Homeless in Arizona

Medical Marijuana & Drug War News

 

Bid to halt medical-pot ruling due in court

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne violates campaign finance laws and gets into a hit an run accident Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne and Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery continue to try to flush Arizona's medical marijuana laws down the toilet.

Carmen Chenal the woman Tom Horne is allegedly having an affair with If you remember Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne was in an alleged hit and run accident while having an alleged affair with assistant attorney general and alleged mistress Carmen Chenal. If you ask me Tom Horne is just trying to create a smoke screen to cover up his own crimes.

Source

Bid to halt medical-pot ruling due in court

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The RepublicIazcentral.com Wed Dec 12, 2012 11:46 PM

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Michael Gordon will hear arguments at 11 a.m. today on a request to stay or suspend his recent ruling on the legality of the state’s medical-marijuana law.

Last week, Gordon ruled Arizona’s controversial medical-marijuana law does not conflict with federal drug laws and rejected arguments made by Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and Attorney General Tom Horne that state employees would be facilitating federal crimes if they issued licenses to medical-marijuana dispensaries.

Gordon also required the county to issue documents allowing White Mountain Health Center of Sun City to move forward with its effort to open a dispensary.

Montgomery and Horne have filed a motion to suspend Gordon’s ruling until their appeal has run its course. In their request, the prosecutors asked the court to “preserve the status quo” pending an appeal, saying, “This case concerns the question of pre-emption by federal law of the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act, a significant issue of first impression in the Arizona courts. Given that there is no appellate court guidance in Arizona on this important issue, it would be prudent to preserve the status quo and not compel county defendants to take any action that may later prove to be unsupported by Arizona law.”

Local attorneys Jeffrey Kaufman and Ezekiel Edwards, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s criminal-law reform project, represent White Mountain Health Center. The lawyers said that neither the stay request nor the appeal has merit and that the judge has already considered Montgomery’s argument that county officials would be harmed if they issued zoning documents.

“The argument has been raised and rejected,” Edwards said. “It seems the county is simply trying to sabotage implementing the voter-approved and voter-enacted Arizona Medical Marijuana Act, and we are encouraging the court to reject the county’s motion to stay.”


Linda Valdez thinks marijuana should be legalized???

Source

Linda Valdez | azcentral Republic

U.S-Mexico border lesson: legalize marijuana

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Linda Valdez

The U.S.-Mexico border is rarely discussed in such rational terms as these:

“You know, as we continue to tighten the border more and more, they’ll find every method they can explore to get their drug loads over.” That was Border Patrol Agent K. Linwood Estes talking to KTVK-TV Phoenix.

Agent K is far too astute to ever go into politics. Pity. He was talking about smugglers who become rich by being resourceful in the lucrative business of supplying the recreational drug needs of Americans.

The smugglers in this story used cannons to lob canisters of marijuana from Mexico. You can only wonder what took them so long to think this up.

The officers who found the cans of pot near Yuma this week said the strategy was new to the area. Yuma is everybody’s favorite border enforcement success story. It has super-sized fencing, and is lifted up by Republicans and other border hardliners as having gained “operational control.”

Somebody had better tell the smugglers.

It’s a few billion dollars too late to discover that “danged fence” doesn’t get the job done. And you can bet the danged-fence advocates will keep pounding the drum to “secure the border” if discussions about real immigration reform ever get started again.

But the pot cannons and the frank assessment of one Border Patrol agent really ought to teach us a few things.

  1. If there’s a demand — for drugs or cheap labor — somebody will find a way to supply it.
  2. Fences foster creativity; they don’t stop smuggling.
  3. Legalizing marijuana makes more sense than enriching the drug cartels.

When it comes to border fences, the lesson is simple: If you build it, they will find a way around it.


Judge denies Montgomery's effort to delay marijuana dispensary paperwork

What??? Did Judge Michael Gordon play hookey on the day his high school showed the move "Reefer Madness" about the dangers of marijuana.

In the move you will see that if a White person smokes one marijuana cigarette they will go out and rape 6 Black women? Man that's what marijuana does to people!!!! Marijuana turns you into a killer, rapist zombie!!!! Honest.

OK, most of us know the movie "Reefer Madness" is a crock of BS and is just a bunch of racist propaganda against marijuana, but don't tell Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery that.

He certainly doesn't want to end his jobs program for cops that throws medical marijuana users in prison.

Source

Judge denies Montgomery's effort to delay marijuana dispensary paperwork

Posted: Thursday, December 13, 2012 4:57 pm

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

A judge on Thursday rebuffed efforts by Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery to further delay the paperwork necessary for opening a marijuana dispensary.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Michael Gordon said he heard nothing from Montgomery during the half-hour hearing to convince him to stay his ruling earlier this month ordering the county to provide the necessary zoning documentation the would-be operators of a Sun City dispensary need to get the required state permit. Montgomery wants to keep that shop from opening while he seeks review from the state Court of Appeals.

But the legal fight has implications far beyond whether this one shop gets to open its doors: Montgomery said the appellate ruling he hopes to get, unlike Gordon's narrow decision here, could determine what action police officers can take against dispensary operators.

"It does not give me the information I need to provide guidance to law enforcement with respect to any other dispensary in Maricopa County or any activity related to it,'' Montgomery said after the hearing. "As long as the implementation of the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act is unclear, we need an appellate review that will provide binding precedent that applies beyond just the parties to this action and the location in question.''

In fact, state Attorney General Tom Horne is also working to block the dispensary under the same grounds of federal preclusion. And if what is likely a test case of the law gets to the state Supreme Court, as is eventually anticipated, that ruling will set the fate of dispensaries statewide.

The 2000 voter-approved law allows individuals with a doctor's recommendation and a state-issued ID card to obtain up to 2 1/2 ounces of marijuana every two weeks. While that initially meant people growing their own, the plan is to have more than 125 state-regulated dispensaries around Arizona.

State regulations require would-be dispensary owners to file a statement from local authorities showing the site they want to operate is properly zoned.

This fight stems from the refusal of county officials, on Montgomery's advice, to provide that certification for the owners of White Mountain Health Center so they could open a shop at 99th Avenue and Greenway Road in Sun City. Montgomery contends that Arizona cannot license people to sell marijuana because it remains illegal under federal law.

The owners sued. And earlier this month Gordon agreed with Jeffrey Kaufman, their attorney, that the county had to provide the documentation.

On Thursday, Montgomery asked Gordon to delay implementation so he could appeal -- and do that before the dispensary opened.

"If we have to move forward and take action on something that obviously we're advocating we believe is in violation of federal law, we will have effectively done what we're trying to avoid doing,'' Montgomery said.

And Montgomery said later than Kaufman and his client may regret pushing ahead with their clinic plans while he seeks appellate court review.

"Their haste to open could very well result in the equally quick loss of their investment and liberty,'' he said.

But Emma Andersson, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told Gordon there's no danger to county employees for just processing paperwork even though marijuana possession and sale remain illegal under federal law.

"The county cannot be federally prosecuted for issuing a zoning compliance statement at all, much less against its will, as would be the case here,'' she said.

Montgomery, however, said he does not see it that way.

"Mere compliance with state law is not a defense to federal prosecution,'' he said.

Andersson, however, said Montgomery's fears are overblown and without basis.

She pointed out that officials in other cities and counties had issued the necessary zoning certification without any federal prosecutors showing up at their doors. In fact, Andersson noted, there already is one dispensary actually selling marijuana in Glendale, with sales to start soon at sites in Tucson and Dragoon.

Maricopa County officials are involved in this issue because Sun City is in an unincorporated area.

As it turns out, Kaufman told the judge his clients have to move the location of their dispensary since the Greenway Road site "is no longer available.''

Kaufman declined to say where they intend to go, saying he fears people opposed to the dispensary might harass that landlord into making that storefront off limits, too. Instead, he described it as being about a mile north of the original site.


Obama: I’ve got ‘bigger fish to fry’ than pot smokers

Obama is a liar!!!

Source

Obama: I’ve got ‘bigger fish to fry’ than pot smokers

Posted by Rachel Weiner on December 14, 2012 at 8:35 am

In an interview with ABC News, President Obama told Barbara Walters that recreational pot smoking in states that have legalized the drug is not a major concern for his administration.

“We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Obama said of marijuana smokers in Colorado and Washington, the two states where recreational use is now legal.

“It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it’s legal,” he said.

Under Obama, the Drug Enforcement Administration has aggressively gone after medical marijuana dispensaries in California, where they are legal. In September, federal officials raided several Los Angeles shops and sent warnings to many more.

“This is a tough problem, because Congress has not yet changed the law,” Obama told Walters of the legalization in Colorado and Washington. “I head up the executive branch; we’re supposed to be carrying out laws. And so what we’re going to need to have is a conversation about, how do you reconcile a federal law that still says marijuana is a federal offense and state laws that say that it’s legal?”

Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech Wednesday that he would announce a policy on the new state laws “relatively soon.”

The president, who smoked pot often in high school, told Walters that he does not support general legalization “at this point.” It’s the same position he’s taken throughout his political career, despite his own history.

“There are a bunch of things I did that I regret when I was a kid,” Obama told Walters. “My attitude is, substance abuse generally is not good for our kids, not good for our society.”


Obama: Feds shouldn't target recreational pot users in Colorado, Washington

If that is true why is Obama sending his jackbooted DEA thugs to bust medical marijuana clinics in California???

Source

Obama: Feds shouldn't target recreational pot users in Colorado, Washington

9:07 a.m. CST, December 14, 2012

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama says federal authorities should not target recreational marijuana use in two Western states where it has been made legal given limited government resources and growing public acceptance of the controlled substance.

His first comments on the issue come weeks after Washington state and Colorado voters supported legalizing pot, or cannabis, last month in ballot measures that stand in direct opposition of federal law.

"It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law that's legal," he told ABC News in part of an interview released on Friday.

"At this point (in) Washington and Colorado, you've seen the voters speak on this issue. And, as it is, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions," Obama said.

The Department of Justice has said pot remains a federally controlled substance and states have been looking for guidance from Washington on how it will handle the conflict with state laws.

Medical use of the substance is legal in 18 U.S. states. But federal officials have still continued to crack down on some providers in those states.

Pot remains an illegal narcotic under U.S. law, but Washington and Colorado became the first states in the nation to legalize recreational marijuana use on November 6. A similar effort in Oregon failed.

Obama called the situation "a tough problem, because Congress has not yet changed the law." He told ABC that "what we're going to need to have is a conversation about" how to reconcile federal and state laws, and that he has asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to examine the issue.

In his 1995 memoir, "Dreams of My Father," Obama admitted to regularly smoking pot in high school. The father of two told ABC that he would not go so far as to say pot should be legalized altogether. There are also concerns about drug use in children and violence, he told ABC, according to its website.

"I want to discourage drug use," he added.

The new measures in Washington and Colorado, which already permit medical marijuana use, allow possession of up to an ounce of the substance for private use. They also will regulate and tax sales at special stores for those aged 21 and older.


Bill Montgomery is a zealot who hates medical marijuana!!!!

Source

Montgomery still blowing smoke

Posted on December 13, 2012 by EJ Montini

Current Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery is to medical marijuana what former County Attorney Andrew Thomas was to immigration.

A zealot.

A person so personally, philosophically and politically opposed to the notion that he either cannot or will not let it go.

Montgomery hates the medical marijuana law.

Not having been able to convince voters in Arizona to go along with him, he has since been trying to convince a court, any court, to keep the law from going into effect.

His persistent argument is that county workers who do the paperwork necessary for medical marijuana businesses are violating federal law and could be arrested.

It doesn’t matter that U.S. attorneys in other states with medical marijuana laws have not done such a thing.

It didn’t matter when Arizona’s former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke came right out and said, “We have no intention of targeting or going after people who are implementing or who are in compliance with state law.”

A while back, when I asked Montgomery why other prosecutors in other states haven’t done what he’s doing, the county attorney told me, “Just because another state didn’t have either the legal acumen or the political courage to do the right thing isn’t going to keep me from wanting to make sure that I am doing what I need to do to protect county employees.”

Not many people are buying that.

Montgomery is determined to do whatever he has to do in order to satisfy what appears to be his own personal political agenda on this issue.

When Gov. Jan Brewer and Attorney General Tom Horne joined his crusade and took the issue to court to try to keep the law from being implemented, Montgomery said, “I think this is the end of the medical-marijuana movement. You can’t do a wink and a nod toward unlawful conduct and not have a consequence.”

Only it wasn’t the end.

Just as it wasn’t the end when Montgomery and others tried to get a superior court judge to say the law was unconstitutional.

Now Montgomery promises to go to the appeals court. (See an article by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez here.) And if he loses there, he’ll most likely take it to another court. All of which he gets to do on the county’s dime by claiming that he’s doing this “to protect county employees” rather than to satisfy his own political vanity.

Hubris can be a dangerous quality in a job like county attorney.

Look where it got the last guy.


Alvarez to '60 Minutes': False confessions story was 'offensive'

Anybody that doesn't believe that the police routinely get innocent people to confess to crimes they didn't commit needs to read up on "The 9 Step Reid Method".

"The 9 Step Reid Method" is the technique that most police agencies in the world use to get confessions.

Go ahead right now and Google

9 Step Reid Method
Lots of sites will pop up. Here are some of them:

Back in the old days cops used to get confessions by beating people with rubber hoses. The great thing about rubber hoses is they don't leave marks like beating a person with a club would and the cops can say the person confessed willingly without being beaten.

