Page 2/The Battalion/Monday, February 2,1987
*5B
The Battalion
(USPS 045 360)
Member of
Texas Press Association
Southwest Journalism Conference
The Battalion Editorial Board
Loren Steffy, Editor
Marybeth Rohsner, Managing Editor
Mike Sullivan, Opinion Page Editor
Jens Koepke, City Editor
Jeanne Isenberg, Sue Krenek, News Editors
Homer Jacobs, Sports Editor
Tom Ownbey, Photo Editor
Editorial Policy
The Battalion is a non-profit, self-supporting newspaper oper
ated as a community service to Texas A&rM and Bryan-College Sta
tion.
Opinions expressed in The Battalion are those of the editorial
board or the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinions
of Texas A&M administrators, faculty or the Board of Regents.
The Battalion also serves as a laboratory newspaper for students
in reporting, editing and photography classes within the Depart
ment of Journalism.
The Battalion is published Monday through Friday during
Texas A&M regular semesters, except for holiday and examination
periods.
Mail subscriptions are $17.44 per semester, $34.62 per school
year and $36.44 per full year. Advertising rates furnished on re
quest.
Our address: The Battalion, Department of Journalism, Texas
A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-41 1 1.
Second class postage paid at College Station, TX 77843.
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Battalion, De
partment of Journalism, Texas A&M University, College Station
TX 77843-4111.
Guilty as charged
Blame it on lack of experience, haste or foolish oversights, but re
gardless of where the blame is placed, two dangerous criminals may
soon be free to walk the streets of Bryan-College Station.
In a case that has been handled unprofessionally from robbery
scene to courtroom, Felix Orta and Crispin Morales undoubtedly
will luck out.
Orta and Morales were found guilty by jurors in Brazos County’s
272nd District Court Wednesday on three charges of the Oct. 26 ag
gravated armed-robbery of a local 7-Eleven store. Orta, 32, was sen
tenced to life in prison, while Morales, 26, was given a shorter sen
tence.
But considering the manner in which the whole case was han
dled, a judicial slip-up was inevitable.
The bumbling began with a Rambo-style round-up of the of
fenders which claimed the life of a third offender at the scene of the
crime. According to the A&M student who was held hostage, his life
nearly was claimed by police as they shot at the offenders.
In the courtroom, defense attorneys kindly were given a choice
by the court as to which reversible errors they wanted to use to win
their client’s aquittal:
Presiding Judge John Delaney left out an important phrase while
reading from a paragraph listing the elements of the crimes alleged
in the charges. He ordered the jury to return to deliberations and re
consider its decision in light of the new clause.
Defense attorneys say the the judge’s action constitutes “double
jeopardy” — meaning the defendants are facing the possibility of
conviction twice for the same crime — and is illegal. In all likelihood,
Orta and Morales will win their freedom because of the mistake.
The second choice was offered by a juror who told a KBTX-TV
reporter that she recognized him from the previous evening’s news
cast. The only story the reporter had done the night before was the
Orta-Morales trial.
Unfortunately for College Station prosecutors, jurors are forbid
den by law to watch or read any material about their cases during the
trial, and doing so may lead to dismissal of a case.
In the end, instead of treating Orta and Morales like the crimi
nals they are, the city has housed and fed them for three months and
will more than likely have no choice but to free them, enabling them
to repeat their crimes in College Station.
Justice is supposed to be blind. But when it’s carried out with the
lack of finesse and professionalism demonstrated in this case, it
should be a crime.
STEED RESEARCH + CONDITIONING LAB
(USED BY ATHLETES Y/HO GET A
free: education)
INTRAMURAL WEIGHT ROOM
(USED BY STUDENTS VJHO PAY THEIR. WAV'
THROUGH SCOOL)
How obout a little chicken
to go with your additives?
We’ve all eaten
them in some
form or another;
Chicken McNug-
gets, Chicken
Tenders, Chicken
Chunks, Chicken
fingers — the list
goes on and on.
These bite-sized,
batter-fried bits of
chicken and va
rious other ingre-
Paula
Vogrin
dients have taken America’s restaurants,
supermarket freezer sections and kitch
ens by storm.
Since McDonald’s introduced the first
Chicken McNugget in 1983, chicken
nuggets have become, according to the
Washington Post, ‘the hotdog of the
80s.’
Nuggets are easy to fix and quick to
eat. If you don’t cook, you can pick
them up at virtually any fast food res
taurant. If you know how to turn on the
oven, you can get the frozen variety at
your neighborhood grocery store. If
you do like to cook, there are hundreds
of recipes for nuggets ranging from Ca
jun to nouvelle cuisine.
