Skip to main content

Robert Telles sentenced to life in prison


I'm happy to see that a certain trial in Nevada has come to a conclusion whereby a smug and 
privileged murderer is going to get what is coming to him. 

 As August ended a jury found Robert Telles guilty of the murder of Jeff German, a reporter for the Las 
Vegas Review-Journal. His beat for the paper had entailed organized crime and political corruption.  

Telles stabbed German to death outside of his home in early September 2022. German's editor, Glenn 
Cook, gave a wonderful interview after German's body was found, describing the deceased. Cook said 
"you could tell" when he was about to break a big story, "he had almost this kind of grouchy streak and 
if he was walking around the newsroom with a furrow in his forehead, you knew something big was up
and that he was close."

Telles was the object of some of German's stories, as Clark County Public Administrator. He was about 
to feature in another such story at the time of his death. It would have concerned the inappropriate 
relationship between Telles and a woman who worked for him in that office. German had obtained the
emails  between Telles and that subordinate. 

One procedural issue loomed rather large in the pre-trial proceedings. The prosecution wants access to German's work in progress, such as to the notes he may have been keeping on electronic devices. The Review-Journal wanted to block such access, arguing that both state and federal statutes limit prosecutorial access to such material. 

How does one have a free press, they ask, if public officials can seize notes of a reporters' work in progress? One might well ask in response: how does one have a free press if public officials can get away with shooting reporters who write unfavorable pieces about them? It seemed pretty much a lose-lose.

Fortunately, the dilemma was resolved on the side of Justice. The privileged matters were excluded, and the prosecution managed to make its case effectively nonetheless. 

Telles, who is 47 years old. will be eligible for parole after 20 years. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers