Homeless in Arizona

Bid to halt medical-pot ruling due in court

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.

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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.”

‘Joey’s Law’ won't fix the problem the government created.

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‘Joey’s Law’ toughens restrictions for hit-run motorists

By Allie Seligman The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Dec 12, 2012 9:49 PM

Motorists who kill someone and drive away now could lose their licenses for a decade, justice that a Peoria man who spent months fighting for the new law may not get.

Jesse Romero, 51, channeled the pain of losing his youngest son, Joey, into a push for legislation that stiffens penalties for hit-and-run drivers. The young man was killed two years ago on his way home from work.

“To me, you hit a person and you leave them, you have no regard for human life,” Romero said.

On Wednesday, Gov. Jan Brewer, legislators, the Romero family and Peoria City Council members met at City Hall for a ceremonial signing of “Joey’s Law,” the nickname for Senate Bill 1163.

Brewer, who officially signed the bill in April, said Joey’s Law is “legislation that makes my job such a blessing and such an honor.”

Under Joey’s Law, when hit-and-run accidents result in death, drivers can lose their licenses for up to 10 years but can apply for a restricted license after five years.

If a hit-and-run victim is seriously injured, the driver will lose his or her license for up to five years.

The license-revocation period in either case starts after the driver is released from jail.

Before the law was passed, hit-and-run drivers could lose their license for five years if someone was killed; three years if someone was injured. And those periods could begin while in jail, where the offender would not need a car.

Joey Romero, 18, the youngest of six kids, died in October 2010. Laura Flanders, now 25, drove on a sidewalk and ran down the Centennial High school senior as he walked home from his job at a dollar store, according to police.

Police records describe Flanders as so incoherent from prescription medication that she thought she hit a tree, pole or bush.

A grand jury indicted Flanders on one count each of manslaughter and leaving the scene of an accident. She has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to appear in court next week.

Because Joey’s Law went into effect after the accident that killed the young man, it will be up to a judge to decide whether Flanders could face the penalties in the law if the case goes to trial, Peoria City Attorney Steve Kemp said.

Romero hopes she will.

“I would like for her to be made the example of what the law really should be like,” he said. “This law is because of her.”

Flanders’ lawyer could not be immediately reached.

Romero began working on the law in November 2011.

He contacted Peoria officials, who set up a meeting with state Sen. Rick Murphy, R-Peoria. Romero told him his son’s story and stressed the importance of a stricter law for hit-and-run drivers. Murphy sponsored the bill, and it passed the House and Senate unanimously.

Romero’s moving story helped build widespread support, said John Schell, Peoria’s intergovernmental director.

“It’s hard not to be deeply effected by what happened,” he said. “That experience of tragedy resonates with everyone.”

The new law may save lives, but the pain of losing his son isn’t any more bearable, Romero said.

“I raised my kids to be strong and smart,” Romero said, “and Joey made me proud all the way around.”

Linda Valdez thinks marijuana should be legalized???

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.

Quinn, Emanuel assail court's concealed carry decision

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Quinn, Emanuel assail court's concealed carry decision

By Monique Garcia and Hal Dardick, Chicago Tribune reporters

6:11 a.m. CST, December 13, 2012

Gov. Pat Quinn on Wednesday indicated he would like to see assault weapons banned in Illinois as lawmakers this spring revise state law to allow some form of concealed carry to comply with a court ruling that tossed aside a long-standing ban on allowing people to carry weapons.

Meanwhile, at City Hall, Mayor Rahm Emanuel blasted Tuesday's federal appellate court decision as "wrongheaded" as he offered legal help to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan as she weighs an appeal.

Judges gave the General Assembly six months to make changes, and the Democratic governor suggested the new rules will have to restrict who can get a permit to carry a gun.

"We have to have reasonable limitations so people who have clear situations where they should not be carrying a gun, for example, those with mental health challenges, those who have records of domestic violence, we cannot have those sorts of people eligible to carry weapons, loaded weapons, on their person in public places" Quinn said. [There is no such thing as reasonable limitations when it comes to flushing the 2nd Amendment down the toilet]

National Rifle Association lobbyist Todd Vandermyde said the governor is "being very pragmatic in his approach" on concealed carry. Though Vandermyde expected gun rights groups to hold firm on a variety of points, he said his group wanted to "work for a reasonable solution and policy on right to carry."

Quinn also pressed for an assault weapons ban, saying Illinois residents "overwhelmingly support that."

"I want to say today, and I'll say every day, we need to ban assault weapons in our state of Illinois. We aren't going to have people marching along Michigan Avenue, or any other avenue in the state of Illinois, with military-style assault weapons, weapons that are designed to kill people."

An assault weapons ban has been elusive in Springfield because of geographical differences of opinion. Opponents point to the fact that Chicago had a gun ban for decades, even as criminals obtained guns and shot people.

For his part, Emanuel noted his efforts while working for former President Bill Clinton to require background checks for gun buyers and ban semi-automatic assault weapons.

"We fought against the National Rifle Association. They had not been beaten in 30 years in the United States Congress, and we beat 'em," Emanuel said.

"I think this opinion by the 7th Circuit Court is also wrongheaded," he added.

Emanuel said he has offered to make city Law and Police department resources available to the Illinois attorney general. Meanwhile, the city is reviewing its gun registration ordinance to see if it needs modification in light of the court ruling.

Tribune reporter Ray Long contributed.

mcgarcia@tribune.com

hdardick@tribune.com

Gun rights, even in Illinois

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Gun rights, even in Illinois

A court gives new meaning to the Second Amendment

Steve Chapman

December 13, 2012

There are certain constants to life in Illinois. Abraham Lincoln has always been revered. The Cubs always find a way to lose. Lake Michigan never goes dry. Letting citizens carrying concealed firearms is out of the question.

But one of those is no longer true. Tuesday, a federal appeals court said the state cannot maintain its flat ban on concealed carry — a policy that makes it unique among the 50 states. In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to have and use a gun for self-protection. Extending the logic of that decision, the appeals court said this freedom includes the right to carry a weapon outside the home.

"A Chicagoan is a good deal more likely to be attacked on a sidewalk in a rough neighborhood than in his apartment on the 35th floor of Park Tower," wrote federal appellate Judge Richard Posner. "To confine the right to be armed to the home is to divorce the Second Amendment from the right of self-defense ..."

This decision comes as a surprise, partly because it does not appear to be strictly in line with what the court said in the 2008 case. "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited," wrote Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. "For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues."

The court also specifically accepted "laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings" — even though the need for self-defense may arise in those places. But some eminent legal scholars, like UCLA's Eugene Volokh, agree with the appeals court's view that "the Second Amendment secures a right to keep and bear arms outside the home, possibly subject to some regulation and limitation."

It's hard to overstate what a radical step this is in Illinois, with its stubbornly impervious suspicion of guns in general and handguns in particular. Sure, there are hunters and target shooters, but they have limited sway with lawmakers.

The resistance to concealed weapons makes it an outlier. So does its law requiring a state permit, known as a Firearm Owner's Identification card, to buy a gun or ammunition. Chicago (along with a couple of other cities) had a complete ban on handgun ownership, which lasted until 2010, when the Supreme Court struck it down.

Elected officials are given to pronouncements that would be politically fatal in most states. When asked by a reporter a couple of years ago if Chicago's handgun ban was actually effective in reducing crime, Mayor Richard Daley brandished a rifle with a mounted bayonet and replied, "If I put this up your butt, you'll find out how effective it is."

Democratic state Sen. Donne Trotter opposed a bill legalizing concealed carry because it would mean "creating part-time police officers who have not gone through the extensive training, who have not had the psychological evaluations, who will be getting out there who feel now that they are stronger, they are badder, they are tougher because they have this nine-shooter on their hip."

That statement should not be interpreted to mean the senator is opposed to the idea in all circumstances. Not long ago, Trotter was arrested for allegedly trying to board a commercial airplane with a handgun in his carry-on bag.

The appeals court ruling provoked the usual gasps and grumps from local politicians. Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office pronounced itself "disappointed." Democratic State Rep. Eddie Acevedo said parts of the city may resemble "the wild, wild West" — as though they were islands of tranquility right now.

What other states have figured out is that forbidding citizens from carrying concealed weapons does not enhance public safety, because it doesn't prevent criminals from getting or packing guns. All it does is prevent law-abiding individuals from using such weapons to protect themselves. It punishes the victims, not the villains.

The same fears expressed by anti-gun alarmists here were expressed elsewhere, only to be proved groundless. A 2004 study by the National Academy of Sciences found "no credible evidence that 'right-to-carry' laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime."

When it comes to day-to-day life, in fact, the change will be no big deal. But for Illinois residents to finally have the freedom to make their own choices — now, that is a big deal.

Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/chapman.

schapman@tribune.com

Chicago wants to cover up court "police code of silence" verdict

Don't let city out of police 'code of silence' verdict, judge told

By Annie Sweeney Tribune reporter

7:15 p.m. CST, December 12, 2012

Two top civil rights attorneys argued strongly against efforts by the city to vacate the recent landmark jury verdict that a "code of silence" within the Chicago Police Department in part led to an off-duty officer's infamous video-recorded beating of a female bartender.

"The city should not be permitted to escape a finding that it covered up the misconduct of its officers by allowing it to simply erase that adjudication as if it never occurred, and then go on denying a code of silence," attorneys Locke Bowman and Craig Futterman wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief filed late Tuesday in federal court.

The video of off-duty Officer Anthony Abbate pummeling bartender Karolina Obrycka inside a Northwest Side bar in 2007 marked one of the most embarrassing chapters in recent department history. The jury decision holding Chicago police responsible because of its unofficial code of silence was a rare rebuke for the city, as such policy claims typically don't make it to trial.

The city has sought to vacate the judgment, calling the verdict "ambiguous" and likely to lead to numerous frivolous lawsuits. City attorneys also have argued that the beating happened five years ago, and reforms have been put in place since then.

In their filing, Bowman and Futterman seized on the city's pledge in court last week that the $850,000 in damages awarded to Obrycka would be paid to her regardless of whether U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve agreed to set aside the verdict.

With justice ensured for Obrycka, they wrote, there is no reason to set aside a hard-fought and important jury verdict that could prompt reform within the department given its struggles with police misconduct since the 1980s.

"If the city is allowed to sweep verdicts such as this one under the rug, it will have no incentive to change," the lawyers wrote.

asweeney@tribune.com

Judge Derek Johnson - Rape, it's the Woman's fault???

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U.S. judge says victims’ body can prevent rape

Associated Press Fri Dec 14, 2012 12:20 AM

SANTA ANA, California — A Southern California judge is being publicly admonished for saying a rape victim “didn’t put up a fight” during her assault and that if someone doesn’t want sexual intercourse, the body “will not permit that to happen.”

The California Commission on Judicial Performance voted 10-0 to impose a public admonishment Thursday, saying Superior Court Judge Derek Johnson’s comments were inappropriate and a breach of judicial ethics.

“In the commission’s view, the judge’s remarks reflected outdated, biased and insensitive views about sexual assault victims who do not ‘put up a fight.’ Such comments cannot help but diminish public confidence and trust in the impartiality of the judiciary,” wrote Lawrence J. Simi, the commission’s chairman.

Johnson made the comments in the case of a man who threatened to mutilate the face and genitals of his ex-girlfriend with a heated screwdriver, beat her with a metal baton and made other violent threats before committing rape, forced oral copulation, and other crimes.

Though the woman reported the criminal threats the next day, the woman did not report the rape until 17 days later.

Johnson, a former prosecutor in the Orange County district attorney’s sex crimes unit, said during the man’s 2008 sentencing that he had seen violent cases on that unit in which women’s vaginas were “shredded” by rape.

“I’m not a gynecologist, but I can tell you something: If someone doesn’t want to have sexual intercourse, the body shuts down. The body will not permit that to happen unless a lot of damage is inflicted, and we heard nothing about that in this case,” Johnson said.

The commission found that Johnson’s view that a victim must resist to be a real victim of sexual assault was his opinion, not the law. Since 1980, California law doesn’t require rape victims to prove they resisted or were prevented from resisting because of threats.

In an apology to the commission, Johnson said his comments were inappropriate. He said his comments were the result of his frustration during an argument with a prosecutor over the defendant’s sentence.

Johnson said he believed the prosecutor’s request of a 16-year sentence was not authorized by law. Johnson sentenced the rapist to six years instead, saying that’s what the case was “worth.”

European court condemns CIA in landmark ruling

European court condemns CIA in landmark ruling

By Angela Charlton Associated Press Thu Dec 13, 2012 9:23 PM

PARIS - A European court issued a landmark ruling Thursday that condemned the CIA’s “extraordinary renditions” programs and bolstered those who say they were illegally kidnapped and tortured as part of an overzealous war on terrorism.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled that a German car salesman was an innocent victim of torture and abuse, in a long-awaited victory for a man who had failed for years to get courts in the U.S. and Europe to acknowledge what happened to him.

Khaled El-Masri says he was kidnapped from Macedonia in 2003, mistaken for a terrorism suspect, then held for four months and brutally interrogated at an Afghan prison known as the “Salt Pit” run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. He says that once U.S. authorities realized he was not a threat, they illegally sent him to Albania and left him on a mountainside.

The European court, based in Strasbourg, France, ruled that El-Masri’s account was “established beyond reasonable doubt” and that Macedonia “had been responsible for his torture and ill-treatment both in the country itself and after his transfer to the U.S. authorities in the context of an extra-judicial rendition.”

It said the government of Macedonia violated El-Masri’s rights repeatedly and ordered it to pay $78,500 in damages. Macedonia’s Justice Ministry said it would enforce the court ruling and pay El-Masri the damages.

U.S. officials closed internal investigations into the El-Masri case two years ago, and the administration of President Barack Obama has distanced itself from some counterterrorism activities conducted under former President George W. Bush.

But several other legal cases are pending from Britain to Hong Kong involving people who say they were illegally detained in the CIA program. Its critics hope that Thursday’s ruling will lead to court victories for other rendition victims and prevent future abuses.

The case focused on Macedonia’s role in a single instance of wrongful capture. But it drew broader attention because of how sensitive the CIA extraordinary renditions were for Europe, at a time when the continent lived in fear of terrorist attacks but was divided over the Bush administration’s methods of rooting out terrorism.

Those methods involved abducting and interrogating suspects — without court sanction — in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. A 2007 Council of Europe probe accused 14 European governments of permitting the CIA to run detention centers or carry out rendition flights between 2002 and 2005.

The CIA declined to comment on Thursday’s ruling.

The court, in its 92-page ruling, said El-Masri was severely beaten, sodomized, shackled and hooded “at the hands of the CIA rendition team” in the presence of Macedonian authorities.

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

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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.”

DNA tests free victim 301 - Santae A. Tribble

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D.C. judge exonerates Santae Tribble of 1978 murder based on DNA hair test

By Spencer S. Hsu, Friday, December 14, 7:10 AM

A D.C. man who spent 28 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit was formally declared innocent by a Superior Court judge Friday, ending his long fight for exoneration.

Santae A. Tribble, 51, was convicted in the killing of a Southeast Washington taxi driver in 1978 after an FBI examiner traced his hair to a stocking found near the crime scene. The killer was wearing a stocking mask. Tribble always maintained his innocence, and after he served his sentence, DNA tests on the hair earlier this year excluded him as the source.

In a five-page order, Judge Laura A. Cordero granted Tribble’s request for a certificate of innocence.

“In light of the parties’ concession that new DNA evidence conclusively shows that the hair found in the stocking cap was not Mr. Tribble’s, the Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that he did not commit the crimes he was convicted of at trial,” Cordero wrote.

With the ruling, Tribble became the second District man this year and the third since 2009 to be exonerated after serving a lengthy prison term based on false hair matches by different examiners in the FBI Laboratory. Their cases, which were featured in a series of articles in The Washington Post, helped focus national attention on flaws in the U.S. forensic science system.

In response, the Justice Department in July announced a nationwide review of all cases handled by the FBI Laboratory hair and fibers unit before 2000, more than 21,000 cases in all, for instances in which scientifically improper lab reports or testimony may have contributed to a conviction. The lab began DNA testing of hair in 1996.

This summer , Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced Tribble and Kirk L. Odom, whom a District judge cleared this year of a 1981 rape, at a committee hearing about legislation that would overhaul standards for forensic science practitioners and researchers.

“It has long been clear that action is necessary to ensure improved support for forensic science and meaningful national standards and oversight,” Leahy said after shaking hands with the District men. He added, “Strong research, standards, and oversight will also help to ensure that forensic evidence is never misused to convict innocent people.”

Besides Tribble and Odom, Donald E. Gates in December 2009 was cleared of a 1981 murder in Rock Creek Park after DNA testing showed only another man could have committed the crime.

