The case of Lionel Tate in Claudia Rankine's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric" (2004) – and on the internet today

While re-reading Claudia Rankine's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric" (2004), I was struck by her mention of Lionel Tate. In 2001, Tate was convicted of murder as an adult for a death he caused at 12. In 2004, when his conviction was overturned, he accepted a plea deal including ten years' probation, so when charged with armed robbery in 2005, he was sentenced to ten years for the robbbery and thirty years for violating probation. Since all the reports on this were at least ten years old, I limited my search to the past year – and the results about Tate's case were mostly essays for students to plagiarize. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 29 September 2024)