Well… What happened next?
(Excerpt from Wikipedia:)
Tennessee state law required that the name of a candidate who died before the election be removed from the ballot, and it did not allow the candidate’s party to replace a deceased candidate who died within 30 days of the election. Accordingly, after Burks’s death, Looper became the only candidate listed on the official ballot for Burks’s senate seat.
Several people tried to have Looper’s name stricken from the ballot, claiming that Looper’s arrest constituted moral turpitude. The state Republican Party distanced itself from Looper. To prevent Looper from winning the state senate seat on a technicality, Burks’s widow, Charlotte was put forth as a write-in candidate for her husband’s seat. Dozens of volunteers helped her campaign, including some Republicans. On election day, Charlotte Burks, as a write-in candidate, won the seat with 30,252 votes (95.18%) against Looper’s 1,531 votes (4.82%). One of her first initiatives as state senator was to introduce legislation to ensure that the name of any candidate who dies within 40 days of an election could remain on the ballot, thus preventing the situation that occurred after her husband’s death. Charlotte Burks won re-election in 2002, 2006, and 2010. She retired after the 2014 election.
Yea… I read this and just WTF’ed at this. Imagine if the dude never got caught.
Like why run a campaign if you could just a little crime.
Also, dude was so stupid, could’ve hired an assassin instead of doing it himself.
(Also, if he were a former president instead, he would’ve been immune from the criminal prosecution. Rookie mistake.)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Looper#Assassination_of_Tommy_Burks
He should have participated in an insurrection, he would have been pardoned.
Those republicans were different. They helped the Democratic Candidate’s widow with her csmpaign and she won with more than 95% of the vote. If it happened today, those republicans would’ve begin screaming “FALSE FLAG”, “CRISIS ACTOR”, and/or “DEEP STATE”, basically scream every buzzword, and also harass the widow accusing her of being the murderer, there would be a whole conspiracy movement to stop her from getting elected, and there is a good chance that Looper would’ve won, and then get a committee position.
A man living before his time. Not much before, mind you.
I said elsewhere in this comment section, the person who can pardon his murder charges was the office he was running for. So had he won the election he would have been able to pardon himself.
Looper was found dead in his prison cell on June 26, 2013. A prison incident report shows that he assaulted a pregnant female counselor less than two hours before his body was found; Looper had to be restrained during that incident.
Wow! A piece of shit through and through.
That kind of “found dead in his cell” language is shady af, although in the case it’s very easy to imagine that he got what he deserved. It’s just weird how many people mysteriously die in facilities that are supposed to be secure…
Ladies and gentlemen, the pharaoh suddenly died!
Ouf were just reminded of the Robert Brooks videos. That was some blood boiling heinous shit.
Republican
The state Republican Party distanced itself from Looper.
Would never happen today.
They’d be pardoned
Well to be fair if you murdered someone to become governor, the charges would be brought by the state, and the only person who can pardon state charges is uh … The governor, so you know. Yeah he’d probably have pardoned himself if he got elected.
Wow, he was “unlucky” to be ahead of his time.
Nowadays there is a good chance he would have gotten away with some legal trick or be pardoned and made the secretary of justice or FBI boss.
He would have been pardoned by a Democrat who just wanted to “Help the country heal from this tragedy”
Listen dude, it’s actually not as easy as you’d think to hire a hit man. 99.99999 percent of hit men you can find out there are actually FBI. Unless you’re the leader of a drug cartel with a guy on hand that does that shit, in North America it is basically just “you want to hire a hitman, go directly to jail!”
That must mean it’s much better to hire a hitwoman.
We call them “hit they”
A hit-ler
wait a minute…
This joke made me choke on my coffee. My wife thought I was dying.
Better to hire “a one hit wonder”
I imagine that is just online though. Finding someone desperate on the street couldn’t be that hard. Guys card declines buying groceries… Follow him to his car and offer him some money.
Or maybe go on Craigslist or one of those jobs sites and just look for a handyman. If your desperate enough to be offering services on Craigslist, they are probably desperate enough to take money.
When the people are struggling, morality becomes questionable. If I wasn’t on a list before typing this… I’m sure I am now… Oops
Yeah just ask random people in parking lots if they want to murder someone for you, that won’t get you arrested as fuck hahaha
I’d love to know the breakdown of the 1531 votes for him. Some are probably straight Republican votes down the ballot, and a few ignorant of the news. But I’m sure some heard the news, and voted for him anyway with a shrug.
I mean, you’re gonna get a handful of such voters here and there, that’s just statistics
In Tennessee? Inconceivable.
Honestly wild still getting 5% of the vote and I doubt people kept quiet about such an abnormal event
Worth reading the whole Wikipedia entry, to see just how stupid this Looper guy was - discussing with various people both his advance intent to kill, and then also the fact that he had just done so. Wild stuff.
Other political candidates and public personalities have emulated Looper’s adopted name or have independently adopted similar names. Among these were Something Awful founder Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, who adopted his nickname as a reference to Byron Looper, for whom Kyanka nearly worked as an intern in the summer of 1997.
I didn’t realize Lowtax was named after him. I thought Something Awful leaned a bit more left in general, if just because of the ShitRedditSays connection.
How very Republican.
This put me in a hole where I learned about the other lowtax and something awful and some more.
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His middle name was also (Low Tax), including the parentheses
Looper by name, looper by mentality
Low Tax would have been a well rounded MAGAt and he would have easily become, at minimum, a GOP senator in Tennessee.
Majority Leader and Chair of the Senate Ethics committee
What a loophole.
