With the election season here and staying for a while, it's time to distinguish between Democratic and Republican crime.

I submit that most violent crime is Democratic, not that most Democrats are innately criminal, but that violent crime is usually the province of the underprivileged, the abused, the un-gifted lashing out in their resentment against those who have it better, or just the scarifying acting-out of the mentally ill.

Don't ask me to justify it by any more than gut instinct, but all of the types above seem to me to be natural Democratic constituents.

Now, white collar crime is indubitably Republican; the embezzler, the tax cheat, the junk bond floater, the pension fund gobbler and the stock manipulator all likely belong to the party of Lincoln.

I know there are a myriad of exceptions to both of the above rules, but we’re talking about trends here, and that’s fashionable in an election year.

So Republican crime is generally duller than Democratic crime. Nobody gets killed or raped by a white collar criminal. The crimes themselves are often difficult to understand, unless you have a background in the science of finance.

Republican politicians, however, outperform their Democratic colleagues spectacularly in the crime field. A thick, cloying coating of hypocrisy is almost automatically attached to any Republican officeholder’s misdeed, since they are the party of law and order. Railing against terrorists and then getting indicted for helping to fund them puts former GOP congressman Mark Deli Siljander at the top of this week’s list of recent noteworthy criminals.

But it’s when the pants come off that Republican pols really shine. Larry Craig and Mark Foley  are just two examples of Republicans who ran on virulently anti-homosexual platforms and were subsequently revealed to be scorchingly gay. When a closeted Democratic politician gets outed, like James McGreevey of New Jersey, he might have to quit his job, but at least he doesn’t have to deny his nature; Larry Craig to this day insists that soliciting anonymous sex in a public bathroom from another man doesn’t mean he’s anything less than resolutely hetero.

Senator David Vitter proved that Republicans don’t have to be gay for their impulses to get them in trouble, and the madam at the New Orleans brothel he favored claims that while her clientele consisted of both Democratic and Republican pols, the Republicans were far kinkier. Whips, chains and pain were favored by the party that wraps itself in the flag of “family values.”

Whether these individuals are just rank, power-grabbing hypocrites or innerly-conflicted to a degree that induces brainlock, or simply bipolar is unknown to anybody but themselves. But as the election season runs its course, rest assured that somewhere in the heartland, someone who is  gay, bondage-loving, or who yearns to dominate little boys, or all three, is running for a job in Washington, and the coattails he’ll be looking to grasp for victory will be those of the Republican nominee.

The death penalty doesn't need to be eliminated; the standard for imposing it has merely to be raised. Reasonable doubt isn't sufficient; let's make execution legal only when the crime can be proved beyond all rational doubt.

My brother's killer got thirty-seven years to life for murdering him during the course of a robbery. No trial was ever held. We were gathered in a courtroom, where the man described my brother's last minutes, including his assertion that there was a struggle for the gun, which somehow just went off. Not a likely story, because my brother was shot in the back of the head, but he told it anyway, and likewise expressed his remorse over the crime, which I couldn't help but think was equally fraudulent. He was a crack addict, and had been drinking in a bar when my brother's presence in the hood caught his eye. In his own words, he said at the time to a friend, "That white guy must have money." My brother's wallet was found empty, in his pocket. His killer did not remove it after the shooting.

Apparently the cops had caught him by turning up the heat on that mean street. The dealers who ran it gave the killer the choice of being dealt with by the justice system or suffering justice at their hands. He chose the state. When the DA took the death penalty away, the harshest sentence that could be imposed on him was life without.  After a bit of legal arm-wrestling, the thirty-seven to life deal was struck.

Nobody asked us. The man won't be eligible for parole for thirty-seven years. I will be nearing the end of my life then, if I am not already dead, and maybe not in full possession of my marbles even if I am still breathing, but I will still be obligated to attend some hearing somewhere to oppose his release.

Not being subject to execution meant that my brother's killer's sentence couldn't be dealt down to life without. He may someday fill his lungs with air outside of s structured setting, which I would hate to see.

