Okay.  It wasn’t the entire cast, Hawkeye, Radar, Hot Lips, Major Burns and Col. Potter.   But B.J. Hunnicut showed up.  For me, it was enough to have the actor/activist Mike Farrell make an appearance, ably representing the entire cast of the 4077.  It was my favorite TV show.

I met Mike and heard him speak on the death penalty at Beacon Heights Church of the Brethren, a member of one of the three historic peace churches.

When he arrived, he was still wearing in navy topcoat, his wavy hair turned mostly white since his earlier days in the popular TV series.  Yet he’s as handsome as that young, war-weary captain, with a friendly, disarming manner.   He seemed eager on this bitter cold morning to get on with the session.

The church gradually filled, with many faces I recognized from my visits over the years and of other friends I came to know during my time writing editorials, dozens against the death penalty.

Ellen Eggers, a California death penalty attorney originally from Fort Wayne, led the speakers.  She told a sad, even tragic story.  Lots of people don’t know that over two thirds of the countries have abolished the death penalty.   But that fits with how we treat all offenders, from the small-time drug dealers to murderers.  In face, we now lock up more people than any country in the world, even China which has four times the U.S. population.

Such punishment hasn’t made us safer, when we’re compared to other democracies.   In fact, as Eggers pointed out, the death penalty is an illusion.  It doesn’t deter murder.  There’s plenty of research on that.  And it doesn’t bring healing to the victims’ survivors.  That’s been my own observation.

Because of the lengthy appeals, and the cost of housing a capital offender, the death penalty costs the taxpayer far more than giving the person a life sentence.   Death row is not bargain:  A regular cell can run as high as $50,000 a year.  The solitary cell on death row  can cost more than $90,000.  Even conservative Indiana’s attorney general, Greg Zoeller, has challenged lawmakers here to weigh the value of executions in light of the cost.  Nationwide, we have 3,000 people in those cells today.   About half, it’s estimated, are mentally ill.   Which was true of every case I wrote about.

Rachel Gross followed Eggers.  A long-time friend from North Manchester, Rachel told stories of her network of people who write letters and send cards to death row inmates.    Some of these letter-writers have visited with the offenders, offering friendship and human contact with a person not part of the criminal justice machine.

Mike Farrell knows his message backwards and forwards, no need for notes or a script.  I thought it was noteworthy that he encouraged death penalty abolitionists not to become self-righteous.  I’ve probably been guilty of that myself.  But to the substance of the issue, citing Justice John Paul Stevens’ recent article, Mike argued that an execution can’t be done constitutionally.

It’s the poor, the minority defendant who is the most likely to receive a death sentence.  As one study of Georgia cases showed, a black defendant is 11 times more likely than a white defendant to get the death penalty. And it’s used disproportionately throughout the country. Several states don’t even have the death penalty on the books.  Most states that do have a higher capital crime rate.

When it’s invoked, the sentence is carried out freakishly, like being struck by lightening.  I imagine Mike, given his role in M*A*S*H*, must often have thought that such punishment is  about as senseless and arbitrary as the battle deaths in Korea.

But he suggested a constructive approach for abolitionists to defenders of the death penalty.  Rather than argue that killing somebody already locked up in a cage is immoral, show how there’s no way that death penalty can be administered fairly.  Impossible, which is exactly where Justice Stevens finished his long tenure on the high court.

Moreover, Mike concluded, such an extreme, inhumane punishment corrodes our system of justice and corrupts those who join in this legalized murder.  And as we’ve dehumanized the offender, we dehumanize the rest of us.  It’s real simple he said:

“Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

“America is the greatest country in the world, she said.”

That was U.S. District Judge Theresa L. Springmann.

Seated between the U.S. and Indiana flags,  she was addressing the 54 persons from 23 different countries who were being sworn in that morning as America’s newest citizens.

This past week, I wasn’t so sure we were the greatest country.

According to polls, most Americans oppose the construction of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero.  Even the usually broad-minded New Yorkers don’t like the center near the site.

