At a press conference this afternoon, Sheriff Van Duncan reacted to the conviction yesterday of his predecessor, Bobby Medford, on federal corruption charges. Duncan asserted that his office is busting illegal video-poker operators, has changed how reservists and volunteers are handled, and that evidence-room procedures have tightened.

“The case has not really had much effect on our day-to-day operation here,” Duncan told the assembled media. “The case has been somewhat of a distraction. It has been quite sad to watch and sad for former Sheriff Medford’s family members, as well as thinking that will be the end thoughts of his 12 years of being sheriff in this county. But we have moved on.”

He said that his office relies on public trust “and hopefully nothing of this extent will ever occur again in this county. It is tough to move past this point and ask folks to trust again, but we think by what we’re doing every day ... we’re building that trust back up, and we’ve come a long way.”

While Duncan mentioned that rumors about gambling had been around for some time, including while he worked in the office under Medford (until 2004), “knowing something or hearing about it and being able to prove it are two very different things.”

Convicted alongside Medford was former reserve Capt. Guy Penland. Questions were raised in the course of the trial about the powers given to reserve deputies and volunteers and the allegation that illegal video-poker operators were able to acquire special deputy cards and badges.

Duncan said the system for reservists “has changed very drastically. Anyone here that’s a reserve officer has the mandatory minimum training expected from a law-enforcement officer,” adding that “they’re certified and sworn through the state before they ever receive an I.D. card that says they’re a deputy, or get one of our badges. That’s controlled very strictly.”

After video-poker machines were banned last July, Duncan said, his office has made charges and confiscated machines. He added that the matter is a high priority “because of the history. We get a call, we address those things.”

He also said that improvements have been made in how evidence is kept and tracked, after an audit at the end of Medford’s tenure revealed missing guns, drugs and money.

“Everything now is brought before a professional evidence tech,” Duncan noted. “Everything now is put on our computer system [and] bar-coded; it’s then tracked and put into the evidence room. We have random inspections or audits from the county. They do that randomly now.”

Duncan flatly denied that he’d approached the FBI or any other outside agencies about activities in Medford’s office before the election.

“No. I felt very strongly once I decided to run and try to change the administration of the sheriff’s office that I needed to deal with service-related issues, that I needed to give a reason why I would be a better sheriff,” he said. “I was afraid anything else would be seen as petty politics or sour grapes.”

But he said he had fully cooperated with the FBI while in office.

Though he took the stand in the trial, Duncan explained that “I didn’t really understand why I was called by the defense” and that giving testimony hadn’t been trying.

When asked if he’d been approached by video-poker operators, he said, “The easiest way to answer that is no. I never had a quid pro quo where someone offered me money in return for some illegal service to be operated.” But, he added, “anything that transpired after I took office and the FBI came in with their investigation, I gave them full disclosure with anyone that may have talked with me after the fact and that’s not something I need to discuss here.”

As the assembled media was preparing to leave, Duncan revealed that he had “mixed feelings” about the Medford trial.

“He did do some good things — and his legacy of 12 years is going to be remembered for this,” he said. “But do you have to hold people accountable? Absolutely.”

Click below to hear Duncan talk about restoring the public’s trust in the Sheriff’s Department. Duncan talks here and here about the ongoing federal investigation into illegal gambling in Western North Carolina.

-—David Forbes, staff writer

We don’t know what day you are reading this, but as we write it, it is Friday, which means we are about to cast ourselves into the great unknown of the weekend. But we just can’t leave without checking in on what’s happening with bloggers. Real quick like ...

Arratik is preparing to graduate then perform some shady caper involving an investor.

Hangover Journals is having groundhog issues.

How to Take a Fall re-lives the time when blogs were called diaries and brings us along.

Stupidmommy has thoughts on what it takes to be a cool mommy.

A Girl Who Wears Glasses is trying to set some dude up, whether he likes it or not.

We’re looking forward to updates on Edgy Mama’s pursuit of a bombshell body.

Meanwhile, a mUSE yourself is just doodling along.

That’s it for this week. See you on Monday.

— Brian Postelle, staff writer

Over the past year, there’s been a variety of movies taking a stance against the War in Iraq — a war for which public support has been pretty constantly eroding. We’ve had Lions for Lambs, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted (which got almost no release) and Stop-Loss clearly in the anti-war column, with The Kingdom treading some sort of weird middle ground that never quite made up its mind.

