people into voting for her. Unbelievable. She’s the Tea Party darling who couldn’t name a Supreme Court decision she opposes – “I know there are a lot,” she said – and promised to list one on her web site. I still can’t find it. Her site described her as someone who “strongly believes in protecting the sanctity of life at all stages,” which is pretty nervy talk for someone who not only opposes sex outside marriage but masturbation as well.

–As of this morning, Tea Partier Joe Miller is a loser, but his race for senator from Alaska may take a while to decide. He challenged the Republican incumbent Lisa Murkowski, got Sarah Palin’s endorsement, beat Murkowski in the primary, and then was shocked when Murkowski announced she would wage a write-in campaign against him. Right now she’s up by 7 percentage points. Why do I care? Because it was Miller and his little band of hired thugs who held a reporter incommunicado for 25 minutes for asking questions Miller didn’t want to address. That’s cause for disqualification.

–Running for governor of Minnesota, Tom Emmer came in second by just 1 percentage point. With luck, that 1 percent will stand during the likely recount. Emmer is the candidate who dismissed a portion of the people of Minnesota by reducing his position on gay marriage to 12 words: “I believe marriage is the union between one man and one woman.” That’s like being asked about Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and responding “I don’t buy it; next question.”

–Happily, Cuomo vanquished the loathsome Paladino. Maurice Hinchey is going back to the House; would that John Hall were going back with him. Meg Whitman learned that even spending $140 million of your own money doesn’t get you elected if the voters perceive you to be a hypocrite. She railed against illegal immigrants but paid one to clean her house for nine years and the claimed she, uh, didn’t know.

–Good news was overwhelmed by the fact that plenty of Sarah Palin acolytes were elected around the country. Palin? 2012? Can’t happen. Bet you $5.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

You’re a reporter in Alaska. You trail a candidate for the U.S. Senate into a public building for a public event. You ask a tough question. The candidate demurs. You follow him into the corridor and ask it again. Then he has you arrested by his private goons.

Not since the grim days of Richard Nixon has the nation been subjected a more obvious trashing of the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. But something dark is happening in America and there has been surprisingly little outrage about a reporter’s being held by a swarm of non-cops. What should have been a noisy cause célèbre seems to have been quickly forgotten.

A touch of background. Alaska gave us Sarah Palin. It also gave us the defeat of a sitting Republican Senator, Lisa Murkowski, by the Tea Party favorite, Joe Miller. Murkowski, who ran a close second to Miller in the GOP primary, is waging a write-in campaign. Some polls indicate she stands a chance of upending Miller. The third candidate is the Democrat, Scott McAdams, who, despite the closeness of the Murkowski-Miller race, is not considered a factor.

So, with Murkowski breathing down his neck, Miller wasn’t eager to take tough questions from a reporter.

Miller was making a campaign stop at a public school in Anchorage on Oct. 17 when he was confronted by Tony Hopfinger, the editor of the Alaska Dispatch web site and no lapdog reporter. Hopfinger tried to ask Miller about his alleged improper use of government computers in Fairbanks North Star Borough for political purposes two years ago.

Hopfinger asked again and was told, not by Miller but by his security detail, that if he didn’t shut up he would be arrested for trespassing – at a public event in a public building. Sure enough he asked again, and sure enough Miller’s privately hired thugs placed him in handcuffs and escorted him away from the candidate. Hopfinger was taken to an adjoining hallway where he was held incommunicado for 25 minutes. The security people, two of whom were reported to be active duty Army personnel on free time, said they were going to call the police. When the cops showed up, they ordered the handcuffs removed.

It’s amusing in a morbid kind of way to think about the right wing’s disgust with government and how often it notes Jefferson’s fear of big government. But conservatives never summon up other Jeffersonian traditions, such as the need for an unfettered press.

Jefferson famously said: “… were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

He less famously said: “The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.”

It’s one thing to refuse to answer reporters’ questions, as cowardly as that is. It’s quite another to have an annoying reporter dragged away in true Stalinist tradition. If anyone is waiting for Miller, Palin, Christine O’Donnell or any of the other Tea Party darlings to even hint that Miller’s goon squad went too far, they should bring provisions. They’re going to have a long wait.

