Homeless in Arizona

You can continue to grow marijuana till December???

Phase-out of OK to grow pot postponed

Posted: Wednesday, November 21, 2012 8:12 am

State health officials say a delay in opening the first medical marijuana dispensary in the Phoenix area means there will be a delay in starting to phase out cardholders’ authorizations to grow their own.

A Glendale dispensary Thursday became the first to be licensed. The Department of Health Services said the licensing triggered a medical marijuana law provision that will phase out growing authorizations for cardholders in nearly all of the Phoenix area as cards come up for annual renewals.

However, the department now says the Glendale dispensary isn’t ready to open and its license’s effective date will be reset in early December

Senate bill rewrite lets feds read your e-mail without warrants

Source

Senate bill rewrite lets feds read your e-mail without warrants

By Declan McCullagh | CNET.com

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.

CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week.

Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge. (CNET obtained the revised draft from a source involved in the negotiations with Leahy.)

Revised bill highlights

Grants warrantless access to Americans' electronic correspondence to over 22 federal agencies. Only a subpoena is required, not a search warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause.

Permits state and local law enforcement to warrantlessly access Americans' correspondence stored on systems not offered "to the public," including university networks.

Authorizes any law enforcement agency to access accounts without a warrant -- or subsequent court review -- if they claim "emergency" situations exist.

Says providers "shall notify" law enforcement in advance of any plans to tell their customers that they've been the target of a warrant, order, or subpoena.

Delays notification of customers whose accounts have been accessed from 3 days to "10 business days." This notification can be postponed by up to 360 days.

Leahy had planned a vote on an earlier version of his bill, designed to update a pair of 1980s-vintage surveillance laws, in late September. But after law enforcement groups including the National District Attorneys' Association and the National Sheriffs' Association organizations objected to the legislation and asked him to "reconsider acting" on it, Leahy pushed back the vote and reworked the bill as a package of amendments to be offered next Thursday. The package (PDF) is a substitute for H.R. 2471, which the House of Representatives already has approved.

One person participating in Capitol Hill meetings on this topic told CNET that Justice Department officials have expressed their displeasure about Leahy's original bill. The department is on record as opposing any such requirement: James Baker, the associate deputy attorney general, has publicly warned that requiring a warrant to obtain stored e-mail could have an "adverse impact" on criminal investigations.

Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said requiring warrantless access to Americans' data "undercuts" the purpose of Leahy's original proposal. "We believe a warrant is the appropriate standard for any contents," he said.

An aide to the Senate Judiciary committee told CNET that because discussions with interested parties are ongoing, it would be premature to comment on the legislation.

Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that in light of the revelations about how former CIA director David Petraeus' e-mail was perused by the FBI, "even the Department of Justice should concede that there's a need for more judicial oversight," not less.

Markham Erickson, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. who has followed the topic closely and said he was speaking for himself and not his corporate clients, expressed concerns about the alphabet soup of federal agencies that would be granted more power:

❝ There is no good legal reason why federal regulatory agencies such as the NLRB, OSHA, SEC or FTC need to access customer information service providers with a mere subpoena. If those agencies feel they do not have the tools to do their jobs adequately, they should work with the appropriate authorizing committees to explore solutions. The Senate Judiciary committee is really not in a position to adequately make those determinations. ❞

The list of agencies that would receive civil subpoena authority for the contents of electronic communications also includes the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Maritime Commission, the Postal Regulatory Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Mine Enforcement Safety and Health Review Commission.

Leahy's modified bill retains some pro-privacy components, such as requiring police to secure a warrant in many cases. But the dramatic shift, especially the regulatory agency loophole and exemption for emergency account access, likely means it will be near-impossible for tech companies to support in its new form.

A bitter setback

This is a bitter setback for Internet companies and a liberal-conservative-libertarian coalition, which had hoped to convince Congress to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act to protect documents stored in the cloud. Leahy glued those changes onto an unrelated privacy-related bill supported by Netflix.

At the moment, Internet users enjoy more privacy rights if they store data on their hard drives or under their mattresses, a legal hiccup that the companies fear could slow the shift to cloud-based services unless the law is changed to be more privacy-protective.

Members of the so-called Digital Due Process coalition include Apple, Amazon.com, Americans for Tax Reform, AT&T, the Center for Democracy and Technology, eBay, Google, Facebook, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, TechFreedom, and Twitter. (CNET was the first to report on the coalition's creation.)

Leahy, a former prosecutor, has a mixed record on privacy. He criticized the FBI's efforts to require Internet providers to build in backdoors for law enforcement access, and introduced a bill in the 1990s protecting Americans' right to use whatever encryption products they wanted.

But he also authored the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which is now looming over Web companies, as well as the reviled Protect IP Act. An article in The New Republic concluded Leahy's work on the Patriot Act "appears to have made the bill less protective of civil liberties." Leahy had introduced significant portions of the Patriot Act under the name Enhancement of Privacy and Public Safety in Cyberspace Act (PDF) a year earlier.

One obvious option for the Digital Due Process coalition is the simplest: if Leahy's committee proves to be an insurmountable roadblock in the Senate, try the courts instead.

Judges already have been wrestling with how to apply the Fourth Amendment to an always-on, always-connected society. Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police needed a search warrant for GPS tracking of vehicles. Some courts have ruled that warrantless tracking of Americans' cell phones, another coalition concern, is unconstitutional.

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies already must obtain warrants for e-mail in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, thanks to a ruling by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio wins by a lousy .7 percent

While Sheriff Joe is the most popular politician in Arizona, I suspect he is also one of the most hated people in Arizona.

Sadly we will have to put up with Sheriff Joe for another 4 years.

Source

Arpaio wins by .7 percent

By LAURIE ROBERTS

Wed, Nov 21 2012 11:08 AM

Final election results are – at along last – in for Maricopa County.

So, the sheriff, once the most popular politician in the state, eked out a win. Half the county’s voters (actually half plus .7 percent) supported the sheriff.

That means that half (actually half minus. 7 percent) didn’t support the sheriff.

And it took him $8 million to get the .7 percent.

That’s not a mandate, it’s a warning. The question is, did the sheriff, who has already announced his intent to run for re-election in 2016, get the message?

Arizona Organix First Authorized Medical Marijuana Dispensary in Arizona

Arizona Organix Steps Out as the State's First Authorized Medical-Marijuana Dispensary

By Ray Stern Thursday, Nov 22 2012

A business in Glendale has become Arizona's first licensed medical-marijuana dispensary under a voter-approved 2010 law.

It's called Arizona Organix — but it would have been more fitting had the owners dubbed the place Target and adopted the mega-chain's red concentric logo.

This is hostile territory — the land of Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, who claims that anyone selling marijuana can be prosecuted regardless of the state law, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who'll do anything for a headline.

Montgomery, who also strongly opposes abortion and pornography, is trying his best to become a hero to social conservatives. In August, he partnered with Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne to file a motion in Superior Court that seeks to reverse the will of voters — allowing dispensaries and marijuana cultivation — by having a judge declare that the state law is preempted by the federal prohibition against pot.

A ruling on the motion by Judge Michael Gordon is expected any day now. But Montgomery and Arpaio could use another test case.

So far, Arizona Organix owners Ben Myer, Bill Myer (Ben's father), and Ryan Wells have stuck out their heads only halfway.

Their store was authorized on November 15 to sell marijuana by the Arizona Department of Health Services, but it isn't open yet. A sign on the door at Arizona Organix (5301 West Glendale Avenue), which is in a high-profile location between a pet-food store and an antique shop, says, "We hope to be operating within a few weeks" and asks interested customers to sign up on an e-mail list.

The situation frustrates some in the medical-marijuana community, because the DHS said it would begin notifying newly qualified patients who are within a 25-mile radius of the store that they are forbidden from growing marijuana. Arizona law allows patients to grow up to 12 plants each, but not if an operating dispensary is open within a 25-mile zone.

However, on Monday afternoon, DHS director Will Humble announced that it had allowed the dispensary to delay the effective day of operation until the retail store opens, meaning the 25-mile exclusion won't be triggered just yet.

Other dispensaries could open before Arizona Organix. DHS inspectors were scheduled to visit a Tucson dispensary on November 20. But the legal battlefield remains hazy for any marijuana-related business in Arizona.

Wells tells New Times that he and the Myers still are trying to figure out when to open, even though they've been working on the dispensary project for two years.

"This has been such a long road for us; a lot of my feelings are pretty well dulled by this point. The next hurdle is to open and see what happens," Wells says.

They're wondering what Arpaio might do: "He's always in our minds for the worst."

But that's not the only hurdle. Arizona Organix hasn't yet found a cultivation site in which to grow the marijuana that will be sold to qualified patients.

The city of Glendale, which approved the dispensary earlier this year, doesn't allow medical-marijuana retail stores to grow pot on-site. The company's looking for a roomy warehouse to turn into an indoor greenhouse. Landlords, fearing reprisals from the feds, have been more than hesitant.

"Nine out of 10 say no," Wells says. He adds that obtaining a site still appears possible, as they're in negotiations with several property owners.

In theory, the medical-pot shop could open with donated marijuana on the shelves. Patients and caregivers can only possess up to 2.5 ounces at any given time under state law, but growing 12 plants generates more than 2.5 ounces. Arizona law allows patients and registered caregivers, who can cultivate for up to five patients each, to give their excess marijuana away to authorized dispensaries.

Wells says Arizona Organix possibly could find people who want to donate their marijuana, but he says it's not good business to open with a limited supply only to run out before replacement pot from a cultivation site is ready for sale. Being the only operating, official medical-pot store in the Valley would make it popular, for sure. And the location already has been operating as a compassion club, which distributed marijuana to dues-paying members, ostensibly without requiring anything of value in return.

Until last week, the Alternative Health Clinic used what is now Arizona Organix's address and phone number. "Very easy process to get high-quality medicine," says a February 14 comment on the clinic's Yelp.com listing.

Similar businesses have sprung up all over the state since the passage of the Medical Marijuana Act. They're a result, in part, of the vacuum created when Governor Jan Brewer canceled the dispensary portion of the law by executive order in May 2011. After two failures in court to block the law, the Republican governor was ordered by a state judge in January to carry out the wishes of voters. Ninety-seven applicants for dispensaries were selected at random by the state.

Meanwhile, Valley police agencies have raided several compassion clubs, claiming they were operating outside of the medical-marijuana law. New clubs have opened to replace some of those that closed. The raids typically are preceded by an undercover "buy" at the club by an officer with a medical-marijuana card. It's unknown whether Alternative Health Clinic was under investigation by any law enforcement agency when Arizona Organix took over at the location.

I tried to get the 2nd page of this article, but the folks at the New Times screwed up and put a garbage link to the 2nd page.

If you want to read the full article go to the URL and try again to find page two of the article.

Dope up the children to keep them from committing crimes???

Personally I find doping up the kiddies to shut them up is a bit hypocritical and an oxymoron while at the same time the government is jailing the kiddies who use drugs because they are bored with school.

On the other hand teachers unions are pretty powerful these days and maybe that is were the silly notion of doping up the kids to shut them up is coming from.

Source

ADHD drugs may help curb criminal behavior

By Marilynn Marchione Associated Press Wed Nov 21, 2012 10:48 PM

Older teens and adults with attention deficit disorder are much less likely to commit a crime while on ADHD medication, a study from Sweden found.

It also showed in dramatic fashion how much more prone people with ADHD are to break the law — four to seven times more likely than others.

The findings suggest that Ritalin, Adderall and other drugs that curb hyperactivity and boost attention remain important beyond the school-age years and that wider use of these medications in older patients might help curb crime.

“There definitely is a perception that it’s a disease of childhood and you outgrow your need for medicines,” said Dr. William Cooper, a pediatrics and preventive medicine professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “We’re beginning to understand that ADHD is a condition for many people that really lasts throughout their life.”

He has researched ADHD but had no role in the new study, which was led by Paul Lichtenstein of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The findings appear in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.

About 5percent of children in the U.S. and other Western countries have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which can cause impulsive behavior and difficulty paying attention. Many youngsters are given medication to help them sit still and focus in school. Some people have symptoms into adulthood.

“It’s well known that individuals with ADHD have much higher rates of criminality and drug abuse than people without ADHD,” but the effect of treatment on this is not well known, Lichtenstein said.

Using Swedish national registers, researchers studied about 16,000 men and 10,000 women ages 15 and older who had been diagnosed with ADHD. The country has national health care, so information was available on all drugs prescribed.

Court and prison records were used to track convictions from 2006 through 2009 and see whether patients were taking ADHD drugs when their crimes were committed. A patient was considered to have gone off medication after six months or more with no new prescription.

The FBI will pay you $250,000 to frame a terrorist? Maybe!!!

Source

Dependence on paid informant in terror case may aid defense

By Phil Willon and Andrew Khouri, Los Angeles Times

November 21, 2012, 7:04 p.m.

Federal agents' use of a paid informant to ensnare four Southern Californians plotting to join Al Qaeda is expected to be a focus of their defense against federal terrorism charges, allegations that continue to mystify family, friends and local Muslim leaders.

An attorney for one of the suspects on Wednesday criticized the case for hinging on evidence gathered by a confidential informant who had been convicted of drug-related charges.

The informant, who received $250,000 from the FBI and "immigration benefits" for his work over the four years, infiltrated the group in March and wore recording devices that provided evidence crucial to the case. The federal complaint unsealed this week against the four men was based in large part on incriminating statements recorded by the informant.

"What jumps out to me was the footnote in the affidavit that said the confidential source was paid a quarter million dollars," said Anaheim Hills attorney Randolph K. Driggs, who represents Ralph Deleon, 23, of Ontario. "We see the same thing in drug cases.... Informants push and prod until someone gives in. They have a financial incentive.''

Driggs said the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have aggressively pursued potential terrorism threats since the Sept. 11 attacks, increasing the possibility that people who lack the ability or intent to commit terrorist acts may be arrested for idle talk or a delusional fantasy.

Deleon and two other suspects, Miguel Santana of Upland and Arifeen Gojali of Riverside, both 21, were taken into custody during a vehicle stop in Chino on Friday, a day after they booked airline tickets from Mexico to Afghanistan. Attorneys for Santana and Gojali declined to comment about the case.

Terrorism experts dismissed the notion that suspects, as ill-prepared as they may appear, would not pose a potential threat.

"Bin Laden is dead, but Al Qaeda isn't. It has appeal to people, including amateur terrorists," said Bruce R. Hoffman, a counter-terrorism analyst at Georgetown University.

That includes a "small number" of Americans, he said, including the recent case of some 20 young men in Minneapolis who authorities say were recruited to undergo training for attacks abroad, and three former high school classmates in New York convicted of plotting to bomb the subway. Hoffman said there is no distilled profile of the type of person attracted by such a cause, but noted that many are young Islamic converts drawn in by a charismatic ringleader.

The central figure in the alleged plot is Sohiel Omar Kabir, 34, who has lived in Pomona and served a year in the U.S. Air Force. The native Afghan and naturalized U.S. citizen converted Deleon and Santana to Islam in 2010, then left for Afghanistan, intent on joining the Taliban or Al Qaeda and paving the way for Santana and Deleon to join him, according to authorities. Santana and Deleon allegedly recruited Gojali in September.

Kabir was taken into custody Saturday in Kabul.

Brian Levine, director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, said the explosion of social networking — through Facebook, YouTube and other avenues — also has aided terrorist recruitment and training, and has allowed kindred individuals to connect.

"The overwhelming majority of these folks are not-ready-for-prime time players," Levine said. "The important thing to look at, though, is how committed they are to violence and their cause.... They can always be trained."

At the Masjid al-Sabireen mosque in Pomona, which Gojali, Deleon and Santana attended, members expressed shock about the allegations against the young men.

"They are some wonderful youngsters," said Aaron Goulding. "If they are guilty of anything it's just of being youth and naive. Neither one of them have the ability nor the money to do what they claim they were willing to do."

Krya Jacques, president of the Cham American Muslim Community, said Gojali and his family were frequent visitors to the mosque and were well respected in the community.

"My impression was that this family is good family to all … and I hope all the news we get is false news," said Jacques.

Jacques said the mosque does not preach extremism.

"I don't know if it is the true story or a setup of some kind," he said of the allegations.

phil.willon@latimes.com

andrew.khouri@latimes.com

Pakistan to suspend cell phone service to protect us from terrorists

Source

Pakistan to suspend cell phone service to prevent attacks against Shiites, causing controversy

By Associated Press, Updated: Friday, November 23, 5:35 AM

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s interior minister said Friday that the government will suspend cell phone service in most parts of the country over the next two days to prevent attacks against Shiite Muslims during a key religious commemoration.

Militants often detonate bombs using cell phones and the Pakistani government has implemented similar service suspensions in the past, but not on such a wide scale.

Saturday and Sunday are the most important days of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, which is especially important to Shiites.

Pakistani Shiites on Sunday observe the Ashoura, commemorating the 7th century death of Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson. The Sunni-Shiite schism over the true heir to Muhammad dates back to that era. Different parts of the Muslim world mark Ashoura on different days — neighboring Afghanistan, for example, observes it on Saturday.

Sunni extremists often target Shiites during Muharram, especially on Ashoura, frequently using cell phones. Several bombings targeting Shiites earlier this week killed over a dozen people.

The suspension of cell phone service will begin at 6 a.m. Saturday and run through the next day, Interior Minister Rehman Malik told reporters in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. He said 90 percent of the bombs set off by militants in Pakistan have been detonated using cell phones.

Some commentators have criticized the government for the policy of suspending cell phone service, saying it was a huge inconvenience to millions of Pakistanis and that militants could find other ways to stage attacks.

“The people it truly affects is every other Pakistani who may not have any alternative means of communication,” wrote Nadir Hassan in a column Friday in The Express Tribune newspaper.

“These are the people caught in accidents who need to call for help, those who just want to go about their everyday business without being unduly hindered by the state,” Hassan said.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Schools flush 4th Amendment down the toilet with drug dog searches

Tolleson schools use dogs to sniff out drugs

By Eddi Trevizo The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Nov 25, 2012 10:11 PM

At Tolleson Union High School District, drug-sniffing dogs are the latest tool the in the fight against narcotics on campus.

While other districts have school-resource officers [school-resource officers is government double talk for the police officers stationed at the school] and prevention programs to help curb high-school drug use, Tolleson Union has hired a private firm to conduct more than a dozen random searches.

District officials hope the effort will have an impact. Drug incidents were rising incrementally districtwide, but more than half of all drug violations occurred at one school in the 2010-11 school year, school officials said.

The private companies that perform these searches fill a need that local police departments can’t because of legal concerns and staffing shortages, police and national experts say. [I suspect the private companies are used in an attempt to keep the schools from being sued for violating the kids 4th Amendment rights]

“We want students to know they are coming somewhere where people aren’t bringing guns and drugs,” said Superintendent Lexi Cunningham.

The Tolleson pilot program comes as drug-related incidents in Arizona schools have risen over the past two years.

Statewide, the number of drug incidents at schools rose more than 5 percent in the 2011-12 school year, Department of Education figures show. There were 6,697 student drug-related violations in 2010-11 and 7,062 drug violations a year later.

It’s difficult to draw conclusions from the figures, said Molly Edwards, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Education.

“There is no way to compare schools because the data depends upon their individual policies,” she said.

The Tolleson district is the first Arizona public-school client for Interquest Detection Canines. The Houston company has about 40 franchises nationwide. District officials hired Interquest last year, after there were a high number of drug-related incidents at one of the district’s six high schools.

School incidents

The Tolleson high-school district has about 9,200 students at schools in Avondale, Glendale, Phoenix and Tolleson.

Last year, Tolleson paid Interquest $7,440 to conduct searches of Sierra Linda High School, one of its schools in Phoenix. The school had the highest number of drug-related incidents in the district in 2010-11 school year.

That school year, there were about 114 reported incidents of drugs, alcohol or prescription medications on all high-school campuses, according to the district’s discipline-hearing records. More than half of those incidents occurred at Sierra Linda, the records show.

Last March, students learned about the program at a pep rally, and letters were sent to home to parents. The company did 16 [illegal]searches by the end of that summer.

When Interquest’s dog searched the high school last year, it didn’t find any contraband substances.

The program is meant to be a deterrent, and the dog does not always find drugs, said Keith Coddington, 38, owner of the Arizona franchise.

District officials said it is hard to measure the program’s success.

School records show that drug incidents at Sierra Linda decreased the year after the program. In the 2011-12 school year, drug-use and -possession incidents climbed to 121 total in the district, but Sierra Linda incidents dropped, accounting for about 25 percent of the total.

It is unknown if the decline is because of the canine visits, officials said. The Interquest program was only in place at Sierra Linda for one semester and wasn’t repeated at the same campus. The district can only afford to have the program at one school at a time.

This school year, Interquest will visit Tolleson Union High School 18 times.

On a recent school day, Tolleson Union High School students were unexpectedly asked to file out of their classrooms and into a hallway. A dog named Gator entered randomly selected rooms and walked up and down aisles of desks, sniffing backpacks and areas in the room.

Students peeked in through windows and petted the dog once he finished looking through the classrooms.

No drugs were found that day.

If a substance had been found, school administrators would have asked for the student’s permission to look through his or her belongings and notified the parents. [I suspect "asked" is the wrong word, they probably order the students to give them permission do to an illegal search ]

Students caught with drugs face penalties ranging from short-term suspension to expulsion from the district, said Cunningham. Also, police can make an arrest.

Parent Anna Tovar, whose son J.C. Tovar is a senior at Tolleson Union High School, supports the program.

It makes the school safer, she said.

“Drugs on campus can be intimidating for students, so I think that this proactive measure is great,” Tovar said.

Last year, Tolleson Union High School had 46 contraband violations that were “arrestable,” meaning a school-resource officer [remember school-resource officer is government double talk for the campus cops - and it looks like the campus cops do a lot more then Sgt. Obed Gaytan tells us] was called for assistance. This year, the number has dropped.

“This year we have only had six, and we are halfway through the year,” said Chad Doyle, assistant principal at Tolleson Union High School.

Private vs. police dogs

Most police departments won’t conduct random searches at schools because of legal constraints, law-enforcement experts say.

Generally, police canines are only used at school during an investigation, or when school-resource officers require assistance, said Sgt. Brandon Busse, a spokesman for the Avondale Police Department, which has resource officers at two Tolleson district high schools.

“Agencies shy away from doing police work at schools ‘just because’ they need probable cause to conduct a search,” said Tom Healy, west vice president of the United States Police Canine Association. The Springboro, Ohio-based association provides training and certification for handlers and dogs.

Under the Fourth Amendment, people are protected from searches and seizures without probable cause, Healy said.

Schools, however, have more leeway to conduct searches. Legally, students have a reduced expectation of privacy on campus, especially when a student violates district policies, Tolleson-district officials said.

That means districts can hire Interquest’s dogs and handlers to randomly search school common areas because they are enforcing school policies.

A school-resource officer’s [school-resource officer is government double talk for the police officers stationed at the school] primary job on campus is to provide law-related education about the legal system, rules and consequences, said Sgt. Obed Gaytan, a spokesman for the Tolleson Police Department. [That's some fancy double talk saying the school cop's job is to arrest kids that get out of line]

Interquest at work

Interquest trains its dogs to find marijuana, prescription medications, methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, gunpowder residue and alcohol.

Coddington started the Anthem-based franchise last year and said the Tolleson district is his first client.

Other schools that have expressed interest are cash-strapped and unable to hire the company, Coddington said. Interquest charges about $500 for a full-day visit.

The company has three employees who are also dog handlers.

Zane, a yellow Lab, is the company’s primary detection dog, Coddington said.

Gator, a pit bull and retriever mix, helped with the recent Tolleson district search while Zane got additional training. Gator was on loan from out of state.

The dogs are licensed by the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and state agencies.

The police know what you Googled for! They usually do!!!!!

I never have approved of people committing real crimes like the murder in this article. I suspect the cops that read my web pages and emails will try to twist my words around and say I do, but they are lying.

But sadly most of the people arrested by the police are not arrested for real crimes like in this article.

About two thirds of the people in American prisons are their for victimless drug war crimes that didn't hurt anybody, and it's you folks whom I am warning.

I don't think people commit victimless drug war crimes are criminals, I think the cops, prosecutors and government bureaucrats that passed the laws jailing them are the real criminals.

Source

Casey Anthony detectives overlooked Google search

Associated Press Sun Nov 25, 2012 1:51 PM

ORLANDO, Fla. — The Florida sheriff’s office that investigated Caylee Anthony’s death confirmed Sunday that it overlooked a computer search for suffocation methods made from the little girl’s home on the day she was last seen alive.

Orange County sheriff’s Capt. Angelo Nieves said the office’s computer investigator missed a June 16, 2008, Google search for “fool-proof” suffocation methods. The agency’s admission was first reported by Orlando television station WKMG. It’s not known who performed the search. The station reported it was done on a browser primarily used by the 2-year-old’s mother, Casey Anthony, who was acquitted of the girl’s murder in 2011.

Anthony’s attorneys argued during trial that Casey Anthony helped her father, George Anthony, cover up the girl’s drowning in the family pool.

WKMG said sheriff’s investigators pulled 17 vague entries only from the computer’s Internet Explorer browser, not the Mozilla Firefox browser commonly used by Casey Anthony. More than 1,200 Firefox entries, including the suffocation search, were overlooked.

Whoever conducted the Google search looked for the term “fool-proof suffication,” misspelling “suffocation,” and then clicked on an article about suicide that discussed taking poison and putting a bag over one’s head.

The browser then recorded activity on the social networking site MySpace, which was used by Casey Anthony but not her father.

A computer expert for Anthony’s defense team found the search before the trial. Her lead attorney, Jose Baez, first mentioned the search in his book about the case but suggested it was George Anthony who conducted the search after Caylee drowned because he wanted to kill himself.

Not knowing about the computer search, prosecutors had argued Caylee was poisoned with chloroform and then suffocated by duct tape placed over her mouth and nose. The girl’s body was found six months after she disappeared in a field near the family home and was too decomposed for an exact cause of death to be determined.

Many jurors apparently went into hiding amid public outrage over the verdict and refused to comment, but two have said prosecutors couldn’t conclusively prove how Caylee died.

Prosecutors Linda Drane Burdick and Jeff Ashton didn’t respond to emails from The Associated Press on Sunday.

But Ashton told WKMG that “it’s just a shame we didn’t have it. This certainly would have put the accidental death claim in serious question.”

Baez didn’t respond to phone or email messages Sunday from The Associated Press but told WKMG that he expected prosecutors to bring up the search at trial.

“When they didn’t, we were kind of shocked,” Baez, who no longer represents Anthony, told the station. Her attorney, Cheney Mason, who was also on the trial team, didn’t return an email message from AP Sunday, and his office answering service refused to take a phone message.

The sheriff’s office didn’t consult the FBI or Florida Department of Law Enforcement for help searching the computer in the Anthony case, a mistake investigators have learned from, Nieves said.

Supreme Court blocks Illinois law prohibiting taping of police

Supreme Court blocks Illinois law prohibiting taping of police

Tribune staff

10:12 a.m. CST, November 26, 2012

The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked enforcement of an Illinois law that prohibited people from recording police officers on the job.

The justices on Monday left in place a lower court ruling that found that the state's anti-eavesdropping law violates free speech rights when used against people who tape law enforcement officers.

The law set out a maximum prison term of 15 years.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in 2010 against Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez to block prosecution of ACLU staff for recording police officers performing their duties in public places, one of the group's long-standing monitoring missions.

Opponents of the law say the right to record police is vital to guard against abuses.

Last May, a federal appeals court in Chicago ruled that the law “likely violates” the First Amendment and ordered that authorities be banned from enforcing it.

The appeals court agreed with the ACLU that the "Illinois eavesdropping statute restricts far more speech than necessary to protect legitimate privacy interests.”

The appeals court ruling came weeks before the NATO summit when thousands of people armed with smart phones and video cameras demonstrated in the city. Officials had already announced that they would not enforce the law against summit protesters.

Public debate over the law had been simmering since last summer.

In August of 2011, a Cook County jury acquitted a woman who had been charged with recording Chicago police internal affairs investigators she believed were trying to dissuade her from filing a sexual harassment complaint against a patrol officer.

Judges in Cook and Crawford counties later declared the law unconstitutional, and the McLean County state's attorney cited flaws in the law when he dropped charges this past February against a man accused of recording an officer during a traffic stop.

Harvey Grossman, legal director of the ACLU of Illinois, said the organization was "pleased that the Supreme Court has refused to take this appeal. . .The ACLU of Illinois continues to believe that in order to make the rights of free expression and petition effective, individuals and organizations must be able to freely gather and record information about the conduct of government and their agents – especially the police. The advent and widespread accessibility of new technologies make the recording and dissemination of pictures and sound inexpensive, efficient and easy to accomplish.

The police will illegally search your cellphone without a warrant????

Sadly some courts have not ruled this as being a violation of the 4th Amendment.

Source

Courts Divided Over Searches of Cellphones

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: November 25, 2012 149 Comments

Judges and lawmakers across the country are wrangling over whether and when law enforcement authorities can peer into suspects’ cellphones, and the cornucopia of evidence they provide.

A Rhode Island judge threw out cellphone evidence that led to a man being charged with the murder of a 6-year-old boy, saying the police needed a search warrant. A court in Washington compared text messages to voice mail messages that can be overheard by anyone in a room and are therefore not protected by state privacy laws.

In Louisiana, a federal appeals court is weighing whether location records stored in smartphones deserve privacy protection, or whether they are “business records” that belong to the phone companies.

“The courts are all over the place,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a criminal lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group. “They can’t even agree if there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy in text messages that would trigger Fourth Amendment protection.”

The issue will attract attention on Thursday when a Senate committee considers limited changes to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a 1986 law that regulates how the government can monitor digital communications. Courts have used it to permit warrantless surveillance of certain kinds of cellphone data.

A proposed amendment would require the police to obtain a warrant to search e-mail, no matter how old it was, updating a provision that currently allows warrantless searches of e-mails more than 180 days old.

As technology races ahead of the law, courts and lawmakers are still trying to figure out how to think about the often intimate data that cellphones contain, said Peter P. Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University. Neither the 1986 statute nor the Constitution, he said, could have anticipated how much information cellphones may contain, including detailed records of people’s travels and diagrams of their friends.

“It didn’t take into account what the modern cellphone has — your location, the content of communications that are easily readable, including Facebook posts, chats, texts and all that stuff,” Mr. Swire said.

Courts have also issued divergent rulings on when and how cellphones can be inspected. An Ohio court ruled that the police needed a warrant to search a cellphone because, unlike a piece of paper that might be stuffed inside a suspect’s pocket and can be confiscated during an arrest, a cellphone may hold “large amounts of private data.”

But California’s highest court said the police could look through a cellphone without a warrant so long as the phone was with the suspect at the time of arrest.

