Thursday, March 29, 2007

Brown's Chicken Trial Starts, and Someone is Already Complaining


I went for a semi-long bike ride this morning, and stopped downtown for some late breakfast and to relax, read the paper, and exist somewhere outside of the house. It's a sanity tool I need to use as often as possible, even when I am working, especially now when I am pulling my hair out waiting on the mail.


I got the paper at Hickey's, meaning to get the Trib, but getting sucked in, as sometimes happens, by the Sun-Times gaudy headline: Verdict Guilty and image on the front page of the Sun-Times. This, as I said, happens occasionally, and I usually regret it. The Sun-Times is shameless at it's attempts to increase circulation and have resorted to headlines in the past, both false and inflammatory, that keep me a Trib reader. Once again, the story was all bark, it was actually reader comments about how bad the Trib has managed the Cubs as owners, not a whole lot of substance, none that you couldn't find on any message board, still, I had the paper and read the rest. Rip=off or not, it's nice to get what I have always considered the trashy perspective on sports and Chicago news once in a while. Some of their columnists are even better.
What I found were a couple of articles that really had me thinking. So much that I tore them out of the paper and took them on the rest of the ride with me. I didn't need the rest of it and I'm sure some later coffee drinking lunch eater would enjoy my discard and be sure that what was ripped out was the secret to the universe itself. Isn't that how it always seems?
So, the article this post is supposed to be about covers the finally starting Brown's chicken trial, but from an instantly annoying perspective, the whining viewpoint. The Sun Times reporter, Eric Herman, covering a story about a mass killing, finally coming to trial 14 years later, which is etched into everyone's minds if you have been in this area, interviews families of the victims, who seem more concerned about the trial scheduling than justice.
The trial, for whatever reason, is running from 12-8 PM, and the daughter is more worried about not getting to see her 2 year old before she gets back from the courtroom than what's going on in the trial. I feel for this woman, her parents were both killed, and this is the reaction put forth in the news from her. OMG
Did the reporter skip over other comments because they were all regular territory and hang this woman out to dry as a whiner, because this is what I get from it. These guys need to face justice, at whatever schedule, and except possibly as one of those 'weight of the crime' witnesses. she has no bearing on this trial. Let them do their job.
The editors at the Sun-Times might also have realized this, because it was on page 16 instead of being another one of their Gaudy headlines.

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