We explore real-life reformation here in this informed, online community.
On October 20, 1987, indignant Maryland judge Vincent Femina tried and sentenced the convicted Massachusetts murderer Willie Horton to two consecutive life terms plus 85 years for crimes committed in Maryland, including assault, armed robbery, and rape.
Horton pleaded with Judge Femina to send him back to Massachusetts where he could serve out the remainder of his life sentence for the brutal murder of a teenage boy.
At the time, technocratic Massachusetts Governor Dukakis was releasing violent criminals for weekend furloughs “as an experiment” in case the overcrowded prisons might someday release hundreds of criminals back into society. On one particular Friday, Horton was furloughed, fled to Maryland, and tortured a young Maryland couple, telling them, “I like this life. I choose this life.”
Judge Femia refused to return Horton to Massachusetts, stating, "I'm not prepared to take the chance that Mr. Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise released. This man should never draw a breath of free air again."
Horton continues to rot away in a Maryland maximum security prison.
At 6:52 on a school morning, somewhere in your neighborhood, a ten-year-old is standing at the end of a driveway in the dark. His backpack weighs about a fifth of what he does. He ate breakfast in four bites. The bus is late again.
For a long time I thought of that kid as a scheduling problem. Early mornings, long days, a lot of sitting still. Then I sat down and did the math, and it stopped being about scheduling.
Over thirteen years, that boy will hand roughly 16,000 hours to a building. Homeschooling gives most of them back.
Robert Bortins
"In the words of Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, the midterms were ‘an extinction-level event’ for the Republican party."
British academic Matt Goodwin
American foreign policy must consider not only the condition of allied nations today but also the direction or trajectory in which they are moving. European leadership restricting freedom of speech and banning entry to peaceful activists cannot be dismissed as purely domestic when it affects American citizens and raises questions about the values on which the transatlantic alliance rests.
Kristin Ziccarelli
