WickedHate posted:

It sounds simplistic, but they kind of have a point. If the government wants someone dead, the availability of capital punishment probably doesn't factor into the equation. The CIA, cops, military, or whoever else will be in charge of assassinating you sure won't mind if you vote against it.

Delivery McGee posted:

The CIA isn't allowed to assassinate heads of state, because of an executive order from I think Gerald Ford. Specifically the CIA and only for presidents/monarchs/etc. The local cops can pretty much get away with anything, and the military kinda has to do their thing when needed (though tbh, sometimes they're not needed but sent anyway; "ours is but to do and die" and all.)

Solice Kirsk posted:

When was the last time a monarch/head of state was assassinated? I think there was one in the Philippines a decade or so ago right?

Pick posted:

Depends on what you mean by "assassinated", Gadaffi died in 2011. They're not that common.

WickedHate posted:

Or were innocent and died during much shorter sentence, or were innocent and got out so traumatized and fundimentally hosed with by the experience that they ended up committing a crime for real.

The prison system is fuuuuuuuuuuucked.

MightyJoe36 posted:

Something to consider when advocating for abolishing capital punishment.

Jedit posted:

Gaddafi wasn't assassinated, he was executed without trial. Assassination implies that the deceased was not a captive of his killers. Also if they were, they would generally have been deposed first.

Anyway: the last officially assassinated sitting head of state was the President of Guinea-Bissau in 2009.

MightyJoe36 posted:

First off, I totally agree that the prison system, and the criminal justice system are both hosed and could use some SERIOUS reforms.

However, there's one point that always gets overlooked when discussing capital punishment - closure for the victim's family members.

I'm not talking about closure in the sense of revenge, I'm talking about closure in the sense that once the murderer is executed, it's over and they can start the healing process.

If the murderer is sent to prison for "life," unless it's one of those cases where they get life without the possibility of parole, or seven consecutive life sentences, or 750 years in prison, etc., they are going to keep coming up for parole.

Yes, in a lot of cases (e.g., Charles Manson) it's just a formality and you know they are never getting parole, but the victim's family still has to go and testify at the parole hearing and relive the whole thing over and over again.

People get old, memories fade, and the guy who was the "heinous butcher" in 1978 becomes the "harmless old man" in 2018 and there's few if any people who remember the facts of the case and how brutal and horrible his crime was, and prisons are overcrowded, and hey, why don't we just let this poor old man live out his life in a nursing home.

Something to consider when advocating for abolishing capital punishment.

A Pinball Wizard posted:

i too remember the time they let that serial rapist retire to reverie village assisted living community because his victim's brother failed the trivia round of the parole hearing

yo rear end is grass posted:

If you think about it, we've all been given the death penalty.

Ugato posted:

I was raised as a Baptist and what really turned me away from it was just the constant hypocrisy I was confronted with. But I'm not trying to bring up that whole here - just for context.

This is very for me that they had the balls to call the death penalty un-Christian. Not that it really is or isn't, specifically. I just admire them a lot for that. The rest brings me back to but that's nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to topics like this. Thanks for the story/info.

quote:

As the syringe filled, Kane noticed a chemical smell to the blood. Kane handed the syringe to Welch and leaned closer to the dying woman to try to trace the odor’s source. Welch sniffed the syringe and smelled something, too: I thought it would smell like chemotherapy, the way the blood smells putrid when people are taking some of those drugs. Instead, Welch says, it smelled like ammonia. She passed the syringe to Julie Gorchynski, a medical resident who noticed unusual manila-colored particles floating in the blood--an observation echoed by Humberto Ochoa, the doctor in charge of the emergency room, who was helping treat Ramirez.

Kane turned toward the door of the trauma room and swayed. Catch her! someone shouted. Ochoa lunged for Kane, caught her, and gently guided her limp body to the floor. Kane said that her face was burning, and she was put on a gurney and taken from trauma one. Gorchynski too began feeling queasy. Complaining that she was light-headed, she left the trauma room and sat at a nurse’s desk. A staff member asked Gorchynski if she was okay, but before she could respond she slumped to the floor. She was now the second member of the Riverside emergency room staff being wheeled away from the trauma room on a gurney. Gorchynski shook intermittently; over and over again she would stop breathing for several seconds, take a few breaths, then stop breathing again--a condition known as apnea. Meanwhile, back in trauma one, Welch became the third to succumb. I remember hearing someone scream, Welch says. Then when I woke up, I couldn’t control the movements of my limbs.

