Locking Them Up Forever, or Trying Them As Adults and Sentencing Them to Death?’ Instead, the reports remained studiedly factual, even after a minimum eighteen-year sentence had been passed on each of the boys. As soon as the case had concluded, it appeared to fall entirely from view.
That was, I supposed, hardly surprising. A small community would not wish to have that particular wound repeatedly reopened: a murder committed by two of their own, a pair of apparently normal young boys, against a black girl, who was not one of their own by virtue of her race but was still only a girl. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the black and white communities in that part of North Dakota shared a common bond through baseball. North Dakota, along with Minnesota, was one of the few states in the Union where blacks and whites had always played together with little trouble. Freddie Sims and Chappie Gray had been the first black athletes to play semipro baseball in North Dakota, soon followed by Art Hancock, the ‘black Babe Ruth,’ and his brother Charlie. Eventually the Bismarck town team attracted the great Satchel Paige, and it was in North Dakota that Paige played alongside white men for the first time. Upon retiring from the game, a number of the black players decided to spend the rest of their lives in Drake Creek, and there was still a small museum in the town devoted to their achievements. In other words, the sex-related killing of a black girl by two white boys would have threatened the delicate racial balance that this part of North Dakota had managed to maintain for so long. Better to deal with it, then set aside all that had happened as extraordinary and move on. And perhaps those who felt that way were right: The killing of children by children is a terrible exception, or it was until gangbangers and ignorant men began glorifying the code of living and dying by the gun in projects and ghettos. Each instance deserved to be examined, if only so that some understanding of the individual circumstances might be reached, but whether or not there was a general lesson for society in a case like the Selina Day killing seemed unlikely.
Still, by the end of my search I had confirmed a number of the names on Haight’s list: the two public defenders appointed to the boys, the prosecuting attorney (who was the same in both cases), and the judge. The witness statements were minimal, as the boys had confessed to the crime before trial, so the issue at hand became purely a matter of sentencing. No mention was made of the deal that Randall Haight had claimed was struck, the social experiment that would ultimately allow him and Lonny Midas to escape the shadow of their crime, publicly at least. Again, that wasn’t particularly unusual; to some degree, it would have been dependent on the progress made by the boys while in custody, and no sane prosecutor, defender, or judge hoping for a degree of advancement in the judiciary would willingly have become a public party to such an agreement in the immediate aftermath of the trial.
I started working on the four names. One of the public defenders, Larraine Walker, was dead; she had died in a motorcycle accident in 1996. The second public defender, Cory Felder, had dropped off the radar, and I could find no record of him after 1998. The prosecuting attorney was a man named R. Dean Bailey. That name rang a bell. A couple of keystrokes later, R. Dean Bailey was revealed as a repeatedly unsuccessful challenger for a Republican nomination to Congress. Bailey’s views on immigration, welfare, and, indeed, government in general were colorful to say the least, even by the standards of some of the vitriol that regularly emerged from the extreme conservative wing of the Republican Party. In fact, like most of his kind, his views on federal government could best be summarized as ‘keep it as small as possible unless it’s convenient for me and my friends to have it otherwise, and as
That was, I supposed, hardly surprising. A small community would not wish to have that particular wound repeatedly reopened: a murder committed by two of their own, a pair of apparently normal young boys, against a black girl, who was not one of their own by virtue of her race but was still only a girl. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the black and white communities in that part of North Dakota shared a common bond through baseball. North Dakota, along with Minnesota, was one of the few states in the Union where blacks and whites had always played together with little trouble. Freddie Sims and Chappie Gray had been the first black athletes to play semipro baseball in North Dakota, soon followed by Art Hancock, the ‘black Babe Ruth,’ and his brother Charlie. Eventually the Bismarck town team attracted the great Satchel Paige, and it was in North Dakota that Paige played alongside white men for the first time. Upon retiring from the game, a number of the black players decided to spend the rest of their lives in Drake Creek, and there was still a small museum in the town devoted to their achievements. In other words, the sex-related killing of a black girl by two white boys would have threatened the delicate racial balance that this part of North Dakota had managed to maintain for so long. Better to deal with it, then set aside all that had happened as extraordinary and move on. And perhaps those who felt that way were right: The killing of children by children is a terrible exception, or it was until gangbangers and ignorant men began glorifying the code of living and dying by the gun in projects and ghettos. Each instance deserved to be examined, if only so that some understanding of the individual circumstances might be reached, but whether or not there was a general lesson for society in a case like the Selina Day killing seemed unlikely.
Still, by the end of my search I had confirmed a number of the names on Haight’s list: the two public defenders appointed to the boys, the prosecuting attorney (who was the same in both cases), and the judge. The witness statements were minimal, as the boys had confessed to the crime before trial, so the issue at hand became purely a matter of sentencing. No mention was made of the deal that Randall Haight had claimed was struck, the social experiment that would ultimately allow him and Lonny Midas to escape the shadow of their crime, publicly at least. Again, that wasn’t particularly unusual; to some degree, it would have been dependent on the progress made by the boys while in custody, and no sane prosecutor, defender, or judge hoping for a degree of advancement in the judiciary would willingly have become a public party to such an agreement in the immediate aftermath of the trial.
I started working on the four names. One of the public defenders, Larraine Walker, was dead; she had died in a motorcycle accident in 1996. The second public defender, Cory Felder, had dropped off the radar, and I could find no record of him after 1998. The prosecuting attorney was a man named R. Dean Bailey. That name rang a bell. A couple of keystrokes later, R. Dean Bailey was revealed as a repeatedly unsuccessful challenger for a Republican nomination to Congress. Bailey’s views on immigration, welfare, and, indeed, government in general were colorful to say the least, even by the standards of some of the vitriol that regularly emerged from the extreme conservative wing of the Republican Party. In fact, like most of his kind, his views on federal government could best be summarized as ‘keep it as small as possible unless it’s convenient for me and my friends to have it otherwise, and as
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