Slashdot Mirror
Database Finds Fugitive After 35 Years
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian has a story on a woman who was claims she is innocent and was apprehended 35 years after escaping prison by a computer database created by the Department of Homeland Security. Linda Darby was convicted of killing her husband in 1970 and sentenced to life at an Indiana prison but escaped two years later by climbing over a barbed-wire fence at the Indiana Women's Prison. She knocked on a stranger's door in Indianapolis, telling the woman who answered that her cuts and scratches were from a fight with her boyfriend. In Indianapolis she met the man who would become her third husband and moved to his hometown of Pulaski, where they raised their two children and watched eight grandchildren grow up. As Linda Jo McElroy, she used a similar date of birth and social security number to her real ones which allowed a computer database created by the Department of Homeland Security to identify her. Darby says she is innocent and fled prison because she did not want to serve time for another person's crime."
<sarcasm>I don't know. I think the acquisition of lots of money is inherent to the human condition, and so should not be punishable by law.</sarcasm>
The whole point of laws is to keep people from doing every damn fool thing that pops into their greedy, selfish, perverted heads with no regard to the expense and detriment to others. Of course people "yearn to be free", but they gave up the right to act on it when they willfully hurt other people for their own selfish desires. Some people might also "yearn" to rape children, murder their mothers, and barbecue the guy down the street, but that doesn't mean those things shouldn't be punishable by law.
Mexico is essentially saying that "our people are animals, and may act like animals at will", which is why their society is such a damn mess in most places. They have no expectation of higher standards.
The problem with Mexico is that they consider exporting their people to the US to be a reasonable solution to their societal problems. The government was even handing out border-crossing how-to books at one point, and is a routine and vehement opponent to the US government every time we want to do something about the thousands of illegal border crossing per day. Their desire is to simply relocate their problems, but they just keep making more because they refuse to fix the corruption and anarchy that's causing it to begin with.
If their jails are so flooded with petty criminals that's an indictment of the government's economic policies and criminal justice system, among others.
Anyone who says "People's Republic of California" is guilty in my book.