I caught a distinct whiff of bigotry directed at Muslims when I first heard of the opposition.    Hey, I wanted to shout.  Muslims didn’t bring down the World Trade Center.   That was suicidal fanatics.

Never mind the First Amendment, all that beautiful rhetoric about tolerance, respect for everyone regardless of race, religion or national origin.   Cable TV’s talking heads grumbled and  the next thing you knew lots of folks talked as if the Commies had crawled under our beds again.

I refuse to dwell on the weird case of the Rev. Terry Jones and his tiny Gainesville church that planned to burn copies of the Koran on 9/11.   Too much has been said about that already.

In any case, those few days didn’t seem to  be a good week for proclaiming our country’s greatness.   Until that Friday morning in a a federal courtroom.   Just think about.  More than 50 people from all over the world sworn in as American citizens.  That included our good friend Abdalla from Darfur.   Well, observing all this I had to conclude that I  Judge Springmann is right. We are pretty great.  Never mind the nut cases.

What other country attracts such a diverse group of immigrants?   What other country really does accommodate most all the time such a diversity?   Even Fort Wayne schools here in the traditionalist heartland provide special help for kids who grew up speaking a score of other languages.

The judge reminded the audience of all the things our newest citizens had to do to win their U.S. citizenship.  That took years of study, including English language lessons and American history.  They had to go through a background check.  And a personal interview.   It all took courage, she said.

They have to swear allegiance to the country, even bear arms if only as a non-combatant.   (I was glad to even pacifists can become naturalized citizens.)  What about giving those millions of undocumented a shot at this, too?

Many native born citizens might have trouble making the cut.  What year did the Civil War end?  Who were we fighting in the Korean War?  What president introduced Social Security?  Get out your U.S. history books you native born!

“You dared to dream the American dream,” Judge Springmann said, again to the new citizens.   That line hit a chord with me.  Gave me chills.   That’s right.  We’re truly a land of dreamers.

The judge even made the ceremony personal.  In her concluding remarks, she told us that her own grandparents had come to America as immigrants.  She spoke of their dreams, their hopes, their struggles and the life they made for their descendants: doctors, teachers, business leaders and, yes, a judge.   Immigrants bring such gifts, making our mosaic much more dazzling.

We all stood for the pledge of allegiance.  Then we sang the Star Spangled Banner.   You wouldn’t want to make a CD of that rendition of the national anthem, accompanied by a recording.   But it was sung in earnest in a dozen accents.   Beautiful.

At the closing,  Judge Springmann invited the new citizens to join her at the judge’s bench, front of the riblue drape with the U.S. district court of Northern Indiana seal on it.  She wanted to shake hands of these newly honored Americans and give them a chance to have their pictures taken.

At the insistence of our friend Abdalla, my wife and I joined him, his wife, daughter, two sons  and the judge for the photo opportunity.  And we all celebrated this milestone.

As we made our way to the door, I glanced at the photographs of the judges who had presided over this courtroom.  Faces I recognized from my days with the paper looked back.   There were others from long ago, before my journalism career.  Lots of heartwarming stories unfolded under that vaulted ceiling.

The ceremony is held once a month, a court official told me.  But he thought it was going to be changed to once every other month.  He didn’t say why.

You don’t think much about how so many different seasonings get dropped into our melting pot every month, all across the country, in every state.   If you’re amazed at the rapid change in technology, consider the change in the makeup of the population.

They escaped from El Salvador’s civil war.  They fled oppression in Burma.  They left loved ones in India for new opportunities here.  They gave up the grinding poverty of Haiti.   They brought with them their beliefs, their customs, their work ethic.  And probably some prejudices, too.

Witnessing this profoundly moving ceremony,  I knew our home-grown bigots won’t carry the day.   Eventually, they’ll get their comeuppance and fade away.  And the rest of us will move on.   Conceived in liberty, one nation.  Because that’s who we are.

An old friend died the other day.

Bill Taylor wasn’t just anybody either.  Not to me.  Not to the country.

Indeed, his obit ran in The New York Times and other major newspapers.

