Law and Order: Social Media Unit

The San Francisco Police Department may have an "Instagram officer," but other forces are
trolling social media for criminal activity too
Earlier this month, the public learned that the San Francisco Police Department has a dedicated Instagram
officer who patrols the popular photo share site in search of illegal activities. The officer, Eduard Ochoa, had nabbed
a minor for illegal firearm possession after the defendant posted pictures of himself carrying a gun on his Instagram
page, under the username 40glock. Ochoa used the pictures as grounds to search 40glocks house, leading to his
conviction. Ochoas (unofficial) job title as Instagram officer came to light as part of the court filings.
The story was reported by a number of media outlets in a tone of surprisethe police use Instagram?! But those who
follow trends in criminal justice know that San Francisco is hardly unique.
Police use of the internet and social media has been growing rapidly in the past several years, and using Instagram to
catch criminal activity is only the tip of the iceberg. According to a 2013 survey from the International Association of
Chiefs of Police, nearly 96 percent of the 500 law enforcement agencies in America surveyed use social media in
some capacity. The most commonly used social media sites are Facebook (92.1 percent), Twitter (64.8 percent) and
YouTube (42.9 percent). Some 80 percent say social media has helped them solve crimes.
There are probably many officers like Ochoa, though police departments generally dont advertise that fact, says Lori
Brainard, a professor of public policy and public administration at George Washington University, who studies police
use of social media. I think its probably common among very large police departments, she says.
Even departments without dedicated social media officers commonly use Facebook or YouTube to seek the publics
help in identifying or apprehending suspects. A decade or two ago, police might have sent security camera footage of
suspected bank robbers or muggers to the local news to ask viewers for tips. Now theyre likely to also post the
footage on YouTube or their departments Facebook page.
Police also monitor social media sites in search of postings about illegal activities. Some law-breakers, especially
young ones, seem to forget social media is public or semi-public. They post pictures of drug use on Facebook or pose
for selfies wearing stolen clothes or jewelry. A young woman in Texas robbed a bank, then posted a YouTube
video bragging about the experience. She was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison. A searched-for robbery
suspect checked in to a strip club on Facebook, leading officers straight to his location.
Community members can purposely or inadvertently draw police by using hashtags in social media posts. Police
might, for example, follow the hashtag #StateBasketballRules after a local college basketball game. If a picture of an
illegal celebratory street bonfire shows up with the hashtag, police could go to the location and arrest the revelers.
Police have searched hashtags like #420 or #weedstagram to nab drug users. Citizens also sometimes tweet pictures
of vandalism or other minor crimes at police departments as a way of reporting problems without calling 911.
While Facebook and Instagram are common places to search for criminal activity and information about suspects, an
increasing number of police departments are also using Pinterest, that bastion of cookie recipes and baby shower
decoration ideas. In the past year or so, a number of departments have created Pinterest pages to use as virtual lostand-founds. A peek at the Gloucester Township, New Jerseys recovered property board shows several pairs of
earrings and glasses, two sets of car keys and a cell phone. The unclaimed property board from the Dover, Delaware
PD is heavy on purses and wallets. Mountain View, Californias lost and found board has several dozen bikes
(appropriate for a city designed to be a bicycle friendly community). Dallas breaks its board into subcategories:
bicycles, jewelry, electronics, sporting goods, equipment/hardware and miscellaneous.
Other departments use Pinterest as a virtual wanted poster. The unsolved cases board of State College,
Pennsylvania includes pictures of suspected law-breakers: several Walmart thieves, a couple of young women who
used a karaoke room without paying and "two college aged white males along with two college aged white
females" who stole a floor sign from a Taco Bell.
Social media can also help police reach out to non-English-speaking residents. In 2013, the police department of
Alhambra, California, where more than half the residents are of Chinese descent, became the first PD in the country to
start a Weibo, or Chinese Twitter, page. Many of the posts are merely translations of the PDs Facebook posts, while
some are specifically directed at the Chinese community, giving information or looking for help solving crimes. Earlier
this year, the police department of Aurora, Colorado, where some 28 percent of residents are Hispanic, created
a Spanish-language Twitter account.