Meanwhile, the question remains: If Miller tolerates this assault on the First Amendment as a candidate, what will he tolerate if he’s elected to the Senate?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

Two political observations.

–A friend of mine from New Jersey sent me a one-page document that I suspect has made its way through the Internet. It starts with the provocative assertion “Let’s put the seniors in jail and the criminals in nursing homes.”

It’s silly of course, but I think it illustrates the anger, frustration and political disillusion some Tea Partiers – not to mention just about every other American voter as well – are experiencing this year. It should serve as a warning to the left and right alike that if the tea people increase their numbers over the next few election cycles so that they actually have some clout in the House and Senate, the United States might never be the same. Can you see it? A constitutional convention to consider whether that pesky First Amendment is still needed. It only takes two-thirds of Congress or two-thirds of the state legislatures to call for such a convention.

If the homes of convicts and old people were switched, my Jersey friend says, jailed seniors would have access to showers, hobbies, and walks. But prisoners living in nursing homes with names like Happy Vistas would get one shower a week.

Old folks in jail would receive all the telephone calls they wish, but convicts serving their time in a nursing home would live in tiny rooms for which they’d have to pay something like $5,000 a month.

You get the point.

–Various people who claim to speak for the Tea Party movement say that they are not partisans, that they do not target individual politicians but the actions of individuals. They claim they are somehow above politics, but the fact is that they use the political system expertly and to their best advantage.

And they know where not to go. I’m still waiting for some Tea Partiers from the plains to demand that crop subsidies be eliminated as a means of reducing federal spending.

Their often proclaimed loathing of politicians is a sham. So is their conservatism. We have seen the attack on the moderate Republican Mike Castle in Delaware by the antimasturbatory Christine O’Donnell, but have not heard of their embrace of any conservative Democrats. The typical Tea Partiers are older white men. While their philosophical guides yammer on the radio about the need to cut back the Social Security program, I’ve yet to see a single sign at a Tea Party rally calling for such reductions.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Not since the last time a defendant in a rape case said the woman’s sexy outfit meant she was “asking for it” have we encountered a more grotesque defense and sentencing than that of an ex-cop charged with drunken driving and killing a woman with his SUV.

A judge in Brooklyn ruled last week that because the woman, leaving a wedding reception in Mill Basin 13 months ago also was drunk, she contributed to her being struck by Andrew Kelly, the drunk off-duty NYPD officer. Kelly refused to take a breath test until seven hours after the incident and only then under orders. And just months later, as part of a deal, he pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide and driving while intoxicated, and admitted that he had been drunk at the time he plowed into Vionique Valnord-Kassime. He also resigned from the police department.

Ms. Valnord-Kassime is dead and state Supreme Court Justice Allan Marrus sent Kelly to jail for 90 days and put him on probation for five years. You read that right.

The judge, prosecutor and the attorney representing Andrew Kelly seemed able to find a way to pin the rap of Ms. Valnord-Kassime’s death on Ms. Valnord-Kassime herself.

The assistant district attorney said, “She had been at a wedding. She had been drinking.”

Kelly’s lawyer said, “It appears that she was drunk and she wandered into traffic.”

Acknowledging that his sentence might strike some people as on the lenient side, the learned Judge Marrus was quoted by The New York Times noting that “the alcohol consumption of the victim [and] the fact that she walked out onto a rainy street to hail a cab against the advice of friends” could have been contributory factors to her being hit.

What Marrus did was to find Ms. Valnord-Kassime guilty of a crime that does not exist – WWI, or walking while intoxicated.

Translation: It was all her fault.

Anybody want to tell me about justice?

Only Sanford Rubenstein, the lawyer representing Ms. Valnord-Kassime’s family, observed that she was the sole victim in this case, no matter that she herself had had too much to drink.

Ninety days? Ninety days for driving drunk and killing someone is more like an annoying inconvenience than a serious penalty, and the question must be asked. What would the sentence have been had Andrew Kelly not been a cop at the time of Ms. Valnord-Kassime’s death? If Andrew Kelly were just another working stiff trying to make it in this economy, would he have been sent away for three months?