These are all very different movies from nearly every standpoint but one — they’ve either tanked, or seriously underperformed at the box office. Stranger still, considering that movie critics (with very few exceptions) are supposed to be a bunch of pinko commie elitists, is that they haven’t exactly been embraced by the critical populace. Even the best reviewed of the lot, In the Valley of Elah, has an air of “close, but no cigar” tepidness in the responses. The question is why this should be so.

Broadly speaking, it’s not just a case that the movies aren’t very good. That might answer the question on a critical basis, because all in all the movies aren’t very good however noble their intentions might be. But as far as the moviegoing public are concerned, not enough people went to see these films for them to know whether or not they’re good. The problem then must be inherent in the very subject matter.

Historically, the anti-war film has given us a lot of notable titles dating back at least to Thomas H. Ince’s Civilization (1916), an allegorical pacifist propaganda piece that was designed to keep the U.S. out of World War I. (In case you missed this fact, it didn’t.) The first great anti-war film was probably Abel Gance’s J’accuse (1919), made just after the war — a signficant detail that seems lost on the makers of the current crop of anti-war pictures.

Probably the most famous — and still one of the best — of all anti-war films is Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), a large-scale adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel. It was gigantic, but kept sight of the intimate details in such a way that made it tragically human. The film’s penultimate image of Paul (Lew Ayres) reaching out of a trench in attempt to touch a butterfly is deservedly one of the most iconic in all film, while its final haunting double image of soldiers and a graveyard is still powerful. You might also note that it was made 12 years after the war.

Much the same can be said of Howard Hawks’ The Dawn Patrol (1930), though it’s a lesser film. In the same category is Mitchell Leisen’s The Eagle and the Hawk (1933) — even if you might not guess the extent of its message today, since the original version is seemingly lost to us. When the film was re-issued closer to the approach of World War II, its anti-war coda involving the Cary Grant character having become a conscience-stricken alcoholic for helping to promulgate the notion that Fredric March’s character died a hero. (The March character commited suicide, but Grant makes it appear he was killed in a dogfight.)

Anti-war films were not uncommon in the 1930s. William Dieterle’s science fiction picture, Six Hours to Live (1932), was at bottom a pacifist work. Even a fantasy like Mitchell Leisen’s Death Takes a Holiday (1934) makes ironic comment on the topic. Death masquerading as Prince Sirki (Fredric March) sarcastically refers to mankind’s “sacred privilige of blowing each other up,” and comments that he can never make out what the armies are fighting for ("It’s usually a flag, isn’t it? Or a barren piece of land that neither side wants"). The ideas might seem naive, but they reflect the mood of the day.

Both the Marx Brothers and the now largely forgotten comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey made anti-war comedies — Duck Soup (1933) and Diplomaniacs (1933). The Marx film is the better of the two by a wide margin, but the tone of both is similar. War and the reasons for war are shown as absurdities, but sometimes the absurdities hit close to home, as when Groucho reasons that there has to be a war because “I’ve already paid a month’s rent on a battlefield.” The big musical number, “The Country’s Going to War,” in Duck Soup is such a deft skewering of mindless jingoism that it packs the same punch 75 years later that it did then.

By 1937, when James Whale made The Road Back, another Erich Maria Remarque adaptation, the anti-war tone and anti-German militarism was tamed down before the film even made it out of Universal City. Why? The Nazi government threatened to ban not just this film but all Universal releases if changes weren’t made. The Spanish government had done something similar two years earlier — on very different grounds — wih Josef von Sterneberg’s The Devil Is a Woman. In both cases, the interference all but destroyed both men’s careers.

The key to all this anti-war creativity is that all of these films were made in a time of domestic peace. You’ll find less such films as World War II draws nearer, and you’ll find no anti-war films at all during World War II itself. Of course, no one then or now is likely to take issue with the cause of World War II or the necessity of it from the Allied standpoint.

