Gerry Charlotte Phelps

Most Ex-Felons Should Not Vote

    (Image from newsimg.bbc.co.uk)

By ex-felon Gerry Charlotte Phelps (7 1/2 years in prison)

Most ex-felons are still criminals.  They are career criminals, and have not changed.  Most became habitual criminals in their youth, entered the justice system as juvenile delinquents, have been imprisoned more than once, and are likely to go to prison again.  Most had an average of 15 arrests before their most recent imprisonment, and another 3 arrests within 3 years of their release.  They also typically committed many more crimes than the ones for which they were actually arrested.

Since most do not stop being criminals, they can be expecteed to vote as criminals.  Since around 75% of recidivists (repeaters) are thieves of various kinds, they are likely to vote in ways that professional thieves would vote.

What problems would arise from giving more than 3,000,000 ex-felons the vote?  A minor effect is that since most would vote Democrat, the actual balance of power in the United States could be affected.  The more important effect is that they would vote to support those candidates more likely to weaken law enforcement.  This could be expected to cause crime rates to rise.  The continual decrease in crime rates in recent years is due to the fact that more criminals are locked up than before.  If this changes, crime naturally would increase again.  Ex-falons who are still criminals would like to see that happen.  That is how they would vote.

Some argue that it is wrong to put limits on voting by ex-felons, that many have abendoned criminality and have become upstanding citizens, so they should not be denied the vote.  But that needs to be documented.  Before restoring voting rights, first there should be some years of a verifiable track record of no crime, of employment and of being a productive, law-abiding citizen.  Such a verifiable track record is a must.  Since most ex-felons are among the best con artists in the world, we should not rely on their own self-reporting.  We also should not rely much more on references from individuals, since most people can be persuaded into giving a good referral.

Only police and parole or probation records, together with such things as employment and credit records, should be considered.

Until such a verifiable track record of good citizenship has been maintained for years, voting rights should not be restored.  There is too much risk that the ex-felon is still a criminal, and would vote contrary to the interests of law-abiding citizens.

Some argue that the ex-felon has earned the vote, once the imprisonment or parole or probation is over and the "debt to society has been paid."  But there is no such "debt to society."  What the ex-felon has "earned" by serving the time, in prison or in completing parole or probation, is no longer having to be in prison or on parole or probation!  It is regaining freedom of movement and freedom from supervision.  The restoration of civil rights lost, such as the right to vote or bear arms, should depend on proof that the ex-felon has permanently abandoned being a criminal.

Some also argue that if the vote is not restored, it gets in the way of rehabilitating ex-felons.  But that argument is so weak as to be silly.  There is zero evidence that voting has ever rehabilitated any criminals whatsoever.

Rehabilitation is a great thing.  But the rehabilitation of felons is one of the most difficult and resistant of all tasks.  They are the "hard core of the hard core."

Many would-be prison reformers have listened all too well to what felons themselves say.  Felons typically claim that they are criminals because they never had a chance to be anything else.  That lack of education, or racial discrimination, or high unemployment rates, etc., made it impossible for them to earn a living except by crime.

Because of such assumptions, most rehabilitation in prisons is based on education.  Clearly education should happen in every prison.  But studies have shown that education in prison has had no detectable effect on recidivism rates, which are the best measure of any reform or lack of it.  Sadly, despite the many benefits of prison education programs, most prisoners they educate simply become, well, better educated criminals.

So is there no hope for reform programs?  There is, but only when they can be shown to have results.  What does it take to turn an habitual criminal away from crime?  There is only one answer.  That is that nothing will work except for the criminal to make a decision never to commit crime again.  That means completely turning his or her life around.

Some criminals make that decision, then relapse.  But not one criminal ever reforms without making a life-changing "U-turn" decision.

In 7 1/2 years in prison, I observed that a few fellow prisoners were cured of criminalilty just by going to prison, then resolving never to risk that again.  But most who were rehabilitated, however, went through a religious committment first.  Yet even some of those relapsed.

The best results for reform of criminals that I saw came from a life-changing religious experience that does not go away.  That kind of reform program is not well-suited to efforts by governments.  But when they let religious groups come in to have such programs in prisons, theirs are almost the only programs showing much in the way of lasting rehabilitation.

