You never know who you're going to meet

It's a small world, as Midmorning host Keri Miller found out. She just ran into a Macalester College graduate in Tanzania who's there as a defense attorney in a Rwandan war-crimes trial. Kerri is in Tanzania right now following a Minnesota researcher who's studying the relationship between poverty and the lion population. Read the blog Kerri's been writing by going to mpr.org and clicking Tanzania in the shortcuts menu.

I was pretty disturbed by the tone of the story about the Macalester grad defending the war criminal. Yes, everybody has a right to a fair trial, but this Rwandan war criminal is most likely a mass murderer, guilty of perpetrating and encouraging some of the most horrendous, brutal violence in human history (women and children being hacked to death with machetes, for example).

So, while certainly the war criminal deserves a defense lawyer, I could do without that defense lawyer telling us all what a great guy this mass murderer of the innocent is.