If there’s one thing that always upsets me, it’s when the generic term cowboy is used to describe somebody who’s an obvious out and out villian.
You can suffer bad work from a ‘cowboy builder’ and be told to watch out for cowboy mechanics but convicted murderers being described as ‘an old cowboy’?
That was the way lawyer Thomas Phalen described Viva Leroy Nash - “the oldest death row inmate in the United States, who spent most of his life behind bars” - who has just died of natural causes at the age of 94.
Phalen tells the NZ Herald:
“He was born in 1915 and he was sent to prison in 1930,” Phalen said.
“Think about it - he had 15 years of life in southern Utah, at a time when Utah and Arizona was the wild, wild West - and he went to prison in 1930, and he remained in prison for the next 80 years, more or less.
Not the kind of guy I would have wanted to bump into down a dark alley!
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Tags: Crime
