Month: August 2007

Kenneth Foster


Meet Kenneth Foster. He’s 31, and hails from San Antonio, Texas. Up until 1997 he ran a small record company, Tribulation Records. 

On August 14th 1997, Kenneth was driving a borrowed car around the streets of his home town. With him were three friends, Dewayne Dillard, Julius Steen and Mauricio Brown. 

It was a wild night. At the end of of it, two armed robberies had been committed, and a man lay dead. Mauricio got out of the car, into an argument, then shot and killed the guy he had the disagreement with, Michael LaHood.

The LaHood family are rich and influential, and Michael’s father an attorney who is highly respected in the Texas legal community. The family pushed for, and got, the result they wanted. Justice, if you like. Mauricio Brown was found guilty and executed for the crime in 2006. Dillard and Steen were given life sentences for their parts in the events, which is bad enough when you consider that they were in the car and 100 yards away from Brown at the time of the shooting. Brown himself has testified that the murder was unpremeditated.

But the worst part of the story is that Kenneth Foster, in the same car as Dillard and Steen, and equally unaware of what his homie was up to, was also sentenced to death.

In Texas, it now seems that being in the wrong place at the wrong time can kill you.

Kenneth’s downfall is The Law Of Parties, a Texan law designed to counteract conspiracy by charging accomplices with the same force as the main defendants. It’s at best a technicality, and at worst part of “the structure of the Texas’s legal system [that] makes it easier to sentence people to death”.(David Dow, founder and director of the Texas Innocence Network and author of Executed on a Technicality (2005).

In an August 10th editorial in the Galveston County Daily News, Heber Taylor writes “If people in Texas let Foster die, we’ll be putting our approval on the idea that it’s OK to use a law designed to punish conspirators even in cases where there’s no conspiracy. And we’ll be saying we’ll stretch the law in cases where we’re mad enough against one criminal but we won’t stretch the law in cases where we’re not that mad at his two riding buddies.”

Yeah, ok, admission of bias. I’ll put my hand up and say that I’m completely against the death penalty, and in this case it seems especially farcical. Kenneth Foster committed crimes that night in August, sure. And he should be in prison. But he should not be on death row, about to die for a capital crime of which no-one including the Texan Criminal Court believes he’s guilty.

If anyone can explain that to me, I’d be grateful, because it’s making my head hurt.

Read more on the case here. (including more from the two pieces I’ve quoted from above.)

Express your feelings to the Texas Legislature, who are now probably the only people that can do anything to reverse this perverse decision. 

Keep it clean, though, people. Just cos there’s a life at stake is no call for bad manners…

Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em

The smoking ban in public areas has been running for just over a month now, and the strangeness is starting to come out. Case in point today – I had my first lunch break in a while, and chose to spend it outside the Crown & Two, my local pub. There were ashtrays arranged on the windowsills outside. The reason for this became clear later on, when we noticed smoke and embers coming out of the cellar hatch. We tipped beer onto the glow, and called out the staff. The embers were cigarette butts, dropped and left to smoulder in the wood. As everyone has to smoke outside, the corner of Dean and Bateman Street is kneedeep in old fag ends. It’s a side-effect I hadn’t considered. What’s especially interesting is how quiet it is inside the pubs. Quiet and clean. I could easily be persuaded to drink indoors from now on.

Lee Hazelwood

Yet another formative figure from my youth has gone to join the house band upstairs. Lee Hazlewood was one of those moody, romantic figures on which I modeled myself unsuccessfully as a yout. A maverick, a mystic, a bruised romantic. 
I still play the seminal Nancy and Lee album sometimes, and one of my favourite albums of last year, Ballad of the Broken Seas by Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, owes a massive debt to the innocence corrupting experience dynamic that he and Nancy Sinatra had going on. (I always wondered about Nancy and the obvious thing she had for older men – a fixation that reached it’s creepy climax on Something Stupid – a love duet with her own dad. Urgh.)

By way of tribute, this is Summer Wine, one of my favourite tracks of Lee’s, interpreted with the help of Swedish chontoose Siw Malmkvist. (via WFMU’s Beware Of The Blog)

So long, cowboy.

Notes on A Marriage

I had to work late that night, and found out about it early. I called Clare to let her know.
“You’d better feed yourself, I’ve got no idea when I’ll be back,” I said.
She sighed. This had been happening a lot lately. “Ok,” she said.
“See you later,” I said, and returned to the vast stepped ziggurat of work in front of me.

By half past six that evening, it was clear that I could do no more without getting in the way, so I called it done and rang Clare.
“Good news,” I said. “I’m done, and I’m coming home to you.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “See you soon.” She sounded distracted.

I was home by eight o’clock. Clare was studying, frowning over Shakespeare’s Henry V. She’d scattered books and papers over the table in the back room. “Hey baby,” she said, smiling gently, and got up to give me a hug.

“Listen, I’ve eaten,” I said. To a point, that was true. My dinner had been the chicken katsu curry I’d abandoned at lunchtime, unevenly microwaved and wolfed while I worked. “But I can do you something.”
All she wanted was something simple, pasta and sauce, the kind of thing she’d cook if I wasn’t around. That’s what I did. Spaghetti carbonara. While she worked, I divided my attention between her dinner and a couple of emails. The house was silent apart from the puttering of the water for the pasta. We were both perfectly quiet, perfectly at peace.

She left half of the carbonara, but then I always cook too much. I’m used to making food for two.

When she was done, and had gone back to her books, I tidied up around her. She kissed me on the cheek as I bent to take her plate away.
“You don’t have to wait on me like this,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I do.”

Later, we had ice cream.

How To Play Guitar

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the guitar since I was in my early 20s, and it’s not getting any less dysfunctional. I practise on occasion, moon over guitar magazines and tabs, and generally fanny around in a wan and flappy manner that let me tell you readers is not attractive to the ladies. I can hear Clare’s teeth gritting whenever I pick up my Argos special.
Perhaps I need a new direction, away from tabs and scales and chords and set tunings. Explore the instrument, and find out how to relate to the object as mine, rather than it dictating terms to me.
To that end, I was delighted to find an article on the Half-Japanese website. How To Play Guitar by David Fair could well be the paradigm shift I need.

Clare, baby … sorry in advance.

Helicopters in Cornwall

An interesting, if slightly odd week in Cornwall recently. As holidays go, it was very pleasant, and it was great to get away from the daily growl for a bit. But it’s a curious place.
Take this as an example. We hired bikes for a ride along part of The Camel Trail, a path that winds it’s way through 15 miles of lovely coastal scenery along a disused railway line between Padstow and Bodmin.
About halfway down the route to Wadebridge, my back tyre blew. A worn tyre had caused the tube to fall apart. Fortunately, we’d picked up a repair kit, and began to fix the problem. Jokes flew about, along the lines of “Call The RAC”, and “Better let Air Sea Rescue know.”
A couple of minutes later, an Army Sea King did indeed come across the bay, did a low sweep directly over us, turned, did it again to make sure we were ok, and the pilot waved as he span away.
And was I too dumbstruck to take photos?
Yes, of course I was?
Have I been kicking myself ever since? What do you think?

Actualy, while I remember, we were at Harlyn Bay last year when the air ambulance landed on the beach to pick up someone who’d had a heart attack. If there’s a sure way to get sand in your suntan lotion, it’s landing a chopper in the middle of a bay filled with the fine stuff.
I swear, I must attract the things.