From:    Albertus Magnus                        Area: Metaphysical
To:      All                                     5 Mar 95 11:22:48
Subject: The Week in Death: Feb 17-23 a         UpdReq 

 Celebrity Birthdays, February 24
 Susan Scannell, actress (37)
 Paula Zahn, newsanchor (39)
 Alain Prost, auto racer (40)
 Helen Shaver, actress (44)
 Edward James Olmos, actor-director (48)
 Barry Bostwick, actor (50)
 James Farentino, actor (57)
 Renata Scotto, soprano (60)
 Frank Chapot, equestrian (61)
 Jay Sandrich, television director (63)
 Michel Legrand, film composer-conductor (63)
 John Vernon, actor (63)
 Richard B. Shull, actor (66)
 Steven Hill, actor (73)
 Abe Vigoda, actor (74)
 Scott Long, editorial cartoonist (78)
 Quote of the Week
 "It's always more expensive to have and use the death penalty than
 it is not to have it, for the very simple reason that lawyers are
 more expensive than prison guards.  It's that simple."
                         -- Franklin Zimring, director of the
                            Earl Warren Legal Institute, UC Berkeley
 The Weeks In Death (February 17-February 23)
 Robert Barton (91), businessman.  Took over Parker Bros. from
 his father-in-law in 1932.  Barton was responsible for turning
 down the rights to Monopoly, invented by Charles B. Darrow;
 he thought the game too involved, too long, and it was about
 (gack!) =real= =estate=, for crying out loud.  Milton-Bradley turned
 it down too.  John Wannamaker, the Philly department store owner,
 decided to sell it, and it was a hit.  Barton got a second chance at
 the rights to the game, and this time he didn't bobble the ball.
 Melvin Franklin (52), singer.  Franklin was one of the original
 Temptations, the band that set the standard for Motown vocal groups.
 Michael V. Gazzo (71), playwright, actor.  Recognizable for his
 gravel-throat voice, he balding, thick-moustached Gazzo received
 an Oscar nomination for his work in "The Godfather, Part II."
 He is better known for writing "A Hatful of Rain," a 1955
 play that introduced the street to Broadway theater.
 The play was about a man trying to break a narcotics habit.
 James Herriott (78), writer.  Herriott drew on his career as a
 veterinarian in Yorkshire for much of his fiction, including the
 enduring "All Creatures Great and Small."  Last year, Herriott's leg
 was broken by a rampaging herd of sheep; he had been trying to make
 them cease eating his lawn, and they took exception to his efforts.
 Think about that next time you liken a group of placid people to
 sheep.  "James Herriott" was a pen name taken from an Scottish
 football goalie.
 John Howard (82), actor.  Films included "Lost Horizon"
 and "The Philadelphia Story."
 Art Kane (69), photographer.  An award-winning photographer whose
 work was recently repopularized when "A Great Day in Harlem" was
 nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar this year.  The doc was
 inspired by a Kane 1958 snapshot of a group of America's great jazz
 musicians, including Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie,
 Charles Mingus, Gene Krupa, and Sonny Rollins.
 Jim Katcavage (60), athlete.  Rookie defensive end with the 1956
 Giants championship team.
 Yank Lawson (84), musician.  Trumpeter who played with
 Bing Crosby, Tommy Dorsey, and Benny Goodman.
 William A. Moffitt (62), historian.  The librarian of the
 Huntington Library, which has photographs of the entire Dead
 Sea Scrolls, as a hedge against any damage to the documents.
 A small team of historians had exclusive access to the Scrolls,
 which it guarded jealously.  Moffitt decided to provide open
 access to the Huntington's photos, thereby breaking the
 monopoly the group had on the Scrolls.
 Homer Pickens (91), naturalist.  After a forest fire in New Mexico
 in 1950, Pickens housed and nursed the cub who would grow up to be
 Smokey the Bear.  Here's some groovy trivia: Smokey's original name
 was Hot Foot Teddy.  Smokey died in 1976.
 Noel Rockmore (66), painter.  Known for his portraits of New Orleans
 jazz artists and scenes of that city.
 Bob Stinson (35), musician.  A founding member of the Replacements.
 Stinson lived for rock 'n' roll, girls, booze, and drugs.  One
 or both of the latter two did him in.  No matter how wasted he
 was on stage (hell, perhaps because he was always wasted on
 stage), Stinson's guitar playing was an apotheosis of bar-band
 brilliance-via-sloppiness.  The rest of the Placemats (no angels
 themselves) finally had enough of his binges and kicked him outta
 the band.  Damn, where's TWIDman going to find a copy of "F*ck My
 School" at this hour?
... The answer to your question is very simple: I don't know.  