When anti-war pictures started up again, there was a tendency to go back to World War I for subject matter. It was a safer bet. There was a distancing effect, but more importantly it was a war that seemed less justifiable. Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) took this road, but strangely enough Lewis Milestone’s Pork Chop Hill (1959) did not. It took direct issue with the Pork Chop Hill episode as little more than an exercise in impressing Red China with American military power — and this was a war that ended a mere six years earlier. In many ways, the film marked a shift in tone in that it questioned the judgment of those high up in the U.S. armed forces. It wouldn’t be the last such film. It was a tone that would grow during the Vietnam era.

The interesting thing about the anti-war films that came about during the Vietnam war is that once again the tendency was to focus on other wars. The fact that anti-war films were being made at all during a war was remarkable, but the war at hand was all but off-limits — unless, of course, you were John Wayne making The Green Berets (1968), which is anything but an anti-war film.

The logic behind this is not entirely clear, though it may be a hangover from the McCarthy era when a hot-button political issue could only be addressed allegorically. Joseph L. Mankiewicz could make an anti-McCarthy film in 1951, but he had to dress it up as social comedy in the form of a Cary Grant vehicle, People Will Talk. Yes, Charlie Chaplin addressed McCarthyism head-on in 1957 with A King in New York, but that was from the safety of Great Britain — and the results didn’t play in the U.S. till 1973.

Whatever the reason, the Vietnam-era anti-war pictures took the allegorical route. The boldest of the lot was probably Richard Lester’s How I Won the War (1967) which was set in World War II — and like Chaplin, Lester had the advantage of working in Great Britain. At the same time, despite the presence of John Lennon in the cast, the film was not a huge success. This, however, probably had more to do with the complexity of the movie’s vision — this wasn’t just an anti-war film, it was an anti-war-film film — and its unrelenting Britishness. Though it was soundly embraced in the early ‘70s on college campuses, it was also obvious that many of the jokes baffled American audiences and the accents made some of the dialogue indecipherable.

Mike Nichols’ Catch-22 (1970) was more successful, but again it was a Vietnam-era film using World War II for its story. Bloody, anarchic, very much at odds with militarism it nonetheless sidestepped a direct confrontation with the issue of the moment — even if its sentiments didn’t really fool anybody.

The big winner from that time was Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970). Altman himself made no secret of the fact that his Korean-war film was at bottom about Vietnam, but for viewers who didn’t want to know that, the film itself could be taken more literally and no bones were broken. That its sentiments were clearly leftist and totally anti-war seem pretty inescapable, but dressed up as hip comedy it went down better. Both How I Won the War and Catch-22 are also essentially comedic in tone, but the comedy is bitter and angry, not hip.

It’s not until after Vietnam that we really got films that directly related to that war. Consider Coming Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979) for starters. Even the musical Hair didn’t make it to the screen until 1979. Films like Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) were even further away from the war itself, as was Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989).

One of the most interesting — and complex — of all Vietnam-tinged films, Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man (1980) managed to actually address the issue of the anti-war film in its story of a Vietnam veteran (Steve Railsback) — and refugee from the law — with a somewhat tenuous grip on reality who becomes involved with a dangerously obsessive filmmaker (Peter O’Toole) who is making an anti-war film. The film being made is set in — you guessed it — World War I, referred to by O’Toole’s character as “the ultimate romantic insanity.”

What makes The Stunt Man stand apart from the pack is that the film actually understands the perils of making an anti-war film. At one point the O’Toole character remarks, “We’re shaking a finger at them, Sam, and we shouldn’t. If we’ve anything to say it’s best to slip it in while they’re all laughing and crying and jerking off at all the sex and violence.” Similarly, he notes that a friend of his once made an anti-war picture — a good one — and that when it was shown in the man’s hometown army enlistment went up 100 percent. The film fully realizes the gap between what is intended and how the audience may take it. Rush demonstrates at every turn just why Altman’s M*A*S*H worked with audiences.

This, I think, is exactly where and why the current attempts at anti-war films have failed at the box office and to a somewhat lesser extent with the critics. Each and every one of the films in question have indeed shaken a finger at the viewer — and they’ve done so without any distancing. It’s one thing to suggest that we as a people might have bungled something in the past, or that we were somehow not as attentive or aware as we might have been. It’s another thing to lecture the viewer that they’re doing the same right now. Nobody likes being lectured, and there probably aren’t that many people who feel the need to have a narrative film tell them what’s going on.

