On May 15, Knox County (TN) Criminal Court Judge Richard Baumgartner rescheduled the trial of Knoxville Horror defendant George Geovonni “Detroit” Thomas for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, for August 11, the same date it had originally been scheduled for on May 17, 2007. Due to dithering by Knox County District Attorney General Randy Nichols over whether to seek the death penalty in case of a murder conviction, Thomas’ trial had since been postponed until a date to be determined in 2009, an unconscionable, and arguably unconstitutional delay of over two years after the defendant’s arrest.

The Sixth Amendment states, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial…” This amendment was to prevent British-style abuses, where the government throws someone in jail to rot, without a trial. It never occurred to the Framers that the government might delay a trial, in order to avoid exercising its proper powers, rather than to abuse them. Then again, the Framers never anticipated the likes of Randy Nichols.

Last May, Judge Baumgartner scheduled all four state trials for this spring and summer: May 12 for Letalvis “Rome” Cobbins; June 16 for Cobbins’ girlfriend, Vanessa Coleman; and July 14 for Cobbins’ half-brother, Lemaricus “Slim” Davidson.

And yet, DAG Nichols did not announce whether he would seek the death penalty in the first case until December 7, and then only under pressure from Judge Baumgartner. Nichols took until March 3 to announce that he would seek the death penalty in all four cases.

The DAG’s office was responsible for other delays, as well. In early March, Nichols’ prosecutors requested and got permission to repeat DNA tests on the defendants that had been completed one year earlier, leading Thomas’ attorneys, Tom Dillard and Steve Johnson, to suggest that the DAG’s office had lost or destroyed evidence. (See the prosecution’s rejection of the defense’s characterization here. ) Already last October, the prosecution requested and got a delay of its duty to share its evidence with the defense. Since the defense must have sufficient time to examine the people’s evidence, the latter move was bound to delay the trial.

In January, Cobbins’ attorney, Kim Parton, responded to the death penalty notice that she lacked sufficient time to mount a competent defense. Tennessee law requires that any defendant on trial for his life be represented by two defense lawyers, one of whom must be certified as qualified to defend capital cases; the aforementioned defendants only had one defense counsel each. Thus did Judge Baumgartner move the first planned trial, of Cobbins, from May 12, 2008 to January 26, 2009.

In April’s federal trial, in which Eric Dewayne Boyd was convicted as an accessory after the fact to the carjacking, TBI serology expert Jennifer Millsaps testified that DNA matches linked (only) Davidson and Cobbins to the rapes of Christian. (Coleman’s statements to federal investigators put her at the murder scene.) DAG Nichols sought to bolster his weak rape case against Thomas via incriminating testimony in the first three state cases.

Three conditions made seeking the death penalty a no-brainer: 1. The murders were committed in conjunction with other felonies; 2. More than one person was murdered; and 3. The killers’ gruesome, hours-long torture of Channon Christian. DAG Nichols ultimately gave eight reasons for seeking the death penalty.

DAG Nichols’ death penalty dithering appears to this observer to have been due to his desire not to offend Knoxville’s black community, and provided a golden opportunity for Thomas, who already had the requisite attorneys, who applied to the court to restore his original trial date.

The change may imperil the Thomas prosecution.

Winston Churchill learned in 1897 while fighting the feuding Pathan tribesmen of what’s now the Pakistan-Afghanistan border:

“Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud. The numerous tribes and combination of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid… The life of the Pathan is thus full of interest…”

Now Jared Diamond has published in The New Yorker an account of a tribal feud among New Guinea highlanders based on his native chauffeur’s old war stories. It’s an interesting description of the logic of violence when there’s no state with a monopoly on force to put an end to squabbling.

The uncle of Diamond’s pal was killed in battle by another tribe in 1992, so honor demanded that his nephew avenge it. The young tribesmen spent three years organizing his revenge, which involved expensive diplomacy with many other tribes to borrow their warriors, six battles, and thirty deaths before vengeance was finally his.

Granted, that just meant the ball was now in the other tribe’s court to get revenge on him, but at least it gives the men something to do with their days while their women are out working in the fields.

These are the people that Diamond theorized in his bestselling Guns, Germs, and Steel must have higher intelligence than Westerners because they are under more intense selection pressure by their environment. As Diamond wrote in the Prologue of his Pulitzer Prize-winner:

“My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not.