But police attempts to use social media to gather community support can easily backfire, especially in the current
atmosphere of anger about police killings of unarmed black citizens. Last year, the NYPD asked people to tweet
photos of themselves with officers using the hashtag #myNYPD. While some people posted what the department had
been hoping forshots of themselves smiling with officers at picnics or paradesmany used the hashtag to tweet
pictures of police brutality.
Unfortunately, Brainard says, its incredibly difficult for police departments to use social media to both catch suspects
and build a sense of community. Residents who feel theyre being watched on social media are less likely to want to
share information with the police. The feeling of being spied on engenders mistrust. It has a very chilling effect on
peoples inclination to engage with the police on social media, she says.
Posting information about suspects online can be problematic too, Brainard says. People are innocent until proven
guilty. But when a video of you supposedly committing a crime gets online, it will follow you forever, even if youre
found not guilty.
In the old days, if you slapped someones 'wanted' poster in the newspaper [and] wanted to find that years later, youd
have to look through microfilm at the library, Brainard says. [The internet] has reputation-damaging potential in a way
old-fashioned media didnt.

Five Paralyzed Men Move Their Legs Again in a UCLA Study

As electrodes on the skin stimulated their spines, the study participants made "step-like"
motions
The five men had each been paralyzed below the waist for at least two years. Some had suffered sports injuries;
others had been in car accidents. Their legs were completely motionless, unresponsive to any internal or external
stimuli.
But, during a groundbreaking new study conducted at UCLA, all five men moved their legs with the aid of
transcutaneous stimulation, or the application of electrodes to the skin. Its the first time such results have been
achieved without surgery to implant electrodes beneath the skin.
"Until a year ago, if you had a spinal cord injury and you were completely paralyzed, you had no hope of recovery,"
says Roderic Pettigrew, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National
Institutes of Health, which helped fund the research. "That is no longer the case."
Over the course of 18 weeks, the five men in the study had weekly treatments. Doctors placed electrodes on the
participants' lower backs and near their tailbones. Then, for 45 minutes, the men were suspended by braces from the
ceiling, to take the weight off their legs, while electrical currents stimulated their spines. The stimulation produced a
step-like motion, like walking on air.
[Transcutaneous stimulation] permits us to stimulate the spinal cord in a manner that can activate circuits that
reconnect the brain to the neurons that control muscles, says V. Reggie Edgerton, senior author of the research and
a UCLA distinguished professor of integrative biology and physiology, neurobiology and neurosurgery.
Previous studies looked at whats known as epidural stimulation, where patients have electrodes surgically implanted
in their spinal cords. Those studies showed great promisesubjects with the implants were able to voluntarily move
their legs. But epidural stimulation is invasive, and its difficult to modify the electrodes once theyre implanted. With
transcutaneous stimulation, the electrodes can be moved around as needed. The treatment is also "simpler to do,
cheaper to do and easier to do," Pettigrew says. Researchers say the stimulation methods could eventually be used
together to optimize treatment.
Conventional wisdom in paralysis research has long been that neurological circuits are completely dead. But since the
test subjects recovered motion so quickly, its likely the circuits were simply asleep. This research is especially
exciting, Edgerton says, because it suggests that the electrical current is helping reawaken these dormant circuits.
The results of the research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation,
the Walkabout Foundation and the Russian Scientific Fund, were reported in the Journal of Neurotrauma.

Researchers caution that the movement achieved in the study is not walking. The study subjects were tested while
lying down, so no weight was put on their legs. It will take considerably more improvement to reach a stage where
complete weight bearing can be achieved, Edgerton says.
Future studies will look at whether subjects can indeed learn to stand on their own with transcutaneous stimulation.
The team also plans to study whether the treatment can help paralyzed people regain bodily functions often lost due
to paralysis, such as sexual function and bladder and bowel control.
We feel that were just scratching the surface, and its going to take a number of experiments over time, Edgerton
says.
Preliminary research suggests transcutaneous stimulation could also be useful for stroke victims and those with
Parkinsons disease. Studies are also beginning to investigate whether transcutaneous stimulation can help
quadriplegicspeople paralyzed in both their arms and their legs. This presents additional challenges, as
quadriplegics' injuries often involve a greater degree of autonomic nervous system problems, as well as difficulty
controlling breathing.
With proper funding, Edgerton says a transcutaneous stimulation device based on his team's research could be widely
available in as little as two years. About 6 million Americans are affected by paralysis; 1.3 million of those have spinal
cords injuries.
Russ Weitl, 45, was paralyzed below the waist in a rodeo accident in 2011. From the earliest days after his injury, he
was determined to find some kind of treatment that worked. But a year of intensive physical therapy produced few
results. Then, he joined the UCLA study.
"After not moving my legs for two years, to have control of my legs and be able to move them was unreal," he says.
Weitl even, jokingly, tried to kick one of the students assisting in the study. To his surprise, it almost worked. Though
the study treatments didn't leave him with lasting movement once the electrodes were removed, he does have
increased sensation.
"The important thing is that [the research] was a proof of concept," he says. "Now they know it works."