Balderas endured bouts of apnea during a ten-day hospitalization. Gorchynski, the most severely ill, spent two weeks in intensive care, where in addition to apnea she suffered from hepatitis, pancreatitis, and avascular necrosis, a condition in which bone tissue is starved of blood and begins to die. In her case the avascular necrosis attacked her knees, restricting her to crutches for months. It takes a really drat potent toxin to do all that, says Sheldon Wagner, a clinical toxicologist at Oregon State University.

That surreal night would throw Riverside General Hospital into newspapers and tv news broadcasts for weeks, as the frightening possibility of a human body releasing toxic fumes captured the public’s imagination. It also triggered one of the most extensive investigations in forensic history--medical detectives from ten local, state, and federal outfits examined dozens of potential culprits, from poisonous sewer gas to mass hysteria. So far, all the suspects have beaten the rap, except for one extraordinary hypothesis: a team of researchers think that a chain of chemical reactions may essentially have turned Gloria Ramirez’s body into a canister of nerve gas.

Cat Potency posted:

Bulgaroctonus posted:

Hey, thanks for the second link, I've read about this case before, but never heard the meth precursor hypothesis. Seems a hell of a lot more plausible, especially considering how shady the hospital and coroner's were behaving.

quote:

Almost immediately after Ramirez's death, crucial evidence began disappearing.
The syringe used to draw her blood couldn't be found. After dodging questions over its whereabouts for several weeks, Riverside County spokesman Tom DeSantis finally confirmed it was missing. He told reporters it did not occur to the Fire Department to retrieve it the night of February 19.

But nurse Sally Jo McCorkle, the last person to handle the syringe that night, said in sworn testimony in the Ramirez lawsuit that the Fire Department's hazardous-materials specialists did inquire about the needle. McCorkle said she was asked by both the HAZMAT crew and her supervisor where, exactly, she had disposed of the syringe and how they could find it.

The blood taken from Ramirez at the hospital before she died also disappeared, according to notes obtained by New Times that were written by Tom Hanley, Southern California regional manager for Cal/OSHA.

Meanwhile, Ramirez's IV bag, another possible source of the fumes, was sent to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for testing, according to Riverside Chief Deputy Coroner Cupido. But Cupido recently acknowledged in a deposition that he never bothered to follow up with the FDA, failing to call and find out whether the bag had indeed been tested. (An FDA spokeswoman refused to confirm whether her agency received or tested the bag.)

Other materials--IV tubing, towels, bedding, and clothing worn by the ER staff--were packed into barrels and sent to a desert waste facility, where they baked in the sun for the next several months, according to a deposition by Kent Livingston, the county's risk manager. No tests were performed on the materials.

Livingston said that when he went to the desert dump to look over the evidence four months after Ramirez died, he discovered that none of it had been tagged and that nearly all of it was spoiled.

"There were no labels on any of the items in there," he said. "It was as though they had collected up bags, red bags filled with items, thrown them in a barrel, sealed the barrel and shipped it....I can honestly say that everything I saw out there is useless except for a couple of items."


Despite the high-profile nature of the Ramirez case, the county did not have a chain of custody indicating who was in charge of what evidence and when, Livingston said. He also admitted that no one made any effort to figure out how the evidence should be preserved.


The Ramirez episode left Riverside County facing some hair-raising liability problems. A young mother--who, doctors say, was likely to live at least another year despite her cancer--was dead. A young doctor wound up in intensive care. Five other Riverside General staffers had been hospitalized.
Sure enough, the county was later hit with two lawsuits: one by Ramirez's family, the other by Dr. Gorchynski. The physician, who subsequently spent three months in a wheelchair and experienced debilitating knee injuries and bleeding in her brain, is seeking $6 million in damages; the Ramirez family has not yet specified an amount.
Both suits, expected to go to trial this fall, charge that county and state officials deliberately destroyed evidence and covered up the release of some kind of toxic or dangerous substance in the ER. The Ramirez suit specifically names Cal/OSHA; Ken Cohen, the head of Riverside County's Health Services Agency; Coroner Hill; and other high-ranking county and hospital officials.

"The way they handled the evidence is consistent with a total cover-up," says Ronald Schwartz, a Newport Beach attorney representing the Ramirez family.
Peter Osinoff, a Los Angeles lawyer representing Cohen and the county health agency, denies there was a meth lab in the hospital or that county officials covered it up. "There've never been so many [government] agencies looking into the same thing," he says. "You had the county, OSHA, the state. There's not a shred of evidence as to a cover-up." A Cal/OSHA spokesman also denied a cover-up.
The Ramirez family's suit was fueled in part by anger at how the county handled her corpse.