The "9 Step Reid Method" is just a modern method of beating the sh*t out of suspected criminals with psychological rubber hose. It's a very effective method in getting people to confess. In fact it's so effective that it routinely gets innocent people to confess to crimes they didn't commit.

And the good thing about "The 9 Step Reid Method" is that the psychological rubber hoses used to beat a suspected criminal into confession leave even less marks then real rubber hoses.

The bad thing about "The 9 Step Reid Method" is that the confessions cops get when they use it are about as reliable as those they got when they beat the sh*t out of a person with a rubber hose to get the confession.

As of today, DNA tests have cause 301 people who were framed by the police to be released from death row. Many of those people confess to the crimes the crimes the police framed them for. And of course most of those police confessions were obtained using the "The 9 Step Reid Method".

Source

Alvarez to '60 Minutes': False confessions story was 'offensive'

By Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune reporter

8:05 a.m. CST, December 14, 2012

After days of scathing reviews of her "60 Minutes" interview on false confessions, Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez fired off a letter to the venerable news program calling its Sunday report "one-sided and extremely misleading" and vowing to set the record straight.

The segment titled "Chicago: The False Confession Capital" featured two infamous Chicago-area cases in which teenage boys allegedly confessed to brutal murders but were later exonerated when DNA excluded them as the killers.

In her letter, addressed to CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager, Alvarez called the story "an offensive display" and accused reporter Byron Pitts of using only snippets of a 6-month-old interview to distort her record and make it appear she was still trying to prosecute the cases.

"Had I known that this story would completely distort my position and intentionally omit critical facts, I would never have agreed to your interview," Alvarez wrote.

One particularly damaging portion of the interview involved the Dixmoor Five case in which five men were convicted as teens of the 1991 rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl whose body was found on a path. DNA linked a serial rapist to the crime and undermined confessions from the teens. They were cleared in 2011 after spending years in prison.

Alvarez explained in the interview that one possible explanation for the DNA was necrophilia — that the rapist had sex with the girl after she'd already been killed.

That answer — which was roundly mocked in blogs and news critiques — was misconstrued, Alvarez said in the letter. She wrote that the necrophilia theory was used at trial years before she had any involvement in the case.

"I have never advanced that theory or argument, but simply responded, when asked by Mr. Pitts, that we can't say with certainty what had occurred," Alvarez wrote. "This story was not designed to inform, it was designed to undermine me and mislead the public."

Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for Alvarez, said the reaction to the piece has been vitriolic. "She's gotten hate mail, things you couldn't even publish," Daly said.

CBS News representatives did not return phone calls seeking comment.

jmeisner@tribune.com


Obama won’t go after marijuana use in 2 states

I will believe it when I see it.

When Obama first got elected he said he supported medical marijuana, but then he sent his DEA goons to raid California medical marijuana dispensaries.

I would like to think President Obama really feels this way, but he has lied to us before and I wouldn't be surprised if he is lying to us again.

Source

Obama won’t go after marijuana use in 2 states

Associated Press Fri Dec 14, 2012 11:22 AM

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama says the federal government won’t go after recreational marijuana use in Washington state and Colorado, where voters have legalized it.

In a Barbara Walters interview airing Friday on ABC, Obama was asked whether he supports making pot legal.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Obama replied. “But what I think is that, at this point, Washington and Colorado, you’ve seen the voters speak on this issue.”

But the president said he won’t pursue the issue in the two states where voters legalized the use of marijuana in the November elections. Marijuana remains illegal under federal law.

“… as it is, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions,” Obama said. “It does not make sense, from a prioritization point of view, for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law, that’s legal.”

Marijuana officially became legal in Washington state and Colorado this month.

The Justice Department hasn’t targeted recreational marijuana users for decades. With limited resources, its focus has been to go after major drug traffickers instead.

Nonetheless, the Justice Department has said repeatedly in recent weeks that it is reviewing the legalization initiatives passed in Colorado and Washington state. The states have expressed concern that the federal government might sue over the issue. Department officials have said they are waiting to see what regulations the two states adopt to implement the initiatives.

Obama’s remarks did not address that ongoing Justice Department review.

In the department’s most recent statement on the issue, the U.S. attorney for Colorado said Monday that the department’s responsibility to enforce the federal Controlled Substances Act “remains unchanged.”

“Neither states nor the executive branch can nullify a statute passed by Congress,” U.S. Attorney John Walsh said. “Regardless of any changes in state law, including the change that will go into effect on Dec. 10 in Colorado, growing, selling or possessing any amount of marijuana remains illegal under federal law.”

Walsh added: “Members of the public are also advised to remember that it remains against federal law to bring any amount of marijuana onto federal property, including all federal buildings, national parks and forests, military installations, and courthouses.”


Arizona Court of Appeals to hear medical marijuana case

Here we go again. The tyrants that enforce the laws want to keep marijuana illegal.

Doesn't Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery have any real criminals to hunt down? You know criminals like robbers, rapists and burglars that commit real crimes that hurt people. Not harmless pot smokers.

Source

Arizona Court of Appeals to hear medical marijuana case

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Dec 14, 2012 5:22 PM

The Arizona Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments on the high-profile medical marijuana case at 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 20.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery requested that the appellate court temporarily block a lower court ruling that the state’s medical marijuana law is constitutional and that the county must provide zoning documents for a potential dispensary.

Montgomery asked the court to make a quick decision on whether it will stay or suspend Superior Court Judge Michael Gordon’s Dec. 4 ruling. Gordon on Thursday rejected Montgomery’s request to block the ruling, prompting Montgomery’s filing Friday with the Court of Appeals.

The county prosecutor disagrees with Gordon’s ruling that the state’s medical marijuana law is legal, pointing out that marijuana is illegal under federal drug laws.

Montgomery argues the county could suffer “irreparable harm” if county officials are made to “commit violations of federal law by facilitating” the manufacturing and distribution of marijuana.

Attorneys Jeffrey Kaufman and Ezekiel Edwards, who represent potential dispensary White Mountain Health Center, disagreed with the notion that the medical marijuana law requires government workers to engage in activities that would expose them to prosecution.

Meanwhile, Kaufman filed an application Friday for attorney fees. He is seeking $45,003 from Maricopa County and the state of Arizona, since Attorney General Tom Horne intervened in the case.


Texas cops guard cocaine shipments???

Source

Feds: 4 Texas officers guarded cocaine shipments

Associated Press Fri Dec 14, 2012 12:31 PM

McALLEN, Texas — Three South Texas lawmen including the son of a prominent county sheriff will likely spend the weekend in custody on charges accusing them and another officer of accepting thousands of dollars in bribes to guard shipments of cocaine.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Dorina Ramos set bond at $100,000 Friday for Mission Police officer Jonathan Trevino, 29, and Hidalgo County Sheriff’s deputies Fabian Rodriguez, 28, and Gerardo Duran, 30. The same bond was set a day earlier for their alleged co-conspirator Mission Police officer Alexis Espinoza a day earlier.

Ramos said it was unlikely that pre-trial services could arrange for their release if any of the men posted bond before Monday.

Prosecutors say the four were members of a task force called the Panama Unit that fights drug trafficking. Instead of combatting the drug trade, prosecutors say the four provided protection for it.

Trevino is the son of Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Trevino. Espinoza is the son of Hidalgo Police Chief Rodolfo “Rudy” Espinoza.

Sheriff Lupe Trevino, dressed in a sport coat and jeans, sat in court with other family members Friday. After the hearing, federal agents who worked the case filed out of the first row of seats in the courtroom, stopping to shake hands with him.

“It’s hard, those FBI agents are friends of mine,” the elder Trevino said, visibly emotional.

The news that the men would likely not be able to leave custody before Monday came as a disappointment. Trevino said they had spent Thursday trying to meet the conditions of bond. Ramos said if they post bond they will be on home detention and monitored electronically, allowed to leave home for work, religious services and court appearances. Ramos urged them to find work outside of law enforcement as soon as possible.

On Friday, the three lawmen stood among a group of 15 men making their initial appearances on a variety of felony charges. They stood motionless as Ramos read their charges for possession with intent to distribute cocaine and noted that if convicted they could face from 10 years to life in prison.

The federal charges against the men have sent shockwaves through the area’s law enforcement community.

The sheriff said the FBI came to his office around 3 p.m. Wednesday to tell him that two of his deputies and his son were targets of an investigation. He said the Panama Unit was formed more than three years ago to help Mission clean up its street-level drug crime, and that he couldn’t comment on the specifics of the case because it wasn’t his investigation.

The three were taken into custody on Thursday.

Federal prosecutors say the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement department that conducts internal reviews received a tip in August that Espinoza and another task force member had been stealing drugs. Local police are often assigned to multiagency task forces focusing on drug interdiction. Federal investigators set up a sting.

According to prosecutors, a confidential source working for the government told Duran in September that the drug trafficking organization he was working for needed corrupt law enforcement officers to escort drug loads. On Oct. 19, Duran and another individual escorted a load of 20 kilograms of cocaine north from McAllen to the Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias about an hour away. Duran was allegedly paid $4,000, they said.

The officers earned thousands of dollars more for allegedly escorting four more cocaine shipments in November that were part of the sting operation, prosecutors contend.

The complaint said all four “utilized their positions as law enforcement personnel to escort and protect loads of narcotics.” Nothing in the charging documents accuses them of stealing drugs.

Mission Police Chief Martin Garza said Thursday that Jonathan Trevino was the only officer from his department assigned to the Panama Unit and that Espinoza was assigned to an ICE task force that had its own supervisor. The prosecutor’s office didn’t immediately respond to an after-hours message Thursday seeking clarification on the matter.

Garza said both officers were fired Thursday. The FBI visited his office late Wednesday afternoon to advise him of their investigation and to collect documents related to it. Garza said he cooperated fully and his department would conduct its own investigation.

Espinoza’s father did not respond to phone messages seeking comment. Nobody from his department is accused of wrongdoing.

Lupe Trevino said Thursday he was cooperating fully with the federal investigation and conducting his own internal review, but he added that he also has responsibilities as a father.

“It’s been devastating to our family, devastating to the organization,” he said.


Federal prisoners turn snitching into a profitable gig

Source

Federal prisoners turn snitching into a profitable gig

By Brad Heath USA Today Fri Dec 14, 2012 9:51 AM

ATLANTA -- The prisoners in Atlanta’s hulking downtown jail had a problem. They wanted to snitch for federal agents, but they didn’t know anything worth telling.

Fellow prisoner Marcus Watkins, an armed robber, had the answer.

For a fee, Watkins and his associates on the outside sold them information about other criminals that they could turn around and offer up to federal agents in hopes of shaving years off their prison sentences. They were paying for information, but what they were really trying to buy was freedom.

“I didn’t feel as though any laws were being broken,” Watkins wrote in a 2008 letter to prosecutors. “I really thought I was helping out law enforcement.”

That pay-to-snitch enterprise — documented in thousands of pages of court records, interviews and a stack of Watkins’ own letters — remains almost entirely unknown outside Atlanta’s towering federal courthouse, where investigators are still trying to determine whether any criminal cases were compromised. It offers a rare glimpse inside a vast and almost always secret part of the federal criminal justice system in which prosecutors routinely use the promise of reduced prison time to reward prisoners who help federal agents build cases against other criminals.

Snitching has become so commonplace that in the past five years at least 48,895 federal convicts -- one of every eight -- had their prison sentences reduced in exchange for helping government investigators, a USA TODAY examination of hundreds of thousands of court cases found. The deals can chop a decade or more off of their sentences.

How often informants pay to acquire information from brokers such as Watkins is impossible to know, in part because judges routinely seal court records that could identify them. It almost certainly represents an extreme result of a system that puts strong pressure on defendants to cooperate. Still, Watkins’ case is at least the fourth such scheme to be uncovered in Atlanta alone over the past 20 years.

Those schemes are generally illegal because the people who buy information usually lie to federal agents about where they got it. They also show how staggeringly valuable good information has become — prices ran into tens of thousands of dollars, or up to $250,000 in one case, court records show.

John Horn, the second in command of Atlanta’s U.S. attorney’s office, said the “investigation on some of these matters is continuing” but would not elaborate.

Prosecutors have said they were troubled that informants were paying for some of the secrets they passed on to federal agents. Judges are outraged. But the inmates who operated the schemes have repeatedly alleged that agents knew all along what they were up to, and sometimes even gave them the information they sold. Prosecutors told a judge in October that an investigation found those accusations were false. Still, court records show, agents kept interviewing at least one of Watkins’ customers even after the FBI learned of the scheme.

The risks are obvious. If the government rewards paid-for information, wealthy defendants could potentially buy early freedom. Because such a system further muddies the question of how informants -- already widely viewed as untrustworthy -- know what they claim to know, “individual cases can be undermined and the system itself is compromised,” U.S. Justice Department lawyers said in a 2010 court filing.

Before Watkins became an informant, he was a prolific armed robber.

In 1995, he held up a string of shops and restaurants, sometimes robbing the same place more than once, and sometimes pulling more than one robbery a day, according to court records. The last time he was arrested, in 2006, Atlanta police said he asked a supermarket clerk for a pack of cigarettes, stepped back, pulled a handgun and yelled “robbery.” He fled before he got any money, employees caught him, and federal prosecutors hit him with a gun charge that could have put him in prison for the rest of his life.

By then, Watkins had been a federal informant for a decade, he said in a letter to USA TODAY. He claimed he once wore a wire inside a prison to help catch another man who was selling information to would-be witnesses. That man, Gregory Harris, later confessed, but, in an unusual move, the government agreed to halve the 20-year prison sentence Harris was already serving in exchange for his cooperation in other cases. (Harris was found dead this year inside the trunk of a burning car.)

And so began a career of trying to cash in on what he knew.

Pressure, and plenty of cooperation

People charged with federal crimes don’t have many ways to avoid a tough sentence.

Nearly everyone charged is convicted. They usually face the prospect of a lengthy prison term, driven by long minimum sentences for drug crimes and sentencing rules that leave judges little leeway to make exceptions — unless they cooperate. Often, becoming an informant is the only chance defendants have.

An experienced lawyer who knows what his client has been charged with “can ask a client three or four questions, and you can get 95 percent accuracy on the sentencing range within 10 minutes â€1// unless he has something to trade,” said Tim Saviello, a John Marshall Law School professor and former federal public defender in Atlanta. “People are willing to pay $20,000 or $30,000 to get a piece of information. That tells you how valuable it is.”

Every year for the past decade, 11 percent or more of the people convicted of a federal crime got a shorter sentence because they provided “substantial assistance” to investigators, a USA TODAY examination of federal sentencing data shows. That figure almost certainly understates the extent to which defendants cooperate because some get breaks that aren’t reflected in court records and others only pass on information that the government doesn’t find useful.

In return, prisoners offer up names and addresses of drug dealers. They wear recording devices or let police listen to their phone calls. They introduce undercover agents to their contacts inside crime organizations.

That kind of help has become indispensable for law enforcement. The Drug Enforcement Administration told the Justice Department’s inspector general in 2005 that it “could not effectively enforce the controlled-substances laws of the United States” without its confidential sources.

Cooperation is especially common when drugs are involved. Nationwide, at least a quarter of the people sent to federal prison in drug-trafficking cases over the past five years successfully traded information for a shorter sentence. In some parts of the country — including Idaho, Colorado and western New York — more than half did, while in Nebraska, fewer than 5 percent of convicted drug traffickers got deals. One reason is that some prosecutors’ offices demand far more cooperation to get a deal.

The benefits can be huge. Last year, half of the defendants who cooperated with the government got their sentences chopped by 50 percent or more, according to a U.S. Sentencing Commission report. People convicted of some white-collar crimes such as bribery and tax evasion usually avoid prison entirely.

It’s up to Justice Department lawyers to decide who gets a break.

A jailhouse enterprise

Watkins’ business plan was simple.

His associates on the outside collected information about drug dealers and other criminals, and he offered to sell it to other prisoners at the Atlanta City Detention Center who had money but lacked the facts or criminal contacts to cooperate with the government on their own. Sometimes the money ended up in a jail account that inmates use to buy commissary items, according to court records.

In exchange, he would deliver “packages” of information his customers could share with federal agents looking to open new cases or buttress old ones.

The trouble was most of what Watkins had to sell was “classic street-level information” that was of little interest to federal agents looking to take down major drug traffickers, said Robert McBurney, who worked a related case when he was a federal prosecutor in Atlanta. He said Justice Department lawyers were uncomfortable shortening one prisoner’s sentence as a reward for someone else’s information, and doubly so when the would-be informants concealed the fact that their information was secondhand.

And then there was the money. “There were discussions that, if the information he relayed is valid, maybe he’s an entrepreneur. If he chooses to get money instead of a reduction in sentence, Adam Smith would applaud that,” McBurney said, invoking the 18th-century economist. But prosecutors didn’t take the same view.

Watkins said he didn’t see the problem. “The biggest buyer of information is the government,” he said during a brief phone call from a detention center in Georgia. “But they pay in years.”

He claimed during a phone call that the agents who debriefed him “knew money’s been changing hands,” and his lawyer said in court filings that it should have been obvious to investigators that Watkins was getting outside information. “They basically authorized all of this,” Watkins said. He said he is still providing information to federal agents, an allegation that prosecutors have disputed.

Watkins’ enterprise didn’t come to light until the summer of 2008, when another inmate contacted prosecutors looking for a deal — with information about Watkins. (He got one.) Watkins later told the FBI that he had brokered deals for four inmates. James Rochester, the informant who turned him in — and had been intercepting his mail — told federal prosecutors through his lawyer that he thought there were at least a dozen customers. Watkins himself wrote to agents and prosecutors admitting that he had acted as a broker for other prisoners seeking information.

McBurney said prosecutors tried to review all cases that could have been tainted by Watkins’ scheme. “It’s a pernicious situation that, sadly, undid some good works,” McBurney said. But FBI Agent Mile Brosas testified in December 2010 that agents went “just based on the names that Mr. Watkins gave us.”

Neither Watkins nor his customers were ever prosecuted for the scheme. At least one actually won a reduced sentence .

Watkins is still angling to get his own sentence reduced.

He pleaded guilty to a federal gun charge in 2007; in exchange, the government promised in a written plea agreement to recommend a 30-year sentence. But five and a half years later, he still hasn’t been sentenced. Part of the reason is that he’s still trying to get a judge to force the Justice Department to give him a “substantial assistance” reduction as a reward for the help he said he has given to state and federal agents.

The Justice Department “feigns dismay that Marcus Watkins was allegedly buying and selling information when the Government had been legally buying information from him over a lengthy period of time,” his lawyer, Martin Cowen III, alleged in one court filing. He said it should have been obvious to agents by 2008 that Watkins -- who had been in prison for two years by then -- couldn’t have been giving them current information about criminals unless he was getting it from someone outside the jail.

The government, Cowen said, was “’shocked, shocked’ to find that information was being sold in the jail.”

But if prosecutors weren’t actually surprised, Atlanta’s chief federal judge was. At a hearing in 2010, U.S. District Court Judge Julie Carnes excoriated the “abominable situation” of prisoners trading for outside information, and said she was “appalled that it’s going on to the level it appears to be going on.” The scheme, she said, could let the wealthy buy their way to reduced sentences, conjuring images of Hessian mercenaries of the Revolutionary War.

Carnes still hasn’t decided what to do with Watkins.

Information has a price

It wasn’t the only time someone here figured out how much information was worth.

In 2010, federal prosecutors indicted another man, Sandeo Dyson -- an Army medic locked up on charges that he had tried to burn down a strip club for money -- for running a similar scheme out of the same jail at the same time as Watkins. His customers paid $5,000 and $10,000 for information they hoped would win them lighter sentences. Prosecutors said he made $50,000 selling information to four other inmates.

Dyson pleaded guilty to a charge of encouraging his customers to lie to agents about the source of their information and was sentenced to 18 more months in prison.

U.S. District Judge Richard Story had planned to lock Dyson up longer. But by the time Dyson’s attorney, Barry Lombardo, finished sketching the history of the pay-to-snitch business in Atlanta, Story instead sentenced him to the bottom end of what the federal sentencing guidelines said was appropriate, Lombardo said. (The transcript of that hearing remains sealed.)

In 2000, prosecutors here convicted Harris.

Four years before that, agents charged a prominent local defense lawyer, Robert Fierer, and his former drug-dealer client, Kevin Pappas, with running an even bigger information-for-sale enterprise. Their customers were quoted prices up to $250,000 for information that they hoped might help them go home sooner, according to court records.

To get a deal, Pappas said, people needed the right kind of information about the right kind of criminal -- solid information about someone significant enough to be worth a federal agent’s time, but not so ironclad that they’d ever be asked to testify. “The key is you got to know what the point of interest is in a given office today,” he said.

The prosecutor who put the pair in prison, Buddy Parker, says he understands the pressures that made the information so valuable. “The only way to avoid a long sentence was to cut a cooperation deal. People without information, they’re screwed,” he said. “The guy who was the greatest criminal had the greatest likelihood of getting a low sentence.”

Fierer got a two-and-a-half-year sentence. But he went home early after he gave agents information about another case.

Following the information, and the money

Watkins’ information is still reverberating through one drug case.

In early 2008, an Atlanta jail inmate facing mortgage fraud charges approached FBI agents with information about a drug trafficker who was dealing in tractor-trailer loads of marijuana and cocaine. Leon Lumsden was by then practiced at trying to use information to win a deal. At his sentencing hearing that July, so many federal agents showed up on his behalf that the judge gave him an even bigger sentence reduction than prosecutors had sought.

The prosecutor on Lumsden’s case, Gale McKenzie, had warned state and federal officers that his “credibility was nil.” Still, she wrote in a September, 2008 e-mail, “many from state and federal law enforcement debriefed him and reported receiving verified information of value as well as making arrests based on his cooperation.”

But the information about the drug dealer panned out. Marlon Burton -- “Bird” on the street -- lived in a country club south of Atlanta and traveled in a Mercedes; he had a direct connection to a Mexican cartel, according to court records.

What was less clear was how Lumsden -- a white-collar crook -- knew about him. During a phone interview this month, Watkins said he provided the information about Burton to Lumsden, and that he was compensated for it. Court records show he had previously offered the same facts to federal investigators.

Lumsden insisted that the information he got from Watkins was worthless. “I didn’t benefit from all the garbage he gave me,” he said during a brief phone call from a Georgia prison. “Everything he gave me was straight BS.”

A reliable source, and more arrests

Still, in November of 2008, the FBI used Lumsden’s information to ask a federal judge to let agents wiretap the trafficker’s cellphone. He was an important part of the case because the agents’ other informant hadn’t done business with Burton in years, meaning a judge might think it was too stale to justify a wiretap. The agent who signed the wiretap application, Nikki Badolato, told the judge that Lumsden was “reliable.”

Badolato later testified that she didn’t know that Lumsden had been buying information because his name was misspelled in an FBI database.

The FBI got its wiretap. Agents arrested Burton the next year.

Burton in turn informed on the other members of his organization. In return, prosecutors chopped a decade off his prison sentence, a bargain the judge called “more than generous.” One of the people Burton implicated was the owner of a Lithonia, Ga., machine shop where he said he would park, and sometimes unload, truckloads of marijuana and cocaine.

Agents arrested the owner, Ivey Grant, in the drive-through line of a Sonic Drive-In. It was the first time Grant, 61, had been charged with a crime, and when FBI agents booked him, they found his hands were so scoured by years of labor that his fingerprints had worn away.

Grant is serving nine years in federal prison.

He insists he didn’t know what was in Burton’s trucks; to him, they were just like any of the other big rigs and dump trucks that rent space in the shop’s dusty parking lot. Now he’s asking a federal appeals court in Atlanta to overturn his conviction, saying that the judge who approved the wiretap that ensnared him should have been told about the shaky informants behind it.

Sitting in a cinder-block prison office in Atlanta’s federal prison last month, Grant sounded more confused than angry about how he ended up facing almost a decade in custody. “I don’t think it’s right for a convicted felon to get up on the stand in front of honest citizens and convict other people,” he said.

But with seven years to go, he sees the attraction.

“If someone says you can go home today if you say that box is blue,” he said, stabbing a thick finger at a big, white cardboard box in the corner of the office and grinning, “then that box is blue.”


Pot proponents hopeful, wary after Obama comments

Obama has lied to us before about his position on marijuana

"Pot advocates say they are leery since previous statements from the administration that it wouldn’t go after individual medical marijuana users was followed by crackdowns on dispensaries and others who grew and sold the pot"

Source

Pot proponents hopeful, wary after Obama comments

Associated Press Fri Dec 14, 2012 4:24 PM

WASHINGTON — Officials and pot advocates looking for any sign of whether the Obama administration will sue to block legal pot laws in Washington state and Colorado or stand idly by as they are implemented got one from the president himself.

But it did little to clear the air.

While they welcomed President Barack Obama’s comments that catching pot users was a low priority for his administration, they said it didn’t answer a bigger question: Will federal prosecutors and drug agents also look the other way?

Pot advocates say they are leery since previous statements from the administration that it wouldn’t go after individual medical marijuana users was followed by crackdowns on dispensaries and others who grew and sold the pot.

“There’s some signal of hope,” said Alison Holcomb, who led Washington’s legalization drive, but added that it will take more than the president to clarify the issues around legal pot. “We ultimately need a legislative resolution.”

In an interview with Barbara Walters scheduled to air on ABC on Friday, Obama said that going after “recreational users” would not be a “top priority” in the two states, where voters legalized pot use in November.

In his comments, the president didn’t specifically address how the federal government would respond to state officials in Washington and Colorado, who are beginning work on regulations for commercial pot sales.

Under the laws, possession of up to an ounce of pot is legal for adults over 21.

The Justice Department has declined to say whether it would file a lawsuit to block the laws, but has said marijuana is still illegal under federal law.

Tom Angell of the group Marijuana Majority said Obama’s comment didn’t add anything new. He said the federal government rarely goes after users and the president can do more besides passing the responsibility to Congress.

Angell said Obama can use executive power to reclassify pot as a legal drug.

Federal prosecutors haven’t targeted users in the 18 states and Washington, D.C. that allow people to use marijuana for medical reasons. However, federal agents have still cracked down on dozens of dispensaries in some of those states.

U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., said Obama’s statements weren’t definitive but could be a sign that the federal government might be willing to work with the states to develop a new regulatory model for marijuana.

“I think the president’s comments are a good sign,” she said.