We’re supposed to respect the law and the people who enforce it and those who run our courts. And we are supposed to understand the random danger of drunken driving. But Marrus’s sentencing of the disgraced Andrew Kelly was an absurdity that flies in the face of common sense and sends a terrible message that maybe killing someone while you’re blind drunk isn’t such a terrible thing after all.

At the time of the sentencing, Ms. Valnord-Kassime’s father, the Rev. Varius Valnord, the pastor of the Haitian Church of God in Brooklyn, came face to face with Andrew Kelly in the courthouse. Kelly apologized. The Rev. Valnord accepted. But 90 days?

Clearly, Rev. Valnord is a forgiving man of God though he intends to bring a wrongful death action against Kelly and the city. Forgiveness is a wonderful – and personal – step. But one thing must be understood. The case against Andrew Kelly was not brought in the name of the Valnord and Kassime families. It was brought in the name of all 14 million people of the state of New York. We all need protection from drunken drivers.

The rest of us must demand representation in cases such as this since the next time someone is run down by a drunken driver – cop or civilian – the victim could be your kid, your sweetheart, your friend.

Because one thing about drunken drivers. They’re not very discriminating; they’ll kill anybody in their path.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

Tuesday is the 12th anniversary of an American crucifixion. It was on Oct. 12 in 1998 when two young men in southeastern Wyoming got hold of a third man outside a bar in Laramie, beat him to a bloody pulp, and then took him out to a ranch where they tied him to a fence and left him in cold weather for about 18 hours. Finally someone spotted him and called for help.

It took Matthew Shepard four days to die. At the time, it was reported that the reason for the attack was that Shepard, a gay 22-year old student at the University of Wyoming, had made a pass at one of the men.

In some insane code, Shepard had to pay for this with his life. Of course, if everybody who ever made a pass – gay or straight – was treated like this, there would be no vacant spaces along the fences of America. After they tied Shepard up, their honor ostensibly upheld, his two assailants drove back to Laramie, where they attacked two Hispanic men.

For killing Matthew Shepard, Russell A. Henderson, 21, and Aaron J. McKinney, 22, were sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Recently, I’ve been reminded of Shepard’s fate when I read about the equally unspeakable death of Tyler Clementi in New Jersey. In Clementi’s case, there was no direct physical assault. Instead, prosecutors say, two other students at Rutgers University set the wheels in motion for Tyler’s suicide.

No one has been convicted of anything. Indeed, no one’s even been indicted yet. So for now, responsible news organizations must stick with “allegedly” and “police said” and “prosecutors charged.” But what can never be called into question is the fact that Tyler Clementi was gay-bashed to death without anyone laying a finger on him.

Someone tore away any defenses that Clementi may have set up for himself by secretly webcasting his gay sexual encounter with another Rutgers student and putting it up on the Internet for all the world to see. A few days later, Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge.

Authorities charged Clementi’s roommate, Dhuran Ravi, and another student, Molly Wei, with invasion of Clementi’s privacy. That alone could get them five years in prison. Additional charges are possible. For example, if prosecutors pursue the case as a bias crime, the maximum penalty could go to 10 years.

As usual in cases like these, people are left with the question that seems as though it never will be satisfactorily answered. What is the fear that drives men such as Henderson and McKinney to do what they did to Matthew Shepard? That some gay guy is going to make off with them? That’s absurd in general; all they have to do is say no. It’s especially ridiculous in Shepard’s case since he was all of 5 feet 2, not exactly a physical threat. The other question is whether they might have had doubts about their heterosexuality and had to come to grips with that as a result of an encounter with a gay man.

Through their lawyers, Ravi and Wei have said that they did not hold Clementi’s homosexuality against him. Then, what could possibly have been their motivation for allegedly posting Tyler Clementi’s tryst on the Internet? They didn’t address that.

The death of Tyler Clementi informs us that the outrages are far from over. Anyone who was aware of Matthew Shepard’s death in 1998 likely hoped that such an atrocity could not happen again. But it did and we are left with yet another question: How many more young men must pay with their lives for the crime of being who they are?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

Lately, some Zest writers have been discussing sports writing in general and the work of Jimmy Cannon in particular and, as a result, we decided to have a contest for our readers. Actually, it’s not much of a contest. We’re just asking you to join the discussion with some observations about your favorite sportswriters – the poets of journalism.
 
