Whitey Update – Mid Morning Monday Deliberations

I’ll tell you it was nice getting away from the travails of Whitey for a weekend. I woke up refreshed today having almost forgotten about the matter. Then I realized it was still ongoing and the jury was out.

If you have a tweeter account you can follow the updates at #Bulger, that is what I am doing.

There’s a jury question that asks in effect it the jury finds someone else committed the crime, this could be one of the extortions and the murders of the two young women, does that mean Bulger is automatically guilty. Judge will instruct them that is not enough, they have to find that Bulger also did it, or was an aider and abettor or a co-conspirator.

It is surprising to me that the jury after 3 1/2 days of deliberation and a weekend rest doesn’t understand this fairly basic concept. They have been instructed on this a couple of times before and have it in writing before them as part of the judge’s instructions on the law but one or more of them has difficult understanding it. I’m not sure how helpful it will be explaining it again.

But it does tell us a couple of other things. There’s at least one juror, maybe some more, who has not bought into all of the government’s case. This cannot make the prosecutor’s too happy. Remember if the prosecutors cannot implicate Whitey in the murders of the two women, then their deal with Flemmi, who is fact is the worst of the bunch, becomes questionable. All this hoopla about this trial only makes sense if we keep up the fiction that Whitey was worse than Flemmi.

Or I should add also worse than his buddy Martorano. Recall Martorano added Whitey into the murders he and Howie Winter did on behalf of Gerry Angiulo. Whitey wasn’t pulling the trigger but was off some place else in a crash car. I thought the defense would go after this in a bigger way but it pretty much left Martorano’s tales unchallenged. That was because they believed Whitey was probably going to testify and admit his involvement in these crimes. When he didn’t they had to come up with the “sprinkling Whitey in” argument where J.W Carney held up his hand as if he were holding a salt shaker and as he’d mention the murders he’d move it as if he were adding salt to an invisible steak. If Whitey only gets nabbed on 10 murders (only ten?) that makes him half as bad as John Martorano.

What it also shows is the jury has probably reached decisions on many of the other charges before it. It shows there will be no general nullification verdict but the jury will find Whitey guilty of most of the charges. Just finding him guilty of one will keep him in prison for the rest of his life since he turns 84 in less than a month.

What’s left are bragging rights or a matter of legend. We’ll be able to debate whether he was or was not an informant until we are blue in the face because the jury is not considering that issue. We’ll know one way or the other if the government proved he murdered the women, or at least one of them. We may know how much less worse he was than Flemmi or Martorano.

But there is no doubt he is one of the most evil men who walked the streets of the city and he will get his just due. For that, the prosecutors should be pleased although I’d suggest they could have accomplished this in much less time and with many fewer charges.

After Whitey is finally marched off to the shouts of hoorah from the media, and to the relief of most others who see him paying for his crimes, we can then concentrate on more important things like the increasing militarizing of the police and the growing police state in America (Concord, N.H. debating tonight on whether to accept some type of armored tank from Homeland Security to guard against Free Stater terrorists)  and the increasing secretiveness of the FBI (man who kidnapped girl killed by FBI agents, FBI will investigate circumstances of killing and some day down the road they may tell us why the man was killed.)