It's a good article, people should read it.
Yes, they both come across well in the story. It's a heartwarming story with enough attention paid to systemic problems that it's also thought-provoking.
And L'Engle describes herself as,
"I'm nearly six feet tall and am built somewhat like a giraffe," she described herself in an early letter to Rahman, "and am excessively near-sighted--physically, but not, I hope, in other ways."
The unarmed man they murdered was a 23 year old student called Franklin Abramson. His name appears nowhere in the article or in the OP.
I see no reason why it should have.
I didn't even know L'Engle's and Rahman murdered anyone.
Way to assign collective guilt with "they" just like COINTELPRO did.
4: Did you know that name off the top of your head?
8: Pretty much any court in the land is going to assign some collective guilt for crimes committed while part of a vigilante group.
Didn't he get a way longer sentence than the guy that actually pulled the trigger?
Sure, courts hate vigilantes, unless their name happens to rhyme with Shittenhouse.
12: Totally a case where a court assigned collective guilt. Just not with the defendant.
11: Googling around, looks like it, but because he refused a plea for the lesser sentence. I think he didn't probably more time than necessary given the totality. But shock at the collective guilt aspect is absurd.
Christ, "I think he did more time than necessary", is how that should read.
This conversational path seems like a bad idea.
16: Probably. Doubt I'll check back on the thread again much less comment again. Quick, just flip back to the previous like when you'd take a wrong turn in the choose your own adventure books.
16: True. The article is good and worth reading, regardless of what anyone thinks about felony murder or Ahmad Rahman's legal or moral guilt.
I feel like gswift used to actually participate regularly and then troll on certain topics, and has gotten rid of the normal participation and only kept the trolling.
Was gswift the anonymous author of 4? That was the first trolling comment in this thread. I regret responding to it.
I'm not shocked, I'm continuing to be angry at something that has been a major statutory injustice for ages, and which California rightfully abolished a few years ago.
I read this article when it came out, and I thought it was lovely. I feel like both brought such a generous attitude to working together.
9: of course I didn't, but I was really struck that a) the guy isn't even mentioned by name and b) there isn't a single word of remorse from Rahman for getting this poor harmless hippie killed when him and his buddies decided to mount an armed vigilante raid on their house and beat them up.
Felony murder laws are a bad idea generally and should not exist.
WTF is felony murder? Is it being an accomplice before the fact?
Roughly, if you commit a felony, and in the complex of events related to the felony you committed someone dies, you have committed felony murder. The parameters vary some from state to state, it's usually not all felonies, and exactly how related the death has to be to your crime is an issue as well. But there doesn't have to be any ordinary language sense where your actions were the cause of the death.
See, e.g., https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/emilywilder/police-shooting-felony-murder-third-party -- if the police shoot a suspect, or a bystander while attempting to apprehend a suspect, other people involved in the crime can be charged with felony murder even if their own actions didn't injure anyone.
24: Being shocked that there "isn't a single word of remorse" from Rahman about the death quoted in a Vanity Fair story about an entirely different topic seems very strange to me, if you're thinking of it as meaning anything about Rahman. Are you shocked at the Vanity Fair writer and editor's choices about how to frame the story, or what?
For the record, I think 4 is a perfectly appropriate comment (though odd as an anonymous drive-by).
I agree with LB that it's not surprising that the story doesn't include discussions of remorse (which may not have been part of their correspondence), but it's fair to say that we, as readers shouldn't gloss over the murder.
I was thinking about that question reading the NYer article about Eddy Zheng -- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/an-education-while-incarcerated
It clearly finds him sympathetic, and the article is stronger for including a (brief) comment from his victims.
I'm not sure it glosses over it, they pretty clearly explain what happened, the role that he played, and that this was the intentional goal of the FBI. That is the FBI set this up in the hopes that someone would die, because they wanted more heroin dealers in Black communities and less school lunches.
Yes, I think the article is well done and does a good job of providing enough information to prompt reflection on a variety of questions, without trying to offer neat answers. I don't think it glosses over the murder, but I do think it allows the reader to do so (so, again, I don't think 4 is required as a comment, but I don't think it's unreasonable).