The Victim's Song
Kaminsky, Alice R.
I am less confident than Posner that a judge, no matter how learned or wise, can ever engage in an objective task of "imaginative reconstruction," as he understands it. Suppose, as is probable, that...
...Thus, the average felony conviction in New York City now involves seven-teen court appearances by witnesses and victims, all at no cost to the defendant...
...The history of men of letters from Solon to Norman Mailer probably says the same thing...
...often determine the very criteria used to decide what counts as evidence, and what weight to assign it...
...Thousands of people who never knew Eric Kaminsky are going to be moved by his story...
...One example: If anything is known with certainty about Roosevelt's family life it is that his mother, Sara, was suffocatingly protective of her only child—almost in a class with Douglas MacArthur's mother...
...So, for example, Henry Morgenthau recorded in his diaries a very different Franklin D. Roosevelt from the man portrayed by Frances Perkins, say, or Henry L. Stimson...
...For the Kaminskys this meant making the long drive from Bingham-ton countless times...
...It is not words which threaten our freedom, but the political power behind the misleading words...
...Sewn hardcover, $24.95 COLLECTED WORKS OF G. K. CHESTERTON Vol...
...This book is about the life of Alice Kaminsky's son, her grief, and her experiences with the American justice system...
...After all, as Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark once put it, was there ever a boy anywhere who would rather steal a wallet than steal second base...
...indeed, such presuppositions Halfway through this wonderful book, Alice Kaminsky quotes Solon: "We will not have real justice until each person is as offended by a crime as the victim himself...
...His influence has been enormous, and this volume spear-heads the great revival of interest in Chesterton's works...
...Defense lawyers operate under the self-proclaimed obligation to use every cheap trick in the book to get their clients off the hook...
...The state denied individual freedom through the most severe means...
...Any rebellious word, deed or even facial expression was punishable by torture and death, enforced by the ever-present "Thought Police...
...Don't they deserve some respect, perhaps even a little sympathy and compassion...
...THE KATIINGER UNIT A 1 \l -I1\I\ I I\ 1111\ II N I I 0111 NIM,1Y- .Ir.M G.K...
...This is light-years away from the "what's-the-use" attitude that masquerades as "forgiveness" in History's juries are always out...
...But in their sophomoric way, the Mailerites have celebrated this discovery by shouting giddily that everything is permitted...
...Such differences aside, there is much more to this book—for example, an excellent chapter on legal education that ought to be heeded in the all-too-arid environment of today's law schools...
...Who could tell what FDR [as President] was really thinking...
...But, because we have made amass purchase of Scandia bags, we Are able to sell them at the remarkable low price of $29.95 each...
...Sewn soft-cover, $9.95 — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger A CHESTERTON ANTHOLOGY Edited by P. J: Kavanagh G. K. Chesterton is one of the most widely quoted 20th century writers...
...Only a murder, and we are talking about an 18-year-old [defendant...
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...Cardinal Ratzinger addresses a variety of critical issues in the Church, making clear what he thinks the problems are—and their solutions...
...They tried to throw him onto the subway tracks...
...She is particularly scornful of the Pope's forgiveness of Ali Agca...
...its hand-some, casual look goes as well with a business suit as it does with jeans and a sweater...
...The Pope was not petitioning to have Agca let out of jail...
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...Alice Kaminsky is a professor of English in upstate New York...
...One of the muggers—the one who had not wielded the knife—plea-bargained a short sentence in return for his testimony against the THE VICTIM'S SONG Alice R. Kaminsky/Prometheus Books/$19.95 William Tucker Three Outstanding New Books THE RATZINGER REPORT An Exclusive Interview On the State of the Church Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger with Vittorio Messori In this controversial, highly publicized interview, Cardinal Ratzinger speaks candidly and forcefully about the state of the Church in the post-Vatican II era...
...During the struggle one mugger knifed him in the back—making sure to turn the knife so it would do William Tucker is The American Spectator's New York Correspondent and most recently author of Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime in America (Stein and Day...
...It must be clearly stated that a real reform of the Church presupposes an unequixocal turning away from the erroneous paths whose catastrophic consequences are already incontestable...
...Suppose two equally capable judges come to diametrically opposing conclusions on the basis of their imaginative reconstruction...
...California residents please add 61/2% sales tax...
