Four years too harsh
By Jim Baron
Politics As Usual
AAm I the only one in Rhode Island -- and I don?’t discount the possibility that I might be - who thinks the four-years-to-serve sentence Daniel Biechele got last week was too harsh?
There are people who should go to prison for their role in the fire at The Station nightclub that killed 100 people and maimed or injured twice that number. I?’m just not sure Biechele is one of them. He was the guy who pressed the button (or flipped the switch, whatever it is you do) that set off the pyrotechnics that ignited the foam on the ceiling and walls of the club. That was the extent
of his culpability. He did not wrap the entire nightclub in extremely flammable polyurethane foam that flared up in fast-moving flame and choking smoke, emitting cyanide gas as it burned. He did not pack the room far beyond its capacity. He did not issue a fire inspection okey-dokey to a tiny woodframe building where the walls were covered with a substance sometimes called ''solid gasoline.''
I have never subscribed to the notion that something bad happened
and therefore somebody must pay. Biechele was exactly what his lawyer Thomas Briody described him as, a scapegoat.
Biechele was a guy doing his job, as he had done it without incident hundreds of times before, in venues across the country, including, a few years earlier, at The Station itself. He didn?’t press the button from miles away, not knowing or caring what the result would be; he was in the building himself when he set off the sparks. He very easily could have been one of the people trapped inside, as Great White guitarist Ty Longley was.
As Judge Francis Darigan himself said, ''There is nothing in the record of this case to indicate the defendant ever intended to harm anyone ..the commission of this crime was totally devoid of criminal intent on the part of the defendant.''
That would be a truly perverse result of the tragedy that occurred Feb. 20, 2003.
By Jim Baron