Humans Evolved to Be Moved by Art

New research shows that while people respond to art for very different reasons, the ability
to be moved in the first place is universal
Theres a lot going on in the brain of a person experiencing a painting, movie or other piece of art. But it doesnt matter
whether the art in question is aesthetically pleasing: in fact, sometimes thats why art is enjoyable. Now, writes Jessica
Herrington for SciArt in America, researchers have found evidence that humans evolved to be moved by art
whether they like it or not.
Aesthetic taste presents a conundrum for neuroscientists: Most seek out some kind of artistic experience in their life,
even if its as basic as having a favorite band. However, the many ways in which people engage with art are
subjective, coming down to individual tastes.
Intrigued by these differences, writes Herrington, a group of neuroscientists at New York University took a look at what
happens in the brain when people look at art by examining the neurological pathways responsible for taste.
Differences in subjective experience may arise not only from differences in the emotions that a given artwork evokes,
but also from how different individuals weigh these emotions, researchers Edward A. Vessel, G. Gabrielle Starr and
Nava Rubin write in the study, which was published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
The team showed subjects a variety of art as their brains were scanned. While participants feelings about the art
ranged from joy to disgust, the study found that many of them showed similar levels of brain activity, especially if they

felt personally connected to the art, Herrington writes. Researchers concluded that while people are moved by art for
very different reasons, the ability to be moved in the first place is universal.
While more research needs to be done to figure out why peoples artistic tastes vary so much, the new research lends
credence to the theory that humans evolved to seek out art for its emotional rush. Now, Frontiers in Human
Neuroscience is putting out a call for more research that studies why people have such disparate experiences with art.
There may soon be scientific evidence for why artists from Georges Seurat to Taylor Swift have the power to make
people grit their teeth in agony or smile in delight.

