Adventures in Criminal Justice…and Texas
Time to waste some digital ink on two of my favorite subjects. (Check out Chapter 1 for this blog post’s objective.)
The Word That Stayed With Me
the verb “city-slick”
This, which I haven’t seen anywhere else, comes courtesy of Gary Cartwright, who only entered my life about a year and a half ago. He started out in newspapers around and in Dallas, then became a staff writer at Texas Monthly. He’s an incredibly clever writer; his sentences just pop off the page like champagne corks. Anyway, this use of “city slick” is in his 1979 book, Blood Will Tell, about the richest man (at the time) ever tried for murder. How he uses it requires some context to have it make sense: The rich dude’s trial was moved from high society Fort Worth to podunk Amarillo, and his lawyers worried they’d come off as city-slickers the jury wouldn’t trust, so:
“They needed one well-known Amarillo lawyer present in the courtroom to dispel the image of themselves as a battery of high-priced outsiders come to city-slick the good folks of Potter County.”
I love it when words are used in interesting and different-than-expected ways, such as nouns transforming into verbs.
Also, I highly recommend that book, particularly Part 1.
The Words I Wish I’d Written
“On April 12, 1987, Michael Morton sat down to write a letter. ‘Your Honor,’ he began, ‘I’m sure you remember me. I was convicted of murder, in your court, in February of this year.'”
— “The Innocent Man, Part One” by Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly
It’s not exactly the most scintillating word-play out there, but how fast it goes from 0 to 60 fascinates me. The first line is rather ho-hum: OK, so he wrote a letter, so what? Then he mentions being convicted of murder, and it’s like: Holy shit! Even better, the remaining 28,000 words or so don’t let that feeling up.
The Stories I Made Time For
“Is Texas Getting Ready to Kill an Innocent Man?” by Jordan Smith, The Intercept
After the “this is motherfucking atrocious” reaction I get whenever I see these kinds of stories, I quietly think this to myself: Seems like there could be one of these stories for every reporter there is in Texas. The state is so chockfull of them, it made reading this New Yorker story on an innocent-but-imprisoned man in Chicago rather strange — Wait, I found myself thinking, this didn’t take place in Texas? Anyway, David Grann’s story on the execution of a more-than-likely (read: totally) innocent man is required reading.
“9 Exits on America’s Football Highway” by Wright Thompson, ESPN The Magazine
Pretty, pretty sentences. The man writes pretty, pretty sentences. I also admire how he mixes up the length of his paragraphs, sometimes going long paragraph, one-sentence paragraph, long paragraph, one-sentence paragraph, with the one sentence as one of many kickers (or mic-drops) throughout the story. One more thing, I think this is a great observation about suburban life nowadays: “They came to New London to find oil, and they come to places like Allen, north of Dallas, to find affordable land within an ever-expanding definition of a reasonable drive to work.”
The Older Story I Made Time For
“Free to Kill” by Gary Cartwright, Texas Monthly
Cartwright details legendary Texas killer Kenneth McDuff’s two sprees in horrific detail. It’s hard to read. I’m sure that’s the point.
The Article That Got Me Thinking
“Bill Keller Knows Why the Oxpecker Sings” by Matt Negrin, Bloomberg Politics
Keller is the former editor of The New York Times and recently started The Marshall Project that will cover criminal justice (in case you hadn’t heard). The interviewer asked whether the venture was advocacy journalism, to which Keller replied:
Was Watergate advocacy? Woodward and Bernstein and The Washington Post understood there was something really rotten going on in the Nixon administration. And that didn’t make them Democrats or Libertarians or left-wingers or right-wingers. It just made them journalists. … When you look at a system that is not living up to its own standards, and you report on that, that’s not partisan or ideological. That’s just journalism.
This reminds me a bit of what the authors The Race Beat called the “cult of objectivity”: Reporters covering the Civil Rights Era struggled with whether to put denials from racists that they were racists in their stories. They finally decided, essentially, What’s the point? If a racist is a racist, he’s a racist. Being “objective” — and issuing denials — served no purpose, and really was a disservice to readers.
Keller also said this to Vox about the Project:
I like the idea of we’re doing journalism because that’s what I do, but I like the idea of journalism with a sense of mission, a kind of focus, a sense of purpose. Which is not an agenda of specific reforms we want to enact, or people we want to elect, but problems that we want people to think clearly about and understand. And we’ll also write some about solutions and whether or not they stand up to scrutiny.
And this:
I have never believed that impartial journalism — which is the word I prefer to objectivity, just because objectivity sounds like a state of being that doesn’t really exist — I’ve never believed that impartial journalism meant that you didn’t reach conclusions, that you gave equal ink to every point of view, even the preposterous points of view. Impartial journalism doesn’t mean you have to pretend that evolution doesn’t exist, or that climate change is a myth. What it means is that you go into your reporting with an open mind. You’re led by the facts. Sometimes those facts lead to a conclusion; sometimes they lead to a disagreement.
So, fairness > objectivity. Sometimes a story, and the truth, is one-sided.
(OK, I guess that was technically two articles that made me think.)
— h/t American Press Institute
What’s Burning a Hole in my Pocket App
Sometimes I scroll through my Pocket app like it’s a Netflix queue: What do I want to entertain me right now? I’ll pass a title and think, that would be a good film to watch, but I just don’t have the mental stamina to engage with something of substance right now. Same with some articles in that app: I know, at some point, I’ll want to read them, but I want to savor the moment. Needless to say, some stories get stuck in there a while.
This week: “The Endless Odyssey of Patrick Henry Polk” by Gary Cartwright, Texas Monthly
The Book I’m Engrossed In Right Now
The Powers That Be by David Halberstam
Still deep in it but making progress. One thing I didn’t know was that Time was essentially a Republican mouth piece when it started. Its creator and editor-in-chief, Henry Luce, changed copy to make Republicans awesome and Democrats vile and also to reflect how he wanted the world to be, not how it was. And, boy, were (some of) his reporters pissed. Another thing I didn’t know: the founders of the Los Angeles Times thought Time was too far to the left.
Thanks for reading!
Behind Blue Skies 