Homeless in Arizona

Chandler police crack down on seatbelt use

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Chandler police crack down on seatbelt use

Posted: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 2:43 pm

By Courtney Carlmark, ABC15

Chandler police are spending a lot of money on a new seatbelt crackdown in the Valley.

They're using a $60,000 grant from the Governor's Office of Highway Safety to encourage seatbelt use in order to save lives and cut down on crashes.

More people are skipping seatbelts than you might think.

According to the Arizona Department of Transportation, more Arizonans were injured in crashes where they weren't wearing seatbelts last year than crashes that involved alcohol.

The holiday months are the busiest time of the year on the roads. Chandler Police officers know it's a hectic time of year and folks have a lot on their minds, but say now is not the time to forget to buckle up.

ADOT statistics show last December there were more crashes in Arizona than any other month.

Chandler Police Detective Seth Tyler said this time of year they see an increase in minor crashes around shopping malls and folks need to be more courteous on the roads.

And here's some national statistics to consider before heading out of the holidays.

Saturdays tend to be the deadliest days on the road and the peak hours for crashes are 3-6 p.m.

Did the FBI create this crime so they could be heroes when they busted it???

From this article it sounds like this could be another one of those cases where the FBI created the crime so the FBI could look like heroes after they busted the crime they created.

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U.S. suspects' alleged terror plot beset by hurdles, FBI says

By Phil Willon, Kate Mather and Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times

November 21, 2012, 2:51 a.m.

The alleged aspiring terrorists "liked" each other's jihadist Facebook postings. When they played paintball in Corona to prepare for Holy War, they commended each other for going full-throttle for shaheed (martyrdom) against timid opponents.

One man vowed to start hiking to get to know mountain terrain, and maybe try skydiving to see how he handled fear. Yet even as he expected to go on a suicide mission once he reached the Middle East, at home in Ontario, he briefly fretted over selling his car to fund the trip.

The federal complaint unsealed this week against four Southern California men depicts them as intent on joining Al Qaeda and killing American and coalition troops. But their alleged road to martyrdom was rutted with endless logistical problems, dubious connections overseas and their own equivocating over the smallest decisions: How do you pack for a jihad?

Ralph Deleon, 23, told two of his cohorts and an FBI informant "to bring thermal underwear, an XBox, sports magazines, and durable shoes." They cleanly shaved to avoid suspicion in transit to the Middle East — just before their friend in Kabul, the fourth defendant, told them to arrive with full beards to gain the trust of the Taliban.

That friend got sick and had to miss his scheduled suicide mission. His cohorts in the U.S. told him to hold off on his next mission at least until they arrived, so he could introduce them to their handlers before he killed himself. They had already talked him out of leaving Afghanistan altogether for Yemen.

Miguel Santana, 21, Arifeen Gojali, 21, and Deleon booked their tickets from Mexico City to Istanbul on Thursday, and were taken into custody during a vehicle stop in Chino the next day, authorities said. Santana is a Mexican national who was in the process of getting his U.S. citizenship. Deleon is a legal permanent resident from the Philippines. Gojali is an American of Vietnamese descent.

The central figure in the alleged plot is Sohiel Kabir, 34, a native Afghan and naturalized U.S. citizen who has lived in Pomona and served in the U.S. Air Force from 2000 to 2001. He converted Santana and Deleon to Islam in 2010, then left for Afghanistan to make arrangements for the three of them to join the Taliban or Al Qaeda. (Santana and Deleon subsequently recruited Gojali in September.) Kabir was apprehended Saturday in Kabul.

Federal officials took the defendants' plans extremely seriously, and expended "extraordinary resources" to track and stop them, said David Bowdich, special agent in charge of counter-terrorism in Los Angeles, at a news conference Tuesday.

Undercover FBI operatives began chatting with Santana online in February, and the informant had infiltrated the group by March.

"Not only were they playing paintball, they were going to shooting ranges," Bowdich said. "They saw this as jihad."