Judges across the nation have written tomes about whether a cellphone is akin to a “container” — like a suitcase stuffed with marijuana that the police might find in the trunk of a car — or whether, as the judge in the Rhode Island murder case suggested, it is more comparable to a face-to-face conversation. That judge, Judith C. Savage, described text messages as “raw, unvarnished and immediate, revealing the most intimate of thoughts and emotions.” That is why, she said, citizens can reasonably expect them to be private.

There is little disagreement about the value of cellphone data to the police. In response to a Congressional inquiry, cellphone carriers said they responded in 2011 to 1.3 million demands from law enforcement agencies for text messages and other information about subscribers.

Among the most precious information in criminal inquiries is the location of suspects, and when it comes to location records captured by smartphones, court rulings have also been inconsistent. Privacy advocates say a trail of where people go is inherently private, while law enforcement authorities say that consumers have no privacy claim over signals transmitted from an individual mobile device to a phone company’s communications tower, which they refer to as third-party data.

Delaware, Maryland and Oklahoma have proposed legislation that would require the police to obtain a warrant before demanding location records from cellphone carriers. California passed such a law in August after intense lobbying by privacy advocates, including Mr. Fakhoury’s group. But Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed the bill, questioning whether it struck “the right balance between the operational needs of law enforcement and individual expectations of privacy.”

Similar legislation has been proposed in Congress.

Lacking a clear federal statute, the courts have been unable to reach a consensus. In Texas, a federal appeals court said this year that law enforcement officials did not need a warrant to track suspects through cellphones. In Louisiana, another federal appeals court is considering a similar case. Prosecutors are arguing that location information is part of cellphone carriers’ business records and thus not constitutionally protected.

The Supreme Court has not directly tackled the issue, except to declare, in a landmark ruling this year, that the police must obtain a search warrant to install a GPS tracking device on someone’s private property.

“We are in a constitutional moment for location tracking,” said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “It’s percolating in all these places.”

The Rhode Island case began shortly after 6 a.m. on a Sunday in October 2009, when Trisha Oliver called 911 to say that her son, Marco Nieves, 6, was unconscious in his bed. An ambulance rushed the boy to the hospital. A police officer also responded to the call, and Ms. Oliver escorted him through the bedrooms of her apartment. She then went to the hospital, leaving the police officer behind.

The officer heard a “beeping” in the kitchen, according to court papers. He picked up an LG-brand cellphone from the counter and saw this message: “Wat if I got 2 take him 2 da hospital wat do I say and dos marks on his neck omg.” It appeared to be from Ms. Oliver to her boyfriend, Michael Patino, court documents said.

Mr. Patino, 30, who was in the apartment at the time, was taken to the police station for questioning. The cellphone he had with him was seized. By evening, the boy was dead. The cause of death, according to court records, was “blunt force trauma to the abdomen which perforated his small intestine.”

Mr. Patino was charged with Marco’s murder.

In the course of the investigation, the police obtained more than a dozen search warrants for the cellphones of Mr. Patino, Ms. Oliver and their relatives. They also obtained records of phone calls and voice mail messages from the cellphone carriers.

Nearly three years later, in a 190-page ruling, Judge Savage sharply criticized the police.

The first police officer had no right to look at the phone without a search warrant, Judge Savage ruled. It was not in “plain view,” she wrote, nor did Ms. Oliver give her consent to search it. The court said Mr. Patino could reasonably have expected the text messages he exchanged with Ms. Oliver to be free from police scrutiny.

The judge then suppressed the bounty of evidence that the prosecution had secured through warrants, including the text message that had initially drawn the police officer’s attention.

“Given the amount of private information that can be readily gleaned from the contents of a person’s cellphone and text messages — and the heightened concerns for privacy as a result — this court will not expand the warrantless search exceptions to include the search of a cellphone and the viewing of text messages,” she wrote.

Mr. Patino remains in jail while the case is on appeal in the state’s Supreme Court. A lawyer for Mr. Patino did not respond to a request for comment.

Just months before Judge Savage’s ruling, the Rhode Island legislature passed a law compelling the police to obtain a warrant to search a cellphone, even if they find it during an arrest. Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee, an independent, vetoed the bill, saying, “The courts, and not the legislature, are better suited to resolve these complex and case-specific issues.”

Enrique Peña Nieto to continue Felipe Calderon's "war on drugs"

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Calderon finishes his six-year drug war at stalemate

By Nick Miroff and William Booth, Updated: Tuesday, November 27, 4:50 AM

MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderon, who sent battalions of poorly trained soldiers into the streets to fight powerful transnational crime organizations, leaves the battlefield this week after six years with at least 60,000 dead in drug violence and the war essentially a stalemate.

Although Calderon’s security forces have captured or killed more than two dozen of Mexico’s most-wanted drug cartel leaders, many of those vacancies have been filled. And while some cartels have been diminished, others have thrived, and there has been no measurable decrease in the quantity of drugs smuggled into the United States.

Calderon’s strategy unleashed record levels of crime that helped send his party to a staggering defeat in July’s presidential election, though a majority of Mexicans say in polls they support the military campaign.

Incoming president Enrique Peña Nieto of the rival Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, replaces Calderon on Saturday, promising to press ahead with the fight and maintain Mexico’s drug war partnership with the United States.

Yet Peña Nieto says he will fight the drug war differently, measuring success not by bringing down cartel bosses but by bringing down Mexico’s homicide rate. He will meet with President Obama at the White House on Tuesday.

What is unclear is how Mexico’s new president can deliver security gains in cities and towns, where government troops are often the only bulwark between relative order and total criminal takeover.

Calderon has insisted his military-led strategy is finally making Mexico safer. Homicides attributed to organized criminal activity fell in the first six months of this year, his administration says, declining for the first time since Calderon took office in December 2006.

The country has gone several months without one of the spectacular mass killings that left police corpses dumped along major highways or tortured bodies hanging from bridges a few miles from the U.S. border. And regions popular with tourists and American retirees are mostly free of violence.

Homicide rates have plunged in the once notoriously dangerous border cities of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. Businesses have reopened, and citizens praise the relative calm.

Calderon’s approval rating has improved in polls as public perceptions of security tick upward, and in recent speeches he insists “history will be the judge” of his term.

“In these six years, our nation has waged an unprecedented fight for the rule of law, justice and freedom for our families,” Calderon said in a recent address to the Mexican Congress that was careful to characterize the fight as a still-evolving “process.”

It is hard-won progress at an extraordinary price.

Calderon came into office vowing to reduce poverty, increase educational opportunities and open the country to free and competitive enterprise. Modest gains were made, but his center-right government was consumed by the drug war.

Stemming the flow of illegal narcotics from Mexico was one of the drug fight’s top priorities for Washington, which has backed Calderon with nearly $2 billion in security aid.

The U.S. government delivered Black Hawk helicopters, night-vision goggles and crime-fighting computer software, and helped train thousands of Mexican federal police at academies supported with U.S. tax dollars.

Six years into the fight, Mexican marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin remain cheap and more plentiful than ever in the United States, according to U.S. government data. U.N. surveys indicate that the per-gram price of cocaine on American streets is roughly the same today as it was a decade ago.

Calderon was not the first Mexican president to send soldiers against drug traffickers. But the deployment of more than 50,000 heavily armed, masked troops to patrol city streets became his signature security strategy, as Mexico’s police floundered in corruption scandals and the nation’s dysfunctional criminal justice system was overwhelmed, critics say.

According to tallies of government homicide data by Mexican media organizations, about 60,000 people have been killed in cartel-related violence since Calderon took office. An unknown number have gone missing; unknown because the government has refused to release its internal tallies.

Calculating the drug war dead is a guessing game. Earlier this year, the Calderon government announced it would no longer update its running count of drug killings, saying the true cause of death could not be reliably ascertained in a country where fewer than 10 percent of all crimes are investigated.

But Mexico’s raw crime statistics are sobering.

All homicides, whether the result of a barroom brawl or cartel feud, have gone up every year under Calderon, from fewer than 9,000 in 2007 to more than 27,000 last year, according to Mexico’s National Statistics Institute. It is likely there will be more than 100,000 homicides in Mexico during Calderon’s term, far more than in the United States — which has almost three times the population — during the same period.

Kidnappings, robberies and extortion have soared as well, symptoms of a broader breakdown in public security unleashed by the cartel violence, analysts say.

In one especially grim gauge of the violence, Mexican prosecutors revealed earlier this year that more than 1,300 people were beheaded in the country between 2007 and 2011.

In May, three top Mexican generals, one a former undersecretary of defense, were arrested and charged with working for the Beltran Leyva drug cartel.

“You can say the war has been a failure because Calderon said violence needed to stop, and now there’s three times more violence,” said Ruben Aguilar, a popular commentator in Mexico who served as spokesman for Calderon’s predecessor, President Vicente Fox.

“He said he had to diminish the cartels. But the cartels are still here, bigger and more violent than ever.”

Kingpins and killings

Although many drug lords have fallen, a glaring exception is Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman, Mexico’s most powerful trafficker, who under Calderon has expanded control over the most lucrative smuggling routes.

Forbes magazine listed Chapo as one the world’s richest men. In private, U.S. narcotics agents grumble that his web of bribery reaches deep into the Mexican government, helping him elude capture over and over.

But the Obama administration has avoided criticizing Calderon or his strategy on the record.

Calderon “has had significant success in clearly recognizing the problem and working to find a way to address it,” said David T. Johnson, the former U.S. assistant secretary of state who was in charge of the drug war partnership with Mexico and American assistance for judicial reform. “It is much to his credit that he has reached out to the United States as partner, working with us to build capacity of the criminal justice system.”

Yet not one of the dozen top cartel leaders captured alive has been put on trial and convicted in Mexico using police-gathered evidence or witness testimony — a sign that the institution building and judicial reform that were supposed to be a hallmark of Calderon’s campaign have fallen far short.

Instead, the kingpins are typically extradited to the United States or held for years without trial in Mexico.

A July report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass), concludes the deployment of Mexican military to fight organized crime has been ineffective and may have increased sensational killings by fragmenting crime mafias into warring bands.

Police tactics

Mexican film director Roberto Hernandez, whose “Presunto Culpable” (Presumed Guilty) chronicled the odyssey of a wrongly accused man and became the highest-grossing documentary in Mexican history after authorities tried to censor it, said “some progress has been made” in reforming the country’s legal system, “but unfortunately, I can’t say it’s due to the leadership of the president.”

Forced confessions continue to be standard practice, sometimes exacted by torture, say human rights observers, who have found that the worst abuses have been committed by Mexican soldiers.

“The military was the only institution with the firepower to confront the drug cartels, but it didn’t have the policing skills, and the police had those skills, but not the firepower,” said Roderic Camp, an expert on the Mexican military at California’s Claremont McKenna College.

Calderon attempted to reshape Mexico’s federal police force for that role, raising the number of officers from 6,000 to more than 35,000. But the agency has been plagued by scandal and criminal infiltration.

A dozen Mexican federal police, wearing civilian clothes and driving unmarked cars, launched at a high-powered ambush attack in August against an armored sports utility vehicle with diplomatic plates, leaving two CIA agents and a Mexican marine wounded. Mexican officials have still not determined whether the attack was a case of mistaken targets or directed at U.S. personnel.

The federal police buildup was a cornerstone of Calderon’s security strategy. Peña Nieto plans to shift tactics and fight the narcos with a new paramilitary force modeled after the French National Gendarmerie.

By then, Calderon may no longer be living in Mexico. In diplomatic receptions, he has repeatedly said he plans to move to the United States at the end of his term, fearing for his life.

If Mexico’s homicide rate continues to decline and security improves after he leaves office, Calderon will probably be vindicated for his strategy despite the high costs, said independent pollster Jorge Buendia.

“Right now, I think the public is ambivalent,” Buendia said. “They support the fight against the cartels as a matter of principle. But they’re ready for a change.”

Illinois lawmaker plans to push medical marijuana bill

Lawmaker plans to push medical marijuana bill

By Ray Long, Chicago Tribune reporter

6:00 a.m. CST, November 27, 2012 SPRINGFIELD—

The sponsor of a measure to let Illinois residents use marijuana for medical purposes said Monday he's closing in on collecting enough votes to pass the bill in the House.

Rep. Lou Lang said his "nose count" has him at or near the 60 votes needed for approval of a three-year trial medical marijuana program.

"If members vote their consciences, I'll have the votes," said Lang, D-Skokie.

The Senate has approved similar legislation before; the House has been the stumbling block. Last year, Lang fell a handful of votes short.

One big difference between now and then is that the election is in the past. There will be three dozen lawmakers in the House and Senate who are not coming back in the next General Assembly, making them lame ducks. Their votes are more likely to be up for grabs given that they are not expected to face the voters again.

The medical marijuana bill is one of several pieces of high-profile legislation that could come up as the General Assembly returns to the Capitol on Tuesday for the annual fall session.

Lawmakers will decide whether to try to override Gov. Pat Quinn's veto of a major gambling expansion bill. The governor cited a need for stronger ethical safeguards in the measure, which includes a Chicago casino that Mayor Rahm Emanuel covets.

Supporters could push a separate bill that would ban campaign contributions from casino interests and address some of the governor's other ethics concerns. Another potential scenario would be to iron out a new version of the gambling bill.

The state's shaky finances also are expected to be talked about in the next two weeks, if not resolved. On Monday, Quinn budget director Jerry Stermer warned a House committee that the growing costs of pensions are putting a tighter "squeeze" on all other government operations, ranging from public safety to education.

The retirement systems are costing as much as $1 billion a year more from funds that are shared with other programs. Lawmakers already saw education funding cut in the current budget.

Stermer said the worry is that the pension payments, without changes to rein in spending, could go from eating up roughly 16 percent of overall general operating funds to 25 percent within a few years and put Illinois finances in even worse shape.

The governor's budget point man gave his testimony as lawmakers heard arguments on a measure that would basically freeze the amount of money set aside for union salaries even as negotiations continue.

Any overhaul on public pensions is more likely to arise in early January, when fewer votes would be needed to pass legislation than while lawmakers are in session during the next two weeks.

rlong@tribune.com

NYPD using lost cell phones as an excuse to spy on people

Source

City Is Amassing Trove of Cellphone Logs

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

Published: November 26, 2012

When a cellphone is reported stolen in New York, the Police Department routinely subpoenas the phone’s call records, from the day of the theft onward. The logic is simple: If a thief uses the phone, a list of incoming and outgoing calls could lead to the suspect.

But in the process, the Police Department has quietly amassed a trove of telephone logs, all obtained without a court order, that could conceivably be used for any investigative purpose.

The call records from the stolen cellphones are integrated into a database known as the Enterprise Case Management System, according to Police Department documents from the detective bureau. Each phone number is hyperlinked, enabling detectives to cross-reference it against phone numbers in other files.

The subpoenas not only cover the records of the thief’s calls, but also encompass calls to and from the victim on the day of the theft. In some cases the records can include calls made to and from a victim’s new cellphone, if the stolen phone’s number has been transferred, three detectives said in interviews.

Police officials declined to say how many phone records are contained in the database, or how often they might have led to arrests. But police documents suggest that thousands of subpoenas have been issued each year, with each encompassing anywhere from dozens to hundreds of phone calls.

For example, T-Mobile, which has a smaller market share than some of its competitors, like Verizon, fulfilled 297 police subpoenas issued in January 2012, according to a police document.

To date, phone companies have appeared willing to accede to the Police Department’s requests for large swaths of call records. Memos issued Sept. 28 by the chief of detectives, Phil T. Pulaski, instruct detectives to prepare subpoenas for stolen phones assigned to AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile or Metro-PCS. With these carriers, the police do not generally seek the victims’ consent; in fact, the subpoenas are executed without the victims’ knowledge. (It does not appear that subpoenas are issued when the stolen phone is served by Sprint Nextel. In those cases, detectives are instructed to ask the victim to fill out consent forms that authorize Sprint Nextel to release call records and location information to the police.)

“If large amounts of victim phone records are being collected and added to a searchable database, it’s very troubling,” said Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who represents wireless carriers, in a phone interview.

“We’re all used to the concept of growing databases of criminal information,” Mr. Sussmann, of the firm Perkins Coie, said, “but now you’re crossing over that line and drawing in victim information.”

Police officials would not say if detectives had used the call records of any cellphone theft victims in the course of investigating other crimes. Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, did not reply to more than half a dozen requests for comments.

The practice of accumulating the phone numbers in a searchable database is “eye-opening and alarming,” a civil rights lawyer, Norman Siegel, said when told of the protocol for subpoenaing phone records. “There is absolutely no legitimate purpose for doing this. If I’m an innocent New Yorker, why should any of my information be in a police database?”

Mr. Siegel also said the Police Department should not be permitted to hold on to phone records indefinitely if the records were not relevant to active criminal investigations.

Nationwide, cellphone carriers reported receiving about 1.5 million requests from law enforcement for various types of subscriber information in 2011.

Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who is co-chairman of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, began seeking information this year about how cellular carriers handle law enforcement’s requests for subscriber information. And on Thursday, a Senate committee will consider changes to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Mr. Sussmann suggested that the Police Department could limit its subpoenas to phone calls beginning on the hour, not the day, of the theft, and ending as soon as the victim has transferred the number to a new phone.

According to documents reviewed by The New York Times, the police subpoenas seek call records associated with the telephone number of the stolen phone.

As a result, three detectives said in interviews, the phone companies’ response sometimes includes call records for not only the stolen phone, but also the victim’s new phone, depending on variables like how quickly the victim transfers the old phone number to a new handset and how many days of calls the subpoena seeks.

One detective said the subpoenas from recent cases typically requested about four days of phone records, but documents reviewed by The Times indicate that the subpoenas can cover longer periods, sometimes as much as two weeks or more.

In interviews, detectives said that if an arrest occurs, it is often a result of earlier investigative steps. Chief Pulaski’s memos from Sept. 28 instruct detectives to use any tracking or location application on the victim’s phone to track down a suspect. Victims are asked to immediately call the phone carrier and learn the details of any phone calls placed after the theft. In addition, detectives ask the victim not to transfer their phone number to a new phone for about four days. Finally, detectives are then required to prepare a subpoena, the results of which usually take a few weeks.

By then, most of the unsolved phone cases have been put on the back burner, and the subpoenaed records seldom lead to an arrest, four current and retired detectives said in interviews.

Drunk drug counselor kills man in hit and run accident!

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DUI suspect in Torrance pedestrian death was a drug counselor

By Kate Mather and Ruben Vives, Los Angeles Times

November 27, 2012, 12:33 a.m.

Sherri Wilkins wrote in a Myspace profile that "she used to be into drugs very heavy" and "with that came terrible choices."

Wilkins was trying to turn her life around: She wrote that she had been sober for 11 years, had reconnected with family and, according to state records, earned a certification in drug and alcohol counseling. She was working at a Torrance treatment center, helping others battle the addiction she tried to put behind her.

But over the weekend, Wilkins allegedly struck a pedestrian while driving drunk on Torrance Boulevard and kept driving for more than two miles with the man embedded in her windshield, according to police.

Torrance police arrested the 51-year-old on suspicion of driving under the influence and manslaughter. Wilkins told officers she "panicked" after the crash Saturday night and simply kept driving, said Sgt. Robert Watt.

Other motorists managed to stop Wilkins and grab her keys at 182nd Street and Crenshaw Boulevard, Watt said. Phillip Moreno, 31, of Torrance still had a pulse when officers arrived, but was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Wilkins had a blood-alcohol level more than double the legal 0.08% limit, Watt said. He said she told police she was on her way home from work at the time of the crash, but officials at the treatment center said it had only daytime meetings on Saturdays and was closed.

"There was absolutely nothing that gave us an indication that she was in a danger zone," said David Lisonbee of Twin Town Treatment Centers.

"We feel just absolutely appalled and horrified that this happened to both families," he added. "It's a horrible tragedy."

In 2010, Wilkins faced charges of driving under the influence, hit and run, and being under the influence of a controlled substance after she allegedly hit a power pole at the intersection of 182nd Street and Hawthorne — less than two miles from where Moreno was pulled from her windshield. Wilkins dragged the pole into the road, where a few other cars struck it and were damaged, said Patrick Sullivan, assistant city attorney for Torrance.

That case, however, was eventually dismissed. Sullivan said Wilkin's blood-alcohol level came back at zero and the levels of drugs were "so low" an expert couldn't testify there was an impairment. Wilkins reached a civil compromise with the other drivers.

Watt said it was "hard to say" if Moreno would have survived had Wilkins stopped earlier. The 18-year police veteran called the incident "mind-boggling."

"I've never seen this," Watt said. "It shows you how impaired she must have been."

A memorial for Moreno was crafted at the corner where he was struck. Bud Light beer bottles, a miniature Dodgers bat, a Kobe Bryant jersey, balloons and flowers lay at a nearby railroad signal, along with notes with Moreno's nickname, "Chud."

"Chud, you will be missed," one note read. "You will be in our hearts."

Standing nearby, Gilbert Chavez, 25, described his longtime friend as a "good hangout buddy" well-liked by many. Friends and family called Moreno "Chudweiser," Chavez said, because he liked to drink and have a good time.

"He was a good person," Chavez said. "He was definitely a jokester."

Tiffany Servio, 29, met Moreno at a Torrance park, where she said Moreno would play basketball almost every week. She often picked him to be on her team because he was tall, stocky and — "very athletic," she said.

Staring at the memorial site, Servio called the entire incident "crazy."

"This was very unexpected," she said.

A man who went to high school with Moreno's older brother, who gave his name only as Armando, said he couldn't believe the driver didn't stop.

"At least pull over," he said. "There's a gas station right there. Pull in and say you made a mistake, drop him off and flee if you want."

Court records showed Wilkins also had two convictions for burglary and petty theft in Los Angeles County, along with a conviction out of San Bernardino County for bringing alcohol or drugs into a prison.

In her Myspace profile, Wilkins said she was a "proud parent" who loved music, dogs, painting, cooking and the mountains. "I love life today," she wrote.

Under "Smoke / Drink," the profile read: "No / No."

kate.mather@latimes.com

ruben.vives@latimes.com

Lawsuit targets ‘locator’ chips in student IDs

Looks like 1984 is here, even if it took a almost 30 years

Lawsuit targets ‘locator’ chips in student IDs

By Paul J. Weber Associated Press Tue Nov 27, 2012 9:06 PM

AUSTIN, Texas -- To 15-year-old Andrea Hernandez, the tracking microchip embedded in her student ID card is a “mark of the beast,” sacrilege to her Christian faith — not to mention how it pinpoints her location, even in the school bathroom.

But to her budget-reeling San Antonio school district, those chips carry a potential $1.7 million in classroom funds.

Starting this fall, the fourth-largest school district in Texas is experimenting with “locator” chips in student ID badges on two of its campuses.

When Hernandez and her parents balked at the so-called SmartID, the school agreed to remove the chip but still required her to wear the badge. The family refused on religious grounds, stating in a lawsuit that even wearing the badge was tantamount to “submission of a false god” because the card still indicated her participation.

On Wednesday, a state district judge is expected to decide whether Northside Independent School District can transfer Hernandez to a different campus.

“How often do you see an issue where the ACLU and Christian fundamentalists come together? It’s unusual,” said Chris Steinbach, the chief of staff for Republican state Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, who has filed a bill to outlaw it in Texas schools.

In Texas, school funding is based on attendance. The more students seated in homeroom when the first bell rings, the more state dollars the school receives.

With the locator chips, a clerk in the main office can find out whether students are elsewhere on campus and, if so, include them in the attendance count.

Gonzalez said the district estimated it’ll bring in an additional $1.7 million in funding, somewhat lessening the sting of losing $61.5 million after state lawmakers cut public school funding in Texas.

Fountain Hills pastor accused of selling drugs

Personally I think all drugs should be legal, but these religious folks are hypocrites for selling drugs at the same time they are demonizing people for using drugs.

Note the cops also stole seized this guys phone and computer, hoping to use the data on them to track down other drug users.

Source

Fountain Hills pastor accused of selling drugs

By Amber McMurray The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Wed Nov 28, 2012 10:26 PM

A Fountain Hills pastor arrested Wednesday is accused of selling drugs to people to “bring them closer to God,” according to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

Deputies received information that Mark Derksen, 63, was selling drugs out of his apartment to 30 people Tuesday, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said.

A search warrant was issued for Derksen’s apartment where deputies found large amounts of heroin, methamphetamine and prescription drugs, Arpaio said.

Officials believe the Faith Mountain Christian Church, where Derksen is a pastor, is currently for sale. Arpaio said it is unknown whether or not Derksen ever sold drugs at the church.

A 36-year-old woman was also arrested at the apartment for outstanding warrants for drug-related activity and suspicion of possession, Arpaio said.

The drugs were seized at the scene along with a shotgun and a small caliber pistol, Arpaio said.

Deputies also seized Derksen’s phone and computer. Arpaio said he hopes a search of the phone and computer will reveal Derksen’s clients and possibly his supplier.

“I want to know all the people who went to his house to buy drugs,” Arpaio said.

Derksen admitted to giving drugs to people to “bring them closer to God,” Arpaio said.

Arpaio said what’s unusual about this case is that Derksen is giving drugs to people for free while selling drugs to others. Officials believe Derksen did this to get people hooked on the drugs so he could get more clients.

Derksen is a user himself and is currently in the hospital for an unknown illness, Arpaio said.

MCSO has had information about Derksen for two years but has not had enough evidence to arrest him until now, Arpaio said.

How many murdered in Felipe Calderon's US financed war on drugs???

Source

Mexico’s crime wave has left about 25,000 missing, government documents show

By William Booth, Published: November 29

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s attorney general has compiled a list showing that more than 25,000 adults and children have gone missing in Mexico in the past six years, according to unpublished government documents.

The data sets, submitted by state prosecutors and vetted by the federal government but never released to the public, chronicle the disappearance of tens of thousands of people in the chaos and violence that have enveloped Mexico during its fight against drug mafias and crime gangs.

Families have been left wondering whether their loved ones are alive or among the more than 100,000 victims of homicides recorded during the presidency of Felipe Calderon, who leaves office Saturday.

The names on the list — many more than in previous, nongovernment estimates — are recorded in Microsoft Excel columns, along with the dates they disappeared, their ages, the clothes they were wearing, their jobs and a few brief, often chilling, details:

“His wife went to buy medicine and disappeared,” reads one typical entry.

“The son was addicted to drugs.”

“Her daughter was forced into a car.”

“The father was arrested by men wearing uniforms and never seen again.”

The documents were provided by government bureaucrats frustrated by what they describe as a lack of official transparency and the failure of government agencies to investigate the cases.

The leaked list is not complete — or, probably, precise. Some of the missing may have returned to their homes, and some families may never have reported disappearances.

But the list offers a rare glimpse of the running tally the Mexican government has been keeping, and it confirms what human rights activists and families of the missing have been saying: that Mexico has seen an explosion in the number of such cases and that the government appears overwhelmed.

“What does the government do? Nothing or almost nothing. Why? There is a paralysis,” said Juan Lopez Villanueva of the group United Forces for Our Missing in Mexico. “The state has failed us.”

According to the National Commission on Human Rights, more than 7,000 people killed in Mexico in the past six years lie unidentified in morgue freezers or common graves.

The commission’s numbers suggest the government count might be accurate. From 2006 to mid-2011, the commission reports that more than 18,000 Mexicans were reported missing.

Calderon’s spokesman declined to offer a reason why the numbers have not been made public during his tenure, and the attorney general’s office did not respond to questions about the list that its staff members compiled.

Critics say the outgoing government has been slow to collect data on those who disappeared and is burying the numbers because their publication would highlight Mexico’s failure to investigate the cases and undermine efforts by Calderon to show that his U.S.-backed fight against organized crime is working.

“Releasing the data would add to the already deteriorating forecast about growing insecurity, and publishing such a very large number, 25,000, it just reinforces the idea that the country is violent,” said Edna Jaime Trevino, director of the think tank Mexico Evalua.

Whatever the reasons, the task of tracking the missing now falls to incoming president Enrique Pena Nieto’s new government. There is no statute of limitations for missing-person cases, and Mexico has heard withering criticism from both the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the United Nations about its handling of them.

In December 2011, Calderon pledged in a speech to create a national database including lists of the people who had disappeared and of unidentified bodies, and he promised it would be ready in early 2012.

Then in March, the Mexican Congress passed a law that required the government to establish Calderon’s database, which medical examiners, law enforcement officials and families could use to help track cases. Since then, lawmakers have failed to publish the regulations that would allow the law to be implemented.

State prosecutors agreed to provide data from their missing-person cases to the attorney general, but their reports appear uneven. For example, prosecutors in the northern border states of Chihuahua and Coahuila report only a few hundred cases, even as the governors of those states have stated that there were many more.

The list is a first step, but it is also a disappointment, according to Mexican officials and rights activists. That is because the list, as it is compiled, contains a broad spectrum of cases, mixing together all those who have vanished, whether they were forcibly abducted, young lovers running away or simply people who left their homes to work in the United States or elsewhere.

“This half-baked effort is reflective of an administration that never took the problem of disappearances seriously and is now trying to cover its tracks. But for all its problems, the list provides clear evidence that thousands of Mexicans have gone missing and that the government knew about them,” said Nik Steinberg, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.

According to his family, Antonio Verastegui, a shopkeeper, and his nephew, an engineering student, were detained by hooded men wearing police bulletproof vests on Jan. 24, 2009, when they were traveling from a religious festival to their home in the state of Durango.

“A police commander told us they had made a mistake in detaining them,” said Jorge Verastegui, a brother. “He told us they were arrested and beaten and released.”

The two have not been found.

“If the government releases the figures of the displaced, the missing and the dead, it would reflect badly on them, but they ignored us, they ignored the reality,” Verastegui said. “Because to release these figures would show that their strategies had failed, and they had failed us.”

Gabriela Martinez contributed to this report.

Rules for Targeted Killing

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Rules for Targeted Killing

Published: November 29, 2012

The White House reportedly is developing rules for when to kill terrorists around the world. The world may never see them, given the Obama administration’s inclination toward unnecessary secrecy regarding its national security policy. But the effort itself is a first step toward acknowledging that when the government kills people away from the battlefield, it must stay within formal guidelines based on the rule of law — especially when the life of an American citizen is at stake.

For eight years, the United States has conducted but never formally acknowledged a program to kill terrorists associated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban away from the battlefield in Afghanistan. Using drones, the Central Intelligence Agency has made 320 strikes in Pakistan since 2004, killing 2,560 or more people, including at least 139 civilians, according to the Long War Journal, a Web site that tracks counterterrorism operations. Another 55 strikes took place in Yemen.

Administration officials have never explained in any detail how these targets are chosen. Are they killing people only associated with groups that participated in the Sept. 11 attacks, the limitation imposed by Congress when it authorized military force in 2001? Or are they free to remove any threat to the United States they perceive? Officials insist they go after only actual belligerents covered in the 2001 legislation, but the public and the world have no way of knowing whether these decisions are made ad hoc, or how they would be interpreted by future presidents.