It’s easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners may be correct. First, Europeans have for thousands of years been living in densely populated societies with central governments, police, and judiciaries. In those societies, infectious epidemic diseases of dense populations (such as smallpox) were historically the major cause of death, while murders were relatively uncommon and a state of war was the exception rather than the rule. Most Europeans who escaped fatal infections also escaped other potential causes of death and proceeded to pass on their genes. Today, most live-born Western infants survive fatal infections as well and reproduce themselves, regardless of their intelligence and the genes they bear. In contrast, New Guineans have been living in societies where human numbers were too low for epidemic diseases of dense populations to evolve. Instead, traditional New Guineans suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents, and problems in procuring food.

Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example, people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A. That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.

After this introduction, Jared spends hundreds of pages explaining how it’s totally racist to think that there could possibly be IQ differences! The distribution of power and accomplishment in the modern world is all due to geographical differences between the continents! But, as I gently chided in my review of his book in National Review in 1997,

“Diamond makes environmental differences seem so compelling that it’s hard to believe that humans would not become somewhat adapted to their homelands through natural selection.”

But exactly what kind of Darwinian selection pressure does constant feuding impose? Diamond’s buddy, as the survivor of the feud, is presumably good at feuding, but he’s not exactly James Clerk Maxwell. Everybody in Diamond’s story seems content to play the game by the old rules, over and over again, with nobody trying to change the rules by technological or political innovations. Even the European tradition of dueling, which strikes us as pretty stupid today, but which served to isolate feuds among two individuals, allowing honor to be satisfied without the extended families being dragged in, seems to have proved beyond the New Guineans.

I suspect that female farming cultures like New Guinea and Africa, where the men spend their ample leisure hours competing to be Big Men, selects for Big Men traits, Machiavellian skills at manipulating others into fighting your battles. (Of course, Machiavelli was hardly the first Machiavellian. What he brought was the power of abstraction to coherently explain the rules of the game of power that so many Big Men had intuitively grasped before him.)

What these kind of female farming economies where the women do most of the work select for is not the nerd traits that are crucial to technological advancement. Perhaps the need to survive winter selects for nerdish genes that are good at technology, which can then be used for creating better weapons.

It’s not exactly clear from Diamond’s account what kind of battles took place. There seem to be “public” battles where young men show off in front of their fans just barely in range of the other side’s arrows, and more serious “stealth” battles, which sound more like Mafioso rub-outs–ambushes and massacres–than the Battle of Gettysburg. The idea of the Waterloo-like “decisive battle,” where armies line up and march shoulder to shoulder toward each other strikes most peoples down through history as nuts. Indeed, the whole idea of a “fair fight” strikes most peoples as nuts.

David Axelrod has built Barack Obama’s campaign around the old 1968 Nixon slogan of “Bring Us Together,” rhetorically running against Karl Rove’s central idea that you only need 51 percent to win.

The funny thing is, of course, that Obama will likely wind up winning with just 51% over Hillary Clinton. In Presidential primary campaigns, the leader normally pulls away due to the bandwagon effect, but Obama has been content to eke out the narrowest victory in recent primary history. He hasn’t done a thing to reach out substantively to white voters worried about his long track record as a racial activist.

Obama tried to lie and bloviate his way out of his first Rev. Wright jam, so Wright went on his little media tour to set the record straight, finally getting Obama to defriend him by saying Obama’s “a politician.” Moreover, Obama has refused to compromise on any race-related issue. So, he’s stuck at 51%.

But, guess what? Karl Rove was right. You only need 51%.

And Axelrod/Obama know it’s really not hard to get 51% with these opponents. It’s not like Germany in 1914, where they’ve got to beat France and Russia (plus any of their friends who tag along). Obama isn’t running against FDR and Reagan, he’s running against a proven screw-up in HillaryCare and the elderly Arizona Jones.

The fine reporter Ralph Z. Hallow has an interesting interview with Tom Tancredo in the Washington Times. Tancredo remains perhaps the most modest of all the politicians who have had an important impact on the country in recent years.

Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado donned his bulletproof vest last year and hit the campaign trail expressly to get his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination - and the voters - to make illegal immigration a real, rather than rhetorical, priority.

He says he failed.

And he doesn’t trust Democratic Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton or even presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain to do the right thing on immigration once one of them moves into the Oval Office.

“Nobody’s going to enter the White House in January of ‘09 who is committed to securing the border and ending the disaster of illegal immigration,” said Mr. Tancredo, who wears the vest when he feels insecure about the enemies he has made over the years while touting his anti-illegals stance.

“Therefore, the next stage in the battle is going to be in the states,” he said.

So, Mr. Tancredo is leaving the halls of Congress to join the front lines, possibly with either a new or established advocacy group, and promote court-tested efforts states and localities have adopted to address the strain illegal immigration has put on the educational systems, social services and law enforcement.