Even then, a religious conversion, in prison or not, is no guarantee of the reformation of any given criminal.  Sometimes it brings no reform at all.  Or there can be a reform, then a relapse.  Or sometimes a felon fakes a conversion, to help beat the case against him or her, or to help make parole.  Many felons do fake it.  Other prisoners decide who is faking it by watching the "convert" for a long time.  They know to watch for actions, not just words.

That kind of guarded attitude is also  the best guarantee for society.  The ex-felon should be watched for actions, not just words.  Society should watch  a long time, looking for concrete, verified, long-term proof that the ex-felon is no longer a criminal.  Only then is it safe for society to restore the right to vote.

_________________

Sources:

"Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 1994," U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, at ojp.gov/bjs/abstract/rpr94.htm .

OCE/CEA Three State Recidivism Study, Sept. 30, 2001, Steurer, Smith and Tracy, at ceanational.org/documents/3StateFinal.pdf..

“FBI: Violent Crime Fell 3 Percent in 2003,” Associated Press, www.foxnews.com, Oct. 25, 2004.

“The Inner Change Freedom Initiative,” Johnson and Larson, Manhattan Institute and Univ. of Pennsylvania, manhattaninstitute.org/innerchange.pdf.

Research suggests that ex-felons of all races lean toward the Democratic Party  http://www.sptimes.com/News/021901/State/Blacks__Allow_ex_felo.shtml

Starting a Gun-Free Zone

                               (Image from onlyhuckabee.com)

Try this - at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0vyxgJLJVA  (2 minutes.)

Drugs Not A Victlimness Or Non-Violent Crime

                                      Mexican Drug Cartels

                                    (Image from Stratfor.com)

One of the things I learned in my 7 1/2 years in prison was that every prisoner I ever knew assumed all drug users are thieves.   Period.   I never ran across one prisoner who did not absolutely believe that.  They would have laughed at anyone who thought otherwise.  Personally, I never talked to a drug user in prison, including those arrested only for drug possession, who did not admit to stealing to feed their habit - usually from their parents first, as they were less likely to call the police.  Then from old people, then from hospital patients using painkillers.

                               Colombian Drug Cartel Bust 

                            (Image from thefreshscent.com)

One of the first things we can assume about any drug user jailed for possession is that they are also almost certainly a thief, even if they were not caught stealing.   Stealing to feed their habit, they steal constantly.  As most prisoners also admitted freely to me and to each other, they were caught only about 10% of the time.  The other 90% of their thefts went unsolved and unpunished.

Afghanistan Opium-Poppy Grower

(Image from s3.amazonaws.com)

What is the point here?  Simply that drug use is never a victimless crime.  Theft is an integral part of almost all drug use.  If it were possession, not theft, for which they were caught, they are still habitual thieves with many, many victims.  Drug use is not a victimless crime.

Second, drug use and the accompanying habitual stealing can lead a user to unplanned violence, usually to escape being caught.  But even more, and worse, violence comes from those who supply drugs to that user, including a huge part of all murders and assaults.  Even if all an offender does is use drugs, that very use supports and generates all that violence.  Drugs are not a non-violent crime.. 

The drug trade is extremely profitable.  Guaranteed, life-long customers, easily hooked when young and dumb.  A crop that can help poor peasants make a better living.  A product that is sold for huge profits.  A trade that can be monopolized and controlled by those violent enough to get rid of the competition.  Such vast amounts of money that governments, armies and agencies can be corrupted and bought.  Such power that even whole countries can be taken over - Colombia and Mexico, very close.  Russia, if not for Putin's ruthless counter measures.  And easy financing from the drug trade for terrorists the world over.  The jungle guerrillas of South and Central America.  Jihadists of South Asia and the Middle East, including Viet Nam, Thailand,  Iran, Afghanistan and many others.

Drugs are criminal on an international scale.  They bring large-scale slaughter to many innocent people.  They bring destabilizing large-scale corruption to many countries.  They help terrorists keep their murderous organizations going.  Just the losses from the theft committed by users alone amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Drug users have many victims and cause much violent crime.  They do it by being the foundation of the great market that drives the drug trade.  If we want to stop the evils of the drug trade, we have to stop the market.

Some will answer that we are dealing with something that has existed throughout history, something genetic perhaps.  But that view comes from the stubborn resistance of the Boomer generation to seeing any history that happened before they were old enough to remember events. 