They told how he was a major civil rights attorney, starting his career with Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Attorneys there had this brilliant young lawyer write the legal brief in the Little Rock desegregation case.

He was the lead attorney in a number of cases, including St. Louis.  And in Cincinnati.

“I wish we could clone him,” Federal District Judge Walter Rice in that case told me.

I got to know Bill when I was writing editorials that called for Fort Wayne Community Schools to fully desegregate its kids.  That was in the 1970s and 1980s.  The district ran half dozen schools that we nearly all black in our inner city.   Bill, mostly by telephone, tutored me in the fine points of desegregation law, the history of major court decisions and the legal basis of any suit we could file against the district here.

I got to know Bill best at education conferences and, when my wife Toni was a program officer at the National Science Foundation in 1992, over a number of lunches.

I helped enlist Bill to lead the effort to get the Fort Wayne district to do what I strongly felt was its legal and moral responsibility.   With the financial support of Lincoln National Corp.’s CEO, Ian Rolland, Bill got involved.  First, he tried negotiations with school attorneys.  That produced only frustration.  Then, in 1986, he filed the lawsuit in federal court.   It wasn’t until 1989, however, that district officials consented to an out-of-court settlement.

The result was to racially balance all Fort Wayne schools, mostly by creating a number of magnet schools.

That watershed event in the community’s history now seems so long ago.  You no longer see letters to the editor decrying the integration of the schools.  Nobody even proposes filing a new lawsuit to overturn the district’s method of assigning students.  A recent Supreme Court ruling would appear to place that method in legal jeopardy.

Meantime, in his legal work, and lobbying in Congress,  Bill went on to other things.  That included drafting the No Child Left Behind Law for Sen. Ted Kennedy.  To Bill’s dismay, President Bush and the Republican controlled Congress failed to adequately fund the law.   Nevertheless, Bill always felt that much-maligned law helped established standards to the benefit of poor and minority kids.  He wrote a memoir, “The Passion of My Times.”

Since I learned of Bill’s death last week, I’ve often thought how far from realizing the equality that civil rights champions like him dreamed of.  Lots of our fellow citizens object to the idea of having a black president. Others have no interest in making it possible for undocumented immigrants to become citizens.

Maybe these folks don’t hate America.  But it’s the America of the 1950s they think they love.   The country we’ve become, with much expanded rights and opportunities for those who may not be like us,  that’s the America they hate.

To the end, though, I know that Bill Taylor never gave up on his dream of a greater America, a country of justice for all.   He sure did his part.  Of course, I’ll miss him.

An old friend died the other day.

Bill Taylor wasn’t just anybody either.  Not to me.  Not to the country.

Indeed, his obit ran in The New York Times and other major newspapers.

They told how he was a major civil rights attorney, starting his career with Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Attorneys there had this brilliant young lawyer write the legal brief in the Little Rock desegregation case.

He was the lead attorney in a number of cases, including St. Louis.  And in Cincinnati.

“I wish we could clone him,” Federal District Judge Walter Rice in that case told me.

I got to know Bill when I was writing editorials that called for Fort Wayne Community Schools to fully desegregate its kids.  That was in the 1970s and 1980s.  The district ran half dozen schools that we nearly all black in our inner city.   Bill, mostly by telephone, tutored me in the fine points of desegregation law, the history of major court decisions and the legal basis of any suit we could file against the district here.

I got to know Bill best at education conferences and, when my wife Toni was a program officer at the National Science Foundation in 1992, over a number of lunches.

I helped enlist Bill to lead the effort to get the Fort Wayne district to do what I strongly felt was its legal and moral responsibility.   With the financial support of Lincoln National Corp.’s CEO, Ian Rolland, Bill got involved.  First, he tried negotiations with school attorneys.  That produced only frustration.  Then, in 1986, he filed the lawsuit in federal court.   It wasn’t until 1989, however, that district officials consented to an out-of-court settlement.

The result was to racially balance all Fort Wayne schools, mostly by creating a number of magnet schools.