Tribble could not immediately be reached for comment Friday morning. In a letter to Superior Court Chief Judge Lee F. Satterfield this month urging a quick decision, the attorney who helped clear all three District men, Sandra K. Levick, chief of special litigation for the D.C. Public Defender Service, said, “He [Tribble] is destitute. He has no job, no possessions other than a few items of clothing and personal effects, no savings, no source of income and no prospects for employment.”

The Post reported in April that Justice Department officials had known for years that flawed forensic testimony and false matches might have led to the convictions of hundreds of potentially innocent people. Hair analysis was subjective and lacked scientific research into how often hairs of different people might appear to match, and the FBI lab lacked protocols to ensure that agent testimony was scientifically accurate.

But Justice Department managers limited their review of hair cases to the work of one agent, even as they learned that many examiners’ matches were often wrong and that numerous examiners overstated the significance of matches in federal, state and local cases, using bogus statistics or exaggerated claims, The Post found.

In many cases that the agency did review and found to have problems, prosecutors never notified defendants or their lawyers of the issues uncovered.

In Tribble’s case, the FBI agent testified at trial that the hair from the stocking matched Tribble’s “in all microscopic characteristics.”

In closing arguments, federal prosecutor David Stanley went further, saying “There is one chance, perhaps for all we know, in 10 million that it could [be] someone else’s hair.”

In January court-ordered DNA testing by a private lab confirmed that none of the 13 hairs retrieved from the stocking shared Tribble’s genetic profile or that of his alleged accomplice, Cleveland Wright. The lab also found that the 13 hairs came from three human sources, each of African origin, except for one — which came from a dog – facts over which the FBI-trained examiners disagreed or missed outright.

Cordero tossed out Tribble’s conviction at the request of prosecutors in May, saying he could not be re-tried.

The government later notified Cordero it would not contest Tribble’s effort to be declared innocent, although prosecutors declined to join his motion.

“Because the hair evidence that implicated defendant now has been thoroughly discredited, and because the hair evidence was a key component of the government’s case at trial, the United States does not oppose the Court’s granting defendant’s request for a Certificate of Innocence,” U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. explained.

Under the D.C. Innocence Protection Act, the judge’s ruling allows Tribble to obtain compensation from the government for his wrongful imprisonment.

Counting Tribble, 301 people in the United States have been exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing since 1989.

The daughter of John McCormick, the slain cabdriver, said her late mother would have wanted police to find the real killer.

“I lost a father many years ago to murder. Now I learn that the wrong man spent years in prison for the crime,” Carolyn McCormick, 65, a high school chemistry and anatomy teacher in Austin, wrote Cordero in an affidavit in October. “I will do anything to help to see that justice is done.”

L.A. County sheriff's jailer charged with assaulting 2 inmates

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L.A. County sheriff's jailer charged with assaulting 2 inmates

By Jack Leonard and Robert Faturechi, Los Angeles Times

December 13, 2012, 9:30 p.m.

A Los Angeles County sheriff's jailer was charged Thursday with assaulting two inmates and falsifying police reports afterward, the first prosecution since abuses in the jails were first alleged more than a year ago.

Jermaine Jackson, a five-year veteran of the department, is accused of assaulting two inmates using "a deadly weapon" — his feet. At least one of the incidents was caught on tape, a sheriff's spokesman said.

The deputy was being booked Thursday into the jail system he once policed and was ordered held on $100,000 bail. Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said Jackson is on leave without pay pending the outcome of the case. He has not yet entered a plea.

The arrest comes more than a year after the FBI began an investigation into deputy misconduct within the L.A. County jail system, the largest in the nation. This arrest, however, resulted from an internal sheriff's investigation.

One of the alleged assaults that Jackson, 35, was charged with was described in a declaration filed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

In a sworn statement, inmate Derek Griscavage said he was housed in the Twin Towers jail in downtown L.A. on Christmas Day 2010 when Jackson shouted profanities at him because he did not drop to his knees fast enough during a routine search. Griscavage said he flashed his middle finger at the jailer, whom he described as a bulky, 6-foot deputy with a shaved head.

About 20 minutes later, the deputy ordered him to face a jail window and then kicked the insides of Griscavage's ankles hard with his boots, according to the declaration. Jackson, Griscavage said, handcuffed him and "savagely pushed my cuffed hands up so my arms resembled chicken wings, straining my shoulders and handling me with enough force that my face was pushed into the pod window."

Jackson then forced Griscavage to walk to an area of the jail where four or five deputies were waiting, and "everything went black," the declaration said.

Griscavage said he woke up in the hospital "with a stabbing pain in my head ... undoubtedly the worst headache I have ever felt." He said there was blood on his bare chest, and his eyes were "swimming with blood flowing out of the cuts on my face and head."

He said he suffered a broken nose, black eyes, a cut to his ear, a swollen head and a chipped tooth.

Inmates later told him that Jackson had punched him while he was handcuffed and then kneed and kicked his head and face, according to the declaration. Other inmates, he said, were ordered to mop up a pool of blood after the assault.

Griscavage said a sheriff's detective visited him about the incident but that her focus was not whether the deputy assaulted him but whether he attacked the deputy and caused a scratch to Jackson's hand. He said the detective told him he needed to give a blood sample to ensure that the deputy had not been exposed to any infectious diseases but did not ask any other questions about the incident. Griscavage alleged that another deputy snickered at him, saying, "I heard you got knocked out."

The incident was among dozens of abuse allegations the Sheriff's Department began reexamining last year amid public criticism of jail conditions.

Prosecutors charged Jackson, of Corona, with assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury, assault by a public officer and filing a false report in connection with two separate incidents. He is also accused of assaulting Cesar Campana, an inmate at the Compton courthouse lockup, in December 2009.

"The sheriff is taking this very seriously," Whitmore said. The incidents, he added, were isolated with no other employees involved.

Peter Eliasberg, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California, said he was pleased that the Sheriff's Department had taken action in response to his organization's complaints, but questioned why more hadn't been done when the incident first occurred.

"Why wasn't this arrest made in 2011? The answer is, because very likely the first investigation was cursory, sloppy and a whitewash," he said.

jack.leonard@latimes.com

robert.faturechi@latimes.com

Mexican cops loot Jenni Rivera plane crash site

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Jenni Rivera crash: Officers allegedly stole items, took graphic photos

December 14, 2012 | 6:43 am

As Jenni Rivera's remains were positively identified Thursday, two police officers were arrested in the alleged theft of materials from the site where the singer's plane crashed Sunday.

Authorities told Mexican media that "victim's belongings" were found at the homes of the two officers. The Associated Press reported that one of the officers allegedly took graphic photos of the crash site, including of body parts.

Rivera's plane plummeted nose-first Sunday, 28,000 feet in 30 seconds, leaving its wreckage — and the remains of Rivera and six others — splayed across the side of the mountain like a wash of pebbles.

Authorities have been combing the area for clues ever since, though they said they have not determined the cause of the crash.

Rivera, 43, a mother of five and master of a growing international business empire, was killed when the jet crashed early Sunday morning near Iturbide, Mexico.

Authorities have said that Rivera’s camp chartered the flight from Starwood Management to ferry her from a performance in Monterrey, Mexico, to an appearance near Mexico City.

In a telephone interview from Mexico City, an executive at the firm that owns the plane, Christian E. Esquino Nunez, said that the Learjet 25 was perfectly maintained. Esquino, 50, said he believes that the 78-year-old pilot suffered a heart attack or was incapacitated in some other way, and that a “green” co-pilot was unable to save the plane.

“We’re all grieving,” said Esquino, who described himself as the operations manager of the company that owned the Learjet 25, Starwood Management LLC of Las Vegas. “I’m definitely very sorry that this happened.” Esquino said maintenance and safety issues “had nothing to do with the accident.” He said the 1969 Learjet had been based and maintained in Houston for the last 10 years, and underwent a top-to-bottom inspection this summer.

The same plane, according to U.S. aviation records, sustained “substantial” damage in 2005 when a fuel imbalance left one wing tip weighing as much as 300 pounds more than the other. The unnamed pilot, despite having logged more than 7,000 hours in the air, lost control while landing in Amarillo, Texas, and struck a runway distance marker. No one was injured.

Esquino called that accident “minor” and said the plane had flown without issue for 1,000 hours since then. He said the only conceivable explanation for the crash is that 78-year-old pilot Miguel Perez Soto was incapacitated. He said that while the Learjet was a fine airplane, “it has some critical characteristics.”

“Once it gets out of normal flight mode … it’s hard to recover,” said Esquino, himself a pilot for many years.

Mexican authorities said Starwood Management officials told them that Rivera was interested in buying the plane, and as a result, hadn’t paid to rent it.

Mexican authorities and the National Transportation Safety Board were continuing to investigate the crash “to formulate a hypothesis as to the cause of the accident,” the statement said, noting that the investigation could take nine months to a year.

The remains of the passengers that have been found, including Rivera’s, have been taken to the University Hospital in Monterrey, where they will be analyzed by forensic experts, the statement said.

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

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!!!!

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'

"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

• Reid technique - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• The Reid Technique of Interrogation
• What are the nine steps of the Reid interrogation technique ...
• Reid 9 Steps of Interrogation - YouTube
• Modern Police Interrogation Techniques Use Subtle Psychological ...
• [PDF] Arguments Against Use of the Reid Technique for Juvenile ...
• Method to the Madness – Officer Reid's Torture Technique | The ...
• John Reid and the Reid Technique of Interviewing & Interrogation ...
• W-R-R The Reid Method
• Essentials of the Reid Technique: Criminal Interrogations and ...

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

The Cost of Solitary Confinement

Messy cell criminals - It will get you solitary confinement!!!

NY state imposed 70,000 isolation sentences for offenses like having an “untidy cell”

These jerks remind me a lot of my father.

I used to get punished for things like:

• Saying hi wrong
• Acting funny
• Not keeping my hair tied in a pony tail or under my hat

I wonder do the Homeland Security cops that read my web page punish your children for trivial crimes like those.

Source

The Cost of Solitary Confinement

Published: December 13, 2012

The New York Legislature greatly improved the treatment of mentally ill inmates in 2008, when it required the prison system to place seriously mentally ill inmates who violate rules into a treatment program instead of solitary confinement, where they were more likely to harm themselves or commit suicide. Related

A lawsuit filed last week by The New York Civil Liberties Union, however, suggests that the system is still misusing punitive isolation, not just for some of the mentally ill, but for a broad range of the system’s 55,000 inmates.

Most prison systems use isolation selectively, singling out violent people who present a danger to guards and other inmates. The lawsuit asserts that New York uses isolation as routine punishment for minor, nonviolent offenses — more than any other system in the country.

The plaintiff in the suit, Leroy Peoples, is a 30-year-old with a history of mental illness who was twice sentenced to solitary confinement. In 2005, he was sentenced to six months for “unauthorized possession of nutritional supplements” that were available for sale in the prison commissary. In 2009, he was sentenced to three years in isolation for having unauthorized legal materials.

According to court documents, between 2007 and 2011, the state imposed 70,000 isolation sentences for offenses like having an “untidy cell or person,” or for “littering,” “unfastened long hair” or an “unreported illness.” On any given day, about 4,300 of the system’s inmates are locked down for 23 hours a day in tiny concrete cells, many of them destined to remain there for years. As additional punishment, prison officials can deny food, exercise, bedding or showers.

The suit charges that New York’s system is arbitrary and, therefore, unconstitutional. It also suggests that African-American inmates are more often banished to isolation, and for longer periods of time, than inmates from other racial groups. However the court decides this case, it seems clear that New York’s isolation policy is inhumane and counterproductive, requiring clearer guidelines from the Legislature as to when isolation can and cannot be used.

Obama won’t go after marijuana use in 2 states

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.”

Texas cops guard cocaine shipments???

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

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.”

Obama gets another gun control opportunity!!!

Source

20 children among 27 dead in Conn. school shooting, police say

Associated Press Sat Dec 15, 2012 12:10 AM

NEWTOWN, Conn. - A man killed his mother at home and then opened fire Friday inside the elementary school where she taught, massacring 26 people, including 20 children, as students cowered in fear to the sound of gunshots reverberating through the building and screams echoing over the intercom.

The 20-year-old killer, carrying two handguns, committed suicide at the school, bringing the death toll to 28, authorities said.

The rampage, coming less than two weeks before Christmas, was the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by the Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead in 2007.

“Our hearts are broken today,” said a tearful President Barack Obama, struggling to maintain his composure, at the White House. He called for “meaningful action” to prevent such shootings. “As a country, we have been through this too many times,” he said.

Police shed no light on the motive for the attack on two classrooms. The gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, was believed to suffer from a personality disorder and lived with his mother, according to a law-enforcement official who was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to discuss it.

Panicked parents looking for their children raced to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, a prosperous New England community of about 27,000 people, 60 miles northeast of New York City. Police told youngsters at the kindergarten-through-fourth-grade school to close their eyes as they were led from the building.

Schoolchildren — some crying, others looking frightened — were escorted through a parking lot in a line, with hands on each other’s shoulders.

Law-enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity said that Lanza killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, and then drove to the school in her car with three guns, including a high-powered rifle that he apparently left in the back. Authorities said he shot up two classrooms, but they gave no details on how the attack unfolded.

A custodian ran through the halls, warning of a gunman on the loose, and someone switched on the intercom, alerting people in the building to the attack — and perhaps saving many lives — by letting them hear the hysteria apparently going on in the school office, a teacher said.

Teachers locked their doors and ordered children to huddle in a corner or hide in closets as shots echoed through the building.

State police Lt. Paul Vance said 28 people in all were killed, including the gunman, and a woman who worked at the school was wounded.

Lanza’s older brother, 24-year-old Ryan, of Hoboken, N.J., was being questioned, but a law-enforcement official said he was not believed to have had any role in the rampage. Investigators were searching his computers and phone records, but he told law enforcement he had not been in touch with his brother since about 2010.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.

At one point, a law-enforcement official mistakenly identified the gunman as Ryan Lanza. Brett Wilshe, a friend of Ryan Lanza’s, said Ryan Lanza told him the gunman may have had his identification. Ryan Lanza has a Facebook page with updates posted on Friday afternoon that read, “It wasn’t me” and “I was at work.”

Robert Licata said his 6-year-old son was in class when the gunman burst in and shot the teacher. “That’s when my son grabbed a bunch of his friends and ran out the door,” he said. “He was very brave. He waited for his friends.”

He said the shooter didn’t utter a word.

Stephen Delgiadice said his 8-year-old daughter was in the school and heard two big bangs. Teachers told her to get in a corner, he said.

“It’s alarming, especially in Newtown, Connecticut, which we always thought was the safest place in America,” he said. His daughter was uninjured.

Theodore Varga said he was in a meeting with other fourth-grade teachers when he heard the gunfire, but there was no lock on the door.

He said someone had turned on the intercom so that “you could hear people in the office. You could hear the hysteria that was going on. I think whoever did that saved a lot of people. Everyone in the school was listening to the terror that was transpiring.”

A custodian also went around warning people there was a gunman, Varga said.

“He said, ‘Guys! Get down! Hide!’” Varga said. “So he was actually a hero.”

The teacher said he did not know if the custodian survived.

On Friday night, hundreds of people packed a Newtown church and stood outside in a vigil for the victims. People held hands, lit candles and sang “Silent Night” at St. Rose of Lima church.

Anthony Bloss, whose three daughters survived the shootings, said they are doing better than he is. “I’m numb. I’m completely numb,” he said at the vigil.

Mergim Bajraliu, 17, heard the gunshots echo from his home and ran to check on his 9-year-old sister at the school. He said his sister, who was uninjured, heard a scream come over the intercom. He said teachers were shaking and crying as they came out of the building.

“Everyone was just traumatized,” he said.

Mary Pendergast said her 9-year-old nephew was in the school at the time of the shooting but wasn’t hurt after his music teacher helped him take cover in a closet.

Richard Wilford’s 7-year-old son, Richie, told him that he heard a noise that sounded like “cans falling.” The boy said a teacher went out to check on the noise, came back in, locked the door and had the children huddle in the corner until police arrived.

“There’s no words,” Wilford said. “It’s sheer terror, a sense of imminent danger, to get to your child and be there to protect him.”

On Friday afternoon, family members were led away from a firehouse that was being used as a staging area, some of them weeping. One man, wearing a T-shirt without a jacket, put his arms around a woman as they walked down the middle of the street, oblivious to everything around them. Another woman with tears rolling down her face walked by, carrying a car seat with a baby inside.

“Evil visited this community today and it’s too early to speak of recovery, but each parent, each sibling, each member of the family has to understand that Connecticut — we’re all in this together. We’ll do whatever we can to overcome this event,” Gov. Dannel Malloy said.

Adam Lanza and his mother lived in a well-to-do part of Newtown where neighbors are doctors or hold white-collar positions at companies such as General Electric, Pepsi and IBM.

Three guns were found — a Glock and a Sig Sauer, both pistols, inside the school, and a .223-caliber rifle in the back of a car.

The shootings instantly brought to mind such tragedies as the Columbine High School massacre that left 15 dead in 1999 and the July shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., that left 12 dead.

