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The Ballad of Kathryn Johnston

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Sean Mullins’ ode to the 92-year-old woman killed in a botched drug raid came out a few weeks ago. And it’s good! Well, the music is good. The lyrics wander around a bit, and don’t really tell what actually happened. But hey, it’s a good pop song about a botched drug raid. I’m not going to complain. I can’t find it online anywhere, but you can download it from Amazon for a buck.


Here’s a short interview Mullins gave to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I’d beg to differ with him on one point. Mullins says this kind of thing only happens in “certain neighborhoods.” It’s probably true that low-income people get the brunt of it. But there are plenty of examples of botched raids on college students, middle-class homes, and, occasionally, even millionaires.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 8:55 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Five-Star Fridays/Music, General Drug War, Police Militarization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “The Ballad of Kathryn Johnston”

  1. #1 |  Thomas |  April 24th, 2008 at 10:25 am

    Radley, Amazon is Online. I haven’t heard of them opening any bricks and motar stores, or have they in the DC area? ;-)

  2. #2 |  Fay |  April 24th, 2008 at 11:28 am

    I’d say that Shawn’s comment is accurate for Atlanta, at least. We’re a very segregated city that pretends to be progressive; the police tactics are completely different on one side of town than on the other.

    Just my two cents of course, and now I’ll go searching for botched drug raids in other than “certain areas,” just to be sure. :)

  3. #3 |  Blue |  April 24th, 2008 at 12:17 pm

    I just got the lyrics posted on my blog. I hope that people will hear it and read up on the story.

  4. #4 |  Weekend links at Punditry by the Pint |  April 25th, 2008 at 8:14 pm

    [...] Mullins has written a ballad for Kathryn Johnston, the 92-year old Atlanta woman killed in a wrong-door Swat [...]

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