Ballad of Eric Conn a sour note for poor people in jail

Eric Conn is the new Pancho Villa of the mountains.

Is he running a horse through the desert wearing a sombrero, bullet belts across his bare chest crossed with an X and a knife in his teeth, cursing federales in his new language?

Or is he lurking like Hannibal in some tourist island with a flop hat and about to have somebody for dinner?

Or is he running like Long John, long chain on, like a turkey through the cawn. Out-smarting the dawgs. Swimming to Cuba like Diana Nyad?

Or is he at the head of Big Mud, staying by day in the old mine and coming out at night to marry somebody?

My friend Adam Damron spent WW II in a defense plant and said it was only him and women. Adam said you can’t be around that many women and not marry some of them. Conn has been a serial marrier, and that proves what an optimist he is even more than bail jumping does.

What bail jumping as theater does, in fact, is to keep poor people in jail by giving judges an excuse to violate their right to bail. Federal judges, to their credit, do honor people’s right to bail, even if that sometimes embarrasses them when a 56-year-old man decides to risk flight rather than spend 12 years without attention.

In the store, and there are two now, we used to talk about Gov. Paul Patton stuff, but now the main subject in supermarket aisles is which countries extradite and which do not. The percentage of those people who would hide Conn would surprise you. Many of them saw trees for the first time when Conn’s billboards went.

I suspect his new job is as an art teacher, teaching people how to draw.

But you see his point. Is it fair that two men ripped the government off for half a billion each and one is now president of the United States and the other is Most Wanted?

The idea of post-plea bargain plea bargaining may catch on in legal circles. Get you a deal, then run off and tell them you won’t come back until you get a better deal.

But now, Conn is going to have to step it up. We need a new e-mail, or whatever he sends, about every day. We don’t want to read the same stuff over and over just to get to whatever he is treating us with at the time.

And we all have been little crooks when it comes to ripping off the government. Some have been medium crooks for that. So we forgive him for his major contribution to opioid abuse and the fact that the castanet-like shake of pills in a bottle has become the new mating call of hillbillies.

One good thing has come out of all this. Ned Pillersdorf, attorney for Conn’s former clients, has nominated himself for a Nobel Prize.

This story was originally published June 30, 2017 at 4:32 PM with the headline "Ballad of Eric Conn a sour note for poor people in jail."