The Star-Ledger has a story about one of the guys in my Abraham class last summer.

An inmate at the Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility in Burlington County was strangled late Thursday and his body found under another inmate’s bunk, authorities said yesterday.
…
Schweitzer, of Easton, Pa., was sentenced in June 2003 to 8 1/2 to 10 years for sexually assaulting a 2-year-old girl in Phillipsburg the previous summer.
…
It has been nearly two years since an inmate was murdered in a state prison.

(My emphases in bold.)

It seems to me that 8 1/2 to 10 is too short for that crime, and death at the hands of another inmate (after two years “inside” hoping nobody found out what your crime was) is too much.

Pray for his family and whoever killed him. Pray also for the victim of his crime and her family.

There was a big conference here a couple of months ago about how terrible torture is. I wouldn’t be surprised if Abu Graibh and Guantanamo came up, if the posters promoting it are any clue. I wonder, though, if anything came up about torture in Iraq before the war. Consider this report about the trial of Saddam Hussein:

The documents revealed some unbelievably terrifying facts about the Dujail massacre; can you imagine that when orders were given to execute the 148 “convicts” the prison authorities executed only 96 of them. Why? Because the remaining 48 “convicts” had already passed away during “interrogation”!! What kind of interrogation was that killed one third of the suspects?!

How many Torture seminars were there here protesting Torture in Iraq between 1979 and 2003? (Kudus to Belmont Club.)

Update: even worse things at Michael J. Totten’s site (not especially graphic).

Here’s another photograph I’ve been meaning to upload. This is the Quad back in the fall sometime. I’m standing next to Hodge Hall looking over at Miller Chapel, and Stuart Hall in the background.

If certain Swiss/German theologians had written the Book of Genesis, it would read thusly:

In the beginning, inception, initiation, and inauguration, God in freedom, liberty, and unconstrained volition, created, established, ordained, fashioned, and made heaven and earth, land and sky, that which is and that which also is but isn’t the first thing I mentioned…

You know who you are.