Legalization activists in Colorado were frustrated after they tried and failed to get the president to take a stand on the state’s marijuana measure during the presidential campaign in the battleground state.

“Here’s the president, an admitted marijuana user in his youth, who’s previously shown strong support for this, and then he didn’t want to touch it because it was such a close race,” said Joe Megyesy, a spokesman for a marijuana legalization group.

Megyesy said Obama’s comments were “good news,” but left unanswered many questions about how pot regulation will work.

Even if individual users aren’t charged with crimes, pot producers and sellers could be subject to prosecution and civil forfeiture and other legal roadblocks, he said.

Marijuana is a crop that can’t be insured, and federal drug law prevents banks from knowingly serving the industry, leaving it a cash-only business that’s difficult to regulate, Megyesy said.

Other states have been closely watching the developments in Colorado and Washington and how the federal government responds.

In Delaware, where a medical marijuana program has been put on hold amid concerns over fear of federal prosecutions of pot growers and distributors, Gov. Jack Markell’s spokeswoman said his administration has the same concerns about legalization.

“If the federal government is saying it won’t pursue persons with a medical need or recreational users, but it is prosecuting persons who provide that marijuana in a safe manner, then we are forcing people to obtain marijuana from the illegal market,” Cathy Rossi said.


Turkey Seizes Drugs, Guns, Ammo in Raid on Kurdish Rebels

As long as drugs are illegal criminals will use them to raise large sums of money.

Of course when drugs are legalized this criminal activity will disappear overnight, and all the real crimes that were cased by making drugs illegal will also disappear at the same time.

The insane world wide "war on drugs" was created by the American government and exported to the rest of the world when the American government started giving "bribes" which they call "foreign aid" to other countries to criminalize drugs.

If drugs were legal, a kilo of marijuana wouldn't cost any more then a head of lettuce.

Source

Turkey Seizes Drugs, Guns, Ammo in Raid on Kurdish Rebels

By REUTERS

Published: December 15, 2012 at 10:14 AM ET

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - Turkish security forces backed by helicopters seized an estimated $22.5 million worth of marijuana along with guns and fertilizer in a swoop against suspected Kurdish militants on Saturday, officials said.

Hundreds of soldiers, police and special forces carried out the coordinated raids in seven villages around the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, seizing drugs, guns, ammunition and ammonium nitrate, which can be used to make explosives, officials said.

Turkish officials say the drug trade is a major source of funding for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants, who since 1984 have been fighting to carve out a Kurdish state in Turkey's southeastern border region with Iran and Iraq.

The PKK uses the remote Kandil mountains in northern Iraq as a base from which to stage attacks on Turkish territory. The group is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

"The income obtained from drugs is sent to Kandil ... The organization is earning a significant income though these drugs," Diyarbakir Governor Mustafa Toprak told reporters.

The PKK has mainly carried out guerrilla-style attacks against Turkish military targets in the southeast but has also killed civilians with bomb attacks in major cities including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.

Fighting flared over the summer and the security forces have stepped up operations against suspected PKK bases in recent weeks out of fear that they could try to stage further attacks in the winter months.

The military carried out several raids on suspected PKK bases in the Bestler-Dereler area of the neighboring province of Sirnak last week, destroying 32 of the group's camps and seizing explosives, the governor's office said on Saturday.

There have also been raids by the security forces against two PKK groups in the province of Tunceli further north, security sources said.

Toprak said the security forces had seized 21 tonnes of marijuana and destroyed drug plantations in the fields around the villages in Saturday's operation. Three people were arrested while a fourth was still being sought, he said.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in 28 years of fighting between Turkey and the PKK, a conflict which has hampered development in one of the country's poorest corners.

In 2009, U.S. authorities named several senior members of the PKK as suspected narcotics traffickers, freezing their assets and banning U.S. citizens from doing business with them.

Turkey is an important route for drug trafficking to Europe both as a producer and an importer, mainly from Syria and Iran.

Turkey seized around 47 tonnes of marijuana in 2011 as a whole, a 50 percent rise on the previous year, according to Turkish police figures.

($1 = 1.7790 Turkish liras)

(Writing by Seltem Iyigun; Editing by Nick Tattersall/Mark Heinrich)


More confusion on Obama's pot policy

Obama has lied in the past and said he wouldn't bust medical marijuana users, while at the same time he was sending in his DEA thugs to raid California medical marijuana clinics.

Personally I suspect Obama is still lying to us. I suspect Obama says he won't bust pot smokers because he wants mainstream Americans to love him. I suspect he will also continue to support the unconstitutional war on drugs because he wants the DEA thugs that work for him to keep their high paying jobs arresting people for victimless drug war crimes.

Source

President's pot comments prompt call for policy

By Paul Elias

Associated Press

Posted: 12/15/2012 07:21:03 AM PST

SAN FRANCISCO -- President Barack Obama says he won't go after pot users in Colorado and Washington, two states that just legalized the drug for recreational use. But advocates argue the president said the same thing about medical marijuana -- and yet U.S. attorneys continue to force the closure of dispensaries across the U.S.

Welcome to the confusing and often conflicting policy on pot in the U.S., where medical marijuana is legal in many states, but it is increasingly difficult to grow, distribute or sell it. And at the federal level, at least officially, it is still an illegal drug everywhere.

Obama's statement Friday provided little clarity in a world where marijuana is inching ever so carefully toward legitimacy.

That conflict is perhaps the greatest in California, where the state's four U.S. Attorneys criminally prosecuted large growers and launched a coordinated crackdown on the state's medical marijuana industry last year by threatening landlords with property forfeiture actions. Hundreds of pot shops went out of business.

Steve DeAngelo, executive director of an Oakland, Calif., dispensary that claims to be the nation's largest, called for a federal policy that treats recreational and medical uses of the drug equally.

"If we're going to recognize the rights of recreational users, then we should certainly protect the rights of medical cannabis patients who legally access the medicine their doctors have recommended," he said.

The government is planning to soon release policies for dealing with marijuana in Colorado and Washington, where federal law still prohibits pot, as elsewhere in the country.

"It would be nice to get something concrete to follow," said William Osterhoudt, a San Francisco criminal defense attorney representing government officials in Mendocino County who recently received a demand from federal investigators for detailed information about a local system for licensing growers of medical marijuana.

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano said he was frustrated by Obama's comments because the federal government continues to shutter dispensaries in states with medical marijuana laws, including California.

"A good step here would be to stop raiding those legal dispensaries who are doing what they are allowed to do by law," said the San Francisco Democrat. "There's a feeling that the federal government has gone rogue on hundreds of legal, transparent medical marijuana dispensaries, so there's this feeling of them being in limbo. And it puts the patients, the businesses and the advocates in a very untenable place."

Obama, in an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, said Friday that federal authorities have "bigger fish to fry" when it comes to targeting recreational pot smokers in Colorado and Washington.

Some advocates said the statement showed the president's willingness to allow residents of states with marijuana laws to use the drug without fear of federal prosecution.

"It's a tremendous step forward," said Joe Elford, general counsel for Americans for Safe Access. "It suggests the feds are taking seriously enough the idea that there should be a carve-out for states with marijuana laws."

Obama's statements on recreational use mirror the federal policy toward states that allow marijuana use for medical purposes.

"We are not focusing on backyard grows with small amounts of marijuana for use by seriously ill people," said Lauren Horwood, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner in Sacramento. "We are targeting money-making commercial growers and distributors who use the trappings of state law as cover, but they are actually abusing state law."

Alison Holcomb, who led the legalization drive in Washington state, said she doesn't expect Obama's comment to prompt the federal government to treat recreational marijuana and medical marijuana differently.

"At this point, what the president is looking at is a response to marijuana in general. The federal government has never recognized the difference between medical and non-medical marijuana," she said. "I don't think this is the time he'd carve out separate policies. I think he's looking for a more comprehensive response."

Washington voters approved a medical marijuana law in 1998, and dispensaries have proliferated across the state in recent years.

Last year, Gov. Chris Gregoire vetoed legislation that would have created a state system for licensing medical dispensaries over concern that it would require state workers to violate the federal Controlled Substances Act.

For the most part, dispensaries in western Washington have been left alone. But federal authorities did conduct raids earlier this year on dispensaries they said were acting outside the state law, such as selling marijuana to non-patients. Warning letters have been sent to dispensaries that operate too close to schools.

"What we've seen is enforcement of civil laws and warnings, with a handful of arrests of people who were operating outside state law," said Alison Holcomb, who led Washington's legalization drive and helped write the bill that Gregoire vetoed. of

Eastern Washington has seen more raids because the U.S. attorney there is more active, Holcomb added.

Colorado's marijuana measure requires lawmakers to allow commercial pot sales, and a state task force that will begin writing those regulations meets Monday.

State officials have reached out to the Justice Department seeking help on regulating a new legal marijuana industry but haven't heard back.

DeAngelo said Friday that the Justice Department should freeze all pending enforcement actions against legal medical cannabis providers and review its policies to make sure they're consistent with the president's position. He estimated federal officials have shuttered 600 dispensaries in the state and 1,000 nationwide.

DeAngelo's Harborside Health Center is facing eviction after the U.S. attorney in San Francisco pressured his landlord to stop harboring what the government considers an illegal business.

"While it's nice to hear these sorts of positive words from the president, we are facing efforts by the Justice Department to shut us down, so it's hard for me to take them seriously," DeAngelo said.

The dispensary has a hearing Thursday in federal court on the matter.

----

Associated Press writers Terry Collins in San Francisco and Manuel Valdes in Seattle contributed to this report.


Border Patrol to stop interpreting

But you should always take the 5th and say no to any police questioning!!!

If you talk to any competent defense lawyer they will always tell you to always take the 5th Amendment and to refuse to answer any and all questions from the police. And of course that includes border patrol thugs.

Source

Border Patrol to stop interpreting

Associated Press Thu Dec 13, 2012 3:39 PM

SEATTLE — U.S. Border Patrol agents will no longer serve as interpreters when local law enforcement agencies request language help, according to a new decree issued by the Department of Homeland Security.

The new guidance said agents should refer such requests to private services often used by government agencies.

Seeking language help is a common practice among local law enforcement agencies in Washington state. If a person is pulled over and can only speak Spanish, the U.S. Border Patrol is often called.

However, immigration advocates complain that Border Patrol agents ask people questions about immigration and in some cases arrest immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally.

“The concept of language access should be without people being questioned about their immigration status,” said Jorge Baron, executive director of the Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a legal aid organization.

Immigrants have grown apprehensive about calling local law enforcement agencies if they knew the Border Patrol is going to respond, he said.

The new Border Patrol guidance should help, even though it leaves agents some room for decision-making, he said.

The Border Patrol said Thursday it is trying to use its resources efficiently.

“The new guidance related to requests for translation services helps further focus CBP efforts on its primary mission to secure our nation’s borders.” a statement by Customs and Border Protection said. “CBP remains committed to assisting our law enforcement partners in their enforcement efforts.”

The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project sent a letter in May to the Department of Justice and Homeland Security saying the interpreting practice violated the Civil Rights Act.

The letter included dashboard camera video in which a Border Patrol agent is heard using a derogatory term for illegal immigrants.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush ordered U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, to beef up its presence on the U.S.-Canada border, which is almost twice as long as the U.S.-Mexico border.

In 2007, the northern border had about 1,100 agents. Now it has more than 2,200. In the same period, the number of agents in the Blaine sector, which covers the border west of the Cascades, went from 133 to 331.

Along with providing language services, Border Patrol agents often assist local law agencies that are short on personnel and equipment. In addition, highway checkpoints have been implemented.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Northwest Immigrant Rights Project filed a lawsuit earlier this year seeking to bar Border Patrol agents from doing traffic stops on the Olympic Peninsula, claiming people were being pulled over and questioned over the way they look and without reasonable suspicion. The lawsuit is pending.

The Border Patrol has denied any discrimination.


Tom Horne and Bill Montgomery should arrest real criminals, not pot smokers!!!!

Jason Llewellyn wants Tom Horne and Bill Montgomery to arrest real criminals instead of pot smokers!!!

Source

Letter: An open letter to Bill Montgomery and Tom Horne

Posted: Saturday, December 15, 2012 2:31 pm

Letter to the Editor

Dear Sirs, Please be advised that President Obama has said in an interview with Barbara Walters the following when it comes to legalized marijuana. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry... It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational uses in states that have determined that it’s legal.”

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne violates campaign finance laws and gets into a hit an run accident So Mr. Montgomery and Mr Horne, we all know you both have a disdain for medical marijuana and the current president. So why can’t you just let this go? Clearly, the president doesn’t see it as a priority, so why do you both continue to waste taxpayer dollars? Instead, take the tax revenue and fight real crimes. The voters and legislatures in 18-plus states and D.C. have made their choices and we, the voters, demand that you stop chasing ghosts and stop the charades. Let adults make their own choices. Click here to find out more!

Court after court in Arizona has sided against the state time and time again when it comes to Proposition 202. It’s time for the full law to go into effect. As a medical cannabis patient, and a U.S. Navy Gulf War-era veteran, stop harassing us!

Jason Llewellyn

CHANDLER


Bill Betz thinks it's time to boot Bill Montgomery

Bill Betz thinks it's time to boot Bill Montgomery

Source

Montgomery oblivious

Dec. 15, 2012 04:26 PM

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, an elected official, does his utmost and expends who knows how much taxpayer money to thwart the will of the people by fighting the thrice-approved medical- marijuana law.

Hopefully, voters will remember this blatant waste of time and resources in the next election.

-- Bill Betz, Mesa


As pot goes proper, a history of weed

Source

As pot goes proper, a history of weed

By By GENE JOHNSON, Associated Press – Dec 6, 2012

SEATTLE (AP) — The grass is no greener. But, finally, it's legal — at least somewhere in America. It's been a long, strange trip for marijuana.

Washington state and Colorado voted to legalize and regulate its recreational use last month. But before that, the plant, renowned since ancient times for its strong fibers, medical use and mind-altering properties, was a staple crop of the colonies, an "assassin of youth," a counterculture emblem and a widely accepted — if often abused — medicine.

On the occasion of Thursday's "Legalization Day," when Washington's new law takes effect, here's a look back at the cultural and legal status of the "evil weed" in American history.

___

CANNABIS IN THE COLONIES

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew hemp and puzzled over the best ways to process it for clothing and rope.

Indeed, cannabis has been grown in America since soon after the British arrived. In 1619 the Crown ordered the colonists at Jamestown to grow hemp to satisfy England's incessant demand for maritime ropes, Wayne State University professor Ernest Abel wrote in "Marihuana: The First Twelve Thousand Years."

Hemp became more important to the colonies as New England's own shipping industry developed, and homespun hemp helped clothe American soldiers during the Revolutionary War. Some colonies offered farmers "bounties" for growing it.

"We have manufactured within our families the most necessary articles of cloathing," Jefferson said in "Notes on the State of Virginia." ''Those of wool, flax and hemp are very coarse, unsightly, and unpleasant."

Jefferson went on to invent a device for processing hemp in 1815.

___

TASTE THE HASHISH

Books such as "The Arabian Nights" and Alexandre Dumas' "The Count of Monte Cristo," with its voluptuous descriptions of hashish highs in the exotic Orient, helped spark a cannabis fad among intellectuals in the mid-19th century.

"But what changes occur!" one of Dumas' characters tells an uninitiated acquaintance. "When you return to this mundane sphere from your visionary world, you would seem to leave a Neapolitan spring for a Lapland winter -- to quit paradise for earth -- heaven for hell! Taste the hashish, guest of mine -- taste the hashish."

After the Civil War, with hospitals often overprescribing opiates for pain, many soldiers returned home hooked on harder drugs. Those addictions eventually became a public health concern. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, requiring labeling of ingredients, and states began regulating opiates and other medicines — including cannabis.

___

MEXICAN FOLKLORE AND JAZZ CLUBS

By the turn of the 20th century, cannabis smoking remained little known in the United States — but that was changing, thanks largely to The Associated Press, says Isaac Campos, a Latin American history professor at the University of Cincinnati.

In the 1890s, the first English-language newspaper opened in Mexico and, through the wire service, tales of marijuana-induced violence that were common in Mexican papers began to appear north of the border — helping to shape public perceptions that would later form the basis of pot prohibition, Campos says.

By 1910, when the Mexican Revolution pushed immigrants north, articles in the New York Sun, Boston Daily Globe and other papers decried the "evils of ganjah smoking" and suggested that some use it "to key themselves up to the point of killing."

Pot-smoking spread through the 1920s and became especially popular with jazz musicians. Louis Armstrong, a lifelong fan and defender of the drug he called "gage," was arrested in California in 1930 and given a six-month suspended sentence for pot possession.

"It relaxes you, makes you forget all the bad things that happen to a Negro," he once said. In the 1950s, he urged legalization in a letter to President Dwight Eisenhower.

___

REEFER MADNESS, HEMP FOR VICTORY

After the repeal of alcohol prohibition in 1933, Harry Anslinger, who headed the federal Bureau of Narcotics, turned his attention to pot. He told of sensational crimes reportedly committed by marijuana addicts. "No one knows, when he places a marijuana cigarette to his lips, whether he will become a philosopher, a joyous reveler in a musical heaven, a mad insensate, a calm philosopher, or a murderer," he wrote in a 1937 magazine article called "Marijuana: Assassin of Youth."

The hysteria was captured in the propaganda films of the time — most famously, "Reefer Madness," which depicted young adults descending into violence and insanity after smoking marijuana. The movie found little audience upon its release in 1936 but was rediscovered by pot fans in the 1970s.

Congress banned marijuana with the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. Anslinger continued his campaign into the '40s and '50s, sometimes trying — without luck — to get jazz musicians to inform on each other. "Zoot suited hep cats, with their jive lingo and passion for swift, hot music, provide a fertile field for growth of the marijuana habit, narcotics agents have found here," began a 1943 Washington Post story about increasing pot use in the nation's capital.

The Department of Agriculture promoted a different message. After Japanese troops cut off access to Asian fiber supplies during World War II, it released "Hemp For Victory," a propaganda film urging farmers to grow hemp and extolling its use in parachutes and rope for the war effort.

___

COUNTERCULTURE

As the conformity of the postwar era took hold, getting high on marijuana and other drugs emerged as a symbol of the counterculture, with Jack Kerouac and the rest of the Beat Generation singing pot's praises. It also continued to be popular with actors and musicians. When actor Robert Mitchum was arrested on a marijuana charge in 1948, People magazine recounted, "The press nationwide branded him a dope fiend. Preachers railed against him from pulpits. Mothers warned their daughters to shun his films."

Congress responded to increasing drug use — especially heroin — with stiffer penalties in the '50s. Anslinger began to hype what we now call the "gateway drug" theory: that marijuana had to be controlled because it would eventually lead its users to heroin.

Then came Vietnam. The widespread, open use of marijuana by hippies and war protesters from San Francisco to Woodstock finally exposed the falsity of the claims so many had made about marijuana leading to violence, says University of Virginia professor Richard Bonnie, a scholar of pot's cultural status.

In 1972, Bonnie was the associate director of a commission appointed by President Richard Nixon to study marijuana. The commission said marijuana should be decriminalized and regulated. Nixon rejected that, but a dozen states in the '70s went on to eliminate jail time as a punishment for pot arrests.

___

"JUST SAY NO"

The push to liberalize drug laws hit a wall by the late 1970s. Parents groups became concerned about data showing that more children were using drugs, and at a younger age. The religious right was emerging as a force in national politics. And the first "Cheech and Chong" movie, in 1978, didn't do much to burnish pot's image.

When she became first lady, Nancy Reagan quickly promoted the anti-drug cause. During a visit with schoolchildren in Oakland, Calif., as Reagan later recalled, "A little girl raised her hand and said, 'Mrs. Reagan, what do you do if somebody offers you drugs?' And I said, 'Well, you just say no.' And there it was born."

By 1988, more than 12,000 "Just Say No" clubs and school programs had been formed, according to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library. Between 1978 and 1987, the percentage of high school seniors reporting daily use of marijuana fell from 10 percent to 3 percent.

And marijuana use was so politically toxic that when Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he said he "didn't inhale."

___

MEDS OF A DIFFERENT SORT

Marijuana has been used as medicine since ancient times, as described in Chinese, Indian and Roman texts, but U.S. drug laws in the latter part of the 20th century made no room for it. In the 1970s, many states passed symbolic laws calling for studies of marijuana's efficacy as medicine, although virtually no studies ever took place because of the federal prohibition.

Nevertheless, doctors noted its ability to ease nausea and stimulate appetites of cancer and AIDS patients. And in 1996, California became the first state to allow the medical use of marijuana. Since then, 17 other states and the District of Columbia have followed.

In recent years, medical marijuana dispensaries — readily identifiable by the green crosses on their storefronts — have proliferated in many states, including Washington, Colorado and California. That's prompted a backlash from some who suggest they are fronts for illicit drug dealing and that most of the people they serve aren't really sick. The Justice Department has shut down some it deems the worst offenders.

___

LEGAL WEED AT LAST

On Nov. 6, Washington and Colorado pleased aging hippies everywhere — and shocked straights of all ages — by voting to become the first states to legalize the fun use of marijuana. Voters handily approved measures to decriminalize the possession of up to an ounce by adults over 21. Colorado's measure also permits home-growing of up to six plants.

Both states are working to set up a regulatory scheme with licensed growers, processors and retail stores. Eventually, activists say, grown-ups will be able to walk into a store, buy some marijuana, and walk out with ganja in hand — but not before paying the taxman. The states expect to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for schools and other government functions.

But it's not so simple. The regulatory schemes conflict with the federal government's longstanding pot prohibition, according to many legal scholars. The Justice Department could sue to block those schemes from taking effect — but hasn't said whether it will do so.

The bizarre journey of cannabis in America continues.

___

Johnson can be reached at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle

Associated Press researcher Julie Reed Bell contributed to this report from Charlotte, N.C.


Marijuana, grown in a National Forest near you!!!!

Drug cartels target national forests

Source

Drug cartels target national forests

4:12 AM, Dec 16, 2012 |

Judy Keen

USA Today

Mexican drug traffickers are finding prime new territory for their vast marijuana growing operations: American’s national forests.

They are planting illicit crops on public land, creating risks for hunters and others enjoying the wild and leaving behind pollution and trash.

Drug organizations find it easier “to grow within this country” than to risk bringing marijuana across the U.S.-Mexico border, says Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen.

Benjamin Wagner, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, which has been dealing with the problem for years, says it makes sense to drug traffickers “to move marijuana cultivation … closer to your point of sale.”

The relaxation of marijuana laws — some states allow medical use and Washington state and Colorado voters last month legalized possession of small amounts — “certainly doesn’t help the situation,” Wagner says. “It creates an environment in which law enforcement gets mixed signals.”

An August raid in Wisconsin’s Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest resulted in the seizure of more than 8,000 marijuana plants and the arrests of seven people.

Drug Cartels Using Wis. National Park to Grow

Source

Drug Cartels Using Wis. National Park to Grow

LAKEWOOD, Wis. -- These campers didn't come to the beautiful, pristine Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest to enjoy nature, bird watch, fish or hike.

They didn't care about the environment, leaving behind mounds of empty beer cans, picante sauce bottles, Ritz cracker boxes, Spam cans and Gatorade jugs. They left behind clothing, shoes, camouflage tents, dark-colored sleeping bags, camping chairs. They left behind a mess.

After all they were in the forest not to sightsee but to make money - lots of it.

Heavily armed drug traffickers from Mexico are using the only national forest in Wisconsin as their personal farms and greenhouses, growing millions of dollars in marijuana and leaving behind their garbage, poached deer carcasses, fertilizer and pesticides.

For the last three summers, large marijuana operations have been discovered in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in northern Wisconsin. In each of those busts, law enforcement made numerous arrests, almost all natives of Mexico here illegally. Confiscated weapons included handguns, AK-47s and a.308-caliber rifle with ammunition magazines taped together.

Jeff Seefeldt, district ranger for the U.S. Forest Service, surveyed the scene with disgust.

"When the spring rains come all this would have ended up in that Class A trout stream," Seefeldt said nodding to the south branch of the Oconto River that wound through an area that had been clear-cut and planted with hundreds of marijuana plants.

Since 2008 officers have discovered 11 large illegal marijuana operations, mostly on public land in Wisconsin.

Investigators say it's likely only the tip of the iceberg.

Each of the last three major grows in the Chequamegon-Nicolet were discovered by hunters or anglers. With 1.5 million acres of remote land in the national forest, and many more millions of acres in county and state land, law enforcement is trying to get the word out to outdoors enthusiasts. That includes more than 600, 000 hunters heading into the woods for opening weekend of the gun-deer season Saturday.

In the back page of this season's deer hunting regulations pamphlet, hunters are cautioned to be suspicious of illegal drug operations on public land and leave immediately when they see areas with abnormal cuttings or clearings, makeshift structures, gardening tools, watering cans and chemical containers. Hunters who see something that doesn't look right should note the location, with GPS coordinates if possible, and report it to law enforcement.

"It's a significant problem," said Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen. "We have people who want to use our lands for public recreation, and they're at risk from people who have a big cash crop to protect. When we encounter ammunition and people armed in the woods with that incentive, it's a great danger to the public."

Of those arrested in the last few years, many revealed they were recruited in California for the work, driven to northern Wisconsin - some didn't even know which state they were in - and dropped off in the woods. They were supplied by people dubbed "loncheros" who stopped every few days to bring supplies. While the 2012 case is pending, 10-year federal prison sentences were handed down in the other cases. After they serve their prison terms, they will be deported back to Mexico.

"Which begs the question why do we bother if we're going to deport?" said U.S. Attorney John Vaudreuil for the Western District of Wisconsin.

"But I have a strong feeling that that's not right. If this was an American citizen doing this crime they would serve 10 years. Plus there's a good chance the guys will come back to the U.S. and do this again if we deport them right away," said Vaudreuil, a Rice Lake native.

Using hand axes and saws they cut down thousands of trees, clear cut numerous small areas of the forest, planted marijuana and then carefully cultivated the plants each day by siphoning water from nearby streams before harvesting and packing it out where it likely ended up being sold in Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago and the Twin Cities.

Why are Mexican drug organizations coming all the way to Wisconsin when they can grow marijuana out west? Economics, explained David Spakowicz, state Division of Criminal Investigation director of field operations for Wisconsin's eastern region.

"Once it's up in northern Wisconsin, you don't have to worry about transportation costs, you don't have to worry about getting it over the (U.S.-Mexico) border. It's so appealing because of the rural nature of Wisconsin," Spakowicz said.

It's also a labor-intensive crop if done right. Marijuana plants are cultivated by breaking off the leaves, which pushes the tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, to the bud and makes the weed more potent and valuable. High-grade marijuana found growing on public land in California has a street value of $4,000 to $6,000 per pound, Spakowicz said.

He estimated much of the marijuana found in recent years on public land in Wisconsin would have a street value of $2,500 per pound. Each marijuana plant provides roughly one pound of pot. Last summer in the Chequamegon-Nicolet in Oconto County, 8, 385 plants were confiscated while almost 7, 000 plants were discovered in the forest in Ashland County in 2011.

The plants are dried on racks made from poles cut and lashed together, then usually vacuum-packed into plastic bags and carried out where the men and their backpacks filled with marijuana are picked up and driven away, leaving behind their garbage and hundreds of holes left in the ground. Investigators know in some cases growers returned to use the same land in subsequent years when they were not detected.

"It disgusts me. They don't respect the environment, they don't respect other people who want to enjoy the land," said Seefeldt, who grew up in Wausau. "I would think there would be a huge outcry from the public because these people are misusing the land."

Since Wisconsin has a shorter growing season than in western states, growers usually plant two crops, putting three to four seedlings in each hole. The seedlings are typically planted in May and then another crop is planted a couple of weeks later so the first crop is ready for harvesting in late August and the second crop can be picked before the first frost arrives.

Growers pick their areas for remoteness and access to water, cutting down trees to reduce the canopy and allow in more light, which sometimes raises the temperature of trout streams. Law enforcement has found stumps covered with dirt so they won't be noticed in aerial surveillance. At one site investigators discovered a 4-foot-deep pit where growers hid their generators, water pumps and cellphone chargers with logs and a tarp over the top to reduce noise.

As more sites have been discovered and arrests made, officers noticed growers changed their tactics, planting in more remote areas and dividing their crop up into smaller quarter-to half-acre plots. Wisconsin National Guard helicopters were used at one site to airlift the garbage and marijuana plants out of a remote area.

National, state and county forest land is used because it is less likely to be detected, Spakowicz said.

"With these vast tracts of public land they sort of roll the dice; that's why they go so far in to the woods," Spakowicz said. "They're living there for three months and they're very knowledgeable about the terrain."

Copyright 2012, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

"When we encounter ammunition and people armed in the woods with that incentive, it's a great danger to the public." J.B. Van Hollen, state Attorney General JSOnline To watch video and see a photo gallery, go to jsonline.com/multimedia. "It disgusts me. They don't respect the environment, they don't respect other people who want to enjoy the land." Jeff Seefeldt, district ranger for the U.S. Forest Service

Wisconsin Hunters On The Prowl For Marijuana Crops

Source

Wisconsin Hunters On The Prowl For Marijuana Crops

Posted: November 18, 2012

Wisconsin officials have asked area hunters and fishermen to keep their eyes peeled for illegal marijuana crops, according to CNN.

A number of marijuana growing operations have been discovered in Wisconsin’s Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest over the past few years. In order to get a handle on the situation, the US Forest Service has asked hunters and fishermen to report any crops they see during their outdoor adventures.

Jane Cliff, spokesperson for the US Forest Service, explained that a fishermen stumbled across an $8 million marijuana operation back in August. Officials confiscated over 8,000 plants during the bust.

“The fisherman was walking along the banks of the Oconto River and noticed these patches that had been cleared and disturbed. Trees were down, things didn’t look right, and he reported that to authorities, and a surveillance operation was established,” Cliff explained.

According to Officer.com, 11 illegal operations have been uncovered in the area since 2011. Authorities believe the national park is being used by Mexican drug cartels to produce large crops of marijuana.

Since the US Forest Service doesn’t have the manpower to comb every last inch of the park for crops, authorities have turned to local hunters and fishermen to lend a helping hand.

“Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest is large, secluded and heavily roaded, so our personnel cannot by themselves keep an eye on every acre,” Cliff said. “That’s why we are relying on forest users to share information with us.”

If you should stumble across and illegal marijuana growing operation, authorities are hoping you’ll make note of the location on a GPS device to help them locate the crop in the future. Getting out of the area as soon as possible is also strongly advised.

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen explained that these problems are currently being addressed in order to keep park users safe and sound during their stay.

“We have people who want to use our lands for public recreation, and they’re at risk from people who have a big cash crop to protect. When we encounter ammunition and people armed in the woods with that incentive, it’s a great danger to the public,” Hollen explained.


Capitol display lauds Bill of Rights

Gun grabber, 300 percent tax on medical marijuana, run the Mexicans out of town and police state fan Kyrsten Sinema sponsored the "Bill of Rights monument"???

Give me a break that is like Hitler sponsoring a monument honoring the rights of Jews.

Of course tyrants always want the serfs they rule over to think they have rights, which is why tyrants sponsor these silly meaningless monuments.

Don't get me wrong, if you talk to Kyrsten Sinema she is a REAL nice person. But she also wants to micro-manage your life, make your guns illegal, and slap her outrageous 300 percent tax on any medical marijuana you use.

I bet if you talked to Hitler he also came off as a "really nice person". Well at least when he wasn't murdering Jews.

Source

Capitol display lauds Bill of Rights

By Kaila White The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Dec 15, 2012 10:23 PM

State political leaders and hundreds of other Arizonans gathered Saturday to dedicate the nation’s first Bill of Rights monument in Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza across from the Arizona state Capitol on Saturday.

Kyrsten Sinema the government tyrant that proposed a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana

As a light drizzle soaked the plaza, speakers including Gov. Jan Brewer, Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton and U.S. Rep.-elect Kyrsten Sinema used the occasion and the backdrop of National Bill of Rights Day to reflect on the power and enduring legacy of America’s celebrated list of codified, inalienable rights.

“This is exactly what the Bill of Rights is meant to do in this country: bring together Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, those from any political party or none whatsoever,” said Sinema, who as a Democratic state representative co-sponsored the bill to establish the monument in 2005.

The ceremony came a day after a gunman killed 26 people, including 20 young children, at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school, reigniting national debate over gun-control laws and the Second Amendment.

The tragedy added a somber tone to the proceedings, but for the most part, Arizona leaders refrained from using the dedication to weigh in on the controversy.

Stanton said “in hindsight, we see there were flaws in the original text (of the Constitution),” and he mentioned its improvements in the years since, such as suffrage and the abolition of slavery. “Now, more than ever, it is a time for our country to have a debate on the parameters of the Second Amendment,” he added.

Consisting of ten 10-foot-tall limestone monoliths, each engraved with an amendment, the monument sits in an arch around a grassy amphitheater near the Vietnam veterans memorial. It is feet away from a stone tablet of the Ten Commandments, the text that inspired stand-up comedian and juggler Chris Bliss to spearhead a movement to erect a monument to the amendments.

In 2004, when Bliss was based in Phoenix, a national debate had erupted over whether to keep a public monument to the Ten Commandments that had gone up in Alabama.

In his comedy act, Bliss joked that rather than remove the monument, officials should display the Bill of Rights next to it so that people could “comparison shop.”

As the joke morphed into a cause, Bliss pitched the idea to Sinema in 2005 during a radio-show interview in Phoenix, and she immediately took to it. Sinema reached out to former state legislator Karen Johnson to co-sponsor a bill, and together, they pushed the idea into reality.

“They got the unanimous, nonpartisan support of the Arizona Legislature,” Bliss said during the dedication, garnering claps and laughs. “I don’t think this Legislature has ever seen either of those.”

After getting an official location for the memorial in the plaza in 2010, Bliss organized an executive committee, contracted with a stone sculptor in Texas and set out to raise $400,000. In May, he hosted a comedy-show fundraiser at Symphony Hall in Phoenix, raising more than $110,000.

Money also came from local businesses and organizations including the Newman’s Own Foundation, the Arizona Cardinals and the Arizona Diamondbacks.

The goal was to be ready by Dec. 15, the day that the amendments were adopted in 1791 and that President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a national holiday in 1941.

Brewer expressed pride that Arizona had the first monument of its kind.

As the final speaker, Bliss talked about the bill’s role as a blueprint for the future.

“The very phrase ‘Bill of Rights’ has now become synonymous with the demands of people the world over seeking freedom from oppression. It has become a global template for human rights and dignity,” he said.

Ten Arizona figures, ranging from high-school history teacher Katie Parod Hansen to Brewer herself, pulled a cloth veil off each monolith as its amendment was read aloud.


AG Tom Horne’s hit-and-run case delayed again

Source

Horne’s hit-and-run case delayed again

Associated Press Mon Dec 17, 2012 7:16 AM

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne violates campaign finance laws and gets into a hit an run accident PHOENIX — A court proceeding on a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge against Arizona Attorney Tom Horne is being postponed again and his lawyer says he is trying to reach a settlement with prosecutors.

Horne’s attorney requested and obtained a second one-month delay in a pretrial conference that was scheduled Monday in Phoenix Municipal Court.

Michael Kimerer’s request says he needs more time to evaluate the evidence and interview “critical witnesses.” He also wrote in a Dec. 13 motion he is having ongoing settlement communications with city prosecutors he hopes lead to a resolution.

Horne is accused of not leaving a note after FBI agents saw him tap another vehicle while driving a borrowed car earlier this year.

Horne says he didn’t think the other vehicle was damaged. He has pleaded not guilty.


School uses GPS chips to track student locations

Source

Texas student tracking chip suit back in court

Associated Press Mon Dec 17, 2012 7:04 AM

SAN ANTONIO — The family of a 15-year-old student fighting the use of tracking badges in her San Antonio high school is asking a federal court to keep her on campus.

The Northside school district equipped 4,200 students this fall with mandatory ID badges containing tracking chips. Administrators say locating students via computers will improve safety and boost attendance records that are used to calculate how much state funding a district receives.

Sophomore Andrea Hernandez has refused to wear the badge, and the district says she must transfer to another campus if she doesn’t comply.

A San Antonio federal court Monday is set to hear the family’s request to stop the district until the lawsuit is settled.

Northside ISD is the fourth-largest school district in Texas.


Cell phone data analysis by the police

If the cops get your cell phone this is what they will do with it

This is an interesting article from the November 2012 issue of Law and Order.

The article is titled

"Cell Phone Analysis: Part 1"
While we certainly don't like crooked cops that doesn't mean they are stupid. And from this article if you happen to be unlucky enough to be arrested with a cell phone and the police find it they will probably steal your phone and get a lot of information off of it they may be used against you in court.

They will also get your contacts information off the phone probably contact those people asking them about you trying to dig up dirt on you.

And of course they can get GPS information off of the phone and from cell phone tower records to monitor where you have been.

Source

Cell Phone Analysis: Part 1

Written by Ed Sanow

"At a crime scene, grab the cell phone."

www.paraben.com
www.secureview.us
www.cellebrite.com
The Columbus, Ohio Police and the Ohio High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area offer a one-day course on Cell Phone Analysis across the U.S. Taught by Christine Roberts, the class familiarizes investigators and patrol officers alike with the basics of cell phone technology, the information and data stored on these phones, forensic methods used in retrieval, cell-tower site analysis, and the info available from cellular service providers.

This is all geared to better understanding the use of mobile devices as evidence in criminal trials. The course covers the use of information stored on the handset, SIM cards, expansion cards, prepaid phones, live and historical tracking, cell-based financial crimes, payments and money laundering, cyber stalking and cloud storage.

An incredible amount of evidence is just sitting on smartphones waiting for you to access it. You would never overlook a drop of blood at a crime scene. A cell phone may even be more helpful, and that includes info “deleted” from the phone.

Juries understand cell phones, cell phone towers and cell phone pinging. They also understand cell phones can put the suspect in the proximity of the crime. Or at least the cell phone was at the area – and the suspect testified that he never lets the cell out of his possession. Cell phones and cellular service providers are a vast source of evidence that investigators are just now grasping.

Mobile phones are one of the most important developments in technology in the courtroom in the last five years. When a person types and sends an e-mail or text message, they create a piece of evidence that can be used for or against them. Cell records can be used in court to show exactly where someone was – or was not – and to whom they were talking at a particular time.

Electronic and Retained Evidence

Two types of evidence can be retrieved from a cell phone: 1) electronic evidence and 2) retained data evidence. Electronic evidence includes the user’s call history, contacts / phone book, calendar information, and information stored on the SIM card. Retained data evidence is telecom records involving the detail of calls made and received and the geographical location of the mobile phone when a call took place. Part One will cover electronic evidence. Part Two (November 2012, LAW and ORDER) will cover retained evidence.

Electronic evidence is stored in different places depending on the channel access method of the phone. GSM (global system for mobile communication) is typically used by AT&T and T-Mobile. With this and the iDEN (integrated digital enhanced network) phones, evidence is stored on the handset and the SIM card. CDMA (code division multiple access) is typical of Verizon and Sprint-Nextel. The evidence here is all on the handset. There is no SIM card with CDMA phones. However, this is slowly changing – the new LTE network will require all phones to have a SIM card.

Every handset has a unique identification number. On CDMA phones, an ESN (electronic serial number) or a MEID (mobile equipment identifier) 56-bit serial number is used. On GSM phones, an IMEI (international mobile equipment identity) is used. Both are found under the battery. The point is this: you don’t need to know the phone number for the handset. You can subpoena the MEID/ESN or IMEI to obtain call detail records.

“The SIM card of a phone can contain a lot of valuable evidence. If you see these loose and lying around, grab them,” said Roberts. Then you can subpoena the ICCID number to the network provider and receive the toll records associated with that phone.

Electronic evidence is fragile. It can be altered, damaged or destroyed by improper handling or improper examination. Special precautions should be taken to document, collect, preserve and examine this type of evidence.

The Big Three

The address book, call history and text messages are the Big 3 in your investigation. The address book has contact information that gives insight to the social network of the suspect or victim. It can be used to link a suspect to a victim and to provide a list of people to interview. It can provide a cross-reference between real names and nicknames. And the picture next to the contact number can even put a face to a name.

The call history gives even a deeper insight to the activities of the owner. You can see the last received and sent calls, when they occurred and their duration. The duration is important for indirect conclusions. A wrong number going to voice mail would have a duration of 30 seconds, while a duration of 15 minutes means a real phone conversation.

Text messages are becoming more and more important in both criminal and civil proceedings. Texts are one of the most common forms of electronic evidence. Texts offer concrete and direct information in contrast to the call history and address book that only offer indirect and inferential information. These contain the actual words written by the owner or intended for the owner. That is good news for evidence in court.

Text Is Perishable

The bad news is that text messages are perishable. Cell phone companies no longer store or extract text messages. Verizon does not keep text messages on their servers for very long, between three and seven days. AT&T stores the text message for 48 hours to be sure it is delivered, and then deletes them.

The best chance to get any text message information is by searching the handset. If the telecom company keeps text messages, then an option is to fax a letterhead “preservation” request to the cell service provider. If this is done in time, the cell phone company will hold the data for a police agency for up to 90 days, allowing the investigator time to get a court or search warrant for records.

If the text messages have been deleted from the handset, a cell phone forensic specialist must become involved. Even still, “try” and “maybe” are what you are likely to hear. However, these forensic specialists pride themselves on doing the difficult and complicated. The lesson is the text is not “deleted” until the cell forensics folks with all their expensive retrieval hardware and software say it is deleted.

Unlike text messages, voice mail is stored at the service provider for at least 30 days. Voice mail can be more damaging evidence than text messages. Texts don’t indicate tone of voice or sincerity. Voice mail reveals much more of a person’s intentions, especially in stalking or intimidation cases. Some of today’s smartphones store voicemail on the handset so don’t think that all voicemail is deleted.

Voicemail is easy to copy. Audacity.com offers free software. CellTap™ from JK Audio allows audio recording, including live recording, from any cell phone, not just smartphones. On the other hand, voice mail can also be deleted remotely.

Photos on SD Cards

People are proud of their crimes. They take cell phone pictures of the crimes as trophies, and sometimes cell phone videos of the crime in process. Data on the phone can be used to determine the exact date and time an image was taken, and possibly even a location.

Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification to photos and videos. Geotags are automatically embedded in photos taken with smartphones. When these photos are uploaded to the Internet, they remain tagged with location data. Got a photo of a marijuana grow operation? Got a photo of a kidnap victim? The image probably contains the geotag with the latitude and longitude. “We often overlook this,” Roberts said.

One place to look for images is the expansion memory (SD) cards. The iPhone does not use an SD card. It uses its hard drive instead. All other phones use an SD card. A 32-GB SD card can hold 12,320 (fine mode) photos. In a child porn case, one forensic specialist retrieved 4,500 images that had been “deleted.” One forensic specialist retrieved 5,800 text messages that had been “deleted.”

Just to keep the two straight, an SD expansion or memory card is very different from a SIM card. The SD card holds photos and videos. The SIM (subscriber identity module) card is the brains of the phone and stores the phone number subscribed to the phone.

Grab all the SD cards you can. Getting deleted images from these cards is relatively easy unless the information has been over-written. Consider asking cooperative witnesses (who have taken images of the crime or suspects) for their SD card – if you can verify that the evidence is stored on the SD card. You don’t need their phone (if it has an SD card) and they won’t want to give it up for the duration of a criminal investigation. Just ask for the SD card.

SIM Cards

SIM cards may hold incredible amounts of evidence. And the information on the SIM card may be very different from what is on the handset. The trained cell forensic specialist will want to process the cell phone (handset) separately from the SIM card in that phone. Deleted text messages on the SIM card can be retrieved as long as a new message has not over-written the old message. SIM card readers like Paraben are pretty common.

The investigator may find loose SIM cards lying around on desks or in wallets. Grab them. As a rule, AT&T and T-Mobile phones use SIM cards. Even the iPhone uses a SIM card if it is on AT&T. (Recall the iPhone does not use an SD card).

The phone book on the SIM card and the handset may have different phone book contact numbers. The SIM card typically holds between one and 10 numbers last dialed. The cell phone’s internal memory may hold many more than that.

If the Phone Is OFF

The rule: If the cell phone is OFF, leave it OFF until the SIM card and SD card are processed by a cell forensic specialist.

The location area identifier shows where the mobile phone is currently located. This value is retained by the SIM card when the phone is turned OFF. However, the location updates on the SIM card when the phone is turned back ON.

You found the cell phone of an abducted child. What if that phone was turned OFF at the location the child is being held or the body was disposed? The location area identifier will tell you where the phone was when it was shut OFF. Turning the phone ON destroys that information!

Just turning the phone ON runs the risk of changing other data on the phone. For example, you turn the phone ON and two bad things can happen. First, new information may be added through an incoming call or text message. This may cause over-writing of existing calls, voice mails or text messages. A new text comes in and bumps off the oldest 20th text (max of 20 SMS) and that 20th text had valuable intel.

Second, turning the phone ON allows the increasingly common kill/wipe signal to be received. Just like the voice mail can be remote deleted, the hard drive can be remote wiped. Most cell phone companies offer a lost phone tool on smartphones. If you lose your phone, you can log onto the website and send a command to erase all the information stored on the phone, phone book, recent calls, and text messages.

If the Phone Is ON

If the phone is ON, the very first step is to find a way to get the phone off the network. There are several options. One of the easier options is to put the cell phone in airplane mode (Stand Alone, Radio Off, Standby or Phone Off Mode). This is not considered a “search” because it is done to “preserve evidence.”

If the phone is on, leave it on. Why safeguard the phone in the “ON” position? Why not just turn it OFF or pull the battery? This can cause the phone to activate a handset lock code that your forensic expert may not be able to bypass. A forensic expert can defeat a lot of handset passcodes on a small percentage of today’s phones. Always ask for the passcode from the suspect whom you are taking the phone; you will be surprised how many suspects give up there passcode when asked. Make sure to write this passcode down for the forensic expert.

Pre-Paid Phones

Everything that can be done on a regular contract cell phone can be done on a pre-paid cell phone. Numerous Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) sell mobile services with few restrictions. Nextel has Boost; Sprint has Virgin, Disney and Helio; Verizon has Tracfone and Amp’d Mobile; AT&T has GoPhone; and T-Mobile has T-Mobile.

The advantage of a pre-paid phone for criminal activity is obvious: anonymity. Plans and phones are paid for with cash. There is no contract to tie the identity of the person to the device or service agreement. They are essentially disposable.

However, there is still valuable data on the Verizon, Nextel, T-Mobile and AT&T supported cell phones. It is on the handset and SIM card! This includes the last numbers dialed, call logs, call durations, pictures and text messages. (Text messages may contain names or nicknames.)

It gets better. Did the subject buy a ringtone, game, music or app on the Internet for the pre-paid phone? You might now have a credit card number. Same for purchasing additional minutes. They may have used an e-mail address registering online for a receipt or a notification.

By mapping Call Data Records (patterns of communication) to known acquaintances and performing a Cell Site Analysis, it may be possible to either prove or disprove ownership of the pre-paid phone.

Damaged Phones

Don’t let a damaged phone, even a badly damaged one, stop you from obtaining evidence. The majority of all damaged cell phones can be repaired and processed. That includes the ever-common water damage. (One investigator had been able to recover some evidence from a phone that had been under water for two years). About 90 percent of water damage that most of us cause is just to the battery and connections. In fact, part of formal cell phone forensics training is cell phone repair. The iPhone, for example, has 42 screws and snap-in parts. Take the cell phone to the forensic expert and see if repairs can be made.

Formal training is necessary to become a cell phone forensic specialist. This training may be covered by grants, such as the Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Grant. Specialized hardware and/or software will be required. Software-based solutions include Paraben and Secure View. Hardware-based solutions are available from Cellebrite. Cellebrite is easy, portable and car-adaptable. The unit is a bit expensive, compared to the software-only solutions, including both an initial outlay and a yearly subscriber fee.

Grant money is available for cell-phone investigative training based in Ohio and California. This training is the one-day initial overview training up to a 40-hour advanced investigative training, and the formal cell-phone forensic training involving forensic and diagnostic hardware and software to process the handset and SIM cards.

Published in Law and Order, Nov 2012


Mexican president announces new security force

Source

Mexican president announces new security force

By Richard Fausset and Cecilia Sanchez, Los Angeles Times

December 17, 2012, 8:33 p.m.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico will have a new 10,000-member security force that will be deployed to regions of the troubled country where violence and instability are greatest, President Enrique Peña Nieto said Monday.

The president said at a meeting of the National Public Security Council that the force would consist of 10,000 members to start, though he did not say when it would be created. For the time being, the military will remain in the streets in an effort to maintain order. The federal police will add 15 units that will focus solely on kidnapping and extortion, he said.

"This is the beginning of a relationship of respect and responsibility to achieve the justice and peace that our country demands," said Peña Nieto, who took office Dec. 1. "Mexicans want a Mexico at peace and demand respect, and respect for human rights."

Peña Nieto pledged during his election campaign to create the security force as a way to differentiate his strategy from that of former President Felipe Calderon, whose aggressive war against drug-trafficking organizations resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.

He has promised to focus on reducing the violence that affects everyday citizens. At the same time, his government is trying to downplay the struggle against drug trafficking and focus more on economic matters. Notably absent from the president's speech Monday were any references to drug cartels or organized crime.

Calderon spent millions trying to strengthen and clean up the federal police, adding thousands of officers and increasing salaries. But recent incidents, including an attack on CIA officers in August, have raised questions about the trustworthiness of the 36,000-member force.

Peña Nieto has already essentially demoted the federal police in a government restructuring. According to an advisor who helped prepare the new security plan, the new security force, which will be referred to as a gendarmerie, will draw in part on former federal officers who lose their jobs in the shake-up.

The advisor, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the plan, said the gendarmerie would be responsible primarily for basic law enforcement duties such as patrolling roads and cities. The federal police will focus more on investigations, he said.

The separation of those two fundamental tasks is aimed at reducing the potential for corruption that arises when the same law enforcement officials are in charge of both patrolling and arresting and then building the legal case, the advisor said.

Alejandro Hope, security director of the Mexican Competitiveness Institute, a Mexico City think tank, said he worried about the time it would take to create a force when Mexico faces so many pressing challenges. He said that interagency squabbling also seemed likely.

"Within a year, everybody's going to be talking about the conflict between the gendarmerie and the federal police," he said.

Peña Nieto said he would also create a national human rights program. An Amnesty International report in October accused the Mexican government of ignoring an increase in reported instances of torture and abuse by security forces deployed to fight the drug cartels.

richard.fausset@latimes.com

Sanchez is a news assistant in The Times' Mexico City bureau. Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this report.


Kristen Maurer rents out her "narc dog"

Source

Worried parents of teens hire drug-sniffing dogs to search their homes

Dec. 10, 2012 at 9:38 AM ET

Video: How far would you go to find out if your child was using drugs? NBC’s Janet Shamlian reports on parents who are going above and beyond, hiring drug-sniffing dogs to check out their kids’ bedrooms and other parts of the house.

If you suspected your child was using drugs and hiding them in your home, would you hire a drug-sniffing dog to root them out?

Some concerned parents are doing just that, at a cost of several hundred dollars.

“I was very worried that my daughter was hanging around with kids that were doing drugs,” one Houston mother said in a report that aired on TODAY on Monday. Ava, who didn't want her last name used, hired a private company to bring Roxie, a white German shepherd who used to work for the military, into her Houston home to check for illegal drugs.

Ava was worried about what Roxie might find. “Oh, I was very nervous that she was going to find drugs in the garage,” she said.

The dog with the super-sensitive nose did indeed find marijuana in the garage, a discovery that was difficult for Ava and her daughter.

“She was upset that I invaded her privacy,” Ava said.

But it led to a conversation that Ava believes helped turn her daughter’s life around. The girl found a new group of friends and improved her grades.

“The reason why I did it is to keep her safe and off drugs,” Ava said.

Ava seemingly got the outcome she wanted. But using a drug-sniffing dog can make matters worse, said child psychologist Jeffrey Gardere, a TODAY contributor.

“Looking for the drugs with a dog, I think, is an overkill,” Gardere said on TODAY. “What it comes down to is having a relationship, and I don’t know if you can do that if you’re bringing in drug-sniffing dogs.”

When Roxie goes to work, handler Kristen Maurer takes her through a home, looking for the scent of illegal drugs while the parent is present. “Roxie can find drugs in places that parents will never find,” Maurer said.

If the dog signals she’s found something, the parent must uncover whatever it is.

“I just say ‘My dog’s alerted in this area and if I were you I would search the entire area,’” Maurer said. “I kind of give them an idea of what they need to do next.”

