Morons, murders, and manifestos

I believe in the presumption of innocence: and that we ought all to give it. Right now, the Mangione kid has that presumption (he may or not be a murderer; he is quite evidently an utter shit). All the same, a few things…

Whoever is found guilty of the murder of Brian Thompson can cite whatever he likes as ‘justification’, but there is no justification. None. And whoever is convicted gave no such presumption to the victim. Rather, on whatever feigned grounds, the murderer acted as judge, jury, and executioner, without hearing or process. That is intolerable—and inexcusable.

Those attempting to palliate, excuse, or justify this murder, and those fawning upon Mangione and his puerile manifesto, ought to be—were they capable of shame—ashamed of themselves. And they certainly ought to be despised and condemned openly and repeatedly.

As to the accused… Such faith as I retain in the young is not bolstered by his alleged actions or by the perverse support being given to whomever the murderer may be found to have been.

(If Mangione is found guilty, that shall merely confirm my opinion of the sort of people currently being turned out by the American university, and today’s Penn not least.)

One thing mystifies me. Yes, Mangione, the suspect, went to Gilman, and presumably there is money in the family. Well, I had classmates at W&L who’d gone to Gilman. (Mostly large, gruntingly monosyllabic, and obsessed to the exclusion of all else with lacrosse.) I can’t imagine them in this position.

And the press keeps describing him as the son of a ‘prominent Maryland family’: which baffles me.

I’m a Carroll on both sides of the family, a cousin to the Blenheim Lees, the Steuarts, the Johnses, Hopkins, Calverts, and Crosslands, a connexion of the Chews and the Howards… Perhaps my standards of prominence are different. It’s a minor point in all this, but this trope does seem poor journalism with a (perhaps unconscious) agenda. Murderers appear in all classes.

And this matters. For this sort of thing ought never to obscure what matters: the presumption of innocence; the necessity of due process; the duty of doing justice; and the brute and brutal fact of murder.

Here endeth the Lesson.