The death penalty could be retained with the simplest of reforms. Instead of applying death when the conviction of the killer is beyond all reasonable doubt, make it beyond all rational doubt. Make the evidence overwhelming, and the crime heinous, and it should still be applied. The higher standard of evidence should eliminate all the doubtful convictions on death row; mistaken eyewitnesses, jailhouse confessions, testimony by others involved in the crime would not be considered sufficient to impose death, as they are now.

Executions would be rare, but that's okay by me. Life without is a form of execution as well. I wish my brother's killer were serving it. And if Osama were ever caught alive, we would still have still the legal means to put him to death.

NEXT: More light crime, and if a right to abortion exists in the US Constitution, why a right to be a prostitute must exist there as well.

Before ending the story of my brother’s murderer’s conviction, and making a suggestion regarding the use of the death penalty, I want to a time out for some light crime news, because it’s been a great week for it. Barry Bonds gets arraigned for lying about steroids, a dead Brit comes to life in PanamaBritish Couple Accused of Staging Death - AOL News, and Debra Lafave is re-incarcerated for talking to a seventeen year-old girl about sex.

Apparently no one feels it was a crime for Barry Bonds to use steroids, except for baseball fans, and as a member of that fraternity, I see their point clearly; baseball is not only played every ongoing season but against the backdrop of its history. Bonds and McGwire play not only against each other but against the memory (and records) of Ruth and Aaron. It’s unique in baseball. No one compares Peyton Manning with Joe Namath.

No, Bonds’ crime will be lying about it. His secondary crime will be being loutish to the press, which apparently he usually is. And while baseball players shouldn’t use steroids, because they need to compete on a level playing field with the ghosts of history, they are at least nominal adults with autonomy over their own bodies. Steroids need to be kept away from kids on their high school football teams. Probably would have been a good idea to keep them away from the (nominally adult) band of outlandish amateur bodybuilders and male strippers I was acquainted with during my long, misspent youth. People who talk their girlfriends into smuggling Diannabol through the Tijuana border line and then beat them up in a 'roid rage need to stay away from that stuff, too. Normally I’m not on board with criminalizing the use of every drug you can’t get a prescription for, but let’s leave steroids on whatever Federal schedule of banned substances  they happen to be on.

I don’t think there’s a person alive who hasn’t dreamed of faking their own death in order to start life completely anew, but the story of John Darwin takes a bit of the glamour out of the concept. Faking his expiration by means of a sea-battered kayak, he revealed himself to his wife after a year on the street, then spent nearly four years hiding in a clandestine apartment in their home, virtually hiding in the closet when anybody who had known him, including his two sons, came to call. He and his wife finally decided to move to Panama, but the changed their minds and got themselves arrested for insurance fraud instead. Never been to Panama myself, but it’s hard to believe prison is preferable.

Finally, the taxpayers will take custody of Debra Lafave once again. Her initial crime was to have sex with a fourteen year old boy, thereby fulfilling his every fantasy. I refuse to believe that teenage males are somehow traumatized by having sex with attractive older women, since I’ve been a teenage male myself and daydreamed daily at that time about being offered similar relief. The fact that I never was probably doesn’t make much of a difference now, but I doubt I would have been anything less than thrilled to the core of my hormonally drenched being if it had happened to me then.

Debra’s latest offense? Talking about sex to a fellow waitress at the restaurant at which she was employed. The waitress was only seventeen, so Debra violated the terms of her probation. So Debra’s back in jail based on two premises: fourteen year old boys never want sex, and seventeen year old girls never want to talk about it.

The Crime Line. People Who Never Expected To Be Arrested. Joining the ranks of Scooter Libby and Martha Stewart this week as people who likely expected to be able to complete their lives without a well-publicized brush with the law is the manager of an Abercrombie & Fitch store in the Lynnhaven mall in Virginia Beach, who was cited over the weekend for "displaying obscene materials in a location open to children."
 
One of the alleged obscenities was a poster of several young men running shirtless in jeans through a field of tall grasses. One of them has let the jeans slip down far enough so that the top of his buttocks are visible. The other poster was of a woman's breast with her hand covering the nipple. They were supplied by Abercrombie and Fitch to the store, and are openly displayed and apparently not considered illegal in Abercrombie & Fitch stores outside of Virginia Beach.
 