Before the election, when it looked as if Mitt Romney had a chance of winning the White House, administration officials began codifying these rules, according to a recent report in The Times by Scott Shane. Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, one official told Mr. Shane anonymously.

That impulse was right, even if the reasoning was wrong. The rules for killing shouldn’t be amorphous simply because Mr. Romney might have taken over; they need to be rigorous and formalized for Mr. Obama, too. If he sets proper boundaries, it would create a precedent that his successors would have to justify breaking.

Providing a wide latitude to kill would be worse than pointless. Any rules should specify that no one can be killed unless actively planning or participating in terror, or helping lead Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Raising money for terror groups, or making tapes urging others to kill, does not justify assassination, and neither does a threat or a revolt against another government. Killing should be a last resort, when it can be demonstrated that capture is impossible. Standards for preventing the killing of innocents who might be nearby should be detailed and thorough. (Most of these rules are already part of international law.)

Standard police methods should be used on American soil. And if an American citizen operating abroad is targeted, due process is required. We have urged the formation of a special court, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, that could review the evidence regarding a target before that person is placed on a kill list. Otherwise, the government should establish a clear procedure so officials outside of the administration are allowed to pass judgment on assassination decisions.

Mr. Obama has acknowledged the need for a “legal architecture” to be put in place “to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president’s reined in.” Yet his administration has resisted legal efforts by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union to make public its secret legal opinions on these killings. Once the rules are completed, they should be shown to a world skeptical of countries that use deadly force without explanation.

Mesa police paid big bucks to arrest people for victimless crimes???

On the other hand the cops who make big bucks arresting those harmless people will certainly complain very loudly when they have to arrest dangerous criminals like robbers and murders who might fight back.

"Maybe somebody who was arrested for something like spitting on the sidewalk or trespassing on the railroad and giving false information to the police. In two instances these guys spent over a month in jail for some serious mental-health issues. If we had identified them early, we could have maybe gotten them into some kind of treatment right away."

Jesus, don't the Mesa cops have any REAL criminals to hunt down????

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City Court in Mesa speeds mental screenings

By Gary Nelson The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Nov 30, 2012 9:13 AM

Mesa’s Municipal Court is streamlining the way it screens defendants with potential mental-health issues.

If the program is successful, it will reduce crime, put people on a pathway to treatment rather than punishment, and save public dollars.

The City Council’s public-safety committee enthusiastically endorsed the idea after city prosecutor Jon Eliason spelled it out in a recent meeting.

“In today’s world, where there is such a callous indifference to people less fortunate, you guys are being proactive to help people with serious mental-health issues,” Councilman Chris Glover told Eliason and City Court officials.

The program will change how Mesa administers what court professionals call Rule 11, which requires that people be mentally competent to help manage their defenses if they’re charged with a crime.

In cases where that’s in question, the defendant goes through an initial evaluation. If the person is found competent, the case is scheduled for City Court. But if not, it moves to Maricopa County Superior Court, where more evaluations are required.

Eliason said one of his prosecutors travels, usually once or twice a month, to downtown Phoenix to attend Rule 11 proceedings there for Mesa defendants.

“A lot of times the defendant won’t show up to the appointment,” Eliason said. “These are seriously mentally ill people a lot of times. Getting to court is tough for them.”

The result can be that people are picked up on failure-to-appear warrants and Mesa pays the Sheriff’s Office to house them in county jail.

Eliason said Phoenix began experimenting last spring with conducting Rule 11 screenings at the city courthouse. “They have found a significant decrease in failures to appear,” he said, because defendants already know where to go.

Eliason said many Rule 11 cases involve relatively minor offenses.

“Maybe somebody who was arrested for something like spitting on the sidewalk or trespassing on the railroad and giving false information to the police,” he said. “In two instances these guys spent over a month in jail for some serious mental-health issues. If we had identified them early, we could have maybe gotten them into some kind of treatment right away.”

Councilman Dennis Kavanaugh said courts across the country have been trying to speed their handling of potentially mentally ill defendants, with good results.

Paul Thomas, who administers Mesa’s City Court, said the change will be welcome. “The court is frustrated because a person with mental-health issues, the justice system really struggles to come up with any kind of options that are appropriate,” Thomas said.

He added, “The early identification, I think, will serve the courts, the defendant and the city well.”

Thomas said the court is establishing a grant-funded position to coordinate the screenings and to make sure defendants continue to get treatment and services if their criminal cases are dismissed.

“Not to create classes of defendants,” Thomas said. “But to bring into play an array of services for all defendants ... veterans who have issues, homeless who have issues.”

Eliason told The Republic the program is still taking shape.

“So far we’ve gotten a positive response from the doctors we’ve contacted to come and do the screenings here,” Eliason said. “The next goal is to have a day set aside each month for them to come here and screen them.”

“If these people stay on their drugs and stay on their management plan we don’t have as much recidivism,” he said.

But the program is not aimed at putting every mentally ill defendant back on the streets. “Obviously, if somebody is dangerous or violent that’s another story,” Eliason said.

He told the council committee that the court currently sees about 10 Rule 11 cases a month, and that the new program has been endorsed by the police department, defense lawyers, mental-health professionals and the county Superior Court.

Felipe Calderon is now at Harvard University

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Outgoing Mexican President Felipe Calderon heading to Harvard

By Daniel Hernandez

November 28, 2012, 10:10 a.m.

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican President Felipe Calderon will head to Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., after his six-year term ends Saturday. He will be a teaching and research fellow in 2013, the university and the president's office said in statements Wednesday.

The announcement put to rest one of the most pressing questions in Mexico's political chatterbox: What's the next post or destination for Calderon, who declared a military-led campaign against drug cartels that left scores of civilians dead or missing across the country?

For his next move, the politically conservative Calderon will be named Inaugural Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School for next year, allowing him to lecture, teach and conduct research as he pleases, the school said.

Calderon received a mid-career master's degree in public administration at the Kennedy School in 2000. He also holds a law degree and a master's degree in economics from institutions in Mexico.

In inviting him to Harvard, the school emphasized Calderon's "pro-business" economic policies and his government's reforms in areas such as climate change and healthcare.

"President Calderon is a vivid example of a dynamic and committed public servant, who took on major challenges in Mexico," David T. Ellwood, dean of the school, said in the statement. "I am thrilled he will be returning."

Earlier this year, Calderon was in negotiations to take a post at the University of Texas at Austin, sparking protests among students and faculty there. One organizer of a petition against inviting Calderon to the University of Texas told a local news outlet in September that his presence there would be "like saying, 'We don’t care about your pain ... We don't care that your country has been ravaged.' "

Elite private universities in the United States are friendly ground for Mexican presidents. Calderon gave the commencement speech at Stanford University in 2011. Ernesto Zedillo, president of Mexico from 1994 to 2000, is currently a professor at Yale University.

On Saturday, Calderon hands over Mexico's presidential sash to Enrique Peña Nieto in a ceremony at the lower house of Congress to launch the country's next six-year presidential term.

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Exiting Mexican Leader to Go to Harvard

By KARLA ZABLUDOVSKY

Published: November 29, 2012

MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderón, who unleashed the military to take on drug traffickers and saw violence spiral out of control during his tenure, will move out of Mexico shortly after leaving office on Saturday.

In January, Mr. Calderón will join the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard as the first Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders fellow, a one-year position created to give high-profile leaders leaving office time to write, lecture and generally share their experiences.

Mr. Calderón, 50, who earned a master’s degree in public administration from the Kennedy School in 2000, will focus on “the many policy challenges he encountered while serving as president,” the school said in a news release that did not mention his biggest challenge: confronting the drug-trafficking organizations that have terrorized the country and fueled a war that left tens of thousands of people dead during his six years in office.

The school’s statement praised other achievements, including his stewardship of the economy, which stabilized after a recession and is now growing faster than the United States’.

Mr. Calderón, who has a wife who has dabbled in politics and three young children, was long expected to leave Mexico, either because of safety considerations or to follow a custom of departing Mexican presidents, who generally do not stay.

“It’s a tradition,” said Shannon K. O’Neil, senior fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, “to give your successor a little bit of space.”

Shortly after leaving the presidency in 1994 under a cloud, Carlos Salinas de Gortari went into self-imposed exile, traveling to New York, Montreal and Havana and finally settling in Dublin. He sought to be named the head of the World Trade Organization, but withdrew after his brother was arrested on charges of ordering the assassination of a Mexican politician.

His successor, Ernesto Zedillo, joined Yale University, his alma mater, as director of the Center for the Study of Globalization.

Vicente Fox, Mr. Calderón’s immediate predecessor and a fellow member of the National Action Party, remained in Mexico in recent years.

He started a research group and kept his hand in politics, causing a stir last summer when he all but endorsed Enrique Peña Nieto of the rival Institutional Revolutionary Party for president. Mr. Peña Nieto won and takes office on Saturday.

Some analysts contend that security problems in Mexico would make it difficult for Mr. Calderón to stay, despite the government’s provision of an extensive security detail for former presidents.

“Calderón is going to pay a high personal cost for having had the courage to take on the cartels, and part of it entails having to be away with his family for some time,” said Gabriel Guerra, a political analyst and consultant.

Mr. Calderón’s job hunt has brought some controversy.

After The Dallas Morning News reported in August that he was in talks with the University of Texas about a teaching position, students and faculty members started circulating a petition across the country blaming him for the deaths of young people in the drug war and calling on campuses to bar him.

Felipe Calderón irá a Harvard en 2013

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Felipe Calderón irá a Harvard en 2013

Publicado: Miércoles, 28 de noviembre de 2012 a las 08:42

CIUDAD DE MÉXICO (CNNExpansión) — El presidente Felipe Calderón irá a la Universidad de Harvard como académico al terminar su mandato.

"El Primer Mandatario se convertirá en el primer participante invitado al Programa Angelopoulos de Líderes Públicos Globales en la Escuela de Gobierno John F. Kennedy de la Universidad de Harvard", informó la Presidencia en un comunicado este miércoles.

Detalló que el programa busca dar un espacio académico donde los líderes globales puedan dictar conferencias, interactuar con futuros líderes, académicos e investigadores, así como reflexionar sobre sus experiencias.

Agregó que Calderón colaborará con el Programa de Estudios de Caso de la Escuela de Gobierno durante 2013.

El programa en el que participará fue creado con el respaldo de la servidora pública griega Giana Angelopoulos, quien es miembro de la Iniciativa Global Clinton y Vicepresidenta del Consejo del Decano de la Escuela de Gobierno John F. Kennedy.

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Será Felipe Calderón academico en Harvard

Noviembre 28 de 2012

Por Yadira Rodriguez

México.- La Presidencia de la República informó que Calderón aceptó la invitación que le hizo la Universidad de Harvard, en los Estados Unidos, para participar como académico durante el 2013 en la Escuela John F. Kennedy.

Calderón se integrará al Programa Angelopoulos de Líderes Públicos Globales, que tiene como objetivo formar a los líderes del futuro.

Entre las actividades que tendrá Calderón en Harvard destacan: colaborar con académicos, investigadores y estudiantes, dictar conferencias y colaborar con el Programa de Estudios de Caso de la Escuela John F. Kennedy.

En el comunicado se detalla que Calderón se convertirá en el primer mexicano que participe como invitado en el Programa de Líderes Públicos Globales de la Universidad de Harvard.

El Programa Angelopoulos de Líderes Públicos Globales fue creado con el respaldo de la servidora pública griega Gianna Angelopoulos, quien es Miembro de la Iniciativa Global Clinton y Vicepresidenta del Consejo del Decano de la Escuela de Gobierno John F. Kennedy.

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Felipe Calderón fue designado investigador de Harvard

Reflexionará sobre su sexenio en México

El presidente mexicano Felipe Calderón fungirá a partir de enero como investigador de la Escuela Kennedy de la Universidad de Harvard, anunció el decano de la institución David Ellwood.

"El presidente Calderón es un ejemplo vivo de un servidor público dinámico y comprometido, que confrontó los mayores desafíos de México", dijo Ellwod, citado por la agencia mexicana Notimex.

¿Qué opinas del futuro del presidente mexicano Felipe Calderón? Participa en nuestros Foros.

"Aportará su experiencia y conocimiento que ayudará a informar e inspirar a los estudiantes y a la facultad", añadió.

Calderón, quien entregará el sábado el poder a Enrique Peña Nieto, será el primer invitado del programa Angelopoulos para líderes globales establecido en 2011 con el apoyo de la ex legisladora griega Gianna Angelopoulos con el objetivo de brindarle a líderes que abandonan puestos públicos la oportunidad de enseñar, aprender e investigar.

Calderón estará desde enero hasta diciembre de 2013 en Harvard, donde ya había obtenido una maestría en administración pública, recordó The Associated Press.

Entre sus funciones se reunirá con estudiantes, hará colaboraciones con profesores e investigadores y ofrecerá discursos.

Calderón afirmó estar emocionado

"Estoy emocionado por la oportunidad de regresar a la Escuela Kennedy de Harvard una vez que termine mi presidencia. Será una tremenda oportunidad para reflexionar sobre mis seis años de gobierno", afirmó Calderón en una declaración a la universidad.

Igualmente destacó la oportunidad de "empezar a trabajar en importantes investigaciones que documentarán los muchos desafíos que enfrentamos, y las posiciones políticas que asumimos durante mi gobierno".

Calderón estará asimismo afiliado con el Centro de Negocios y Gobierno Mossavar-Rahmani.

El programa de Lideres Públicos Globales Angelopoulos fue diseñado para personas que ejercieron un liderazgo de alto nivel que se encuentran en etapa de transición de la vida pública y ofrece una residencia para enseñar, aprender e investigar, señaló la universidad.

Fue establecido con el apoyo de Gianna Angelopoulos, una organizadora olímpica y embajadora, además de abogada y ex miembro del Parlamento.

"Estoy emocionada que el presidente Calderón regresará a Harvard para servir como el primer investigador del programa", dijo la embajadora.

La universidad señaló que la residencia de Calderón se extenderá hasta diciembre del 2013.

Calderón, del Partido de Acción Nacional, lanzó desde su llegada al poder en 2006 una ofensiva militarizada a los carteles del narcotráfico que ha dejado hasta septiembre de 2011 al menos 47,500 muertes, según cifras oficiales.

Peña Nieto asumirá el 1 de diciembre la presidencia para los próximos seis años, lo cual marcará el regreso al poder del Partido Revolucionario Institucional que ya gobernó el país de manera ininterrumpida entre 1929 y 2000.

Drone crashes mount at civilian airports

Drone crashes mount at civilian airports

By Craig Whitlock, Published: November 30

The U.S. Air Force drone, on a classified spy mission over the Indian Ocean, was destined for disaster from the start.

An inexperienced military contractor in shorts and a T-shirt, flying by remote control from a trailer at Seychelles International Airport, committed blunder after blunder in six minutes on April 4.

He sent the unarmed MQ-9 Reaper drone off without permission from the control tower. A minute later, he yanked the wrong lever at his console, killing the engine without realizing why.

As he tried to make an emergency landing, he forgot to put down the wheels. The $8.9 million aircraft belly-flopped on the runway, bounced and plunged into the tropical waters at the airport’s edge, according to a previously undisclosed Air Force accident investigation report.

The drone crashed at a civilian airport that serves a half-million passengers a year, most of them sun-seeking tourists. No one was hurt, but it was the second Reaper accident in five months — under eerily similar circumstances.

“I will be blunt here. I said, ‘I can’t believe this is happening again,’ ” an Air Force official at the scene told investigators afterward. He added: “You go, ‘How stupid are you?’ ”

The April wreck was the latest in a rash of U.S. military drone crashes at overseas civilian airports in the past two years. The accidents reinforce concerns about the risks of flying the robot aircraft outside war zones, including in the United States.

A review of thousands of pages of unclassified Air Force investigation reports, obtained by The Washington Post under public-records requests, shows that drones flying from civilian airports have been plagued by setbacks.

Among the problems repeatedly cited are pilot error, mechanical failure, software bugs in the “brains” of the aircraft and poor coordination with civilian air-traffic controllers.

On Jan. 14, 2011, a Predator drone crashed off the Horn of Africa while trying to return to an international airport next to a U.S. military base in Djibouti. It was the first known accident involving a Predator or Reaper drone near a civilian airport. Predators and Reapers can carry satellite-guided missiles and have become the Obama administration’s primary weapon against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Since then, at least six more Predators and Reapers have crashed in the vicinity of civilian airports overseas, including other instances in which contractors were at the controls.

The mishaps have become more common at a time when the Pentagon and domestic law-enforcement agencies are pressing the Federal Aviation Administration to open U.S. civil airspace to surveillance drones.

The FAA permits drone flights only in rare cases, citing the risk of midair collisions. The Defense Department can fly Predators and Reapers on training and testing missions in restricted U.S. airspace near military bases.

The pressure to fly drones in the same skies as passenger planes will only increase as the war in Afghanistan winds down and the military and CIA redeploy their growing fleets of Predators and Reapers. Last year, the military began flying unarmed Reapers from a civilian airport in Ethiopia to spy in next-door Somalia.

In a Nov. 20 speech in Washington, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said the Pentagon would expand its use of the unmanned attack planes “outside declared combat zones” as it pursues al-Qaeda supporters in Africa and the Middle East.

“These enhanced capabilities will enable us to be more flexible and agile against a threat that has grown more diffuse,” Panetta said.

The Air Force says that its drones are safe and that crash rates have declined as the military fine-tunes the new technology. Mishap rates for Predators have fallen to levels comparable to F-16 fighter jets at same stage in their development, according to the Air Force Safety Center at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.

‘Backlash and repercussion’

In Djibouti, five Predators have crashed since the Air Force began ramping up drone operations there to combat terrorist groups in nearby Yemen and Somalia.

Many of the mechanical breakdowns have been peculiar to drones.

On May 7, 2011, an armed Predator suffered an electrical malfunction that sent it into a death spiral about a mile offshore from Djibouti City, the capital, which has about 600,000 residents. “I’m just glad we landed it in the ocean and not someplace else,” a crew member told investigators.

Ten days later, another Predator missed the runway by nearly three miles and crashed near a residential area. The aircraft was carrying a live Hellfire missile, but it did not detonate and no one was injured.

Another close call came March 15, 2011. An armed Predator came in too steep and fast for landing, overshot the runway and slammed into a fence.

Investigators attributed that accident to a melted throttle part, but they also blamed pilot error. They said the remote- control pilot was “inattentive” and “confused” during the landing. Because he was isolated inside a ground-control station, the report added, he did not notice the wind rush or high engine pitch that might have warned a pilot in a manned aircraft to slow down.

In Djibouti, the Air Force drones operate from Camp Lemonnier, a fast-growing U.S. military base devoted to counterterrorism. The base is adjacent to Djibouti’s international airport and shares a single runway with passenger aircraft.

That has led to miscommunications and tensions with Djiboutian civil aviation officials. One unidentified U.S. officer told investigators last year that he often had to sternly remind his fellow troops that civilians were in charge of the site.

“There is a need to understand the urgency that this airport doesn’t belong to us,” he said. “Every time that we cause a delay or they miss flight times and connecting flights, there’s a big backlash and repercussion.”

In addition to the five Predator wrecks in Djibouti, the officer said he had witnessed three emergency landings that narrowly avoided catastrophe. “I have no illusions that this won’t happen again, whether it’s an MQ-1 or otherwise,” he said, referring to the military code name for a Predator.

Meanwhile, U.S. drone crews complained to investigators about the Djiboutian air-traffic controllers, saying they speak poor English, are “short- tempered” and are uncomfortable with Predators in their airspace.

According to the crew members, the Djiboutian controllers give priority to passenger planes and order drone pilots to keep their aircraft circling overhead even when they are dangerously low on fuel.

Big Safari

The operation started with four Reapers that spied on pirates at sea and terrorism suspects on land in Somalia, about 800 miles away. It was also an experiment to test new technology for operating the drones.

Normally, Reapers and Predators are flown through satellite links by pilots based in the United States, while local ground crews handle the takeoffs and landings. In the Seychelles, however, the flights did not require a satellite link; details of the new technology remain classified.

Starting in September 2011, records show, the U.S. Air Force took the unusual step of outsourcing the entire operation to a Florida-based private contractor, Merlin RAMCo. By then, the Seychelles operation had dwindled to two Reapers after the other aircraft were redeployed.

The military drew up the surveillance missions, but Merlin RAMCo hired its own remote-control pilots, sensor operators and mechanics, and dispatched them to the islands.

The arrangement was overseen at a distance by the Air Force’s secretive 645th Aeronautical Systems Group at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. The unit, also known as Big Safari, develops and acquires advanced weapons systems — many of them classified — for Special Operations Forces.

A spokesman for the Big Safari program declined to comment on the Reaper operations in the Seychelles or its contract with Merlin RAMCo, citing “security concerns.” Lt. Col. Brett Ashworth, an Air Force spokesman at the Pentagon, said the service does not “currently” use contractors to fly drones on “combat operations,” but he declined to elaborate.

Merlin RAMCo, based in Jacksonville, Fla., is a privately held company that was incorporated in 2006, records show. The firm’s vice president and general manager, Robert A. Miller Jr., did not return phone calls or an e-mail seeking comment.

The company supports Air Force missions and other government contracts with more than 80 employees at 14 locations in the United States and five sites overseas, according to the Air Force.

The contractor was subjected to little direct oversight in the Seychelles, records show. The Air Force posted two officials on the islands to coordinate flights and serve as a liaison with the contractor, but neither had experience operating drones.

Underscoring the secrecy of the operation, neither official was allowed to have a copy of Big Safari’s contract with Merlin RAMCo.

“You can imagine it’s awful hard to hold somebody accountable for compliance with a contract that you physically can’t see,” one of the Air Force representatives told investigators.

The other liaison officer told investigators that the whole idea of outsourcing drone flights made him uneasy. “In hindsight, it appears it may not have been the best way to conduct business,” he said.

Seychelles program halted

After Merlin RAMCo took charge, the two Reapers deployed to the Seychelles quickly became hobbled by problems.

In November 2011, the Air Force liaison officers grounded the drones after discovering that they had not received required mechanical upgrades. Just days after the aircraft resumed flying, on Dec. 13, one of the Reapers ran into trouble.

Two minutes after takeoff, the engine failed. The pilot was unable to restart it and tried to execute an emergency landing. But the aircraft, which was not armed at the time, descended too quickly and landed too far down the runway. It bounced past a perimeter road, over a rock breakwater and sank about 200 feet offshore.

Investigators blamed the crash on an electrical short and concluded that the pilot made things worse by botching the landing.

In February, the remaining Reaper was struck by lightning while in flight. The crew was able to steer it home safely, but mechanics grounded the plane for a month to make repairs.

A few days after resuming operations, a different Merlin RAMCo pilot, with limited experience in takeoffs and landings, erred in every way imaginable during the brief flight before crashing the Reaper. Contractors worked for days to fish all the parts out of the water.

The Seychelles and U.S. governments announced a suspension of drone flights afterward, but they didn’t mention that there wasn’t much choice — no intact Reapers were left on the island. U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who met with Seychelles officials a few days later, pledged a “thorough and fully transparent” investigation of the crash.

The accidents, nonetheless, stirred worry among some islanders. In a letter to the Seychelles Nation newspaper, resident James R. Mancham questioned whether civil aviation officials had “seriously examined the implications” of allowing drones to fly from Seychelles International Airport.

“What guarantee do we have that never will one of these drones crash upon or collide with an approaching or departing plane or crash on the air-control tower itself?” Mancham wrote.

Tom Saunders, a spokesman for the U.S. military’s Africa Command, said the Air Force has not flown drones from the Seychelles since April. He declined to comment on whether it planned to resume the flights.

Jean-Paul Adam, the foreign minister of the Seychelles, said the U.S. military has not shared the results of the crash investigations. He said the U.S. government has indicated that it would like to restart the operations but has not said when.

Adam cautioned that the Seychelles Civil Aviation Authority would need to review the investigation results but said his government was amenable toward a return of the drones.

“The two crashes were obviously of concern,” he said in a telephone interview. “But I would say the approach we’ve had with the United States has been one of good cooperation.”

Will Enrique Peña Nieto continue the insane drug war???

Source

Incoming President Enrique Peña Nieto inherits a bruised Mexico

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

November 30, 2012, 5:58 p.m.

MEXICO CITY — When Enrique Peña Nieto assumes the Mexican presidency on Saturday, returning to power a once-autocratic party that ruled for seven decades, he will immediately confront a sluggish economy and a bloody war against drug gangs.

How he will handle those two problems is the biggest question surrounding the incoming government.

Peña Nieto, 46, and his Institutional Revolutionary Party want to shift the focus away from the battle against drug cartels that consumed and ultimately haunted outgoing President Felipe Calderon.

But Peña Nieto is inheriting a bruised, terrified and polarized nation that has lived through its most violent period since its revolution a century ago. Tens of thousands of people — mayors, police, journalists, lawyers, officials, businessmen as well as criminals — have been killed. Thousands are missing, and human rights abuses by authorities have skyrocketed in the six-year campaign against the drug gangs.

Despite the elimination of several top drug lords, the flow of narcotics has not slowed. The gangs have only extended their influence from the border with the U.S. deep into southern Mexico and beyond.

Calderon, meanwhile, will take on a teaching position at Harvard University, swiftly leaving the country he ruled since 2006. Presidents are limited to one term in Mexico, and Calderon's National Action Party came in a poor third in last summer's election.

The PRI finished first, but with only about 38% of the vote, limiting the mandate that Peña Nieto will enjoy and complicating his ability to push through ambitious reforms he promised. He will have to struggle to balance competing forces within his party: the so-called dinosaurs who evoke old-school, heavy-handed politics versus the U.S.- or Europe-educated modernizing younger members. His Cabinet, announced Friday, contains both.

"The most serious problem for Peña Nieto is his desire to draw a line between those traditional PRI practices … and the image of modernity that is incompatible with the old way of doing politics," commentator Ezra Shabot said in an El Universal news column this month.

Instead of the drug war, Peña Nieto would like to talk about the economy, foreign investment and jobs. But security issues will be unavoidable from Day 1.

The new president has pledged, rather vaguely, to "reduce violence" and cut the homicide rate as a way to return to besieged Mexicans a sense of safety and tranquillity. Critics fear that means pulling punches when it comes to persecution of drug gangs.

In the past, the PRI was known to enter into pactos, or deals, with cartel leaders to keep the peace and share the profits.

Peña Nieto has angrily denied that he plans to cut deals with drug gangs, something that would be more complicated today because of their fragmented nature and the acute viciousness of one of the newer and now-dominant groups, the Zetas.

He has said he will keep the army deployed throughout the country, as Calderon did, at least initially. In addition, he will demote the U.S.-backed federal police while building up a national gendarmerie that in theory would eventually replace the military in the drug offensive.

Despite the PRI's long nationalistic streak, Peña Nieto says he intends to maintain and would like to expand Mexico's close cooperation with the United States in security matters. Currently, the U.S. supplies intelligence data to Mexican authorities for the tracking of traffickers and is training thousands of police officers, judges, prosecutors and others as part of a $2-billion aid program.

He has already hired Gen. Oscar Naranjo, retired head of the Colombian national police, as a special security advisor. Naranjo is beloved by the Americans and is expected to bring on board U.S.-promoted tactics from the Colombian conflict, including the increased use of small, vetted police or military units for raids.

Calderon's strategy was faulted for concentrating on military force and underestimating cartel strength while failing to go after the money, much of it laundered through Mexican businesses and banks.

Peña Nieto is promising a new, reformed PRI, one that will not revert to its old habits of election-rigging, paying off supporters, co-opting the opposition and occasionally beating them up.

The Mexico of today is very different from that of nearly two decades ago, when the last PRI president was elected. Some, but certainly not all, of its institutions are stronger, such as the Supreme Court and the news media, and can provide a counterbalance to the presidency.

Yet six years of bloodshed have left a dispirited society that may be willing to give ground to organized-crime kingpins if it at least means being left alone.

Polling data released this week show roughly equivalent portions of Mexicans saying the drug war was Calderon's most important achievement and his biggest failure. And about two-thirds of those surveyed said they believed the cartels were winning the war.

Serious systemic problems, like impunity and corruption — perfected under the long PRI reign — will continue to hinder any progress Peña Nieto hopes to make.

On the economy, Peña Nieto has stressed his plan to open up the state-run oil giant Pemex to private and foreign investment, long a taboo here. To do so means challenging the Pemex unions that have long allied themselves with the PRI.

Already, another key reform, on labor workplace rules, passed the Legislature only after the PRI gutted measures that would have forced powerful unions to be more accountable and transparent.

wilkinson@latimes.com

Skype - a tool or trap for freedom fighters???

For Syria’s Rebel Movement, Skype Is a Useful and Increasingly Dangerous Tool

By AMY CHOZICK

Published: November 30, 2012

In a demonstration of their growing sophistication and organization, Syrian rebels responded to a nationwide shutdown of the Internet by turning to satellite technology to coordinate within the country and to communicate with outside activists.

When Syria’s Internet service disappeared Thursday, government officials first blamed rebel attacks. Activist groups blamed the government and viewed the blackout as a sign that troops would violently clamp down on rebels.

But having dealt with periodic outages for more than a year, the opposition had anticipated a full shutdown of Syria’s Internet service providers. To prepare, they have spent months smuggling communications equipment like mobile handsets and portable satellite phones into the country.

“We’re very well equipped here,” said Albaraa Abdul Rahman, 27, an activist in Saqba, a poor suburb 20 minutes outside Damascus. He said he was in touch with an expert in Homs who helped connect his office and 10 others like it in and around Damascus.

Using the connection, the activists in Saqba talked to rebel fighters on Skype and relayed to overseas activists details about clashes with government forces. A video showed the rebels’ bare-bones room, four battery backups that could power a laptop for eight hours and a generator set up on a balcony.

For months, rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad have used Skype, a peer-to-peer Internet communication system, to organize and talk to outside news organizations and activists. A few days ago, Jad al-Yamani, an activist in Homs, sent a message to rebel fighters that tanks were moving toward a government checkpoint.

He notified the other fighters so that they could go observe the checkpoint. “Through Skype you know how the army moves or can stop it,” Mr. Yamani said.

On Friday, Dawoud Sleiman, 39, a member of the antigovernment Ahrar al-Shamal Battalion, part of the Free Syrian Army, reached out to other members of the rebel group. They were set up at the government’s Wadi Aldaif military base in Idlib, a province near the Turkish border that has seen heavy fighting, and connected to Skype via satellite Internet service.

Mr. Sleiman, who is based in Turkey, said the Free Syrian Army stopped using cellphone networks and land lines months ago and instead relies almost entirely on Skype. “Brigade members communicate through the hand-held devices,” he said.

This week rebels posted an announcement via Skype that called for the arrest of the head of intelligence in Idlib, who is accused of killing five rebels. “A big financial prize will be offered to anyone who brings the head of this guy,” the message read. “One of our brothers abroad has donated the cash.”

