The Nation has the story Why Is a Florida Man Facing Life in Prison For Lending a Friend His Car and Going to Sleep? by Charles Grodin.

Ryan Holle, who has no prior record, is currently serving his eleventh year of a life sentence.

Several years ago I read a piece in The New York Times by Adam Liptak about Ryan Holle. Ryan, who had no prior record, is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole in Florida. He was convicted of pre-meditated murder, even though no one, including the prosecutor, disputes that Ryan was asleep in his bed at home at the time of the crime.

Why not give us a link to The New York Times article Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers?

Mr. Holle, who had given the police a series of statements in which he seemed to admit knowing about the burglary, was convicted of first-degree murder.

Not having heard what the jury in this case heard, I have no way to interpret what “seemed to admit” means.

Right from the start in reading Grodin’s article, I knew that he was not telling us the whole story.  Since he has no smell test for his own writing, it’s no wonder that he had no sense of smell when he read The New York Times story.

I do not know if the accused is guilty or not, but I  have a strong suspicion that the “news” media are leaving out a lot of things.  It is obvious what the media want us to believe, but they are going to have to work harder to get me to believe it.

The Nation story was reprinted on Alternet as How Lending A Friend Your Car, Then Going to Bed Can Land You a Life Prison Sentence.

How is this kind of reporting any better than what you might get on Faux Noise?  I want the media that I read to have a higher set of standards than the media I refuse to read because of its low standards. Why would a news outlet that had pretensions of standards want to publish dreck like this? Do they realize how badly this damages their reputations? Are we to think that the editors have no sense of smell?

April 12, 2014 – 8:15 PM

I must apologize to The New York Times. Apparently I did not read the whole story.

I wanted to respond to Roger’s comment that I did make my feelings known in a comment on Alternet.

I noticed that in a comment about my comment there were some words about the trial that I had not read. These words were from The New York Times story. This is about comments from the defendant.

“All he did was go say, ‘Use the car,’ ” Mr. Allen said of Mr. Holle in a pretrial deposition. “I mean, nobody really knew that girl was going to get killed. It was not in the plans to go kill somebody, you know.”

But Mr. Holle did testify that he had been told it might be necessary to “knock out” Jessica Snyder. Mr. Holle is 25 now, a tall, lean and lively man with a rueful sense of humor, alert brown eyes and an unusually deep voice. In a spare office at the prison here, he said that he had not taken the talk of a burglary seriously.

“I honestly thought they were going to get food,” he said of the men who used his car, all of whom had attended the nightlong party at Mr. Holle’s house, as had Jessica Snyder.

“When they actually mentioned what was going on, I thought it was a joke,” Mr. Holle added, referring to the plan to steal the Snyders’ safe. “I thought they were just playing around. I was just very naïve. Plus from being drinking that night, I just didn’t understand what was going on.”