Torry Hansen, the Sheriff and Justice American-Style
What do we know about Ms. Torry Hansen, the woman who returned her seven year old adopted son to Russia, alone, alleging that the child had threatened to burn down the house? She is a registered nurse, a single parent, and apparently a woman with a malicious streak. The Tennesseen reports that Ms. Hansen, feuding with a neighbor in 2006, planted a neon-painted trailer on the property, loaded with camera surveillance equipment and sensor-controlled lighting, and trained it on the neighbor's house.
But what confuses me most about this incident, is the fact that the Tennessee sheriff handling the case says that he has been unable to question the woman, because “she refuses to talk.” I’m neither a lawyer nor criminal justice expert. Perhaps that is why I can’t for the life of me understand what is really going on. Who decides whether a person suspected of a crime, who “refuses to talk,” will be awakened in the middle of the night, have the front door battered in by rifle-ready police in SWAT gear, be dragged off to an interrogation room in the sub-basement of the police station, with wrists handcuffed to a chair, and cigarette smoke blown in the suspect's face?
I’m not suggesting that this woman should be stripped of her civil rights, due process, or, for that matter, tortured for gross neglect and abandonment of a child. But what I am saying is this. There was a time not very long ago, when the mere hint that an African-American resident of Tennessee had broken a law or even transgressed its unwritten racial codes, would lead to that individual being found dangling from the end of a tree branch. While I am grateful that the American south is not the place it used to be. I’m not so sure that times have changed as much as we would like to think. I have a nagging suspicion that if an incident of comparable embarrassment to the United States had been precipitated by a person of Middle Eastern origin, the sheriff and his coherts would have found a way to “make the person talk.”
The workings of the American criminal justice system remain a mystery to me.
But what confuses me most about this incident, is the fact that the Tennessee sheriff handling the case says that he has been unable to question the woman, because “she refuses to talk.” I’m neither a lawyer nor criminal justice expert. Perhaps that is why I can’t for the life of me understand what is really going on. Who decides whether a person suspected of a crime, who “refuses to talk,” will be awakened in the middle of the night, have the front door battered in by rifle-ready police in SWAT gear, be dragged off to an interrogation room in the sub-basement of the police station, with wrists handcuffed to a chair, and cigarette smoke blown in the suspect's face?
I’m not suggesting that this woman should be stripped of her civil rights, due process, or, for that matter, tortured for gross neglect and abandonment of a child. But what I am saying is this. There was a time not very long ago, when the mere hint that an African-American resident of Tennessee had broken a law or even transgressed its unwritten racial codes, would lead to that individual being found dangling from the end of a tree branch. While I am grateful that the American south is not the place it used to be. I’m not so sure that times have changed as much as we would like to think. I have a nagging suspicion that if an incident of comparable embarrassment to the United States had been precipitated by a person of Middle Eastern origin, the sheriff and his coherts would have found a way to “make the person talk.”
The workings of the American criminal justice system remain a mystery to me.
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