Daily Scroll
Your Timeline digest, updated throughout the day
By Tim Townsend
Sirhan’d me the keys to this cell
On Wednesday, parole commissioners in San Diego said Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of assassinating Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, “did not show adequate remorse or understand the enormity of his crime,” according to The Associated Press. It was the 15th time Sirhan has been denied parole.
He has maintained, if not innocence, an inability to recall doing anything wrong on the night in question, when he was 24 years old. In 2011, he told the parole board:
“I don’t remember pulling a gun from my body. I don’t remember aiming it at any human being. Everything was always hazy in my head. I don’t remember anything very clearly.”
Parole — the release of a prisoner before his sentence is completed — comes from the French phrase parole d’honneur, or “word of honor.”
According to Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University and author of The Innocent Prisoner’s Dilemma: Consequences of Failing to Admit Guilt at Parole Hearings, the idea of parole originated in 19th-century English and Irish prisons where inmates earned “marks” for good behavior and progress toward self-improvement.
The concept came to the US in the late 19th century when prison officials’ punishment theory stressed rehabilitation. Parole, they hoped, would be seen as a way to lighten long sentences while using possible early release to control prisoner behavior.
The first American institution to embrace parole was the Elmira Reformatory in New York in 1876, and its philosophy was straightforward:
“Criminals can be reformed; that reformation is the right of [convicts] and the duty of the State; that every prisoner must be individualized and given special treatment adapted to develop him to the point in which he is weak — physical, intellectual, or moral culture, in combination, but in varying proportions, according to the diagnosis of each case.”
Sirhan Sirhan will get a 16th chance at parole, at the age of 76, in five years.
Don’t kill the Mockingbird, Sorkin
The producer Scott Rudin said Wednesday that he had acquired the right to stage To Kill A Mockingbird on Broadway. For more than five decades, author Harper Lee resisted selling the professional stage rights to her 1960 novel, but in 2017, Scout and Atticus will take up residence on the Great White Way.
In 1961, Lee’s former literary agent, Annie Laurie Williams, wrote to a theatrical publishing company that before Lee had sold the film rights to Mockingbird, “several Broadway producers tried to get Miss Lee to consent to having a dramatization of her book made for Broadway. She said she did not want her book made into a play.”
The movie, which won three Academy Awards, came out in 1962, the same year Lee sold the amateur stage adaptation rights to Christopher R. Sergel, who had also adapted Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
Sergel’s adaptation of Mockingbird, for his Dramatic Publishing Company, has since been the only version to be performed — mostly by schools and regional theaters. Critics have long complained that Sergel’s adaptation included a “lack of complexity in the relationships,” as the Wall Street Journal put it.
Rudin has hired celebrity writer Aaron Sorkin to adapt Lee’s book for the professional stage. With what’s sure to be a celebrity cast on the way, too, critics are likely already slobbering all over themselves to protect the integrity of America’s favorite novel about its greatest sin.
Overcrowd your prison, get a fatal riot
Just before midnight, fighting began between two drug gangs at the Topo Chico prison in Monterrey, Mexico. Inmates set fire to a food storage area, and by the time it was extinguished Thursday, 49 prisoners were dead.
A 2014 report by the National Human Rights Commission found that Topo Chico held about 4,585 prisoners, about 1,000 more than it was designed to house.
Just four years ago, cartel members killed 44 members of a rival drug gang at another overcrowded prison in the same state, Nuevo León.
Overcrowding has been a factor in other prison riots that have led to mass fatalities.
In 2014, a judge in Brazil sentenced 15 police officers to 48 years in prison each for their roles in what is now called the Carandiru jail massacre.
In 1992, 7,300 inmates were packed into Carandiru Penitentiary in Sao Paulo, a facility — called “the Powder Keg” — built to hold 3,500. A fight between members of rival drug gangs escalated into a riot. Eventually, 300 military police responded, opening fire and killing 111 inmates.
A court convicted the commanding officer, Col. Ubiratan Guimaraes, of the military police troops of approving excessive force. Ultimately 73 officers were convicted of murder. Guimaraes’ conviction was later overturned.
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