I can't think of a better way get some quality pro bono representation than to claim that you were trying to kill Donald Trump.
An Ithaca man accused of killing a UPS driver from Candor said in court Monday afternoon that not only did he believe he shot and killed Donald Trump, but that no evidence could be presented to him to suggest otherwise.
Justin R. Barkley, 38, said during his arraignment and subsequent attempt to plead guilty, "I shot and killed Donald Trump purposely, intentionally and very proudly."
He told the court that he knew where president elect Donald Trump would be on Dec. 8 and waited in the Ithaca Walmart parking lot kill him.
"I went there to purposely shoot and kill him and put him down," Barkley said.
He told the court that he understood the difference between mistaking a person for being Trump and asserting that he actually killed Trump. When asked if any evidence could be presented to him to suggest he killed a different person, he said, "I would hope not."
If this whole murder trial thing doesn't work out, he can always get a job working for the New York Times.
Now obviously Barkley is out of his mind. But the murder of an innocent man is another example of how the media's climate of hate can backfire. Did the media's paranoid fantasies about Trump feed into Barkley's paranoid fantasies?
It's an interesting question. Meanwhile a man is dead.
Minutes before the killing, a Walmart customer was making pleasant "small talk" with the victim while waiting in the cashier's line and joking about some oversized lighters near the cash register. That same customer later watched the victim fall to the ground after being shot, all according to Ithaca City Court records released Friday.
Schumacher was a seasonally-employed UPS driver who had stopped to get something to eat during his overnight shift, according to Susan Rosenberg, a spokeswoman for the Atlanta-based package delivery company. He was about four weeks into his second stint as a seasonal driver of a tractor-trailer hauling packages between UPS processing hubs, she said Thursday.
A second witness who was playing cellphone games while waiting in the parking lot told police Schumacher walked out of the Walmart around 12:35 a.m., carrying a bag and walking back to his parked vehicle minutes before the shooting.
The media is pushing its fake news censorship hysteria. Meanwhile its own news can only help encourage crazy people to do things like this.