INTERNATIONAL
SATURDAY, MAY 27, 2017
Prisoner executed in 8th date with death
WASHINGTON: Tommy Arthur was executed late
Thursday after his eighth, and final, rendezvous with
the US state of Alabama’s capital punishment system.
The 75-year-old was given a lethal injection after the
US Supreme Court allowed the execution to proceed
by denying the inmate’s stay requests. Arthur’s death
ends a legal saga spanning more than three decades
in which he became known by some as the Houdini
of death row, managing to evade his final sentence
seven times.
He was first sentenced to death back in 1983 for a
murder he denies committing. Since then, the southern US state has executed 58 people - an end Arthur
had until now dodged. “Thomas Arthur’s protracted
attempt to escape justice is finally at an end,”
Alabama’s Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a
statement released following the execution. In lastminute appeals Arthur’s lawyers had challenged the
injection method to be used on Thursday and asked
that a cellphone be put in the death chamber in the
event that something went awry - requests the
nation’s highest court denied.
In her dissenting opinion Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Kennedy was a
school prankster
BOSTON: Years before he captained the torpedo boat PT109, ran for office or set the United States on a path to put
a man on the moon, President John F Kennedy was a troublesome teen whose hijinks nearly got him kicked out of
his prestigious boarding school. The scion of a wealthy
Boston family, Kennedy spent his mid-teens at
Connecticut’s elite Choate Rosemary Hall, where he
excelled at history and literature - but infuriated the
school’s headmaster by organizing pranks as a member of
an unofficial school club known as “The Muckers”.
Those details of the early life of the 35th president,
whose term was cut short by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas
in 1963, emerge in a new exhibit at Boston’s John F
Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, timed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth on May 29,
1917. Pages from a high school scrapbook, diligently filled
out by the man who would go on to become the first
Roman Catholic president, show he loved ancient history,
music and football, as well as “beefing,” slang for complaining or arguing. Despite his later fame as an orator, he
never got higher than the middling grade of C+ in public
speaking, according to the school.
“Got shot at today for calling an old farmer a bad
name,” reads an entry written by a 17-year-old Kennedy
on Oct 19, 1934. “Almost got hit.” The scrapbook pages are
among 40 Kennedy relics never before publicly exhibited,
with notes extending to his years at Harvard University
and the London School of Economics, before his World
War Two service aboard torpedo boats and well before his
first successful run for Congress in 1947. Kennedy went on
the serve in the Senate before being elected president in
1960, at the start of one of the most tumultuous decades
in US history. “That’s why I so love this scrapbook, because
it is so revealing about who he was at the time,” said Stacey
Bredhoff, the museum’s curator. Kennedy and his prankster
friends went head-to-head with Choate’s headmaster,
George St John, in his years at the school. The “Muckers”
club took its name from a speech in which St John excoriated pranksters, using the label applied to Irish immigrants
whose only work was shoveling up horse manure.
The group took the idea and ran with it, commissioning
gold shovel pins and hatching a plot to pile horse manure
in the school gymnasium. “George St John got wind of it
and even though the prank never was actualized, it was
enough that they would even consider such a thing, so he
threatened to expel them all,” but eventually relented,
said Judy Donald, the school’s archivist. The details of the
group’s successful pranks may be lost to time. But Donald
said an oft-told tale that a young Kennedy blew up a
school toilet with a powerful firecracker known as a cherry
bomb is not true - while that incident did occur, it was the
work of another student a decade later. “St John was
understandably angry,” Donald said. “But JFK was not
responsible for that one.” — Reuters
noted the risks of the
lethal injection protocols, writing: “When
Thomas Arthur enters
the execution chamber
tonight, he will leave his
constitutional rights at
the door.”
‘Houdini no more’
His case had angered
both opponents and
supporters of the death
Tommy Arthur
sentence: The former
saw his endless run-ins with execution as a form of
psychological torture, while those who supported
the sentence see Arthur and his legal team as constantly playing the system to cheat justice. “Thomas
Arthur is an escape artist,” said Janette Grantham,
director of the advocacy group Victims of Crime and
Leniency (VOCAL). “He has used every trick in the
books to manipulate the courts for over 34 years. He
has used every trick possible to manipulate the pub-
lic into believing he is innocent,” she said. “Hopefully
Houdini’s bag of tricks is empty and he is finally going
down. No Houdini no more.”