“You go to a movie theater in Aurora and all of a sudden your life is taken,” Columbine Principal Frank DeAngelis said. “You’re at a shopping mall in Portland, Oregon, and your life is taken. This morning, when parents kissed their kids goodbye knowing that they are going to be home to celebrate the holiday season coming up, you don’t expect this to happen.”

He added: “It has to stop, these senseless deaths.”

Obama’s comments on the tragedy amounted to one of the most outwardly emotional moments of his presidency.

“The majority of those who died were children — beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old,” Obama said.

He paused for several seconds to keep his composure as he teared up and wiped an eye. Nearby, two aides cried and held hands as they listened to Obama.

“They had their entire lives ahead of them — birthdays, graduations, wedding, kids of their own,” Obama continued about the victims. “Among the fallen were also teachers, men and women who devoted their lives to helping our children.”

Sandy Hook massacre: New details, but few answers

Sandy Hook massacre: New details, but few answers

By Steve Vogel, Sari Horwitz and David A. Fahrenthold, Published: December 15

NEWTOWN, Conn. — The gunman who killed 27 people, including 20 children, on Friday targeted a school to which he had no apparent connection — forcing his way in [he broke a window to get in] and spraying classrooms with a weapon designed to kill across a battlefield, authorities said.

On Saturday, law enforcement officials gave new details about the rampage of Adam Lanza, which ended with Lanza’s suicide. Their new narrative partially contradicted previous ones and made a baffling act seem more so.

Lanza’s mother, for instance, was not a teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary, after all. She apparently was unemployed. So it was still a mystery why her 20-year-old son — after dressing in black, killing his mother and taking at least three guns from her collection — then drove the five miles to a school where he was a stranger.

The part of the story that remained grimly, awfully unchanged was what Lanza did when he got there.

Authorities on Saturday released the names of those Lanza killed at the school, who ranged in age from 6 to 56. And the state’s medical examiner — speaking in sanitized, clinical terms — described the results of something deeply obscene: a semiautomatic rifle fired inside an elementary classroom.

“I’ve been at this for a third of a century. And my sensibilities may not be the average man’s. But this probably is the worst I have seen,” said H. Wayne Carver II. Carver described the children’s injuries, which he said ranged from at least two to 11 bullet wounds apiece.

He had performed seven of the autopsies himself. A reporter asked what the children had been wearing.

“They’re wearing cute kid stuff,” Carver said. “I mean, they’re first-graders.”

On Saturday, this small New England town and the country played out what is now a familiar ritual: the dumbstruck aftermath of a young gunman’s massacre. Word came that President Obama would arrive Sunday for an evening interfaith service, repeating his role from Fort Hood, Tex.; Aurora, Colo.; and Tucson, Ariz. He would again be chief mourner.

In Connecticut, people who had known Adam Lanza described him as odd, nervous and withdrawn, and they searched their memories for signs they’d missed. Memorials went up. Politicians talked — a little more forcefully this time — about how someone needed to be brave enough to talk about guns and gun control.

And, in Newtown, they started funeral preparations. This time, the ritual was for lives so new that it seemed impossible to speak of them in the past tense.

“He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Rabbi Shaul Praver of Adath Israel, who said that his congregation lost a first-grade boy. “His little body could not endure so many bullets like that.”

On Saturday, law enforcement officials said that Lanza had entered the school by force [he broke a window to get in] sometime after 9:30 a.m. Friday. Sandy Hook’s principal, Dawn Hochsprung, had recently installed a new security system in which the school doors were kept locked all day starting at 9:30. But Lanza had apparently shattered the glass in a window or door.

Lanza was carrying at least three guns from a collection maintained by his mother, who friends said enjoyed target shooting. Lanza had two pistols, a Glock and a Sig Sauer.

But he apparently chose a larger weapon, a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle, for much of the killing. This rifle fires one bullet for every pull of the trigger, and the unusually high speed of its round was designed to produce significant internal damage. Authorities said Lanza fired dozens and dozens of times in a spree that lasted minutes.

“All the wounds that I know of at this point were caused by the long weapon,” said Carver, the medical examiner.

He said he saw multiple wounds on the bodies of those he examined, and based on his conversations with colleagues, “I believe everybody was hit more than once.” None of the victims likely survived very long after being hit, Carver said.

When police arrived, Lanza was dead. So were Hochsprung and five other adults. So were 18 children. Two more were pronounced dead later at a local hospital.

Sixteen of the 20 children were just 6 years old. The other four were 7.

Later, when investigators went to the home that Lanza shared with his mother, Nancy Lanza was found dead there — the first victim of the killings and the last discovered.

On Saturday, authorities said they had “very good evidence” regarding Adam Lanza’s motives. But they didn’t say what that evidence was, and law enforcement officials said they had not found anything like a suicide note.

“No words can truly express how heartbroken we are,” Adam Lanza’s father, Peter Lanza, said in a statement released Saturday. “We are in a state of disbelief and trying to find whatever answers we can. We too are asking why.”

Around the country, advocates for stronger gun-control laws said they hoped that the shock of this crime would start a debate that other mass shootings had not. Still, with so little known about Adam Lanza and the guns he used, it was difficult to say what sort of law, precisely, was needed to prevent another shooting like Friday’s.

“If having dozens of people gunned down in an elementary school doesn’t motivate Washington to do even the easy things they can do, it’s not clear what will,” said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group chaired by New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) that represents 750 mayors across the country.

Politics will come later, once the country has become used to the idea that this actually happened. In Newtown on Saturday, the shooting still seemed to dwell in the realm of the unthinkable.

“The emotions of yesterday were just absolutely overwhelming,” Monsignor Robert Weiss of St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church in Newtown said in an interview Saturday with NBC News. “I don’t know if the reality has really settled in yet.’’

Weiss had accompanied police when they notified parents that their children had been killed. They asked him questions that most likely will never have answers.

“What were the last moments of these people’s lives like? They were wondering, did the child even know what was happening? Were they afraid? Did they see something coming?” Weiss told NBC. “ . . . So these parents are left with those unanswered questions in addition to just why this had to happen — why to their child?’’

Elswehere in Newtown, 8-year-old Maleeha Ali, a third-grader at Sandy Hook who escaped unharmed, came with her father and mother to Treadwell Park near the school with a sign she had made honoring Vicki Soto, the first-grade teacher who reportedly died trying to protect her students from the gunman. Soto taught Maleeha when she was in first grade, and the two would exchange greetings every day, the girls’ parents said.

The sign called Soto “our hero.”

One parent who lost a child, Robbie Parker, spoke to reporters Saturday evening. He expressed sympathy for Lanza’s family, saying, “I can’t imagine how hard this experience must be for you.”

Parker said that Emilie, the daughter he lost, was blond and blue-eyed and could light up a room. “All those who had the pleasure to meet her would agree that the world was better because she was in it,” Parker said.

He recalled the last time he saw Emilie, on Friday morning as he headed to work. He had been teaching her Portuguese, and so their last conversation was in that language.

“She said that she loved me, and she gave me a kiss and I was out the door,” said Parker, whose family moved to Newtown eight months ago. “I’m so blessed to be her dad.”

Horwitz and Fahrenthold reported from Washington. Brady Dennis in Washington contributed to this report.

Newtown Shooting | The Victims

1. Charlotte Bacon, 6
2. Daniel Barden, 7
3. Olivia Engel, 6
4. Josephine Gay, 7
5. Ana Marquez-Greene, 6
6. Dylan Hockley, 6
7. Madeleine Hsu, 6
8. Catherine Hubbard, 6
9. Chase Kowalski, 7
10. Jesse Lewis, 6
11. James Mattioli, 6
12. Grace McDonnell, 7
13. Emilie Parker, 6
14. Jack Pinto, 6
15. Noah Pozner, 6
16. Caroline Previdi, 6
17. Jessica Rekos, 6
18. Avielle Richman, 6
19. Benjamin Wheeler, 6
20. Allison Wyatt, 6
21. Rachel Davino, 29
    Teacher
22. Dawn Hochsprung, 47
    School principal
23. Nancy Lanza, 52
    Mother of gunman
24. Anne Marie Murphy, 52
    Teacher
25. Lauren Rousseau, 30
    Teacher
26. Mary Sherlach, 56
    School psychologist
27. Victoria Soto, 27
    Teacher

The guns used in these murders were all legal

Source

A Mother, a Gun Enthusiast and the First Victim

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER and RAVI SOMAIYA

Published: December 15, 2012

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Nancy Lanza loved guns, and often took her sons to one of the shooting ranges here in the suburbs northeast of New York City, where there is an active community of gun enthusiasts, her friends said. At a local bar, she sometimes talked about her gun collection.

It was one of her guns that was apparently used to take her life on Friday. Her killer was her son Adam Lanza, 20, who then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he killed 26 more people, 20 of them small children, before shooting himself, the authorities said.

Ms. Lanza’s fascination with guns became an important focus of attention on Saturday as investigators tried to determine what caused Mr. Lanza to carry out one of the worst massacres in the nation’s history.

Investigators have linked Ms. Lanza to five weapons: two powerful handguns, two traditional hunting rifles and a semiautomatic rifle that is similar to weapons used by troops in Afghanistan. Her son took the two handguns and the semiautomatic rifle to the school. Law enforcement officials said they believed the guns were acquired legally and were registered.

Ms. Lanza, 52, had gone through a divorce in 2008 and was described by friends as social and generous to strangers, but also high-strung, as if she were holding herself together. She lived in a large Colonial home here with Adam Lanza, and had struggled to help him cope with a developmental disorder that often left him reserved and withdrawn, according to relatives, friends and former classmates.

At some point, he had dropped out of the Newtown school system. An older son, Ryan, did not live with Ms. Lanza.

In a statement on Saturday night, her ex-husband, Peter Lanza, an executive at General Electric, said he was cooperating with investigators. “We are in a state of disbelief and trying to find whatever answers we can,” he said. “We, too, are asking why.”

He added: “Like so many of you, we are saddened but struggling to make sense of what has transpired.”

Ms. Lanza’s brother James Champion, a former police officer who lives in Kingston, N.H., said on Saturday that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation had questioned family members on Friday night.

Mr. Champion would not discuss whether Adam Lanza had a developmental disorder or mental illness.

“On behalf of Nancy’s mother and siblings, we reach out to the community of Newtown to express our heartfelt sorrow for the incomprehensible loss of innocence that has affected so many,” Mr. Champion said in a statement.

He said Ms. Lanza had grown up and lived in Kingston with her husband and sons before they left in 1998. He said he had not seen Adam Lanza in eight years.

Ms. Lanza’s sister-in-law Marsha Lanza, who lives in Illinois, said Adam Lanza had been home-schooled for a time because his mother was not “satisfied with the school.”

Former classmates here described him as nervous, with a flat affect.

“He was always different — keeping to himself, fidgeting and very quiet,” said a classmate, Alex Israel. “But I could always tell he was a supersmart kid, maybe just socially awkward, something just off about him. The same went for when I went to his house. His mother was always nice to me; she was a kind, typical suburban mom as far as I remember. As time went on, he continued to keep to himself and I branched out more, so not much contact with him after middle school.

“By the time high school came around, he did sort of disappear,” she added. “I’d see him in the halls walking quickly with his briefcase he carried, but I never had a class with him and never saw him with friends. I was yearbook editor and I remember he declined to be photographed or give us a senior quote or baby picture.”

Some former classmates said they had been told that Mr. Lanza had Asperger’s syndrome, which is considered a high-functioning form of autism.

News reports on Friday suggested that Ms. Lanza had worked at the elementary school where the shooting occurred, but on Saturday the school superintendent said there was no evidence that she had ever worked there.

The authorities said it was not clear why Mr. Lanza had gone to the school.

Ms. Lanza was a slender woman with blond shoulder-length hair who enjoyed craft beers, jazz and landscaping. She often went to a local restaurant and music spot, My Place, where at beer tastings on Tuesday evenings, she sometimes talked about her gun collection, recalled an acquaintance, Dan Holmes, the owner of a landscaping company in Newtown.

“She had several different guns,” Mr. Holmes said. “I don’t know how many. She would go target shooting with her kids.”

Many of those who knew Ms. Lanza in Newtown were at a loss to describe what she did for a living. Her brother in New Hampshire said she had not been working, but had once been a stockbroker.

Louise Tambascio, owner of My Place, said Ms. Lanza volunteered occasionally.

“She stayed with Adam,” Ms. Tambascio said, adding that, as a younger child, he “couldn’t get along with the kids in school.”

Ms. Lanza spoke often of her landscaping, Mr. Holmes recalled, and later hired him to do work on her home.

He recently dispatched a team to put up Christmas decorations at her house — garlands on the front columns and white lights atop the shrubbery.

After the work was complete, Ms. Lanza sent Mr. Holmes a text: “That went REALLY well!”

Jim Leff, a musician, often sat next to her at the bar and made small talk, he said in an interview on Saturday.

On one occasion, Mr. Leff said, he had gone to Newtown to discuss lending money to a friend. As the two men negotiated the loan, Ms. Lanza overheard and offered to write the man a check.

“She was really kind and warm,” Mr. Leff said, “but she always seemed a little bit high-strung.”

He declined to elaborate, but in a post on his personal Web site, he said he felt a distance from her that was explained when he heard, after the shootings, “how difficult her troubled son,” Adam, “was making things for her.”

She was “handling a very difficult situation with uncommon grace,” he wrote.

She was “a big, big gun fan,” he added on his Web site.

There are many gun enthusiasts in this area, residents said.

When some people who live near the elementary school heard the shots fired by Mr. Lanza on Friday, they said they were not surprised.

“I really didn’t think anything of it,” said a resident, Ray Rinaldi. “You hear gun shots around here all the time.”

Neighbors recalled Ms. Lanza as a regular at Labor Day picnics and “ladies’ nights out” for a dice game called bunco.

“We would rotate houses,” said Rhonda Cullens, 52. “I don’t remember Nancy ever having it at her house.”

Ms. Cullens said Ms. Lanza spoke often about gardening — exchanging the sorts of questions typical of the neighborhood: Is maintenance worth the trouble for a house like the Lanzas’, scarcely visible from the street?

But for many of those on Yogananda Street, where the Lanzas lived, the recollections about Ms. Lanza were incomplete.

“Who were they?” said Len Strocchia, 46, standing beside his daughter as camera crews came through the neighborhood. “I’m sure we rang their door bell on Halloween.”

He looked down the block, then turned back to his daughter. “I’m sure of it,” he said.

Ms. Lanza’s sister-in-law Marsha Lanza also struggled to make sense of events. “I just don’t have an answer,” she said, starting to cry. “I wish I had an answer for you. I wish somebody had saw it coming.”

Cops turn Connecticut Massacre into a jobs program???

Gov: Gunman shot self as police closed in

By John Christoffersen Associated Press Sun Dec 16, 2012 12:12 PM

NEWTOWN, Conn. — The gunman in the Connecticut shooting rampage committed suicide as first responders closed in, the governor said Sunday, raising the specter that Adam Lanza had planned an even more gruesome massacre and was stopped short.

Lanza blasted his way into the Sandy Hook Elementary School and used a high-power rifle to kill 20 children and 6 adults, including the principal and school psychologist who tried to stop him, authorities said.

As President Barack Obama prepared a visit and churches opened their doors to comfort a grieving town Sunday, federal agents fanned out to dozens of gun stores and shooting ranges across Connecticut, chasing leads they hoped would cast light on Lanza’s life.

Among the questions: Why did his mother, a well-to-do suburban divorcee, keep a cache of high-power weapons in the house? What experience did Lanza have with those guns? And, above all, what set him on a path to shoot and kill 20 children, along with the adults who tried to stop him?

Speaking on ABC television’s “This Week,” Gov. Dannel Malloy said Lanza shot himself as police entered the building.

“We surmise that it was during the second classroom episode that he heard responders coming and apparently at that, decided to take his own life,” Malloy said.

Malloy offered no possible motive for the shooting and a law enforcement official has said police have found no letters or diaries left behind that could shed light on it.

Lanza shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, to death at the home they shared Friday, then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School in her car with at least three of her guns, forced his way in by breaking a window and opened fire, authorities said. Within minutes, he killed the children, six adults and himself.

All the victims at the school were shot with a rifle, at least some of them up close, and all were apparently shot more than once, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver said. There were as many as 11 shots on the bodies he examined.

All six adults killed at the school were women. Of the 20 children, eight were boys and 12 were girls.

Asked whether the children suffered, Carver said, “If so, not for very long.” Asked how many bullets were fired, Carver said, “I’m lucky if I can tell you how many I found.”

Parents identified the children through photos to spare them some shock, Carver said.

The terrible details about the last moments of young innocents emerged as authorities released their names and ages — the youngest 6 and 7, the oldest 56. They included Ana Marquez-Greene, a little girl who had just moved to Newtown from Canada; Victoria Soto, a 27-year-old teacher who apparently died while trying to hide her pupils; and principal Dawn Hochsprung, who authorities said lunged at the gunman in an attempt to overtake him.

