A mere legality

[George Thompson]

LH writes:
> I can imagine a crafty defense lawyer crafting a defense for a client
indicted for attempted suicide (if any ever is) on the grounds that in no
other case is the crime of "attempted Xing" punished more severely than the
corresponding crime of "Xing"; any penalty for attempted murder that was
more stringent that for murder in the same jurisdiction would be deemed an
instance of cruel and unusual punishment, or attempted armed robbery, etc.
etc., so why should that be countenanced in the case of (attempted)
suicide?  Of course from the Almighty's perspective, successful suicide
*is* punished more severely than merely attempted suicide, and there's no
parole.  But--at least until the inauguration of President Santorum--not
all sins are crimes.
>
>
>

This puts me in mind of a note I have long contemplated inflicting on
you-uns, regarding a traditional joke among rounders.
Years ago, my father and I used to go to prizefights held weekly in
Portland, Me.  A number of the boxers appeared frequently, including one,
the hero of the story, XYZ, a very muscular and determined but not very
capable middleweight from Boston.  At one of these shows, someone near us
asked the world, Whatever happened to XYZ, he hasn't been on the card for a
couple of months.  Someone else replied, that it would be a while before he
would be on the card again: he was in jail in Boston, for attempted bank
robbery.  My father -- a bootlegger in his younger days, associated with
Vannie Higgins' mob in Brooklyn -- said "Why, what severe laws they have in
Boston, to be sure!  Put a man in jail just for attempting to rob a bank?
 What would they have done if he had succeeded?"
A few years later, I read an article probably in a Sunday Supplement
magazine, by a female reporter who had had the chance to sit in with a
group of Hollywood actors -- the two whose names I recall were John Wayne
and Dean Martin.  She was starry-eyed, and the actors were acting their
roles as real manly men, maybe even over-acting.  Someone among them asked
what ever had happened to an acquaintance, ZYX.  Someone else replied that
he had been put in jail for attempted murder.  Dean Martin said, What!  In
jail for just attempting murder?  He didn't even succeed?  The reporter
made it clear that she thought that Martin must be pretty dumb if he didn't
know that attempting murder was illegal.

GAT

--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

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