I’ve no doubt that one day a powerful anti-war film about Iraq will be made — whether it uses satire or drama or both — but to try to make that film in the midst of the war in question appears doomed to failure. Maybe those folks who turned to allegory had a better handle on things than we might have thought at the time.

It will only cost you a quarter to ride the bus on Friday, May 16, the last day of this year’s Strive Not to Drive effort to encourage people to stash their cars, trucks and SUVs and find alternate modes of transportation

With gas prices edging ever closer to $4 a gallon, the 25-cent fare is set to encourage people to use the Asheville Transit System and mark Strive Not to Drive week. Regular bus fare is $1. The promotion is timed with the kick-off of Asheville’s Downtown After 5 party, which features the Firecracker Jazz Band and Mamadou Diabate Ensemble starting at 5 p.m. on Lexington Avenue.

There’s an added bonus: Bus riders on Friday will receive a little gift to welcome them — a special wallet to hold a bus pass.

Here’s more information from the city about Strive Not to Drive and the Asheville bus system:

ABOUT THE ASHEVILLE TRANSIT SYSTEM: Asheville Transit provides bus service throughout the city of Asheville and other local areas with 24 bus routes running from 6 a.m.-11:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and 6 a.m.–12:45 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Transit maps and schedules are available at http://www.ashevillenc.gov/transit.

Routes radiate from the Transit Center, located downtown at 49 Coxe Ave. next to the U.S. Post Office. The center provides such amenities as clean restrooms and indoor and outdoor seating. There is also an on-duty information assistant who provides information about routes, or from whom you may purchase monthly and annual passes and ticket books.

ABOUT STRIVE NOT TO DRIVE: This is an annual event to encourage people to avoid driving their car for a day to experience the benefits and opportunities of walking, bicycling, riding the bus, carpooling or telecommuting. There’s more information at: http://www.blueridgecommute.org/faq.html.

— Jason Sandford, multimedia editor

At an April 7 Buncombe County Board of Commissioner’s meeting, it was announced that the drinking wells of several families living in The Oaks subdivision in south Asheville had tested positive for low levels of trichloroethylene, an industrial solvent. It is the same chemical that has been identified as the primary ground-water pollutant at the former CTS of Asheville plant, a hazardous-waste site located nearby the subdivision.

In their respective meetings on Tuesday, Buncombe County Board of Commissioners and Asheville City Council voted to form a partnership to streamline the extension of a municipal waterline that would serve that neighborhood. County commissioners voted unanimously to allocate $220,000 to cover the cost of materials and supplies needed for the waterline installation, while Asheville City Council unanimously approved more than $100,000 in fee waivers and expenses that will be absorbed by the water resources department by performing the work with an in-house crew.

Construction has been scheduled to begin as soon as possible, with an expected start date of June 2. Officials estimate the project will take about 12 weeks and that water service will be in the subdivision by Sept. 1, according to a joint press release from the city and county.

“This joint city/county effort is the right thing to do for these citizens and we are very appreciative that the city is making this happen so quickly,” said Board of Commissioners Chairman Nathan Ramsey.

Meanwhile, county officials are in the process of developing policy guidelines to determine when it is appropriate to extend public water service where ground-water contamination has been identified. A staff recommendation for this policy should be coming out in the next few months.

— Rebecca Bowe, contributing editor

Family
Even though last year’s Family: A Century of Blood and Tears (Tate Publishing & Enterprises, 2007) by local author D.C. Force begins nearly a century ago, it comes across as semi-autobiographical.

The novel is detail-heavy, thick with conversation, and reaches too far to be an actual family history (even if the author had access to extensive journals and records). But it’s the story of a family based to some extent on fact, and likely closely tied to some personal history. After all, the novel is set in the Northern Midwest (near Chicago) where the author grew up, and the final chapters in the book follow the character Celeste from the Midwest into N.C.; the same journey made by Force.

More importantly, Family offers readers a glimpse into the struggle of immigrants to the U.S., and how many generations it takes to truly assimilate and overcome the hardships that go hand-in-hand with outsider status.

The book is broken into chapters by decade, beginning on New Year’s Day, 1911 and continuing in a trinumeral pattern (2/2/22, 3/3/33, etc.). That tool provides little more than organization, though it’s an interesting choice and throughout the novel suggests a more significant meaning might be revealed (it’s not).