Before I give you the details of the competition, let me weigh in with my own recollections of Jimmy Cannon.

When Zesters Bob Gaydos and Mike Kaufman were talking about him, I had a twitch of memory, something about an ahead-of-his-time description of the most famous Yankee of them all. I finally found it in a dusty old collection of Cannon’s columns. “Babe Ruth,” he wrote, “was more than a man. He was a parade all by himself, a burst of dazzle and jingle, Santa Claus drinking his whiskey straight and groaning with a bellyache caused by gluttony.”

Here he is on what baseball is: “Baseball isn’t rich men whining publicly about how much baseball costs them. It is Willie Mays running with that rocking gait, his back to home plate, as he chases down a fly ball hit over his head. It is the multitude at Shea Stadium shrieking ‘Let’s go Mets’ with two out in the ninth and five runs down. This is baseball, where every day is another season.”

He wrote about all sports and may have been his best on boxing. He wrote: “Once again today they’re trying to figure out Floyd Patterson. They wonder why he bleeds for small money when he is a rich man. It is all behind him, and the barbaric traditions of the fight racket always offended him. But he borrowed a left hook to the body from the shylock of the past and knocked out Charlie Green Tuesday night in the tenth and final round of a clumsy and boring fight.”

All right, think of your favorite writers working today or the ones you read when you were a kid. Tell us who you like and if there’s a line in their work you found so perfectly written, breathtakingly insightful that you committed it to memory. Drop me a line at the address below and be the envy of your friends with a mention in Zest of Orange.

In this contest, everybody wins.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

With regard to Christine O’Donnell, the press has come up short in asking the hard questions.

Bill Maher says there is tape of O’Donnell, the holier-than-thou-and-everyone-else Tea Party candidate for the Senate from Delaware, saying she would never tell a lie. Never is too far in the future to let pass without elaboration.

What if Hitler rang the doorbell and O’Donnell had Anne Frank hiding upstairs. “No, I would not lie,” O’Donnell was quoted by Maher. “God would find a way.”

But of course in Anne Frank’s case, God did not find a way.

Still, couldn’t some lady or gentleman of the fourth estate have asked O’Donnell how God would have protected Anne? Because when the Nazis finally came for her she was unceremoniously shipped off to Bergen-Belsen where she died. She was 15.

I don’t think it’s unfair to infer that someone who would refuse to lie in order to save a human life most likely would refuse to steal to save a life as well. Could O’Donnell identify even in the slightest with Jean Valjean who stole bread in order to survive in “Les Misérables?” Or would she dismiss him as a common thief who deserves everything he gets from the merciless Javert? But no one asked such questions.

In another matter, no one put the words “I dabbled into witchcraft”—complete with that strange preposition – into Christine O’Donnell’s merciless mouth. The words came gushing out on their own in one of her many appearances on Maher’s television show “Politically Incorrect.” Granted, the witchcraft discussion was in 1999, and nowadays she reminds us that this dabbling occurred when she was in high school. Macbeth listened to some witches and you know what it got him.

“One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s little blood there and stuff like that,” O’Donnell said. “We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.” That would be the altar with the little bit of blood and stuff like that, right? Unless you have O’Donnell’s phone number, you won’t know whose blood it was, or how it got there because no one in the press has asked her about that.

She said all that fun on the satanic altar after the movie was one of her “first dates” with a witch. But no one asked her how many more such bloody dates she has had with witches, or when the last one was.

She did, however, ask a cheering crowd: “How many of you didn’t hang out with questionable folks in high school?” Actually I hung out with Judy Levine but, despite the fact she always dressed in black, I don’t think Judy was questionable. She wasn’t a witch; she was a beat generation writer. When we were reading “The Catcher in the Rye” and thinking ourselves pretty cool for doing so, Judy was reading “On the Road.”

Now, masturbation is to be avoided, according to the story of Onan and Judah in Genesis 38:3-10. And I know that everybody has violated the word at one time or other – maybe many more times or other. O’Donnell has said that masturbation is a form of adultery.