The charges appear to be based largely on the work of the undercover informant, who has been on the FBI payroll for more than four years and has received $250,000 and "immigration benefits" for his work. According to the affidavit included in the criminal complaint, he was once convicted of trafficking pseudoephedrine, a chemical precursor to methamphetamine.

News of the arrests rattled neighbors of the defendants, who lived in quiet neighborhoods in Ontario, Upland and Riverside.

Just a few months earlier, Deleon was regularly playing basketball in the driveway of his parents' Ontario home with his 15-year-old next-door neighbor, Martin Garcia.

"I was in shock. I was like, damn!" Garcia said. "He's actually a really nice guy. He'd offer to take me out to dinner when we played basketball together."

"Then he became Muslim. He would try to influence me to become Muslim, tell me all these nice stories and it sounded pretty cool."

Deleon's younger brother told Garcia that Deleon was moving to Afghanistan.

"He just said he was tired of all that life," Garcia said. "He was just a regular teenager, partying and all that before."

Ulises Vargas, 23, said he attended classes at Ontario High School in 2006 with Deleon, and ate lunch with him and other friends almost daily. Deleon was outgoing — someone who played on the football team, made Homecoming Court and cracked jokes at lunch.

"It's surreal because it's somebody that you knew," Vargas said.

Deleon's father politely declined to comment, saying only, "It's too difficult."

The case comes after a series of similar federal investigations of individuals in terror plots targeting sites in this country and abroad.

In the Pacific Northwest, half a dozen radicals were stopped after planning to open a terror training camp near the Washington-Oregon border. In Minneapolis, some 20 young men were recruited to undergo training for attacks abroad; one of them, Shirwa Ahmed, died in a round of suicide bombings in Somalia.

Kabir first got to Afghanistan in July 2012 and informed Santana and Deleon that they would join the "students" (the Taliban) and then step up to join the "professors" (Al Qaeda), according to the affidavit. He said the "brothers would take care of everything." But by Aug. 31, he was telling them the situation with Al Qaeda was a "little complicated." In September, he told them his main priority was now in Yemen, and they asked why they should fly to Afghanistan if that was so. On Sept. 30, Kabir said there were more complications because the three were coming from the United States.

In California, the men kept practicing and planning, trying to get their various immigration problems fixed They scrubbed their Facebook sites of jihadist material to avoid detection.

All the while, the FBI was compiling evidence against them. According the complaint, Santana repeatedly spoke of the violence he would cause: "I wanna do C-4s if I could just put one of these trucks right here.... Just drive it into like the baddest military base.... I'm gonna take out the whole base."

His comments, as conveyed in the FBI affidavit, suggest he had no qualms about killing people: "The more I think about it the more it excites me," he proclaimed. He wanted to go to Afghanistan because it was the most active spot, like "South Central."

While driving home after shooting an M-4 rifle at the range one day, the confidential informant asked the group how Kabir got them to convert. "Santana said that, growing up, he was easily influenced by people," according to the affidavit. "Santana said that he would hear Kabir talk and then 'accepted Islam without knowing anything about it besides it being the truth.' "

Deleon's conversion to Islam was similarly easy, according to the affidavit.

When the informant asked him at one point how he felt about the possibility of killing someone, Deleon said, "I'll snipe the guy off. I'm so ready"

A neighbor of Deleon's, who declined to be identified because he "didn't want trouble," said that recently Deleon began to wear Muslim attire on Fridays, a traditional day of prayer for Muslims.

Neighbors of Santana said he too lived with his parents, who are said to be devoted Catholics who dote on their young daughter and love to play with her at the neighborhood pool.

Maria Villa, who lives a few houses down the street, said her son and Santana used to hang out skateboarding and playing video games when they were students at Upland High School. That friendship quickly cooled two weeks ago when her son called Santana to catch up. Santana lectured him about the glory of Islam and seemed paranoid that people were following him.

"He was just talking about Allah," Villa said. "He just started to talk about Allah and said, 'You guys shouldn't be around me. I know people are looking at me.' "

phil.willon@latimes.com

kate.mather@latimes.com

joe.mozingo@latimes.com

The White House routinely lies to us for political reasons??? Probably!!!!

