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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsToday in Murder Trials
Last edited Wed Jun 12, 2013, 11:00 PM - Edit history (2)
First up, in Boston, is the start of the trial for 83 year old Southie, Whitey Bulger. A long time on the lam, the long arm of the law (and a girlfriend) finally got him. Whitey still enjoys something of a Robin Hood personna in some circles.
Next up is George "Nightwatch" Zimmerman. Jury selection is now underway but is reported to be going very slowly. I think this has the potential to be a societal flash point when the trials ends later this summer. I find it surprising that the judge has decided not to sequester the jury.
Last up was that scumbag from Cleveland, Ariel Castro. He had a hearing today. It lasted less than one minute. He pleaded not guilty to the nearly 400 counts against him. His bail was kept at $8M. Having induced a miscarriage in one of his captives, he could be charged with murder.
Can anyone muster any sympathy for any of these three? I know I sure can't.
edited to remove the trailing "b" in "lam" . . . . in response to the funny post with the pictures of the rodeo kid by our new friend, Mr. Hundred Dollar Portrait, and the snark laden chastisement from my Friend From Back Home, catnhatnh.
REP
(21,691 posts)Hard to pick a winner in this bunch, but the other two make Bulger look merely "vile." Quite an, uh, accomplishment for the other two, considering what a vicious little ratfucker Bulger is.
davidn3600
(6,342 posts)I know people are annoyed by that...but just wanted to point that out...
Stinky The Clown
(67,676 posts). . . . I oppose the death penalty, even for scumbags like these.
uppityperson
(115,674 posts)Politicalboi
(15,189 posts)Nimajneb Nilknarf
(319 posts)This one seems to have the hang of it!
This rodeo stuff looks like grand fun. We didn't have anything like that in the 18th Century.
catnhatnh
(8,976 posts)and confused by how "lamb"s were involved I googled...
"On the lam" or "on the run" often refers to fugitives. Mencken's The American Language and The Thesaurus of American Slang proclaim that lam, lamister, and "on the lam" all referring to a hasty departure were common in thieves' slang before the turn of the 20th century. Mencken quotes a newspaper report on the origin of 'lam' which actually traces it indirectly back to Shakespeare's time.
Its origin should be obvious to anyone who runs over several colloquial phrases for leavetaking, such as 'beat it' and 'hit the trail'. The allusion in 'lam' is to 'beat,' and 'beat it' is Old English, meaning 'to leave.' During the period of George Ade's 'Fables in Slang' (1900), cabaret society delight in talking slang, and 'lam' was current. Like many other terms, it went under in the flood of new usages of those days, but was preserved in criminal slang. A quarter of a century later it reappeared.
Mencken also quotes a story from the New York Herald Tribune in 1938 which reported that "one of the oldest police officers in New York said that he had heard 'on the lam' thirty years ago."
From WIKI entry on "fugitives"
But the photo of on the lamb was a riot...