The tragedy has plunged Newtown into mourning and added the picturesque New England community of 27,000 people to the grim map of towns where mass shootings in recent years have periodically reignited the national debate over gun control but led to little change.

School officials were trying to determine what to do about sending the survivors back to class, Newtown police Lt. George Sinko said at a news conference Sunday.

Sinko said he “would find it very difficult” for students to return to the school. But, he added, “we want to keep these kids together. They need to support each other,” he said.

Plans were being made for some students to attend classes in nearby Monroe, said Jim Agostine, superintendent of schools there.

Residents and faith leaders reflected Sunday on the mass shooting and what meaning, if any, to find in it. Obama planned to attend an evening interfaith vigil — the fourth time he will have traveled to a city after a mass shooting.

At Saint Rose of Lima Roman Catholic church, Jennifer Waters, who at 6 is the same age as many of the victims and attends a different school, came to Mass on Sunday in Newtown with a lot of questions.

“The little children — are they with the angels?” she asked her mother while fiddling with a small plastic figurine on a pew near the back of the church. “Are they going to live with the angels?”

Her mother, Joan, 45, assured her they were, then put a finger to her daughter’s lips, urging her to be quiet.

An overflow crowd of more than 800 people attended the 9 a.m. service at the church, where eight children will be buried later this week. The gunman, Adam Lanza, and his mother also attended church here. Spokesman Brian Wallace said the diocese has yet to be asked to provide funerals for either.

Boxes of tissues were placed strategically in each pew and on each window sill. The altar was adorned with bouquets, one shaped as a broken heart, with a zigzag of red carnations cutting through the white ones.

In his homily, the Rev. Jerald Doyle, the diocesan administrator, tried to answer the question of how parishioners could find joy in the holiday season with so much sorrow surrounding them.

“You won’t remember what I say, and it will become unimportant,” he said. “But you will really hear deep down that word that will finally and ultimately bring peace and joy. That is the word by which we live. That is the word by which we hope. That is the word by which we love.”

After the Mass, Joan and Jennifer stopped by a makeshift memorial outside the church, which was filled with votive candles and had a pile of bouquets and stuffed animals underneath, to pray the Lord’s Prayer.

Jennifer asked whether she could take one.

“No, those are for the little children,” her mother replied.

“Who died?” her daughter asked.

“Yes,” said her mother, wiping away a tear.

But the noon Mass was disrupted when worshippers hurriedly left the church, saying they were told there was a bomb threat.

Halfway through the Mass, the priest stopped and said, “Please, everybody leave. There is a threat,” said Anna Wood of Oxford, Connecticut, one of the worshippers who left.

It’s not clear whether there actually was a threat or whether it was a hoax or the result of a community on edge.

At least a dozen police in camouflage gear and carrying guns arrived at St. Rose of Lima Church. An Associated Press photographer saw police leave carrying something in a red tarp. There was no official report from police about the threat or evacuation.

In the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI told pilgrims and tourists Sunday that he is praying for the families of the victims.

“I assure the families of the victims, especially those who lost a child, of my closeness in prayer,” the pope said. “May the God of consolation touch their hearts and ease their pain.”

Amid the confusion and sorrow, stories of heroism emerged, including an account of Hochsprung, 47, and the school psychologist, Mary Sherlach, 56, rushing toward Lanza in an attempt to stop him. Both died.

There was also 27-year-old teacher Victoria Soto, whose name has been invoked as a portrait of selflessness. Investigators told relatives she was killed while shielding her first-graders from danger. She reportedly hid some students in a bathroom or closet, ensuring they were safe, a cousin, Jim Wiltsie, told ABC News.

“She put those children first. That’s all she ever talked about,” a friend, Andrea Crowell, told The Associated Press. “She wanted to do her best for them, to teach them something new every day.”

There was also 6-year-old Emilie Parker, whose grieving father, Robbie, talked to reporters not long after police released the names of the victims but expressed no animosity, offering sympathy for Lanza’s family.

“I can’t imagine how hard this experience must be for you,” he said.

The gunman’s father, Peter Lanza, issued a statement Saturday relating his own family’s anguish in the aftermath.

“Our family is grieving along with all those who have been affected by this enormous tragedy. No words can truly express how heartbroken we are,” he said. “We are in a state of disbelief and trying to find whatever answers we can. We too are asking why. … Like so many of you, we are saddened, but struggling to make sense of what has transpired.”

The rifle used was a Bushmaster .223-caliber, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation who was not authorized to speak about it and talked on condition of anonymity. The gun is commonly seen at competitions and was the type used in the 2002 sniper killings in the Washington, D.C., area. Also found in the school were two handguns, a Glock 10 mm and a Sig Sauer 9 mm.

A law enforcement official said Saturday that authorities were investigating fresh leads that could reveal more about the lead-up to the shooting. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Ginger Colbrun, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said earlier there was no evidence Lanza was involved in gun clubs or had trained for the shooting. When reached later in the day and asked whether that was still true, she said, “We’re following any and all leads related to this individual and firearms.”

Law enforcement officials have said they have found no note or manifesto from Lanza of the sort they have come to expect after murderous rampages such as the Virginia Tech bloodbath in 2007 that left 33 people dead.

Education officials said they had found no link between Lanza’s mother and the school, contrary to news reports that said she was a teacher there. Investigators said they believe Adam Lanza attended Sandy Hook many years ago, but they had no explanation for why he went there Friday.

Authorities said Adam Lanza had no criminal history, and it was not clear whether he had a job. Lanza was believed to have suffered from a personality disorder, said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Another law enforcement official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Lanza had been diagnosed with Asperger’s, a mild form of autism often characterized by social awkwardness.

People with the disorder are often highly intelligent. While they can become frustrated more easily, there is no evidence of a link between Asperger’s and violent behavior, experts say.

The law enforcement officials insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the unfolding investigation.

Richard Novia, the school district’s head of security until 2008, who also served as adviser for the Newtown High School technology club, of which Lanza was a member, said he clearly “had some disabilities.”

“If that boy would’ve burned himself, he would not have known it or felt it physically,” Novia said in a phone interview. “It was my job to pay close attention to that.”

———

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Jim Fitzgerald, Bridget Murphy, Pat Eaton-Robb and Michael Melia in Newtown; Denise Lavoie in Danbury, Connecticut; Adam Geller in Southbury, Connecticut; Stephen Singer in Hartford, Connecticut; Pete Yost in Washington; and the AP News Research Center in New York.

More articles on the Connecticut school murders

I am also going to post the previous articles there too.

LAPD ordered to pay $24 million in 13-year-old's shooting

Source

LAPD ordered to pay $24 million in 13-year-old's shooting

By Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times

December 15, 2012

A jury on Friday handed down a $24-million verdict against the Los Angeles Police Department for the shooting of a 13-year-old boy who was playing with a replica gun. His injury left him paralyzed.

The award is believed to be the largest sanction ever against the LAPD for a single incident and perhaps the largest of any kind against the department. It comes as the LAPD is trying to stem the number of costly lawsuits brought against it.

The case centered on a December 2010 encounter, in which Officer Victor Abarca and his partner were on patrol in Glassell Park shortly before 8 p.m., according to police records.

The officers, who told investigators they were in search of graffiti and gang activity, came upon Rohayent Gomez and two of his friends on a street.

Gomez's attorney, Renaldo Casillas, said the evidence and testimony from two eyewitnesses to the shooting "completely blew apart" Abarca's account.

Casillas said Gomez, whom he described as a tuba player and soccer enthusiast, was playing "cops and robbers" in the street near his home with his friends. They each had airsoft pistols that fire small plastic pellets and are made to look like actual firearms.

The witnesses told jurors that the officers arrived and immediately drew their weapons, Casillas said. Gomez, who was hiding behind a parked van to reload his pellet gun, was unaware of the police, Casillas said, and was startled when Abarca came around the side of the van.

The witnesses said the officer gave one command ordering Gomez not to move and then fired a single shot at the boy as he took a step out of surprise, Casillas said.

The boy was hit in the chest and left paralyzed by the injury.

That account differs dramatically from the one Abarca gave investigators.

Abarca said that in the darkness he was unaware he was confronting a teenager and claimed that the boy ignored repeated commands to come out from behind the van.

When he finally complied, Abarca said, the person "had both hands concealed within his sweatshirt and was bent slightly at the waist," according to the LAPD's internal investigation into the incident.

Abarca said it was only then that he drew his service pistol and fired a single round when Gomez pulled what appeared to be a pistol from his waistband.

Abarca told investigators he had not been able to see the colored tip of the airsoft pistol that is supposed to distinguish it as a fake.

Casillas rejected this, saying the witnesses had testified that it was "glaringly apparent they were kids and that they were playing cops and robbers."

The boy's wounds also countered the officer's version of events, Casillas said. Gomez was shot in the left clavicle and the bullet traveled downward into his spine — a trajectory that would have been impossible if Gomez had squared off with Abarca as the officer claimed, Casillas said.

The jury found that Abarca had used excessive force and was negligent in his decision to fire. Although city taxpayers will pay the $24-million verdict, Abarca himself could be ordered to pay additional punitive damages if the jury chooses to award them at a later hearing.

Lawyers from the city attorney's office, which defended Abarca and the department in the case, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Last year, Abarca was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Police Commission, which rules in all shooting cases on whether officers were justified in using deadly force.

The commission concluded that the replica "was indistinguishable from a real firearm" and that "reasonably, any officer in similar circumstances would be focused on the threat posed by the weapon and would not see the red tip on the end of the gun."

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said in a statement Friday that he's been seeking legislation that would require makers of replica guns to better distinguish them from regular guns.

"This is a tragedy for all involved, but in particular for the young man injured in this police shooting and for the officer who believed that he was protecting himself and his partner from a real threat," Beck said. "The replica gun [the boy] had was indistinguishable from a real handgun on a dark night. When our officers are confronted with a realistic replica weapon in the field, they have to react in a split second to the perceived threat. If our officers delay or don't respond to armed suspects, it could cost them their lives."

joel.rubin@latimes.com

Former LAPD detective charged with theft and fraud

Source

Former LAPD detective charged with theft and fraud

December 14, 2012 | 9:37 pm

A former Los Angeles police detective who allegedly lost millions of dollars given to her by fellow officers and other investors was charged with theft and fraud this week by the California attorney general’s office.

It is the second time Darcey Greenfield has faced allegations that she misled investors in a real estate investment scheme. Last year, prosecutors in San Bernardino County brought similar charges.

Prosecutors in the attorney general’s white collar crime unit began investigating Greenfield, 41, several months ago, after LAPD investigators presented them with the findings of their own inquiry, according to the attorney general’s office.

“This is another unfortunate case where a perpetrator exploited the trust placed in a professional relationship to defraud an investor,” said Commissioner of Corporations Jan Lynn Owen, whose office assisted the attorney general in the investigation. After interviewing several alleged victims and examining her bank records, investigators concluded that Greenfield had lied to investors, according to documents filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Greenfield, who resigned in disgrace in 2011, allegedly told investors their money was being used to help homeowners who were facing foreclosure, court documents said. In reality, she handed the funds over to a felon, who disappeared with the cash, the records say.

Greenfield was arrested Wednesday after a court appearance on the earlier charges in San Bernardino. She was later released from custody on her own recognizance and is scheduled to appear in court for a preliminary hearing Jan. 29.

Investigators began to scrutinize Greenfield after The Times profiled her financial dealings in a 2010 article. In that story, Greenfield said she began investing in real estate shortly after she joined the LAPD in 1994. Those early purchases and sales of properties were personal deals but soon evolved into a side business that involved soliciting investments from others. She made grandiose claims, telling investors they would receive double-digit returns within months, according to authorities, interviews with investors and documents obtained by The Times.

In the case brought by the attorney general’s office, Greenfield faces nine charges of securities fraud and grand theft involving the $865,000 she solicited from four investors. Total losses were probably far greater, however. Over several months in 2007 and 2008, Greenfield told The Times, she collected about $2 million from investors. San Bernardino County officials put the total amount raised from Los Angeles County residents at $3 million.

At least 13 LAPD employees gave funds to Greenfield, including four detectives and five supervising sergeants, according to court records. Police officials suspect that even more department employees were involved, because groups of officers probably pooled their money and invested under one name.

Greenfield told investors she was swindled by Leroy Dowd, a 70-year-old self-proclaimed bishop of a now-defunct South Los Angeles church, according to court documents. She gave Dowd cash to catch up on late mortgage and tax payments on his church and several other properties, she said. In exchange, Dowd promised he would repay her with interest when the properties sold or the mortgages were refinanced.

Dowd was eventually arrested on unrelated fraud charges. He pleaded guilty in May 2010 to one count of grand theft of personal property and was sentenced to three years in state prison but disappeared after being released from custody.

The attorney general’s office declined to comment on Dowd or whether it was pursuing charges against him.

Greenfield could not be reached for comment. In an earlier interview, however, she told The Times she was upfront with investors about her dealings with Dowd — a claim at least some of them deny.

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

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)

McAfee 'not out of the woods' legally

McAfee 'not out of the woods' legally

Bob Egelko

Updated 11:33 pm, Friday, December 14, 2012

Software developer John McAfee is a free man because he managed to elude police in Belize and slip into Guatemala, from where - like any run-of-the-mill illegal immigrant - he was deported.

Whether he stays free in the United States or is sent back to Belize is likely to depend, in the words of the extradition treaty with the Central American nation, on whether he becomes a "person sought for prosecution" in the murder of a fellow American expatriate.

He hasn't reached that status, according to news accounts. But, said Bill Hing, a veteran immigration lawyer and law professor at the University of San Francisco, "This guy is definitely not out of the woods."

The saga of the 67-year-old former Silicon Valley magnate and antivirus-software developer is extraordinary - he spent three weeks in disguise and on the run, claimed he was the target of a government plot after refusing to pay a bribe, and admitted faking a heart attack. But his legal situation is far from unique, and the last chapter hasn't necessarily been written.

McAfee disappeared a month ago, shortly before police in Belize described him as a person of interest in the Nov. 11 shooting death of Gregory Faull, a businessman who was his neighbor on the island of Ambergris Caye, Belizean territory, where McAfee had lived since 2008.

McAfee, who has kept in touch with U.S. media, has said that he's innocent and that Belize's government is after him. He claimed soldiers invaded his property in April, falsely accused him of running a drug lab, handcuffed him, shot his dogs and demanded a $2 million bribe, which he refused to pay.

The nation's prime minister, Dean Barrow, has described McAfee as "extremely paranoid, even bonkers."

McAfee, a British native, was arrested in Guatemala last week. He applied unsuccessfully for political asylum and told ABC News he faked a heart attack when it appeared a Guatemalan judge was about to order him deported to Belize.

But after a week in custody, he was put on a plane to Miami. Hing said Guatemala apparently granted McAfee's request to be deported to his nation of origin.

"Under standard deportation laws, you can be deported to the country of your nationality or the country from which you last embarked," he said.

The usual practice, said San Francisco immigration attorney Marc Van Der Hout, is to deport illegal entrants to their country of citizenship - which could have been either the United States or Great Britain, as McAfee claims dual citizenship. The main exception, Van Der Hout said, is that undocumented immigrants caught at the airport will often be sent back where they came from.

No warrants have been issued for his arrest, so McAfee is no longer a fugitive. But U.S. authorities could arrest him if Belize seeks extradition. The U.S.-Belize extradition treaty, signed in 2000, provides for removal of anyone "sought for prosecution" in either country.

Belize authorities interpret that term to apply to criminal suspects. But Raphael Martinez, a spokesman for the nation's police, was quoted by Reuters as saying that while officers want to question McAfee, "we don't have enough information to change his status from person of interest to suspect."

If that changes, Mc-Afee would be entitled to a hearing before a federal judge to challenge extradition.

At the hearing, prosecutors from Belize wouldn't have to provide proof of McAfee's guilt, but they'd need to show that "they've got enough there, that the case hasn't been trumped up or is (a product of) some local political dispute," said Denver attorney Laura Lichter, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

The hearing would also examine whether the nation seeking extradition would provide a fair trial, a question on which a judge seeks the views of the U.S. State Department. According to the department's website, Belize's "independent judiciary generally enforced" the right to a fair trial, conducted by a judge without a jury.

The State Department, Hing said, "can strongly urge a court (to deny extradition) for diplomatic reasons or for a history of human rights violations."

But in McAfee's case, Hing said, "we get along with them (Belize). They have a system. ... If they give assurances to the U.S. that they will afford him sufficient due process, and there is an agreement between the two countries, they'll extradite him."

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: begelko@sfchronicle.com

More confusion on Obama's pot policy

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

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!!!!

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.”

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

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.

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.

