Notorious Foot Licker Redux

 Police news in the Providence Journal , Jan.28: "  Raymond Dublin, the notorious ' Footlicker in trouble again ". The Boston Globe published my comments on him in a letter dated August 31, 2003: " Free the Footlicker ! " it was titled. " At worst Ray Dublin represents Providence at its most kinky ". I thought he had received " a rather harsh sentence of 18 months in prison ".

         Now more than a decade later we see how hopeless it is to process pathological cases through our criminal justice system. When will we cease to make severe mental illness a crime ? When will the courts rise above a Dark Age understanding of the human soul ? In general, our legal system acts as if intellectual giants like Darwin, Marx and Freud never existed. No more lawyers like Clarence Darrow out there ? No more editors like H.L. Mencken ?