If the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were Twitter Revolutions, then Syria is becoming the Skype Rebellion. To get around a near-nationwide Internet shutdown, rebels have armed themselves with mobile satellite phones and dial-up modems.

In many cases, relatives and supporters living outside Syria bought the equipment and had it smuggled in, mostly through Lebanon and Turkey.

That equipment has allowed the rebels to continue to communicate almost entirely via Skype with little interruption, despite the blackout. “How the government used its weapons against the revolution, that is how activists use Skype,” Mr. Abdul Rahman said.

“We haven’t seen any interruption in the way Skype is being used,” said David Clinch, an editorial director of Storyful, a group that verifies social media posts for news organizations, including The New York Times (Mr. Clinch has served as a consultant for Skype).

Mr. Assad, who once fashioned himself as a reformer and the father of Syria’s Internet, has largely left the country’s access intact during the 20-month struggle with rebels. The government appeared to abandon that strategy on Thursday, when most citizens lost access. Some Syrians could still get online using service from Turkey. On Friday, Syrian officials blamed technical problems for the cutoff.

The shutdown is only the latest tactic in the escalating technology war waged in Arab Spring countries.

But several technology experts warned that the use of the Internet by rebels in Syria, even those relying on Skype, could leave them vulnerable to government surveillance.

Introduced in 2003, Skype encrypts each Internet call so that they are next to impossible to crack. It quickly became the pet technology of global organizers and opposition members in totalitarian countries. And while Skype’s encryption secrets remain elusive, in recent months the Assad government, often with help from Iran, has developed tools to install malware on computers that allows officials to monitor a user’s activity.

“Skype has gone from in the mid-2000s being the tool most widely used and promoted by human rights activists to now when people ask me I say, ‘Definitely, don’t use it,’ ” said Ronald J. Deibert, director of Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that monitors human rights and cybersecurity.

Using satellite phone service to connect makes Skype potentially more dangerous since it makes it easier to track a user’s location, said Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San Francisco.

The Syrian government has “gone from passive surveillance to more active surveillance in which they’re gaining access to dissidents’ and opposition members’ computers,” Ms. Galperin said.

The pro-government Syrian Electronic Army has largely led the response to early cyberattacks by rebels and overseas sympathizers. At checkpoints in government-controlled regions, Assad forces examined laptops for programs that would allow users to bypass government spyware, several activists said. In cafes where the Internet was available, government officials checked users’ identification.

Rebels are starting to suspect that the government’s efforts are paying off. A media activist in Idlib named Mohamed said a rebel informant working for the government was killed in Damascus six months ago after sending warnings to the Free Syrian Army on Skype.

“I saw this incident right in front of my eyes,” Mohamed said. “We put his info on Skype so he was arrested and killed.”

In August, an activist named Baraa al-Boushi was killed during shelling in Damascus. Activists later circulated a report saying that a Saudi Arabian claiming to support the revolution was actually a government informant who determined Mr. Boushi’s location after a long conversation on Skype.

A Skype spokesman, Chaim Haas, said calls via the service between computers, smartphones and other mobile devices are automatically encrypted. But just like e-mail and instant messaging can be compromised by spyware and Trojan horses, so can Skype.

“They’re listening to the conversation before it gets encrypted,” Mr. Haas said. “That has nothing to do with Skype at all.”

Liam Stack contributed reporting from New York; Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon

Sex Offenders - A jobs program for cops???

On top of that the laws sound so draconian and complex that I suspect they are doomed to fail because it is almost impossible for homeless, unemployed former sex offenders to obey the laws.

Many of these people classified by the government as "sex offenders" are really not "sex offenders". If you have been arrested for taking a leak in an alley these silly, evil and draconian laws classify you as a sex offender and require you to register as a sex offender.

I think H. L. Mencken famous quote addresses this issue perfectly

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

In 4 days you will be able to legally smoke a joint in Washington State.

Washington set to legalize marijuana use without Justice Department guidance

By Sari Horwitz, Published: December 1

Adults in Washington state will be able to smoke marijuana legally when it is officially decriminalized Thursday, even though the Justice Department has offered no guidance on the conflict with federal drug laws.

Prosecutors throughout the state have begun dismissing hundreds of misdemeanor marijuana cases, according to authorities there, and state and local police are being retrained to arrest drivers who are high and allow adults to light up in their homes.

Marijuana, however, is still illegal under federal law. State officials say the Justice Department is creating confusion by remaining silent about what steps it may take in Washington and Colorado, which passed initiatives in November legalizing the manufacturing, distribution and possession of up to an ounce of marijuana.

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire (D) met with Deputy Attorney General James Cole at the Justice Department, but came away with no answers.

“They said they were reviewing it,” Gregoire’s spokesman, Cory Curtis, said Friday. “They didn’t give us a timeline when they would provide clarity.”

After his state approved the initiative, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) called Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and wrote him a letter asking for guidance about how the federal government will react to the state’s new law.

“We need to know whether the federal government will take legal action to block the implementation of Amendment 64, or whether it will seek to prosecute grow and retail operations,” Hickenlooper wrote.

He also asked Holder if Justice will prosecute Colorado state employees who regulate and oversee the growing and distribution of marijuana.

“We find no clear guidance on these issues in memoranda or statements previously issued by the DOJ,” Hickenlooper wrote.

Like their counterparts in Washington, Colorado prosecutors have begun throwing out hundreds of misdemeanor marijuana cases.

Holder has not responded to Hickenlooper’s Nov. 13 letter. Justice spokeswoman Nanda Chitre said the letter is “still under review.”

Several universities in the two states have decided to maintain the status quo, banning students from smoking or consuming marijuana on campus.

The schools rely on millions of dollars in federal funding, and officials say they are worried that failure to abide by federal marijuna laws could jeopardize the money. The federal Controlled Substances Act prohibits the production, possession and sale of marijuana and classified it as a Schedule 1 drug, putting it in the same category as LSD and heroin.

“There are a lot more questions than answers at this point,” said Kathy Barnard, spokeswoman for Washington State University in Pullman. “Marijuana is still illegal under federal law and as a federally funded institution, we abide and respect that.”

Mexican President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto also said he is waiting to see how Justice responds to the conflict between state and federal laws. In an interview with Time magazine last week, he called for a rethinking of drug policy and the war on drugs after the legalization of marijuana in the two states.

Peña Nieto’s top adviser, Luis Videgaray, has said that legalization “changes the rules of the game in the relationship with the United States” in regard to anti-drug efforts.

“Obviously, we can’t handle a product that is illegal in Mexico, trying to stop its transfer to the United States, when in the United States, at least in part of the United States, it now has a different status,” Videgaray said.

Strategy, timing key to states’ pot legalization

Strategy, timing key to states’ pot legalization

Associated Press Sun Dec 2, 2012 11:54 AM

SEATTLE -- In the late-1980s heyday of the anti-drug “Just Say No” campaign, a man calling himself “Jerry” appeared on a Seattle talk radio show to criticize U.S. marijuana laws.

An esteemed businessman, he hid his identity because he didn’t want to offend customers who — like so many in those days — viewed marijuana as a villain in the ever-raging “war on drugs.”

Now, a quarter century later, “Jerry” is one of the main forces behind Washington state’s successful initiative to legalize pot for adults over 21. And he no longer fears putting his name to the cause: He’s Rick Steves, the travel guru known for his popular guidebooks.

“It’s amazing where we’ve come,” says Steves of the legalization measures Washington and Colorado voters approved last month. “It’s almost counterculture to oppose us.”

A once-unfathomable notion, the lawful possession and private use of pot, becomes an American reality this week when this state’s law goes into effect. Thursday is “Legalization Day” here, with a tote-your-own-ounce celebration scheduled beneath Seattle’s Space Needle — a nod to the measure allowing adults to possess up to an ounce of pot. Colorado’s law is set to take effect by Jan. 5.

How did we get here? From “say no” to “yes” votes in not one but two states?

The answer goes beyond society’s evolving views, and growing acceptance, of marijuana as a drug of choice.

In Washington — and, advocates hope, coming soon to a state near you — there was a well-funded and cleverly orchestrated campaign that took advantage of deep-pocketed backers, a tweaked pro-pot message and improbable big-name supporters.

Good timing and a growing national weariness over failed drug laws didn’t hurt, either.

“Maybe … the dominoes fell the way they did because they were waiting for somebody to push them in that direction,” says Alison Holcomb, the campaign manager for Washington’s measure.

Washington and Colorado, both culturally and politically, offered fertile ground for legalization advocates — Washington for its liberal politics, Colorado for its libertarian streak, and both for their Western independence.

Both also have a history with marijuana law reform. More than a decade ago, they were among the first states to approve medical marijuana.

Still, when it came to full legalization, activists hit a wall. Colorado’s voters rejected a measure to legalize up to an ounce of marijuana in 2006. In Washington, organizers in 2010 couldn’t make the ballot with a measure that would have removed criminal penalties for marijuana.

Since the 1970 founding of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, reform efforts had centered on the unfairness of marijuana laws to the recreational user — hardly a sympathetic character, Holcomb notes.

That began to change as some doctors extolled marijuana’s ability to relieve pain, quell nausea and improve the appetites of cancer and AIDS patients. The conversation shifted in the 1990s toward medical marijuana laws. But even in some states with those laws, including Washington, truly sick people continued to be arrested.

Improved data collection that began with the ramping up of the drug war in the 1980s also helped change the debate. Late last decade, with Mexico’s crackdown on cartels prompting horrific bloodshed there and headlines here, activists could point to a stunning fact: In 1991, marijuana arrests made up less than one-third of all drug arrests in the U.S. Now, they make up half — about 90 percent for possession of small amounts — yet pot remains easily available.

“What we figured out is that your average person doesn’t necessarily like marijuana, but there’s sort of this untapped desire by voters to end the drug war,” says Brian Vicente, a Denver lawyer who helped write Colorado’s Amendment 64. “If we can focus attention on the fact we can bring in revenue, redirect law enforcement resources and raise awareness instead of focusing on pot, that’s a message that works.”

With a potentially winning message, the activists needed something else: messengers.

Steves, who lives in the north Seattle suburb of Edmonds, was a natural choice — the “believable, likeable nerd,” as he calls himself. Known for his public television and radio shows, as well as his “Europe through the Back Door” guide books, he openly advocated in 2003 for a measure that made marijuana the lowest priority for Seattle police.

He already knew Holcomb, who had been the drug policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington state. The ACLU chapter recognized that voter education would be crucial to any future reform, especially after polling revealed that many voters didn’t even know Washington had a medical marijuana law.

Holcomb helped recruit Steves to star in a 2008 infomercial designed to get people talking about marijuana law reform. The video was aired on late-night television and at forums held across the state, during which experts in drug policy answered questions from audiences.

In November 2009, John McKay, the former Seattle U.S. attorney, agreed to appear on one of those panels. McKay was well respected, from a prominent Republican family and had served as the Justice Department’s top prosecutor in western Washington — charged with carrying out U.S. drug laws.

He called for a top-to-bottom review of the nation’s drug war and endorsed regulating marijuana like alcohol.

Suddenly, the legalization movement had traction.

Over the next year, a voter initiative drive and legislative efforts gained steam but ultimately failed. California’s Proposition 19 legalization measure also failed in 2010. But even with little money and no significant editorial endorsements, in an off-presidential election year with lower youth turnout, Prop 19 received more than 46 percent of the vote.

Holcomb thought: Imagine what Washington could do in a presidential year, with an endorsement from McKay and some money.

So, with the backing of the ACLU’s state chapter, Holcomb formed New Approach Washington. In June 2011, the group announced Initiative 502, to legalize up to an ounce of marijuana and to create a system of state-licensed growers, processors and retail stores. It was tailored to gain mainstream support: There would be no home-growing, and there would be a DUI standard designed to be comparable to the 0.08 limit for blood-alcohol content.

The drug also would be taxed at every stage, from growing and processing to selling. State studies were done showing legalization could bring in half a billion dollars a year for schools, health care and substance-abuse prevention.

The list of co-sponsors was unimpeachable: Steves, McKay, Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes, the former top public health officer for Spokane County, two past presidents of the state bar association, a top University of Washington addiction expert. The Seattle Times’ editorial page offered its own endorsement.

National drug-policy reform groups also were focusing on 2012. The New York-based Drug Policy Alliance saw campaigns developing in three states — Washington, Colorado and Oregon — and it had the money on-the-ground advocates so desperately needed. The alliance is funded in part by billionaire and longtime liberal political donor George Soros, who came out in favor of marijuana legalization in 2010.

The organization chipped in more than $1.6 million in Washington. The Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project gave $1 million in Colorado.

Then came another big donor. Peter Lewis, the founder of Progressive Insurance, had used marijuana after a leg amputation and had been a big contributor to medical marijuana campaigns. His people initially told Holcomb they didn’t think I-502 would pass, but then he offered a match: If they could raise $650,000, he’d kick in $250,000. New Approach Washington met the goal, and Lewis became the campaign’s biggest donor, responsible for more than $2 million of the $6 million raised.

The money ensured that Washington’s activists could keep their message on air, and they did so effectively.

The first television ad, which aired last summer, featured a middle-aged mom saying that she didn’t like marijuana, but that taxing it would bring in money for schools and health care and free up police resources. Among women aged 30 to 50, Holcomb says, support for regulating marijuana jumped about 18 percent.

The next ads featured McKay, former Seattle U.S. Attorney Kate Pflaumer and Charles Mandigo, the former head of the FBI office in Seattle, urging approval of I-502.

Colorado’s measure didn’t have the big-name endorsements that Washington’s did, but the state had other things going for it. For one, it already had the most highly regulated medical marijuana market in the country. There, organizers were careful to appear before news cameras in suits and ties. Ads featured middle-aged women, or schoolchildren who could benefit from marijuana taxes.

Opponents tried to fight back, mounting a $543,000 campaign in Colorado, with backing from a Florida-based anti-drug group and an evangelical Christian group.

In Washington, a small group from the medical marijuana community raised $6,800 to oppose I-502. They criticized the DUI standard as arbitrarily strict and said the measure didn’t go far enough because it wouldn’t allow home-growing.

A group of nine former heads of the Drug Enforcement Administration urged U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to publicly oppose the measures, but the DOJ and the White House remained silent.

Instead, Kevin Sabet, a former White House drug policy adviser, served as a counterpoint to the legalization campaigns. The ills of prohibition — the racial disparities in who gets busted, the lifelong consequences of a conviction for landing jobs or student loans — could be solved without legalization, which would increase the availability of marijuana for teens who are most susceptible to becoming addicted, he contended.

Yet such arguments found little support.

“When you hammer away at that message, saying we can save education and make better use of police resources and get rid of cartels, and there’s nothing to oppose that, that sounds sensible to people who aren’t hearing the other side,” Sabet says.

On Nov. 6, I-502 passed with nearly 56 percent. Colorado’s Amendment 64, which allows home-growing and does not include a drunken driving standard, passed with 55 percent.

Oregon’s Measure 80 ultimately failed. But even with little campaigning behind it, that proposal got nearly 47 percent of the vote.

As they await word about whether the Justice Department will try to block the measures from taking effect, national drug-law reform groups are salivating over their chances in 2014 and 2016.

California? Nevada? Massachusetts?

“Something is happening, and it’s not just happening in Washington and Colorado,” says Andy Ko, who leads the Campaign for a New Drug Policy at Open Society Foundations. “Marijuana reform is going to happen in this country as older voters fade away and younger voters show up. Legislators see this as something safe to legislate around.

“They see the writing on the wall.”

———

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

Kristen Wyatt contributed from Denver

Pot legalization no free ride to smoke on campus

Source

Pot legalization no free ride to smoke on campus

Associated Press Wed Nov 28, 2012 12:48 PM

SPOKANE, Wash — Young voters helped pass laws legalizing marijuana in Washington and Colorado, but many still won’t be able to light up.

Most universities have codes of conduct banning marijuana use, and they get millions of dollars in funding from the federal government, which still considers pot illegal.

With the money comes a requirement for a drug-free campus, and the threat of expulsion for students using pot in the dorms.

“Everything we’ve seen is that nothing changes for us,” said Darin Watkins, a spokesman for Washington State University in Pullman.

So despite college cultures that include pot-smoking demonstrations each year on April 20, students who want to use marijuana will have to do so off campus.

“The first thing you think of when you think of legalized marijuana is college students smoking it,” said Anna Marum, a Washington State senior from Kelso, Wash. “It’s ironic that all 21-year-olds in Washington can smoke marijuana except for college students.”

Voters in November made Washington and Colorado the first states to allow adults over 21 to possess up to an ounce of marijuana, and exit polling showed both measures had significant support from younger people. Taxes could bring the states, which can set up licensing schemes for pot growers, processors and retail stores, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year, financial analysts say.

But the laws are fraught with complications, especially at places like college campuses. At Washington State, students who violate the code face a variety of punishments, up to expulsion, Watkins said. The same is true at the University of Colorado Boulder, where the student code of conduct prohibits possessing, cultivating or consuming illegal drugs.

“If you possess marijuana and are over 21, you still may face discipline under the student code of conduct,” Huff said.

Gary Gasseling, deputy chief of the Eastern Washington University police department, said that while they await guidance from the state Liquor Control Board, which is creating rules to govern pot, one thing is clear.

“The drug-free environment is going to remain in place,” he said.

Even if conduct codes did not exist, marijuana remains illegal under federal law, another key reason that campuses will remain cannabis-free.

The Drug Free Schools and Communities Act requires that any university receiving federal funds adopt a program to prevent use of illicit drugs by students and employees, much in the same way other federal funding for law enforcement and transportation comes with clauses stipulating that recipients maintain drug-free workplaces.

Washington State, for instance, receives millions in federal research funds each year, which prohibits them from allowing substances illegal under federal law on campus.

College dormitory contracts also tend to prohibit possession of drugs, officials said. Dorms and other campus buildings also tend to be smoke-free zones, which would block the smoking of marijuana, officials said.

At Eastern Washington, there is a student-led movement to ban smoking even outside across the entire campus, Gasseling said.

In addition, NCAA rules prohibit student-athletes from consuming marijuana or other illegal drugs.

With all these complications, it is reasonable to expect that some students will be confused by the new laws.

“Some type of communication is going to come out from the university to clarify this,” said Angie Weiss, student lobbyist for the Associated Students of the University of Washington.

Derrick Skaug, student body vice president at Washington State, said he believes most students will understand they cannot consume marijuana on campus.

“I don’t see it likely that people will be smoking marijuana while walking around campus,” Skaug said. “Most people do understand that just because it is no longer banned by state law, it doesn’t amount to a get-out-of-jail-free pass.”

Skaug acknowledged that some students might feel they should be allowed to consume marijuana on campus if it is legal everywhere else.

“It may be something worth starting a discussion on,” Skaug said. “But there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed.”

Colleges in Washington already dealt with this issue in 1998 when the state approved the use of medical marijuana, which was also banned on campus, Watkins said.

Students who wanted to use marijuana for medical reasons had to live off-campus, and Washington State waived its requirement that all freshmen had to live in dorms to accommodate them, Watkins said.

Of course, pot has been illegally used on college campuses for decades, and students for decades have been getting busted for possession.

Marum said that many Washington State students who have medical marijuana cards are allowed by their residence hall advisers to consume marijuana brownies, even though the drug is banned on campus.

“People in dorms now who want to smoke, they do it,” Marum said. “I do think more people will be smoking in the dorms when marijuana is legal for use.”

One thing that will change: Some off-campus police departments have said they will no longer arrest or ticket students who are 21 and older and using marijuana.

In Boulder and Seattle, prosecutors have said they will not prosecute criminal marijuana cases for less than an ounce for people age 21 and over.

Huff said University of Colorado police will no longer ticket people who are legal under state law to possess marijuana.

The Arizona Republic editorial staff still has the hate marijuana mentality.

Our View: State inspectors must keep pot dispensaries in check

By WEST VALLEY OPINIONS

Wed, Nov 28 2012 10:13 AM

Although bragging rights come with being the first licensed medical-marijuana dispensary in the state, the Glendale dispensary operators should keep in mind that all eyes will be watching them once they open their doors.

Medical-marijuana cardholders. Opponents of medical marijuana. Leaders in the state and federal government.

All will be watching to make sure this dispensary (currently an undisclosed location) does not pander to the darker potential of medical-marijuana distribution — a cover to distribute an illegal street drug.

Voters approved a medical-marijuana program in 2010, albeit amid legal challenges. Yet the program has been a reality in this state since the Arizona Department of Health Services began accepting qualifying patient applications in April 2011.

As of November this year, more than 33,000 Arizonans qualify; nearly 28,000 are authorized to cultivate their own medicinal pot.

And more than 1,000 people in Glendale are qualifying cardholders. The first licensed dispensary is in central Glendale, an area with 380 patients.

Because of those figures, we are thankful AZDHS and its Director Will Humble will also keep close watch on the dispensary.

Humble and AZDHS successfully snuffed out scams within the medical-marijuana program in the past, by identifying doctors who appeared to be abusing the program as they handed out thousands of certifications.

Now that the dispensary in Glendale has been licensed and more dispensaries are slated to be licensed in the future, we hope Humble will look for scams within the dispensary system, too.

AZDHS and Arizona cities and towns have little to no authority over the people who cultivate medical marijuana in their homes. Those approved to cultivate medical marijuana could grow up to 12 plants.

AZDHS does not monitor where people get the plant seeds from or inspect their homes, which are possibly near schools and churches.

But patients living within 25 miles of the Glendale location will no longer be approved to self-grow. Instead of keeping 12 plants, patients can receive only 21/2 ounces every two weeks from dispensaries.

Zoning permits keep dispensaries in designated locations. Glendale allows dispensaries in only commercial and heavy-commercial zoning districts. They must also be 500 feet away from residential neighborhoods and 1,320 feet away from schools.

AZDHS holds the dispensaries to certain standards as well, with a thorough nine-page inspection checklist. The inspectors make sure dispensaries keep regular inventory and take specified security measures.

Is there room for slip-ups, break-ins and corruption? Of course. It would be naive to think otherwise.

But Humble’s diligence has kept the medical-marijuana program in check in the past, and it will keep the Glendale dispensary’s future in check as well.

The Arizona Republic Editorial Board, West Valley

Smugglers ram Coast Guard boat trying to arrest them

Coast Guard member killed; 2 suspected smugglers detained

December 3, 2012 | 4:09 am

Two men have been detained after a veteran U.S. Coast Guard chief petty officer was killed Sunday after suspected smugglers in a panga rammed his vessel off the Ventura County coast.

The Coast Guard declined to identify them or say whether drugs were found aboard the boat. A second suspicious vessel was believed to have been traveling alongside the panga before the incident.

"We are deeply saddened by the loss of our shipmate," said Adm. Robert J. Papp, the Coast Guard commandant. "Our fallen shipmate stood the watch on the front lines protecting our nation, and we are all indebted to him for his service and sacrifice."

Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III, 34, of Redondo Beach was second in command of the Halibut, an 87-foot patrol cutter based in Marina del Rey. Authorities said they could not recall a Coast Guard chief petty officer being killed in such a manner off the coast of California.

Early Sunday morning, the Halibut was dispatched to investigate a boat operating near Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California's eight Channel Islands. The island is roughly 25 miles southwest of Oxnard.

The boat, first detected by a patrol plane, had fallen under suspicion because it was operating in the middle of the night without lights and was a "panga"-style vessel, an open-hulled boat that has become "the choice of smugglers operating off the coast of California," said Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggers.

The Coast Guard cutter contains a smaller boat — a rigid-hull inflatable used routinely for search-and-rescue operations and missions that require a nimble approach. When Horne and his team approached in the inflatable, the suspect boat gunned its engine, maneuvered directly toward the Coast Guard inflatable, rammed it and fled.

The impact knocked Horne and another Coast Guardsman into the water. Both were quickly plucked from the sea. Horne had suffered a traumatic head injury. While receiving medical care, he was raced to shore aboard the Halibut. Paramedics met the Halibut at the pier in Port Hueneme and declared Horne dead at 2:21 a.m.

The second crew member knocked into the water suffered minor injuries and was treated and released from a hospital later Sunday. He was not identified.

Using a helicopter and a 45-foot boat stationed in Los Angeles, the Coast Guard later found the panga and stopped it.

"We are actively working to ensure that all of the individuals involved in this illegal activity are brought to justice," said Coast Guard Capt. James Jenkins.

The Coast Guard was unable to provide a detailed account of Horne's service.

He had been heralded by the agency on several occasions.

He appears to have arrived in Southern California last summer after serving for two years as an executive petty officer in Emerald Isle, N.C. There, he received a Coast Guard Commendation Medal for his leadership in 63 search-and-rescue cases, in which 38 lives were saved.

According to an account of the medal ceremony, the most notable of those operations involved a boat that capsized in a North Carolina inlet in 2010. The account said Horne coached his team through "treacherous" sea conditions to rescue five people.

The Coast Guard also noted Horne's involvement in a January operation in which the Halibut found and stopped two boats operating at midnight with no lights. The boats contained 2,000 pounds of marijuana.

In the last five years, as U.S. authorities have become increasingly successful at blocking traditional land routes, smugglers have taken increasingly to the sea — ferrying both drugs and immigrants. Authorities believe a smuggling vessel is launched toward California every three days; the number of immigrants and smugglers arrested at sea or along the coast more than doubled to 867 in 2010 from the previous year.

Sally finally got her medical marijuana card

Fla. man serving 60 years in drug case seeks clemency

Fla. man serving 60 years in drug case seeks clemency

12:41AM EST December 2. 2012

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- The young man, sandy hair lightened by the sun, took a deep breath before speaking to the judge.

His mother and older sister sat clutching hands in the Fort Myers courtroom.

Michael Edwards, who was 31 years old, thought his ex-girlfriend wouldn't testify that he sold her $850 worth of cocaine. Before trial, she signed an affidavit saying another man gave her the drugs. Edwards passed up a plea deal of 15 years. A jury found him guilty.

"I do some idiotic things because I'm addicted to cocaine," Edwards told the judge. "If I had a chance, just one chance, last chance of my life ... I bet I could get out and stay straight."

It was 1994 and "Just Say No" was still on the lips of guidance counselors. Cocaine was a public enemy. Edwards' record, smeared with convictions, did not inspire sympathy.

Lee County Judge Jay Rosman had heard enough.

Sixty years, he ordered.

Edwards recognized his mother crying behind him as a bailiff escorted him away.

Some 6,661 days later, when Edwards looks in the plastic mirror in his locker, he sees a 49-year-old man, hair white around the temples; a soul locked in regret for choices he made as an addict — snorting cocaine until his heart felt it could explode and arrogant enough to return to the realm of drug sales seven months after leaving prison.

"I don't know sometimes why I chose to make the wrong choices," he says. "I knew I was wrong. I always felt guilty. Why do we do things that are destructive?"

He wants the world to see who he is now: a Christian who has read the Bible cover to cover three times, a father who talks about the stock market with his adult son and a model prisoner with a file full of ideas: a mentoring network for children, jingles for the pool and spa business he hopes to run with his sister, and a product to sell downloadable engine sounds for electric cars.

But all those ideas rest on whether he can convince the state's highest leaders he should be free before he's an old man.

His release date is Christmas Day 2044. He would be 81 years old.

An unlikely ally, former State Attorney Joseph D'Alessandro, has spoken in court on his behalf.

"He has served way more time than the crime," he said. "I think he has changed."

D'Alessandro's office recommended the sentence in 1994. How did it get to 60 years? First, Edwards was punished as a habitual felony offender, with 30-year sentences running back-to-back. D'Alessandro said his office had a low tolerance for criminals who tried to slide.

"I finally convinced the judges and everyone, watch their defense and if you feel, 'Hey, that's a legitimate defense.' That's fine. But if you form the opinion that they're just throwing the dice and they're trying to maybe get a jury to walk them when it's all BS, that's when they'd come down hard on them," he said.

"That's probably what happened to him."

The same month Edwards was sentenced, another Fort Myers man was sent away for 20 years after shooting his son-in-law seven times and killing him outside a bar.

The state prosecutor on Edwards' case, now Lee County Judge H. Andrew Swett, and Rosman, the circuit's chief judge, declined to comment through a courts spokeswoman, who cited ethical concerns because of Edwards' bid for clemency.

Habit forming

Edwards was the type of kid who cried when he feared his father might shoot a rabbit on a hunting trip. He was also the type of kid who charged friends a dime to play the mini-golf course he erected from construction scraps in his backyard.

His father, an Atlanta doctor, was killed in a car crash when Michael was around age 9. Michael, his older sister, Mimi, and his mother, Alicia, moved to Fort Myers in the early 1970s. At Fort Myers Middle School, Michael tried drugs: marijuana first. Cocaine came later.

He ran with a crowd of privileged teenagers.

His mother, a Southern gentlewoman, marveled at her son's popularity, clueless as to one of its contributors.

"My goodness," said, Alicia Allan, lowering her voice. "I did not know anything about pot."

Mimi saw how her brother could talk their mother out of strict punishment.

"Michael grew up never differentiating between right and wrong," Mimi Edwards-Beach said. "He has a heart and you want to give him another chance."

Alicia remembers grounding him, but there were things her well-mannered son concealed.

After Fort Myers High, Michael enrolled at Edison State College but dropped out after a semester of too much partying. Not long after, he moved to Fort Lauderdale, where he met Colombians tapped into a steady stream of cocaine. Edwards would use and sell to friends and business associates. A kingpin, he claims, he was not.

He had three quick marriages, the second to Chrissy Shunda. After their son Kingsley was born in 1985, Edwards tried to stay clean, sold cars but became ensnared in drugs again. Shunda gave him an ultimatum: cocaine or their family.

She saw him months after their divorce. His green eyes that once shined for life looked hollow.

"His habit was following him around like a black shadow," she said.

Friend turns informant

Eventually, the law caught up. In February 1991, in Broward County, Edwards was arrested on charges of cocaine trafficking, drug possession and battery on law enforcement. He says officers found an ounce of cocaine in his home. He pleaded guilty to the charges, though he maintains he's innocent of battery. In April of the same year, he was picked up again for trafficking, after he said his supplier sold him an ounce of cocaine.

His prison sentence: three years.

Released in March 1993, he headed to Fort Myers. His sister offered up her spare condo for him to live. He began partying with Rene Cianci, a fellow addict he met through a furniture store where their mothers worked. The families did not approve; nothing good could come from the pairing of their demons.

Edwards eventually broke up with Cianci, he recalls. At some point, Cianci became an informant to a narcotics task force.

She wore a wire. Edwards made the arrangements.

His last night of freedom was Tuesday, Oct. 12, 1993. Around 10:45 p.m., he pulled his Cadillac into the condo's driveway to see a cadre of officers waiting with handcuffs. His stomach dropped.

Bound by law

The moment inmate Edwards felt he might die, he changed. It was about five years into his sentence and he ingested so much cocaine on this day his heart began to surge. He crumpled to his bed and asked a fellow inmate to push on his chest.

