You may have heard this story. I hadn't. Or at least not beyond the punch line, the cruelty part.

There was a man, a black man. He was angry a lot and one night when a friend couldn't afford $3 cover charge to get into a dance hall, he pulled out a gun and shot 3 people, I presume also black, but maybe not. One died. All over a $3 cover charge. He then drove away and stayed with different people for 3 days until his sister got him to agree to surrender to an old acquaintance, a cop. The cop was sitting in his mother's kitchen, said hi to him, and then turned back to speak to the mother, at which point the man fired 2 deadly shots into his neck and head.

He then walked outside, and fired a shot into his own head, leaving him partially lobotomized.

This is the part that's been reported many places. There are some reports that the man seemed slow as a kid, was beaten a lot, was angry and rather violent - people were quite scared of him. What they usually don't say is that he was married (part of his time "on the run" was still at his wife's house, oddly), fathered a number of kids elsewhere (i.e. for slow, he wasn't completely unable to function socially, despite a poor track record keeping jobs). He was arrested and spent time in jail for disorderly conduct, assault and battery, forgery, grand larceny, assault with intent to kill (and rather beside the point, selling pot), but all ended with fines or dismissal. Most reports also don't mention that the officer killed was a white guy, was known for the time and care that he put in with the black community - that the reason the sister called him specifically was she and her brother knew he'd be fair, that he'd arrested the man before, that they'd known him for years, but was still trusted and trustworthy.

When another cop said, "“What should I do if I see him?” the cop replied, “You don*t do nothing. You call me. Because he’ll kill you. But he won’t kill me.”"

The reports also don't mention that the man was examined 3 times over his 11 years on death row, and cleared as competent to die all 3. For example, though 1 hearing proved he had amnesia of his crimes, it also noted that amnesia isn't a defense against a crime nor against dying for it. What keeps getting mentioned elsewhere in the press is that he'd asked to save the pie in his last meal "for later".

Me, I would have executed him in a heartbeat. 

The only part I'd heard was that Bill Clinton had flown back to Arkansas to see he was executed, and that the execution was botched - that it took 50 minutes for them to find a vein and for him to die.

If you want to read about it all, in detail, it's here - 33 pages, rather fascinating. Yes, they write about Clinton too.

The reason I'm even writing about this was because of an article in Salon on "the death of neoliberalism", in which he states "...some of Clinton’s harshest progressive critics were in fact women and people of color". The link is to a February piece in The Nation by Michelle Alexander, the one who made Hillary's 20-year-old "superpredator" comment a headline in the primaries. I'd read this before, but because of the recent election and the fact that I'd criticized the Crime Bill's reduction to 1 "superpredator" comment out of larger context, I started to re-read. And that's when I came across the reference to the case above. See if you can recognize it:

 Just weeks before the critical New Hampshire primary, Clinton proved his toughness by flying back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired black man who had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him for later. After the execution, Clinton remarked, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.”

A "mentally impaired black man". His dessert. Bill's callous comment. WTF. The reason this man was impaired was that after shooting 4 people, killing 2 including the only cop around who'd endeared himself to blacks, he fired a bullet into his own head.

(Presumably the author had never heard the one about the man who killed his parents and asked for leniency because he's an orphan.)

 But since as a Sanders partisan and a career activist ("The New Jim Crow"), Alexander had an agenda to push - the unfair and racist destruction of the 90s the Clintons had pushed.

I don't know if her book addressed the intricacies of the time, the tradeoffs, the horrible urgency, but her article sure didn't.

It'd be nice to know what she thought should happen with a 31-year-old married man with a history of violent and felonious behavior who then shoots 4 people, leaving 2 dead, a pre-meditated cop killer.

I don't know if she gets into the contradictions of trying to prove he was too mentally retarded to take care of himself, but not too retarded to be married, to knock up multiple women leaving offspring around for others to care for, and not too retarded to carry a gun and be involved in violent activity - the kind the Crime Act had to addressed. She offers no solutions. None.

Not the least hint what Clinton, the police, the family should do about it. Put him in an asylum to terrify already insane residents? Let him go free? Help me, I'm stumped. Maybe they should have caught this case at an earlier age, maybe he really was retarded, but that's the same with millions of people suffering from mental issues.

And really, I don't even see that race has much to do with it - maybe some of the arrests were questionable, but overall it seems Arkansas was lucky to dodge having a full John Gacy case on their hands somewhere further down the line.

But to Alexander, "she used racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals". Well, kind of - when we call Trump or Bill Cosby or Roman Polanski a "sexual predator", we're also calling them a criminal uncontrollable animal. But not in a racist sense. And if "black children" or "white children" are carrying automatic weapons and shooting up other kids or adults and getting young kids hooked on crack or heroin, uh, yeah, they're acting like predators - murderous thugs and animals, whatever the cause. This isn't the von Trapp family or the Huxtables (except sadly maybe the father).

And it's this kind of dishonesty I've hated all through this campaign - the ability to mangle and misuse the facts and situations, and then pretend that someone's built up some kind of ethical case for something, anything - blatant, obvious political hatchet jobs in the guise of some speaking-truth-to-power or #SJW effort or just partisan shrillness that's largely overshadowing any chance to debate real issues and real solutions.

I've long been critical of the mass incarceration during the 90's, including the use of the largely irrelevant pot cases, not as much the harder drugs that drove much of the gang warfare, but at the same time, I've long known that the black-on-black murder rate was sky high in 1992 and fell to 1/3 that by 2000.

Without discussing the crisis at the time, the victims of these crimes, the concerns and participation by the black community itself, attempts to redress the greatest flaws, we have simply character assassination - another crime that seems to have worked. New Jim Crow? How about a renewed respect for the truth, a new push for real solutions, and liberal ethics and tolerance and understanding even in the course of bitter debate or determined action. Because liberal still implies liberal, whether "new" or "old".