Abercrombie & Fitch has been in this spot before; they had to pull their Christmas catalogue one year because some thought it contained pictures of too many attractive people who were somewhat too naked. They were also caught selling thong underwear to seven-year olds. Angry parents pointed out that children should not be wearing thongs.
 
They're right, but the vast majority of adults shouldn't be wearing thongs, either, and nobody can stop that. If you want to dress up your child like a contestant on Dancing With The Stars, you ought to be able to, I guess, from a civil libertarian point of view, although you could save a few bucks by merely hand-painting a "You Go Pedophiles!" sign for your front yard.
 
After viewing the offending poster (first link above, or head to your local A&F, unless you're in Virginia Beach) you might come to the conclusion, as I did, that the VB cops were not actually offended by obscenity but likely exercising their homophobia. Young men running shirtless-and-soon-to-be-pantsless together in an open field is a gay fantasy, and the cops of Virginia Beach apparently don't want anyone enjoying any such fantasies in public. Probably they just tore down the semi-naked breast poster as a sop to equality. Most male cops enjoy breasts, and aren't afraid to admit it.  The ones that enjoy naked young men generally keep that to themselves.
 
What's bugging the VB authorities, besides their own sexually hysterical citizenry, is a clothing concept that has been around long before there was an A&F, or a Victoria's Secret, or a Fredericks, i.e., clothes that beg to be torn off the wearer's body. You can cite as many store managers as you can find, but as long as sex and clothing exist, some are going to want to wear, and some are going to want to tear, and all the cops south and north of the Mason-Dixon Line are never going to stop them.
 
 

The Crime Line 10. A writer of crime novels blogs about real crime. OJ's BACK IN JAIL. And he might get to stay there. Seems the football legend-slash-unconvicted murderer may have violated the terms of his bail on his latest alleged offense by trying to communicate with one of his co-defendants.
 
Like the accusation that originally caused Simpson to take to the freeway in his Bronco, the circumstances of his latest alleged offense are entirely murky. People were detained, guns were displayed, and property was demanded. To which OJ replies that he didn't detain anyone, he didn't know his buds were strapping, and the property was his.
 
His defense doesn't seem likely, although it's considerably more likely than the defense of the headline criminal of the week. That would be the man sought for killing the pregnant Marine who accused him of raping her. His story, which he was wise enough to leave behind in a note instead of relating to the cops personally, was that the victim came to his house and cut her own throat. Then, apparently, she cleaned her blood off the floor, burnt her own corpse, and buried her remains in his back yard. Talk about vindictive!
 
But back to OJ. There's little doubt that the authorities would love to see him spend the rest of his life in prison. The kidnapping charges alone would do it; OJ's in his sixties now (as is the accused in the case of the Georgia hiker…been a bad week for sociopaths approaching Social Security eligibility) and a couple of consecutive twenty-year terms would keep him off the golf course for good.
 
That, ironically, bodes well for Simpson. Once again he can complain that the cops are railroading him, and once again at least some people, maybe even those on the jury, will believe him. There's little doubt in my mind that OJ was guilty of the murders of his wife and Ron Goldman (if he didn't do it, who did?) but there's also little doubt that part of the evidence against him was manufactured; the glove that didn't fit, the missing blood from the sample the cops took, and the sock that apparently wasn't being worn when it was spotted with blood. (Who shakes their bloodstained hands over their sock drawer?)
 
Cops have been known to manufacture evidence, and the LAPD has been caught at it since OJ. Cops manufacture evidence against people they are sure are guilty of something, however; let’s give them that much credit. They were probably right in OJ's case; they've probably been wrong in others.
 
Between cops toying with the evidence, prosecutors playing for the voters and defendants lying to save their skins, what we get in this country is justice that is far worse than blind. Blind, perverted and daft, rushing to convict and interminable to appeal is a more cogent description. Or, as one of my characters says, "the law has damn little to do with justice.  And even less with truth.  It's more like a pickup basketball game between a bunch of eight-graders, with a referee who's either completely useless or malignantly aligned with one side or the other."
 
My prediction? There's enough he said/he said something else about the case to enable OJ to cop a plea and settle for a sentence that will have him back on the golf course before he's 65.

When my brother’s killer was arrested, we were given only a little more information than we had before…just the man’s name, his age and the fact that he had confessed to the crime. He had also confessed that he had committed the crime while attempting to rob my brother, making him eligible for the death penalty.