That watershed event in the community’s history now seems so long ago.  You no longer see letters to the editor decrying the integration of the schools.  Nobody even proposes filing a new lawsuit to overturn the district’s method of assigning students.  A recent Supreme Court ruling would appear to place that method in legal jeopardy.

Meantime, in his legal work, and lobbying in Congress,  Bill went on to other things.  That included drafting the No Child Left Behind Law for Sen. Ted Kennedy.  To Bill’s dismay, President Bush and the Republican controlled Congress failed to adequately fund the law.   Nevertheless, Bill always felt that much-maligned law helped established standards to the benefit of poor and minority kids.  He wrote a memoir, “The Passion of My Times.”

Since I learned of Bill’s death last week, I’ve often thought how far from realizing the equality that civil rights champions like him dreamed of.  Lots of our fellow citizens object to the idea of having a black president. Others have no interest in making it possible for undocumented immigrants to become citizens.

Maybe these folks don’t hate America.  But it’s the America of the 1950s they think they love.   The country we’ve become, with much expanded rights and opportunities for those who may not be like us,  that’s the America they hate.

To the end, though, I know that Bill Taylor never gave up on his dream of a greater America, a country of justice for all.   He sure did his part.  Of course, I’ll miss him.

When a child kills, in Kosciusko County

I can only guess at the anger and the hurt a mother or father must feel when a son or daughter  takes the life of another person.   And what about the crime where the victim has been a family member?

We read the news accounts and can only shake our heads in disbelief.

“Most of the kids locked up here have just  made some adult really mad,” the Oklahoma City juvenile detention director told me.

“But sometimes, it’s a different story,” he added.   What an understatement.

That conversation took place back when I was writing editorials for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette and urging the county to tear down a deteriorating Wood Youth Center and replace it with a  modern and humane facility.   So I interviewed directors of other centers around the country.

Of course,  in the recent Kosciusko County murder of Phillip Danner,  the young boys charged with this crime have done much more than upset adults.  They couldn’t have imagined what sorrows they would have wrought.  This is a huge tragedy.  It  touches family members, neighbors, the boys’ teachers,  indeed the community.

They’re all left to huddle together like cattle in the storm.   And to wonder at this fantasy world in which the boys could head for Arizona to sell T-shirts.

There’s nothing here a county judge or prosecutor can fix.   At best they can only render a crude approximation of justice.

There did appear an unseemly rush to transfer 15-year-old Colt Lundy and 12-year-old Paul Gingerich.    Judge Duane Huffer found state law didn’t permit the second 12-year-old to be waived.  That boy was only an accomplice.  He’ll still be locked up for a long time.

For the boys accused of doing the shooting, there was no time to waste, the prosecutor said.  “It demands expediency,” he was quoted saying.   That was just days after the boys were picked up in Illinois.  No time for psychiatric evaluations?  No time to interview teachers and school counselors?   No time to investigate family life?  No time to visit the adult prison where the older boy surely would be housed?

This plan itself, a late spring lark really, speaks volumes of the immaturity of the boys.   At a minimum it means they likely will be about as competent in any court proceeding as an adult with a profound mental illness.  But apparently the rush to transfer these baby-face accused shooters to the adult court didn’t give the prosecutor time to research this point.

I was reminded of another case, in Huntington in the 1990s.  There, a 14-year-old girl had set fire to the family home killing her mother and sister.  Then, the police allowed the father to approve of the girl answering questions and waiving her  constitutional right to silence.  Problem at that time, it was possible the father was complicit in the crime.  Even the detective told me he thought so. That waiver wouldn’t have stood a court test.

But it never was challenged.

What about these boys?  Did a parent or legal guardian consent to a waiver of constitutional rights?   I believe Indiana law still requires it.

A more critical parallel:  In the Huntington case, once the late Judge Mark McIntosh heard the full story of the girl’s family life, he “sincerely” recommended that she be held in a juvenile treatment center until she would turn 18.   Her original sentence was for 25 years.  There the judge made his recommendation under a fairly new state law.  Until an appeals court ruling, a couple of years later,  the Department of Correction refused to move the girl to a juvenile center.

