Witches · Lord of War · Skirts
Plus: A new scam podcast
the true crime that's worth your time
And we thought the Groveland Four’s exoneration took too long. According to the New York Times, Elizabeth Johnson Jr.’s high-profile conviction was reversed last week by officials in Massachusetts.
Johnson confessed to practicing witchcraft during the Salem witch trials in the late 1600s; she was sentenced to death in 1693, but was granted a reprieve by the state governor at the time, and died in 1747 at the age of 77. Unlike most of the folks convicted in that actual witch hunt (a term that’s often misused, as I am sure you’ve noticed!), she didn’t have any descendants who fought to clear her name in the centuries hence.
As the Times reported nearly a year ago, her cause was taken up by a group of middle school students.
“To right a wrong, it’s worth doing,” Carrie LaPierre, the teacher of the eighth-grade civics class at North Andover Middle School, said on Thursday.
As part of their civics education, Ms. LaPierre said, the students are taught about acceptance.
“It’s something we talk a lot about: identity and stereotypes and respecting people who are different than you,” she said.
State Senator Diana DiZoglio introduced a bill to clear Johnson’s name back in March of 2021, but it got dumped along the way. It took some trickery regarding Gov. Charlie Baker’s sign-off on the state budget to secure her exoneration. From the NYT:
The effort to clear Ms. Johnson’s name was a dream project for the eighth-grade civics class, Ms. LaPierre said. It allowed her to teach students about research methods, including the use of primary sources; the process by which a bill becomes a law; and ways to contact state lawmakers. The project also taught students the value of persistence: After an intensive letter-writing campaign, the bill to exonerate Ms. Johnson was essentially dead. As the students turned their efforts to lobbying the governor for a pardon, their state senator, Diana DiZoglio, added an amendment to the budget bill, reviving the exoneration effort.
"We will never be able to change what happened to victims like Elizabeth but at the very least can set the record straight," DiZoglio told CBS, which notes that Johnson was Salem’s “last accused witch to be cleared.”
"While we've come a long way since the horrors of the witch trials,” DiZoglio said, “women today still all too often find their rights challenged and concerns dismissed." — EB
Tell Sarah what to review! Paid subscribers prodded Sarah into watching and writing about Adrienne last month, and now we start a new cycle for August. This time includes a seminal creepypasta tome, and yet another take on our not-dad. Vote now to either buoy Better To Have Gone to triumph or to bump Kilgallen out of (as of writing time) last place. — EB
And while you’re at it, why not send Sarah (and me) a little cheddar to gnaw on while she reads? Paid subscribers get exclusive content like most Monday issues and Sarah’s monthly reviews; they’re also why we can afford to keep writing this thing. If you can afford to help support your work, we’d sure be appreciative!
I wonder if Brittney Griner has seen Lord of War? The 2005 movie starring Nicholas Cage was, as I vaguely recall, about an international arms dealer suffering a crisis of conscience in that Cagey-way. The star played Yuri Orlov, a character reportedly inspired by Viktor Bout, the imprisoned Russian munitions salesman who’s reportedly been offered up in a trade to secure the basketball star’s freedom.
ABC has a great overview of Bout’s life and the claims against him — after he was pinned down by DEA agents in Thailand, in 2010 he was convicted in federal court and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
"Viktor Bout has been international arms trafficking enemy number one for many years, arming some of the most violent conflicts around the globe," said Preet Bharara, the US attorney in Manhattan when Bout was sentenced in New York in 2012.
"He was finally brought to justice in an American court for agreeing to provide a staggering number of military-grade weapons to an avowed terrorist organization committed to killing Americans."
The trial honed in on Bout's role in supplying weapons to FARC, a guerrilla group that waged an insurgency in Colombia until 2016. The US said the weapons were intended to kill US citizens.
If you keep heading down the Bout hole, you’ll get to a 2010 CNN piece on the trial, which has this kicker:
"Someone will undoubtedly write a book about this case some day, and I can tell you that it will read like the very best work of Tom Clancy, only in this case it won't be fiction," Michael Braun, then assistant administrator and chief of operations for the DEA, told CNN in 2008.