All of the members of my immediate family were contacted by the District Attorney’s office to probe our feelings about the nature of the punishment they would try to inflict on the man. They asked me specifically about the death penalty. I told them it would be fine with me. Almost immediately after this consultation, the prosecutors informed us that they were taking the death penalty off the table.

We didn’t want to endure the appeals process for a capital case, we were told. We would have to show up in court for years. My mother and father were already in their seventies; my father passed away the year following the crime. The crime had been committed in a state that had the death penalty but in which virtually no one had been executed since the politicians had reinstated it. It is nonetheless routinely sought here, when the crime is notorious enough.

My brother’s death lacked notoriety. The crime was not noted by the media. He was killed on the same day a famous figure in American sports died suddenly, and that swept a mere street murder off the front page. In the weeks of numb suffering we endured afterwards, we were grateful for the lack of attention, but the DA’s decision to not go for execution was not doubt influenced by the fact that it was a crime virtually no one had heard of. My brother was white, and his accused killer was a member of a minority group; black or brown on white crime is punished more harshly, statistically, than any other. Perhaps the DA didn’t want to add to that statistical burden.

Likely most importantly, my brother hadn’t been in his own neighborhood when he died. Any defense attorney would try to shift the blame from the killer to the victim, who was in a place he didn’t belong, and that defense attorney would be free to imply that he was there doing something he ought not to be doing, and thus contributed to his own murder, as unsupported by evidence as that implication would be.

Then the DA let us know that we needn’t even prepare ourselves for a trial. A deal had been struck.

THE CRIME LINE. A writer of crime novels blogs about real crime. Nobody needs crime more than cops and prosecutors, with the media a close second, even us small, largely ignored members of the profession. My first thought, as I read through the summary of the week's crime news on my favorite Internet outlet (AOL-I love being able to read all the trashy celebrity stories without actually having to buy US Magazine) was that crime in the New Year was off to a particularly unoriginal start.
 
I do apologize to the victims of the first nationally publicized crimes of '08 for downplaying their suffering, but there was nothing there that hadn't been done before. I paused at the story of the child rapist whose death sentence has been taken up by the Supreme Court but after reading it, I decided the story wasn't whether child rapist should get the death penalty, but whether the guy should have been convicted at all; inconclusive physical evidence, the twelve-year old victim initially identifying two other suspects, then, after being questioned for twenty months, finally identifying the guy facing lethal injection.
 
Yeah, he might be guilty, but he might only be another black guy with a shitty lawyer…they seem to comprise a disproportionate number of the people on death row, and he didn't kill anybody. Unfortunately, in the grand way of the law, the Supremes might just decide the case on the question of whether a non-murderer may receive the death penalty, even though many murderers, including my brother's killer, do not, rather than on the issue of whether the guy should have been prosecuted in the first place.
 
So let's broaden our outlook…let's go international! Just as nobody needs crime more than cops and prosecutors, nobody needs enemies more than politicians and armies. Hardly anyone nowadays would argue that the 9-11 attacks weren't a godsend to Bush and Cheney, who were already predisposed to war upon Iraq, and aren't currently a boon to the presidential run of Rudy Giulani. Likewise the war in Iraq is the lifeblood of Al Qaeda. That’s the point of view of a cynic, you may say, and you’ll get no argument from me, but a world held hostage by fanatics cries out for an upsurge in cynicism, and I’m here to help.
 
We like to think of ourselves as a secular nation of law holding the Western fort against the fanatical hordes of Islamic fundamentalists, but Mikey Weinstein, of the  Military Religious Freedom Foundation has found the fanatics among us, and they are armed (by the taxpayers), dangerous and believe in Crusading as much as the Taliban believes in jihad. The presence of Christian fundamentalism in the Armed Forces command structure has been a fact for years, particularly at the Air Force Academy. The Air Force is the most technically-oriented of the service branches; one would think that having one’s life and livelihood depend on the fruits of scientific research would lead a person to trust in science when it came to questions like evolution, but no. So, what we have here is people with their fingers on the triggers of our most sophisticated weapons of mass destruction who confidently believe, despite the dissent of the scientists who designed their arms, that the world was created in seven days, that it did not rain on Earth before Noah's flood and that the only thing that might prevent them from winning the battle of Armageddon is that they might get snatched up from the controls of their nuclear-armed bombers in the Rapture before their mission against the unbelievers is completed.
 
