Slashdot Mirror
Billy the Kid Faces The Law... Again
Jason Raddin writes "MSNBC.com has an interesting story about a new showdown in the Old West. It seems as if Billy the Kid can still cause problems for the law-men of New Mexico, even as he rests in his grave. Several small New Mexico towns claim to possess the "true" grave of Billy the Kid (a.k.a. William H. Bonney, Henry McCarty, Kid Antrim). Two sheriffs in Capitan, New Mexico have proposed that this mystery be solved using modern DNA testing. The proposal was made in June to exhume the remains of Bonney's mother and the two reported graves of Bonney. This has spurred a hot legal debate raising an interesting question: which is more important, tourist dollars or the truth?"
...the rights of the dead buried people that they're digging up?
Who owns those plots of land? Do dead bodies automatically become the property of the state?
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
What if they do the DNA tests and it turns out that Billy the Kid isn't in either of those graves?
Whatever happened to the whole "rest in peace" notion? Let me get this in writing right now: if someone comes diggin' me up in a century or so, I am *so* gonna haunt that guy!
"...which is more important, tourist dollars or the truth?"
How about respecting the dead? Is 'loss of tourism' really the best answer we can come up with to not open up two people's graves (at least one of whom is assuredly not Billy the Kid)?
Kevin Fox
News For Nerds, Stuff that matters. That's the test. A new technology comes in that lets you determine identity accuratly, 100%. A man has died and been buried for around 100 years. The question here is: "Should technology be used retroactivly?"
Consider the following example. A person is murdered. A murder-machine is invented 100 years after the person is killed that tells who killed a person even 100 years after the person died. Is it ethical to put the families of the suspects (all the suspects are long dead) through the trauma of knowing that their grandfather was a murderer?
Geekdom is occasionally concerned with science fiction, and science fiction creates worlds with rules designed such that the author can play with an idea. Here, the rules change such that a person can determine identity 100%. This change makes this News for Nerds, and I'd certanly say that the issue of retroactive technology, which can include DNA Testing, Mitochondrial DNA, and Cryogenics, matters.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
I've got a lot of family in New Mexico and Arizona, and I've actually been to a couple towns which claim to have his body, and you know what?
Nobody really cares, outside of those towns.
The problem is, some of these town, having basically nothing aside from big-ass desert, have so little in the way of anything whatsoever, that some of these little towns a hundred miles from anything have to go out of their ways to rationalize their existance.
And you know what's really shocking? It's not even a tourist thing. There's not that much cash in it. Nobody makes holy pilgrimages to Billy the Kid's tomb. It's a pride thing. It's completely about these towns wanting some claim to history, however miniscule.
It's rather sad really. Not unlike the town of Roswell, where you can't go downtown without seeing a dozen shops selling schlocky plastic alien trinkets.
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."