...The effort to construct a persuasive account of the shaping of Franklin Roosevelt's character rests on two great explanatory pillars in every biography...
...Kaminsky has not quite forgiven the universe...
...Some 2500 years later, Kaminsky notes, Norman Mailer wrote about murder: "It means that two people are engaging in a dialogue with eternity...
...that possibly I am motivated by the sheer joy of thwarting the will of authority...
...In order to control speech and thought, government developed a new language wrapping misleading pleasant words around very ugly things...
...It Wears Well .. . As anyone who's ever owned a Scandia will testify, this bag lasts for years...
...Are they really that important...
...Unfortunately, not all of Kaminsky's book is entirely admirable...
...Eric resisted—trying to protect his pianist's hands in the process...
...But is it an accurate likeness...
...We need an enlightened, dedicated leadership that can shred the nonsense of amorality and hold the nation to a reasonable standard of human justice...
...What has happened is that the killer is becoming a little more possible, a little more ready to love someone...
...But there is something else going on...
...Half the world now lives under Communist governments which resemble Orwell's state...
...In this extensive, wide-ranging interview...
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...Any delay usually works for the benefit of the defendants," Kaminsky quotes one defense attorney as saying...
...But Lindbergh was living in a time when the justice system was willing to express the victim's anger...
...they asked...
...But such a thing no longer exists for us...
...He is also a senior research fellow at the Hudson Institute...
...It is well she does...
...Thus, "forced labor camp" became "joy camp...
...The two teenagers apparently became worried that he could identify them...
...Ratzinger's forthright, measured criticism of certain forms of liberation theology, and his removal of the imprimatur from two widely read books in the U.S., are well known...
...Fifteen years ago, for example, a department head at the upstate college where her husband works refused her a job because he didn't want to hire faculty wives...
...Thus, it has only been twenty-five years from the beginnings of the compassion crusade to the comment made in the Kaminsky case by Judge Benjamin Altman, who, when he becameexasperated with complaints from the district attorney about trial delays, finally blurted out: "This is only a murder, Mr...
...Nothing, she says, will ever make up for the loss of her son...
...Reputations, even of major figures of centuries ago, totter and fall or swell and soar as new generations of historians unearth new material or, more commonly, reinterpret what had always been at hand...
...Signature The World's Largest Bookstore FDR: A BIOGRAPHY Ted Morgan/Simon and Schuster/$22.95 Karl O'Lessker Scandia: The Shoulder Bag That Has It All Two 7" x r outer pockets F (!y ad...
...Attorneys, of course, insist that they are only defending the Constitution...
...Chesterton's writings are so rich in good sense, in wit, and in plain, profound and cheerful truth that almost every page deserves a review to itself.''— The Spectator Sewn soft-cover, $12.95...
...His flexible mind did cartwheels...
...This deserves to become the standard introduction to Chesterton...
...Henry Adams once remarked that the history of American Presidents from George Washington to U. S. Grant disproved Darwin's theory of evolution...
...This is a glorious portrait of a man called Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...Greenbaum...
...This substantial work shows the many sides of Chesterton's mind...
...Alice Kaminsky does not have the leisure simply to mourn her son...
...There is evidently nothing in the law that takes into consideration the special kind of victimization that parents suffer as a result of such a delay," writes Kaminsky: "But since anappeals court might overturn the decision on the grounds that [the murderer] was not allowed to see a psychiatrist, the prosecutor has to allow him more time...
...He never rebelled openly but learned to be devious, to get around her...
...myself of such Pirandellian truths: especially so when the biographer has, as Ted Morgan does, a novelist's gift for bringing his subject to life...
...Through shameless misreadings of the Constitution, plus a denuding of the once sacred rights of the jury, Americans now find themselves underthe domination of a smug legal fraternity that sees criminal justice as—in the exasperated words of Chief Justice Warren Burger---"nothing more than a sporting contest...
...Posner does not give enough credit to the philosophical presuppositions and values which subtly shape the way in which one approaches historical evidence...
...Here again Mr...
...It was a matter of survival...
...Only in the last few pages does she soften her tone...
...We are given a wide variety of highly readable and enjoyable selections from his noels...
...that far from being an unfortunate side effect of the noble enterprise of defending the rights of the individual, maybe putting criminals on the street is the main point...
...The best summary of Chesterton available...