Intelligence officials edited talking points on Libya attack

By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times

November 21, 2012, 12:26 a.m.

WASHINGTON — Authorities with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the CIA, decided to remove the terms "attack," "Al Qaeda" and "terrorism" from unclassified guidance provided to the Obama administration several days after militants attacked the U.S. mission in Benghazi, a senior official said Tuesday.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, relied on the so-called talking points when she appeared on several Sunday TV talk shows five days after the Sept. 11 attacks in eastern Libya. She asserted that the violence, which killed four Americans, erupted out of a protest over a film made in the U.S. that mocked Islam.

Critics accused Rice and other administration officials of twisting the intelligence for political reasons when it later emerged that the CIA had concluded that the lethal assault involved militants, some of whom had links to Al Qaeda's North African affiliate. The White House has argued that Rice was relying on information provided by the CIA and other agencies and didn't deviate from it.

U.S. intelligence officials supported the administration claims Tuesday, contending that language in the talking points was changed by intelligence officers to protect information that was classified at the time.

"Early drafts of the talking points included several analytic judgments that were debated and adjusted during the internal intelligence community coordination process," said the senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue involved classified material. "The adjustments were focused on producing talking points that provided the best information available at the time, protected sensitive details and reflected the evolving nature of rapidly incoming intelligence."

Officials at the CIA and at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by James R. Clapper, "were all communicating on an email chain, which is normal in our coordination process," the official said. "Suggestions were being made and implemented in a collaborative manner."

The CIA drafted the initial talking points, and they were not "edited to minimize the role of extremists, diminish terrorist affiliations, or play down that this was an attack," said a second U.S. official familiar with how the material was edited.

David H. Petraeus, the former CIA director, told the House and Senate intelligence committees in closed hearings Friday that he believed almost immediately that the Benghazi assault was an organized terrorist attack, according to lawmakers who attended the hearings. But he said the CIA initially withheld reports that extremists with links to Al Qaeda were involved to avoid tipping off the terrorists.

Petraeus also said some early classified reports supported the possibility that some attackers were motivated by violent protests in Cairo earlier that day over the anti-Islam video.

When the CIA drafted language that Rice could use for her TV appearances, it circulated the language to officials at Clapper's office, which has a supervisory role in the intelligence community. In the editing process, the word "attack" was changed to "demonstration," and the phrase "with ties to Al Qaeda" was removed, officials said. The word "terrorism" also was removed.

If intelligence professionals were responsible for the changes, it might dispel charges from some Republicans that political operatives at the White House had manipulated the narrative to downplay the possibility of an Al Qaeda attack when the Obama administration was campaigning on its successes in degrading the terrorist group.

One of the most vocal critics, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said he was "somewhat surprised and frustrated" Tuesday after CBS broke the news.

During the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last week, McCain said, "senior intelligence officials were asked this very question, and all of them, including the director of national intelligence himself, told us that they did not know who made the changes. Now we have to read the answers to our questions in the media."

McCain said the episode "is another reason why many of us are so frustrated with, and suspicious of, the actions of this administration when it comes to the Benghazi attack."

Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and an embassy computer specialist were killed when the militants stormed and set fire to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Two CIA contractors were killed several hours later when mortar rounds were fired at a CIA compound about 1 1/2 miles away.

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

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

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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.

Markham cops charged with theft

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Markham cops charged with theft

By Steve Schmadeke Tribune reporter

1:46 p.m. CST, November 21, 2012

Two Markham police officers – one of them the son of the town’s mayor – have been charged in state court with stealing thousands of dollars from a south suburban business while on duty and investigating a burglary, officials announced today. [Kind of reminds me of Tempe Police Sgt Robert Mitchell. He is the son of Tempe Mayor Harry Mitchell. I sued him in Federal court for false arrest and civil rights violations.]

Darryl Starks, 38 and Andre Webb, 41, are charged with armed violence, theft of property and official misconduct for their alleged actions during a 2010 investigation into flat-screen televisions that were stolen from a Markham distributor.