137 police shots, 2 dead: Many questions in Ohio

137 police shots, 2 dead: Many questions in Ohio

By Thomas J. Sheeran Associated Press Sun Dec 16, 2012 11:30 AM

CLEVELAND — A chase that ended with 13 officers firing 137 rounds, killing two people, began with a pop — perhaps a gunshot or backfire from a car speeding past police headquarters.

For the next 25 minutes late in the night of Nov. 29, the car crisscrossed Cleveland tailed by officers, headed along Interstate 90 and wound up near the back entrance of a school in East Cleveland, where police opened fire.

Police don’t know why the driver, Timothy Russell, 43, refused to stop. Russell had a criminal record including convictions for receiving stolen property and robbery. His passenger, Malissa Williams, 30, had convictions for drug-related charges and attempted abduction.

The fallout from their deaths has cast the Cleveland police department in an uneasy light amid community complaints about what’s been called a racially motivated execution of two people with no evidence they were armed.

The state took over the case and families for both victims and civil-rights groups have demanded a federal investigation. They accuse officers of alleged civil rights violations in the pursuit and gunfire barrage.

“You just can’t help but wonder how so many officers were able to shoot so many bullets at these two people in this vehicle,” said Paul Cristallo, an attorney representing Russell’s family.

Protesters yelled “execution” at a community meeting called by Mayor Frank Jackson to quell rising tensions. The city tried to defuse the outrage by reaching out to federal officials for help. There was no immediate federal decision to intervene.

The officers involved in the shooting have been assigned to desk duties, which is standard procedure after a shooting. They want to avoid talking to the media while subject to the state and internal investigations, their union president said.

The scene of the deaths has turned into a memorial, with small vigil candles arranged in the shape of a heart and the number 137 and stuffed animals piled together with a frost-encrusted poinsettia.

The chase began about 10:30 p.m. when an officer thought he heard a gunshot from a car speeding by the police and courts complex in downtown Cleveland and jumped into his patrol car, made a U-turn and radioed for help.

The chase went through crowded residential neighborhoods, then reversed course, headed east onto busy I-90 and through parts of Cleveland and eventually East Cleveland, ending with the car blocked in the rear of a school.

By police accounts, at least 30 patrol cars were involved in the chase, including Cleveland and East Cleveland police, sheriff’s deputies and state troopers.

As the chase ended along hillside driveways heading to the school in John D. Rockefeller’s old neighborhood, Russell allegedly rammed a patrol car and drove toward an officer on foot. Then the gunfire erupted: 137 rounds, Russell shot 23 times and Williams 24 times and their car pockmarked.

Jeff Follmer, president of the police union, defended the officers’ actions and said officers used force to confront a driver using his vehicle as a potentially deadly weapon.

That was an acceptable police response, said David Klinger, a former Los Angeles and Redmond, Wash., patrolman who teaches criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

“Police officers are authorized to use deadly force to protect themselves and others from great bodily injury or death,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to stand there and let somebody run me over.”

While the driver may have endangered officers, Klinger questioned why the passenger was shot two dozen times, though he wondered whether officers missed while aiming at the driver.

Follmer said some officers in the chase believed both the driver and passenger were armed, and police radio chatter had numerous references warning about a weapon or gunfire from the fleeing car. “I guess he’s waving a gun out the window pointing at the officers,” one radio dispatch said.

But no weapon or shell casings were found in the fleeing car and the chase route was searched for any trace.

In a well-integrated police force, the makeup of the officers who fired raised the issue of race: 12 are white and one Hispanic. Both victims were black.

The police union president said race wasn’t an issue and said the racial makeup of the pursuing officers was random.

But the NAACP called the shootings unacceptable and avoidable and called on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio went further, calling for a special prosecutor without ties to the northeast Ohio law enforcement community. The ACLU also asked the attorney general to remove East Cleveland police and the sheriff’s department from the state probe because they were involved in the chase.

Cristallo said people who are part of Cleveland’s black community are angry. “The people who live in the inner city in Cleveland, the black people in this community, feel that this was an assault on the whole community,” he said.

Complaints about the relationship between police and Cleveland’s black residents date back to the discovery of the bodies of several black women in a home in an impoverished neighborhood east of downtown in 2009. The man who lived in the home was sentenced to death last year in the killings of 11 women.

That case shed light on residents’ complaints that reports of missing black women involved in drugs and prostitution were ignored, tarnishing the image of police.

“This most recent shooting is only the latest in a long line of incidents in Cuyahoga County that have tested people’s faith in their public servants,” said James Hardiman, a veteran civil-rights attorney and legal director of the ACLU of Ohio.

The shooting deaths have also strained the relationship between officers and city leaders.

The mayor offered an even-handed approach and said police would be backed if they obeyed procedures during the chase but would face unspecified consequences if that wasn’t the case.

But the quick response by a glum-looking police Chief Michael McGrath that that the shooting was a tragedy upset rank-and-file officers who felt he spoke too fast without knowing the facts.

“Morale is down. There is no confidence that there’s backing with the chief right now,” union president Follmer said.

The internal investigation on whether officers followed departmental procedures could take six weeks or more, the chief said. The mayor said the state investigation could take months.

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

Horne’s hit-and-run case delayed again

Associated Press Mon Dec 17, 2012 7:16 AM

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

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

The article is titled

"Cell Phone Analysis: Part 1"

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

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

Get ready: Drones will come to Bay Area

Get ready: Drones will come to Bay Area

Chip Johnson, Chronicle Columnist

Updated 8:29 pm, Monday, December 17, 2012

If everything goes according to plan, the Alameda County Sheriff's Office will soon have a drone, a small unmanned aircraft, to aid with crowd control, search-and-rescue missions and other law enforcement duties that could use a set of eyes in the air.

Think of it as the newest tool for law enforcement. Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy about this.

The chief concern of critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, is that the drones threaten the privacy rights of everyday citizens.

The Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission went as far as to propose a ban, a "No Drone Zone" in Berkeley airspace for all but hobbyists.

But despite the commission's stern stance, in the not-too-distant future the skies above American cities will host unmanned flying vehicles.

As an Oakland resident, I'd like to propose that all future law enforcement drone flyovers planned for Berkeley instead be rerouted here. We need all the help we can get.

In Oakland, residents are concerned that there aren't enough law enforcement eyes to watch out for them. We already use technology to help detect and trace gunfire. We're endeavoring to make downtown Oakland a place with more cameras perched on building ledges than pigeons. The city has a program to aid private businesses to install their own systems.

The truth is that personal privacy was breached by modern technology nearly 20 years ago, and there's no going back.

There's little you can't see for yourself online, and if nudity advocates in Berkeley and San Francisco had their way over the years, there would be little you couldn't see just walking down the street.

However, the potential applications for unmanned aircraft are boundless. Desired in Oakland

In Oakland, Police Chief Howard Jordan supports their use for law enforcement because the flying machines - which federal guidelines limit to 55 pounds or less - can serve as a force multiplier in a city whose officers are outnumbered, outgunned and too often out-maneuvered by the bad guys. "If they're used to assist us in fighting crime, locating hazardous materials, search-and-rescue efforts and catching the bad guys, I have no problem using them," Jordan said.

He dismissed the privacy issue, noting that many law enforcement agencies already possess helicopters equipped with advanced sensory systems.

"A helicopter can already do the same thing - but they cost three times as much to operate," Jordan said.

The sheriff's department has requested a little more than $30,000 to purchase a drone, but the plan requires a public hearing process and final approval by the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, which last week tabled the matter because of vigorous voices raising privacy concerns.

"The (unmanned aircraft systems) are a tool that we're going to use for mission-specific events," said Sgt. J.D. Nelson, a sheriff's department spokesman. "We've used remote-controlled robots for more than a decade, and they too are specific tools used for specific jobs."

It's particularly interesting to see Berkeley in the middle of the latest potential government threat on personal privacy, but certainly not because it's out of character. Irony in Berkeley

It's because in a UC Berkeley lab just a couple of miles away from Berkeley City Hall, Karl Hedrick, a professor of mechanical engineering, is working with his team at the Center for the Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles on the next generation of unmanned flight: autonomous aircraft tasked and equipped to search for anything from a gas leak to a lost hiker. It could fly to the target, avoiding dangerous obstacles, conduct a search, collect data and return - all without any remote operation.

"They are very good at surveillance, and if it was just controlling traffic or chasing the bad guys, I don't think the public would have too much of a problem with that," Hedrick said.

I sure hope not, because their arrival is inevitable.

Chip Johnson's column appears in The San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday and Friday. E-mail: chjohnson@sfchronicle.com

Mexican president announces new security force

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.

Student with prop replica gun prompts lockdown at Gilbert school

Source

Student with prop replica gun prompts lockdown at Gilbert school

Posted: Monday, December 17, 2012 10:59 am

Tribune

A school project provoked a Gilbert police department response and a lockdown at Williams Field High School on Friday.

Police were alerted after a parent observed what he or she thought was a student walking across campus with a rifle.

However, the rifle turned out to be a non-functional, prop replica gun, police said. No threats and no crime occurred.

The school was in lockdown for 30 minutes as police searched the area, police said. The student returned to school after seeing the police response and explained that he carried the replica home after school.

“The police department appreciates the diligence of community members for calling in this suspicious activity,” said Sgt. Jesse

Sanger, spokesman for the department. “As always we encourage citizens to report any type of suspicious activity, regardless of how small the situation may seem.”

The school will conduct its own administrative investigation, Sanger said.

Williams Field High School is in the Higley Unified School District.

Bias toward killer’s victims led to police failure

Source

Bias toward killer’s victims led to police failure

Associated Press Mon Dec 17, 2012 3:36 PM

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Systemic police prejudice against the poor, drug-addicted sex workers who convicted killer Robert Pickton targeted in Vancouver allowed him to spend years hunting his victims unimpeded by authorities, said a report released Monday by a public inquiry into what police have called Canada’s worst serial killing case.

Commissioner Wally Oppal’s 1,448-page final report chronicles years of mistakes that allowed Pickton to lure dozens of women to his farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, with little interference from police and even less concern from the public.

Pickton was convicted in 2007 of six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of sex workers. He slaughtered the women at his suburban pig farm and fed some of the remains to his pigs. Pickton was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years.

Pickton picked the women up from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, several square blocks of squalid hotels, drug dealers and street-level prostitution, luring his victims with promises of money, alcohol and drugs.

There were reports of missing women in Vancouver dating back to the 1980s, and those disappearances increased dramatically in the mid-1990s.

When relatives and friends attempted to report those women missing, officers and staff with the Vancouver police department told them the women were transient drug addicts who weren’t in any trouble or were simply on vacation, Oppal’s report notes, referring back to testimony from those families at the inquiry.

Oppal wrote in his report, “Forsaken,” that police did not take the disappearance of the women seriously because the victims were poor, aboriginal and addicted to drugs.

“The missing and murdered women were forsaken by society at large and then again by police,” said Oppal.

While Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder, 20 other charges of first-degree murder were stayed.

Commission lawyer Art Vertlieb said DNA from 32 identified missing women and one unknown woman were found at the farm Pickton owned with his siblings in Vancouver’s Port Coquitlam suburb.

The report said the first major investigative blunders began in 1997, when Pickton attacked a sex worker at his farm. It was later revealed DNA from other missing women were on his clothes that day. Pickton was charged with attempted murder, but prosecutors stayed the case in 1998, after which 19 more women later connected to Pickton’s farm vanished.

Oppal said it was “patently unreasonable” that that investigation was not further pursued.

Pickton had been tagged as a prime suspect in 1999 as police investigated reports of missing sex workers and Pickton bragged to police after his February 2002 arrest that he had killed as many as 49 women and intended to kill more.

Oppal, a former judge, concluded police failed to fully investigate Pickton, 63.

“Recurring patterns of error . . . went unchecked and uncorrected,” Oppal said.

Vertlieb told Oppal in his opening statement to the inquiry that Vancouver police officer Kim Rossmo said a serial killer was at work but his assertions were dismissed by police superiors.

In his report, Oppal said the women’s lives were marked by violence, addiction, racism and mental health issues.

He said the relationship between police and sex workers is marked by distrust. He said poor report taking and follow-up of missing women lead to “critical failures” by police. He said leads about Pickton would have been generated had police acted on reports.

He also concluded police “utterly failed” to warn women of dangers to their safety.

Oppal began the inquiry hearings in October 2011 after the Supreme Court of Canada rejected Pickton’s final conviction appeal in 2010.

The report contains 63 recommendations, among them establishing a regional police force for the Vancouver area and that police must be more accountable to their communities.

Diane Rock was among one of the victims in the 20 charges stayed against Pickton by prosecutors.

Her sister, Lilliane Beaudoin, hopes the report will be taken seriously and that people in Pickton’s poverty-stricken hunting ground will be helped.

“I’ll never have closure,” she said. “It’s hard to feel one’s lost a loved one when there’s no burial. There are no remains of my sister. I can’t comprehend that.”

The case was the largest criminal investigation in Canadian history.

A Vancouver Police Department August 2010 report said 11 women may have been spared had city police or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police acted on information available four years before Pickton’s arrest.

Arizona is number #2 in government sponsored murders??

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Report: Few states carry out most executions

By Mark Sherman Associated Press Mon Dec 17, 2012 9:19 PM

WASHINGTON -- Four states carried out more than three-fourths of the executions in the United States this year, while another 23 states have not put an inmate to death in 10 years, an anti-capital punishment group reports.

The Death Penalty Information Center says in its annual report released Tuesday that Texas led the nation, as it does every year, with 15 executions. Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma had 6 each. Together, the four states accounted for 33 of the 43 executions in the United States in 2012.

The report also says that a handful of states were responsible for nearly two-thirds of death sentences imposed in 2012.

Both executions and new death sentences are far below their peaks since executions resumed in 1977 following a halt imposed by the Supreme Court. Texas’ 492 executions since 1977 are the most, by far. No more executions are scheduled before the end of the year, the group says.

“By every count, the death penalty is declining and becoming less relevant. It’s not turned to even in states that have been strong proponents of the death penalty. I’d even include Texas, which is sentencing many fewer people to death,” said Richard Dieter, the center’s executive director and author of the report.

Dieter singled out Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, none of which carried out an execution this year. And among those states, the only new death sentences were two in Georgia and one in Louisiana.

The exoneration of people wrongly convicted, the availability of prison terms of life without parole and the cost of capital trials and the appeals process all are factors in the decline, Dieter said.

The 43 executions equal the total in 2011 and were roughly half as many as in 2000. Ninety-eight prisoners were put to death in 1998, the busiest year for U.S. death chambers since 1977.

Only nine states in all performed lethal-injection executions. Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Ohio and South Dakota were the others.

Escape from 15th floor with bedsheets???

Source

Official: Convicted bank robbers used bedsheets to escape

By Rosemary Regina Sobol, Adam Sege and Annie Sweeney Tribune reporters

1:55 p.m. CST, December 18, 2012

Two convicted bank robbers escaped from the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in the Loop this morning by tying bedsheets together and shimmying down at least 15 stories to the ground below, officials say.

Joseph "Jose" Banks and Kenneth Conley were somehow able to climb out of the narrow slit of a window in the cell they shared and make their way down the south face of the federal jail, the spokesman said.

“A rope was fashioned out of bedsheets,’’ said a spokesman for the MCC. “I would imagine that they saved them up."

Conley and Banks, known as the Second-Hand Bandit who was convicted just last week, were discovered missing from their cell at the federal jail at 71 W. Van Buren St. around 8:45 a.m., according to Central District Police Sgt. Michael Lazzaro. The inmates were last checked at 5 a.m., he said.

The makeshift rope could be seen dangling along the south side of the MCC.

The MCC spokesman declined to say whether any guards were under investigation or whether anything was smuggled into them or how the narrow cell window was widened.

Hours after the escape, SWAT teams forced their way into a Tinley Park house where a relative of Conley is believed to live. But no one was found inside, and FBI officials said they believe Conley and Banks had been there hours earlier. The SWAT officers left the home after about 20 minutes and walked down the street with dogs as neighbors followed, taking pictures with their phones. About two blocks down, the officers searched the Metra stop.

A woman who answered at the home of a relative of Conley said it was "very upsetting for everyone" and declined further comment. Banks’ cousin, Theresa Ann Banks, pleaded for Banks to turn himself in.

“I just don’t want to see him get hurt or killed,” she said with a shaky voice. “(The family) is trying to hold themselves together. We just have to have faith in God and hope everything goes right.”

Theresa Ann Banks said she received a call about the escape from Banks' father, who heard about it on the news.

When Joseph Banks was arrested in 2008, Theresa Ann Banks said she visited him whenever she had a chance. “When I went to see him, he was calm, he was humble, he was happy to see me,” she said. “He was very positive every time I would go.”

Banks was described as black, 37, 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing 160 pounds. Conley is white, 38, 6 feet and 185 pounds.

Banks, known as the Second-Hand Bandit, was convicted last Thursday of two bank robberies and two attempted holdups. He made off with a nearly $600,000 in the heists, and authorities say $500,000 is still unaccounted for.

Banks was an aspiring clothing designer who claimed to be a "sovereign citizen" who could not be tried in a federal court. He acted as his own attorney and had to be restrained during his trial.

During closing arguments, Banks repeatedly interrupted Assistant U.S. Attorney Renato Mariotti, commenting on the evidence and suggesting photo lineups were rigged. Mariotti raised his voice over the interruptions to remind the jury of the evidence at trial, including $40,000 found in Banks' safe deposit box as well as a fake beard he wore in the robberies.

Security footage played for jurors showed Banks jumping bank counters and wielding a handgun as he ordered employees to open vaults and ATMs at the banks. In one video, a bank worker was shown hyperventilating on the floor of a cash room, clutching his chest and neck.

One day during his trial, Banks had to be restrained to keep him from leaving the courtroom. He had fired his attorneys, so Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer told him he had to stay in court.

Banks eventually agreed to sit still. As the security staff wheeled him into a room to release him from the chair, he called out: "I feel like I'm Hannibal Lecter or something."

Security was beefed up when the jury reached its decision, with 10 deputy U.S. marshals in the courtroom when the guilty verdict was read.

"I'll be seeking retribution as well as damages," he told U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer.

The judge calmly asked him how long he needed to submit a filing outlining his concerns. "No motion will be filed, but you'll hear from me," he replied.

Theresa Ann Banks said her cousin is “kind and intelligent,” and not the unruly character he was described during his trial.

“He is the kind of person that wants to make sure everyone is at peace,” she said. “He’s always been a good child.”

Conley pleaded guilty last October to robbing nearly $4,000 from a Homewood bank last year. He had lived in Tinley Park.

Conley robbed the MB Financial Bank branch at 2345 W. 184rd St. in Homewood on May 13, 2011. A floor host at a Chicago Heights strip club, he went back to work hours later to repay $500 he owed another club employee, authorities said. He was flashing a large amount of cash and was wearing the same black suit and white tie the bank robber wore, according to the criminal complaint.

Conley was caught by Chicago Heights police when he pointed a gun at someone while driving a gold Land Rover. Officers noticed he resembled the surveillance photos of the man who robbed the Homewood bank. Although the bank teller identified him and he was interviewed by authorities, he fled to California and was arrested there in September 2011.

The last escape at the MCC was in 1985 when two convicted murderers enlarged a sixth-floor window and climbed down a 75-foot electrical cord attached to a floor buffer.

Bernard Welch and Hugh Colomb used a bar from exercise weights to knock out concrete and used hacksaw blades to cut metal away, enlarging a 3-inch window slit. The blade had been smuggled into the jail, authorities said.

Welch was serving a 143-year sentence for the 1980 murder of Dr. Michael Halberstam, a Washington, D.C. cardiologist and brother of Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam.

Colomb was convicted of killing an inmate and assaulting a guard in the federal penitentiary in Marion.

Both men were apprehended months later.

rsobol@tribune.com

2 inmates escape from federal prison in Chicago

2 inmates escape from federal prison in Chicago

Associated Press

Associated Press Tue Dec 18, 2012 12:18 PM

CHICAGO — Two convicted bank robbers used a knotted rope or bed sheets to escape from a federal prison window high above downtown Chicago early Tuesday, a week after one of them made a courtroom vow of retribution.

The escape occurred sometime between 5 a.m. and 8:45 a.m. when the inmates were discovered missing, Chicago Police Sgt. Mark Lazarro said. Hours later, what appeared to be a rope, knotted at six-foot intervals, could be seen dangling into an alley from a window of the Metropolitan Correctional Center approximately 20 stories above the ground.

Jose Banks, 37, and Kenneth Conley, 38, had been wearing prison-issue orange jumpsuits, but now might be wearing white t-shirts, gray sweat pants and white gym shoes, Lazarro said.

The FBI said in a statement that the men were last seen together in the Tinley Park area, about 25 miles southwest of Chicago, and that they should be considered armed and dangerous. Police SWAT teams stormed a Tinley Park home early in the afternoon, but it was not immediately clear what they found.

Banks is described as a Black man, 5-feet-8, weighing 160 pounds. Conley is described as white, 6 feet tall, weighing 185 pounds.

The men apparently descended from a thin window on the flat south side of the prison into the alley below. The specially designed cell windows are barely half-a-foot wide.

Crowds of people gathered outside the building where the ropes still blew in the breeze, shaking their heads in disbelief that someone could have escaped from a lockup in the heart of downtown Chicago, just a block or two from key federal court and office buildings.

The owners of several small shops across the street from the wall said they didn’t see any police activity until around 8:30 a.m., when a dozen or more police cars and SWAT teams rushed into the area. Some police officers sprinted for a nearby subway entrance.

“It was clearly already too late. They were long gone,” said Randy Cohen, owner of the Royal Jewelry and Loans store 10 or 20 yards from where the inmates scaled down the rope.

Homeland Security and U.S. Marshal’s Service agents questioned him later in the morning and asked if security cameras on his building could have captured the escape or the men fleeing, Cohen said. He said he didn’t think the cameras would have been pointed in the right direction.

Liquor store owner, Baljit Singh, has a clear view of the side of the prison where the men escaped. She said there was no indication anything was amiss when she arrived at work at 7 a.m.

Banks, known as the Second-Hand Bandit because he wore used clothes during his heists, was convicted last week of robbing two banks and attempting to rob two others. Authorities say he stole almost $600,000, but most of that is still missing.

Banks was convicted by a federal jury last week after a trial at which he had to be restrained because he threatened to walk out of the courtroom. He acted as his own attorney and verbally sparred with the judge.

After U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer convicted him, he said he would “be seeking retribution as well as damages,” the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune reported.

When the judge asked how long he needed to submit a filing, Banks replied, “No motion will be filed, but you’ll hear from me,” the newspapers reported.

Conley pleaded guilty last October to robbing a Homewood Bank last year of nearly $4,000.

Manhunt continues after daring Loop jailbreak

Manhunt continues after daring Loop jailbreak

By Rosemary Regina Sobol, Annie Sweeney, Bridget Doyle and Andy Grimm Tribune reporters

9:05 a.m. CST, December 19, 2012

The search continued this morning for two convicted robbers who rappelled down the side of a high-rise federal jail in the South Loop, scurrying some 15 floors to freedom on a rope made of bedsheets.

The daring, carefully planned escape from the Metropolitan Correctional Center Tuesday by Joseph "Jose" Banks and Kenneth Conley shocked federal law enforcement officials who scrambled to find the two violent bank robbers on a desperate run.

FBI spokeswoman Joan Hyde says there are no developments to report this morning.

"Unfortunately, we don't have any new news," she said. "Our focus is still primarily on the Chicago metropolitan area."

The hulking federal jail with its narrow slits for windows has defied escape attempts. This marked only the second successful one and the first in almost three decades. Just three years ago, however, a brother of a famous Hollywood director was caught with 31 feet of roped bedsheets in his cell.

The two escapees made for memorable bank robbers — Banks for his goofy disguises and Conley for flaunting his cash loot a short time later at the strip club where he worked.

Banks and Conley were present for a 10 p.m. check Monday, but by 7 a.m., MCC employees arriving for work saw the crudely wrapped rope dangling on the south side of the building, still swinging in the wind.

Guards found the window in their cell broken and the makeshift rope tied to its bars, federal authorities revealed late Tuesday in filing escape charges against the pair. Numerous articles of clothing and sheets were piled under a blanket in both their beds to make it appear they were asleep for the standard overnight bed checks.

In addition, authorities found metal bars from the window in a mattress as well fake bars in the cell, suggesting the two had gone to some lengths to cover their tracks as they prepared their escape.

But exactly how Banks and Conley slipped through a window just 5 inches wide was not immediately clear.

"You've got to be a contortionist to pull that one off," said Scott Fawell, a top aide of convicted former Gov. George Ryan. Fawell spent about eight months at the MCC for corruption.

However, one law enforcement source said Banks and Conley may have removed a cinder block from beneath the window to make a bigger opening to slip out.

The jail, at 71 W. Van Buren St., was placed on lockdown after the break was discovered and visits with inmates were canceled, according to several criminal defense attorneys who had planned to meet with clients. The facility, which is operated by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, opened in 1975 and houses about 700 inmates.

Conley and Banks were last seen in suburban Tinley Park and are believed to be together. Banks, 37, was described as black, 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing 160 pounds, while Conley, 38, is white, 6 feet and 185 pounds.

Banks could have as much as $500,000 stashed away, according to testimony at his trial. He stole a combined $589,000 in two robberies, but only about $80,000 had been recovered or accounted for through Banks' purchases, prosecutors said.

The FBI called Banks one of the most prolific bank robbers in Chicago history, saying at the time of his arrest in 2008 that he was suspected in about 20 heists. However, he was charged in only two bank robberies and two attempted holdups. A jury convicted him on all counts last week.

An aspiring clothes designer, Banks was caught on bank surveillance tapes in 2007 and 2008 jumping bank counters and directing employees to empty vaults while wearing a fake beard. He was dubbed the Second Hand Bandit because of the discount clothing he wore during the robberies.

On the day he was scheduled to go to trial in late October, Conley abruptly pleaded guilty to robbing a Homewood bank in 2011 while brandishing a pistol and threatening a teller.

"If you don't give (the money) to me, I will put them in your head," he allegedly said.

Conley then went to the Chicago Heights strip club where he worked while still dressed in the black suit and white tie he wore during the holdup, flashing cash around, prosecutors alleged. He paid off a $400 debt before telling co-workers he was jetting off to Bermuda, according to the charges.

Conley, incarcerated at the MCC since October 2011, faces a maximum 20 years, while Banks, who has been in custody since 2008, could be hit with an 80-year sentence. An escape conviction carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Early in the day the search for the duo zeroed in on Tinley Park, where Conley lived and where the two had last been spotted, authorities said. SWAT teams searched the home of a Conley relative, but the investigators missed the two by a few hours, authorities said.

Helicopters hovered above the southwest suburb and streets were blocked by police squads as the search continued. The SWAT team walked the nearby streets with dogs as neighbors followed behind, snapping pictures with their phones. About two blocks down, the officers searched the Metra stop.

In the wake of the deadly school shooting in Newtown, Conn., Tinley Park officials notified local schools and dispatched police officers to school buildings closest to where the search was under way.

Federal and local law enforcement also charged into Conley's old strip club, Club 390, surprising staff and patrons, in an attempt to find him, staff said.

FBI agents first showed up at the Chicago Heights club early Tuesday morning, hours before its 11 a.m. opening. The agents questioned an employee who told them she hadn't seen Conley, staff said.

Sheriff's deputies returned around 1 p.m., bursting into the club in police gear and scattering the lunch crowd, employees said. A few officers questioned staff and searched the building, including the dancers' dressing room and women's bathroom. Plainclothes officers remained seated in the darkness at the periphery of the stage around 3 p.m.

A mug shot of Conley was posted near the cash register at the bar.

Authorities were chasing numerous tips into the night Tuesday, but the search so far remained focused on Chicago and the suburbs.

A woman who answered at the home of a relative of Conley said the day's events were "very upsetting for everyone" and declined further comment.

The Banks family learned of the escape while watching the morning news, said Banks' cousin, Theresa Ann Banks, who pleaded for her cousin to turn himself in.

"I just don't want to see him get hurt or killed," she said in a shaky voice. "(The family) is trying to hold themselves together. We just have to have faith in God and hope everything goes right."

Banks represented himself at the trial, challenging U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer so much that he was briefly strapped into a restraint chair during the trial. In court filings, he identified himself as "Joseph Banks-Bey," a Moorish national, and made legal filings defying the court's jurisdiction.

He offered a long, rambling closing that Pallmeyer finally cut off because Banks would not stop making wild accusations that the government had "trumped" up the charges and rigged photo lineups in the case.

The law enforcement source said security had been stepped up for Pallmeyer and the prosecutors involved in Banks' trial.

Tribune reporter Adam Sege contributed.

FBI: Escaped inmates took cab near Chicago jail

FBI: Escaped inmates took cab near Chicago jail

Associated Press Wed Dec 19, 2012 8:11 PM

CHICAGO — Two convicted bank robbers who pulled off a daring overnight escape from a high-rise Chicago jail had changed from their prison garb by the time they hopped into a cab near the lock-up, investigators said Wednesday as they expanded their manhunt for the men.

Authorities were raiding houses and combing through records looking for anybody with ties to the inmates who climbed out a jail window and descended 20 stories using a makeshift rope.

The FBI said surveillance footage from a camera near the Metropolitan Correctional Center shows Kenneth Conley and Joseph Banks getting into a cab around 2:45 a.m. Tuesday — about four hours before workers spotted the rope dangling from the federal jail. The pair had changed from their orange jail-issued jumpsuits into light-colored pants and shirts, the FBI said.

“We don’t know if they fashioned their own clothes, or what,” said Special Agent Frank Bochte.

The FBI was offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of Conley and Banks, with the manhunt focused mainly on Chicago and its suburbs.

Law enforcement officials said at least three homes in the suburbs south of Chicago where one of the inmates once lived were searched Tuesday, and a suburban strip club where Conley once worked confirmed that investigators had visited.

Investigators believe the men had been at a home in Tinley Park, 25 miles southwest of Chicago, just hours before police SWAT teams stormed it. A law enforcement official said the home was that of Conley’s mother and that after the woman refused to let the escapees in, the men used a rock to break a window.

The person, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation so would speak only on condition of anonymity, said authorities also searched the home of a former girlfriend of Conley in nearby New Lenox, where the escapees had eaten breakfast.

In Orland Park, which borders Tinley Park, police Chief Timothy McCarthy said records revealed Conley had been arrested several years ago on a robbery charge.

“We looked at our own files and came up with a former colleague, a past associate,” he said.

Orland Park officers helped search a house where the associate lives or once lived, he said, but there was no evidence the escaped inmates had been there.

But the chain of events illustrates just the kind of thing investigators are doing: looking through records, arrest reports and even traffic tickets in the hopes of finding where the men went.

Authorities have not said exactly how many people are involved with the search. But the entire 35-member staff of the U.S. Marshals Service’s Chicago office was involved, a show of force that spokeswoman Belkis Cantor said “was rare.”

Many questions remained about how the two managed to pull off such an escape from the federal prison in the heart of downtown Chicago. At the top of the list is how they could have smashed a gaping hole into the wall at the bottom of a 6-inch wide window being heard or seen by correctional officers.

Another question is why, in the federal facility that houses some 700 inmates, the correctional officers didn’t notice the men were missing between a 10 p.m. headcount and one at 5 a.m.

A guidebook for jail inmates indicates there would have been headcounts at midnight and 3 a.m. But inmates aren’t required to stand for those headcounts, only for ones at 4 p.m. and 10 p.m. It’s unclear if guards may have been fooled by items the FBI said the men stuffed under their beds to make it appear they were there.

It’s also unclear what happened between when authorities have said guards first realized the men were missing and when the rope was spotted at 7 a.m.

Authorities also have not said how the two men managed to collect 200 feet of bed sheet or how the broke through the wall.

The escape bore a striking resemblance to one at the same jail in 1985. In that case, convicted murderer Bernard Welch and an accomplice, Hugh Colomb, smashed through a window with a bar from a weight set and used bed sheets and an electrical cord attached to a floor buffer to descend six stories to the ground.

William Rollins, a Washington, D.C., police detective at the time who was brought in by the U.S. Marshals Service to investigate, said the noise of breaking the wall would have been deafening. But he thinks other inmates would have gladly made a lot of noise to drown out the sound.

“They will lure a guard into the laundry room and have all the dryers going,” said Rollins, now retired, whose investigation is included in a book about Welch by Jack Burch and James B. King called “Ghost Burglar.”

Not only that, but he said his investigation revealed that inmates had hidden hacksaw blades in ceiling tiles and drill bits in bed frames.

“And they used a vacuum cleaner motor to power the drill bit,” he said. “These guys are really creative.”

Rollins said it’s likely Conley and Banks are still in the area. The vast majority of escapees don’t stray too far, he said.

“They stay where they feel comfortable in that environment,” he said.

Manhunt widens for escaped bank robbers

Manhunt widens for escaped bank robbers

By Annie Sweeney, Andy Grimm and Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune reporters Tribune reporters

11:08 p.m. CST, December 19, 2012

Two fugitive bank robbers who slid down the side of a high-rise federal jail on a rope constructed from bedsheets made their getaway by hopping a cab a few blocks away, authorities disclosed as they continued the manhunt for the elusive convicts.

Federal agents obtained surveillance video of Joseph "Jose" Banks and Kenneth Conley jumping into a taxi at Congress Parkway and Michigan Avenue at about 2:40 a.m., FBI spokeswoman Joan Hyde said. The video showed the two wearing light-colored clothing.

The break helped investigators pinpoint the timing of the bold nighttime escape from some 15 stories above the street at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Banks and Conley, both convicted bank robbers awaiting sentencing, were last accounted for at 10 p.m. Monday during a routine bed check.

