Fourth Sunday from Jingle Jangle

A Shady Person (Chapter 4 of Jingle Jangle)

By Jim Rix

[Editor’s Note: Blurb from the dust jacket: “Jim Rix has written an astonishing memoir about his cousin Ray Krone’s wrongful conviction for a 1991 Arizona murder. Rix meticulously details every aspect of police corruption, prosecutorial misconduct, defense incompetence, expert witness tampering and jury shenanigans that led to Ray’s decade-long nightmare. But Rix doesn’t stop there. He dissects each problem, then with careful research explains how it is not an isolated incident but part of a larger pattern of problems in the criminal justice system. Rix’s wry humor and occasional sarcasm reveal the depths of his despair at realizing that the justice system, which he once trusted, is so deeply flawed. Scariest about this true story is that if Ray Krone, an honest, law-abiding person, could end up on Death Row, it could happen to anyone.”
        –Rachel King, author of Don’t Kill in Our Names and
        Capital Consequences, teaches legal writing
        at Howard University School of Law ]

Fourth Sunday from Jingle Jangle

The Videotape (Chapter 3 of Jingle Jangle)

By Jim Rix

[Editor’s Note: Blurb from the dust jacket: “An amazing story of the uphill battle required in the fight for truth. For those readers with no experience in the criminal justice system, the measures taken in the name of ‘justice’ will be shocking. The story of Ray Krone offers all readers important lessons – never give up hope, never stop believing in yourself and never stop fighting for what is right. Jim Rix paints a powerful picture of hope, frustration and perseverence. Jingle Jangle shows why we must never stop fighting for those whom the legal system has failed.”
                – Caroline M. Elliot, law school student and 2006-07
                President of the UNC Law Innocence Project
                and the UNC Law Death Penalty Project]

Jingle Jangle sells!

Author Jim Rix is signing books again this weekend, this time at Costco's Carson City, Nevada store. He must be signing a lot of them. Look! He's having fun.
     Ray Krone, the subject of the book, lives on a farm outside York Pennsylvania and when last heard from was continuing to lobby for an end to the death penalty, under whose shadow he lived for three years before his cousin began to champion his case and worked with attorney Christopher Plourd to win a new trial. The second jury again bought the bogus bite mark evidence, but this time only sentenced the innocent Ray to life in prison.
    It had become abundantly clear that the only way to get Ray Krone out of prison was to discover who really killed Kim Ancona....

When Jim was through signing today (at 3 p.m.), only eleven of thirty-six copies were left. Hey, Costco needs to restock! Move over, John Grisham. (In fact, the store manager has asked Jim to bring six cases for the next signing session.)
    He left the poster below to pitch those last books for him until he returns tomorrow. The dust jacket art was created by Brooklyn graphic artist Matthew Moss. Drawings inside the book were created by Rob Esmay, whose cartoons occasionally appear in The New Yorker Magazine. I edited Jingle Jangle. It is published by Broken Bench Press.

Jingle Jangle on the use of the human brain

The witty glossary in Jim Rix's fine book about the wrongful convictions of his cousin Ray Krone, Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out, was developed with the criminal justice system in mind. But its entries about the use of the brain are equally applicable to politics and religion (both of which played crucial roles in Krone's convictions):

cerebral cortex—that part of the human brain where thinking occurs. When dominant over its counterpart, the reptilian-complex, truth prevails. When dominated, bullshit prevails.

reptilian-complex—that part of the human brain in common with snakes and programmed primarily for survival which when stuck where the sun doesn't shine dominates the cerebral cortex.

denial—a delusion of the reptilian-complex whose major symptom is bullshit, such as "The system works" and "We don't convict and execute innocent people."

Jingle Jangle's primary chapter about the reptilian-complex is "Catch-22: The Gila." Here's the chapter's haunting, poetic opening:

From southwestern New Mexico, a river born of the waters of mountain tributaries enters Arizona and travels westward across the state. The first part of its journey is mostly through mountain valleys. At Florence, its halfway point, it passes so close to Arizona State Prison that Ray would have had a view of the Gila—if his cell had had any view at all. Then it moves northwest, passing through Maricopa County south of Phoenix before turning southwest toward Yuma, where the waters that survive the Sonoran Desert join the Colorado River and eventually return to the Pacific Ocean through the Sea of Cortez.
    The Gila River shares its name with a monster of sorts, a poisonous lizard indigenous to the desert southwest. When the Gila Monster bites its prey it rolls onto its back to allow the venom stored in glands in its lower jaw to trickle down grooves in its teeth into the wound. Unlike its cousin the snake it does not have the ability to inject its poison. The Gila Monster must hang on tenaciously until its victim dies. Its reptilian brain is programmed only for survival. Should the Gila Monster bite off more than it can chew it has no intelligence to tell it to let go. So when it bites a human being it doesn’t know any better than to hang on until its own death. Fatalities among humans are rare, although it does take a pair of pliers to release the reptile’s jaws.
    The brains of the great dinosaurs that dominated the earth for hundreds of millions of years were ill-equipped to deal with the climate changes that were triggered by the impact of a huge meteorite on the Yucatan peninsula around 65 million years ago. As a result, the dinosaurs became extinct. Among the survivors were birds—the only direct descendants of the dinosaurs—and budding mammals from which humans evolved. [p. 257; drawing, by New Yorker cartoonist Rob Esmay, appears on p. 274]