If we assume the boys are found guilty of killing Phillip Danner, Judge Huffer can make such a recommendation.

I must concede that since the 1990s and the Huntington case, the department has provided for a more sensible place to house juveniles waived to the adult criminal court.  The kids are housed separately from adults – “sight and sound separation.” That’s today’s standard.

Mike Dempsey is the executive director of the Division of Youth Services for the DOC. He told me that Colt Lundy, the 15-year-old, would be housed at the Miami Valley Correctional Facility.  There, he’ll get high school classes and counseling.

For the 12-year-old, Paul Gingerich, the department probably would place him in a secure unit at one of the state’s juvenile centers.

Still, I have to believe that the boys and the public safety would be better off if the judge had declined to transfer either one to the adult criminal court.   It was his call.

Under the waiver now, it’s only a few years before they’re placed in the general population with hardened adult offenders to finish their sentences.  With good behavior, they’re likely to still be in their 20s upon release.    Then, as much research suggests, they are more apt than those originally sentenced as juveniles to commit new offenses.

“How do you propose to diminish crime or to reform offenders by this system of sending children of the state to this school of v ice and infamy, where they cannot fail by means of the associations into which you thrust them, to be irretrievably ruined?”

That’s was Mr. Bryant of Warren during the 1850 debate over the Indiana Constitution.

For Phillip Danner’s family and all members of the boys’ families, I doubt if there ever will be closure.   Such cases have a very long shelf life.    For some, the second-guessing of their own if incidental role won’t end.  The judge and the court officials will try to clean up the mess as best they can.

It’s hard to believe any good can  come of a murder of a step-father in Kosciusko County.

I was delighted to see it:

The psychiatrist is on to something.

Oh, I’ve been there before.  In various ways, in various formats, I’ve made the argument that it usually takes a lot more than drugs to help somebody who is suffering from anxiety, depression or wild mood swings.

And if you’ve battled mental illness yourself, you know that Dr. Daniel Carlat didn’t discover the cure for schizophrenia or any other serious mental illness.

But there it was, all laid on in a briskly written narrative by a respected expert. And published in The New York Times Sunday magazine no less.

Treating a patient he calls “J.J.,” Carlat realized that he was merely asking the patient about his symptoms.  So the goal was to match the symptoms to a medication.

Think about it.  This is exactly what your pharmacist does.  No search for causes, for context, for an understanding of the person.   Since the psychiatrists threw out Freud and psychoanalysis,  they’ve been reduced to pushing pills.

Often, patients get better.   Or seem to.  And the doctor might refer the patient to a counselor for talk therapy.

What Carlat is forced to acknowledge, though, is that in the formal tests of the psychotropic drugs, the placebo can be just about as effective as the medication being tested.

This is fascinating stuff.  Somehow, the brain changes itself when you think you’re getting an active medication.  In reality, you’ve been duped.  It’s a dummy pill.

Of course, the changes still are brain chemistry.   But a person’s thoughts and feelings have an impact that now can be seen in a PET scan.   Indeed, when you get angry or jealous or afraid,  your brain chemistry changes.

Exercise, too, gets the brain chemistry going.

And when you introduce talk therapy, you can find even greater brain chemistry changes.   Not always maybe.  But often.

As a practical matter, we probably won’t see psychiatrists moving out of their role as highly trained pharmacists,  mainly matching symptoms to meds.   These doctors’ time with each patient usually is quite limited.  Too little to go deep.  And there are too few psychiatrists to go around.

In his Times article, Dr. Carlat says he got into psychiatry for personal reasons, much of that harking back to his mother’s suicide.  He didn’t know what medications if any she had been on at the time of her death.  But he is right to wonder.   What if she’d had the right kind of therapy?  What if she had the kind that allows a person to transcend their fears and sense of hopelessness?  Just maybe her life could have been spared.

Very often,  the right prescription for mental illness doesn’t come in a bottle.