Hours after the pair fled south in the cab, they banged on Conley's mother's door in far southwest suburban Tinley Park but were quickly sent on their way, according to a family member.

The two were last seen walking away from the home about 7 a.m., Hyde said.

FBI agents were analyzing the video for more leads, including the identity of the cab company and the number of the taxi.

The FBI also announced on Wednesday a $50,000 reward for information leading the capture of the two fugitives. Banks, 37, was described as black, 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing 160 pounds, while Conley, 38, is white, 6 feet and 185 pounds. Conley has a tattoo of a devil on his shoulder and a sun tattoo on his back.

With the pair on the loose for a second day, new details were emerging about Conley, the lesser known of the two.

Unlike Banks, who was considered by the FBI as one of the most prolific bank robbers in Chicago history, Conley was facing sentencing on just one bank holdup.

According to court records, Conley has a long criminal history. He has been convicted in Cook County of offenses ranging from retail theft to weapons violations and was sentenced to eight years in prison for an armed robbery in 1996.

Conley also was sentenced to six years in prison in San Diego County for petty theft with a prior conviction, according to California records. Less than a year after his parole in 2010, Conley robbed a bank in suburban Homewood of less than $4,000 cash, the heist that landed in him in the MCC.

Federal court records show Conley had been involuntarily committed at a hospital not long after the May 2011 bank robbery and that he was arrested at the Tinley Park Mental Health Center for violating his California parole.

A brother of Conley's who asked that his name not be printed said he wasn't home when Conley and Banks arrived at the family home early Tuesday, but he spoke to his mother and sister minutes after the pair's visit.

He said Conley turned up at the Tinley Park home with a man whom family members later identified as Banks.

"He was pounding on the door, and the doorbell was going crazy," said his brother.

Conley came in, looking frazzled and wearing a white shirt and gray pants, the brother said. "He said, 'Hey, I'm out on bond,' which we thought was strange, because usually the family gets some notice."

They asked him to leave, although one brother gave him a winter coat.

"Do I think he's capable of doing something dangerous?," the brother said. "I don't know. I hope he just turns himself in."

Banks, too, has a criminal history, court records show. He was sentenced to three years in prison each for a 1994 burglary and a 1995 attempted burglary.

Banks' prolific bank spree as the Second Hand Bandit — so named for the discount clothes he wore to his robberies — earned him headlines. He was an aspiring clothing designer when he started knocking off banks.

But his trial in recent weeks added a new level of curiosity about Banks, who represented himself and at times made a quiet spectacle in court as he challenged the proceedings.

At one point the judge ordered he be strapped into a restraint chair, prompting him to tell her felt like Hannibal Lecter.

Banks and Conley were cellmates at the MCC and together plotted only the second successful jailbreak there in three decades.

The shocking escape appeared to involve extensive planning. In addition to the bedsheets, investigators recovered bars that had been removed from a window as well as fake, replacement ones. The men had also put clothing and sheets under blankets in both their beds to throw off guards making nighttime checks, authorities said.

After Banks and Conley were seen in Tinley Park, federal and local investigators zeroed in on the south suburban area, executing raids at several locations. The hunt shifted late Tuesday evening to nearby New Lenox, where authorities believed some of Conley's friends and associated lived.

On Wednesday there was little visible evidence of the manhunt, but FBI officials said the search remains focused in and around Chicago.

asweeney@tribune.com

agrimm@tribune.com

jmeisner@tribune.com

FBI: 1 of 2 escaped Chicago inmates arrested

FBI: 1 of 2 escaped Chicago inmates arrested

Associated Press Fri Dec 21, 2012 12:58 AM

CHICAGO — One of two bank robbers was arrested late Thursday after a manhunt following the pair’s daring escape from a high-rise federal jail in Chicago, the FBI said.

FBI spokeswoman Joan Hyde said Joseph “Jose” Banks, 37, was captured without incident. Agents and officers from the Chicago FBI’s Violent Crimes Task Force, along with officers from the Chicago Police Department, arrested Banks about 11:30 p.m. Thursday in Chicago, Hyde said in a news release.

The arrest came days after Banks and Kenneth Conley somehow broke a large hole into the bottom of a 6-inch wide window of the Metropolitan Correctional Center, dropped a makeshift rope made of bed sheets out and climbed down about 20 stories to the ground.

The escape went unnoticed for hours, with surveillance video from a nearby street, showing the two, no longer wearing orange jail-issued jumpsuits hop into a cab shortly before 3 a.m. on Tuesday.

But when the facility did discover the two men were gone at about 7 a.m., what was found revealed a meticulously planned escape, including clothing and sheets, shaped to resemble a body, under blankets on beds, bars inside a mattress and even fake bars in the cells.

A massive manhunt involving state, federal and local law enforcement agencies was launched, as SWAT teams stormed into the home of a relative of Conley, only to learn the two had been there but had left, and searched other area homes and businesses — including a strip club where Conley once worked.

The search for Conley, 38, continued early Friday.

Law enforcement officials did not answer a host of questions, including how the men could collect about 200 feet of bed sheets, and what they might have used to break through the wall of the federal facility.

The 37-year-old Banks, known as the Second-Hand Bandit because he wore used clothes during his heists, was convicted last week of robbing two banks and attempting to rob two others. Authorities say he stole almost $600,000, and most of that still is missing.

During trial, he had to be restrained because he threatened to walk out of the courtroom. He acted as his own attorney and verbally sparred with the prosecutor, at times arguing that U.S. law didn’t apply to him because he was a sovereign citizen of a group that was above state and federal law.

Conley, 38, pleaded guilty last October to robbing a Homewood Bank last year of nearly $4,000. Conley, who worked at the time at a suburban strip club, wore a coat and tie when he robbed the bank and had a gun stuffed in his waistband.

Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center can't escape bad reputation

MCC can't escape bad reputation

By Annie Sweeney, Chicago Tribune reporters

December 26, 2012

The daring overnight escape last week of two convicted bank robbers who descended several stories from their federal jail cell in the South Loop on a rope made of bedsheets was a marvel to many for the ingenuity it required.

But the escape also was a massive security breach at a building that has long drawn sharp criticism for less publicized, routine problems.

Those familiar with the inner workings of the Metropolitan Correctional Center say the concrete high-rise facility is overcrowded. Though intended as a pretrial jail, it has become more of a long-term prison that houses inmates for up to five or six years, they say.

Critics also complain of inconsistent job performance by the guards, some of whom have been accused of crimes while on duty, including smuggling contraband. Some observers say the MCC, like other federal correctional facilities, is stretched thin by federal budget cuts.

"You have a very overcrowded, underfunded situation in which people charged with the responsibility for caring for all of this are overwhelmed," said veteran defense attorney Jeffrey Steinback, who has made countless visits to the MCC over the years.

The 28-story building at 71 W. Van Buren St. houses about 700 inmates awaiting trial, sentencing or placement in a prison to serve a sentence.

Joseph "Jose" Banks and Kenneth Conley made their escape in the early morning of Dec. 18. Banks was caught just two days later, but Conley, remained at large Tuesday.

A Bureau of Prisons spokesman said late last week that the escape remains under investigation and refused to comment on specifics.

But one facet of the investigation is whether a guard who monitors the security cameras in a control room had left the post to help with bed checks, the Tribune reported last week.

If true, that would expose both the staffing issues and the risk of housing inmates for long periods, which leaves them plenty of time to learn the rhythms and routines of the building. Banks has been in custody since September 2008.

"The prisoners watch us," said Dale Deshotel, national president of the union that represents federal prison workers. "They're in there all day watching when the officers go to do their reports. They know when the officer is coming for a shakedown. They look for holes, for opportunities."

Deshotel and a local union official also complained that budget cuts in 2005 hit the entire prison hard in terms of staffing.

A 24-hour foot patrol around the perimeter of the building has been cut back to a 10 p.m.-7 a.m. shift, said the local official, who requested his name not be used.

And, according to the official, who began his career as a guard at the jail, the outside foot patrol is also often called inside to help.

Prison officials have not said whether a guard was monitoring security cameras when Banks and Conley rappelled down the side of the building . But the local union official said those guards are often pulled off post every couple of hours for about 30 minutes to help with bed check rounds.

Banks and Conley were last accounted for at 10 p.m. Dec.17. They were next seen about 2:40 a.m. the following morning on a downtown security camera hopping into a taxi at Congress Parkway and Michigan Avenue, about five blocks from the building.

It is possible they eluded a midnight bed check. Clothing and other items had been stuffed underneath their covers to make it appear they were sleeping, and guards typically do visual head counts with a flashlight, authorities said.

Even with the staffing issues, the local union official remained surprised that Banks and Conley pulled off their escape.

"I don't know how they did it," he said. "I really thought that place was escape-proof. … I'm embarrassed, as are all the employees. Something obviously went wrong."

Other longtime Chicago defense attorneys who represent clients housed at the MCC have complaints not just about the lack of staff but the quality of who is working there.

Thomas Anthony Durkin said that over the years he has noticed a deterioration of the way guards handle attorneys trying to visit clients, saying they are alternately lazy, rude or incompetent. He and other attorneys spoke of hour-plus waits to get inside to meet with clients.

"Things got so bad over there that I refuse to go over there unless it's an absolutely emergency with one of my clients," Durkin said. "They've made it absurd. I think the place is a nightmare."

The attorneys claim there is no predictability to a visit either.

"My experience with the MCC is (that) how well the rules are followed depends on who is working," defense attorney Andrea Gambino said. "You never know what's going to happen."

Contraband has been discovered inside the building, sometimes smuggled during a visit or with the help of staff, according to court records and attorneys. Charges have been brought against guards in the past.

Recently, accused drug trafficker Saul Rodriguez testified to a federal jury that he obtained a cellphone at the MCC after his wife sneaked it in and taped it to the underside of a bathroom sink in a restroom for visitors.

But Gambino, who represented the defendant Rodriguez testified against at the trial, has challenged that story in court documents, suggesting that the phone slipped in through the hands of guards and inmates assigned to a daily work program at a warehouse outside the MCC.

One court filing references a longtime guard who was recently suspended for "smuggling phones, drugs and other contraband into the MCC for inmates." The union confirmed that a guard had been recently put on "indefinite suspension."

Former Illinois state official Scott Fawell, who spent about eight months at the MCC for corruption, said he thought illegal items were sometimes smuggled in through the kitchen when deliveries arrived. And the inmate searches that were done after each visit with a loved one could be not only spotty but also negligent, said Fawell, a top aide to convicted former Gov. George Ryan.

"Some things that got in there, I don't think got in by chance," he said.

Officials at the MCC did not respond to a request for an interview. And a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons did not answer specific questions about the number of infractions or incidents at the MCC or about the overcrowding concerns.

But even some of the Chicago attorneys noted that the staffing and security concerns at the MCC are probably not unlike those at many federal prisons. The entire system, Steinback said, has struggled to keep up with an influx of inmates who flooded the system under stiffer drug laws.

"There are an awful lot of good administrators who do care. And they can't go out and publicly complain," Steinback said.

While the command and control of the building is a crucial issue, it is not the only one, attorneys said. There are other questions about medical conditions, including for those prisoners who spend months locked in isolation or suffering due to alleged inadequate health care.

Although the John Howard Association prison reform organization monitors many state and county prisons in Illinois, it does not watchdog federal facilities, Executive Director John Maki said.

"These places, they are really expensive, and we ask them to perform a very important function," Maki said. "And there really is no oversight. No one outside is looking at them. Ever."

asweeney@tribune.com

jmeisner@tribune.com

No bond for jail escapee Kenneth Conley

No bond for jail escapee Kenneth Conley

By Annie Sweeney, Jason Meisner and Steve Schmadeke Tribune reporters

1:14 p.m. CST, January 5, 2013

Kenneth Conley's formal return to federal custody this morning at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse was a far cry from the brazen way he left.

The second half of a daring escape duo who used bedsheets to scale down the façade of a downtown jail last month was pushed into a federal courtroom in a wheelchair, his legs extended and his feet swollen and shoeless. Shoulder bones pushed through his thin white T-shirt and one pinky was secured in a splint.

A short time later, U.S. District Judge Sheila Finnegan ordered Conley be held in custody without bail and set his preliminary hearing for Jan. 17.

Conley spoke only briefly to tell Finnegan he understood the charges against him.

"Yes, your honor," said Conley, who was wan and appeared thinner than in his booking photo. He wore a flimsy white T-shirt and one pinky was secured in a splint.

Conley, a convicted bank robber, was on the lam 18 days before being arrested Friday afternoon in Palos Hills after police there received a call of a suspicious person. Police said Conley had attempted a disguise, wearing a an overcoat, beret and using a cane he didn't need.

Conley fought briefly with police, slugging one officer before he was tackled, authorities said. He was treated at a hospital before being transferred back to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the jail he busted out of Dec. 18 with his cellmate and fellow convicted bank robber, Joseph "Jose" Banks. Banks was caught two days after the escape.

Conley's attorney, Gary Ravitz, asked Finnegan for permission to use his cell phone camera to document Conley's left foot, which he said was swollen.

Ravitz, who represents Conley on the underlying bank robbery charge, said he did not know the extent of his client's injuries and that he otherwise appeared calm.

"He seemed to be in relatively good spirits, given the situation," Ravitz said.

Conley, 38, allegedly escaped from the jail, located at 71 W. Van Buren Street, while awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty on Oct. 29, 2012, to a 2011 bank robbery of $4,000 in Homewood.

Deputy U.S. Marshals and FBI agents returned to Palos Hills Friday morning to canvass for Conley because of unconfirmed sightings there and his long-standing connections to the area. A 911 call from maintenance workers at a building where Conley is believed to have been sleeping in the basement came in around 3:30 p.m.

The maximum penalty for Conley's escape is five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The maximum penalty for bank robbery is 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

According to court records, Conley has a long criminal history. He has been convicted in Cook County of offenses ranging from retail theft to weapons violations and was sentenced to eight years in prison for an armed robbery in 1996. He also was sentenced to six years in prison in San Diego County for petty theft with a prior conviction, according to California records.

asweeney@tribune.com, jmeisner@tribune.com, sschmadeke@tribune.com

Developers worried about new rules for phone apps

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Developers worried about new rules for phone apps

By Richard Lardner Associated Press Tue Dec 18, 2012 11:56 AM

WASHINGTON — A cellphone game for kids about U.S. geography, “Stack the States,” gets rave reviews from parents. Its creator, Dan Russell-Pinson, considered making the 99-cent app better by adding a feature to allow children to play online against one another. But with the Federal Trade Commission issuing more stringent online child privacy rules, he’s not even pursuing the idea.

“It would require all kinds of data sharing,” said Russell-Pinson, the founder and sole employee of Freecloud Design in Charlotte, N.C. “I would be kind of afraid to do that.”

The software industry is bracing for new regulations that it says will stifle creativity and saddle small businesses with legal and technical costs to ensure their cellphone apps don’t run afoul of the rules. The changes, which the FTC is expected to approve this week, would update a 14-year-old law prohibiting the collection of personal information from preteens. It raises these questions: What is the value of a child’s privacy on the Internet, and who should pay for it?

Businesses said they fear that under the trade commission’s proposal, routine transfers of data that pose no threat to a child’s safety will be treated the same as the improper gathering of information that can be used to create detailed user profiles that are highly valued by advertisers. Responsible software developers will err on the side of caution and the result will be less kid-friendly content available on the Internet, they said.

The FTC’s chairman, Jon Leibowitz, defended the government’s approach. “When you are talking about children, you have to give the benefit of the doubt to privacy,” he said last week on Capitol Hill.

The cost of the changes to developers just selling educational apps for kids on Apple’s iTunes store could be as high as $271 million — nearly 100 times what the FTC has projected for all the businesses it expects to be newly covered, according to the Association for Competitive Technology, a Washington-based trade group that represents small and midsize software development companies. The FTC’s estimate is “laughable,” said Morgan Reed, the association’s executive director.

An outlay of several thousand dollars to design the required privacy policy for an app is small change for larger, established companies. But for the bulk of developers, that’s a lot of money. Most have only a few employees and operate on tight profit margins, Reed said.

Russell-Pinson said he can afford the expense now. But two years ago, when he was starting his business, he would have been in a real bind. “I didn’t even make $10,000 on my first three apps,” he said.

The FTC has imposed steep fines on companies that have violated the current law, the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. In a 2011 case, a mobile apps developer, W3 Innovations, paid $50,000 to settle charges it illegally collected and stored the email addresses of preteens that downloaded apps called “Emily’s Girl World” and “Emily’s Dress Up.”

The technological shift from desk-bound personal computers to wireless devices is driving the FTC’s push for major revisions to the law, known as COPPA. It was written before an era of cellphones and tablets loaded with apps that can be designed to siphon up a person’s precise location and other personal data highly valued by advertisers and data brokers.

