Omnibus Monday: On the subject of state-sponsored killing and $10 haircuts . . .
It is a complete absurdity that we cannot know the governor’s opinion on the death penalty.
We know his stance on abortion, which is one on which I largely agree. Over the last week, though, members of both the state House and Senate fairly unraveled their guts over hotly debated, death-penalty-nullifying HB 1274, which ultimately failed. Still, each of them at least took a stand.
“Yes, I have an opinion,” Bill Ritter told reporters last Thursday, “but I’m not going to share that with you, because then people feel like (the argument) they make is meaningless.”
That, governor, is nonsense.
I give Bill Owens, whose policies I rarely agreed with, credit. You never questioned where he stood, whether it was spending, abortion or, even, Ward Churchill. The man took a stand.
For good or ill, he led his party. Had his party wanted to do away with the death penalty, there would not have been last week’s drama. It would be dead, or he’d at least have each of his party’s defector’s scalps lining his office.
I tried reaching Rhonda Fields the other day. I wanted to know if she wanted Robert Ray dead. It didn’t work out.
She is one of the gentlest, sweetest people in the world, a woman I have spent time with and interviewed since the day her boy, Javad Marshall-Fields, and his fiancee, Vivian Wolfe, were gunned down in an Aurora intersection.
Robert Ray awaits a jury decision whether he dies at the hands of the state or spends the rest of his life in prison. If I asked Fields once, I asked her a million times, if she wanted that murderous knucklehead executed. She, gracious as ever, always demurred.
I suspect she would have done the same had I reached her, saying justice will do what it does.
For a time these past few days, Ray’s conviction made me reconsider my thinking on the death penalty, which I have long considered simply barbarous.
In the end, you are what you are and believe what you do. Me, I’d hate to see the people of Colorado get reduced to what that murderous sociopath is.
There is nothing like an early morning in Five Points. Something always is happening, but you have to look for it.
The couple in the big Chrysler that nearly ran me over had just come from Barbara Maxey’s place. Both had just gotten a haircut. It wasn’t even 10 a.m.
She was standing outside her shop, the Hope For A Change barbers and beauty supply. We chatted for a long time.
Turns out, she has been a barber on Welton Street for more than two decades, opening her own shop last October. It was, frankly, a dubious business decision, considering there must be nearly a half-dozen other barber shops on Welton.
And then I noticed the sign.
“Adult haircuts, $10,” it read.
“People tip me,” she explained. Clipped hair, even at that hour, littered the floor around her lone chair.
“I got here at 9, and people were waiting for me,” she said. “Maybe it’s the economy. But it makes you feel nice, so good,” Barbara Maxey said.
And even at $10, she added, “people still try to bargain me down.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
