A Million Stories

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by Jeffrey C. Billman, Victor Gamez and Holly Otterbein

Evan M. Lopez

Evil has a way of going hand-in-hand with genius. Lucifer, you'll recall from Sunday School, was the Morning Star, not the Dim Bulb. George W. Bush was dumb as a brick, sure, but he had Dick Cheney. See how that works?

In Philadelphia, there's Michael Meehan: He's the longtime head of the Republican City Committee and controls 500 or so jobs at the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) — yet the dude hasn't been elected by anyone. Instead, he's the "legal counsel" for the Philly GOP. And despite the fact that Meehan's shrouded position makes it nigh impossible to unseat him, Republican insurgents keep trying to do just that.

By the time this paper hits the streets, though, the insurgents will have lost. Wednesday night marks the election of citywide Republican leadership by ward leaders, and Meehan's cronies will undoubtedly win. Then they'll decide to keep him as "legal counsel."

Why? Because Meehan's a g-damn genius, that's why.

Let's review how he took down the Republican insurgents — the Loyal Opposition, Al Schmidt, a few Tea Partiers and other fed-up conservatives — one by idealistic one, shall we?

The insurgents' plan went like this: Get their peeps elected as Republican committee people, whose job it is to elect ward leaders, who, in turn, elect citywide leadership. Once in power, boot Meehan and Co. The strategy might be genius, if only it weren't so ... un-evil.

In response to the insurgents, Meehan filed 44 ballot petitions in March challenging candidates for Republican committee persons — folks in his very own party. Matthew Wolfe, of the insurgency, found that some of the "challengers" Meehan put up were Democrats, some had never heard of Meehan and one was just plain dead. Meehan chalked it up to mistakes by ward leaders. Shortly thereafter, the Inquirer reported that the PPA was "humming away on Meehan's behalf" during the primary election, doling out signatures, notaries and candidates to run. A whole government agency behind Meehan, and the insurgents still thought they had a chance. Adorable, right?

Meehan wasn't done yet. Right before the election, the Republican City Committee voted to change its bylaws, so that write-in candidates for committee positions had to get 10 votes, instead of only one. Schmidt told the Daily News that only seven of the 120 write-ins had 10 or more votes — if the insurgents were screwed before, they were pretty much nuked now. And there's more: City commissioners recently announced that they would start giving certificates of election to the Republican City Committee, instead of the winners themselves. Insurgents feared that this would keep committee people who were rightfully elected — but not friends with the right people — from finding out that they had won. Then, last week, as we reported on the Clog, city commissioners suddenly reversed their decision, perhaps because Wolfe was threatening to sue.

For Meehan, it was a minor setback. See, in February, the Republican City Committee voted to give the majority of the ward leaders' voting power to those who resided in the Northeast — Meehan's most loyal supporters. In other words, the insurgents' battle was lost from the beginning. Genius.

HOW EVIL IS TOM CORBETT?

Speaking of evil: Tom Corbett, the attorney general/GOP gubernatorial nominee, scores a 9 on this week's A Million Stories' How Evil Is Tom Corbett? Barometer, which goes from zero to, oh, about 23 or so (we like random numbers). Not bad.

This week's HEITC?™ finds Corbett filing a "friend of the court" brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Albert Snyder, a York County denizen who is suing the Westboro Baptist Church clan, those comically deranged self-parodies who wave " God Hates Fags" signs at military funerals. At first glance, this seems admirable, like maybe Corbett doesn't hate fags — even though he doesn't think they should get married, because God hates anal .

But there's a fallacy with this line of thinking: The slope of restricting free speech is as slippery as K-Y Jelly ; after all, the First Amendment isn't about protecting popular speech. Additionally, with the case's ties to the military — and the fact that his AG's office press-released it — Corbett's move is transparently political. Sigh.

A 9 on the HEITC?™ puts Corbett well below Michael Meehan, who is so evil he'd snap the HEITC?™ needle in half upon telling his mother a white lie about liking her bread pudding.

DEPT. OF BARBARIC PRACTICES

Evan M. Lopez (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Harold Wilson can't catch a break. First, he was convicted of a 1989 triple murder in South Philly that he didn't commit — thanks in part to the DA office's ridiculously racist jury-selection practices — and sentenced to death, then held in prisons across the state for 16 years before DNA evidence cleared him in 2005 [News, "The Exoneree," J.F. Pirro, Sept. 14, 2006].

And then on Friday, a city official told Wilson, 51, he couldn't leave his car parked in front of the District Attorney's Office.

Wilson and 15 other exonerees from across the country had gathered outside the DA's on South Penn Square as members of Witness to Innocence, an anti-death penalty group. Though the South is far-and-away the most lethal-injection-happy region of the U.S. — 1,000 executions out of 1,212 in the country since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center — Witness to Innocence decided to partake of our brotherly love, anyway, to try to dissuade DA Seth Williams from doling out the ultimate punishment.

True, we've only executed three people in the last 34 years, and none in the last decade. Also true, we've had a de facto moratorium in place for years, because six Pennsylvanians, including Wilson, have been cleared after being sentencd to die . On the other hand, the commonwealth still has more than 220 souls awaiting dates with the gurney — more than all but a handful of states. And, moratorium or no, Williams has signed off on a couple of death penalty prosecutions since taking office in January.

"[Williams] has been outspoken about reforms in the criminal-justice system in general and in the death penalty in particular," says Witness to Innocence executive director Kurt Rosenberg. "We just want him to deliver on what he said he would do —which is implementing a more fair capital-sentencing system."

Ideally, they'd like him to take the death penalty off the table, but that's not heppening. So, they'd settle for Williams seeking capital punishment less frequently than predecessor Lynne Abraham, because — and they have a point here — death is forever.

Take Sam Millsap, who as district attorney in Bexar County, Texas, in the 1980s, secured the death penalty for Ruben Cantu, who was executed in 1992. In 2005, a Houston Chronicle investigation cast doubt on the veracity of Cantu's guilt and, Millsap says, brought him to an epiphany.

"Mr. Cantu received what any prosecutor in the country would consider to be the perfect trial," Millsap told the "crowd" (by which we mean "a handful of reporters"). "And yet, he was convicted because the jury did what we asked the jury to do. And so the system worked — but it's not entirely clear that it did."

This week's report by Jeffrey C. Billman, Victor Gamez and Holly Otterbein. E-mail us at amillionstories@citypaper.net.