The push for tougher online safeguards is supported by parents concerned about the abundance of apps and the easy access kids have to them. But parents can be a first line of defense, said Leticia Barr, a former schoolteacher who runs the website Tech Savvy Mama. Barr also works as a social media consultant to Location Labs, a provider of mobile safety apps to wireless carriers, and she is occasionally paid by other app developers to review their products.

Before Barr allows her two young children to use an app, she tests it thoroughly so she knows whether it can collect data or contains advertising that might be inappropriate for kids. “That’s just my personal policy, just as I wouldn’t send them over to a stranger’s house to play,” Barr said.

The FTC’s proposed changes prohibit the use of behavioral marketing techniques that target children. The revisions also would expand the definition of personal information to include the location data that comes from a cellphone or tablet, the device’s unique identification number and data-tracking files known as “cookies.”

As evidence for what it said was the need for updated rules, the FTC announced last week it was investigating an unspecified number of app developers which may have violated the law by gathering information from kids without their parent’s consent. The agency examined 400 apps directed at kids that it purchased from Apple’s iTunes store and Google’s apps store, Google Play. The majority failed to inform parents about the types of data the app could gather and who could access it, the FTC said. The agency did not name the companies or say how many it was investigating.

The co-founder of Launchpad Toys in San Francisco, Andy Russell, said he adheres to the current law and supports more stringent privacy protections for preteens. Russell has eight employees, but his apps business is financed with venture capital and isn’t yet profitable. Spending money to ensure he meets the new privacy requirements means it will take him that much longer to get into the black.

“I can’t speak for other developers, but I think there are a lot of people out there who would say: ‘You know what, that’s OK. I’m just going to fold up shop,’” Russell said.

Under the proposed changes, permission from the parent of a preteen must be verifiable. Russell said that requirement alone could pose a major hurdle. What will qualify as proof that the consent is legitimate? A driver’s license number? A form that is signed and faxed by a parent?

“Nobody uses a fax machine anymore,” Russell said. “Verification is a wonderful thing. But to date there just hasn’t been a good way to do so.”

The need to balance the impact of regulations against their value to the public has long caused conflict between the private sector and policymakers in Washington. The topic of this debate, kids’ privacy, has forced app developers and industry representatives to walk a fine line to avoid being seen as insensitive to an issue parents care deeply about.

The FTC has estimated that 500 existing operators of websites and online services and 125 newly formed businesses would be covered by the rule changes. The overall expense for legal and technical fees to meet the new requirements will be $2.7 million, the agency said. That works out to $9,420 for a new business, and just over $3,000 for an existing one, according to the agency’s figures.

But costs for new and existing operators will probably be the same, said the Association for Competitive Technology’s Reed. Building the required privacy standards into an app already in the market is usually more expensive that adding those features from the start, he said.

They are only in it for the money!!!!

Source

City assails civil rights lawyers trying to save 'code of silence' verdict

By Annie Sweeney, Chicago Tribune reporter

6:47 a.m. CST, December 18, 2012

City attorneys continued Monday to push for a federal judge to set aside a judgment in a recent high-profile Chicago police misconduct trial, saying recent arguments from civil rights attorneys to preserve the decision were filed in "self-interest."

The filing by the city was the latest salvo in a court fight over the landmark jury verdict that a "code of silence" within the Chicago Police Department led to an off-duty officer's infamous video-recorded beating of a female bartender.

"While they profess to argue in the 'public interest,' (the attorneys) are veteran plaintiffs' lawyers whose primary area of practice consists of suing the city and its police officers," the city said of the civil rights attorneys' friend-of-the-court brief. "As a result, their brief advances not only their own self-interest, but also that of fellow plaintiffs' attorneys."

The video of off-duty Officer Anthony Abbate pummeling the bartender, Karolina Obrycka, inside a Northwest Side bar in 2007 marked one of the most embarrassing chapters in recent department history.

Last month a federal jury awarded Obrycka $850,000 while finding that the police had a code of silence and/or a widespread practice of failing to investigate and discipline its officers.

After the verdict, the city asked U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve to set aside the judgment, arguing that the jury decision was "ambiguous" and the city should not have to expend tax dollars to fight numerous court motions and lawsuits that will be filed because of it.

Obrycka's lawyer joined in the request. City attorneys plan to pay Obrycka the $850,000 no matter how St. Eve rules.

The judge has said she would rule swiftly now that the lawyers have weighed in.

In their friend-of-the-court brief, attorneys Locke Bowman and Craig Futterman, who specialize in police misconduct cases, argued that the city was trying to erase the verdict, leaving no incentive to reform the department.

The city maintained that the current police superintendent would not tolerate the kind of misconduct committed by Abbate.

asweeney@tribune.com

Southeast Valley schools boost safety measures after Connecticut shooting

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Southeast Valley schools boost safety measures after Connecticut shooting

By Kerry Fehr-Snyder and Hayley Ringle The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Dec 18, 2012 10:04 AM

Chandler police made their presence known on Monday, the first full school day since a gunman unleashed a shooting rampage that killed 20 schoolchildren, five educators and the principal at a Connecticut elementary school.

An armed officer stood outside Hancock Elementary School in Chandler as parents dropped off their children, while other students pedaled to campus. [Of course the only way minimize the deaths is to let the the teachers and school employees be armed, but that will never happen with our politically correct gun grabbing polticians]

“There will be an increased presence all week,” said Terry Locke, Chandler Public Schools spokesman.

CUSD elementary schools within Gilbert town limits also used stepped-up police patrols to calm fears that a copycat shooting could happen at their school.

The shooting shocked the idyllic rural community of Newtown, Conn., and has sparked a national debate about regulations over assault rifles, which can fire multiple rounds of bullets without reloading. Those firearms have been used by shooters at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., an Oregon shopping mall and in the Tucson shooting two years ago that gravely injured Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, wounded staffers and killed six people, including 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green.

The most recent school shooting also has sparked a debate about the diagnosis and treatment of people with mental-health disorders. The Connecticut shooter is believed to have suffered from mental-health problems and killed his mother before blasting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 26 people and then himself.

“Our greatest threat is with adults, not children,” said Paul Novak, safety and transportation director for the Tempe Elementary School District.

Last week, the district sent e-mails to all its staff members reminding them to wear badges at all times, Novak said.

Staff members also are encouraged to notify principals if they are involved in a domestic-violence dispute with a family member or friend, Novak said.

Locke, of CUSD, agreed.

“The key is communication,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Tempe district is participating in a public forum next month with the Tempe Police Department, public charter schools and private schools to discuss school safety. The forum is 9a.m. Jan.16 at the Tempe History Museum, 809 E.Southern Ave.

That forum was planned before Friday’s school shooting but is more timely than ever after the tragedy.

The district holds regular training sessions for its employees on how to respond to a school crisis. Recently, it had a table-top exercise for its crisis-response team.

“We do planning, training and constant drilling,” Novak said. “And we will use an event like this to talk about what could be done to prevent it from happening again.”

The district has no plans to install metal detectors at its schools after the shooting. The shooter blasted into the school’s front office, and the school’s front-office staff, principal and student counselor tried to stop him.

“These aren’t prisons, they’re educational institutions,” Novak said.

After Friday’s shooting, Higley Unified School District Superintendent Denise Birdwell said district officials have begun “an immediate, thorough assessment to further ensure safety.”

“Above all, we want to assure you the safety of our students, staff and faculty is our top priority,” Birdwell said Monday in a parent letter. [Well if that is true you should allow your teachers and employees to carry guns to work. While it won't prevent a shooting, it will minimize the deaths if one occurs]

Birdwell said Higley is reviewing its systems and methods to ensure that officials provide “timely, critical information to parents.” Birdwell asked that parents make sure their school office has the most up-to-date contact information and sign up for electronic alerts through the district website. [But none of that feel happy stuff will prevent a future shooting]

Neighboring Gilbert Public Schools posted on its website tips on how to talk to students about the shooting.

GPS Superintendent Dave Allison sent a parent letter Monday, asking parents contact their school’s principal, psychologist or social worker for questions or concerns.

Like other districts, visitors to GPS are required to sign in when they enter a school, wear a visitor’s identification badge and sign out when leaving the campus. School staff are required to wear an ID badge with a photo, first and last name and position title. [So what! That didn't prevent the shooting in Connecticut and won't prevent one in Phoenix]

Elementary schools have fences surrounding the campus, funneling visitors to the school office, and high schools have assigned school-resource officers. [Again fences and sign in sheets in the school office didn't prevent the Connecticut shooting and won't prevent one in Phoenix]

Mesa schools reporter Cathryn Creno contributed to this article.

Brewer unsure if Arizona should review gun laws

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Brewer unsure if Arizona should review gun laws in wake of Connecticut shootings

Posted: Monday, December 17, 2012 2:17 pm

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

Jan Brewer said Monday she's "not sure'' whether the shootings in Connecticut mean Arizona needs to revisit the various laws expanding the right to carry weapons in public she has signed in her four years as governor.

The governor, in her first public comments about what occurred, called the incident "absolutely horrific.''

"Everybody's heart is broken to the point where you can't hardly get over it when it's brought to your attention again or you're just thinking about it as you're driving along,'' Brewer said when asked about Arizona's gun laws. She said that such incidents always lead to a discussion of the rights of individuals to bear arms.

"And I'm not sure it's something that needs to be addressed in that respect,'' she said, pointing out that the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers used box cutters.

"There are evil, evil people in our country, unfortunately, and in the world,'' Brewer continued. "And I don't know how we get our arms around it.''

She said people with guns going crazy and killing people is a sad situation.

"I know everybody's looking for an answer,'' the governor said. "I don't know what that answer is.''

The governor said if there is an area where people should focus in the wake of the shootings it should be on making schools safer.

"We've just had too many incidences of this kind,'' she said.

"I hope that people across the country come together and figure out what it is to make that environment safer,'' the governor said. "But I will just always believe that there are evil people and I don't know what the solution is, how you're ever going to stop it.''

The governor said a better mental health system may be part of the answer, helping people with problems "address those issues before they get out of control.'' Still, she said, no amount of counseling can prevent every problem.

"I've been told at least that some incident can take them over the edge,'' Brewer said.

Brewer has inked her name to a variety of measures expanding the rights of people to carry guns since becoming governor in 2009.

The most sweeping permits any adult to carry a concealed weapon. Prior to that, only individuals who had undergone a background check and some special training could hide a gun on themselves; anyone else who felt the need for protection had to have the weapon visible.

She also signed a measure to let those who do have a state-issued permit carry their guns into bars or restaurants where beer, wine or liquor is sold, though they are not permitted to drink. Establishment owners do retain the right, though, of posting "no weapons'' signs at the door.

Brewer also agreed to let people bring their weapons into parking lots and garages of public colleges and universities as long as they leave them in their vehicles. And she signed a law allowing anyone who feels threatened to "display'' a gun without being charged with intimidation.

The governor, however, also has shown there are some limits to how far she is willing to go.

Earlier this year, for example, she vetoed -- for a second time -- legislation which would have permitted individuals to bring weapons into most public buildings. [OK Jan Brewer is a gun grabber in this case]

In her message to lawmakers, Brewer called herself "a strong proponent of the Second Amendment,'' saying she has "signed into law numerous pieces of legislation over these past few years to advance gun rights.'' But she said firearms are not appropriate everywhere, such as schools and government buildings. [Jan Brewer is a gun grabber in this case]

"Decisions made by government officials at the state, county and municipal level impact all areas of life and can have a profound impact upon an individual's family and livelihood,'' wrote Brewer who had been a Maricopa County supervisor. "Emotions can run high.''

And last year she rejected a measure which would have allowed individuals to bring their weapons onto the campuses of public colleges and universities, though not into classrooms. [OK Jan Brewer is a gun grabber in this case]

In that case, however, the governor said her objection was not to having guns on campus but to what she said was the flawed wording of the legislation. For example, said there was no good definition of exactly where guns would -- and would not -- be allowed on campus, pointing out that nowhere in the legislation did it define exactly what is a "public right of way'' where weapons could be carried.

Grand jury probes L.A. County sheriff's handling of FBI informant

Grand jury probes L.A. County sheriff's handling of FBI informant

By Jack Leonard and Robert Faturechi, Los Angeles Times

December 18, 2012, 7:03 p.m.

When Los Angeles County jail officials learned last year that one of their inmates was a secret FBI informant, they launched a plan.

Sheriff's officials moved the inmate from the downtown lockup, where he was surreptitiously collecting information on allegedly abusive and corrupt deputies, to a cell in a patrol station in San Dimas. Jailers kept him under constant watch, sources said, and listed the informant, a convicted bank robber, under a series of aliases — including Robin Banks.

Now, a federal grand jury is investigating whether sheriff's officials moved the informant to hinder an FBI investigation into alleged jail abuses.

Several sheriff's employees have testified at recent grand jury hearings about the handling of the informant, sources said. At least one witness testified that moving the inmate and changing his name was an attempt to hide him from federal agents, and that top officials, including the department's second in command, Undersheriff Paul Tanaka, played a role in the plan, according to a source familiar with the testimony.

Sheriff's officials insist that they were not hiding the informant, Anthony Brown, from the FBI but protecting him from other deputies.

Department spokesman Steve Whitmore said Brown wrote a letter after his identity was discovered, complaining that he feared for his life and felt abandoned by the FBI.

"He was frightened not of inmates but of deputies because he was snitching on deputies," Whitmore said. "We were moving him around to protect him from any kind of retaliation."

The grand jury investigation underscores the rift that developed last year between the Sheriff's Department and federal authorities after deputies discovered the FBI had cultivated an inmate informant as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into the department's jails.

After news broke about the incident, Sheriff Lee Baca publicly accused an FBI agent of possibly committing a crime by smuggling a phone to the informant. He dispatched investigators to the agent's home before determining the case was "not worthy of pursuing."

The grand jury hearings suggest that the federal investigation extends beyond alleged jailhouse abuses by deputies to include the actions of high-ranking members of the department. So far, the U.S. attorney's office has brought charges against only one deputy, who pleaded guilty to bribery for taking money to smuggle the cellphone to the informant.

Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School and a former federal prosecutor, said obstruction of justice cases typically involve intimidation or violence against potential witnesses. But she said prosecutors could build a criminal case against sheriff's officials if they can prove the department's goal in moving Brown was to hinder the FBI's investigation of the jails.

"The biggest challenge is probably to show... the purpose of that was to interfere with the investigation as opposed to other legitimate purposes," she said. "If they can show that there was a conspiracy to hide the informant, they'll find a statute that fits."

Sheriff's officials discovered the informant's identity after jail deputies found his phone during a cell search in August 2011. The phone included calls to the FBI. In an interview with The Times earlier this year, the informant said he had been using his phone to take photos and document excessive force inside Men's Central Jail. Brown said FBI agents regularly visited him in court and at jail, where he supplied them with the names of corrupt and abusive deputies.

Brown said FBI agents rushed into the jail to visit him soon after they learned his cover had been blown. But as the meeting began, Brown said, a sheriff's investigator came in and ended it. "This…visit is over," the official said, according to Brown.

Brown said sheriff's officials moved him, changed his name several times and grilled him about what he knew and whether he would testify in the federal investigation.

"I didn't know it then, but they were hiding me from the feds," said Brown, who is serving 423 years to life in prison for armed robbery.

Whitmore, the sheriff's spokesman, disputed Brown's account of the FBI visit, saying it never happened. Federal agents, he said, never asked to visit Brown and would have been given access to the inmate had they requested it.

Sources who were briefed on the department's handling of the informant said the decision to move Brown was made at a meeting attended by Tanaka. One sheriff's employee testified that supervisors made it clear after the meeting that the intent of moving Brown was to hide him from the FBI, according to a source.

Whitmore said Tanaka played no role in Brown's move.

"That is an absurd allegation," he said. "Were the higher-ups briefed about this? Absolutely. But he had nothing to do with this decision other than the fact that he was aware of it."

In the year since the jail abuse scandal erupted, Tanaka has come under heavy criticism. A county commission created to examine the jails accused Tanaka of exacerbating problems in the lockups by encouraging deputies to push legal boundaries and discouraging supervisors from disciplining deputies involved in misconduct.

The undersheriff admitted some fault, but denied that he turned a blind eye to abuse. In testimony before the commission, he accused his detractors of having personal agendas and trying to discredit him by misinterpreting his actions.

At least one witness has told the grand jury that another top sheriff's official — Lt. Greg Thompson, formerly in charge of the jailhouse intelligence team — was also involved in hiding Brown, according to the source.

Thompson was placed on leave last month. Sheriff's officials are investigating whether Thompson had his son, who is also a deputy, confront another jailer to find out what he had told the grand jury about the elder Thompson, according to several sources who asked to remain anonymous because the investigation is ongoing.

Representatives for the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office declined to comment. Whitmore said that Tanaka and Thompson also declined to comment.

jack.leonard@latimes.com

robert.faturechi@latimes.com