Much of what Bout is alleged to have done is morally reprehensible, but not illegal, Farah said, noting there are no penalties for violating UN weapons sanctions.
"Our book ends saying, 'They'll never catch him,'" he said.
But as far as I know, other than Lord of War, which was released well before Bout’s capture, no one has taken this story on. And even if someone has (have they? Tell me in the comments!), this new chapter regarding Griner (per CNN, “the Biden administration offered Bout up in a potential swap for American basketball star Brittney Griner and former US Marine Paul Whelan) is very cinematic, don’t you think? It feels like now might be the time for Braun to see his prediction realized, though, come on, we can do better than Clancy, can’t we? — EB
I’ve spent the last couple days telling my mom not to respond to various scam texts, so when I got the press release for the latest season of Chameleon, I felt a certain sense of kinship. This is the fourth season of the Sony-produced podcast about various scams and trickery — I think we all listened to the first season, Hollywood Con Queen; subsequent seasons were on a failed FBI undercover sting in Las Vegas, and the so-called “Bush Boys” scam.
This new season, which dropped its first two episodes today (the whole season is available now on Apple’s paid The Binge podcast platform, if you’re impatient), “follows an investigation into what was one of the biggest call center scams ever: more than 300 million dollars was stolen from Americans, and the tens of thousands of victims included people from all walks of life—white-collar and blue-collar workers, the wealthy and the poor, young mothers and elderly grandfathers,” its press release reads.
The host is Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, who’s covered espionage and tech for ages, making him a good fit for a look at how the scam call industry works. This is such a relatable topic — who doesn’t get these calls and texts every damn day? — and, if done right, could help educate a wide swath of the population before they’re separated from their money. I’m sending a link to the show to my mom as soon as I’m done writing this up. — EB
As I often say, a big part of mulling what true crime is worth our time is thinking about who gets to tell true crime stories. And if the alleged behavior of some workers at an Alabama prison are any indication, women dressed in professional attire are not the right folks to cover an execution.
The story, told by AL.com, is infuriating: veteran crime reporter (and style blogger) Ivana Hrynkiw has “has attended and witnessed seven executions,” but when she arrived at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility to cover the execution of Joe Nathan James Jr. last week, she was told her professional attire of blouse, skirt, and open-toed pumps wasn’t acceptable.
“This was an uncomfortable situation, and I felt embarrassed to have my body and my clothes questioned in front of a room of people I mostly had never met,” Hrynkiw said; she borrowed a pair of men’s waders (really) and put on some athletic shoes she had in her car so she’d be allowed in to do her job. Her story ran on Friday.
The piece on her near-blocking by prison officials ran the next day, and since then, she’s been hit with slews of harassing messages, as well as nasty remarks from some other members of the media. Someone even slagged her dog, she said.
Other female reporters at the scene say they, too, had their workplace attire questioned.
After the incident, Hrynkiw and others asked for the dress code and Betts provided an online link to a prison visitation dress code. The dress code is mainly directed at women and states that “all dresses, skirts, and pants shall extend below the knee (females only). Splits/Slits must be knee length or lower (females only).” As for shoes, the only reference is made in the items prohibited include “slippers, shower shoes, and beach shoes.”
Hrynkiw and other reporters who have been covering executions over the past decade have not had any prison official cite any dress codes for reporters. The prison spokeswoman admitted that reporters may not have known about the policy, and it had not been enforced before. She said the new warden of Holman, Terry Raybon, wished to enforce the policy.
We already know that school dress codes are sexist, so it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that prison visitor dress codes are too. I’ve seen some folks argue that treating reporters at work covering the prison system like prison visitors is offensive, but to me that’s missing the point, a bit — both groups (visitors and reporters) deserve to be there, and both deserve to be treated with respect. Tell me how controlling what folks are wearing to visit an institution is anything but an overreach of power? (Just don’t tell me my dog is ugly.) — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: A really awesome discussion thread!
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