For a month after she died, bereaved relatives regularly called the coroner's office asking when her body would be released. The family wanted an independent autopsy done on the body and, after that, they wanted to bury it.
The response by county officials? They sued the family.
The county wanted a judge to order the family to follow the sameextraordinary autopsy protocol the coroner's office had as a condition of releasing the body. But it came out during court hearings on the lawsuit that the coroner's office had secretlyperformed a second autopsy several weeks after Ramirez died--withoutbothering to follow many of the original protective measures they later demanded of the family.
Under pressure to explain their actions, coroner's officials said they simply were finishing what they hadn't the first time around. But Cal/OSHA's Cox believes they had another motive. "When they did the second autopsy they wanted to make sure the chemicals Ramirez had been injected with or exposed to had sufficiently dissipated," says Cox. "There are many chemicals that have a half-life and disappear over time."

Even though county officials acted as if it were normal to conduct anautopsy in two acts, others who cut up bodies for a living say it is not standard procedure. "Normally we do autopsies all at one time," says Scott Carrier, a spokesman for the L.A. County Coroner's Office. "A veteran pathologist should be able to do an autopsy all in one setting."

During one hearing on the county's suit, Riverside Superior Court Judge Victor Miceli criticized coroner's officials for conducting the second autopsy and not informing the Ramirez family so their pathologist could attend. The county's actions, said Miceli, gave "the appearance to the public that the county is trying to hide something." The judge then ordered county officials to answer questions under oath about the Ramirez investigation. Only hours before they were to begin doing so, the county abruptly withdrew its suit.

Two months after Ramirez died, her body was finally released. Despite county promises of cooperation, the corpse was delivered in poor condition to an Orange County pathologist hired by her family to conduct an independent autopsy. For one thing, it was badly decomposed. And all of Ramirez's internal organs--removed during the Riverside autopsies--had been slopped together in a plastic bag as if they were turkey giblets. Strangely, her heart was missing.


Even today, three years later, Ramirez's heart has not been released by the county. Asked during a deposition if there was any medical reason to keep it, Coroner Hill replied, "I don't know of any."


Hill ruled that Ramirez died from heart and kidney failure stemming from her cervical cancer. But the Ramirez family's pathologist said he wasn't able to determine a cause of death because her heart was missing, her other organs were cross-contaminated with fecal matter, and her body was so badly decomposed.


"Gloria was held hostage so long so that our autopsy would have no meaningful results," Gloria's brother-in-law, David Garcia, said at the time. "I think the county has already found out how she died and wanted to make sure we did not find out."

Cat Potency posted:

I love this thread, but sometimes I feel like it gets into really tiresome "PYF serial killer/child rapist" territory when i'd much prefer more of the "PYF unsolved airline disaster/medical mystery/catastrophic expedition". stuff.

THE TOXIC LADY OF RIVERSIDE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Ramirez

Haven't seen any mention of this fairly well-known case in this thread, so I thought I'd do a short write up about a fascinating medical mystery.

.

A Pinball Wizard posted:

There's way better cover stories than "she started emitting fumes" though. That's just begging for an investigation.

H2Eau posted:

From memory, the conclusion Dave came to on The Dollop was that basically someone in either the ambulance or hospital hosed up, and she died as a result. The toxic lady poo poo was just to cover it up. It's been some time since I listened to that episode, though.

Cat Potency posted:

At first they tried to blame it on "mass hysteria" brought on by the horrors of death, citing, among other reasons, that the women in the ER were affected more than men. It was only after the staff basically said "we work in an ER, we deal with far more gruesome poo poo all the time, and some of us developed serious physical injuries" that the department of health solicited the help of a forensics lab.

H2Eau posted:

From memory, the conclusion Dave came to on The Dollop was that basically someone in either the ambulance or hospital hosed up, and she died as a result. The toxic lady poo poo was just to cover it up. It's been some time since I listened to that episode, though.

WickedHate posted:

As someone with social anxiety I think this won't help anyone because I'd just get enough of them to simulate a small town and then never leave the house ever again.

nocal posted:

For "toxic lady," covert hospital meth lab sounds less likely than the reason I saw described somewhere. She was diagnosed with cancer, and she took a bunch of shady Mexican homepathic drugs, some of which are basically converted into toxins. Stores that sell this crap are all over southern California.

flosofl posted:

I'm torn between and for the guy in the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkcKaNqfykg