...was this guy really causing harm to anyone else, let alone enough to justify serving time in federal prison and being stripped of his right to keep and bear arms?
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Famed Appalachian moonshiner Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton, whose incorrigible bootlegging ways were as out of step with modern times as his hillbilly beard and overalls, took his own life rather than go to prison for making white lightning, his widow says.
“He couldn’t go to prison. His mind would just not accept it. … So, credit the federal government for my husband being dead, I really do,” Pam Sutton said in an interview Wednesday from the couple’s home in the Parrottsville community, about 50 miles east of Knoxville.
Once again, I don't discount personal responsibility here, but I can't help but think Mr. Sutton's only crime was doing something the government didn't approve of, something that was wrong only because the government said it was. He may not really be a sympathetic character, but that doesn't change the fact that the feds did him wrong and that it could have been any one of us for another crime. "First they came for the moonshiners..."
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