Craig would do well to help others who are in his situation

I don't know whether Larry Craig, the senator with an apparent case of restless leg syndrome (as seen on TV commercials), is gay or hetero or bi or whatever. I do know, though, that he is incapable of learning. Having been arrested in a Minneapolis airport men's room, having been compelled (or so he says) into a false confession, having been roundly ridiculed and ostracized by many of his colleagues -- et tu, McCain? -- he has neither the gumption nor integrity nor the wit to question some of his former positions which made him, without a doubt, a law-and-order conservative par excellence. Craig wasn't exposed as gay. He was exposed as uneducable.

Along with almost everyone else outside the Republican Senate Caucus -- when the door opens the blast of toxic hypocrisy is enough to deck the average person -- I can see no crime that Craig committed.

Craig says he didn't do what the cop said he did, and what he did do -- that stretch of the leg -- was an innocent act. If it matters any, I don't believe him. But I do believe he was set up and then coerced into pleading to a misdemeanor. If things went as he says, why doesn't he say he learned something from the incident? Maybe he wants to reconsider his votes in favor of restricting death penalty appeals because he now knows that the cops can arrest the wrong person and get them to confess. Look, it happened to him.

It has happened to others as well. We can start with the approximately 124 people who have been freed from death row since 1973 on account of DNA testing -- about one-quarter of whom had confessed. We can go on to John Mark Karr, who proved with his confession to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey that some confessions are nothing more than proof of delusion. And we can proceed to the famous Central Park jogger case in which five young men confessed to the rape and brutal beating of a young woman. Years later, a totally different person not only confessed to the crime, but supplied DNA matching the sample taken from the victim. If this had been a murder, or a black on white rape in the old days, the accused might already have been executed. In this case, the five young men were released from prison.

Such cases are not legion, but they happen. Why they happen is often a mystery, but surely if a three-term U.S. senator can be pressured into confessing to a crime that he insists he did not commit, then something similar can happen to a rattled, undereducated kid who thinks the deck is stacked and is promised a reduced sentence. Cops, prosecutors and defense attorneys know that these things happen -- and they know too about the occasional rogue prosecutor who, for whatever reason, will send an innocent person to jail. Maybe Craig should read "Until Proven Innocent," an account of the railroading of three Duke University lacrosse players by a despicable prosecutor and, truth be told, an intellectually lazy media as well. If three affluent college kids can be so victimized, think of what happens to impoverished people all the time.

Collateral damage in the war on crime, while still inevitable, can at least be rectified -- unless, of course, the "damaged" person is executed.

Craig and others who voted for the death penalty and for restricting appeals and for mandatory sentences and for one penalty for crack and another for cocaine ought to ponder what happened to him -- what he said happened and what actually might have happened. Either way, it was an abuse of police power and, possibly, the coercion of a false confession.

We await Larry Craig's ringing speech on the matter. I shall write it for him. It's the one in which he says that if a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, then a liberal is a conservative who has been busted in a men's room.

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