A Panto in more ways than one
When one reads news reports, one encounters many different types of story; informative tracts, entertaining tracts, serious reporting (although that is nowadays a bit of an oxymoron) and every now and again something that strikes one as somewhat akin to a pantomime.
Such is the case of a certain Oswaldo Martinez, an El-Salvadorian illegal immigrant to the USA. Martinez is currently incarcerated in Williamsburg, James City County, Virginia on murder charges. Now this part of the story is very sad and extremely serious as it involves the death of a teenage girl; it is only when you delve deeper into the story that you discover that Oswaldo Martinez is a deaf mute and that his trial has been delayed since 2005 because he cannot communicate in sign language.
The trial, in fact, will only be able to proceed once Martinez has gained the required competency in sign language to be able to communicate with his defence lawyer’s interpreter; currently his ability at communication is commensurate with a 4 year old child because he can only communicate using methods totally unrelated to formal sign language. He uses a combination of pantomime and unique hand gestures; his defence lawyer has stated that he has made good progress learning sign language, but that 75% of his communication is still based upon his unique pantomime system and that he hopes that at some undefined time in the future, he will be able to be sufficiently proficient at standard sign language to be able to proceed with his trail.
Now, as mentioned before; the case is a serious one considering the offence and considering that a guilty verdict could result in the death penalty for Martinez. I could not find any further details of the prosecution’s case but what I have generally found in many years of sifting through media stories is that when there is any solid compelling evidence to support any trial case or political argument that the authorities are keen to put forward, that evidence is generally published; when there is none, nothing is mentioned regarding evidence in press releases.
As the latter is currently the case: could it just be me, or is it anybody else’s first impression that the Police thought it would be a great idea to ‘pin it on the deaf mute’?