Time for Remedial Courses for the Electoral College

Would you want to win the election in Idaho? More important, they have more say than you do about who is the president of the United States.

BrooklynDodger suspects that the conservative majority in Idaho are lock-em-up minimum sentence advocates, pro-capital punishment, right-to-life ends at birth law and order types. So here is this dude, executed two fish and game guys – actually Idaho state employees, not feds. Only barely convicted of manslaughter. Then, he escapes from prison, hid out for a year, but still gets time off for good behavior.

These people get two senators, two congressional reps and 4 electoral votes: 169,000 voters per electoral vote in Idaho, 350,998 per electoral vote in California. In Wyoming it’s 80,000 voters per electoral vote.

Excerpts from CNN story follow.

Infamous Idaho killer set for release
Case pitted mountain man against government

Saturday, February 5, 2005 Posted: 9:05 AM EST (1405 GMT)

OWYHEE COUNTY, Idaho (AP) -- Idaho's most infamous outlaw, Claude Dallas, 54-years-old is to be released from prison Sunday after serving nearly 22 years for the slayings of Conley Elms and Bill Pogue, officers for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. [Plenty of years to do it again.]

Dallas' 1986 jailbreak only heightened the legend perpetuated by his friends. Dallas hid for nearly a year before he was caught and sent back to prison. Dallas' 30-year sentence was cut by eight years for good behavior.

He was convicted of manslaughter in 1982 for shooting the officers, who had entered his winter camp on the South Fork of the Owyhee River, one of the West's least-populated regions, to investigate reports of illegal trapping.

According to evidence at the trial, Pogue, who had drawn his own weapon, was hit first with a shot from Dallas' handgun. Dallas then shot Elms two times in the chest as the warden emerged from the trapper's tent, where he'd found poached bobcats.

Dallas then used a rifle to fire one round into each man's head.

A jury of 10 women and two men acquitted Dallas of murder, finding him guilty of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter instead.

Jury foreman Milo M. Moore, a retired shopkeeper, said Dallas might have been freed outright if he hadn't used his .22 caliber rifle.

"We felt it was self-defense up to a certain point," Moore said in a recent interview. "Had he not shot them in the head, it would have been a different verdict.