The book begins with German immigrant Anja who suffers abuse at the hand of her third husband. Still, she won’t leave him for fear of being ostracized by the tight-knit immigrant community in which her children have been raised. A decade later it’s Anja’s daughter Katherine who begins the chapter in what becomes a typical fashion for Family: having a baby. Katherine has married outside of the Catholic faith and is living as an outcast. Like most of the book’s characters, her speech is thick with accent.

“No more German, Kate,” Katherine’s husband Otto insists. “We want the babies t’learn English, don’t we?”

And later Katherine says, “I t’ought I couldt go back to bedt for a while.” It’s like that, the accent only finally fading during the 1966 chapter when a teenaged Celeste consciously alters her inherited speech patterns

Besides the time line and accents, Force also uses a flashback function, weaving history into the present-day telling of the story. These past passages are noted by a smaller font, but run on often for several pages at a clip so the reader quickly loses the time frame. And, while the detailed past passages serve to flesh out and explain the present passages, they often seem superfluous. A reader could understand the thrust of Force’s story line without constantly delving back into history.

Overall, Family is an interesting read that sheds light on what it meant to be an immigrant throughout the 1900s. Tracing the legacy of poverty, lack of education, alcoholism, addiction, abuse, neglect and — finally — hope makes for a compelling if not always pleasant journey.

Troubled State
A family history-based book that does draw from actual fact is Black Mountain-based author Gari Carter‘s Troubled State: Civil War Journals of Franklin Archibald Dick (Truman State University Press, 2008). The text is culled from the journals of Carter’s great-great-grandfather, a prominent St. Louis attorney and Assistant Adjutant General to Captain Nathaniel Lyon.

Dick, it turns out, was loyal to the Union in the midst of politically-tirn St. Louis, and his journals demonstrate his own misgivings about the war and concerns as to his own future. It’s an intriguing premise for a book, but worth noting that readers without more than a passing interest in battles and Civil War history will find Troubled to be a dense and fairly dry read. The 205 pages of journal entries are packed with footnotes — often four to a page — and are followed by detailed biographies and a genealogy of the Dick Family.

But there are rare gems tucked into the pages: Images of Dick’s letters to military personnel, a letter from President Abraham Lincoln himself, and Dick’s of-the-moment perspective on momentous events. “Mr. Lincoln, the President, was assassinated last evng. in Washington ...” he writes. “Here and now is the life of the Nation struck at by this vile rebellion. Mr. Lincoln throughout has failed to appreciate the wickedness of these people — pardons & pardons have fallen from him into the hands of guilty doers — who have turned again from their pardoned crimes, to again slay & destroy the defenders of Nation.”

Such weighty insights are an important contribution to the unfolding of American history, and Troubled, though scholarly and challenging, provides a keen look back in time.

Gari Carter reads from Troubled State at Malaprop’s on Wednesday, May 21. The event begins at 7 p.m.

— Alli Marshall, A&E reporter

The local blog Scrutiny Hooligans posted scores of pages of government documents relating to the ParkSide condominium proposal today. The documents, obtained through a records request by Asheville-based activist Elaine Lite — who says she worked on the project with a number of like-minded ParkSide critics — include e-mails, meeting notes, reports and other materials relating to the controversial proposal, which is slated to be considered by Asheville City Council in June.

Nearly 200 pages were released, according to Scrutiny Hooligans’ Gordon Smith. More than 100 of those pages, he estimates, are posted at the site.

“While Scrutiny Hooligans are trying to sort through the FOIA documents related to the suspicious Parkside land deal, we’re well aware that more brains make for better work,” an intro to the documents states. “There’s a lot here for those of you interested in taking the time to peruse.”

Meanwhile, ParkSide LLC, a company involved in the proposed development, has launched its own Web site, Parksidetruth.com, to offer its side of the story. “The ParkSide project continues to be slandered with misinformation,” the site says. “The many wonderful aspects of this project and the benefits to the City, the County, and the community are becoming buried in propaganda and we must attempt to dispel these allegations.”