In the 1800s in America, there were some opiates like Laudenum used for popular medicines, before their addictive nature was commonly known.  That stopped.  Then came the popular use of cocaine in Coca-Cola.  That stopped too.  Then came most of the 20th century, in which recreational drug use was nearly unknown, except, it was believed, for musicians who played in bars and nightclubs. 

The date the large-scale drug culture began in the U.S. was 1964, when Harvard professor Timothy Leary urged students to "Tune in, turn on and drop out."  Drug use soared among the young then, and became a new but persistent part of the Cultural Revolution and today's youth culture. 

It is a relatively new thing, here and in Europe, feeding on the huge U.S. and EU drug markets.  It is cultural, not genetic.  That means that it is not impossible to change it.  That is the important thing to remember in making drug policy.  We cannot afford to give up on this one.  It simply has too many victims and too much violence.

Take Your Choice - Parents or Prisons?

                                       (Image from koze950.com)

By Chuck Colson on Breakpoint, 6/24/2004, here .

I've been going into prisons for nearly three decades. In that time some things have changed: For example, there's a hardness in the faces of prisoners, particularly young ones, that wasn't there ten years ago.

Still, many things remain the same. For one thing, prisons are still filled with men and women from broken families. In nearly every respect, our prisons are a cautionary tale about the dangers of weakening traditional family structures. The question is: Are we listening?

The link between family breakdown and crime is well-established to the point of being almost indisputable. It's estimated that between two-thirds and three-quarters of all inmates grew up in something other than an intact two-parent home. In some juvenile corrections systems, like that of Wisconsin, the number is closer to ninety percent.

Economist Jennifer Roback Morse summed up this link neatly in a recent Policy Review article: "Without parents -- two of them, married to each other, working together as a team -- a child is more likely to end up in the criminal justice system at some point in his life." "More likely," in this case, means at least twice as likely. And in lieu of family, what a child does is join a gang.

The problems don't end there. As Morse puts it, "if a child finds himself in the criminal justice system . . . the prison will perform the parental function of supervising and controlling that person's behavior." The problem is that this supervision is, to put it mildly, a poor substitute for the mixture of love and discipline that only real parents can provide.

What's more, prisons abound with what Morse calls "family substitutes," fellow inmates who teach young offenders how to be "better" criminals. I saw it when I was in prison. Is it any wonder that recidivism rates are so high?

The cost of family breakdown is felt by more than the offender and his victim. Every twinge of fear you feel when you go out at night can be partially attributed to the effects of family breakdown. The same is true of every one of your tax dollars that goes to law enforcement and corrections, instead of other worthwhile purposes.

This brings me to the obvious question: If the effects of family breakdown are indisputably calamitous, why are we so intent on accelerating the breakdown? Whether it's the refusal to treat two-parent families as normative in textbooks, an increasing problem, or the deconstruction of marriage inherent in the campaign for same-sex "marriage," the effect is the same: The one institution that we depend on to instill "the basic self-control and reciprocity that a free society takes for granted" is diminished.

That's because marriage, in the sense of working together as a team and making the sacrifices necessary to raise good kids, is hard work. If people are taught that it's merely one lifestyle choice among many, we are more likely to opt for an easier way of living. Then it will be a case, as Morse demonstrates, of "sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind."

That's why we need to help our neighbors understand what's at stake in the debate over the family and the Federal Marriage Amendment. They may think that we're talking about purely private choices, but as corrections officials will tell you, the consequences are often all too public.

The Root Cause of Crime

"Fatherlessness: The Root Cause - The Link Between Crime and Fatherlessness is Astonishing," by  David Kopel, Independence Institute in National Review Online on 5/02/00, here.

Roger Clegg’s article detailing the continuing rise in illegitimacy rates is terrible news not just for the children themselves, but for every potential crime victim in America. For all the talk about the complexities of the “root causes” of crime, there is one root cause which overwhelms all the rest: fatherlessness.

As Pat Moynihan wrote in 1965: “From the wild Irish slums of the nineteenth-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring a stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos… [In such a society] crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out the whole social structure — these are not only to be expected, they are virtually inevitable.”

A Detroit study found that about 70 percent of juvenile homicide perpetrators did not live with both parents. Another study found that of girls committed to the California Youth Authority (for serious delinquents), 93 percent came from non-intact homes. Nationally, seventy percent of youths incarcerated in state reform institutions come from single-parent or no-parent homes. A survey of juvenile delinquents in state custody in Wisconsin found that fewer than 1/6 came from intact families; over two-fifths were illegitimate.

