Children’s welfare first
What I like about a jury trial is that the jury is not bound by the cold, hard facts but can take into account the emotional and social surroundings. I believe this jury made the correct decision. He killed but it was not murder.
The really guilty one in this tragedy was Idaho’s child welfare system. No one put the children’s welfare first except the grandfather. The children were clearly terrified of going with their father, crying and screaming for their grandfather to protect them.
It really doesn’t matter whether or not the father was an abuser or whether or not the mother had filled the children’s heads with lies. The only thing that matters is that the children were terrified. Yet the court acted as if this was a simple property dispute.
Allowing a surprise, unsupervised visit by the father was irresponsible. He could have taken them anywhere and done what he liked with them, with no one to protect them. Too often, we read about fathers killing their own children to get back at the children’s mother.
If ever a court-appointed children’s advocate was needed, it was in this situation. Even if the father was exonerated, it was still very wrong to force the fearful children to go with him. There would need to be a period of family therapy for father and children to establish trust.
Helen Wootton
Moscow
Well-watered future
When I was hired onto the Nimiipuu, all my jobs before were in the state of science or state of technology. An example was when the computer center was installing a bank of four mainframe computers, the serial numbers from the factory were two, three, five and seven.
Regarding my days in the Fourth Armored Division, a couple of years after my separation, a documentary presented that the Fourth Armored Division was the testing ground for the introduction into the military of high technology.
When starting for the Nimiipuu, there were no computer journals, just a few Xerox copies of failed business articles blaming the computer. I subscribed to a couple of computer journals. One presented a very large-scale, worldwide computer project (several thousand computers).
Because of the extremely huge amount of processing time, only four runs were determined. For each run, the input was a list of different activities. For each run, the output was not a list but a worldwide map showing a future prediction of desertification. Of the four maps, one startled me as it showed the Selway region as an oasis of greenery.
I presented this map to the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee and the list of activities that produced it. My hope is that NPTEC remained true to nature and the Nimiipuu people by following this list of activities for a well-watered future for the Nimiipuu.
James Lawyer
Grangeville
This letter is being republished because of a Tribune typesetting error.
