When the wheels make the man
The Desert Sun of Palm Springs, California, ran a short story last week with this headline:
Wheelchair stabber's sentencing delayedThe news is about a man convicted of stabbing and killing a friend over a dispute about a bicycle. No wheelchair was stabbed. No man in a wheelchair was even stabbed. In fact, it's the guy using the wheelchair that committed the crime.
Nice, eh?
3 comments:
Yeah. Even nicer than the w/c guy who pulled off a couple of local bank heists. Rolled up to the counter, robbed the cashier, rolled back out, and then clicked down his ramp, rolled in, and sped off.
Sigh. Disability doesn't prevent you from committing a crime -- I wonder if we should be congratulating them for writing a non-victim piece on disability or reproving them for featuring disability in a story in which disability does not play a substantive role.
WCD
I think it's the latter. Especially when even such a simple and tragic crime story has so many other possible angles -- one friend killing another, over returning a bike on time, a man injured from a previous shooting (personal violence or was he in the wrong place, wrong time?), up to 23 years in prison (accessible prison?), etc. Lots of other things they could have emphasized for our interest there.
I was also wondering if the coverage might have been different if the two men were not "Garcia" and "Ramirez." Two white guys might have been subconsciously treated differently here, even to the extent of disability not making an appearance? I don't know.
You know? THis is a good race and disability question. I've been trying to toss it around for a while...
I'm not so sure how race features.... It kind of depends on how you are supposed to take lesson... Despite being wheelchair bound from some criminal gangsta shooting thing, he's not crippled enough to stop being a criminal. Criminality and violence are so so deep in his blood that he's aggressively stabbing people over an innocent boy's bicycle? or something like that...
Sigh
WCD
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