Said one counselor at a juvenile detention facility in California: “You find a gang member who comes from a complete nuclear family, a kid who has never been exposed [to] any kind of abuse, I’d like to meet him… a real gangbanger who comes from a happy, balanced home, who’s got a good opinion himself. I don’t think that kid exists.”

Young black males from single-parent families are twice as likely to engage in crime as young black males from two-parent families. If the single-parent family is in a neighborhood with a large number of other single-parent families, the odds of the young man becoming involved in crime are tripled. These findings are based on a study conducted for the Department of Health and Human Services by M. Anne Hill and June O’Neill of Baruch College. The study held constant all socioeconomic variables (such as income, parental education, or urban setting) other than single parenthood.

Crime has often been thought to be a problem of race or poverty, since poor people and racial minorities comprise a larger portion of the violent criminal population than of the population as a whole. But in fact, the causal link between fatherlessness and crime “is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime,” as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted in her famous “Dan Quayle was Right” article.

William Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute, observes that most variables that are said to determine the crime rate have not changed since 1960. Male unemployment, the poverty rate, and the percentage of church members has stayed approximately the same. Urbanization has increased slightly but hardly enough to explain crime search. Since 1960, real personal income per capita doubled, and so has the number of police per capita. “The one condition that has changed substantially,” Niskanen writes, “is the percentage of births [to] single mothers, increasing to 5 percent in 1960 [and] to 28 percent in 1991.” (And, as Clegg explains, to an even higher rate in 1999.)

There is another association between illegitimacy and crime: unwed fathers are more likely to commit crimes than are married fathers. If you see two young men walking towards you on a lonely, dark street, you may start to worry. But if one of the men is holding the hand of a small child, your worries vanish. Marriage and mating really do civilize men, but mere sex and reproduction do not.

Although misguided welfare policies helped spur the rise in illegitimacy, the continued growth in illegitimacy, notwithstanding welfare reform in 1996, suggests a widespread breakdown in social mores, extending far beyond the ranks of welfare recipients. How to fix that problem is the most important question for persons who care about crime control in the long run. Compared to the disaster of illegitimacy, almost everything else on today’s “anti-crime” agenda is a trivial distraction.

Speaking at the 1999 NRA Convention in Denver, the late Vikki Buckley (Colorado’s Secretary of State) brought the crowd to its feet when she explained: “Those who would run the NRA out of town need to look at our own children who are engaging in irresponsible sex and having children they cannot take care of. Such irresponsible sex is a new age hate crime — raise as much heck about that as you do the NRA and you will save more lives in 5 years than are taken with guns in a century.”

Citations for the material in this article can be found in Kopel’s book Guns: Who Should Have Them? (Prometheus Books, 1995).

As Pat Moynihan wrote in 1965: “From the wild Irish slums of the nineteenth-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring a stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos… [In such a society] crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out the whole social structure — these are not only to be expected, they are virtually inevitable.”

A Detroit study found that about 70 percent of juvenile homicide perpetrators did not live with both parents. Another study found that of girls committed to the California Youth Authority (for serious delinquents), 93 percent came from non-intact homes. Nationally, seventy percent of youths incarcerated in state reform institutions come from single-parent or no-parent homes. A survey of juvenile delinquents in state custody in Wisconsin found that fewer than 1/6 came from intact families; over two-fifths were illegitimate.

Said one counselor at a juvenile detention facility in California: “You find a gang member who comes from a complete nuclear family, a kid who has never been exposed [to] any kind of abuse, I’d like to meet him… a real gangbanger who comes from a happy, balanced home, who’s got a good opinion himself. I don’t think that kid exists.”

Young black males from single-parent families are twice as likely to engage in crime as young black males from two-parent families. If the single-parent family is in a neighborhood with a large number of other single-parent families, the odds of the young man becoming involved in crime are tripled. These findings are based on a study conducted for the Department of Health and Human Services by M. Anne Hill and June O’Neill of Baruch College. The study held constant all socioeconomic variables (such as income, parental education, or urban setting) other than single parenthood.

Crime has often been thought to be a problem of race or poverty, since poor people and racial minorities comprise a larger portion of the violent criminal population than of the population as a whole. But in fact, the causal link between fatherlessness and crime “is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime,” as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted in her famous “Dan Quayle was Right” article.

William Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute, observes that most variables that are said to determine the crime rate have not changed since 1960. Male unemployment, the poverty rate, and the percentage of church members has stayed approximately the same. Urbanization has increased slightly but hardly enough to explain crime search. Since 1960, real personal income per capita doubled, and so has the number of police per capita. “The one condition that has changed substantially,” Niskanen writes, “is the percentage of births [to] single mothers, increasing to 5 percent in 1960 [and] to 28 percent in 1991.” (And, as Clegg explains, to an even higher rate in 1999.)

There is another association between illegitimacy and crime: unwed fathers are more likely to commit crimes than are married fathers. If you see two young men walking towards you on a lonely, dark street, you may start to worry. But if one of the men is holding the hand of a small child, your worries vanish. Marriage and mating really do civilize men, but mere sex and reproduction do not.

Although misguided welfare policies helped spur the rise in illegitimacy, the continued growth in illegitimacy, notwithstanding welfare reform in 1996, suggests a widespread breakdown in social mores, extending far beyond the ranks of welfare recipients. How to fix that problem is the most important question for persons who care about crime control in the long run. Compared to the disaster of illegitimacy, almost everything else on today’s “anti-crime” agenda is a trivial distraction.

Speaking at the 1999 NRA Convention in Denver, the late Vikki Buckley (Colorado’s Secretary of State) brought the crowd to its feet when she explained: “Those who would run the NRA out of town need to look at our own children who are engaging in irresponsible sex and having children they cannot take care of. Such irresponsible sex is a new age hate crime — raise as much heck about that as you do the NRA and you will save more lives in 5 years than are taken with guns in a century.”

Citations for the material in this article can be found in Kopel’s book Guns: Who Should Have Them? (Prometheus Books, 1995).

Resources:

DeMint and J. David Woodard, Why We Whisper: Restoring Our Right to Say It’s Wrong (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., January 2008).

Star Parker, White Ghetto (Thomas Nelson, March 2006).

Dave Kopel, “Fatherlessness: The Root Cause,” National Review Online, 2 May 2000.

BreakPoint Commentary No. 080501, “The Whisper Zone: Why We’re Losing Our Right to Speak Out.”

BreakPoint Commentary No. 040624, “Take Your Choice: Parents or Prisons?”

Stephen Baskerville, “The Politics of Fatherhood,” Fathers for Life, December 2002.

Stephen Baskerville, “The Criminalization of Fatherhood,” Fathers for Life, September 2000.

Sara McLanahan, “Father Absence and the Welfare Children,” Network on the Family and the Economy.

Fathers for Life also provides statistics on Children of Divorce and Separation: Consequence of Father Absence.

Also for further study, see a full statistical overview on the Myths and Facts about Fatherlessness.

For further reading of the effect of fatherlessness visit links on Fathers for Life homepage.

David MacRae, “The Root Causes of Crime,” The Contrarian, June 2000.

Catherine Claire, “Abortion Changes You,” The Point, 30 April 2008.

Indianapolis Robber Shoots Pregnant Teller in Stomach

Have you seen this jerk?

He leaped over the bank counter, shot one person, grabbed the money and ran.  The teller  he shot was 5 months pregnant, with twins.  That would make her tummy very big, very noticeably big.  There was no way he would not see that she was very pregnant.  Where did he shoot her?  In the abdomen. 

The bullet missed both the twins.  But they and their mom are still in critical condition in the hospital.

The Indianapolis police want this guy real bad.  Can you help?

Story at http://dotherightthing-cyberpastor.blogspot.com/2008/04/outrage-in-indy-do-you-know-this-person.html .

A Better Way To Handle Thieves?

         (Image from monarch-security.co.uk)

This is "A Step In The Right Direction" from Guest Blogger Rubel Shelly, at www.RubelShelly.com.

Some of the things we do in the name of justice don't make a lot of sense.  I was marginally involved several years ago in a case that serves to illustrate my point.  A man who had fraudulantly used a credit card for several hundred dollars was sentenced to 11 months and 29 days in jail.

The reason behind his use of the credit card made it impossible for him to make amends or make a deal.  (He was flat broke.)  His wife and two children became the responsibility of others.  (She was pregnant with their third child.)  And the year in jail made the marriage harder to hold together and did nothing to repay the fellow whose card he had misused.  (I don't know if the poor guy ever got his money back or his credit score cleaned. up.)

