Murder in Black and White

A black guy who MAY (or may not) have committed a crime was executed in his prison cell by Maryland prison officers. But that's fine, apparently

A healthy young suspect left alone in his maximum-security cell "died of either strangulation or asphyxiation" and "suffered two broken neck bones" a week ago Sunday. Predictably, "authorities" at the prison "have no idea how it happened." Hmmm. Where have we heard that story before?

Ronnie White, 19, is hardly a sympathetic victim. Though the State persecuted him for owning a gun and drugs it doesn't like, he had also committed armed robbery and assault during his brief time on earth. Last weekend, he may have been driving someone else's vehicle. A cop who was "monitoring the suspected stolen truck" tried to intercept it by blocking its path with his cruiser. The Chevy pickup rammed it. Out of the wreckage slithered Richard Findley, 39, a corporal with the police force of Prince George's County, Maryland.

Law enforcement in Prince George's County is violent and abusive. And has been for decades. From 1990 to 2001, according to the Washington Post, cops from the Prince George's Police Department [PGPD] shot 122 people, 47 of them fatally. That works out to more killings per cop than "any major city or county police force from 1990 through 2000. Almost half of those shot were unarmed, and many had committed no crime. .Prince George's top police officials concluded that every one of the shootings was justified. .Since 1990, no officer has been fired or demoted for shooting someone." No wonder the 828,000 residents of Prince George's County "sometimes see [the PGPD] as an occupying army," according to a former honcho at the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

The PGPD's carnage "concerns" Amnesty International. So do the dogs it sics on citizens, its beatings, intimidation, and withholding of attorneys, food, and sleep from kidnapped - sorry, arrested taxpayers. The abuse was so egregious that in 2001, the DOJ could no longer avoid "investigating" the PGPD. Which is rather like Stalin's investigating Mao: this is the same DOJ that pronounced torture not only legal but constitutional. Imagine the meeting of thuggish minds on this one as the DOJ and the PGPD "agree[d]" to standards "governing the PGPD's Canine Section and a memorandum of agreement (MOA) addressing the department-wide use of force." Naturally, this sham wasn't worth the do-do from one of those doggies, as this testimony from the Fraternal Order of Police confirms: "We are confident that the Prince George's County Police Department will be able to satisfy the requirements of the Justice Department." Yep, so am I.

Cpl. Findley was a loyal Praetorian with ten years' experience in defending Leviathan. He crawled out of his smashed cruiser to fire at the pickup. Bad move. Its driver mowed him down, killing him, and left the scene. One of Findley's shots had wounded the truck's passenger. A snitch reported a bloody man to 911; this casualty fingered Ronnie White as the hit-and-run driver when cops captured the two men at an apartment building. They arrested Mr. White on Friday, June 27, charged him with first-degree murder, booked him into the county's jail the next day, and - mirabile dictu - found him dead Sunday morning.

Col. Gregory Harris is the deputy director of the Prince George's County Department of Corrections, a bureaucracy as abusive as the PGPD. Without "signs of trauma on [the] body," Harris had to admit Mr. White didn't commit suicide: "There was no cloth or rope or materials tied around his neck[,] there were no cuts on his wrists or anything." Nor is an inmate responsible since the dead man was "classified as a `high-profile offender' and was being housed alone in a maximum-security cell with steel doors." We can't blame his demise on a visitor, either: he received none.

In fact, the only folks he encountered that weekend were the guards on duty at the cellblock and possibly their supervisors. Yet bigwigs from the county executive to the head of the prison-guards' union pretended bewilderment at Mr. White's death while refusing to "speculate" about what killed him - a reluctance they didn't show when "speculating" on who and what killed Richard Findley. An autopsy foiled their act. Broken bones and strangulation don't happen by themselves, to the chagrin of cops and wardens everywhere.

Meanwhile, Prince George's County Executive Jack Johnson called Mr. White's murder "vigilante justice." He frets that if the vigilante version replaces the stuff the State dispenses, "our society will fall apart." Jack set a pretty high bar for hypocrisy, but the president of the prison guards' union trumped him. Curtis Knowles acknowledged that despite Mr. White's wrongdoing, "he was human, and we hate to lose human life in the Department of Corrections.'" Yeah, right. "Public Safety Director Vernon Herron told corrections center guards that if they don't cooperate with the homicide investigation at the jail, they could be fired..." No doubt they're trembling in the jackboots we buy them.

Fortunately for the murderer, a wounded and unreliable witness claims Mr. White first took out a cop. Sheeple short on both brains and guts seize that as an excuse to grant police a pass: "Pease [sic] Officer Findley" was "a brave hero who made the ultimate sacrifice" while Ronnie was "scum of the earth".

These inconvenient facts didn't keep Maryland's Gov. Martin O'Malley from decreeing that flags fly at half-mast for Findley. No word on how he's memorializing the taxpayer Findley tried to kill before his accomplices finished the job.

Original report here



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