Don Blankenship Is an American Criminal
A Notorious U.S. Coal Executive Remains Blindly Unrepentant for His Part in the Deaths of 29 Miners


Donald Leon “Don” Blankenship, the former head of Massey Energy who is serving federal prison time for his role in the deaths of 29 coal miners six years ago in West Virginia, got beaucoup headline treatment this week for issuing a “manifesto” in which he pronounces himself an “American political prisoner.”

Give the man kudos for a stunt that got traction.

There’s his phrase “American political prisoner” on top of a story published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday and on an article disseminated far and wide by the Associated Press. It appears over and over again in the state where it hurts the most — on far-reaching West Virginia Public Broadcasting, on West Virginia Metro News (the “voice of West Virginia) and on small-town news sites hither and yon across the state.

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He conspired to violate mining health and safety standards in the run-up to the explosion that claimed those 29 lives on April 5, 2010, at the Upper Big Branch mine south of Charleston. That’s why he’s behind bars now, albeit for not that long a time or at that hard core a prison. Blankenship is already midway through his one-year stretch at Taft Correctional Institute, a minimum-security facility in sunny Southern California. He gets out in April.

He was the best-paid U.S. coal-industry executive ...