Arthur was found guilty of conspiring with his thenlover Judy Wicker to murder her husband Troy so that
she could cash in on his life insurance. She was
accused of paying Arthur $10,000 for the hit. Arthur
had already served five years for the 1977 murder of
his sister-in-law and was out of jail on work release at
the time. He admitted to the previous killing, which he
says was an accident and blames on being drunk. But
he has always denied murdering Wicker.
Prior to the execution Troy Wicker’s niece had told
Alabama media that the execution would give surviving family members closure after decades of pain.
“There are no words to describe the living hell that
this has been for the Wicker family. We are hoping
and praying that the execution is not delayed any
further,” Vicky Wilkerson told AL.com. “Our family
deserves closure and justice for the loss of (Wicker)
and the nightmare that we have lived through,” she
said. “Tommy Arthur placed our family through a living hell for a pathetic $10,000 payout.” — AFP
How a Haiti child sex
ring was whitewashed
UN system blamed for atrocities
COLOMBO: When a Haitian teenager
alleged that she had been raped and
sodomized by a Sri Lankan peacekeeper,
the government here dispatched a highranking general suspected of war crimes
to lead the investigation. He didn’t interview the accuser or medical staff who
examined her, but he cleared the peacekeeper - who remained in the Sri Lankan
military. “A suspected war criminal is the
wrong person to conduct an investigation into alleged crimes committed by a
peacekeeper,” said Andreas Schuller of
the European Center for Constitutional
and Human Rights, a Berlin-based group
that helped launch the complaint.
It wasn’t the first time that accusations
against Sri Lankan peacekeepers were
swept aside. In 2007, a group of
orphaned Haitian children identified 134
Sri Lankans who gave them food for sex
in a child sex ring that went on for three
years, an AP investigation found. In that
case, which was corroborated by UN
investigators, the Sri Lankan military
repatriated 114 of the peacekeepers, but
none was ever jailed. In fact, Sri Lanka has
never prosecuted a single soldier for sexual misconduct while serving in a peacekeeping mission abroad, the AP found.
A culture of impunity that arose during Sri Lanka’s civil war has seeped into
its peacekeeping missions. The government has consistently refused calls for
independent investigations into its generation-long internal conflict, marked by
widespread reports of rape camps, torture, mass killings and other alleged war
crimes by its troops. Despite those unresolved allegations, the UN has deployed
thousands of peacekeepers from Sri
Lanka. This is a pattern repeated around
the world: Strapped for troops, the UN
draws recruits from many countries with
poor human rights records for its peacekeeping program, budgeted at nearly $8
billion this year.
An AP investigation last month found
that, in the past 12 years, an estimated
2,000 such allegations have been lev-
KUKULEGANGA, Sri Lanka: In this Sept 13, 2016 photo, Sri Lanka air force airmen train for deployment as UN peacekeepers at the Institute of Peace
Support Operations Training. —AP
eled at UN peacekeepers and personnel. woman said in testimony shared with
That tally could change as UN officials the AP that she was kidnapped by
update their records and reconcile data masked men, taken to what she believes
from old files. Many of today’s 110,000 was an army camp, and repeatedly
or so peacekeepers come from unstable raped. One of her tormentors was
and violent countries. Congolese troops, brought to the room she shared with
for example, also have been accused of four other women. “He was asked to
rape, torture and killings during the take his pick,” she told the International
longstanding war in their country; as Truth and Justice Project. “He looked
peacekeepers, they have faced allega- around and chose me. And took me to
tions of sexual abuse and exploitation.
another room and raped me.”
Robert O Blake, who served as the US
ambassador to Sri Lanka from 2006 to
Jagath Dias
2009, was one of many officials who
She identified him from a series of
pressed the Sri Lankan government for photographs. The AP found that the solmore transparency into alleged wartime dier, an officer, went on to become a UN
abuses. As for the peacekeepers, he said, peacekeeper. During the last months of
“You are there to keep the peace. If they the civil war that ended eight years ago,
themselves are guilty of atrocities, clear- Maj Gen Jagath Dias led an army divily they are not suitable candidates for sion whose troops were accused of
peacekeeping operations.”
attacking civilians and bombing a
Eight years after Sri Lanka’s war end- church, a hospital and other humanitaried in 2009, people who have fled the an outposts. Nevertheless, when a
country are increasingly coming forward teenager said she was raped by a peaceto give horrific accounts of camps where keeper in Haiti, Dias was dispatched to
they say they were gang-raped. One investigate the 2013 case. — AP