Using a dog like Roxie can help parents who feel they have no other options.

“It’s a tool that the parents can use to help get their child the help that they need,” Maurer said.

Handlers like Maurer report a steady business for the searches, which can cost $200 to $500.

The service is similar to one launched in 2010 in Maryland called Dogs Finding Drugs. The Baltimore-based non-profit organization has highly trained dogs that can detect drugs, firearms and explosives.


Rentan mascota para buscar drogas en hogares

Source

Rentan mascota para buscar drogas en hogares

La dueña del animal asegura que los padres no siempre son capaces de identificar los lugares donde sus hijos podrían ocultar sustancias ilegales.

En muchas ocasiones es difícil que los padres descubran si sus hijos suelen consumir drogas; sin embargo, en Houston, pueden acceder a un servicio que les ayuda en esta tarea: contratar un perro para que olfatee algún tipo de estupefacientes.

Kristen Maurer, residente de la ciudad texana, ofrece los servicios de su perra pastor alemán Roxi para rastrear indicios de drogas en las casas de los clientes, de acuerdo a The Today Show

Su dueña declara que el animal ofrece la garantía de encontrar drogas ilegales en lugares donde los padres difícilmente podrían encontrarla.

Aunque parece una buena idea, algunas personas creen que no es tan correcto usar este tipo de iniciativas.

Por ejemplo, un sicólogo infantil aseguró que buscar drogas en una casa utilizando un perro es algo exagerado.

"Lo que se necesita es desarrollar relaciones, y no creo que llevando un perro sea la manera de conseguirlo" propone el doctor Jeff Gardere de acuerdo a declaraciones retomadas por The Daily Mail.


Guerra entre cárteles de la droga provocaron el abandono de un pueblo

Source

Guerra entre cárteles de la droga provocaron el abandono de un pueblo

Sólo se respira muerte y miedo.

La disputa que mantienen los grupos del crimen organizado por el control de la zona que limita los estados de Zacatecas y Jalisco, ha derivado en la desolación de algunos municipios donde se respira la muerte y el miedo.

Tal es el caso de la cabecera municipal de Chimaltitán, ubicada en el norte de Jalisco, donde durante los últimos tres años la población disminuyó de mil habitantes a 600.

Luego de un recorrido realizado por reporteros del periódico mexicano El Universal, se pudo verificar que al ingreso de esta localidad, a poco menos de 200 kilómetros de Guadalajara, hay dos vigilantes del grupo del crimen organizado que controla la plaza -conocidos como halcones- que reciben a los extraños, a quienes fotografían y delatan mediante llamadas por teléfono celular.

Cabe señalar que dicha zona, considerada paso en el trasiego de mariguana hacia entidades del norte del país, es disputada por dos grupos criminales, Los Zetas y los que llaman Chapos o Chapitos, resultado de una alianza entre integrantes del cártel del Pacífico, dirigido por Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán y el cártel del Golfo.

En una plaza vacía localizada a unos 20 metros de la comandancia de policía, se ubica un puesto de discos apócrifos que distribuye únicamente los que produce el grupo criminal que controla la plaza.

No se aceptan forasteros

Entrevistada por el diario mexicano, una mujer de 60 años relató cómo el pueblo se fue muriendo de miedo. "Solo vea alrededor de la plaza y cuente los moños. Tengo mucho con un negocio aquí y no pago renta desde hace tres años. La dueña no quiere venir a cobrar, y no quiere que le deposite, porque dice que es peligroso y alguien podría darse cuenta. Tiene miedo, así es aquí. Los que se van no vuelven", sentenció.

A su vez, un hombre de 70 años advirtió un mal presagio para quienes no son de Chimaltitán y llegan a ser identificados por quienes conocen como los de la plaza. Al cabo de unos minutos el hombre calla, preocupado.

Cuando se retira, la mujer cuenta que al hijo de ese señor lo asesinaron hace meses. El homicida rentó por dos semanas una habitación a dos casas de distancia del domicilio de su víctima. El día del hecho el delincuente esperó a que el hombre estuviera solo en la finca para obligarlo a salir a la calle y matarlo.

Por su parte, las autoridades municipales y estatales indicaron que en la zona norte de Jalisco, limítrofe con Zacatecas, se registraron 30 asesinatos en hechos al parecer vinculados con la delincuencia organizada en 2012.

De esa cifra en Chimaltitán sucedieron 16 muertes, 13 casos en multihomicidios.

Quienes no pagan son asesinados

Entre los que conocen la política local, cuentan que Chimaltitán fue el único municipio de Jalisco que suspendió campañas antes de los tiempos marcados por el calendario electoral durante el pasado proceso, por el ataque a balazos contra un grupo de militantes que dejó dos muertos y dos heridos.

Mientras caminan por las calles solitarias, los pobladores relatan otras historias que motivaron a muchos a irse.

"Aquí cerca de la presidencia municipal, hace dos años, en 2010, Los Zetas trataron de extorsionar a un hombre. Él rentaba maquinaria. Se lo llevaron. Cobraron casi un millón de pesos y lo fueron a tirar embolsado al otro lado del puente", cuenta una mujer de 35 años. Ella asegura que otros que no quisieron pagar rescate se murieron. También hubo quienes luego de ser liberados, huyeron.

"La situación es difícil. Muchos jóvenes le entran a eso y se llevan a la familia entre las patas. Otros se van de aquí a la primera amenaza. Otros ni eso esperan para escapar del pueblo. Muchos que nos quedamos no tenemos nada que perder. Las amenazas no son para nosotros, sólo nos queda rezar para que no nos toque una bala perdida", concluyó la mujer.


La huella de la violencia en México parece imborrable

Source

La huella de la violencia en México parece imborrable

Desapariciones, asesinatos y torturas, ¨el pan nuestro de cada día¨.

Los hechos atroces de violencia en el país siguen, no importa que se haya dado un cambio en el poder Ejecutivo ni el hecho de que sea fin de semana.

De acuerdo a lo que publica la versión digital del semanario mexicano Proceso, los cuerpos de cuatro mujeres que se encontraban desaparecidas en la Sierra Tarahumara, en Chihuahua (norte de México), fueron hallados sin vida y con visibles muestras de tortura.

La Fiscalía de la Zona Sur precisa que las víctimas fueron ultimadas a disparos de arma de fuego; los cuerpos se hallaron en una brecha del rancho La Casita de Samachique, en el municipio de Guachochi.

Las víctimas fueron identificadas como Josefina Díaz Martínez, de 57 años; Elisa Díaz Martínez, de 55; Marisa Díaz Peinado, de 32; y Mayra Lorena, de 39.

Desaparecieron cuando viajaban a bordo de un Jetta color blanco modelo 2012, para asistir a un funeral.

Seis hombres asesinados en Nuevo León

Por otro lado, la agencia Efe informa que seis hombres fueron asesinados el sábado a tiros por presuntos pistoleros, cinco de ellos en el interior de un domicilio, en la zona metropolitana de Monterrey, capital del estado de Nuevo León, norte de México.

Un portavoz del Consejo Estatal de Seguridad informó a Efe que en el primer hecho murieron cinco personas, con edades de entre 30 y 35 años, en una casa en la colonia (barrio) América Obrerista, del municipio de Guadalupe, en la zona metropolitana de Monterrey.

La fuente precisó que dos de ellos quedaron muertos en el interior y tres más en la cochera de la residencia.

Al sitio acudieron autoridades federales, estatales y peritos de la Agencia Estatal de Investigaciones, quienes acordonaron el área para recabar las evidencias del caso.

Las autoridades indicaron que según los primeros reportes, un grupo armado con fusiles automáticos se introdujo en la casa y disparó contra todas las personas que se encontraban dentro para luego retirarse tranquilamente y a la vista de los vecinos.

Las autoridades agregaron que en otro hecho violento, un hombre fue asesinato a tiros en las escalinatas de una estación del Metro, en el centro de Monterrey.

El Consejo Estatal de Seguridad señaló que el hombre, de unos 35 años, recibió disparos en la cabeza, pecho y abdomen.

El reporte detalla que la persona fue perseguida unas cuatro calles por los presuntos pistoleros.

Hasta el cierre de noviembre, en Nuevo León han sido asesinadas 1,370 personas en hechos vinculados con la delincuencia organizada, según las estadísticas de la Procuraduría de Justicia Estatal.

Nueve crímenes en Sinaloa

En tanto, la versión digital del periódico mexicano El Universal informa que en las últimas horas han sido asesinadas nueve personas en Sinaloa, entidad mexicana cuna del cártel narcotraficante del mismo nombre, encabezada por Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán e Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada.

Los crímenes se dieron en un lapso de 12 horas. Nueve hombres fueron asesinados en dos puntos del estado -seis de ellos en la zona que limita con el estado de Chihuahua-.

Tres cuerpos fueron hallados a un costado de la carretera Benito Juárez, torturados, con impactos de bala y con un mensaje cuyo contenido no fue revelado.

El segundo hecho, informa el medio, sucedió en la comunidad de la Sierrita de los Germán, en la parte más alta de Sinaloa. Los pobladores informan que ahí se hallan seis cadáveres, pero la zona es de difícil acceso para las autoridades.


Brits mull raising liquor prices to stop drunkenness

They tried this in the USA and it was a dismal failure. It was called the Prohibition. While it did increase the price of liquor it didn't stop drinking and it was a dismal failure.

Just like the the "war on drugs" is today.

Source

Brits mull raising liquor prices to stop drunkenness

By Traci Watson Special for USA TODAY Tue Dec 18, 2012 10:25 AM

LONDON - On a mild Friday night in the London party district called Camden, the local pubs are surprisingly quiet. It’s the local supermarkets that are bustling — and not with shoppers buying milk.

Crowds of revelers stream into the stores to snap up bargain-priced booze. At one shop a two-liter bottle of hard cider sells for $3.18, the same as a two-liter bottle of Coke.

“When we’re going out, we get drunk on the cheapest spirits beforehand - sort of saving money,” says Alex James, also a student.

British politicians want to dampen the fun. A proposal under review would set a minimum price for alcohol in England and Wales, raising the cost of a supermarket-brand bottle of vodka, for example, from $13.95 to $18.86.

The proposal would also ban “multi-buys,” such as two-for-one specials in supermarkets and liquor stores. Public comment on the proposal began last month and will continue into early next year.

“Alcohol isn’t just an ordinary commodity that can be left to the market like soap powder,” says Ian Gilmore of the Royal College of Physicians. “It’s responsible for a huge amount of damage to innocent victims.”

For most of the 20th century Britons drank moderately, says James Nicholls of Alcohol Research UK, a non-profit group. But in the last few decades, alcohol, especially beer, became vastly more affordable.

Student Chris Theobald was shopping on a Camden street where $5 will buy a bottle of fortified wine with the alcohol content of seven bottles of beer.

Such prices are “crazy,” Theobald says, but he concedes that the deals are helpful when “you want to get drunk quickly. “It’s what we do.”

Affordability is one factor among several that has boosted English alcohol intake, Nicholls says. British alcohol consumption per person rose 19 percent from 1980 to 2007, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Over the same period, U.S. alcohol consumption per person dropped 17 percent.

Brits have also become renowned as some of Europe’s heaviest binge drinkers, or drinkers who quaff five or more drinks at a sitting. A 2010 survey found more people in Britain than anywhere else in Europe have at least 10 drinks a day on the days when they drink.

“I thought we were alcoholics,” says Alexander Ledvinka, a London bartender, speaking of his countrymen in the Czech Republic. But at the London party hubs of Leicester Square and Covent Garden, “I’ve never seen that many drunk people in one place.”

The proposal wouldn’t affect drink prices in pubs and restaurants nor would anything besides cut-rate booze rise in cost.

But the very idea of setting a floor on the price of alcohol has infuriated free-market proponents and angered many ordinary Britons.

“A nanny state that dictates what to drink will soon be telling us how to think,” the Daily Mail, a conservative newspaper, fumed.

“Why does the government want to stop people from having fun?” asked Lia Girandola, a London real-estate agent out with friends in Camden. Drinking “is what people do to socialize.”

Public health officials say drinking is not all polite merriment and something must be done to reduce alcohol’s toll on society.

Photos of drunken young women lying on the sidewalk or retching in alleys are a staple of the British tabloids. Alcohol-related hospital admissions have shot up in England. Twenty years ago, U.K. deaths from liver disease were on a par with rates in Australia and Scandinavia. Now U.K. rates are double the rates in those countries.

Government officials including Prime Minister David Cameron say there’d be widespread benefits to banning dirt-cheap booze, which in Britain is favored by those who drink to excess.

A minimum price would help tackle the problem drinkers without much impact on sensible drinkers, according to a government analysis. The government forecasts the price hike will prod the heaviest drinkers - such as men who regularly drink more than five bottles of wine a week - to cut their intake by 5.9 percent per year, moderate drinkers by 1.2 percent.

As with any price increases, however, people with less money will be forced to make choices that the wealthier will not.

The proposal will “adversely penalize” low-income moderate drinkers, who will be hard-hit, says Simon Russell of the National Association of Cider Makers. And many are skeptical that even a price hike can get drinkers to knock back one fewer drinks.

If prices rose, “you wouldn’t drink less before you went out for a night,” James says. “You’d spend a little more.”


Previous articles on Medical Marijuana and the evil Drug War.

More articles on Medical Marijuana and the evil Drug War.

 

Homeless in Arizona

stinking title