This is the equivalent of letting the Klan run an inner-city police department. The results are bound to be ugly, eventually even if you believe they are not currently, and I have no solution.
 

The Crime Line. A writer of crime novels blogs about real crime.  Recent news! San Diego is reconsidering its antiquated vice laws. About time! If you follow the link, though, you'll find one error. The laws described in it were not enacted in the fifties or sixties. They were passed in the eighties, when I was there.
 
I spent my overly long and dissolute youth in the nightclub business, chiefly in San Diego. One of my steady gigs was at a topless bar in North Park, a tough, racially mixed San Diego neighborhood. It was there that I became aware of the operations of that steely-eyed, incorruptible law enforcement unit known as the San Diego Vice Squad.
 
The Vice Squad struck fear into the hearts of all they surveyed, which was pretty much the denizens of topless bars, peep shows and card rooms. You seldom heard of them going after street prostitutes, although they were then plentiful in several locations or illegal gambling operations. The club I worked at could count on getting “raided” at least twice a year, even though its existence and operation were perfectly legal.
 
The vice made no attempt to conceal their identity when they arrived; they wore the crispest polyester sport coats and the shiniest patent-leather shoes obtainable. As the fictional vice were in the pages of my novel, Truth Or Bare they were only there to pop the club for technical violations.
 
When I first arrived on the nightclub scene in SD, the cops had only the six-foot and the eighteen-inch rules to enforce. A dancing girl with her breasts exposed in SD was required to be on a stage elevated at least eighteen inches above the floor and to stay a full six feet away from the customers. Nude dancing was (and is) prohibited in establishments that served alcohol. Only those not purchasing alcohol on the premises are permitted First Amendment rights in southern California.
 
A ruler was sufficient to enforce the eighteen-inch rule, but the six-foot law was tougher on the cops. How to convince a judge that one was able to eyeball an exact seventy-two inch distance between the naked nipples and the customer's face, all of which objects were likely to be moving? The vice solved their problem by forcing the clubs to paint lines on their stages at the estimated distance from the patron's heads. There was no legal reason for the clubs to succumb to this bullying, but they did, and that served to embolden the cops and the municipality. A few years later, the city started forcing all the clubs, peep shows and juice bars to obtain a special "nude entertainment business license" that cost a substantial sum, and forced the individual dancers to get a "nude entertainer permit" that cost eighty dollars a year, even though the girls in the topless bars were not permitted to be nude.
 
The states issue licenses to various professions; doctors, lawyers, embalmers, insurance agents and even barbers and beauticians, to name a few, and California, having a highly paid, full-time legislature whose business is finding more things to regulate, probably issues more than most, but the city of San Diego may have been the first government entity to license breasts, and to make the display of unlicensed mammaries illegal.
 
It's easy to pass laws against businesses that no one will defend, and maybe that's why all the owners caved abjectly in when the city moved in on them, for fear they would be legislated out of existence. More likely they cared about money more than about anybody's rights, including their own. As one of them said to me "Why should I take it to court? It'll cost me, and it'll help out those other bastards (his competition) as much as me." (The owners of the sleaze businesses uniformly hated each other)
 
By that time, I had developed enough business as a booking agent for strippers, male dancers, lady boxers and wrestlers that my working day consisted of sitting in my office, answering the phone and sending out publicity materials. One day one of the phone calls was from a vice officer, who told me I needed one of those nude entertainment licenses. I told the cop that he was welcome to come out to the office any time he wished, and if he found any nude entertainment going on, I would be happy to apply for one. They never bothered me again.
 
Next: San Diego Vice vs. Miami Vice, or what cops actually do as opposed to what people think they do.

The Crime Line. A writer of crime fiction blogs about real crime.

My brother, a man not forty years old, was found shot to death on the street in a major American city a year after the turn of this century. I'm not going to go into any detail that might further identify him here; my family deserves their privacy and he does, too, even in death.

