The Ongoing Legal Battle For Geronimo’s Skull, Among Other News

"The Last Apache Holdout," via Wikipedia

This weekend, we learned that the U. S. Department of Justice “is asking a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought by descendants of Apache leader Geronimo.” Responding to nearly 100-years of rumors from within the illustrious (and/or defamed, depending on your view) Skull and Bones fraternity at Yale, Geronimo’s descendants have requested the Last Apache Holdout’s skull to be returned for a proper burial (it’s supposedly contained in a glass box inside S&B’s New Haven lair). In February, Ron Rosenbaum offered some generational Bush bashing, along with thoughts on “The Solution to the Geronimo Skull and Bones ‘Mystery’”:

…stupid and credulous as they were, the Bonesmen were not naifs, they were essentially graverobbers who treated the Native peoples their kind plundered with criminal contempt. Even if this new lawsuit doesn’t get back the actual skull of Geronimo, one hopes it will be a headache for the skeevy elitists who thought it was, and they at least will become the laughingstocks they deserve to be. And — who knows? — maybe every last bit of their juvenile secrecy will be stripped away. Maybe future stories will focus — as I’ve repeatedly argued they should — not on their silly undergraduate rituals, but on the mentality of clandestinity, elitism, entitlement, and the old boy network of cozy connections they still use to exercise undue influence…”

And so on.

From there we move to actual imprisonment news, starting in London, where Patrick “Dutchy” Holland, the main assassin responsible for journalist Veronica Guerin’s death (as payback for her reporting on mob-related drug issues) died in prison this weekend. If you’re unfamiliar with the case, Joel Schumacher’s 2003 thriller is a place to start looking into it. Here’s another.

More:

* “…Duch may be the only person ever to be tried in one of the worst episodes of mass killing in the past century.”

* “Supreme Court rules DNA tests for prisoners not a constitutional right,” with an incisive editorial from the LA Times.

* The “breathtaking” idiocy of airport shoechecks

* Multiple firings and overcrowding discussed following mind-boggling Arkansas prison escape

* Obama Delays Release of CIA Probe on Interrogation Program

* “A million dollars is a lot to pay for a whore…”

* ACLU sues over “secretly created” federal prison unit

* 25 Years in Prison for Pot?

Tomorrow: more on the Supreme Court’s DNA decision, and what that decision means for prisoners pursuing exoneration.