But what exactly is a nugget? Is it all
one piece of chicken? Is it little bits of
chicken from different parts of the bird
smashed together to look like a single
piece of chicken.? Is it chicken meat
alone? Is it chicken meat and skin? Is
there any chicken in it?
The answer is all of the above, de
pending on what kind of nugget you
buy. If you like the nugget shape, not
the chicken, you can buy ham and
cheese nuggets from Swanson, turkey
nuggets from Chefs Pantry and ice
cream nuggets from Isaly.
If you’re interested in chicken nug
gets, the Washington Post published a
list of ingredients used by some of the
major fast food chains and in frozen
chicken nuggets.
The description of the chicken filling
used in fast food nuggets varied widely.
For example. Burger King described
their filling as white chicken breast
meat, while McDonald’s used white
meat, dark meat, skin, salt and sodium
phosphate. Which would you rather
eat?
II the- meat lias been ^rouii
chopped and formed with addedii
(lient s si u h as water, so\ proteins ® r ' ^
dium phosphate, the final produciipW
be labeled a patty, or something sEMpfl
to that.
Eli
conct
devel
Chicken tenders are described
whole piece of chicken breast tec
loin, not a combination of darkand
meat that has been choppedorgrot
Those definitions seem prettycM cial h
Here’s a little bit of ambiguii'f ^ 111
° CCIVC
vou. Banquet makes a product ,
Chicken Sticks. The package sann
“meat used is 100 percent chicken j
meat used may be 100 percent chill
but the meat used is only partoi|
filling. The filling includes ingre:
other than meat. According toil
compiled by Con Agra, therearelf
gredients in the filling.
How healthy are chicken nui
anyway? They’re made from chick
stead of beef so they can’t be tooil
right? Wrong. Each three-ounce sell
of McDonald’s Chicken McNugget'
about twice the fat as a regulars'
bu rger.
Killing is too good for him
Richard
Cohen
Earlier this
month, German
police arrested a
man at the Frank
furt airport carry
ing liquid explo-
s i v e s in his
luggage. He
turned out to be
Mohammed Ali
Hamadei, one of
four men indicted
by the United
States, following the 1985 hijacking of a
TWA jetliner, for the murder of a pas
senger. The Germans, to their credit,
refused to extradite Hamadei until the
United States agreed not to seek the
death penalty. Almost 42 years after
World War II, it is the Germans who in
struct us in morality.
If guilty, Hamadei would seem the
perfect candidate for execution. Not
only was the TWA passenger. Navy di
ver Robert D. Stethem, killed in cold
blood, but 39 others passengers were
forced to spend 17 harrowing days as
hostages in Beirut. And now there is ad
ditional evidence that Hamadei was in
tent on even more killing. At only 22
years of age, he is a man to be reckoned
with.
But what purpose would be served by
executing him? Would other zealots be
deterred from further acts of terrorism?
Not likely. Terrorists court death. They
do not put much of a premium on their
own lives, not to mention the lives of
others. Some of them willingly sacrifice
themselves to further their cause. The
Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up
by a suicide driver. The terrorists who
slaughtered Jews in an Istanbul syna-
gogue came prepared to blow them
selves up. They did.
So deterrence is not a factor. What is
left? Simple vengeance, that’s all. And
while that urge is nothing to sneer at, we
have to recognize that at bottom it is
partly what motivates terrorists. They,
too, have a desire to strike back. There
would be nothing as appalling as watch
ing the United States sink to the moral
level of a murderer.
Since the death penalty was re
instated by the Supreme Court in 1976,
it has been a moral blot on the United
States. Sixty-six persons have been exe
cuted and yet — ask yourself — do you
feel any safer? If you hesitate to answer,
let me give you some statistics. In 1986,
the urban-homicide rate was up sharply,
in some cities returning to the record
numbers of the 1970’s. In Chicago and
New York, homicides were up 20 per
cent; in Washington, the figure was 60
percent. Atlanta had a 30 percent in
crease in homicides and in Miami, Dal
las, Boston, Baltimore, St. Louis and
Philadelphia killings increased by as
much as 20 percent.
Homicides are often cold-blooded,
which means the killers know full well
what the penalty could be. As a result,
they should be deterred. Clearly, they
are not.
In his book about the founding of
Australia, “The Fatal Shore,” Robert
Hughes says that 162,000 convicts were
shipped from Britain to its most distant
colony. There, they were often abused
— tortured, starved, worked to death.
Often the crimes were petty, but the
punishment was not. There was hardly
a criminal in all of England who did not
know what arrest could mean — banish
ment to the other side of the world and,
often, death. Yet criminality thrived,
probably for the usual reason: Few
criminals think they will be caught.