“It’s not enough to be abstinent with other people; you also have to be abstinent alone. The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery so you can’t masturbate without lust,” O’Donnell said, and I’m really not sure she knows what she’s talking about.

Isn’t anyone in the press going to ask O’Donnell if she ever had fun with herself under the covers late at night and, if she did, if she considers herself to have committed adultery with – who? Her right hand?

If masturbation is lust that must be avoided, surely extramarital sex is lust that must be avoided as well. I wish that some reporter had asked O’Donnell straight out what she does in those moments alone when a strong libidinous craving overtakes her poor defenseless self and there is no husband to relieve it. She is, after all, 41 years old and single.

Is she suggesting that she has spent the decades suppressing her sudden private needs?

Do you buy that? I don’t. But we won’t know much until someone asks her. And no one seems inclined to do that. Why do you suppose that is? One possibility: Publishers sell newspapers when they can put some certifiable character on Page 1, and publishers these days want to sell all the papers they can.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

Regular Zest of Orange readers may recall the ongoing debate I’ve had with myself, and with you, over the issue of capital punishment. I noted last year that I was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty but that I have my limits.

I recall and honor the words of Clarence Darrow in his famous summation in the Leopold-Loeb murder trial of 1924: “You may stand them up on the trap-door of the scaffold, and choke them to death, but that act will be infinitely more cold-blooded whether justified or not, than any act that these boys have committed or can commit.”

But then came Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City, and after that came Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and that field in Shanksville, Pa., and I wasn’t sure of much. I still believe that the use of capital punishment relegates society to the same circle of hell as the criminal, and I wonder if I will be relegated to the same circle as McVeigh and Mohammed.

In the names of the children McVeigh murdered in the day-care center in Oklahoma and in the names of the kids aboard the four airplanes brought down by Mohammed on Sept. 11, whatever compassion I once might have held for their killers is gone.

And now comes Steven Hayes, proving to be another test of what once was my rock-solid conviction on the death sentence. He’s on trial in New Haven. This is what the authorities say he did.

–Hayes and an accomplice – he will be tried later – broke into the home of William Petit and Jennifer Hawke-Petit in Chesire, Conn. three years ago. Hayes tied Petit up in the basement after slugging him several times with a baseball bat. He forced Hawke-Petit to drive to the bank and bring back $15,000 while he imprisoned her husband and the couple’s two daughters, Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17. But he wasn’t finished.

–When Hawke-Petit returned, Hayes raped her. Then he beat her. This is not an allegation; it’s an admission from Hayes’s lawyer in his opening statement to the jury. But he wasn’t finished.

–Hayes murdered Hawke-Petit by strangling. Again, this is something that has gone past the point of allegation. Hayes admitted the killing. But he wasn’t finished.

–Authorities say Hayes and the accomplice, Joshua Komisarjevsky tied Michaela the 11-year old, and Hayley the 17-year old, to their beds. Then they set the house on fire, and the girls died of smoke inhalation.

Steven Hayes’s trial began on Monday in New Haven. In that opening statement, after acknowledging his client’s rape and murder of Hawke-Petit, Hayes’s lawyer wanted the jury to understand that when Hayes was arrested, he told the police that things had gotten out of control.

Gotten out of control? How were things supposed to have gone?
Such people as Steven Hayes make it difficult to despise capital punishment.

When I wrote last year about my opposition to the death penalty becoming shaky, one reader cautioned me that by killing a mass murderer, I might create a martyr. A valid point, but doesn’t society stand a chance of being called an instrument of brutality and torture every time it sentences someone to life imprisonment without parole?

Another reader noted that veering just one step from the straight and narrow path of death penalty opposition makes one a death penalty supporter. I guess that’s true. But indulge me for a moment and let me pose this: If Hitler or Pol Pot were on trial for their crimes, and if there was a conviction and a sentence of death, ought they be spared because we might create a martyr or might let our emotions rule our lives?

What is the extent of compassion ordinary people are supposed to have for someone like Steven Hayes, whose home invasion “went out of control” resulting in the murders of a woman and her two children? Are we supposed to wonder about Steven Hayes’s childhood and whether his father was a scoundrel who abandoned the family or whether his mother used drugs?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com