Talk:Parker Wickham

Removal
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 * Wickham was forced to move to Connecticut, where he died shortly thereafter. He insisted he was innocent of the charges, but was never granted a trial. Acts of attainder were banned under the U.S. Constitution, which was adopted a few years after Wickham's death.

The first two of those 3 sentences offend chronology.

It is reasonably true that he was forced to leave NYS (in the sense that it is a quibble to say that he could have stayed and been subject to execution), but saying that would be redundant. If it were true that going to RI, MA, NJ, or elsewhere would have killed him with near certainty, or that he was forced into a vessel whose master had orders to put him shore in CT, then perhaps he could reasonably be said to have been forced to go to CT, but either of those would merit their mention, and it is more reasonable to suppose that the editor was continuing their sloppy expression. The just quoted insistence of innocence may refer to his later quote that he was religious, and that (perhaps w/o any actual denial) he "defied" the feasibility of proving three specific kinds of perhaps culpable behavior toward any "member" of "the state"; if that even approaches "insistence" of "innocence" of specific "charges" that may (or not) have been required for a b of a, that needs clarification. (It sounds like the legislature served the role a jury does in a common crime.) The Constitutional ban is discussed at the appropriately linked bill of attainder, but
 * Acts of attainder were banned under the U.S. Constitution, which was adopted a few years after Wickham's death.

is a violation of WP:SYNTH: if it were not, we would have as well a sentence like
 * Acts of attainder have never been renounced by the British imperial power that he was accused of supporting, and their use was tentively proposed by the PM in the 1940s.

We should have neither, unless accompanied by citation of prominent historians who have stated that his case was a substantial influence in the US's renunciations of b of a, or in serious British bills to renounce them. --Jerzy•t 23:14, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

In light of CopyVio removals...
Eventually, i picked up on the fact that
 * Wickham was forced to move to Connecticut, where he died shortly thereafter.

is at best vague and probably misleading: it suggests he promptly fled to CT (and had to deal with presumably hostile Independistas) for the rest of his life. One source is a bit more specific in implying he was fine on LI from just before the Battle of Long Island (1776) until a while after the Siege of Yorktown (1781), so that eventually he was in practice forced to go into exile, at time that reflected his assessment of the balance of risk between being where it's legally death to tarry, and where the local Independistas are strangers instead of your lifelong neighbors, and the royalists perhaps rarer, but no death sentence. As to
 * He insisted he was innocent of the charges

-- what charges are those? I didn't read the act, but it sure sounds like he was guilty of loyalty to a foreign prince, and the editor is just quibbling about whether that should be a crime or not.
 * ... but was never granted a trial.

I pretty well discussed that in the previous section. With the two states in question, attainder means the only trial you get is one by the legislative body. --Jerzy•t 14:40, 4 October 2011 (UTC)