The two were charged with armed violence because they were carrying weapons at the time of the alleged crimes, according to a spokeswoman for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office, which was assisted in its investigation by the FBI and Illinois State police.

Soon after the thefts, a Markham tactical team entered a Dolton warehouse without a search warrant and searched the building for the stolen televisions. Webb and Starks allegedly went into an office there, where Webb, the son of Markham Mayor David Webb, Jr., used a knife to open a locked closet door.

The policemen then each took over $3,000 from a box inside the closet that contained a large amount of cash, hid the money on their bodies and left the office. Another Markham officer later entered the office and counted the recovered funds in the presence of the business owner.

The owner then reported that money was missing and an investigation was immediately started at the warehouse. Webb allegedly admitted taking money and hiding in the police vehicle he drove to the warehouse and $3,380 was recovered from under the driver’s side floor mat.

Over the next two days, Starks said he had additional funds to turn in, eventually giving police $3,175. All of the stolen funds were returned to the business owner.

The two police officers appeared in bond court today, where Judge Israel Desierto set bail at $25,000 apiece and ordered them to turn their firearms over to state police.

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

Hate crimes are politically correct BS???

I think it is wrong for the government to give people extra punishment or less punishment because of they committed a crime against some "protected" or "unprotected" group of people.

I also suspect laws like this which give special treatment to some people will always end up being abused.

For example while I suspect the purpose of the law is to "protect" gay people who are beaten up, a cop or prosecutor who hates gay folks could use the law could be used to give extra harsh treatment to one gay person who gets into a fight with another gay person, and give the government a lame excuse to railroad gay people.

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Phoenix touts police focus on hate crimes

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Nov 23, 2012 12:14 AM

Phoenix is expected to rank among the nation’s top cities in hate-crime reports once again when the FBI releases hate-crime data next month.

Although that status might sound disturbing, police and civil-rights advocates say it’s not so much a stain on the city, but more of a tribute to the diligence of Phoenix police and their efforts to educate the public, collect detailed information on suspected hate crimes and report it accurately to federal officials.

But to assault victims such as Austin Head, those distinctions are merely semantics.

Head was assaulted in early November after he left a popular gay and lesbian nightclub near Seventh Avenue and Camelback Road. Head and a friend were standing near Central Avenue and Osborn Road, about 2 1/2 miles from the club, when two men walked toward them.

“What you say, (expletive)?”

A pejorative name for a gay man was the last word Head and his friend, Eric Kelly, said they heard before the assault began. Head remembers little of the attack, waking up in the hospital with a cut and two fractures under his eye.

Two brothers, Jermon Barnes, 22, and Ernie Barnes, 24, were arrested in connection with the case.

Phoenix investigators determined the case was motivated by anti-gay bias. The severity of the victims’ injuries resulted in both suspects being charged with aggravated assault. If either man is convicted, and prosecutors present evidence of anti-gay bias as a factor for the court to consider at sentencing, it could result in a longer prison term.

The investigators’ view that bias motivated the attack does not guarantee that prosecutors, a judge or jury will agree. Even when all the elements of a hate crime appear evident, judges and juries can stop short of declaring that a crime was motivated by hatred.

At a federal trial earlier this year in which bias was alleged, two brothers faced charges of mailing a pipe bomb in 2004 to then-Scottsdale Diversity Director Don Logan, who is Black. Prosecutors claimed Dennis and Daniel Mahon carried out the bombing for a White-supremacist group, the White Aryan Resistance, which encourages members to commit acts of violence. During the trial, they played messages Dennis left for an undercover informant in which he referred to Logan using a racial slur. The jury found Daniel not guilty of conspiring to damage buildings and property but convicted Dennis of the same charge.

When it came to decide whether the bombing was a hate crime, the jury could not agree that Logan was targeted because of his race. The distinction was largely academic: Dennis Mahon, 61, received a 40-year sentence for the bombing.

By then, however, the damage to the community had been done, said Bill Straus, director of the Arizona Regional Office of the Anti-Defamation League. It stretched beyond the injuries suffered by Logan when the bomb exploded in his hands.