Why don't we do more things like the Hebrew justice system required?  A man who stole a neighbor's sheep, for example, didn't go to jail for a year.  He had to restore four sheep for every one he took.  If he took an ox, it was a five-for-one restitution that was required.  Get the picture?  The community didn't house and feed him in jail for a year.  The thief worked, sacrificed and lived with the community's awareness of his sin.  Still punishment and victim compensation.

This concept of making restitution is what makes me appreciate the thing Adnan and Tiffany McKinnon did a few months back.  They had been gone from their home near Montgomery, Alabama, for a week.  When they got back, the surprise awaiting them was that a burglar had looted the place.

They entered their home, Mrs. McKinnon saw a practically empty house, and she burst into tears.  Not only were her possessions gone but her new house had been ransacked.  "Tears just rolled down my face," she said, "as I walked in and saw everything gone and piles of trash all over my house."

Mr. McKinnon dashed through the house to investigate - and caught the thief red-handed.  He had apparently freelanced the operation and done it solo.  He was making one more trip to the house to pick up a few remaining items of value and walked into the homeowner - wearing Mr. McKinnon's hat no less!

Adnan McKinnon took charge.  He held the thief at gunpoint, while Tiffany called the police.  Then he decided there was no need for him and his wife to have to undo all the chaos the 33-year-old bungling burglar had wreaked.  So he forced him to pick up trash, put broken and discarded items back in place, and clean up the house he had wrecked in their absence.

When the police arrived, the thief had the gall to complain about being forced to clean up the mess he had made.  The policeman laughed and told him that somebody else might have shot him dead.  The whining stopped.

Maybe the McKinnons could make a lecture tour to law schools across the country to explain the basics of restitution.  I think they're onto something.

Heroic Israeli Prof Dies Protecting VT Students

Monday, April 16, 2007

World Renowned US-Israeli Professor, Liviu Librescu, Killed in Virginia Tech Shooting - Actions Described as Heroic.

The names of the victims have not been officially released, but it has been confirmed that one of the victims in the Virginia Tech shooting was a Senior Researcher and Lecturer, Professor Liviu Librescu of Israel.

In speaking of her father in law, Ayala Librescu said "He has been teaching there for 20 years, and was a senior, world-renowned lecturer. He is the professor with the highest number of publications in the history of Virginia Tech. In the past, he taught at Tel Aviv University and the Technion," she added.

Witnesses described the professors actions as heroic: One of Lebrescu's students, Alec Calhoun said "When students realized the sounds were gunshots, they started flipping over desks for hiding places. Others dashed to the windows of the second-floor classroom, kicking out the screens and jumping from the ledge of the room." Calhoun said that just before he climbed out the window, he turned to look at the professor (Librescu), who had stayed behind to block the door. He was killed by gunshots while attempting to block the gunman's entrance.

Prof Librescu and his wife are both Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Israel from Romania. the Communist regime had tried to prevent him from immigrating. He was allowed to leave the country only after the Israeli prime minister at the time Menachem Begin personally appealed to then Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. years later, Librescu left for a sabbatical in the United States and has remained here since. His first son, Arieh, lives in Israel, while his other son, Joe, resides in the US. Librescu's colleagues described him as a "true gentleman."

It is truly shocking that such an accomplished man who survived the holocaust and rose to such prominence in his field (Material Stress), would die in such a senseless way. May he rest in peace and may his family find strength in the face of such a devastating loss.


More First Hand Testimony on the Hero Professor: 'I don't think my teacher got out':

Junior Richard Mallalieu said he and about 20 classmates instantly dropped to the floor, ducking under and behind desks for what sounded like the first 10 shots. Their next move became instantly clear: Get out. Mallalieu said his professor held the door shut while students darted to the windows. Some climbed on desks, ledges and a radiator cover to pull down the screens and kick at the metal-framed glass, Mallalieu said. Three windows easily gave way and swung open on hinges as the gunshots got louder.

Closer....

It's Too Early for 'Healing'

___________

(With apologies, this post was copied entire from the Neocon Express at http://neoconexpress.blogspot.com/2007/04/world-renowned-israeli-professor-liviu.html.  The speed of developments and the significance of this crime overrode my usual prudence about such practice.  Gerry)