Unbalanced Crime

Hello everybody, and welcome to the Sunday night special. Tonight, we will be looking at a gorgeous supermodel who recently decided that wasn’t worth living. Her name is Jeanette Sliwinski In a reckless attempt to end her own lie she ended up taking the lives of three men, Michael Dahlquist, John Glick and Douglas Meis. Fortunately for her she managed to escape the accident nearly unscathed, both physically and legally. She was sentenced to three years in jail for the 3 counts of “reckless homicide”. Thanks to a few technicalities, good behavior, and a diagnosis and treatment for mental illness she was out in little more then one year.
Now, what makes Sliwinski so special? Is it the intense and tragic irony that her attempt failed but managed to take 3 innocent people? No, not exactly. It is that her story parallels the stories of racial bias in the justice system that were sent to Mary Mitchell, Suns-Times columnist, by Andre Duson, an African American man who is currently serving 18 years in prison for drug related crimes. Duson was caught carrying 15 grams of cocaine, along with a few other drug possession crimes, all minor.
Both Sliwinski and Duson have been model prisoners, and both have had their time cut in half because of it (the extra time cut off from Sliwinski’s time is because of technicalities in the legal system). The primary difference between Duson and Sliwinski is that Duson was convicted of a drug charge, which usually carries a heavier weight then other crimes. The other difference between Duson and Sliwinski is that Duson is black and Sliwinski is white.
The full news article on this issue can be found here. The reader commentary is actually quite interesting to read, although sometimes it can be rather uninformed, aggressive, or just plain stupid. That’s just one person’s opinion though.
On a lighter note, the FBI is opening up some “cold cases” that were not completely solved back in the segregation era. It is believed that these cases were ignored at the time because they involved minorities, specifically black men, whom police cared very, very little for at the time. The full article for that can be found here.