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When Drowning is Not Good Enough

There have been rumors swirling since September 2005 that instead of evacuating bedridden hospital patients in the post-Hurricane Katrina aftermath, some doctors used lethal injections to euthanize patients who had previously signed DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) waivers.

Choosing not to leave behind those patients to the chance of a successful rescue or a certain death by starvation or drowning, the very doctors sworn to “First Do No Harm” shattered that covenant with a single plunge of a syringe. December 2, 2005, The Mercury News reported:

Authorities investigating whether hospital and nursing home patients were put out of their misery during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath are testing as many as 100 of the dead for lethal doses of morphine or other such drugs. 

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Jay J. Armes: Private Eye with No Hands

One of my favorite books growing up was Jay J. Armes, Investigator: The World’s Most Successful Private Eye written in 1976 and published by Macmillan. I remember holding the hardcover book in my hands and wondering how the man on the cover, Jay J. Armes, was able to shoot a gun with hooks for hands.

Jay J. Armes

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The Sad Lesson of Jon-Erik Hexum

The worst sort of dying is an unintentional death delivered in a dumb act. Meet the sad lesson of Jon-Erik Hexum.

Jon-Erik Hexum

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The Shared Legacy of a Solitary King

No blog that tries to address issues in the urban core can let Martin Luther King, Jr. Day pass without a deliberate salute to a man who dedicated his life to improving keystone images in an Urban Semiotic.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Right to Reproduce

Is having children a societal right or does it go beyond society and into the realm of sacrosanct individual choice that owes no explanation or responsibility to anyone else?
Do children belong to their parents or to society?

Should the severely mentally disabled be allowed to have children if they cannot afford to pay for their upbringing or even understand what it means to be a parent? Does sexual drive always triumph over intellect?
Should there be a means test before the abject poor are allowed to reproduce? Is it a selfish burden on all of society to bring a child into being if there are no established familial resources to support the child’s well-being?
Should the professionally diagnosed mentally ill be allowed to reproduce?

Or are the psychological problems of the parents only needlessly compounded within the offspring?
If a killer is found guilty of a court of law, should that murderer lose the freedom to reproduce because the irony taking a life only to give a life later is too bitter for society to bear?
Should there be an age limit on having children in order to better promise the unborn child a more responsible and vibrant parent? No one under 21 would be allowed to have children and no one over 40 would be allowed to have children, either.

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A Year Under the Gun

Yesterday, the Jersey Journal reported this in one article:

There were 50 homicides in Hudson County in 2005, the most since 1989. Thirty-nine of those homicides happened in Jersey City — the highest city total since 1982.

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A Killer Hiding in Plain Sight

My recent report on the Jersey City killing of a family turned yesterday when the alleged killer was arrested three miles away. He slit his wrists the day he murdered his sister and two of her children, and then checked himself into Cabrini Green Medical Center in New York City under an assumed name for a “suicide watch.”

A multi-state manhunt over the last month turned up nothing. I’ve claimed here before the criminal mind is a kind of genius that, if turned around, could inherit strength and goodness into the world but first we have to find a way to stop that mind from murdering through its genius.