“You know why hate crimes are such a big deal for us? It’s the only kind of criminal activity that sends a message to an entire community,” Straus said. “If you’re Black and you read about a hate crime committed against a Black man, you feel targeted.”

Phoenix ranks high in hate-crime statistics

In 1990, when the federal government passed legislation requiring the U.S. attorney general to collect data on hate crimes committed in the U.S., the FBI published a book with data from only 11 states. More than 20years later, nearly 15,000 law-enforcement agencies, including 89 in Arizona, collect and report hate-crime data to the FBI. But the results are uneven.

Phoenix has consistently reported the third-most hate crimes in the country, behind New York and Los Angeles — but well ahead of larger cities like Houston and Chicago.

Phoenix reported 135 hate crimes in 2010, while Chicago and Houston reported just 17 and 13, respectively. That disparity is consistent going back through 2007.

Chicago averaged more than 200 hate crimes annually in the 1990s and reported 215 as recently as 2002. But there has been a steep decline in the number of hate-crime reports taken by city officers and reported to the FBI. In 2010, Chicago police received 46 reports and found 17 of them legitimate.

“The Chicago Police Department is mandated to report bias crimes to the FBI; however, only bona fide reports are counted,” Chicago police Sgt. Antoinette Ursitti wrote in response to e-mailed questions from The Arizona Republic. “The Chicago Police Department releases annual hate-crime reports that address all incidents. Over the years, there have been fluctuations in the number of reported bias crimes. Community service organizations often play a role in increased awareness and reporting.”

Like Chicago, Phoenix police have liaisons who work directly with community-advocacy groups. Local police credit those relationships with the number of hate-crime reports taken by Phoenix officers.

Law-enforcement and civil-rights experts say that local hate crimes may be rising slightly but that the disparity between Phoenix and other cities is attributable to the fact that Phoenix police have continued to focus on identifying hate crimes during a time of shrinking budgets and changing leadership in the department.

“We’ve seen so many different types of hate crimes, and I think in some ways people’s expectations of what the (hate crimes) law was going to do is different from what happened in reality,” said John Tutelman, a Phoenix prosecutor who has prosecuted bias-crime cases; served on the Scottsdale Human Relations Commission, which promotes diversity; and trained law-enforcement officers on hate crimes.

“A lot of people saw it (the law) as protecting specific minority groups,” Tutelman said. “I think now there’s a much bigger realization that it’s protecting our sense of ourselves as a community. It’s not really protecting groups so much as it is protecting our society from bigotry and bias.

“It really is a result of Phoenix’s commitment to ensuring that people who are bigoted and are hateful aren’t allowed to get away with committing crimes that involve those elements.”

More crimes reported against some groups

The Police Department’s determination that bias motivated the assaults on Head and Kelly puts the case in a growing file of crimes targeting gay men in Phoenix. African-Americans were the most frequent targets of hate crimes in Phoenix last year, followed by gay men and Hispanics.

Phoenix police Sgt. Jeff Young, who leads the department’s bias-crime unit, said getting caught up in statistics can leave the mistaken impression that other minority groups are not targets. Slurs targeting Blacks, Hispanics and gay men are more recognizable as signs of intolerance, making it easier for patrol officers to record crimes targeting members of those groups in which they believe bias played a role.

“Hate crimes can be perpetrated against any group — that’s the message we need to get out there,” Young said. “We want each and every victim to know: We’re not concerned about anything other than the crime that has been committed against them. We’re dealing with a lot of different groups, we want to do the best job we can for that community.”

The spike in hate crimes targeting Hispanics that many observers anticipated after passage of Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law has not materialized, although advocates stress that many crimes against Hispanics go unreported because of the very nature of the law, which critics say discourages undocumented residents from making contact with law-enforcement or government agencies.

A Republic review of Phoenix police records found that Hispanic victims were more likely to be targets of intimidation, while Black victims most frequently suffered vandalism and property damage. Gay men were most frequently victims of physical violence.

“I’m not surprised at all,” said Michael Lyon, a friend and mentor of Head’s and the executive producer on a documentary about HIV-positive youths that featured Head.

