Fallout

 Twenty-four years ago a Boston restauranteur named Charles Stuart told police a Black man shot him and killed his wife.  Acting on this information the BPD stormed the Mission Hill neighborhood, randomly breaking down doors and shouting "Where's the n----r with the trigger?"  Later it was revealed that Stuart had done the shooting himself, handing his wife's valuables to his brother.  In the meantime two men named Alan Swanson and Willie Bennett were arrested, with Bennett eventually being charged.  Yesterday Mayor Michelle Wu offered a formal apology to Bennett, and it only took a quarter of a century and an HBO documentary.  

The always tardy arc of justice bent even more slowly in Oklahoma, where Glynn Simmons's murder conviction was dismissed after he served 48 years in prison.  The judge ruled that prosecutors withheld evidence, but did not acknowledge that Simmons, now 71, was not involved in the murder.  Authorities just decided he had been locked up long enough.

As predicted, Rudolph Giuliani filed for bankruptcy a day after Judge Beryl Howell ordered him to pay Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman the $148 million awarded for defamation.  It looks like he won't be paying his phone bill either.

Equally predictable are the gaudy death threats being directed at the Colorado Supreme Court after they upheld the Fourteenth Amendment.  Don't the Trumpanzees get tired of the same old bloodcurdling anonymous rhetoric?  Add your name and address or STFU.  Draft-dodger Don is enough of a coward without you.

Don't do the crime if you can't read the book:  The 13-year-old who posted detailed plans for shooting up Temple Israel in Canton, Ohio, was ordered by the judge to write a book report about Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis.  But you don't only get sentenced to homework after pleading guilty to inducing panic in Ohio -- he also has to receive therapy and cannot use the internet unsupervised.  

Two thousand years ago more or less, Romans built this amphitheater in Deva Victrix (now Chester), England.  Today the city marks Saturnalia, the reason for the season.  Happy solstice to those who celebrate.