The Murderous Story of Americas First Hijacking

Earnest Pletchs cold-blooded killing of Carl Bivens was just one chapter in the strange life
of the mechanic, farmhand and erstwhile carnie
Earnest Pletch was mad on planes and mad on flying. In itself, that was scarcely uncommon in the America of the
1930s, a dozen years after Charles Lindberghs solo crossing of the Atlantic turned the United States into the
epicentre of everything exciting in the aviation world. Yet Pletch was a pretty unusual case. He came from a welloff family, but had dropped out of school to find work in a travelling show. He was a serial husband and adulterer who
was already, at the age of 29, planning to abandon his third wife. And he had actually been taking flying lessons
Now late on the afternoon of October 27, 1939 Pletch was looking forward to going solo. He was not going to take
the controls in the usual way, however. He was going to do so after shooting his pilot in the back of the head.
He may be long forgotten now, but Pletch came briefly to Americas attention that autumn after chartering a flight in
Missouri with a pilot by the name of Carl Bivens. Midway through the third of these sessions, while airborne at 5,000
feet and sitting in the rear seat of a tandem training plane equipped with dual controls, he pulled a revolver from
a trouser pocket and, without giving any warning, sent two .32 caliber bullets through Bivenss skull. Pletch then
managed to land the plane, dumped the instructors body in a thicket, and took off again, heading north to his home
state towell, what he intended to do was never really clear.
******
Pletch (who was known to his family as Larry) came from an apparently good home. His father, Guy, was a wealthy
farmer and a county legislator from Frankfort, Indiana, and the young Earnest seems to have grown up wanting for
little. Like many young men in the interwar period, he was a decent mechanic and a self-proclaimed inventor, and,
while he was still at school, he began begging his father to buy him an aircraft. It was at this point that Pletch first
revealed the self-centeredness that characterizes his life story. Told that he would have to graduate from high school
first, he instead left school in disgust around 1926 and impulsively married the first of his at least four wives.
It seems likely that Pletch more or less lost contact with his family at about this time. Later, he would tell the authorities
that he had stolen Bivenss plane so that he could fly it into the side of his fathers barn which would certainly have
made some sort of statement. In the end, he never went through with that plan. But the peripatetic life that the young
Pletch led between 1926 and 1939 was scarcely something that his father would have approved of, and perhaps that
was the point.
How Pletch supported himself for most of those dozen years is largely unknown. One newspaper of the period
described him as a farm hand, but it seems more likely that he made a living as a mechanic, since he preferred
repairing cars and tractors to working on the family farm. According to his own account, he began to study flying
seriously in 1935, working solely from books. He doesnt seem to have laid his hands on an actual aircraft until 1938,
when according to his obituary he took a job at a traveling fair that offered brief airplane rides to thrill-seeking
locals.
This was no ordinary job, and Pletch was working with no ordinary fair. His employer was the Royal American Shows,
an enormous traveling funfair that toured through the United States and Canada for nine months each year,
billing itself both as the most beautiful show on earth and as the proud possessor of the worlds largest midway.
The attractions that Pletch would have worked alongside included girlie shows that featured the likes of Gypsy Rose
Lee. When the fair traveled, it did so using its own special train, which at its peak consisted of almost 100 carriages.
In June 1938, now 28 years old and feeling that he had learned all that he could from reading books and watching the
pilots of the Royal American, Pletch returned home to Frankfort. While there, he stole an aircraft in the middle of the
night and incredibly managed not only to take off, but also to return safely to ground in it. It was the first time I had
ever been at the controls, he later bragged. The boys said it couldnt be done. I took off in that plane at three oclock
in the morning and flew it to Danville, Illinois [about 75 miles due west], and landed it in a seven-acre field.

Presuming that the missing plane would be reported, Pletch kept moving. From Danville, he flew to Vernon, Illinois,
where he set up as a freelance pilot offering thrill rides to paying customers. Its hard to say how long he might have
contrived to keep this business going before anyone caught up with him, because he managed, in short order, to get
himself entangled in yet another problem. One of the customers who paid for a ride in his plane was a 17-year-old
Vernon girl by the name of Goldie Gehrken. Pletch (who was calling himself Larry Thompson and claiming to be 24,
five years younger than his real age) quickly fell for her, and the pair embarked on a five day aerial romance, flying
from place to place around the state while Pletch repeatedly begged Gehrken to marry him. When she refused, Pletch
abandoned her, leaving her sitting under a tree in a field while he flew off.
The girls parents, who had been frantically searching for her for the best part of a week, professed
themselves reluctant to press charges because, the mother said, the young man took such good care of our
daughter. But the police proved less accommodating. Pletch was tracked down and arrested, charged with theft
and then freed on bond to await a trial and likely a spell of imprisonment. That trial was scheduled to begin the week
after he murdered Carl Bivens and made off with his plane.
The precise circumstances of the Bivens murder are rendered hazy by the endless lies that Pletch spun after the
shooting. It seems, though, that he had rejoined the Royal American Shows and that it was the carnival that took him
to Missouri where, in September 1939, he married Francis Bales, of Palmyra. She may have met him at the fair, and
she was, apparently, his third wife. Whatever the truth, the marriage didnt last. Bales left Pletch after only a few days
one source says that he robbed her and not much more than a month later, after borrowing a car in which
he searched unsuccessfully for his missing wife, he did something just as impulsive, but with vastly more serious
consequences. He pitched up in the little town of Brookfield, Missouri, and asked Carl Bivens to teach him to fly.
Pletch took two lessons on the cool autumn afternoon of October 28, and they went well enough for him to request
a third flight in the little yellow Taylor Club monoplane that Bivens had borrowed from a friend. It was 40 minutes into
that third session, while zipping along at about 5,000 feet, that the instructor was murdered.
Pletchs motive for killing Bivens was never really clear. He gave several different versions of events, saying at one
point that he had plotted to steal the plane in order to use it to test his inventions which supposedly included a new
sort of high-performance aviation fuel and at another, in an account that was rather plainly intended to reduce the
charge he faced from first to second degree murder, that he and the instructor had agreed to abscond together in the
plane and head for Mexico.
In this version of events, Bivens had tried to back out of the deal while in mid-air above Missouri. Pletchs story was
that the two men had argued I told him that he was not going to double-cross me and that Bivens had reached
back and attempted to grapple with him, losing control of the plane in the process. It was only because he feared that
they were about to crash, Pletch said, that he drew his gun and fired. The best evidence that this was simply a lie can
be found in the killers own account; having claimed that he acted in a panic to save his own life, Pletch went on to
concede that the emergency only really began after he had shot the pilot: The ship began to pitch and then to dive,
he claimed. I remembered reading about a dying man stiffening at the controls, and then I fired another shot I
reached forward and pulled his body away from the controls, and after a few seconds I got the plane straightened out.
Given the seating arrangement in the plane (Bivens was seated directly in front of Pletch, and also had to fly the
aircraft, meaning that he was scarcely in a position to seriously threaten his student), this last story rings spectacularly
false. It seems much more likely that the murder was nothing more than a means to an end, and that Pletch was
simply doing what he had already done once before stealing a plane and fleeing his responsibilities, albeit in a
startlingly strange and brutal manner. He seems to have hinted as much in what was probably the closest that he ever
came to telling the truth, a statement made to prosecutors in Missouri:

Carl was telling me that I had a natural ability, and I should follow that line [a career in aviation]. I
had a revolver in my pocket and without saying a word to him, I took it out of my overalls and I
fired a bullet into the back of his head. He never knew what struck him.
Having landed briefly in order to dispose of Bivenss body which he did, after relieving the dead man of his wrist
watch and several hundred dollars in cash, by dumping it in a cow pasture near Cherry Box, Missouri Pletch flew
north. He landed in another field as it grew dark, spending the night in a barn and moving on first thing in the morning.
He was heading, apparently, for his parents home, and even circled over it but, having decided against the suicidal
plan of crashing into his fathers barn, he landed instead in a field in Clear Creek, just outside the central Indiana town
of Bloomington. It was dusk by then, and just over a day since the murder: plenty of time for Bivenss body to be
discovered and for word of the stolen plane to spread through the Midwest.
The first people in Clear Creek to notice the planes approach were two young children, Bobby Joe and Jimmy
Logsdon. The brothers had been doing chores when they heard the sound of an engine overhead. Bobby Joe, who
was crazy about aviation, just like Pletch, had never seen or heard a plane at such close quarters, but his father
would not allow him to run out to touch the aircraft as he wanted to. Plenty of others did hurry to the site, however
nothing quite so exciting had happened in the little farming community for years and when Pletch climbed down from

the cockpit and asked if there was anywhere nearby to eat, they pointed him in the direction of the Williams
& Wampler General Store, which had a lunch counter that served hamburgers and coffee.
There was still enough light for several of the locals crowding around the plane to notice something suspicious about
the pilot: there was blood on the front of his blue overalls. Pletch explained the stains away by saying that it came from
a nosebleed that he got from the altitude, but word of his arrival quickly reached Clear Creeks telephone operator,
Bertha Manner, and she had been listening to her radio when it reported a sighting of Pletchs stolen yellow aeroplane
as it circled over Frankfort. Manner, who prided herself on her vivid imagination and a nose for news, lost no time in
calling the Bloomington police.
Interviewed by a local reporter 70 years after the events of that exciting evening, Bobby Joe Logsdon recalled that the
phone soon rang in the general store:

