Overlawyered letters

I noticed that you carried the item (May 20) about the lawsuit against the jail architect et al because the serial killer who hanged himself couldn't be reasonably monitored by jailers. I see your point, but I noticed the story for what might be approaching the opposite angle: According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (the same story you linked to), Travis hanged himself while he had a pillowcase over his head, toilet paper in his nostrils, a washcloth in his mouth, and, and, and, his hands tied behind his back. I'm ready to ask U. of Missouri to set up a Maury Travis memorial gymnastics scholarship. But I view the lawsuit as sort of a kitchen sink set of claims by a family with some pretty good evidence that he might have been abughraibed. -- Chuck Shepherd, News of the Weird

Yes, the episode does seem more than a little fishy. And yet we also noticed (relying, once again, on the same Post-Dispatch piece) that the deceased "had interest and skills in bondage", possibly accounting for his ability to restrain himself in impossible-sounding ways, and that the mother's lawyer is curiously unaggressive (see last few lines of story) about advancing the notion that Travis was murdered. No indication appears whether the authenticity of the suicide note has been questioned. At any rate, as reader Shepherd (whose weekly column is one of the longstanding delights of American journalism) correctly notes, the aspect of the suit that most got our antennae to waving was its avidity in assigning blame to so many different defendants including the prison's architect and builder. -- ed.