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From:    Albertus Magnus                        Area: Metaphysical
To:      All                                     5 Mar 95 11:23:36
Subject: The Week in Death: Feb 17-23 b         UpdReq 

 Walter Williams (76), husband of newly-elected
 NAACP chair Myrlie Evers-Williams.
 Calder Willingham (72), novelist, screenwriter.  Was instantly
 ranked with Norman Mailer as a major young talent with the
 publication of his first novel, "End As a Man," about sadism
 among students on an institution easily recognized as
 The Citadel military college.  His publisher had to
 defend against an obscenity suit because of the book.
     Though Willingham wrote 10 novels, he was still best known for
 his screenplays, which included Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of Glory,"
 "Little Big Man," "Rambling Rose" (adapted from his own book), and
 "The Graduate," for which he was nominated for an Oscar.  He died
 when he was trampled by a marauding herd of sheep.
     Kidding.
 From the Kill 'Em All And Let Pataki Sort Them Out Department
 (KEAALPSTOD): With New York State close to introducing a death
 penalty bill, The New York Times ran a three-parter on the death
 penalty this week.  In the first installment, Sam Howe Verhovek
 tackles the popular right-wing argument that it is more economic
 to sentence someone to death.  The Times cites several studies
 that show that the costs of doing so are in fact much, much
 higher than jailing an offender for 20 years.
     The article focuses on California, which passed the death
 penalty 18 years ago.  It took 15 years to kill the first death row
 inmate, a total of two people sentenced to death have actually been
 killed so far, and the backlog is 403 (including 6 women) and counting.
     One reason for the infrequency of executions is that
 Constitutional protections make a capital case much harder to
 try, and once tried, their fairness is justifiably measured
 against higher standards, opening more opportunities for
 appeals.  Unidentified studies suggest that nearly half
 of Federal petitions filed in death penalty cases result
 in a reversal of either the sentence or the conviction.
     The costs in California are estimated in the hundreds of
 millions, and a lot of that money goes to lawyers.  Since there
 aren't enough public defenders, private-practice lawyers are hired
 at their standard exorbitant rate.  Some small towns have been so
 overburdened by capital cases that the state had to pass a law
 creating a fund just to help them out.  Sierra County at one point
 couldn't fill vacancies in the sheriff's office because of the
 costs of trying four such cases -- now =that's= productive.
     Part two, written by Tamar Lewin, is a little less focused,
 but the basic theme is that in states where there is a death
 penalty, it is applied differently in different regions of the
 state, depending usually on the discretion of the local DA.
 Texas is the clear leader in capital punishment, but the
 majority of those cases occur within Harris County, where
 the DA is an enthusiastic fan of the death penalty.
     The most pointed comments in the piece are from Victor Streib,
 a professor at Cleveland State University who is helping with the
 defense of Susan Smith, the woman who killed her two children in
 North Carolina.  Streib notes that the application of the death
 penalty is almost completely random, but "a key factor is what kind
 of lawyer you can afford, so the death penalty is most commonly
 imposed on poor people.  That often corrleates with people who are
 poorly educated, or people of color, but the issue is really less
 about race or class than whether they have the resources to pay
 lawyer fees."
     The third installment, by Erik Eckholm, looks into charges
 that the death penalty is about race.  The point of the article is
 that the statistics available are open to interpretation, but there
 may be a bias, although not where most people think.  Though an
 arguably disproportionate number of black men have been sentenced
 to death, their race can be factored out.  On the other hand, if the
 =victim= of a murder was white, then the odds that the death
 penalty will be applied go up.  If the bias exists, its source is
 less likely to be found amongst juries than it would be among
 District Attorneys' offices, almost unintentionally amplifying a
 point in the second installment.
 The Week in Death is written by Brian Santo
 (c) 1995 Brian Santo
 Uploaded by Mitch Wagner
... Don't look at me, sir, with--ah--in that tone of voice. * Punch


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