“We will have to see if we can replicate Arizona and Oklahoma in other states because that’s what states and localities do whenever the federal government walks away from its responsibility,” said Mr. Tancredo, who is not seeking a sixth term.

Mr. Tancredo’s distrust of Mr. McCain on questions such as amnesty for illegal immigrants - which each man interprets differently - is so deep that he is not sure he will vote for the presumptive Republican nominee in November.

“Maybe I’ll write me in - who knows?” he said. “When I’m in the voting booth, I’m going to just be tussling with this in my own heart.” …

Mr. Tancredo said Mr. McCain is the last of 10 Republican presidential candidates standing because he and the other eight didn’t provide the leadership voters desired.

“Frankly, I don’t see myself as this great leader, as capable as Ronald Reagan,” he said. “I know I’m not. So I can’t ask people to see something in me that I don’t see in myself.” ….

Opponents who thought he had too much power over immigration policy were snarling “Nazi” and “racist” at him well before entered the Republican nomination battle.

By the Columbus Day Parade in Denver three years ago, epithets were the least of his worries.

He recalled a Denver plainclothes police officer saying, “Congressman, are you aware of the threats on your life here today?”

” ‘More than usual?’ ” Mr. Tancredo asked.

The officer read aloud from his notebook what people were overhead saying about “whacking” Mr. Tancredo that day. More alarming, a parade-route sweep had turned up high-powered rifle ammo taped inside a trash can.

The officer suggested that Mr. Tancredo not ride atop a float but walk the parade route surrounded by eight policemen instead. Along the route, however, he recalled seeing a young woman holding up her baby’s hand “and she has the baby flip me off.”

After that day, the Capitol Police, whose job is to protect members of Congress while in Washington, began showing up now and then at Tancredo speeches across the country.

Eventually he bought a “really good” bulletproof vest on the Internet and wears it when he thinks he needs it.

Mr. Tancredo’s decision to quit the presidential nomination race seemed right at the time.

He was in his hotel room at 11 p.m. on Dec. 20 when he saw former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a one-time advocate of giving sanctuary to illegals and the last of the candidates to adopt a border-security-first approach to the issue, promise in a spot commercial to secure the border and build a fence.

Mr. Tancredo immediately phoned campaign manager Bay Buchanan and said, “You can pull the plug on my campaign. The last domino just fell. Everybody’s come the distance.”

Since then, however, it is not clear whether the impact of Mr. Tancredo’s 11-month presidential nomination campaign has left him as an immigration hero or zero.

“The issue has been elevated to a place it hadn’t been before, but I will also be the first to admit, it has now begun to fall,” he said. “I’m sorry if that’s the result of my getting out of the race.”

“I don’t know that I have that much power over the issue,” Mr. Tancredo said. “I don’t know whether, if I had stayed in the race, it would still be up there at one or two, which is where it was. Now it’s down to three or four. I just don’t know.”

Allow me to predict that the actual assassination threats against Tancredo (as opposed to the much fondled hypothetical ones against Obama) will generate very little interest. Similarly, the 2002 assassination of potential Dutch prime minister Pym Fortuyn by a Stuff White People Like pro-multiculturalist lawyer was greeted by the Great and Good with expressions boiling down to “He had it coming.“

I’ve been losing interest in the campaign, so I’m way late on this, but isn’t it obvious that the berserk over-reaction by Obama supporters to Hillary mentioning that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968 is in part a projection of their own dark fascination with the idea of Obama being martyred before the Chicago pol can disappoint their messianic hopes?

As I wrote in February:

For several weeks, I’ve been noticing that a lot of Obama supporters seem to fantasize about their man being assassinated. The creepy NYT article, “In Painful Past, Hushed Worry About Obama,” only confirms this hunch. To be crass, I think a lot of Obamaniacs are fondling this fantasy, unable to keep themselves from noticing that a slain Obama would provide them with an iconic image of great usefulness. The best thing that ever happened to the left in the U.S. in the second half of the 20th Century was that John F. Kennedy was assassinated (by a far leftist, of course, but for complicated reasons everybody who was anybody acted like the opposite was true).

Here’s an amusing article by Hector Becerra in the LA Times about how American-born Mexican-American politicians are allowed to say in public what everybody feels in private: that Mexican immigrant neighborhoods aren’t “vibrant,” they’re tacky:

It was as if the developers were talking about tacos, and the Latino politicians were talking about apple pie.

Baldwin Park Mayor Manuel Lozano and other city officials listened as the developers said they had studied the demographics of the city and could bring in a retailer known for offering credit to undocumented immigrants and a shopping center with a “Latino feel.”

To Lozano, it was another case of developers typecasting his suburb, which is about 15 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. He didn’t want to see more of what he calls “amigo stores.”

The meeting ended like a bad date, with handshakes and excessive courtesy. But afterward, Lozano made it clear he was not happy.

“We want what Middle America has as well,” said the second-generation Mexican American, recounting the meeting. “We like to go to nice places like Claim Jumpers, Chili’s and Applebee’s. . . . We don’t want the fly-by-night business, the ‘amigo store,’ which they use to attract Latinos like myself.”

Call it “immigrant” store fatigue. It’s happening in cities that are overwhelmingly Latino, with Latino political leaders and with large immigrant communities.

For decades, these cities attracted working-class and immigrant-centric retailers: check-cashing businesses, Latino supermarkets, discount gift stores, bridal shops and Mexican western wear stores. Some are independent, and some are chains such as La Curacao, an appliance and electronics retailer that offers credit accounts to immigrants who lack the documentation for conventional credit cards.

Until relatively recently, cities like Baldwin Park, South Gate and Santa Ana had few options beyond “Latino” retailers. But this year, Baldwin Park — a city of 70,000 in the San Gabriel Valley — enacted a moratorium on new payday loan and check cashing stores. The city is now partners with Bisno Development Co. on an “urban village” of mixed-income housing, theaters and mainstream restaurants such as Claim Jumper, Applebee’s and Chili’s.

To make it happen, the city is considering a plan that could require the use of eminent domain power to clear a 125-acre area.

That would result in the loss of more than 80 homes and more than 100 small businesses.

The huge project has prompted charges that the City Council, composed of Mexican Americans, is ashamed of its culture.

“I’m proud of my roots,” said Rosalva Alvarez, as she stood in her beauty store on Maine Avenue, which is in the redevelopment area. “I was born in Mexico and raised in this country. I agree we need some change. But what they want to bring here is totally unrealistic. Applebee is good, but a Kabuki? And also a Trader Joe’s? Come on, I don’t even go to Trader Joe’s.”

Some opponents say that one councilwoman had told critics to “go back to [Tijuana].”

“I don’t know where they got that,” said Councilwoman Marlen Garcia. “What I said was ‘We’re striving to insure Baldwin Park doesn’t look like Tijuana.’ ” …

But Mayor Lozano is undaunted.

As he rode through the streets of his city, past the rows of low-slung mini malls with signs in a mix of English and Spanish, Lozano complained that downtown Baldwin Park had too many discount gift stores, too many beauty salons, too many Mexican restaurants and way too many pawnshops.

Lozano and his allies believe that mainstream retailers now fit better with Baldwin Park, where many of the residents are second-, third- and even fourth-generation Latinos with little interest in stores aimed at immigrants.

A more subtle point, one lost in the overblown hype about “immigrant entrepreneurialism,” is that as American-born Mexican-Americans assimilate, they become less entrepreneurial than Mexican-immigrants. Over the generations, Mexican immigrants don’t make the transition from owning tacky shops to owning distinctive boutiques. Their neighborhoods start out quirky, but not the kind of Stuff White People Like quirk; over the generations, if all goes well, the prosperous Mexican-American neighborhoods turn into National Chain Power Mall neighborhoods, identical to the rest of the Stuff White People Hate. (And that’s the upside.)

Whereas, say, Armenian immigrants might move up the ladder as business owners from generation to generation, Mexicans instead tend to quit being self-employed and go to work for large institutions. Mexican immigrants start out at the bottom of the entrepreneurial totem pole, running businesses that appeal mostly to other Mexican immigrants. But they generally don’t get more skilled as entrepreneurs with each generation — instead, the next generation gives up and goes to work for somebody else.

National chain restaurants and chain stores are appealing employers to bilingual American-born Mexicans because they can get managerial jobs bossing around Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants while reporting to English-speaking corporate bosses in Atlanta (or wherever).

As I mentioned last year, when I came back from a trip around the country, the libertarian advice to African-Americans to start their own businesses is ill-conceived. African-Americans tend to prefer working for big institutions where all the rules are already written down in three-ring binders (e.g., the U.S. Army) because they are more likely to be successful in that kind of environment. Something similar is true for Mexican-Americans (with perhaps the more macho Marines substituting for the Army).

There’s nothing wrong with preferring to work for a big institution rather than being an entrepreneur–indeed, succeeding in a job is better for all concerned that failing at owning a business–but that much of the punditry about minority entrepreneurialism is romantic hooey.