— Jon Elliston, managing editor

Going by the dust-jacket bio for author Joshilyn Jackson (she’s a native of the romantic but vague “deep South,” a mother of two and — oh yeah — an award-winning author), unassuming is the first word brought to mind. But from the first page of Jackson’s recently-released novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (Grand Central Publishing, 2008), this author reveals herself as a force to be reckoned with.

Swimming is a ghost story, a murder mystery, an examination of family dysfunction, a discussion of the third world living conditions that exist right here in the U.S., and how that form of poverty manages to touch us even in the most manicured and gated of suburban safety. It’s all of this, but with none of the self-righteous lecturing that could come from such socially significant themes. Instead, Swimming almost shrugs at its own depth and focuses, instead, on its wildly vivid characters.

Jackson creates, in polarized sisters Laurel and Thalia, such frenetic energy that the plot takes off at top speed and never slows down. Respectable good girl Laurel lives in a gated community with her inattentive husband and their teenage daughter. What she most wants (or so believes) is to forget the past. But the past continues to visit her in the forms of the clueless mother, the ghost of her dead uncle, Marty, and her loud-mouthed actress sister.

When Laurel awakens from a sleep-walking episode to find a neighborhood girl has drowned in her backyard swimming pool, events of the past race back into Laurel’s life, demanding to be resolved. And, despite an antagonistic relationship with her older sister, it’s Thalia to whom Laurel must turn if she’s to solve the mounting mysteries. Why? Because Thalia was there two decades earlier at the accidental death of Marty, the uncle who threatened to molest young Laurel. 

“Daddy would have called that bullet back before the sound of it rang out.” Jackson writes. “Daddy had turned Marty over with such careful love. He’d put his hands over the hole to try to stop the blood, and with all his will, he’d tried to make his brother not be dead.”

Readers will be kept guessing up to the breathless finish. But as much as Swimming offers fleet action and colorful mayhem, it keeps careful reign on its larger mission: to present a unique insight into a forgotten part of the Southern landscape. The poorest rural regions, the trailer parks, drug addictions and dead-end lives that Laurel must ultimately face, are part of that “deep South” culture that Jackson taps.

Joshilyn Jackson reads at Malaprop’s on Saturday, May 17. The event begins at 7 p.m.

—Alli Marshall, A&E reporter

Each week Xpress reporter Alli Marshall and WOXL DJ Pat Ryan team up to bring you their entertainment suggestions. Here are Pat & Alli’s Weekly Winners for Friday, May 16 through Sunday, May 18. Click here to listen.

Former Buncombe County Sheriff Bobby Medford and former reserve Capt. Guy Penland were found guilty on all counts in their federal corruption trial this morning.

After deliberating for just over two hours, the jury returned guilty verdicts for the two men on charges of extortion under color of law, conspiracy to commit mail fraud, five counts of mail fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice and conspiracy to further an illegal-gambling operation.

The court will now decide how much property they will each forfeit, and what their sentences will be. Given that the counts each carry from 5 to 20 years in prison, both Medford and Penland could easily spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

Medford trembled, his hands on a table, as the verdict was read, while defense attorney Victoria Jayne put her arm on his shoulder. Friends and family of the two men, who filled several benches in the courtroom, burst into tears as they heard the verdict.

Later, the jury found that the both Medford and Penland had also accrued at total of $287,776 in illegal money that would now be subject to forfeiture. The calculation included proceeds from golf tournaments after 2002 and bribes that illegal-video-poker operators testified they paid to Medford.

Judge Tim Ellis announced that the two men will be sentenced in about 4 to 6 weeks. In the meantime, Ellis ruled that they’ll remain under house arrest, with GPS monitoring systems, and not allowed to leave the house except for pre-arranged visits with a doctor or lawyer.

Ellis thanked the jury before dismissing them. While he said that since the case was over, they could talk to whomever they chose, he cautioned them not to speak to “the media mill.”

On his way out of the federal courthouse building, Medford stopped to talk with a group of photographers and reporters. “I still have faith in the justice system,” Medford said.

Penland said “No comment” as he walked to a waiting sport utility vehicle.

Click here to see photos of Medford and Penland leaving court on Thursday afternoon. Click below to hear Ron Honeycutt, Medford’s longtime friend and former campaign manager, react to the jury’s decision.

— David Forbes, staff writer