More Logic

Also from Salon.com, to which you need a subscription, alas. This is from Tim Grieve in 'The War Room.'

In 1998, three Texas men attacked a 49-year-old African-American named James Byrd. They cut his throat, chained him to the back of a pickup truck, then dragged him along a road for several miles. Byrd was alive for at least part of the ordeal; a forensic pathologist said that Byrd lived until he hit a culvert and his arm and head were severed. His attackers dragged what was left of his body for at least an additional mile.

Gruesome? Yes, but it's apparently no worse than what happened to Ken Lay.

The former Enron chairman died of a heart attack at his vacation home in Aspen, Colo., last week. At a memorial service in Houston Wednesday -- with former President George H.W. Bush in attendance -- a local pastor likened Lay's prosecution in Enron's collapse to the attack on Byrd. "Ken Lay was neither black nor poor, as James Byrd was," said the Rev. William Lawson, pastor emeritus of the Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church. "But I'm angry because Ken was the victim of a lynching."

Apparently our legal system, after a long fair trial with the best defense money could buy before a jury that resulted in a guilty verdict, is, at least in the minds of some, the same as a vicious murder. How much respect do such people have for our legal system, juries of our peers, and our Constitution?

The death of Ken Lay is a genuine tragedy, but that changes nothing about his guilt nor the fairness of his trial. For some people a fair trial is only a fail trial if it exhonerates your friends.