And yet the United States keeps
looking for the quick fix when it comes
to its own crime problem. To that end,
the death penalty is often justified as a
deterrent when it is nothing of the sort:
Murder rates rise and fall in sweet and
bloody obliviousness to capital punish
ment. That is especially the case for the
most common of all types of homicide
— the crime of passion in which reason
takes a powder and a spouse, friend or
lover is killed. There has been no deter
ring that.
With the exception of the United
States, the Western world exists without
the death penalty. Only the United
States has barbaric debates about
whether a marginally retarded person
should be executed. Only we have a ma
cabre lottery in which, either on account
of race, plea bargain or the clever mach
inations of a lawyer, only a few mur
derers draw the hangman. And only we
have to wonder whether a mistake has
been made and an innocent person exe
cuted.
About 1,800 Americans await the ex
ecutioner — deaths that would serve no
purpose but to validate the notion that
there are times, outside of self-defense,
when a life can be taken. That is what
Mohammed Ali Hamadei allegedly
thought. It took German insistence to
show how wrong he was.
Copyright 1986, Washington Post Writers Group
In the world of chicken nuggets, the
use of skin is a hot topic. Some nuggets
have it and some don’t. In fact, some
nuggets add more skin than naturally
occurs on chickens. The U.S. Depart
ment of Agriculture says when the in
gredient label lists “chicken skin” you’re
getting an extra dose of skin.
MMMmmmmmmmm . . . extra fat and
cholesterol — the cornerstone of a good
meal.
But if the ingredient label doesn’t in
clude skin, the USDA says you won’t
know if it’s been removed or included in
naturally occurring proportions.
The skin advocates listed several rea
sons in the Washington Post for using
skin. McDonald’s says, “Moisture.” Bo-
jangles says, “Flavor.” Tyson Foods says,
“Cost.” And Wendy’s says, “Helps the
breading adhere to the meat.”
So much for skin.
I also learned there are two different
types of chicken nuggets: chicken pat
ties and chicken tenders. The difference
between these two is like the difference
between night and day.
- Mail Call -
But rest assured, you’re notgtl
just any old chicken in your diKi
nuggets. J ust like certain cows are ill
to he steak, certain chickens arel
lined to become chicken nuggets.
In an interview with the Wasil
Post, Bill Roenigk, director of ecoti
research for the National BroilerCl
cil, said nugget chickens are gro»|
five and one-half to six pounds,ail
posed to four pounds for broiler(1
ens. The larger bird has morel
meat and can furnish more nuggcl
said.
I guess those big leg-and-thighi
at the supermarket are a result'
huge batch of chicken nuggets.
I don’t know — maybe it's jus'. 7
but as far as chicken nuggets art j
cerned, I’d prefer to make myo
have none at all. If you are whatyoi
in the case of most chicken mil
we’d all be unrecognizable.
Paula Vogrin is a senior jou&
major and a columnist for The I
ion.
Nonsense
EDITOR:
In the Jan. 28 Battalion a column entitled
“Abolishment of Corps is key to A&M’s Growth”
appeared. I feel the concern expressed therein is
completely unfounded. Sullivan’s argument is based on
the Corps. In my experience, this simply is not true.
During the early 1980s I spent some time in Honduras.
Texas A&M was fairly well known and almost invariably
described as either “a good engineering school” or as “a
good agricultural school,” not, as Sullivan would have us
believe, a military school.
My undergraduate degree was from the University of
Pittsburgh. When I told my professors where I would be
attending graduate school, they congratulated me on
being accepted to such a good engineering school. They
didn’t even know of the Corps’ existence. I rarely run into
people whose image of A&M is influenced by the Corps.
A university’s academic reputation is built on its
research and, to a lesser extent, on its quality of teaching.
Research, especially in the sciences, costs a great dealof
money. MIT has built its reputation on its $1 billion
research fund from the Department of Defense. A&Mtff
use its military presence to favorably influence theDOD
The Corps, through its presence and work oncanf
has built a school spirit of which no other school canboJi
That school pride translates into graduates whocomete
to A&M when they or their companies need research
performed.
I’m sorry, Sullivan, I’m afraid your faulty assumpti®
led you to a fallacious conclusion. Or as we say incompu
science, “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”
Jeffrey C. Lockledge
Graduate Student
Letters to the editor should not exceed 300 words in length. The editorialst'
senes the right to edit letters for style and length, but will make everj f
inaintam the author’s intent. Each letter must be signed and must includillt 1
sification, address and telephone number of the writer.