...It's a Remarkable Bargain .. . If you've shopped around for high-quality shoulder bags, briefcases, and purses, you're probably aware that most of these items cost at least $50...
...Endless trial delays are one of the favorites...
...How different he appeared to the members of his real family, at least three of whom have written extensively about him...
...This seems most insightful and I know of no evidence to suggest a different explanation...
...In spearheading the effort to free Jack Abbott, a convicted murderer, Mailer announced he was willing to "gamble with a portion of society to save this man's talent...
...Kaminsky has not forgiven him...
...essays, poetry, and apologetics...
...He was only forgiving his attacker in the sense that we forgive the universe for not making us immortal...
...Meanwhile, departments in Washington maintain an average of 15 files on every American...
...On September 13, 1980, her talented only son, Eric, age 22, was robbed and then stabbed to death by two Dominican teenagers on a subway platform in New York City...
...In the presence of a writer as gifted as Mr...
...That's fair enough...
...He said he was "discontent with the world but content with the universe...
...All the more so with personages of our own time: not so much because of lack of crucial in-formation (though this was the case with President Eisenhower until very recently) but because of the sheer volume of it, allowing biographers to pick and choose according to their own predilections...
...Even the most conscientious biographer has to cope with the fact that the memoirs, diaries, and oral histories by his subject's contemporaries are the products of different people, each with his own intellectual and psychological baggage...
...Such things are no more...
...Existentialism, as I learned it, says that the world is basically meaningless—or "random," in the physicist's term...
...That is the whole point of her book...
...The facts are all here...
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...And whether one agrees or disagrees with so original a thinker, Judge Posner and his ideas ought to provoke general reflection about the law...
...One is the influence of his mother...
...Surely, that's a tiny price for a big capacity smart-looking bag that will last for years to come...
...Morgan's reckoning, this accounts for much if not all of FDR's legendary deviousness: "He learned that there was a part of himself he could not reveal to his mother, and acquired an opaque core, a sort of inner armor...
...If I had said to my son's murderers what Pope John Paul II said to Agca . . . then this book could be placed on the shelf with all the `self-help' works that offer instant solutions to all problems," she writes...
...Who are these nameless, faceless victims we are being asked to cry over...
...London Times Sewn soft-cover, $14.95...
...And citizens are herded to polls to vote in "elections" in which there are no choices...
...At its base, the universe will not support the kind of meanings we would like to impose upon it...
...If she had gotten the job, she speculates, is it not possible that some chain of events might have kept Eric away from the subway platform that night...
...Soldiers conquer villagers in "wars of liberation...
...The Scandia is available in six colors: Gray, Black, Dark Blue, Khaki, Brown and Mauvetime ,political life seven years later, Morgan writes, "He was locked - in struggle with a powerful enemy, and although his legs remained withered, his spirit triumphed...
...In Vietnam and the Soviet Union, prisoners are sent to die in I KNOW ku BELiEVE You uN ER511WD WHAT \6u TiaiNK I SAib BUT I'M NOT SURE 1tU REAUzE THAT WHAT You HEARD iS NOT WN4T I MEANT...
...Once a book such as this wasn't necessary...
...But no one seems very interested...
...Kaminsky admits such reasoning is far-fetched, but she doesn't spare us the man's name nor the vague suggestion that he may share some responsibility...
...But in epistemological terms, it is far closer to a novelist's "explanation" of a character's behavior than to the kind of causation that allows us to say with confidence that...
...By Mr...
...The other is the attack of polio that crippled him at age 39...
...a President's policy views produced a certain line of action...
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...Maybe I became a defense attorney so that I could be bad, and still be good...
...But as an inveterate reader of biographies, I sometimes find it useful to remind Karl O'Lessker is senior editor of this journal and professor of public and environmental affairs-at Indiana University...
...Like people everywhere, she has grown up with the sense that some benevolent authority knows right from wrong and has the power and will to tear through the lies of the wicked and wreak punishment on the guilty...
...Suppose, as is probable, that some judges or their staffs are derelict in their research duties or deficient (or perhaps excessive) in imaginative intelligence...
...Notice these people always gamble with other people's security, not ,their own...
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...I: Orthodoxy, Heretics, Blatchford Controversies This first volume of Chesterton's writings contains three of his most influential and engaging works...
...today's American justice system...
...Who will arbitrate between these different judges and their claims...
