Sam Bieler takes me to task for supposedly getting “[e]very single point … wrong” in my post last Thursday about the death of Whittier police officer Keith Boyer. He offers an extensive and thorough criticism, and he may well be right on many key points.
For what it’s worth, I amended my post, within an hour after I first put it up, to note that “state prison officials are contesting (or at least attenuating) the causal connection between AB 109 and Officer Boyer’s death” and to emphasize that my assessment was “predicated on the [newspaper] article’s understanding that there is a traceable connection between Brown v. Plata and Officer Boyer’s death.”
Bieler faults me for providing that update “in the most tentative manner possible.” He may have a fair point. Had I known of the information that I added in my update, I would never have done the post in the first place. Having done it, I suppose that I could simply have deleted, or struck through, the post. But in my haste (I was rushing off to the airport), I thought that the update was adequate.
Seeing that Bieler makes serious points and not having the time to explore the matter further, I am now going to strike-through my previous post (and link to this post to explain why).
(I have tried to follow a practice of scrupulously correcting my errors and of not making points that I can’t responsibly support. I wish that others would follow this same practice.)