Navigation Salon Salon News email print
Arts & Entertainment
Books
Comics
Health & Body
Media
Mothers Who Think
.News
People
Politics2000
Technology
- Free Software
Travel & Food
_______
Columnists

 

Current News
Wire Stories

Click here to read the latest stories from the wires.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon


  
Advanced Search  |  Help

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

Traumatized refugees build a camp metropolis
As NATO troops go back to war, residents develop their own civilization.

By Mark Schapiro
[05/25/99]

How close can NATO get to the KLA?
The accidental bombing of a rebel compound reveals the West's uneasy relationship with indigenous anti-Serbian forces.

By Laura Rozen
[05/24/99]

Whole Lott o' blamin' goin' on
Senate Republicans are angry that their leadership let Al Gore be a hero on guns.

By Jake Tapper
[05/24/99]

Dialogue of the deaf
The Los Angeles Times Book Review is controlled by a leftist editor who relentlessly censors other voices.

By David Horowitz
[05/24/99]

Who will save Albania?
The poorest country in Europe may be hardest hit by the Balkans war.

By David Rieff
[05/24/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -




Is sodomy with a stick worse than death?

News image
The outcry over Justin Volpe's abuse of Abner Louima -- compared with comparative silence about decades of police killings -- suggests assaulting someone's manhood is worse than killing him.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Jill Nelson

May 26, 1999 | NEW YORK -- New York police officer Justin Volpe's guilty plea Tuesday to charges of depriving Abner Louima of his civil rights, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and witness tampering came as no real surprise, given that all last week was spent with his cronies in the New York Police Department testifying to what we already knew: that on Aug. 9, 1997, Volpe and three other police officers beat Louima brutally in a police cruiser, and then back at the station house Volpe sodomized Louima with a broken broom handle while a fellow officer held him down.

While he is now an admitted rapist, sodomizer and sadist of the highest order, Volpe ain't blind. Pleading guilty is simply a desperate attempt to get leniency from the court and save his ass -- and I do mean that literally as well as figuratively -- under an avalanche of damning testimony and damn near certain conviction. The whole defense effort has been both offensive and pitiful, from suggestions that Louima's massive internal injuries -- damage that required multiple surgeries and months of hospitalization -- were the result of consensual homosexual "rough sex," to the bizarre parading about of Volpe's black girlfriend, as if her very existence negated the possibility of Volpe being racist. Hello! Thomas Jefferson had a black girlfriend too, Sally Hemings, and that didn't stop him from owning slaves, demeaning black people in his writings and perpetuating slavery.

The bottom line is that none of the weak balloons the defense tried to float could get off the ground after the testimony of Volpe's colleagues. The image of Volpe strutting around the precinct brandishing a stick covered with shit and blood, preening in sadistic glee, beating walls and bragging to his cronies that "I took a man down tonight" is simply unforgettable, and unforgivable. Trotting out a soul sister girlfriend ain't gonna make that shit disappear, and anyway, so what? Even black women have the right to bad taste.

But even if the judge does shave a few years off his possible life sentence, Volpe can probably kiss his ass goodbye. What began as a dick thing outside a nightclub in Brooklyn, when Volpe was decked by an unknown assailant and chose Louima to blame and punish, will as likely as not end as a dick thing inside some prison. The brothers in the joint are waiting for you, officer Volpe, and it ain't with open arms. As it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end, or something like that.

While it's impossible not to be relieved, and happy on some level, that Volpe will surely serve time in prison for his sadistic crimes -- where he will definitely, and appropriately, get his just desserts -- it's impossible not to wonder why this case galvanized the attention of so many citizens, not only in New York, but across the nation.

. Next page | Who remembers Eleanor Bumpers?




Photograph by AP/Worldwide


 

Salon | Search | Archives | Contact Us | Table Talk | Ad Info

Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus

Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.