Please forgive me God, he recalls praying.

His legal options were running out. He had filed a flurry of motions. In one, he cited 15 claims, including receiving an unusually harsh sentence for exercising his right to trial and the 14 ways in which his lawyer had failed him.

Motion denied.

So, he focused on recovery, on being a better person. Since October 1999, he has not received a disciplinary action. He has attended Bible studies and more than 20 educational and substance abuse programs. After Edwards earned above-satisfactory ratings for behavior, his classification officer wrote a letter recommending his release.

"Inmate Edwards has shown himself to be a peaceful, outgoing, exemplary person who has overcome his drug addiction and is ready to re-enter society as a law-abiding citizen," wrote T. Smith, of South Bay Correctional Facility.

In September 2006, Edwards managed to win a shot at resentencing before Judge Rosman. It was standing room-only in the courtroom. Friends, former top prosecutor D'Alessandro and pastors Edwards had befriended in prison spoke for him.

Then, it was Edwards' turn. He spoke about how he'd matured. When free, he'd attend business classes and church.

"Most important," his voice trailed into silence for half a minute. "It's been so hard. ... Most important thing is to share my experiences with teenagers and others and let them know what the deal is with drugs and hope it deters them from being in a situation like me."

It was rare for Assistant State Attorney Cynthia Ross to see so many people, particularly D'Alessandro, at such a hearing.

"Today is probably one of the most uplifting and saddening days to stand in court on behalf of the state," she said. "Uplifting because this individual, Michael Edwards, has a family and a community with enormous support and it would appear has made a difference and changed his life. That doesn't happen often and it is remarkable to see.

"It is saddening because we have a judicial system and a series of laws that do not allow your honor to act with his heart but require him to act with the law."

The court could not change the sentence, she argued.

Sixteen days later, Rosman issued his order:

"Even though the Court is sympathetic to Defendant's plight, the Court remains unconvinced that it has jurisdiction to consider granting the relief."

It was a legal sentence, even if it didn't feel like a fair one.

Dismissed.

Hope and despair

Wedged in sugar cane fields, about 80 miles east of Fort Myers, is South Bay Correctional Facility, where Edwards lives with almost 1,900 other inmates. The barbed wire on the fence around the prison glints like tinsel in the sun.

Two decades in, his mind is outside. He frequently talks with his sister, son, mother and friends. At times, he's the one to offer encouraging words to a loved one, though it's hard for him to understand how his loved ones can be sad when they're free.

Near the porcelain sink in his 8-by-14 foot cell, Edwards keeps a pile of dirty clothes. If he thinks about drugs, he grabs a shirt and a bar of soap and starts to scrub.

"Drugs disgust me. They've destroyed my life," he said, scanning the walls in the visitation room, during a nearly three-hour interview.

A bruise ringed his eye after he says an inmate punched him for taking too long to microwave macaroni and cheese. He didn't fight back, he said, never does. It could harm his chances at clemency.

Edwards is dogged in his pursuit. The first time he tried to seek executive clemency from the board chaired by Gov. Jeb Bush was in 2002. Another request was denied last year after a rule change required inmates to serve a third of their time, though he filed it before the change. The state has found him to be ineligible for clemency until Sept. 2, 2014. He's written the board, asking members to invoke a rule to hear his case earlier.

The governor's office referred questions to the parole commission. Jane Tillman, the commission's communications director, declined to talk about Edwards because she said the case is confidential.

His chances are slim. Five applications to reduce prison sentences were granted in 2010, two in 2009, according to the parole commission. In the past two years, the commission has received almost 1,440 such applications.

Edwards knows this, but continues a campaign of hope. The flip side, despair, is too hard to bear.

He hopes for a chance to be more of a father, brother and son.

His son, Kingsley, now age 27, wants to know a father beyond phone calls.

His sister Mimi feels guilty she can't help more, wonders how she could have saved him from himself.

His mother, who is in her 70s, thinks about how, if his father had lived, her son would never be at home in barbed wire. Worry keeps her up at night.

At times, when she's speaking to her son from her South Fort Myers home, Edwards falls quiet. She imagines him on the other end, holding the receiver near and trying to conceal his tears from other inmates.

"Michael, I'm right here with you," she says to the silence. "I love you and pray every day that I'll get to hug you every day again."

Son of Kingman legislator gets 3½ years for smuggling heroin

Source

State lawmaker’s son pleads to drug charge

Associated Press Mon Dec 3, 2012 9:16 AM

KINGMAN — The adult son of an Arizona lawmaker from Kingman has pleaded guilty to drug charge.

The Kingman Daily Miner reports (http://bit.ly/SGjp4H) that 28-year-old Michael Goodale pleaded guilty on Thursday to attempting to transport narcotic drugs for sale.

Goodale is the son of state Rep. Doris Goodale.

Michael Goodale is expected to receive more than three years in prison when he’s sentenced Jan. 4.

Goodale and his 31-year-old sister Stephanie were arrested May 23 as part of an investigation into the sale of heroin into the Kingman area.

Police said two people from Las Vegas had met Michael Goodale and his girlfriend to deliver heroin and seized a half-ounce of heroin and $6,000 in cash at the scene.

The case against Stephanie Goodale is still pending.

———

Information from: Kingman Daily Miner, http://www.kingmandailyminer.com

Source

12/3/2012 6:01:00 AM

Kingman legislator's son guilty in heroin case

Miner Staff Reporter

The 28-year-old son of a state legislator has pleaded guilty to bringing heroin into Mohave County.

Michael Goodale pleaded guilty Thursday to attempting to transport narcotic drugs for sale. Under terms of a plea agreement with the state, Goodale will receive 3½ years in prison when formally sentenced Jan. 4.

Michael and his sister, 31-year-old Stephanie, were arrested May 23 following an investigation by the Kingman Police Department into the trafficking and sale of heroin into the Kingman area.

Stephanie was arrested at home the same day Michael, his girlfriend, 19-year old Chyla Cass, and two Las Vegas residents were arrested at a gas station on Highway 68 in Golden Valley. Police said the Las Vegas suspects, Penny Jean Bell, 51, and Stanley Joe Williams, 53, had met Michael and his girlfriend to deliver heroin. They seized a half-ounce of heroin and $6,000 in cash at the scene.

Michael Goodale is the only defendant in the cases to have accepted a plea deal. Prosecutors said he was bringing heroin into Mohave County from January until the time of his arrest.

The case against Stephanie Goodale is still pending. Her attorney said during a hearing earlier this month that he feels prosecutors are looking to make an example out of her because of her last name. Michael and Stephanie are the children of Rep. Doris Goodale and her husband Bill, a Kingman Unified School District board member who passed away from complications from a stroke last month.

Stephanie Goodale's attorney has said that they would at least like to make her eligible for probation and a possible jail stint, but prosecutors said they wouldn't offer a deal that doesn't include prison time. She is currently out of jail on bond.

State Bar investigates Attorney General Tom Horne

Source

State Bar investigates Attorney General Tom Horne

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Dec 3, 2012 6:08 PM

The State Bar of Arizona is investigating Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne over allegations stemming from a 14-month investigation into campaign finance violations.

The Bar, which licenses and regulates attorneys, is investigating the state’s top prosecutor over findings from both the election-related investigation as well as his role in a March hit-and-run along with his employee and assistant attorney general Carmen Chenal.

Citing court rules, Rick DeBruhl, Chief Communications Officer for the Bar, said he could not tell The Arizona Republic who initiated the charges, when the charges were initiated or what the potential sanctions could be. DeBruhl said Horne had been notified of the investigation.

The Bar’s legal regulation attorneys are attempting to determine whether Horne’s actions violated any ethical rules. If the attorneys conclude they did, the attorneys will request a probable cause order, which would allow them to proceed with a hearing to essentially present the evidence of their case.

Asked for comment on the investigation, Horne’s spokeswoman issued the following statement on Horne’s behalf: “Anytime someone makes a complaint to the State Bar, the State Bar investigates the complaint. Then, the State Bar decides whether or not to make a complaint. There has been no decision by the State Bar to make a complaint in this case.”

The immediate and long-term impact of the ethics investigation is unclear. Bar investigations into allegations of wrongdoing can begin and end with no sanctions, or in some instances, lead to disbarment.

Paul Bender, an Arizona State University law professor, said the state Constitution places age, citizenship and residency requirements on eligibility to hold state offices. State statute also states that “The attorney general shall have been for not less than five years immediately preceding the date of taking office a practicing attorney before the supreme court of the state.”

Bender said Horne, if disbarred, could argue state statues are unconstitutional because it places additional conditions on who can serve as attorney general.

Horne and employee Kathleen Winn are accused of illegally coordinating with an independent expenditure committee during the 2010 election.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery is pursuing a civil enforcement action against Horne and Winn, who chaired the committee and then went to work as Horne's director of community outreach. Horne and Winn have said they've done nothing wrong and that they will be vindicated during legal proceedings scheduled in January.

Horne is also charged with a Class 3 misdemeanor for leaving the scene of an accident with an unattended vehicle. The Class 3 misdemeanor carries a maximum of 30 days in jail and a $500 fine. He has pleaded not guilty.

His March 27 fender bender was witnessed by two FBI special agents who were tailing Horne as part of the campaign-finance violation investigation.

Horne in a previous statement has said the accident “may have caused no damage to that vehicle. At worst, pictures show nothing but some scratched paint."

Phoenix Police Department records show that the fender bender caused more than $1,000 in paint damage to the bumper of the other vehicle.

Tom Horne tells Arizona to chill

Tom Horne tells Arizona to chill

By LINDA VALDEZ

Tue, Dec 04 2012 7:55 AM

Someone should follow Tom Horne more often.

While Arizona’s embattled Attorney General was being followed in connection with one investigation, the FBI found him doing something that led to another investigation.

Gee, what else is this guy up to?

Now the State Bar of Arizona is looking into both issues: the alleged elections-related shenanigans and a hit-and-run accident.

Horne is becoming a master at dismissing questions about his suitability to office. He's so good at it that he reminds me of a teen-age boy.

Consider his statement that the hit-and-run “may have caused no damage to that vehicle.” No big deal, Mom! Phoenix Police put the damage to the other guy’s car at about $1,000.

Horne’s office issued a statement about the investigation by the lawyers’ professional association that sounded a lot like: No, I didn’t clean my room, but that doesn’t mean I will never clean my room. So just chill.”

Horne’s exact words: “Anytime someone makes a complaint to the State Bar, the State Bar investigates the complaint. Then, the State Bar decides whether or not to make a complaint. There has been no decision by the State Bar to make a complaint in this case.” So just chill.

But here’s the thing. Following Horne around has produced some interesting information about a guy who heads an office that’s supposed to be as squeaky clean as the Lone Ranger’s horse.

The more we find out about Tom Horne, the more obvious it becomes that he has no business in that office. He should resign.

State bar investigating AG Horne

State bar investigating AG Horne

Posted: Tuesday, December 4, 2012 8:46 am

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

The State Bar of Arizona is investigating Tom Horne, adding to the legal woes of the state's top lawyer.

Bar spokesman Rick DeBruhl confirmed for Capitol Media Services that his organization was looking into a complaint that the attorney general violated rules which govern the conduct of lawyers. If an investigatory committee finds violations, a disciplinary panel could impose sanctions, from a reprimand to being disbarred.

DeBruhl said there are two key areas of scrutiny.

One stems from an investigation of Horne by the FBI into allegations that he broke campaign finance laws in his 2010 election by illegally coordinating his efforts with that of what was supposed to be an independent committee.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery already has concluded there was a violation of the statutes which require separation of such efforts and wants a civil penalty against both campaigns. But both Horne and Kathleen Winn, who ran the independent campaign and works for Horne at the Attorney General's Office, have denied wrongdoing.

The case is set to go to a hearing next month.

DeBruhl also said the Bar is looking into allegations that Horne, driving someone else's car, left the scene after hitting another vehicle.

That incident was witnessed by two FBI investigators who were tailing Horne as part of that campaign finance inquiry. Phoenix police, saying the damage to the other vehicle totaled slightly more than $1,000, subsequently charged him with leaving the scene of an accident; he is tentatively set to be in city court later this month.

Horne has said he does not recall hitting another vehicle but conceded it might have happened.

In a prepared statement, Horne said the fact the Bar is looking at the issue means nothing.

"Any time someone makes a complaint to the State Bar, the State Bar investigates the complaint,'' he said, noting it does not become a formal "complaint'' against an attorney until the organization decides it has at least some merit. "There has been no decision by the State Bar to make a complaint in this case.''

Smuggling marijuana into Los Angeles by boat

Fatal incident reflects new boldness among offshore smugglers

By Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times

December 3, 2012, 8:57 p.m.

The small Coast Guard inflatable vessel was 20 yards from the panga, an open fishing boat that law enforcement officers say has become the craft of choice to ferry untold numbers of marijuana bales and undocumented immigrants from Mexico to Southern California.

Spotted earlier by a Coast Guard cutter, the panga was running without lights, a standard practice in the illicit trade, according to investigators.

The four men on the boat dispatched from the cutter Halibut approached it cautiously, about 200 yards from the shore of Santa Cruz Island, off the Santa Barbara coast. In the darkness, they turned on their blue flashing lights and shouted, in English and Spanish: "Stop! Police! Put your hands up!" according to court documents filed Monday.

In response, the two men aboard the panga throttled their engines and headed straight at the small Coast Guard boat, ignoring shots fired by a crew member, provoking a collision that left a chief petty officer dead and his colleague injured. Then the two men kept going.

One of two men thrown out of the inflatable, Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III of Redondo Beach, died of a head injury caused by a propeller, according to the affidavit, which was filed in connection with the murder case against two suspects detained as they tried to flee to Mexico.

Officials say the tragedy underscores the dangers posed by smugglers who have foregone well-policed land routes in favor of the sea. Although more than 500 maritime smuggling incidents have been logged off the Southern California coast since 2010, this was the first violent death, authorities said.

"Most of our interdictions off of California can only be described as benign," Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggers said. "There may be an attempt to evade, there may be a short pursuit, but we haven't had anything like this."

The men on the panga, Jose Mejia Leyva and Manuel Beltran Higuera, both Mexican nationals, were charged in Horne's death in U.S. District Court. Authorities believe they had been supplying gasoline to other smuggling craft operating off the California coast.

According to the affidavit, military aircraft followed their 30-foot craft as it made its way toward Mexico. With the two men futilely trying to restart their sputtering engine 20 miles north of the border, another Coast Guard vessel overtook them. Crew members demanded their surrender at gunpoint. When the men kept trying to start their engine, the Coast Guard crew doused them with pepper spray.

Encounters with seaborne smuggling have nearly doubled since 2010, with the steepest increases found along the more secluded, less patrolled beaches of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In Santa Barbara County, the surge has alarmed local authorities. In an April letter to Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara), Sheriff Bill Brown said the county experienced 16 "panga incidents" since the previous July, including the beaching of a four-engine, 45-foot "super-panga" that could easily have outpaced his department's sole vessel.

"It's a direct byproduct of increased pressure at the border and increased maritime enforcement to the south of us," Brown said in an interview Monday. "They're going further out to sea and they're coming further north."

Capps said she is asking federal agencies for additional enforcement funds in Santa Barbara.

The greatest number of coastal smuggling cases still occurs in San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties. But intensive interagency efforts based in San Diego and Long Beach have forced some smugglers farther up the coast, officials said.

"It's not so much that efforts are being stepped up as that agencies are pooling knowledge and experience and expertise," Eggers said. "The beautiful thing about Los Angeles is that there's a ton of law enforcement here."

Upgraded technology, such as infrared radar and enhanced video, is being shared among agencies, he said, along with "actionable intelligence."

But smugglers have powerful incentives to take the risk. Dozens of people, paying an average of $6,000 apiece, can cram into each panga. Police say marijuana bales hauled by a typical panga can sell for millions. There's a huge expanse of sea — the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary is nearly 1,500 square miles — and major roads, including U.S. 101, run right by potential landing areas.

Boat pilots often try to outrun law enforcement and some high-speed chases have ended with U.S. officers shooting out gasoline tanks or performing swerving maneuvers to stop the pangas, said a federal law enforcement officer who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"They aggressively try to get away, but not turn their boat on another boat like they did the other night," the officer said.

On occasion, the rugged terrain of Channel Islands National Park has served as a staging area for smugglers.

In 2010, authorities seized 2,448 pounds of marijuana hidden in brush in a canyon on Santa Rosa Island, and arrested four people hiding nearby.

In 2011, 15 suspected illegal immigrants were stranded for three days on Santa Cruz Island, abandoned by the panga pilot who had transported them. They were rescued after calling 911 and hailing a boater.

Sunday's incident at Santa Cruz Island occurred in Smugglers Cove, where tequila traders from Mexico once stashed their goods before the trip ashore, Brown said.

"To a certain extent, we have history repeating itself," he said.

In June, six people were arrested as they unloaded 1.5 tons of marijuana from their panga at Santa Barbara County's El Capitan State Beach. The Gaviota coast has been a landing spot for smugglers dating back to the Spanish colonial era.

Arraignment for the two men charged in Horne's death has been set for Dec. 21.

In another panga case Monday, a federal judge took note of the weekend's deadly encounter as he handed a sentence of nearly four years to a Mexican man whose marijuana-laden panga got stuck in rocks near Deer Creek Canyon in Malibu.

U.S. District Judge John F. Walter said the tragedy made it impossible to view the many sea smuggling cases on his docket as "lighthearted" capers.

"It has taken on now a much more serious tone in light of the events this weekend," Walter said, adding, "Something needs to be done about this rash of panga boats."

The defendant, Antonio Robles-Garcia, was arrested in January. His attorney, Dale Rubin, said he had signed on because was desperate to get to the U.S. and work.

steve.chawkins@latimes.com

Times staff writers Richard Marosi and Harriet Ryan contributed to this report.

Chicago wants $850,000 'code of silence' verdict set aside

In this case the tyrants that run the city of Chicago want to erase the verdict from this court case so in future cases of police corruption they can pretend that police corruption doesn't exist.

Politicians love to claim they are our servants, but servants who behave this way are fired and should be sent to prison and have a permanent black mark on their record saying they can't be trusted.

Source

Chicago wants 'code of silence' verdict set aside

By David Heinzmann, Chicago Tribune reporter

7:24 a.m. CST, December 4, 2012

Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration asked a federal judge Monday to set aside a jury verdict in the infamous videotaped beating of a female bartender by an off-duty Chicago police officer — essentially agreeing to pay the woman $850,000 now in return for erasing the jury's finding that a police "code of silence" protected the cop.

The unusual request is an attempt to prevent last month's damaging verdict from being cited by lawyers in other lawsuits against the Police Department. The former bartender filed the motion jointly with the city; she stands to quickly collect the jury award she won without risking the chance of losing on appeal or having the trial judge reduce the amount.

It will be up to U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve to weigh the interests of the parties involved in the lawsuit against the interest of the public in having the record of the jury's verdict stand. City lawyers said they plan to appear before the judge Monday.

The city battled Karolina Obrycka's lawsuit for five years, arguing that former Officer Anthony Abbate's attack on her, which was caught on security video and eventually went viral on the Internet, was the action of an off-duty officer and not the responsibility of the Chicago Police Department.

As part of her case against the city, Obrycka's lawyers argued that a pattern and practice of covering up police corruption and misconduct exists in the department. Moreover, she argued, Abbate behaved with a sense of impunity because he believed fellow officers would protect him. The jury agreed in its Nov. 13 verdict.

Although the city argued in Monday's court papers that the jury's verdict was "ambiguous" and tied to the peculiar circumstances of the Abbate case, lawyers also wrote that they want the verdict removed from the record because it could influence other lawsuits against the Police Department, of which there are many.

In a statement, Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton said the city reached out to Obrycka after the administration determined it didn't want to appeal the verdict.

"From the city's perspective, vacating the judgment eliminates the risk that the judgment will be misused in a way that hinders the city's ability to defend itself in future cases," Patton said.

The city also argued in the motion that the misconduct in the Abbate case happened several years ago and things are different now. The old Office of Professional Standards, which investigated the Abbate case, was renamed and reconfigured in the wake of the scandal. Also, city lawyers noted that there is a new mayor as well as a different police superintendent.

While the city's effort to erase the jury's verdict would not strike down the record of testimony in the trial, it does pose some risks to the public good, experts said.

"By allowing the kind of agreed-upon whitewash of the jury verdict, it tends to increase the possibility of future bad conduct," said Richard Zitrin, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, who has testified before Congress about secret settlements in police misconduct cases.

"The problem is that the lawyer representing the plaintiff has a duty to do what's right for the plaintiff, and that duty does not include a duty to do what's right for the public as a whole."

Obrycka's lawyer, Terry Ekl, did not respond to calls for comment Monday. City officials also did not immediately answer questions about the move.

In the memorandum filed Monday, the city cited some legal precedents supporting the move to vacate the jury verdict. But federal courts have not always agreed with such motions when public misconduct issues are involved.

In a 2000 case in Virginia, after a federal jury found for a plaintiff in a police excessive force lawsuit, both sides filed a motion to vacate the verdict in favor of a settlement. In that case, the judge wrote, "the public's interest in judicial economy, finality of judgment and the integrity of the courts outweighs the parties' interest in having the verdict vacated."

Lawyer Christopher Smith, who has represented several plaintiffs in lawsuits against the Chicago Police Department, said claims of a pattern and practice of coverups are allowed into cases rarely and on narrow terms.

Applying the precedent from the Abbate verdict to other lawsuits is challenging, he said. However, given the circumstances of the case — the fact that Abbate was off-duty and in a bar — the verdict made a strong statement.

Because the jury decided that the department covered up for a drunken off-duty cop attacking somebody in a bar, the case shows "it's so well-known to officers that no matter what we do, we know we're going to get backed up," Smith said. "No matter how far away (the alleged behavior) was from a police action, there's always a police influence if there's a code of silence."

dheinzmann@tribune.com

Judge rules Arizona’s medical-marijuana law is constitutional

Arizona Attorney General

AG Tom Horne is the jerk who asked Governor Jan Brewer to declare Prop 203 null and void so he could continue throwing pot smokers in prison.

Source

Judge rules Arizona’s medical-marijuana law is constitutional

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Dec 5, 2012 12:43 AM

A court ruling that Arizona’s controversial medical-marijuana law does not conflict with federal drug laws cleared the way Tuesday for dispensaries to open and allows patients to legally obtain marijuana from the facilities.

The long-awaited decision by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Michael Gordon rejected arguments made by Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne that the voter-approved law should be shut down because marijuana is illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act and that state employees would be facilitating federal crimes if they issued licenses to medical-marijuana dispensaries.

The first dispensary, Arizona Organix, is scheduled to open at 10a.m. Thursday in Glendale, with another to follow in Tucson later this month.

“This means that dispensaries are going to be able to open and start serving patients in Arizona,” said attorney Ryan Hurley, an expert in the state’s medical-marijuana law.

“And it means patients are finally going to have the access voters intended them to have to medicine that makes them feel better.”

Gordon, in his ruling, made clear that marijuana is still illegal under federal law, but he wrote that the U.S. Constitution allows Arizona to make different policy choices than the federal government when it comes to decriminalizing and regulating medical marijuana. He ruled that the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act does not undermine the purposes of the federal Controlled Substances Act, which makes possession, sale or use of marijuana a crime.

“Clearly, the mere State authorization of a very limited amount of federally proscribed conduct, under a tight regulatory scheme, provides no meaningful obstacle to federal enforcement,” Gordon wrote. “No one can argue that the federal government’s ability to enforce the CSA is impaired to the slightest degree.”

The judge also noted that 18 states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation permitting the use of medical marijuana, adding: “This Court will not rule that Arizona, having sided with the ever-growing minority of States and having limited it to medical use, has violated public policy.”

Montgomery and Horne said in written statements said that they will appeal.

“As the trial court notes, the questions of law presented in this case and the analysis utilized by the trial court are not well settled or universally accepted,” Montgomery’s statement read. A spokesman for Montgomery stressed that the office’s position on the program has not changed.

Karen O’Keefe, director of state policies at the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C., said Gordon’s ruling falls in line with other decisions.

“No court has ever said that it would be a crime for somebody to implement a state medical-marijuana law,” she said. “This is generally in keeping with other court decisions that found states could remove the criminal penalties for medical marijuana and set up some sort of regulatory system.”

O’Keefe said the federal government has not prosecuted anyone for implementing medical-marijuana programs.

“To suggest there was actually a real threat of this … is certainly foolish,” she said.

Voters in 2010 passed the measure to allow people with certain debilitating medical conditions, including chronic pain, cancer and muscle spasms, to use medical marijuana. They must obtain a recommendation from a physician and register with the state, which issues identification cards to qualified patients and caregivers. Caregivers can grow 12 plants for up to five patients. Users are limited to 2.5ounces every two weeks.

More than 33,000 people have permission to use medical marijuana in Arizona, and most can also grow their own until the dispensaries open.

Under the law, state health officials can license up to 126 dispensaries throughout designated areas. The law does not limit how much marijuana-dispensary operators can grow.

In August, the state Department of Health Services selected nearly 100 dispensary owners to have the opportunity to sell marijuana and operate cultivation sites to grow if they completed certain steps.

Gordon’s ruling stemmed from a legal argument over whether Maricopa County was required to approve zoning for White Mountain Health Center, which wanted to open a dispensary in an unincorporated area near Sun City.

Montgomery had advised county officials not to participate in the medical-marijuana program, saying employees could risk prosecution under federal drug laws.

Meanwhile, he and Horne used the case to test the federal pre-emption argument.

Butch Williams, an owner of White Mountain Health Center, said he hopes to soon fulfill the necessary requirements to become a full-fledged dispensary.

Gordon ruled that Maricopa County must provide the center with paperwork that it complies with zoning restrictions.

“The voters have a constitutional right to implement this in their state, and I’m glad the will of the voters is being listened to,” Williams said.

Attorney Ezekiel Edwards, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s criminal-law reform project, argued on White Mountain Health Center’s behalf during an Oct.19 hearing.

He disagreed with the notion that state law requires government workers to engage in activities that would expose them to liabilities under the Controlled Substances Act.

“The court understood the regulation of drugs and medicine is traditionally a power exercised by the states and that Arizona voters had chosen, as is their right, to decriminalize and regulate the medicinal use of marijuana,” Edwards told The Arizona Republic. “There’s nothing in federal law or in the Constitution that prevents Arizona from doing this.”

Source

Judge rules in favor of Arizona's medical marijuana dispensaries

Posted: Tuesday, December 4, 2012 2:54 pm

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

State and county officials cannot refuse to process applications for medical marijuana dispensaries just because the drug remains illegal under federal law, a trial judge ruled today.

In an extensive ruling, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Michael Gordon rejected arguments by Attorney General Tom Horne and Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery that the 2010 voter-approved Arizona Medical Marijuana Act is illegal and contrary to public policy because the possession and sale of marijuana remain a federal crime.

In his ruling, Gordon pointed out that 18 states and the District of Columbia already have enacted laws permitting some form of legal marijuana use. And the judge said he wasn't about to declare Arizona's own version invalid.

"This court will not rule that Arizona, having sided with the ever-growing minority of states and having limited it to medical use, has violated public policy,'' he wrote.

Gordon acknowledged that Congress enacted the Controlled Substances Act to combat drug abuse and to the control the legitimate and illegitimate traffic of drugs. That law classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug for which there is no legitimate medical use.

And the judge agreed that the 2010 initiative allowing the medical use of marijuana reflects "a very narrow but different policy choice'' about the drug. But he said the fact that Arizona has a different view of the drug does not illegally undermine the federal law: Federal agents remain free to arrest Arizonans who violate that federal statute.

"No one can argue that the federal government's ability to enforce the Controlled Substances Act is impaired to the slightest degree,'' Gordon wrote.

In fact, he said, what voters approved here actually could be interpreted to support the goals of Congress in combating drug abuse.

"The Arizona statute requires a physician to review a patient's medical circumstances prior to authorization of its use,'' he said.

Gordon also said the initiative also gives the state health department "full regulatory authority.'' That agency, in turn, has enacted rules to ensure that those dispensaries which operate within the law.

"The detailed regulations ensure the marijuana is used for medical purposes only,'' the judge wrote, saying the sale and use of the drug by those not authorized remains a state crime.

Most immediately, the decision should pave the way for a dispensary to open in Sun City. But the broad scope of the ruling, unless overturned, provides firm legal grounds for the state going ahead with its plans to license more than 100 such dispensaries around the state.

The 2010 initiative said individuals who have certain medical conditions can seek a recommendation from a doctor to use medical marijuana. The health department reviews those recommendations and, if appropriate, issues an identification card allowing the person to obtain up to 2 1/2 ounces of marijuana every two weeks.

The most recent figures show more than 33,600 applications have been approved.

That law also envisions a network of up to 125 state-licensed dispensaries to grow and sell the drug to cardholders and their caregivers. But state health officials, acting on directions from Gov. Jan Brewer, initially dragged their feet on the whole licensing process until two separate courts rejected their arguments that the law is illegal.

In the interim, cardholders have been able to grow their own drugs.

The state has since licensed a handful of dispensaries. But the owners of White Mountain Health Center ran into a problem: The health department requires that anyone seeking a dispensary permit must provide documentation to the health department that the site is properly zoned.

In this case, Maricopa County officials, acting under Montgomery's advice, refused to provide the necessary letter. The county is involved because Sun City is an unincorporated area.

Dispensary owners sued, asking Gordon to order the county to issue the letter.

Montgomery told the judge he can't do that because it would put the county in the position of helping establish a place for the sale of items that are illegal under federal law. The Attorney General's Office took a similar legal position at an October hearing, with both arguing that public employees are committing a federal crime of aiding and abetting the possession and sale of marijuana in violation of federal law.

Gordon, however, pointed out a conviction under federal law for aiding requires proof the person assists or participates in committing the crime. He said that's not the case with public workers.

"Their specific intent is to perform their administrative tasks,'' the judge wrote.

"They have no interest in whether the dispensary opens, operates, succeeds or fails,'' Gordon continued, saying the workers "wholly unconnected to and separate from'' the people who actually will be selling the drugs. "These employees cannot be held accountable for conduct that they anticipate will occur but could care less if it actually does.'

Thousands sickened by fake pot drugs Spice and K2

Source

Thousands sickened by fake pot, report shows

By Donna Leinwand Leger USA Today Tue Dec 4, 2012 11:26 AM

K2, Spice and other synthetic drugs that mimic a marijuana high sent 11,406 people -- mostly teenagers and young adults -- to the emergency room in 2010, according to the first report on the substances from the federal government’s Drug Abuse Warning Network.

The report, the first to analyze the impact of the popular herbal incense, found that children ages 12 to 17 accounted for one-third of the emergency room visits. Young adults ages 18 to 24 accounted for another 35 percent.

In 59 percent of the cases involving patients ages 12 to 29, doctors found no other substance, differing from most emergency department visits involving illicit drugs and painkiller abuse.