Although the crime was committed in the middle of the afternoon, he was not identified until after midnight. My family got the knock on the door in the middle of the night by the police, exactly as depicted in fiction, the police at the door with news you know is going to be horrible even before they speak.

It quickly became obvious it was a stranger murder. My brother had no enemies; he died miles from home in a bad neighborhood. Drugs were dealt openly on the street he died upon; as much Spanish as English was spoken there. The police made it obvious that they thought he had been there to score dope. Maybe they were sincerely interested in solving his murder from the start, but it seemed to us that they became markedly more sympathetic when the tox screen from the autopsy showed no traces of illegal drugs in his remains.

I should say gruffly sympathetic; they were never polite or even informative. They were optimistic about solving the crime. They also said it would take time. Months went by without any progress. The cops discouraged my family from offering a reward for the killer's apprehension, saying it would lead to a spate of false tips, but we offered it anyway, for the mere sense of doing something.

I did think about doing other things. I moved back to the area where my family lived shortly after my brother's death, because I took custody of my young son at that time. I can tell you the urge to do violence at those who have done you violence is one of the most primal of desires. I lay awake angry many nights, with fantasies about finding and killing my brother's murderer running through my head. They were impossible fantasies; what was I, a single father, going to do to fulfill them? Buy a gun and go cowboy on a crack neighborhood, without a clue as to who the killer might have been? He could be long gone from the city. If I were in his position, I was thinking, I would have been.

After a year most of us had resigned ourselves to the possibility that my brother's killer would never be found. There's a world full of unsolved killings out there and his seemed destined to be just another one. But my parent's phone rang in the middle of the night again, another jolt for them, but this time it was one of the detectives on the case. "We've made an arrest," he said. "We think it's a good one."

The Crime Line. A writer of crime novels blogs about real crime.
 
If abortion is legal, how can prostitution be illegal? That's the argument put forth by the hero of my novel Truth Or Bare. Sure, in the book it's just cocktail party chatter between two cynical attorneys, but in real life the Supreme Court has held that while a woman has absolute autonomy over her uterus, the Court has declined, or not been asked, to affirm a woman's absolute autonomy over that organ sometimes referred to as the birth canal.
 
Before anyone gets upset here, I want to say that I have no interest in providing an argument for overturning Roe vs. Wade. Any adult, mentally unimpaired human should have complete control over his or her body. I'm just carrying the argument to its logical conclusion. If the state cannot forbid abortion, which at the least destroys a potential citizen (and human) why should it be permitted to forbid prostitution, which carries no such clearly defined harm?
 
There's plenty of collateral harm in prostitution, at least in the Western world. In the Far East, the practice of selling daughters a family is unable to afford to marry off into prostitution is thousands of years old, and being a prostitute is regarded more as a matter of bad luck in life than a disgrace. In the West, The Judeo-Christian-Islamic fear of female sexuality heaps scorn on the poor hookers from the right, while from the left they are pitied as victims of an unfortunately sexist society. If the Supreme Court followed its own logic and allowed women absolute freedom over their own sexuality, the Supremes could count on being attacked from both sides. Too bad, because while legal prostitution, as practiced in this country solely in Nevada, results in little overt harm to its practitioners, illegal prostitution is a big loud Bob Barker style COME ON DOWN! to rapists, murderers and serial killers. Streetwalkers are the perfect victims for sociopaths. Murdered women do stir police interest, but non-consensual sex with a prostitute is likely the easiest felony to get away with in any of the United States; prosecutors won't touch it, even if the victim has the gumption to complain. It's the function of the pimp, that stalwart citizen of the streets, to protect the whore; the cops won't.
 
In the interest of protecting ourselves from unrestricted use of the vagina, then, we provide a playground for murderers and rapists and a livelihood for players. It is true that being a hooker is an often unpleasant and future-less occupation, but in order to make the argument that we are protecting these women from themselves you would have to convince me that if prostitution were legal, the number of prostitutes would inevitably increase.
 
Next-IF IT'S LEGAL TO RAPE A HOOKER, SHOULDN'T IT BE LEGAL TO STEAL A RENTAL CAR? Just kidding. I think I'll write about vice cops in San Diego during that period of my life when I unfortunately became acquainted with them, what they really did, and what the taxpayers got for their money.