Dear George,

I have just read with astonishment in this morning's paper that the Virginia Senate has seen fit to transform the 21-Day Rule into a 45-Day Rule. Zero point three cheers for Richmond. A little math shows this to be more than twice as good, after all, as the stupefying status quo ante. But its effect if enacted feels like adding insult to injury: the injury is the still palpable likelihood that the worst kind of injustice will be done (witness the confessional case of Illinois, which it would be folly to consider unique among death-dealing states), the insult is to the sizeable House of Delegates majority that approved during this session an extension that might mean something, from 3 weeks to 3 years. If the short-term lesson here is not to put your faith in legislatures, a corollary is to put additional oomph behind the moratorium movement. So long as the justice system wears the new Rube Goldberg device of a blindfold-plus-stopwatch, it's going to be unsafe at any speed and ought to be taken out of commission -- permanently, in my opinion, since I don't believe it can be fixed at all, ever.

Herbert Tucker (electronic mail, March 6, 2000)
tucker@virginia.edu
804-924-6677