Marijuana, the most popular illicit drug with 18 million regular users, sent 461,028 people to the hospital in 2010.

“This report confirms that synthetic drugs cause substantial damage to public health and safety,” Office of National Drug Control Policy Director Gil Kerlikowske said.

Spice and K2, marketed as legal, fake pot and labeled as herbal incense, emerged as popular drugs among teenagers and college students in 2009, who could purchase the drugs online and in convenience stores.

Problems quickly emerged. Doctors reported teenagers arriving in the emergency room with high fevers and strange behavior.

Police in Nebraska in 2010 arrested a teenage boy who had smoked Wicked X, herbal incense coated with synthetic cannabinoids. The teen careened his truck into the side of a house and then continued driving.

At least 18 states outlawed the substances and the Drug Enforcement Administration instituted an emergency ban.

In July, Congress banned sales of K2, Spice and other synthetic under the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act.

Chicken Littles lose again (aka Tom Horne)

Chicken Littles lose again

By EJ MONTINI

Tue, Dec 04 2012 2:54 PM

Arizona’s anti-medical marijuana Chicken Littles – Attorney General Tom Horne and Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery – were told by yet another judge that, no, the sky is NOT falling.

Maricopa County Superior Judge Michael Gordon did not buy the argument by Horne and Montgomery that county employees could face federal prosecution for aiding and abetting drug crimes if medical marijuana dispensaries are permitted to open. (See an article here.)

(Federal prosecutors have said time and again that they aren’t interested in arresting bureaucrats following state law.)

Of course, this latest ruling will only serve as proof to Horne and Montgomery (who hate the medical marijuana law) that the sky IS falling.

Already the Chicken Littles (who also include Gov. Jan Brewer) have been brushed aside in federal court.

That hasn’t stopped them from trying to prevent a smooth, logical implementation of a medical marijuana law that Arizona voters have repeatedly approved.

A while back I asked Ryan Hurley, who represents some of those hoping to open dispensaries, about the actions taken by Brewer, Horne and Montgomery.

"It was a little surprising," he told me. "Their stated intention from day one was to try to resolve this in a civil fashion in the courts, and that seems to have gone the other way. It's unfortunate because what they're going to end up doing is forcing cancer patients into the black market, into back alleys to pick up their medicine."

Montgomery said Tuesday that he would appeal the latest judge's decision.

The last time Montgomery dragged out the case, Hurley told me, "If he (Montgomery) is successful in delaying or impeding the dispensary program, all he is going to be doing is allowing this unregulated gray market to pop up. And patients aren't protected and growers aren't protected. The dispensaries offer a safe, legal, compliant way for people to get their medicine, and that is what people voted for."

What has been bizarre from the start is the way states’ rights advocates like Brewer would suddenly kowtow to what they say is the supremacy of federal law.

Bizarre, but not surprising.

The argument over medical marijuana, like the argument over immigration, isn’t based on states’ rights but on ideology.

States’ rights is just a cover.

Something a patron at a marijuana dispensary might describe as blowing smoke.

Legalize recreational pot now

Source

Legalize recreational pot now

By LINDA VALDEZ

Tue, Dec 04 2012 3:05 PM

Medical marijuana is a hoax. The fact that a Maricopa County Superior Court says Arizona’s medical pot law is constitutional makes no difference.

The guy I saw on the street corner in Tucson the other day proved my point. He had a big sign telling where to go to get your pot authorization. Real medicine isn’t sold that way.

But the so-called “war on drugs” is a miserable, expensive failure.

Prohibition didn’t work. It’s time to admit that laws against recreational marijuana don’t work, either.

A poll commissioned by the advocacy group Marijuana Policy Project says 58 percent of American voters support legalization and 50 percent predict it will be legal in the next 10 years.

www.mpp.org/assets/pdfs/blog/MPPResults.pdf

John McAfee located with GPS info in cell phone photo!!!

When the Feds passed the law which required cell phone manufacturers to allow cell phones to tell the authorities the location of a cell phone they told us it was to make us safer. That was 100 percent BS. The purpose was to allow the police and government to hunt down cell phone users.

And of course in this case some anonymous hacker used that info to track down fugitive John McAfee's location.

The bottom line is to remember that ANYTIME you use a cell phone it is constantly broadcasting your location to the police and government authorities.

And while the internet isn't broadcasting your location on the air waves like a cell phone is, every time you use the internet your current location or IP address is sent across the internet and can be used to location your physical location.

I also think that some high end cameras have GPS systems in then that will add the location of where you shot all your photos as META data inside the photo, again allowing the government to track down the location of any photos you shoot.

Source

Hacker locates John McAfee through smartphone tracks

By Craig Timberg, Published: December 4

Weeks of international intrigue about the whereabouts of tech millionaire John McAfee ended Tuesday after the Internet pioneer made an elementary digital mistake that highlighted the fraught relationship Americans have with what they once quaintly called “the telephone.”

That homely communication tool, wired into walls everywhere for the better part of a century, has become an untethered e-mailer, browser, banker, shopper, movie viewer, music player and — to an extent that few appreciate — digital spy of extraordinary power.

McAfee, 67, who founded the popular antivirus company that bears his name, has been wanted for questioning by police in Belize since a neighbor turned up dead of a gunshot wound near McAfee’s beach-side home Nov. 11. The troubled tech savant, insisting that he had no role in the shooting, went on the run and has been taunting police by blog, Twitter and occasional podcast.

Authorities couldn’t catch him. But a hacker called Simple Nomad learned McAfee’s location shortly after journalists posted an image of him from his supposedly secret locale under the provocative headline, “We are with John McAfee right now, suckers.”

Embedded in that image, apparently taken by one of the journalists, was the sort of detailed data routinely collected by smartphone cameras and often transmitted along with images wherever they go — on e-mail, Facebook, online photo albums and, it turns out, to Vice magazine’s Web site.

Simple Nomad, who declined to give any identifying personal details in an e-mail interview, examined the underlying data and quickly learned that McAfee’s image emanated from an iPhone 4S at the following location: “Latitude/longitude: 15° 39’ 29.4 North, 88° 59’ 31.8 West,” at 12:26 p.m. Monday.

That put McAfee in a Guatemalan villa south of the border with Belize. Simple Nomad tweeted the information, generating significant online buzz. McAfee tried to cover his tracks with a blog post in which he claimed to have faked the iPhone data to fool police, but he came clean Tuesday morning with another post acknowledging that he was in Guatemala and soon would be meeting with a lawyer.

“Yesterday was chaotic due to the accidental release of my exact co- ordinates by an unseasoned technician at Vice headquarters,” McAfee wrote in a short item posted with an image of the blue-and-white flag of Guatemala. “We made it to safety in spite of this handicap. I had to cancel numerous interviews with the press yesterday because of this and I apologize to all of those affected.”

Simple Nomad was in no mood to gloat about the detective work, saying by e-mail, “McAfee’s mistake was talking to the Vice guys, so ultimately his ego is the culprit.”

But the case resonated with privacy experts, who long have feared that most owners of smartphones have little idea how much information they collect and how easily it can be shared. Hackers can steal it. Police in many situations can review it for potential evidence. And users can accidentally transmit it, sometimes without even knowing they have done so.

The rules governing the collection of personal data are few and often unclear. There is no firm limit, for example, on how long a cellphone carrier can keep GPS location data on its users even though many aren’t aware that such records are being kept. A poll by the University of California at Berkeley released in July said 46 percent of Americans thought cellphone providers should not keep such data, and 28 percent said it should be deleted after one year.

The “metadata” that’s embedded in files is particularly treacherous, said Chris Hoofnagle, a law professor at U.C.-Berkeley. Businesses made so many accidental releases that several programs now are available to help scrub out comments and deletions in documents that are intended to remain private. Rules in some states govern what information lawyers can use when opposing counsel inadvertently shares private information in metadata fields.

The rapid spread of smartphones has made it even harder for most users to monitor the creation and flow of personal information, Hoofnagle said. “It has trapped a lot of people, this problem. We’re often not aware of the metadata that’s created.”

The McAfee case is all the more striking because of his presumed savviness in handling technology. The iPhone appears to have belonged to one of the journalists, but sophisticated users can alter or delete the metadata that accompanies photographs — something that McAfee could have demanded or done himself before the image was sent to the Web site. Vice also could have eliminated such data before posting the image online (as it did after Simple Nomad’s discovery).

Interest in McAfee’s location was intense because of his fame — though he left the antivirus company that bears his name in the 1990s — and the bizarre details of his life, which by various reports included sexual exploits, drug experimentation and a range of unusual business ventures. News stories, some of which McAfee has denied, have portrayed a frenzied, paranoid genius with a knack for extravagant fabrications that he later dismisses as pranks.

He has denied any role in the death of Gregory Faull, 52, while expressing fear of the police in Belize.

McAfee sounded a conciliatory note in a blog post Tuesday afternoon announcing that he has hired a prominent lawyer who is the uncle of his latest girlfriend. He apologized for previous blog posts in which he gave out misleading information while seeking to evade police.

To the authorities from Belize, he offered to discuss the death of his neighbor — but only by phone.

San Francisco narc admits robbing prostitutes and stealing drugs

East Bay vice cop cries, admits thefts

Justin Berton

Updated 11:02 p.m., Wednesday, December 5, 2012

The former leader of an elite Contra Costa County antinarcotics squad cried and broke into an excessive sweat in a federal courtroom Wednesday as he pleaded guilty to stealing drugs from evidence lockers.

Norman Wielsch, 51, also admitted that while on the job as one of the East Bay's top vice cops, he robbed prostitutes of at least $10,000 in cash and electronics and illegally arrested a teenager in an effort to "scare him straight."

A federal judge in Oakland will sentence the former lawman in February. Wielsch's attorney hopes the admissions will result in a sentence of as few as 10 years, while federal guidelines recommend a 14- to 17-year sentence. A judge has wide discretion on the term.

Wielsch, who is said to suffer from a neurological disorder that affects his nerve endings, remained composed for most of the hour-long proceeding.

But after an assistant U.S. attorney read the five counts from a 2011 indictment to which he agreed to plead guilty, Wielsch burst into a sweating jag that caused him to furiously wipe his brow and neck with tissues. His attorney, Michael Cardoza, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Kandis Westmore the outbreak was the result of Wielsch's health condition, and not the magnitude of the hearing.

A contrite-sounding Wielsch offered a lengthy apology to law enforcement agents and residents of Contra Costa County. He said he was ashamed that his actions "tarnished the badge" and brought shame upon his family.

"We did a lot of good," he said of his former outfit, the Central Contra Costa County Narcotics Enforcement Team. "Until we did these stupid things."

Prosecutors said that in late 2010 and early 2011 Wielsch, along with then-private investigator Christopher Butler, 51, stole at least 20 pounds of marijuana and 3 pounds of methamphetamine from police evidence lockers. The U.S. attorney's office valued the amount of stolen drugs at from $30,000 to $70,000.

The duo sold the drugs to one of Butler's former employees, who ultimately went to authorities and agreed to video-record Wielsch and Butler during a drug transaction.

Wielsch also admitted that he and Butler, who is serving an eight-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in September, had staged the arrest of a 19-year-old Danville resident. Butler and Wielsch were hired by the teenager's mom, who suspected her son was dealing drugs and wanted him "scared straight." According to prosecutors, Wielsch handcuffed the teenager and searched his home before releasing him.

Additionally, Wielsch confessed that he and Butler had robbed prostitutes who worked out of hotel rooms. Prosecutors said Butler would knock on the hotel room door and Wielsch would "push his way through" with his badge displayed. Once inside, the pair would steal cash and cell phones. Wielsch admitted they had also taken a computer in one incident.

"I'm sorry," Wielsch said of the robberies. "I don't even believe I did this."

Wielsch waved to his family before U.S. marshals took him into custody.

Outside the courtroom, Cardoza said his client still did not understand his own motives for crossing from one side of the law to the other.

"What I hope some people remember," Cardoza said, "is that Norm Wielsch served the public honorably for a number of years. And then he did go bad, and there's no denying that."

Justin Berton is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jberton@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @justinberton

New high for medical pot backers

New high for medical pot backers

By EJ MONTINI

Wed, Dec 05 2012 8:27 PM

You know how after smoking a joint you sometimes repeat a conversation that you just had and you don’t even realize you did it until some dude tells you, “Bro, you said that same thing, like, two minutes ago?”

Of course you don’t.

Because you’ve told your kids that you never smoked marijuana, or maybe that you were in a dorm room once where a doobie was being passed around, and you may have put it to your lips, but (like former President Bill Clinton) you didn’t inhale.

Maybe your children even bought it.

That’s not the point. The point is that in a sadly ironic twist Arizona officials are playing the part of weed-smoking stoners, rehashing an argument that has been resolved more than once and is, or should be, over.

Earlier this week, Attorney General Tom Horne and Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery were told by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Michael Gordon that he would not prevent Arizona’s medical marijuana law from going into effect, allowing dispensaries to open.

The judge did not buy Montgomery’s argument that county employees could face federal prosecution for aiding and abetting drug crimes.

And why should he?

Federal prosecutors have said many times over the past few years that they aren’t interested in arresting bureaucrats who are following state law. It hasn’t happened in any of the nearly 20 states that also have medical marijuana laws.

Montgomery, Horne and Gov. Jan Brewer, who has backed their efforts, simply don’t like the medical marijuana law.

Their argument for this is that federal law supersedes state law. Just the opposite argument they used when promoting Arizona’s SB 1070.

Citizens have approved the medical marijuana measure more than once, and the dispensary system state officials been trying to inhibit offers the best opportunity to regulate marijuana sales in a way that makes sense.

After the judge’s ruling on Tuesday I spoke with Ryan Hurley, a lawyer who has worked with several of those hoping to open dispensaries.

“It’s a good day for Arizona voters and a good day for patients,” he told me.

Horne and Montgomery say that the case will be appealed.

“I expect that they will appeal,” Hurley said, “But they haven’t asked for an injunction at this point. And I don’t think they’d be likely to get one anyway, so at least for the next year or so people will be able to operate. And I think that an appellate court will find what the two previous courts have found. Which they should. Once the process is in place it will not only be good for patients but also good for the state’s economy.”

The way Hurley figures it, by the time an appeal rolls around a system will be in place that Brewer and associates will have to accept.

Not only that, but what happened in Colorado and Washington this past election might change everything. Those two states passed laws legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana for recreational use. That’s a much more complicated issue for the feds to deal with than medical marijuana.

Still, Hurley continues to hear from people who say that our medical marijuana law was only created to be a stepping stone to legalization.

“I would invite those who say such a thing to go to a cancer ward if they thought this law was about recreational use,” Hurley said.

That can sound like cheap hyperbole coming from a lawyer.

But not from a physician like Dr. Samuel D. Benjamin, whose patients have used marijuana. Benjamin is the host of a one-hour show on Saturdays at 4 p.m. on KTAR, 92.3 FM.

“I have patients for whom marijuana decreases their dependence on other pain medications,” he told me. “I have patients who use it to make tinctures (a plant extract) and rub it onto joints and it helps them. I’ve had elderly patients using it to increase their appetites, and they actually eat, results we don’t get from anything else. There really is no rational argument for opposition to this.”

That’s true, dude, but this is, like, Arizona, where we have irrational arguments about – What was it again? Oh, yeah, pot. -- over and over and over and …

(Column for Dec. 6, 2012, Arizona Republic)

Marijuana is now LEGAL in Washington State!!!!!!!!

Source

Seattle pot smokers celebrate as law takes effect

By Gene Johnson Associated Press Thu Dec 6, 2012 7:03 AM

SEATTLE — The crowds of happy people lighting joints under Seattle’s Space Needle early Thursday morning with nary a police officer in sight bespoke the new reality: Marijuana is legal under Washington state law.

Hundreds gathered at Seattle Center for a New Year’s Eve-style countdown to 12 a.m., when the legalization measure passed by voters last month took effect. When the clock struck, they cheered and sparked up in unison.

A few dozen people gathered on a sidewalk outside the north Seattle headquarters of the annual Hempfest celebration and did the same, offering joints to reporters and blowing smoke into television news cameras.

“I feel like a kid in a candy store!” shouted Hempfest volunteer Darby Hageman. “It’s all becoming real now!”

Washington and Colorado became the first states to vote to decriminalize and regulate the possession of an ounce (28 grams) or less of marijuana by adults over 21. Both measures call for setting up state licensing schemes for pot growers, processors and retail stores. Colorado’s law is set to take effect by Jan. 5.

Technically, Washington’s new marijuana law still forbids smoking pot in public, which remains punishable by a fine, like drinking in public. But pot fans wanted a party, and Seattle police weren’t about to write them any tickets.

In another sweeping change for Washington, Gov. Chris Gregoire on Wednesday signed into law a measure that legalizes same-sex marriage. The state joins several others that allow gay and lesbian couples to wed.

The mood was festive in Seattle as dozens of gay and lesbian couples got in line to pick up marriage licenses at the King County auditor’s office early Thursday.

King County and Thurston County announced they would open their auditors’ offices shortly after midnight Wednesday to accommodate those who wanted to be among the first to get their licenses.

Kelly Middleton and her partner Amanda Dollente got in line at 4 p.m. Wednesday.

Hours later, as the line grew, volunteers distributed roses and a group of men and women serenaded the waiting line to the tune of “Going to the Chapel.”

Because the state has a three-day waiting period, the earliest that weddings can take place is Sunday.

In dealing with marijuana, the Seattle Police Department told its 1,300 officers on Wednesday, just before legalization took hold, that until further notice they shall not issue citations for public marijuana use.

Officers will be advising people not to smoke in public, police spokesman Jonah Spangenthal-Lee wrote on the SPD Blotter. “The police department believes that, under state law, you may responsibly get baked, order some pizzas and enjoy a ‘Lord of the Rings’ marathon in the privacy of your own home, if you want to.”

He offered a catchy new directive referring to the film “The Big Lebowski,” popular with many marijuana fans: “The Dude abides, and says ‘take it inside!’”

“This is a big day because all our lives we’ve been living under the iron curtain of prohibition,” said Hempfest director Vivian McPeak. “The whole world sees that prohibition just took a body blow.”

Washington’s new law decriminalizes possession of up to an ounce (28 grams) for those over 21, but for now selling marijuana remains illegal. I-502 gives the state a year to come up with a system of state-licensed growers, processors and retail stores, with the marijuana taxed 25 percent at each stage. Analysts have estimated that a legal pot market could bring Washington hundreds of millions of dollars a year in new tax revenue for schools, health care and basic government functions.

But marijuana remains illegal under federal law. That means federal agents can still arrest people for it, and it’s banned from federal properties, including military bases and national parks.

The Justice Department has not said whether it will sue to try to block the regulatory schemes in Washington and Colorado from taking effect.

“The department’s responsibility to enforce the Controlled Substances Act remains unchanged,” said a statement issued Wednesday by the Seattle U.S. attorney’s office. “Neither states nor the executive branch can nullify a statute passed by Congress” — a non-issue, since the measures passed in Washington and Colorado don’t “nullify” federal law, which federal agents remain free to enforce.

The legal question is whether the establishment of a regulated marijuana market would “frustrate the purpose” of the federal pot prohibition, and many constitutional law scholars say it very likely would.

That leaves the political question of whether the administration wants to try to block the regulatory system, even though it would remain legal to possess up to an ounce of marijuana.

Alison Holcomb is the drug policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington and served as the campaign manager for New Approach Washington, which led the legalization drive. She said the voters clearly showed they’re done with marijuana prohibition.

“New Approach Washington sponsors and the ACLU look forward to working with state and federal officials and to ensure the law is fully and fairly implemented,” she said.

Now that pot's legal in state, will D.C. delegation defend law?

Now that pot's legal in state, will D.C. delegation defend law?

WASHINGTON — Washington state's new marijuana-legalization law, which takes effect Thursday, is a direct affront to federal drug policy. So does Dave Reichert — the King County sheriff-turned-congressman — think users still should be subject to arrest by federal agents?

He isn't saying. Neither is Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Spokane, the highest-ranking Republican woman in Congress.

And Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both of whom personally opposed making recreational pot legal, haven't exactly been at the forefront of trying to resolve the legal limbo.

The Washington congressional delegation's muted reaction likely will do little to help clarify the state's unprecedented conflict with the federal ban on marijuana. It also leaves unclear whether voters — who approved legalization 56 to 44 percent — can expect their elected representatives to vigorously stand up for the state law.

On Wednesday, the U.S. attorney for Seattle, Jenny Durkan, said in a statement that the Department of Justice (DOJ) still was reviewing legalization measures approved last month by voters in Washington and Colorado: "The Department's responsibility to enforce the Controlled Substances Act remains unchanged. Neither States nor the Executive branch can nullify a statute passed by Congress."

But, as some legal experts expected, the DOJ has not acted.

Other legal experts, as well as marijuana advocates, expect the federal government will quietly let the state laws go forward. As Richard Epstein, a professor at New York University School of Law, put it, the Drug Enforcement Agency is "going to play its version of 'don't ask, don't tell.' "

Colorado's law, which mirrors Washington's new tolerance for personal possession of marijuana, is expected to take effect within 30 days.

Unlike Washington's delegation, Colorado lawmakers have taken more decisive action to defend their state's law. Three House members from Colorado have backed a bill to prevent the federal Controlled Substances Act from pre-empting state laws. Of the 10 co-sponsors of the bill, which was introduced by Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., none is from Washington.

U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Tacoma, has been the delegation's most prominent voice on the right of the state to implement the law. He was one of 18 House Democrats, and the only member from Washington, to sign a post-election letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking the DOJ to refrain from making arrests.

"I don't want to leave my constituents in a limbo not knowing whether a given activity is legal or not," said Smith, a former prosecutor for the city of Seattle, who said he voted for the law.

Smith has not signed onto DeGette's bill but said he supports it in principle.

Smith noted the DOJ has taken a largely hands-off attitude toward medical marijuana, paving the way for its legalization in 18 states and the District of Columbia. But federal authorities still sporadically assert their power, Smith said.

Since January 2010, federal agents have raided more than 200 medical-marijuana dispensaries, labs and cultivation sites in eight states, including Washington, according to Kris Hermes, spokesman for Americans for Safe Access, an advocacy group for medical marijuana.

Washington's new law has left Democrats and Republicans in the state delegation personally at odds with voters' will.

McMorris Rodgers opposes legalizing marijuana. Reichert's office has repeatedly refused to say whether he thinks the new state law should trump the federal ban. Reichert, whose mother took cannabis in a pill form before she died of cancer in 2011, softened his stance on medical marijuana but not to the point of supporting legalization.

Meanwhile, activists in Seattle plan a public celebration at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Seattle Center fountain, despite the new law's ban on public consumption of marijuana. Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes said he hoped there would not be "unfortunate flaunting" of public marijuana use, which is subject to a fine of about $50.

"I think (Seattle police) will see how well people comply," said Holmes. If they issue tickets, "we will enforce the law."

Staff reporter Jonathan Martin contributed to this report. Kyung Song: 202-383-6108 or ksong@seattletimes.com

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne Sex Scandal

The article Assistant Attorney General Carmen Chenal who allegedly is Tom Horne's mistress.

The article also mentions the hit and run accident that Tom Horne was allegedly involved in on his way to have an affair with Carmen Chenal.

At the same time all this has been happening Tom Horne has been doing everything he possibly can to get Arizona's new medical marijuana law thrown out so he can resume throwing medical marijuana patients in prison.

How many allergy deaths have been caused by the "war on drugs"

Source

Ariz. law could prevent child allergy deaths

by Lisa Horne - Dec. 2, 2012 07:40 PM

A stock epinephrine law in Virginia, similar to what will be proposed in Arizona in the legislative session that begins in January, has already saved three young lives in that state. The legislation allows schools to stock epinephrine for use without a prescription during allergic reactions.

One boy's father credits the law with saving his son after he had an allergic reaction to a bee sting while on the school bus -- a school health-services coordinator grabbed the stocked epinephrine auto-injector and darted to the boy's aid after being alerted via radio. The school's intervention happened long before the ambulance could even arrive to transport him to the emergency room. The other two student incidents occurred one after the other within a week's span, with one student quoted in the local paper saying that he "felt like his throat was closing up."

The stock epinephrine legislation approved in Virginia this year commemorates first-grader Ammaria Johnson, who died of anaphylaxis at school after eating a peanut. It was signed into law to prevent such a senseless death from ever happening again and it is paying off.

Arizona children deserve the same protections. It is for this reason that the Arizona Food Allergy Alliance is pursuing stock epinephrine legislation. It will allow public schools in Arizona to stock epinephrine auto-injectors that will be made available to any child on campus for life-threatening allergic reactions to foods and insect stings.

And the statistics show that many reactions happen at school. Specifically, more than one in six children, or more than 15 percent, will experience a reaction at school. Without the law, schools and students are vulnerable to a preventable tragic situation that could even end in death. And one child death or injury is too many, especially when it could have been prevented. As such, we must take action on this important issue now.

Allowing stocking of epinephrine at school will not only save lives but also potentially prevent long-term debilitation, which has happened when a dose of epinephrine has been lacking or delayed during an allergic reaction. In Phoenix, a once perfectly healthy teenager sits in a rehabilitation center a year after an anaphylactic reaction because of such circumstances. She communicates by blinking her eyes.

Consequently, it is important to note that there are already programs in place to help schools with such initiatives, such as those through pharmaceutical companies that provide epinephrine auto-injectors at no cost to schools.

It is for all of these reasons that the AFAA will wholeheartedly pursue the stock epinephrine legislation in Arizona, and we hope to enlist the support of others.

Lisa Horne is president and founder of the Arizona Food Allergy Alliance. More information is available at arizonafoodallergy.org

Feds should back off when states legalize pot, poll says

Feds should back off when states legalize pot, poll says

By Susan Page USA Today Thu Dec 6, 2012 12:00 PM

Americans are split over whether marijuana should be decriminalized -- 50 percent say no, 48 percent say yes -- but they overwhelmingly agree on this: When states vote to legalize pot, the feds should look the other way.

The issue has taken on a new urgency after Colorado and Washington state voted last month to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes. That puts the two states in conflict with federal drug laws.

The Justice Department said Wednesday that its enforcement of drug laws “remains unchanged.”

A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds no new groundswell nationwide to decriminalize marijuana. While support for legalization has steadily risen since the 1970s, the current levels of support are about the same as they were in 2010 and 2011.

However, when asked if the federal government should take steps to enforce federal laws in states that vote to legalize pot, those surveyed say by almost 2-1, 64 percent-34 percent, that they shouldn’t.

“There has been nothing that I have seen or heard from the Department of Justice that says ‘Look we’re not going to continue to enforce federal law,’” Gil Kerlikowske, President Obama’s top drug adviser, said last week in an interview on public radio’s Marketplace. “And we’re going to continue to take a hard look at those people who are involved in making money on essentially a violation of federal law.”

The poll of 1,015 Americans, taken Nov. 26-29, has a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.

Black boxes in cars raise privacy concerns

The article didn't address it but I wonder if the government will require car makers to install GPS chips in your car to tell the police where you have traveled?

Source

Black boxes in cars raise privacy concerns

Associated Press Thu Dec 6, 2012 11:14 PM

WASHINGTON — Many motorists don’t know it, but it’s likely that every time they get behind the wheel, there’s a snitch along for the ride.

In the next few days, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to propose long-delayed regulations requiring auto manufacturers to include event data recorders — better known as “black boxes” — in all new cars and light trucks. But the agency is behind the curve. Automakers have been quietly tucking the devices, which automatically record the actions of drivers and the responses of their vehicles in a continuous information loop, into most new cars for years.

When a car is involved in a crash or when its airbags deploy, inputs from the vehicle’s sensors during the 5 to 10 seconds before impact are automatically preserved. That’s usually enough to record things like how fast the car was traveling and whether the driver applied the brake, was steering erratically or had a seat belt on.

The idea is to gather information that can help investigators determine the cause of accidents and lead to safer vehicles. But privacy advocates say government regulators and automakers are spreading an intrusive technology without first putting in place policies to prevent misuse of the information collected.

Data collected by the recorders is increasingly showing up in lawsuits, criminal cases and high-profile accidents. Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Timothy Murray initially said that he wasn’t speeding and that he was wearing his seat belt when he crashed a government-owned car last year. But the Ford Crown Victoria’s data recorder told a different story: It showed the car was traveling more than 100 mph (160 kph) and Murray wasn’t belted in.

In 2007, then-New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine was seriously injured in the crash of an SUV driven by a state trooper. Corzine was a passenger. The SUV’s recorder showed the vehicle was traveling 91 mph (146 kph) on a parkway where the speed limit was 65 mph (105 kph), and Corzine didn’t have his seat belt on.

There’s no opt-out. It’s extremely difficult for car owners to disable the recorders. Although some vehicle models have had recorders since the early 1990s, a federal requirement that automakers disclose their existence in owner’s manuals didn’t go into effect until three months ago. Automakers who voluntarily put recorders in vehicles are also now required to gather a minimum of 15 types of data.

Besides the upcoming proposal to put recorders in all new vehicles, the traffic safety administration is also considering expanding the data requirement to include as many as 30 additional types of data such as whether the vehicle’s electronic stability control was engaged, the driver’s seat position or whether the front-seat passenger was belted in. Some manufacturers already are collecting the information. Engineers have identified more than 80 data points that might be useful.

Despite privacy complaints, the traffic safety administration so far hasn’t put any limits on how the information can be used. About a dozen states have some law regarding data recorders, but the rest do not.

“Right now we’re in an environment where there are no rules, there are no limits, there are no consequences and there is no transparency,” said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group. “Most people who are operating a motor vehicle have no idea this technology is integrated into their vehicle.”

Part of the concern is that the increasing computerization of cars and the growing transmission of data to and from vehicles could lead to unintended uses of recorder data.

“Basically your car is a computer now, so it can record all kinds of information,” said Gloria Bergquist, vice president of the Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers. “It’s a lot of the same issues you have about your computer or your smartphone and whether Google or someone else has access to the data.”

The alliance opposes the government requiring recorders in all vehicles.

Data recorders “help our engineers understand how cars perform in the real world, and we already have put them on over 90 percent of (new) vehicles without any mandate being necessary,” Bergquist said.

Safety advocates, however, say requiring data recorders in all cars is the best way to gather a large enough body of reliable information to enable vehicle designers to make safer cars.

“The barn door is already open. It’s a question of whether we use the information that’s already out there,” said Henry Jasny, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Automotive Safety.

The National Transportation Safety Board has been pushing for recorders in all passenger vehicles since the board’s investigation of a 2003 accident in which an elderly driver plowed through an open-air market in Santa Monica, Calif. Ten people were killed and 63 were injured. The driver refused to be interviewed and his 1992 Buick LeSabre didn’t have a recorder. After ruling out other possibilities, investigators ultimately guessed that he had either mistakenly stepped on the gas pedal or had stepped on the gas and the brake pedals at the same time.

