"On The Cover Of The Rolling Stone" - Jahar Tsarnaev

[Tearloch7]

Too bad he was set up, like most of the shootings, so they can ban guns.

[nux4lyfe]

Why would they give this guy the publicity?

[DonLever]

Time magazine once had Adolf Hitler and Bin laden on the cover.

Rolling Stone Magazine had Charles Manson.

All of them kill more than this guy. So what is the problem.

[The Bookie]

heh...

Löwenäffchen ‏@Lowenaffchen14h

I heard theres someone on the rolling stone cover who did a crime that caused hearing damage. Its nickelback

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[Common sense]

Just sayin', but this is more offensive:

[DarthNinja]

i can't believe the tin foil hat brigade already jumped on this one.

[The Bookie]

Time magazine once had Adolf Hitler and Bin laden on the cover.

[Bodee]

Why would they give this guy the publicity?

[Bodee]

Rolling stone has been writing on political hot button topics since Vietnam.

The article is not a glamorization and actually attempts to explain how this regular everyday kid who could be any of our friends could do something like this.

People are so quick to label those who commit these attacks without understanding that the problem is so much bigger than the us vs them mentality. The whole USA vs Islam is so Crusades the next generation.

My beef is why people aren't asking why or trying to understand what drove them to this to begin with.

[skolozsy2]

I read the article and really see no reason to fuss. Just an article about who he was and the kind of person he was before that day. Found it intetesting and pretty informative. I definetly didnt see it as a glamorization piece and he's already been made public well before this article was written.

[Bill Sikes]

Felt that way from the beginning. He has talked to his parents and they still say publicly that they believe it wasn't him. The fact that the US is saying he apparently admitted to it all without official published quotes, but officially he has decided to plead not guilty. Not trying to go all conspiracy, but a lot of fishy stuff about the whole thing.

[Blackberries]

Well why did they not put a photo of one of the victims who lost a limb?

[The Bookie]

Matt Taibbi, who most consider to be the best journalist currently writing for Rolling Stone, wrote a blog post about the reaction to the cover. (He didn't write the original article however). Interestingly, he grew up in Boston but spent a decade living in Russia. He mentions that he once missed being blown up by a Chechen bomb in a Moscow subway by minutes.

Anyway it's also long so I'll just quote one part, but he has a great take on it.

As to the question of why anyone would ever put a terrorist on a cover of a magazine for any reason beyond the opportunity to slash a red X through his face or depict him in crosshairs, there's an explanation for that. Terrorists are a fact of our modern lives and we need to understand them, because understanding is the key to stopping them.

But in trying to understand someone like a Tsarnaev, there is a delicate line between empathy and sympathy that any journalist has to be careful not to cross. You cannot understand someone without empathy, but you also have to remember at all times who this person is and what he or she did. I think author Janet Reitman did an excellent job of walking that line, but certainly this kind of approach is going to be inherently troubling to some, because it focuses on the criminal and his motivations and not his victims and their suffering.

Which brings us to point No. 2, the idea that the cover photo showed Tsarnaev to be too nice-looking, too much like a sweet little boy.

I can understand why this might upset some people. But the jarringly non-threatening image of Tsarnaev is exactly the point of the whole story. If any of those who are up in arms about this cover had read Janet's piece, they would see that the lesson of this story is that there are no warning signs for terrorism, that even nice, polite, sweet-looking young kids can end up packing pressure-cookers full of shrapnel and tossing them into crowds of strangers.

Thus the cover picture is not intended to glamorize Tsarnaev. Just the opposite, I believe it's supposed to frighten. It's Tsarnaev's very normalcy and niceness that is the most monstrous and terrifying thing about him. The story Janet wrote about the modern terrorist is that you can't see him coming. He's not walking down the street with a scary beard and a red X through his face. He looks just like any other kid.

[Buddhas Hand]

THE AMERICAN SYSTEM OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY

INTRODUCTION:

Criminal law relates to laws passed by the United States whose violation constitutes a crime which can result in fines, imprisonment...or even death. Unlike civil law in which private citizens utilize the courts to seek redress or enforce their rights, a criminal trial involves either the Federal government or the State government seeking to obtain a guilty verdict against an individual. It is not individuals using the system but the government itself using the legal system to seek to enforce the laws and punish the individual to protect society.

Both the Federal government and the various states all have their own criminal statutes thus criminal trials can occur in either forum depending on which law is violated. By far most criminal trials involve state laws since the Federal government is restricted in its jurisdiction to particular types of crimes. Well over ninety percent of all criminal trials occur in state courts.

Americans are enormously proud and occasionally exasperated by their complex, expensive, and powerful system of criminal law which goes to tremendous lengths to protect the individual rights of the accused. Most people rightly consider the system as slanted towards ensuring the rights of the person charged with numerous safeguards, chief of which is the requirement that the person is presumed innocent until the government meets the highest burden of proof known in American law: proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to a moral certainty. Further, most systems of American criminal law also require a unanimous verdict by the jury to convict. No system of law in the world imposes such a tremendous burden on the State to meet before it can imprison or otherwise punish a citizen accused of a crime.

Yet, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of criminal trials result in verdicts of guilty.

And it is a fact that the recent DNA scientific advances which allowed new methods to verify if convicted murderers were guilty have shown that at least thirty percent and perhaps as much as fifty percent of those convicted and waiting on "death row" for execution were innocent...to the point where the governors of several states have refused to allow further executions until it is determined why this remarkable system seems to have failed.

It would appear that despite these remarkable safeguards to protect the accused, the system seems to be resulting in far more guilty verdicts than justified. In the last section of this article we will discuss the economic aspects of the American criminal law system that may explain the perhaps inappropriate level of guilty verdicts: put simply, the system runs on money and the average accused is poor, thus unable to effectively utilize the various safeguards available. A wag put it well: "if you have money, it is the fairest system in the world." Things are not looking good for Jahar , he does not have much money.