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...Morgan we need to remain skeptical: not because we distrust this biographer but because all biographers are necessarily part fabulists...
...Like suburbanites who let their dogs run loose to experience a vicarious freedom, many of these defense attorneys and Maileresque intellectuals like to see criminals running loose, ex-pressing their vicarious antisociability...
...The knife-wielding murderer then began a long effort to establish a psychiatric defense...
...Anne Morrow Lindbergh, writing about the kidnapping and murder of her son, for example, spoke with a kind of sleepwalking horror that we would expect from the families of murder victims...
...All this seems to me misguided...
...Daily life was monitored through TV cam-eras...
...He had learned as a child to mask his true intentions...
...rehabilitation" and "relocation" centers...
...Tax increases are called "revenue enhancements," and advocates of increased government control are called "progressive" or "liberal...
...And what about these flesh-and-blood people who stand before us, the criminal defendants...
...It is far preferable to have judges engage in old-fashioned analysis—including historical and textual analysis—than to em-bark on careers of imaginative reconstruction which promise to end up in the constitutional boondocks of wishful judicial thinking...
...All this is obvious enough...
...What we call "justice" is essentially only our own invention...
...and the greater their literary powers, the more we must be on our guard...
...p-1 Hillsdale College Hillsdale Michigan 49242 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 proclaims...
...As a bonus, we will also send you a free subscription to our monthly journal Imprimis...
...About twenty-five years ago the hired actors got tired of doing the show...
...For a series of 36 of these award-winning essays, send $10.00 to Alternatives, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242...
...Most educated people seem to prefer the game of seeing how far we can pull things apart before we return to primeval chaos...
...377050 TOTAL THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 37...
...And, no matter how much you pack into the Scandia, it will still be trim enough to carry comfortably...
...But what is ignored is the other side of the equation...
...The trial was postponed for several months simply because he "had trouble" setting up psychiatric appointments...
...Or is it...
...But I could not read it without thinking of a distinction made by John Gunther's dying son in Death Be Not Proud...
...I do not believe in the Christian doctrine of forgiveness," Kaminsky Word Games Over 25 years ago, George Orwell wrote a terrifying little book called 1984, In it, he imagined a society in which a socialist state con-trolled the economy, TV and news-papers, religion, sports—everything...
...As Solon had hoped, we lived in a time when society's delegates—the judiciary—were willing to play out their admittedly histrionic role of righteous indignation...
...I am willing to sacrifice the whole world in order to prevent the scratching of my little finger," said Hume in a deliberate attempt to formulate an absurd proposition...
...And these three were only members of his "official family...
...CHESTERTON l Illll l 1111 \\11111, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 35 other defendant...
...The Victim's Song will stand as a monument to his frail, brief, tragic life...
...CJ the most damage...
...If human justice is our own invention, then we must work twice as hard to establish it as when God or the "natural law" was doing it for us...
...The government slogans "War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," and "Ignorance is Strength" were examples of the new language, which Orwell called Newspeak...
...Where there is a tough fact pattern [a nice term, no?], the more time that lapses, the more witnesses will contradict themselves...
...1984, of course, is fiction...
...Kaminsky quotes James Simon Kunen, a former student radical and now a criminal defense attorney, who confesses in a moment of candor in his book, How Can You Defend Those People?: It occurs to me that maybe I like putting criminals on the street...
...She is unfair, sometimes almost shameless, in her attempt to blame everyone and everything for her son's death...
...And not only the volume of it...
...Aren't they individuals as well...
...And the Scandia will stay in style for years...
...Even in our country, Newspeak seems to be taking hold...
...We must guard against the abuse of both...
...Its high-quality canvas is water-resistant, color-fast, and scuff-proof...
...It was this spiritual battle, this passage from despair to hope, this refusal to accept defeat, this ability to learn from adversity, that transformed him from a shallow, untested, selfishly ambitious and sometimes unscrupulous young Clear vinyl window for schedule, photo, etc...
...I, of course, do not share Kaminsky's pain...
...Like other Americans, she has been forced to rein-vent the justice system for herself—raising a banshee wail loud enough to wake the whole society...
...Morgan accepts the conventional view and builds a compelling psychological case for it...
...It would seem like a noble undertaking for any enlightened man or woman training in the law...
Vol. 19 • March 1986 • No. 3