Bill Wampler answered it. The deputy instructed Bill to say only yes and no in response to his
questions. He asked if the pilot was there, then if Bill could stall him, but not to do anything foolish
because the man was dangerous. Bill was frying the hamburgers for the pilot. He was a nervous,
jittery kind of a guy, but he just scooted the burgers over to the cool part of the grill so they
wouldnt cook so fast.
Thanks to Wamplers quick thinking, Pletch was still in the middle of his meal when the state and local police arrived
and surrounded the building. He gave up without a fight, turned over his pistol, and was led away from the store in
handcuffs. Interviewed in Monroe County Jail, he made much of his love for aircraft. I would rather fly than eat, he
said.
The case threatened to establish some interesting legal precedents. It was, to begin with, the first case of highjacking,
or air piracy, in the United States the Chicago Tribune termed it one of the most spectacular crimes of the 20th
century, and what is believed to be the first airplane kidnap murder on record. Since Pletch could not really navigate
(and had every incentive, in any case, to fudge the issue), it was also not at all clear exactly where the murder had
occurred, and hence where the case ought to be tried. In the course of their lesson, Bivens and Pletch had flown over
three Missouri counties, each of which was a separate jurisdiction. That was confusing enough, but as James L.
Robinson, a law professor and director of the Indiana University Institute of Criminal Law pointed out the statutes in
force at the time had not been drafted to take account of killings that took place in mid-air.
Suppose a murder is committed in an airplane out of sight of land, Robinson hypothesized, making it impossible to
prove the county over which the offense occurred. Could the murder be prosecuted, and, if so, where?
Unfortunately for Earnest Pletch, the prosecutors in Missouri took a much less abstract approach when he was
handed over to them next day. There was some potential for a tussle Fred Bollow, who was the prosecutor for
Shelby County, where Bivenss body had been found, lost little time in filing murder charges. But the plane had spent
most of its time in the air over neighboring Macon County, and Bollows colleague there, Vincent Moody holding
Pletchs confession authentic as to the murder location successfully claimed jurisdiction.
Moody wasted no time in bringing Pletch to court feelings were running so high in the district that there were
fears that he might be lynched if there was any delay and the killer himself speeded things along by waiving his right
to a preliminary hearing. When he was brought into the sparsely attended court on 1 November, he pleaded guilty.
There seems little doubt that this was a legal maneuver designed to give Pletch the best possible chance of avoiding
the death penalty, but it was Etta Bivens who did more than anyone to save her husbands killer from an appointment
with the gas chamber. She told the presiding judge, Harry J. Libby, that she did not wish to seek the death penalty.
Instead, Libby sentenced Pletch to life having first extracted a promise that he would never apply for either pardon or
parole.
What happened next remained something of a mystery for many years. Pletch certainly lived on, and on, finally dying
at the age of 91 in June 2001. That ought to have meant that he served a sentence of almost 62 years in Missouri
State Prison, long enough to win him an unwelcome place on the list of the ten longest sentences ever served in
American jails. When Pamela Keech, an Indiana journalist who interviewed the surviving witnesses to his planes
landing for Bloom magazine in 2009 wrote up her story, she assumed that Pletch had died in jail.
My own research shows that that was not the case. The U.S. Social Security Death Index lists Pletch, but gives the
place of his death as Eldridge, Missouri an isolated spot nowhere near any of the states prisons. And a careful
search of local newspapers revealed that Pletchs name cropped up twice among the small ads published by
the Kansas City Star years earlier, in 1964 and 1965 on the first occasion selling a new ranch type house together
with an associated lot on the Lake of the Ozarks, and on the second auctioning a service station, together with
several items of personal property including boats, motors, caf equipment, and some antiques. Not only that
a man by the name of Earnest Pletch had found employment as a pilot with a firm called Cox Aviation and married a
woman named Mary Leap on the day after Christmas 1973. There must have been other wives as well; when this
Pletch died, he left 16 grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren.
It took some correspondence with the Missouri State Archives to resolve the problem and reveal an outcome that
the merciful Etta Bivens surely never intended when she interceded to save Pletchs life in 1939. The killer, it turned
out, had served less than 20 years for the murder of her husband. Pletch had kept his promise not to apply for a

pardon or parole, but then he hardly needed to his life sentence had been commuted to one of 25 years on January
9, 1953, then further commuted on March 1, 1957, the day of his release.
We looked at the commutation records, an archivist wrote, and they do not give any information as to why his
sentence was commuted twice Commutations for convicted murderers or people with life sentences were fairly
common. Overcrowding was an endemic problem at the [Missouri State Prison], so prisoners with good behavior were
often let out early.
There does not seem to be any evidence that Earnest Pletch committed any further crimes after his early release.
Perhaps he realized he was lucky. Lucky to have landed the Taylor Club successfully that Friday afternoon with a dead
man at the dual controls. Lucky not to have been executed when he was sent back to Missouri. Lucky, again, to have
served his time in a grossly overcrowded jail such that commutation was his way to freedom. But fortunate above all to
have been offered mercy by a woman to whose husband he had shown no mercy at all.