When reports of sudden acceleration problems in Toyota vehicles cascaded in 2009 and 2010, recorder data from some of the vehicles contributed to the traffic safety administration’s conclusion that the problem was probably sticky gas pedals and floor mats that could jam them, not defects in electronic throttle control systems.

“Black box” is a mechanic’s term for a part that should only be opened by someone with authority to do so. The term is most widely used to refer to flight data recorders, which continually gather hundreds of data points about an aircraft’s operation during flight. Aircraft recorders, by law, are actually bright orange.

Some automakers began installing the recorders at a time when there were complaints that air bags might be causing deaths and injuries, partly to protect themselves against liability and partly to improve air bag technology. Most recorders are black boxes about the size of a deck of card with circuit boards inside. After an accident, information is downloaded to a laptop computer using a tool unique to the vehicle’s manufacturer. As electronics in cars have increased, the kinds of data that can be recorded have grown as well. Some more recent recorders are part of the vehicle’s computers rather than a separate device.

Democratic Rep. Michael Capuano has repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, introduced legislation to require that automakers design recorders so that they can be disabled by motorists

A transportation bill passed by the Senate earlier this year would have required that all new cars and light trucks have recorders and designated a vehicle’s owner as the owner of the data. The provision was removed during House-Senate negotiations on the measure at the behest of House Republican lawmakers who said they were concerned about privacy.

“Many of us would see it as a slippery slope toward big government and Big Brother knowing what we’re doing and where we are,” Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., who is slated to take over the chairmanship of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in January, said at the time. “Privacy is a big concern for many across America.”

Obama's DEA thugs seem to want to keep marijuana illegal???

Source

Administration Weighs Legal Action Against States That Legalized Marijuana Use

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: December 6, 2012

WASHINGTON — Senior White House and Justice Department officials are considering plans for legal action against Colorado and Washington that could undermine voter-approved initiatives to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in those states, according to several people familiar with the deliberations.

Even as marijuana legalization supporters are celebrating their victories in the two states, the Obama administration has been holding high-level meetings since the election to debate the response of federal law enforcement agencies to the decriminalization efforts.

Marijuana use in both states continues to be illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act. One option is to sue the states on the grounds that any effort to regulate marijuana is pre-empted by federal law. Should the Justice Department prevail, it would raise the possibility of striking down the entire initiatives on the theory that voters would not have approved legalizing the drug without tight regulations and licensing similar to controls on hard alcohol.

Some law enforcement officials, alarmed at the prospect that marijuana users in both states could get used to flouting federal law openly, are said to be pushing for a stern response. But such a response would raise political complications for President Obama because marijuana legalization is popular among liberal Democrats who just turned out to re-elect him.

“It’s a sticky wicket for Obama,” said Bruce Buchanan, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Austin, saying any aggressive move on such a high-profile question would be seen as “a slap in the face to his base right after they’ve just handed him a chance to realize his presidential dreams.”

Federal officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Several cautioned that the issue had raised complex legal and policy considerations — including enforcement priorities, litigation strategy and the impact of international antidrug treaties — that remain unresolved, and that no decision was imminent.

The Obama administration declined to comment on the deliberations, but pointed to a statement the Justice Department issued on Wednesday — the day before the initiative took effect in Washington — in the name of the United States attorney in Seattle, Jenny A. Durkan. She warned Washington residents that the drug remained illegal.

“In enacting the Controlled Substances Act, Congress determined that marijuana is a Schedule I controlled substance,” she said. “Regardless of any changes in state law, including the change that will go into effect on December 6 in Washington State, growing, selling or possessing any amount of marijuana remains illegal under federal law.”

Ms. Durkan’s statement also hinted at the deliberations behind closed doors, saying: “The Department of Justice is reviewing the legalization initiatives recently passed in Colorado and Washington State. The department’s responsibility to enforce the Controlled Substances Act remains unchanged.”

Federal officials have relied on their more numerous state and local counterparts to handle smaller marijuana cases. In reviewing how to respond to the new gap, the interagency task force — which includes Justice Department headquarters, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State Department and the offices of the White House Counsel and the director of National Drug Control Policy — is considering several strategies, officials said.

One option is for federal prosecutors to bring some cases against low-level marijuana users of the sort they until now have rarely bothered with, waiting for a defendant to make a motion to dismiss the case because the drug is now legal in that state. The department could then obtain a court ruling that federal law trumps the state one.

A more aggressive option is for the Justice Department to file lawsuits against the states to prevent them from setting up systems to regulate and tax marijuana, as the initiatives contemplated. If a court agrees that such regulations are pre-empted by federal ones, it will open the door to a broader ruling about whether the regulatory provisions can be “severed” from those eliminating state prohibitions — or whether the entire initiatives must be struck down.

Another potential avenue would be to cut off federal grants to the states unless their legislatures restored antimarijuana laws, said Gregory Katsas, who led the civil division of the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration.

Mr. Katsas said he was skeptical that a pre-emption lawsuit would succeed. He said he was also skeptical that it was necessary, since the federal government could prosecute marijuana cases in those states regardless of whether the states regulated the drug.

Still, federal resources are limited. Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department issued a policy for handling states that have legalized medical marijuana. It says federal officials should generally not use their limited resources to go after small-time users, but should for large-scale trafficking organizations. The result has been more federal raids on dispensaries than many liberals had expected.

Cop who robbed and murdered drug dealers to be executed?

Source

Former Fla. police officer scheduled for execution

Associated Press Mon Dec 10, 2012 7:16 AM

TAMPA, Fla. — A former South Florida police officer is scheduled to be executed for killing nine people in 1986.

The lethal injection of Manuel Pardo, 56, is set for 6 p.m. Tuesday at Florida State Prison unless he wins an appeal.

On Friday, lawyers for Pardo argued that state courts failed to provide a meaningful review of his challenge to changes in Florida’s three-drug lethal injection cocktail. They also contend psychiatric and competency information about Pardo was never forwarded to the state Executive Clemency Board.

The state filed a response arguing that Pardo’s constitutional rights were not violated.

Prosecutors said he robbed drug dealers and then killed them and witnesses. At his 1988 trial, Pardo admitted to the killings, saying he was ridding the streets of the “scum of the earth.”

Arizona's first legal marijuana store opens!!!!

Source

Medical-marijuana era under way in Arizona

State’s first dispensary now open for business

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Dec 7, 2012 8:02 AM

The state’s first medical-marijuana dispensary opened Thursday in downtown Glendale to dozens of waiting patients, two years after voters approved an initiative to legalize the drug for certain ill patients.

Situated on a tree-lined street near an antique store and a motorcycle shop, Arizona Organix does not look like the kind of place where patients can walk in and buy marijuana, except for a tall sign outside that sports a green cross, the symbol of the medical-marijuana industry.

The business has a part-bank, part-doctor’s office feel.

Its owners spent months renovating the space, polishing concrete floors and installing a giant travertine table and bulletproof windows, walls and bank-teller exchange drawers. Seeking to provide a boutiquelike experience for patients, the owners have decorated the space with art bought at a bank auction.

There’s no hint of the pungent scent of marijuana. Rather, the place smells of the Merry Holiday Happy Everything candles burning in the lobby and a back room.

Passers-by have mistaken the dispensary for an art gallery, one of its owners said while giving a tour to The Arizona Republic this week.

But behind a secure steel door, qualified patients can buy one-eighth of an ounce of pot for $55 to $60 — tax included.

“We didn’t really want it to feel like a medical-marijuana dispensary,” said Ben Myer, 32, part owner of the business with his father and a friend. “We came up with a model of what we wanted — a high-end experience with a lot of security.”

Dispensaries will vary as more open around the state. Some, for example, will offer nutrition advice or other wellness programs as part of their services. Others will sell edibles — such as cookies, candy and brownies —made with marijuana.

Voters in 2010 passed the medical-marijuana measure to allow people with certain debilitating medical conditions, including chronic pain, cancer and muscle spasms, to use marijuana. They must obtain a recommendation from a physician and register with the state Department of Health Services, which oversees the program and issues identification cards to qualified patients and caregivers.

Patients are limited to purchasing 2.5 ounces every two weeks. More than 33,000 people have permission to use medical marijuana in Arizona.

After a prolonged battle over the legality of the state’s law, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge on Tuesday ruled that the law does not conflict with federal drug laws, clearing the way for dispensaries to open without imminent fear of state prosecution.

Under the law, state health officials can license up to 126 dispensaries. The law does not limit how much marijuana dispensary operators can grow. Each city and town is responsible for setting zoning criteria for the dispensaries; some, for example, allow dispensaries to cultivate marijuana on-site while others do not.

In August, the state Department of Health Services selected nearly 100 dispensary owners to have the opportunity to sell marijuana and operate cultivation sites to grow if they completed certain steps.

Arizona Organix was the first dispensary to receive its license and open. A dispensary in Tucson is expected to open later this month. And ADHS Director Will Humble said a handful of other potential dispensaries around the Valley and Tuscon have requested inspections to pave the way for openings.

Arizona Organix’s opening day drew more than 250 patients seeking strains of marijuana to treat ailments ranging from chronic pain to cancer and Crohn's disease. About 130 were served. Some carried canes, some shuffled along while waiting in line and others appeared healthy. The parking lot was full.

Christopher Pratt of Glendale said he started smoking marijuana to treat back pain caused by dirt-biking injuries. Until Thursday, he had obtained the drug from caregivers, who under state law can grow for up to five patients and can donate excess amounts to qualified patients.

“I just wanted to come down here and check it out and be a part of Arizona history,” the 23-year-old said.

So did Myer and his co-owners. He came up with the idea of opening a dispensary even before the initiative qualified for the ballot. His friends in Colorado were in the dispensary industry, so he researched the idea and visited about 75 storefront dispensaries throughout that state to figure out which model he liked.

Along the way, he registered as a qualified patient in Arizona, citing chronic pain because of injuries and stress on his body from skiing and rock climbing. He prefers “natural, organic” medicine over traditional medication.

In early 2011, Myer and his team found the empty Glendale property, leased it and began transforming it into a dispensary. Last summer, the state gave the team permission to move forward.

“Look at this place,” he said. “It couldn’t have worked out any better. But this is a business — not a cool place to hang out.”

Myer, who graduated in 2006 from Arizona State University with degrees in business and communications, said his father was bewildered when he approached him about investing in the business.

“He was a little blown away when I first told him what I was getting into,” he said. “But it’s legal, and I’ve always tried to be my own boss.”

For now, Arizona Organix is supplied by caregivers who donate their excess marijuana supply. Eventually, Myer plans to cultivate marijuana in a separate warehouse to add to the supply, which likely will quickly dwindle because thousands of patients are expected to flock to the dispensary for their medicine.

Most of the marijuana is kept locked out of sight. Dispensary workers must verify the validity of patient’s cards before the patient can pass through a locked steel door to a room where they can view 1-gram samples of strains such as J1, OG Kush, Romulan and Purple Urkle.

Different strains are said to treat different ailments and can target back or joint pain, sleeplessness or appetites.

Then, customers order their medicine from workers through a bank-teller-type window, where the quantity and strain are recorded.

Customers are required to pay in cash. The dispensary has an ATM on-site.

Myer said the dispensary won’t accept credit cards or checks because Arizona Organix has no bank account to process them.

Some banks are refusing to handle money associated with medical-marijuana dispensaries because marijuana is still illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act.

Patients receive the marijuana sealed in a tamper-proof plastic bag, which is placed in a white medication bag, similar to those used by pharmacies.

For now, state health officials have advised Arizona Organix to sell in smaller quantities of one-eighth and one-fourth of an ounce to ensure that they have enough marijuana on hand to stay in compliance with state rules.

Under those rules, dispensaries must be open at least 30 hours a week and have enough marijuana to supply all qualified patients who walk through the door, Humble said.

-------------------

Dispensary lawsuit Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery has filed a motion to suspend a medical-marijuana court ruling while he appeals it.

On Tuesday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Michael Gordon ruled that Arizona’s controversial medical-marijuana law does not conflict with federal drug laws and rejected arguments made by 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 spokesman Jerry Cobb said the stay would give the county time to file and resolve its appeal.

Jeffrey Kaufman, who represented White Mountain in the lawsuit, said neither the stay request nor the appeal have a chance.

“The county is just stubbing its finger in the face of the courts again,” he said. “The judge couldn’t have been more clear that issuing a paper is nothing more than an administerial act and is not aiding and abetting any (drug) offense.”

— Alia Rau

Merry Christmas from the TSA goons

Plenty of smoke clouds the future of legalized pot in Washington

Source

Plenty of smoke clouds the future of legalized pot in Washington

By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

December 9, 2012, 9:16 p.m.

SEATTLE — Customers have been drifting into Jay Fratt's alternative pipe and tobacco shop, Smokin J's, in the days since Washington state's marijuana law took effect, wondering when cannabis would take its place on the shelves next to the handblown glass pipes.

Hold on, he told them. Fratt is, before anything else, a businessman, and he quickly realized there was a lot of smoke in the details.

First of all, the law setting up the nation's first legal regulatory system for retail pot won't allow sales until next year. And the federal government still considers marijuana illegal.

Then there are the taxation provisions: Can legal retailers compete with the black market when they have to pay over 25% in taxes? What about the provision that says marijuana shops can't stock anything but pot and pot supplies? What would happen to the Vancouver, Wash., shopkeeper's tie-dye baby jumpsuits, his "Stoner" trivia games, his meditating Buddha tapestries?

The euphoria that accompanied the debut of the initiative making it legal in Washington for adults to possess an ounce or less of marijuana faded shortly after midnight Thursday, when about 150 people gathered at the base of the Space Needle in Seattle to toke up in celebration.

By Friday morning, the bureaucrats, the lawyers and the suits from Wall Street were pulling into town as state regulators began setting up what could become a $1-billion industry, built precariously on a product whose possession the federal government considers a felony.

State officials estimate that pot will soon be selling legally for about $12 a gram, with annual consumption of 85 million grams — a potential bonanza in state tax revenue of nearly $2 billion over the first five years.

"I'm telling my clients, if I had a collective and I knew that legalization was coming and I knew they were going to be licensing people and I was already in the business, I'd be one of the first people going to apply for a license," said Jay Berneburg, a Tacoma, Wash., lawyer who held a seminar recently about getting into the retail trade.

"You could make a million dollars in five days. There's going to be people lined up to buy marijuana, just because they can," he said.

Venture capitalists are moving in. Brendan Kennedy and Michael Blue, two Yale University MBA graduates with backgrounds in Silicon Valley, have raised $5 million through their private equity firm, Privateer Holdings, believed to be the first in the nation to focus strictly on marijuana-related companies.

"We realized this was and is the biggest opportunity we think we'll probably see in our lifetimes," Blue said.

Their first acquisition was Leafly.com, a website that rates strains of marijuana for their medicinal properties. Users can plug in their ZIP codes and find out which products available in their areas produce the effects they're looking for, from "giggly" to the ability to treat migraines.

Vaporizers are another product they're looking at — anything that doesn't directly involve buying or selling marijuana. Privateer is offering investors the chance to make money in an arena most venture capitalists can't touch under standard partnership agreements, which normally spell out that investments not in compliance with federal law are prohibited. That means, they figure, an opportunity for stunning profits with little competition from other investment firms — though one has to listen to a lot of Bob Marley at trade shows.

"I've studied a lot of industries. I've never seen one that had this unique set of circumstances," Kennedy said. "It's highly fragmented, it's very unstructured, there's no leaders, there's no standards. The entire topic is taboo, and there's no involvement by Wall Street ... which is a unique opportunity, right?"

The state Liquor Control Board is asking for a staff of 40 to help set up a network of possibly 300 or more state-licensed retail stores. The board must also figure out how to regulate growers and packagers.

That process will take much of the next year. Though it has been legal since Thursday for adults to use small amounts of marijuana away from public view, they can't buy it, sell it or grow it until regulations are in place. Exemptions remain for medical users under existing law.

"Nowhere in the nation, or in the world, have they set up a regulatory system for recreational marijuana use. I think that's where we're kind of charting new ground," said Pat Kohler, director of the board.

"There will have to be a set of regulations set up on how much they can grow, what kind of security they need to have, can they grow it indoors — all these things need to be discussed."

In part, Kohler said, Washington will be looking to Colorado — where voters approved a similar statute that goes into effect in January — which has in place regulations for medical marijuana more comprehensive than Washington's laissez-faire approach.

She said it would also be logical to model regulations on rules governing the liquor industry. Until this year, when alcohol sales were privatized, hard liquor in Washington was sold at state-licensed stores that, like those to be set up under the marijuana law, sold nothing but alcohol under tight regulation and taxation.

For Fratt and other potential pot entrepreneurs, the idea has allure but is also fraught with peril.

One big concern is that taxation — a 25% excise tax on each wholesale and retail transaction, along with sales and business and occupation taxes — will boost the price so high that a cheaper black market will persist.

An even bigger worry is that the federal government will step in and shut down the new industry. The Justice Department said last week that it was reviewing the laws in Washington and Colorado and warned that growing, selling or possessing any amount of marijuana remained illegal under federal law.

"If you take someone like me who's been doing business for 15 years and knows how to pay taxes, does everything on the straight up and up, naturally the state would want somebody like me to get into that business. But without federal assurances, there's no way someone like me would be interested," Fratt said.

Also problematic is the strict standard for driving under the influence, which already has been challenged in court. A judge Friday declined a request to suspend the law until that's resolved, but critics have said they will press their case, arguing that under existing rules a driver could be subject to arrest days after smoking a joint.

Berneburg, the Tacoma lawyer, said that while he was advising his clients to apply for a license, he was also telling them not to expect any gold-rush profits to last for long. The novelty will wear off, he predicts.

"You take away the outlaw mystique, and people won't want it anymore," he said.

That's why some entrepreneurs are hoping to cash in on business from outside Washington state, where marijuana retains the charm of forbidden fruit. A new startup in the southern town of Camas, Wash., Washington Freedom Tours, is offering "the first legal cannabis freedom tour in the United States" and has three bookings, owner Robert Flatt said.

"We're getting emails from Italy, France, the U.K.," Flatt said. "It seems like there's going to be an international interest in coming to the free state of Washington."

Trips include a journey through the Columbia River Gorge and a wine and cheese tasting in a private residence featuring, of course, organically grown Northwest cannabis.

kim.murphy@latimes.com

Medical pot was been legalized and nothing happened???

Source

Finally, medical pot here

Dec. 8, 2012 06:08 PM

Arizona voters approved the use of medical marijuana more than two years ago. During that time, state officials have done everything in their power to block implementation of that decision. Eighteen other states and the District of Columbia have passed similar laws.

The first dispensary opened on Thursday. The sun came up, the temperatures rose throughout the day. There were a few traffic accidents and other newsworthy happenings, and then the sun set.

It was not the end of Arizona. The Earth did not open and swallow our state. Armageddon did not happen.

Congratulations to the judge who finally had the sense to properly interpret the U.S. Constitution and allow the dispensary to open and allow sick people to finally get some relief from their pain and suffering. It's about time the will of the voters be allowed to take place.

-- Robb Kask, Phoenix

Drunk, stoned Arizona county judge arrested on DUI charges

Source

Arizona county judge arrested on DUI charges

Associated Press Tue Dec 11, 2012 7:19 AM

FLAGSTAFF — A Coconino County judge has been reassigned to non-judicial duties following his arrest over the weekend on an extreme driving under the influence charge.

The Arizona Daily Sun reports (http://bit.ly/TRRr7E) that Superior Court Judge Joseph Lodge was stopped Sunday morning after he allegedly swerved into oncoming traffic.

Authorities say one test showed Lodge’s breath alcohol content was 0.229 percent, nearly three times the legal limit of 0.08 percent. Authorities say he admitted taking prescription painkillers for a medical condition and drinking beer.

The officer who made the stop reported that the man appeared confused and under the influence of an intoxicant.

Lodge, who handles felony DUI cases, wasn’t on the bench Monday. A message seeking comment was left on the judge’s office phone Monday evening.

His reassignment is the result of an administrative order signed Monday by Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Rebecca White Berch.

———

Information from: Arizona Daily Sun, http://www.azdailysun.com/

Source

Superior court judge charged with extreme DUI

By ERIC BETZ Sun staff reporter

A county judge was arrested on extreme DUI charges Sunday morning after he was stopped in his SUV swerving into oncoming traffic on North Fort Valley Road.

Coconino County Superior Court Division 5 Judge Joseph James Lodge Jr. was arrested at about 9:30 a.m. Lodge blew a 0.229 percent BAC on an Intoxylizer machine and admitted to taking three prescription pain-killers for a medical condition.

“He is not on the bench today. We have a replacement judge standing in for him,” said Coconino County Superior Court Presiding Judge Mark Moran.

No administrative action has been taken at this time.

According to a police report, a caller reported a man as having been parked in his vehicle for about 15 minutes looking confused and possibly intoxicated.

An officer was driving south on North Fort Valley Road when he spotted the newer, silver 4Runner driving the opposite direction. As the officer began following the vehicle, he watched it swerve across the double yellow line toward oncoming traffic and pulled the man over in the area of Late for the Train.

The officer wrote in their report that the man appeared “confused and under the influence of an intoxicant.” Lodge told the officer that he was doing “ok,” but added “my wife and I are having some problems.”

The policeman asked Lodge for his registration, insurance and driver's license and the judge began picking at a sticker on his sunvisor, the report said. He then fumbled around in the vehicle’s center console, finally pulling out a mostly empty 375ml bottle of Smirnoff vodka.

The judge initially denied having anything to drink, but said he suffered from a medical condition and had taken three Oxycodone since 8 a.m.

He was not wearing shoes and struggled to get out of the car, slamming his arm in the door on his way out. The officer said Lodge struggled to maintain his balance and needed to be held up by his arm. In the interest on his safety, Lodge was not asked to do field sobriety tests.

Lodge eventually admitted he had “a lot” to drink that morning, which he described as being three beers.

A police report said he identified himself as a superior court judge via a business card.

Lodge was transported to the Coconino County Detention Facility where he blew a 0.229 percent BAC and a 0.225 percent BAC on an Intoxilyzer machine. The threshold for intoxication 0.08 percent.

He was cited for extreme DUI and then released into the custody of a third party.

As a superior court judge, Lodge handles felony DUI cases.

For more on the story, see Tuesday's Arizona Daily Sun.

Eric Betz can be reached at 556-2250 or ebetz@azdailysun.com.

Marijuana legalization low-key in Colorado

Marijuana legalization low-key in Colorado

Associated Press Tue Dec 11, 2012 7:08 AM

DENVER — Colorado gave a lonely reception to marijuana when it became the second U.S. state to legalize the drug. Just as state officials planned.

Gov. John Hickenlooper on Monday quietly removed the final barrier to legalization by declaring that an amendment passed by voters in November was officially part of the state constitution. He announced the move on Twitter and email after the fact. In response, a handful of marijuana activists celebrated by toking up on the Capitol steps, but there were no crowds and little fanfare.

It was a different scene in Washington state, which last week became the first state to legalize marijuana. There, activists counted down to legalization outside Seattle landmarks such as the Space Needle. Colorado officials wanted no such revelry.

Hickenlooper, a Democrat who opposed the marijuana measure, said he purposely sought a low-key enactment.

Colorado law gave him until Jan. 5 to declare marijuana legal. He told reporters he saw no reason to wait and didn’t see any point in letting marijuana become legal without his proclamation.

“I could have made a bigger deal out of it, you know, tried to make a hoopla out of it,” Hickenlooper told reporters after the marijuana declaration.

“But if we are concerned about young people thinking that this … is really in some way a tacit endorsement, that’s it’s OK to smoke pot — we’re trying to mitigate that as much as possible,” he said.

About two dozen marijuana activists gathered outside Hickenlooper’s office on the Capitol steps to pass around joints and bongs after the announcement. Public consumption in both states remains illegal, but no police officers were in sight of the small celebration in Denver.

“It smells like freedom,” said a smiling, puffing Timothy Tipton, a longtime marijuana activist.

When Colorado’s marijuana measure passed last month with 55 percent of the vote, Hickenlooper cautioned pot smokers not to get too excited because the drug remains illegal under federal law. Colorado and Washington state officials both reached out to federal authorities to see if they planned to sue to block the state pot measures. There’s been no signal, with federal authorities simply repeating that the Controlled Substances Act remains intact.

Hickenlooper said there are still many questions to be answered about how federal authorities plan to respond to state marijuana legalization. Colorado’s measure specifically directs lawmakers to regulate commercial sales of marijuana, something federal authorities have repeatedly said they won’t allow.

The governor said he’s not frustrated by the slow federal response.

“They’re going as fast as they can,” Hickenlooper said. “There’s no black and white, right and wrong answer here.”

Colorado’s constitution now allows adults over 21 to possess up to an ounce of marijuana, and six plants. Hickenlooper has set up a task force of lawmakers, law enforcement, marijuana activists and agriculture officials to suggest how the drug should be regulated. The group has a February deadline for suggesting pot rules, which must be approved by the state Legislature.

———

Find Kristen Wyatt at http://www.twitter.com/APkristenwyatt

Laurie Roberts is getting a medical marijuana card???

Source

Medical marijuana program is a charade

I was all set to go along with the charade.

All the talk of “patients,” of “caregivers” and “medicine.”

But the picture of the teen-age kid holding his skateboard as he came out of Arizona’s first medical marijuana dispensary…

Oh, come on.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery didn’t see the photo in Friday’s newspaper, but he says it’s an accurate reflection of Arizona’s medical marijuana program.

“There’s not a single state with a medical marijuana act or anything similar that hasn’t turned into a recreational use program,” he said. [So what!!! Marijuana should be legal!!! It was legal before 1937!!!]

Potheads have been rejoicing for a week now, ever since Superior Court Judge Michael Gordon ruled that Arizona is good to go. The fact that marijuana is illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act shouldn’t stop the state from doling out doobie, Gordon ruled last Tuesday.

By Thursday, the state’s first marijuana dispensary opened in Glendale, with another to come in Tucson later this month and 124 more to follow soon in a neighborhood near you.

“Patients,” the dispensary’s attorney Ryan Hurley proclaimed, “are finally going to have the access voters intended them to have to medicine that makes them feel better.”

Listening to Hurley you would think all the state’s glaucoma-striken grannies were lining up at the pot clinic last week. That’s not what I saw and it’s not what the numbers reflect.

Not even close.

Medical marijuana eked its way into Arizona in 2010, as 50.17 percent of voters were sold on the law as a way to ease the symptoms of glaucoma or provide relief to a loved one battling cancer.

The law allows anyone with a doctor’s recommendation to obtain a state-issued card, entitling them to 2½ ounces of pot every two weeks. If they don’t want to grow their own, they can obtain it from a licensed “caregiver” – basically anybody who isn’t a certain sort of felon – or, eventually, head down to their neighborhood non-profit pot dispensary.

Nearly 34,000 Arizonans now hold cards giving them permission to smoke or grow weed, according to the state Department of Health Services.

Of them: a whopping 3.76 percent use marijuana to ease the symptoms of cancer. Another 1.53 percent suffer from glaucoma while 1.06 percent have AIDS.

Meanwhile 89.8 percent – 30,203 people – are seeking relief for “severe and chronic pain”.

Nearly 73 percent of “patients” are men and the people most likely to seek relief from their pain are 18 to 30 years old. More than 26 percent of card holders are 18-30, while 13 percent are over 60.

Meanwhile, just 10 doctors certified 46 percent of all medical marijuana patients during the first 15 months of the program, according to a DHS annual report. One busy naturopath recommended 2,557 people – about 12 percent of all medical marijuana patients.

I’m guessing that doctor might have gotten his own card: hand cramp, you know, from writing all those recommendations.

Now before you bash me, I’m all for someone suffering from a legitimate illness getting access to pot if a physician feels it’ll ease his or her pain. But as for those recreational users getting dope under the guise of “medicine,” let’s at least not delude ourselves about what’s going on here by calling them patients.

The more honest approach would be to go the way of Colorado and Washington where voters legalized marijuana last month. Then, at least, we could tax the heck of it, as we do with cigarettes, and put the cartels out of the pot smuggling business.

But if this whole medical marijuana movement is truly about helping those in terrible pain, there is a way to do it: get the U.S. attorney general to reschedule marijuana as a schedule 2 drug under the Controlled Substances Act, allowing it to be prescribed just like morphine or oxycodone.

“If you go that route, I as a law enforcement official have no problem with it whatsoever …,” said Montgomery, who is appealing Judge Gordon’s ruling. “This wink and a nod, it doesn’t serve anybody who may be able to legitimately benefit, nor does it really serve us as a society where we’re playing games with the law.”

Until that happens, though, I’m hoping to become Patient No. 2,558 of a certain naturopath. I, too, have severe and chronic pain, you see, or I will soon enough.

The Arizona Legislature convenes in just 34 days.

Lawsuit over forced DNA in Phoenix officer’s death

Flushing the 4th Amendment down the toilet for piggies is just as wrong as when cops flush our 4th Amendment rights down the toilet by illegally searching us.

Last the Sgt. Trent Crump is really weird. It sounds like Sgt. Trent Crump committed suicide because he know he was going to be arrested on felony charges for falsifying his hours worked.

But the Phoenix PD seems to have done everything possible to make his suicide look like a murder to cover up Sgt. Crump's crimes.

Source

Lawsuit over forced DNA in Phoenix officer’s death

Associated Press Mon Dec 10, 2012 3:20 PM

A government watchdog group has filed a lawsuit on behalf of three Phoenix police officers who were forced to give DNA samples during the investigation into the mysterious death of a fellow officer.

Judicial Watch announced the filing of its civil rights lawsuit Monday. It alleges that authorities forced the officers to surrender their DNA in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights.

Officers Daniel Bill, Bryan Hanania, and Michael Malpass were among the first responders to the call the night Sgt. Sean Drenth was found fatally wounded near the state Capitol on Oct. 18, 2010.

Drenth evidently was killed by a blast from his shotgun, which was found resting on his chest with the muzzle pointing toward his chin. Medical investigators ruled last year that his death was believed to be a suicide.

Judicial Watch said the officers never came in contact with Drenth’s body, the shotgun or his handgun and should not have been forced to provide DNA.

“Simply because officers swear their allegiance to uphold the law doesn’t mean they surrender their rights to be protected under it,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “The Fourth Amendment cannot be selectively applied by the city of Phoenix. Citizens have a right to be secure in their persons — and this includes their DNA.”

Sgt. Trent Crump, a spokesman for the Phoenix Police Department, said Monday he couldn’t comment on the pending litigation.

More than 300 people — including then-Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, other police officers, firefighters and capitol police officers — converged on the area after Drenth was found, according to Judicial Watch.

A month later, the police department began asking for DNA samples from all officers at the crime scene for “exclusionary purposes.” Those who declined were sent a memo requesting immediate compliance.

At the time, police officials said the decision to request samples of genetic material from other officers and personnel on the scene of an emergency wasn’t unusual.

