Passing Time

Check out this gem in Michael Brick's story on plea bargain: Carmine Carini had a decision to make. He was 47 years old. Nearly half that time he had spent in prison for the murder of a Brooklyn record shop owner, a man shot three times to the head and dumped from a car in the watermark style of a Mafia execution.

In those 23 years, Mr. Carini's infant son had grown to a young man. His cousins, well-known Mafia assassins, had been murdered for bungling a job. Vigorous prosecution had diminished the city's organized-crime families. Halley's Comet had passed the Earth, a Democrat had held the White House for eight years and several new methods had been invented for the packaging of toothpaste. Through it all, Mr. Carini had failed on eight attempts to contest his sentence on procedural grounds.