bill bickel's crimeweek

Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Prosecutor Bill Mason, in his May 2 closing in Fernando Newcomb's aggravated murder trial, urged the jury to consider the fact that Newcomb refused to take the stand in his own defense.

Mason hasn't explained why he mentioned this: It's unlikely that he was unaware that the defendant had a Fifth Amendment right not to testify and that the prosecution isn't allowed to ask the jury to infer anything by the fact. It's somewhat more likely that Mason wasn't confident this jury would recommend the death penalty, so he decided to force a mistrial and take his chances with a new jury.

The judge immediately declared a mistrial and ordered the prosecutor's office to pay a $26,204 fine, her estimation of the cost of a new trial.

Taxpayer's money. Shifted from one publicly-funded entity (the prosecutor's office) to another (the courthouse).

Well, that will teach him a lesson.

Here's a thought, and I don't consider this at all extreme: The state Bar should file misconduct charges against Mason and if they determine that his comment was anything other than a slip of the tongue, he should be personally fined, or suspended, or even disbarred.

We can't minimize what Mason did: He subverted a capital murder trial, cost taxpayers a huge sum of money, and tried to effectively deprive a defendant of a very basic constitutional right.

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A fairly pointless controversy is playing out in Chicago, where the city's aldermen are refusing to exempt stage actors from a law against smoking in indoor public venues. A recent production of the alcohol- and tobacco-soaked Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is being cited as a play in which smoking is essential, and The First Amendment has been invoked.

Here's the thing, though: These are actors and I think if they carried unlit cigarettes and pretended to smoke, the audience would accept it without hesitation. In very few of Shakespeare's plays, after all, were actors truly stabbed to death onstage.

And as to the First Amendment thing: Would anybody use the same argument to allow the stars of Living High: The Cheech and Chong Musical to smoke joints throughout the play?

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We all know mothers who have a hard time allowing their children to do things on their own - but very few of us know mothers like the German woman (whose name is being withheld) who insisted on driving her 17-year-old son to a Dresden jewelry shop because "I knew he wanted to rob the shop and I was very worried about him."

She was sentenced last week to three years and ten months in prison.

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Three store detectives at a Munich, Germany department store had a knack for spotting shoplifters: They'd follow them out of the store, confiscate the merchandise, and warn them not to try stealing from the store again.

Problem was they weren't employed by the store, they kept the items, and they were in fact girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen (they "looked older than they were," a police spokesperson explained unnecessarily).

Now what I'm thinking is... If I were the store manager, rather than pressing charges, I'd want to hire them: They never actually harmed the store (the shoplifters had already left the store so the merchandise was gone anyway), they deterred further stealing by confronting the shoplifters, and they were obviously doing a better job than the store detectives actually on the payroll.