According to the lawsuit, the investigative teams in which the three officers were included provided detailed reports as to their actions and whereabouts on the evening Drenth was found. However, the officers were detained under court order in August 2011 and DNA samples were taken.

The swabs were taken without obtaining search warrants and without probable cause, according to the lawsuit.

People and drugs are now being smuggled in on boats???

New panga incident investigated as possible smuggling operation

By Adolfo Flores and Ruben Vives Los Angeles Times

December 10, 2012, 8:28 p.m.

Authorities detained 25 people early Monday riding aboard a panga boat that drifted ashore in Rancho Palos Verdes in the early morning dark in what's being investigated as a possible human smuggling operation.

Two vans, one registered to a Ventura medical transportation firm, were discovered parked near a winding path leading to the Portuguese Bend shoreline. Authorities described them as possible pickup vehicles.

The incident follows a fatal encounter last week off the Santa Barbara coastline in which a Coast Guardsman was killed when two men aboard a panga gunned their engines and struck the vessel he was riding in, tossing him into the ocean.

Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III of Redondo Beach died of a head injury caused by a propeller, according to court documents filed in connection with a murder case against the two suspected panga crew members. They were both detained as they tried to flee to Mexico.

In the pre-dawn dark Monday, authorities said they discovered 25 migrants — 19 men and six women — riding in a 40-foot "super panga" boat, said Joseph Macias, deputy special agent for Homeland Security. No guns or other weapons were found on the vessel.

Border Patrol agents said they spotted the panga, a type of fishing boat that has become the vessel of choice in recent years for drug and human smugglers, off of Abalone Cove about 5 a.m. during routine surveillance.

Agents asked for assistance from other agencies as the boat approached the shore, said Virginia Kice, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman. Gathered on the shore, agents waited for the boat to slide onto the beach and then detained the passengers.

Maritime smuggling has been on the rise as federal authorities fortified border and airport enforcement. In the last two years, encounters with ocean-going smugglers has nearly doubled, with the sharpest increase along secluded beaches in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, though the greatest number still occur in San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties, according to Customs.

In 2008, there were 45 human-smuggling-related incidents, most of them in the San Diego area. In 2012 there were more than 200.

"They started in Orange County or San Diego and now they're coming up north," Macias said. "They start taking longer and larger risks."

Homeland Security is now interviewing those apprehended on the panga, hoping to identify the operators. The interviews could be revealing, Macias said, providing insight into what routes are used to ferry migrants up the Southern California coastline and whether the boat found Monday is part of a larger operation.

Typically the people who are attempting to come into the United States illegally by boat are from Mexico, Kice said, but federal authorities have encountered nationals from other countries as well.

"All smugglers are concerned about is who can pay them," Kice said. "We're still conducting interviews and are working to fully identify all the suspects taken into custody.... Our focus is trying to unravel the broader criminal operation."

Those not held for possible criminal prosecution will be turned over to Border Patrol for possible deportation , Kice said.

Authorities said they are also seeking information on two vehicles — a 1991 blue GMC van and a 2002 red Dodge sports car — that were parked near the beach. One of the vans was registered to a medical transportation company, the other to an individual. The rear window of the GMC van had a sticker with the image of St. Jude that reads "Cuida mi camino" (Look after my path.)

As the encounter off the Rancho Palos Verdes coastline unfolded, police in San Diego's Carmel Valley early Monday arrested 16 people, some in wet clothing caked with sand, believed to be in the U.S. illegally. Some of them were found in a van on Interstate 5, the others hiding in the brush along the freeway's center divider.

Authorities said they suspect those arrested came by boat but that the two incidents do not appear to be connected.

adolfo.flores@latimes.com

ruben.vives@latimes.com

Feds terrorize Harborside Health Center marijuana clinic!!!

Oakland pot club case goes to magistrate

Bob Egelko

Updated 8:55 p.m., Monday, December 10, 2012

The city of Oakland, fighting the federal government's attempt to shut down the nation's largest medical marijuana dispensary, is accusing the government of trying to win the case by bullying the building owner into evicting the pot club under the threat of losing her property.

Justice Department lawyers counter that Oakland has no legitimate voice in the case and is only trying to protect the "windfall" it collects in taxes from the "illegal marijuana distribution activities" at Harborside Health Center.

The dispute, scheduled to be argued Dec. 20 before a federal magistrate in San Francisco, may turn on whether Harborside's alleged lawbreaking is more like the operations of an illegal bingo game or a cigar smuggler. Those were the subjects of two previous cases that reached opposite conclusions about whether the legal deadline for forfeiture is measured from the time the government first learns of lawbreaking.

Harborside, located along the Oakland Estuary at 1840 Embarcadero, supplies marijuana to 108,000 patients. U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag filed a suit in July seeking to shutter the dispensary and force the property owner to forfeit the building to the government because it houses operations that violate federal law.

The dispensary opposes the suit and remains in operation. But the property owner, businesswoman Ana Chretien - who says she was unaware until recently that Harborside was breaking federal law - filed motions last month to prohibit illegal activities in the building, which would put the dispensary out of business.

An Alameda County judge refused to order a shutdown Nov. 30, saying a state court couldn't base an eviction on federal law. There's no such obstacle in federal court, where U.S. Magistrate Maria-Elena James is scheduled to hear Chretien's motion next week.

Oakland has cried foul, saying the government pressured Chretien to seek eviction to short-circuit the city's separate lawsuit over Harborside. That suit, filed in October, argues that U.S. authorities waited too long to try to seize the property. The federal statute of limitations is five years, but the dispensary openly started distributing marijuana six years ago.

Using 'back door'

To support their claim of government coercion, city lawyers cited Chretien's statement in court papers that the government wants her "to take all expeditious steps to halt Harborside's activities" and that she fears loss of her property unless the dispensary is evicted.

The government, Oakland attorney Cedric Chao alleged, "is attempting to do through the back door ... what it is unable to do directly through its illegal forfeiture action." At the Dec. 20 hearing, Chao will ask James to put Chretien's eviction request on hold until she rules on the city's suit.

Federal government lawyers replied last week that Oakland has no property rights in Harborside and no right to interfere with the forfeiture suit or the eviction proceedings.

They also disputed the city's claim that the government had five years to seek eviction from the time the dispensary started operating.

Statute of limitations

That five-year clock starts running anew with each illegal drug sale, said government lawyers, who cited a ruling in 2010 by a federal appeals court in Chicago in the case of an illegal smuggler of Cuban cigars. Although federal authorities were aware of the smuggling operation more than five years before they sought forfeiture of his home, the court said, they acted legally within five years of the date they first seized cigars at the home.

But Chao said Monday that Harborside is more like the case of the illegal Tennessee bingo games the government started investigating in 1988 and shut down in 1994, seizing more than $500,000. A federal appeals court in Cincinnati overturned the seizure in 1998, saying the five-year timetable had started when federal agents first learned of the illegal operation.

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

Some new ingenious ways to smuggle pot across the border??

33 pot-filled cans launched over border fence, officials say

By Domenico Nicosia The Arizona Republic- 12 News Breaking News Team Tue Dec 11, 2012 7:17 PM

Thirty-three marijuana-filled cans were found on the Arizona side of the Mexican border, apparently shot over the fence with an air-pressured cannon, authorities said.

Weighing about 2.5 pounds each, the cans were found scattered in a field in Yuma after reports of suspcious containers, according to the U.S. Border Patrol. They were estimated to be worth a total of $43,000.

Border officials said they believe pressurized cannons - similar to the ones used to launch T-shirts and other items during sporting events - were used to shoot the cans about 500 feet over the border fence. A carbon dioxide tank was also found in the area.

Smugglers try to come up with unique ways to counter authorities as border officials disrupt drug-smuggling patterns, they added.

People can report suspicious activity to the U.S. Border Patrol anonymously at 1-866-999-8727.

More on those smugglers who are using an air gun to shoot dope into the USA

Source

Drug Smugglers Shoot Drugs Across Border with Cannon

ABC NewsBy TAYLOR HOM | ABC News

Drug smugglers continue to show creativity in inventing new ways of getting drugs across the U.S. border from Mexico.

Border Patrol agents say they believe a pneumatic cannon was used to launch dozens of containers of marijuana over the border and 500 feet into Arizona on Friday. Eighty-five pounds of marijuana -- tucked into soup cans and then inserted into larger sealed containers -- were found in a field near the Colorado River in San Luis, Arizona.

After searching the surrounding area, agents spotted the carbon dioxide tank used to power the cannon that propelled the containers into U.S. territory. The smugglers launched the drug-filled projectiles from a position in a brushy area immediately south of the border fence. According to authorities, an accomplice was probably supposed to collect the containers but did not show up in time.

The contraband was discovered by a concerned citizen in a plowed field just northwest of San Luis before the U.S counterpart could collect it. After the Border Patrol was notified and searched the field, Mexican authorities also inspected their side of the border, but no arrests have been made.

"Because of our progress in targeting and obstructing movement, they can no longer just walk across the border," Linwood Estes, a Border Patrol Agent in Yuma, told ABC News. "The more and more successful we are, the more and more unique they become in trying to get the drugs across."

Around two pounds of marijuana were packed into each soup can. The contraband had an estimated value of $42,500 and is scheduled for destruction.

While this specific technique is new to the Yuma area, Mexican pot smugglers have a track record of innovative tactics to sneak their drugs across the border.

In October, two creative bandits attempted to drive a car over the border fence by using a makeshift ramp just 20 miles west of Yuma. When the SUV became stuck on the fence, the men fled the scene before Border Patrol officers arrived.

In 2011, National Guard surveillance video caught drug smugglers using a medieval-style catapult to launch bales of marijuana across the border near Naco, Arizona. Mexican officials recovered the catapult after it was abandoned, and said the device was capable of launching packages weighing two kilograms.

Underground tunnels and ultra light aircraft have also been used in the past year.

Michigan enacts right-to-work law

The reason many employers are moving jobs out of the USA is because of these union thugs.

The reason I included this article about unions is that the police unions routinely use violence and threats of violence to force governments to pay them more money. Sadly the police are often worse criminals then the criminals they claim to protect us from.

Source

Michigan enacts right-to-work law, dealing blow to unions

By Michael A. Fletcher and Sean Sullivan, Published: December 11

Michigan enacted far-reaching legislation Tuesday that threatens to cripple the power of organized labor in a state that was a hub of union might during the heyday of the nation’s industrial dominance.

As thousands of angry union members shouted their opposition outside the state Capitol in Lansing, the Republican-controlled legislature completed work on two measures to ban unions from requiring workers to pay membership dues. Gov. Rick Snyder (R) then signed them into law Tuesday evening.

The “right to work” effort illustrates the power of Republicans to use state legislative majorities won in 2010 to pursue their policy preferences, even after losing a bitter presidential election.

The defeat is devastating for organized labor, which for decades has been waging an uphill battle against declining membership and dwindling influence.

But it also strikes at the roots of a Democratic Party that relied on unions for financial support and to marshal voters for President Obama’s reelection.

The new law comes nearly two years after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) began a push to curb collective bargaining rights for public employees. That effort ignited huge protests from union and liberal activists and triggered a failed effort to recall Walker.

At the same time, a well-funded campaign to curtail union power swept through several other Republican-controlled states in the industrial Midwest.

Indiana followed Wisconsin and passed laws that limited the reach of organized labor. Lawmakers in Ohio also passed legislation that curtailed collective bargaining rights of public sector unions, but voters overturned it.

In crafting Michigan’s measure, supporters avoided some tactical errors from earlier efforts. The measure is attached to an appropriations bill, which exempts it from being taken to a referendum. And it excludes firefighters and police, groups that were critical in overturning Ohio’s law.

Proponents call their win in Michigan especially significant because the state is the birthplace of one of the country’s most powerful labor groups, the United Auto Workers. Founded in 1935, the union organized auto workers, winning wages and benefits that transformed assembly-line work into solid middle-class jobs.

“This is really a message to every other state that is a closed union shop, that if you do it here you can do it everywhere else,” said Scott Hagerstrom, Michigan director of Americans for Prosperity. The group is supported by industrialists Charles and David Koch, billionaires who have pushed for anti-union and other conservative measures.

Supporters predicted that the new law will be a boon to economic growth in an era of global competition. But unions say the measure will starve them of money, weakening their ability to bargain for their members and undercutting their ability to support Democratic political candidates, who typically back their causes.

Labor leaders and Democratic state legislators said they had requested that Obama weigh in on the labor fight. They asked the White House to issue a public statement last week declaring the president’s opposition to the legislation, and for him to refer to the labor fight in his remarks Monday during a visit to Redford, Mich.

“You know, these so-called right-to-work laws, they don’t have to do with economics. They have everything to do with politics,” Obama said. “What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money.”

Labor Department figures show that unionized workers earn more and have better benefits than their non-union counterparts. But the number of American workers who are in labor unions is in sharp decline.

In Michigan, the share of unionized workers has dropped from 28.4 percent to 17.5 percent since 1985. Meanwhile, the nation’s struggle to hold on to manufacturing jobs and the travails of the auto industry made Michigan an economic basket case long before the recession. After the downturn hit, unemployment in the state peaked at 14.2 percent and now stands at 9.1 percent, far above the national average.

With increasing numbers of working Americans who must make do with falling wages, frozen pensions and long periods of joblessness, it is unclear whether they consider unions their allies.

The Michigan vote ended a swift change of fortune for the forces of organized labor there. Unions and their supporters spent more than $22 million to back a ballot measure last month that would have guaranteed collective bargaining rights in the state Constitution, only to see it resoundingly defeated.

The rejection emboldened the other side. Sensing an opening, supporters pushed to have the legislature pass the right-to-work measure. Then Snyder, who had previously expressed ambivalence, came out in favor of it.

Greg McNeilly, who heads the Michigan Freedom Fund, a group backed by multimillionaire conservative activist Dick DeVos that spent millions pressing for passage of the legislation, called their success a potentially decisive hit against organized labor.

“I think today is their Waterloo,” McNeilly said. “To see the birthplace of forced unionization do a turnabout is a very monumental achievement, and it is historic.”

At a news conference Tuesday at the George W. Romney Building steps away from the state Capitol, Snyder defended his move as one that would lead to “more jobs coming to Michigan.”

“I view this as simply trying to get this issue behind us,” he said of his decision to sign the measures. “And I recognize that people are going to be upset. There’ll be a continuation. But hopefully what’s really going to transpire over time is you’re going to see workers making a choice and you’ll see unions being held more accountable and responsive.”

Researchers are divided about whether such laws fuel job creation. Sylvia Allegretto, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, said a similar law that was passed in Oklahoma in 2001 did not improve the labor market.

Meanwhile, the average worker — unionized or not — in a right-to-work state earns $1,500 less per year than a similar worker in a state without such a law, according to the liberal Center for American Progress.

But conservative researchers argue that right-to-work states have done better at attracting investment and jobs than have more heavily unionized states. The West Michigan Policy Forum, a research group that supported the right-to-work bills, said that of the 10 states with the highest rate of personal income growth, eight have right-to-work laws.

Whatever the impact, union leaders promised to work hard to overturn Tuesday’s actions.

“What this means is that for the next two years, we are going to work hard to elect candidates who support the middle class and working class and see what we can do to get this bill turned over,” said Michael Bolton, director of United Steel Workers District 2, which covers Wisconsin and Michigan.

Philip Rucker, Peter Whoriskey and Felicia Sonmez contributed to this report.

America the worlds biggest police state!!!!!

Source

For Lesser Crimes, Rethinking Life Behind Bars

William Widmer for The New York Times

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: December 11, 2012 224 Comments

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Stephanie George and Judge Roger Vinson had quite different opinions about the lockbox seized by the police from her home in Pensacola. She insisted she had no idea that a former boyfriend had hidden it in her attic. Judge Vinson considered the lockbox, containing a half-kilogram of cocaine, to be evidence of her guilt.

But the defendant and the judge fully agreed about the fairness of the sentence he imposed in federal court.

“Even though you have been involved in drugs and drug dealing,” Judge Vinson told Ms. George, “your role has basically been as a girlfriend and bag holder and money holder but not actively involved in the drug dealing, so certainly in my judgment it does not warrant a life sentence.”

Yet the judge had no other option on that morning 15 years ago. As her stunned family watched, Ms. George, then 27, who had never been accused of violence, was led from the courtroom to serve a sentence of life without parole.

“I remember my mom crying out and asking the Lord why,” said Ms. George, now 42, in an interview at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee. “Sometimes I still can’t believe myself it could happen in America.”

Her sentence reflected a revolution in public policy, often called mass incarceration, that appears increasingly dubious to both conservative and liberal social scientists. They point to evidence that mass incarceration is no longer a cost-effective way to make streets safer, and may even be promoting crime instead of suppressing it.

Three decades of stricter drug laws, reduced parole and rigid sentencing rules have lengthened prison terms and more than tripled the percentage of Americans behind bars. The United States has the highest reported rate of incarceration of any country: about one in 100 adults, a total of nearly 2.3 million people in prison or jail.

But today there is growing sentiment that these policies have gone too far, causing too many Americans like Ms. George to be locked up for too long at too great a price — economically and socially.

The criticism is resonating with some state and federal officials, who have started taking steps to stop the prison population’s growth. The social scientists are attracting attention partly because the drop in crime has made it a less potent political issue, and partly because of the states’ financial problems.

State spending on corrections, after adjusting for inflation, has more than tripled in the past three decades, making it the fastest-growing budgetary cost except Medicaid. Even though the prison population has leveled off in the past several years, the costs remain so high that states are being forced to reduce spending in other areas.

Three decades ago, California spent 10 percent of its budget on higher education and 3 percent on prisons. In recent years the prison share of the budget rose above 10 percent while the share for higher education fell below 8 percent. As university administrators in California increase tuition to cover their deficits, they complain that the state spends much more on each prisoner — nearly $50,000 per year — than on each student.

Many researchers agree that the rise in imprisonment produced some initial benefits, particularly in urban neighborhoods, where violence decreased significantly in the 1990s. But as sentences lengthened and the prison population kept growing, it included more and more nonviolent criminals like Ms. George.

Half a million people are now in prison or jail for drug offenses, about 10 times the number in 1980, and there have been especially sharp increases in incarceration rates for women and for people over 55, long past the peak age for violent crime. In all, about 1.3 million people, more than half of those behind bars, are in prison or jail for nonviolent offenses.

Researchers note that the policies have done little to stem the flow of illegal drugs. And they say goals like keeping street violence in check could be achieved without the expense of locking up so many criminals for so long.

While many scholars still favor tough treatment for violent offenders, they have begun suggesting alternatives for other criminals. James Q. Wilson, the conservative social scientist whose work in the 1970s helped inspire tougher policies on prison, several years ago recommended diverting more nonviolent drug offenders from prisons to treatment programs.

Two of his collaborators, George L. Kelling of the Manhattan Institute and John J. DiIulio Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania, have joined with prominent scholars and politicians, including Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich, in a group called Right on Crime. It advocates more selective incarceration and warns that current policies “have the unintended consequence of hardening nonviolent, low-risk offenders” so that they become “a greater risk to the public than when they entered.”

These views are hardly universal, particularly among elected officials worried about a surge in crime if the prison population shrinks. Prosecutors have resisted attempts to change the system, contending that the strict sentences deter crime and induce suspects to cooperate because the penalties provide the police and prosecutors with so much leverage.

Some of the strongest evidence for the benefit of incarceration came from studies by a University of Chicago economist, Steven D. Levitt, who found that penal policies were a major factor in reducing crime during the 1990s. But as crime continued declining and the prison population kept growing, the returns diminished.

“We know that harsher punishments lead to less crime, but we also know that the millionth prisoner we lock up is a lot less dangerous to society than the first guy we lock up,” Dr. Levitt said. “In the mid-1990s I concluded that the social benefits approximately equaled the costs of incarceration. Today, my guess is that the costs outweigh the benefits at the margins. I think we should be shrinking the prison population by at least one-third.”

Some social scientists argue that the incarceration rate is now so high that the net effect is “crimogenic”: creating more crime over the long term by harming the social fabric in communities and permanently damaging the economic prospects of prisoners as well as their families. Nationally, about one in 40 children have a parent in prison. Among black children, one in 15 have a parent in prison.

Cocaine in the Attic

Ms. George was a young single mother when she first got in trouble with drugs and the law. One of her children was fathered by a crack dealer, Michael Dickey, who went to prison in the early 1990s for drug and firearm offenses.

“When he went away, I was at home with the kids struggling to pay bills,” Ms. George said. “The only way I knew to get money quick was selling crack. I was never a user, but from being around him I pretty much knew how to get it.”

After the police caught her making crack sales of $40 and $120 — which were counted as separate felonies — she was sentenced, at 23, to nine months in a work-release program. That meant working at her mother’s hair salon in Pensacola during the day and spending nights at the county jail, away from her three young children.

“When I caught that first charge, it scared me to death,” she recalled. “I thought, my God, being away from my kids, this is not what I want. I promised them I would never let it happen again.”

When Mr. Dickey got out of prison in 1995, she said, she refused to resume their relationship, but she did allow him into her apartment sometimes to see their daughter. One evening, shortly after he had arrived, the police showed up with a search warrant and a ladder.

“I didn’t know what they were doing with a ladder in a one-story building,” Ms. George said. “They went into a closet and opened a little attic space I’d never seen before and brought down the lockbox. He gave them a key to open it. When I saw what was in it, I was so mad I jumped across the table at him and started hitting him.”

Mr. Dickey said he had paid her to store the cocaine at her home. At the trial, other defendants said she was present during drug transactions conducted by Mr. Dickey and other dealers she dated, and sometimes delivered cash or crack for her boyfriends. Ms. George denied those accusations, which her lawyer argued were uncorroborated and self-serving. After the jury convicted her of being part of a conspiracy to distribute cocaine, she told the judge at her sentencing: “I just want to say I didn’t do it. I don’t want to be away from my kids.”

Whatever the truth of the testimony against her, it certainly benefited the other defendants. Providing evidence to the prosecution is one of the few ways to avoid a mandatory sentence. Because the government formally credited the other defendants with “substantial assistance,” their sentences were all reduced to less than 15 years. Even though Mr. Dickey was the leader of the enterprise and had a much longer criminal record than Ms. George, he was freed five years ago.

Looking back on the case, Judge Vinson said such disparate treatment is unfortunately all too common. The judge, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan who is hardly known for liberalism (last year he ruled that the Obama administration’s entire health care act was unconstitutional), says he still regrets the sentence he had to impose on Ms. George because of a formula dictated by the amount of cocaine in the lockbox and her previous criminal record.

“She was not a major participant by any means, but the problem in these cases is that the people who can offer the most help to the government are the most culpable,” Judge Vinson said recently. “So they get reduced sentences while the small fry, the little workers who don’t have that information, get the mandatory sentences.

“The punishment is supposed to fit the crime, but when a legislative body says this is going to be the sentence no matter what other factors there are, that’s draconian in every sense of the word. Mandatory sentences breed injustice.”

In the 1980s, stricter penalties for drugs were promoted by Republicans like Mr. Reagan and by urban Democrats worried about the crack epidemic. In the 1990s, both parties supported President Bill Clinton’s anticrime bill, which gave states money to build prisons. Three-strikes laws and other formulas forced judges to impose life without parole, a sentence that was uncommon in the United States before the 1970s.

Most other countries do not impose life sentences without parole, and those that do generally reserve it for a few heinous crimes. In England, where it is used only for homicides involving an aggravating factor like child abduction, torture or terrorism, a recent study reported that 41 prisoners were serving life terms without parole. In the United States, some 41,000 are.

“It is unconscionable that we routinely sentence people like Stephanie George to die in our prisons,” said Mary Price, the general counsel of the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “The United States is nearly alone among the nations of the world in abandoning our obligation to rehabilitate such offenders.”

The utility of such sentences has been challenged repeatedly by criminologists and economists. Given that criminals are not known for meticulous long-term planning, how much more seriously do they take a life sentence versus 20 years, or 10 years versus 2 years? Studies have failed to find consistent evidence that the prospect of a longer sentence acts as a significantly greater deterrent than a shorter sentence.

Longer sentences undoubtedly keep criminals off the streets. But researchers question whether this incapacitation effect, as it is known, provides enough benefits to justify the costs, especially when drug dealers are involved. Locking up a rapist makes the streets safer by removing one predator, but locking up a low-level drug dealer creates a job opening that is quickly filled because so many candidates are available.

The number of drug offenders behind bars has gone from fewer than 50,000 in 1980 to more than 500,000 today, but that still leaves more than two million people on the street who sell drugs at least occasionally, according to calculations by Peter H. Reuter, a criminologist at the University of Maryland. He and Jonathan P. Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University say there is no way to lock up enough low-level dealers and couriers to make a significant impact on supply, and that is why cocaine, heroin and other illegal drugs are as readily available today as in 1980, and generally at lower prices.

The researchers say that if the number of drug offenders behind bars was halved — reduced by 250,000 — there would be little impact on prices or availability.

“Mandating long sentences based on the quantities of drugs in someone’s possession just sweeps up low-level couriers and other hired help who are easily replaced,” Dr. Caulkins said. “Instead of relying on formulas written by legislators and sentencing commissions, we should let judges and other local officials use discretion to focus on the dealers who cause the most social harm — the ones who are violent, who fight for turf on street corners, who employ children. They’re the ones who should receive long sentences.”

These changes are starting to be made in places. Sentences for some drug crimes have been eased at the federal level and in states like New York, Kentucky and Texas. Judges in Ohio and South Carolina have been given more sentencing discretion. Californians voted in November to soften their state’s “three strikes” law to focus only on serious or violent third offenses. The use of parole has been expanded in Louisiana and Mississippi. The United States Supreme Court has banned life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders.

Nonetheless, the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, still has nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

A Mother Taken Away

Ms. George said she could understand the justice of sending her to prison for five years, if only to punish her for her earlier crack-selling offenses.

“I’m a real firm believer in karma — what goes around comes around,” she said. “I see now how wrong it was to sell drugs to people hooked on something they couldn’t control. I think, what if they took money away from their kids to buy drugs from me? I deserve to pay a price for that. But my whole life? To take me away from my kids forever?”

When she was sentenced 15 years ago, her children were 5, 6 and 9. They have been raised by her sister, Wendy Evil, who says it was agonizing to take the children to see their mother in prison.

“They would fight to sit on her knee the whole time,” she recalled recently during a family dinner at their home in Pensacola. “It’s been so hard for them. Some of the troubles they’ve had are because of their anger at her being gone.”

The youngest child, William, now 20, dropped out of middle school. The older two, Kendra and Courtney, finished high school but so far have not followed their mother’s advice to go to college.

“I don’t want to blame things on my situation, but I think my life would have been a whole lot different if she’d been here,” said Courtney, now 25, who has been unemployed for several years. “When I fell off track, she would have pushed me back. She’s way stronger than any of us.”

Ms. George, who has gotten a college degree in prison, calls the children every Sunday. She pays for the calls, which cost 23 cents a minute, with wages from two jobs: a regular eight-hour shift of data processing that pays 92 cents an hour, supplemented by four hours of overtime work at a call center in the prison that provides 411 directory assistance to phone companies.

“I like to stay busy,” she said during the interview. “I don’t like to give myself time to think about home. I know how much it hurts my daughter to see her friends doing things with their mothers. My boys are still so angry. I thought after a while it would stop, that they’d move on as they got older and had girlfriends. But it just seems like it gets worse every Mother’s Day and Christmas.”

She seemed undaunted, even cheerful, during most of the interview at the prison, where she sleeps on a bunk bed in an 11-by-7-foot cell she shares with another inmate. Dressed in the regulation uniform, khaki pants and work boots, she was calm and articulate as she explained her case and the failed efforts to appeal the ruling. At this point lawyers say her only hope seems to be presidential clemency — rarely granted in recent years — yet she said she remained hopeful.

She lost her composure only once, while describing the evening in 1996 when the police found the lockbox in her apartment. She had been working in the kitchen, braiding someone’s hair for a little money, while Courtney, then 8, played in the home. He watched the police take her away in handcuffs.

“Courtney called out, ‘Mom, you promised you weren’t going to leave us no more,’ ” Ms. George recalled, her eyes glistening. “I still hear that voice to this day, and he’s a grown man.

California prison psychiatrist under investigation for $800,000 pay

California prison psychiatrist under investigation for $800,000 pay

By Thomas Peele Staff writer

Posted: 12/11/2012 06:15:04 PM PST

After raking in half a million dollars for being "on call," California's top paid public employee of 2011 -- a prison psychiatrist from Newark -- has been suspended with pay for allegedly falsifying time records, officials said Tuesday.

Dr. Mohammad Safi, 54, was paid more than $803,000 last year as a supervising senior psychiatrist at a Department of State Hospitals facility within Salinas Valley State Prison in Monterey County, records show.

That amount included more than $503,000 for on-call pay -- in Safi's case being available to respond quickly to emergencies.

His suspension was first reported Wednesday by Bloomberg News, which published an extensive analysis of state government pay that ranked California tops in the nation. It showed Safi was paid more than twice as much as any state psychiatrist in the 12 states Bloomberg examined.

Efforts to reach Safi were unsuccessful Tuesday but his lawyer, Edward Caden, called his client "a scapegoat" for a staffing crisis created by the state.

As a manager, Safi was forced to volunteer for many on-call shifts when others refused, his attorney said, because the state failed to build a required housing unit for doctors to stay overnight at the facility in Soledad.

"He was on call for extended periods of time," said Caden, who said Safi often stayed at a motel near the facility.

At one point, Caden said, Safi was paid for either working or being on call around the clock for fours weeks straight -- 672 consecutive hours.

He is paid roughly $130 an hour, state payroll records show.

On-call duty is voluntary at Salinas Valley because the facility does not have sleeping quarters for doctors, said both Caden and Kathy Gaither, the state hospitals' chief deputy director.

"They are claiming he worked an extended period of time without authorization," Caden said. But, he added, "every time sheet he (submitted) has been signed by the (hospital department's) executive director."

Gaither confirmed that Safi "is being investigated for his use of time," but would not discuss details because the case remains under investigation. He was placed on leave with pay in July, and the investigation is expected to be "completed soon," she said.

An analysis of 2011 pay records by this newspaper for the 370-bed psychiatric hospital within Salinas Valley State Prison where Safi worked shows his pay far exceeded that of other doctors last year. The five people he supervised were paid an average of $313,348, records show -- about half a million dollars less then their boss.

Records also show that 21 doctors with Safi's title of supervising chief psychiatrist working for the hospitals department at other state prisons in 2011 averaged about $283,000.

Safi remains in good standing with the California Medical Board, where he listed as a surgeon.

State Superior Court records show Safi was sued last year by a collections agency for an unspecified amount. Property records show that a five-bedroom Newark house he bought in 2007 for nearly $1 million is now valued at $730,000.

Caden said Safi's taking of on-call shifts had nothing to do with any financial difficulties he might have faced.

"He was the manager," Caden said. "He had to do it."

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