“Gay men are easy targets,” Lyon said.

But cases last year in Phoenix ran the gamut.

A Phoenix woman of Guatemalan descent reported to police in January 2011 that someone broke into her home, stole nearly $23,000 of her family’s belongings and did more than $3,000 in damage to the house, including spray-painting “Leave” on walls throughout her home. The woman also told police that the rear bumper of her truck was stolen three months earlier and that her family’s cars were vandalized two years before that. Neither of those incidents were reported to police.

“What we tell people all the time: If you call the police and say, ‘I don’t expect an officer, but my neighborhood was leafleted by (neo-Nazis) overnight,’ at least the police have that information if something happens a week later,” Straus said.

A Black man living in Phoenix reported in January 2011 that his neighbor pulled a gun on him in a dispute about the victim’s failure to pick up after his dogs. The victim told police his neighbor also repeatedly used racial slurs against him. Officers contacted the neighbor the same day. According to police reports, the neighbor began yelling statements that included profanity and a racial slur and “began making comments about how a White man has no rights.”

The neighbor was charged with assault and later pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct.

That case and the example of the Guatemalan woman highlight the disconnect between legislation and reality in Phoenix.

Arizona’s bias-crime statute allows harsher sentences in felonies involving bias. But the majority of hate crimes in Phoenix are misdemeanors, leaving city prosecutors to present the facts to judges in the hope that they lean toward the higher end of the sentencing range for low-level crimes if bias is a factor.

“I think where we have tagging or graffiti that doesn’t have any element of a bias or hate crime, that the judges tend to not view it as seriously as when there’s something that implies a hate-crime bias, and they sentence accordingly,” Tutelman said.

“Although the aggravator is not statutorily applicable to misdemeanor crimes, we certainly try to use it to aggravate it with a small ‘A’ — in other words, we try to encourage the judges in Municipal Court to see it in the same light that the Legislature did.”

The Barnes brothers are expected to go to trial next year in Superior Court, where county prosecutors could try to convince the jury that bias played a role in the assault and that the crime had an impact on the entire community.

Head, the activist who was victimized, has his own message for the community.

“I don’t really live in fear, it’s unproductive,” he said. “I can’t be a wilted flower. That’s why they attack you: They think you’re weak. I would just say, ‘Be aware and stay strong.’”

Pakistan to suspend cell phone service to protect us from terrorists

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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.

LAPD Capt. Bernice Abram helping dope dealers

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D.A.'s memo details concerns about L.A. County sheriff's captain

By Robert Faturechi, Los Angeles Times

November 22, 2012, 5:16 p.m.

The trap was set. All that was left for Los Angeles County sheriff's investigators to do was wait and see if the unthinkable was true.

Suspicions had grown that one of their colleagues — a respected captain with more than 150 deputies under her command — was funneling secret information to an alleged Compton drug trafficker. So investigators sent out a phony plan as bait, according to records and interviews, detailing their intention to do surveillance on a house near the suspected trafficker's home.

A few minutes after receiving the fake plans, Capt. Bernice Abram was heard on a phone tap placing a call to Dion Grim, the suspected drug dealer.

Authorities listened in as she tipped him off about the location of the planned surveillance. Stay away, she warned.

That day, in April 2011, sheriff's officials placed Abram on leave, and for more than a year afterward her ties to Grim were investigated. Prosecutors recently declined to file charges against Abram, saying they couldn't prove the captain knew that Grim, a documented gang member, was involved in illegal activities.

But a district attorney's memo explaining that decision provides the most detailed description yet of how the Sheriff's Department came to believe one of its up-and-coming leaders was betraying the agency and shows the efforts officials pursued to prove it. The memo also documents several occasions when Abram appeared to use her authority to help Grim avoid law enforcement scrutiny.

An FBI investigation into Abram is ongoing, a spokeswoman said.

The Sheriff's Department placed Abram on leave along with her niece, a custody assistant who prosecutors said improperly accessed a law enforcement database for Grim. They remain on leave and together have collected more than an estimated $300,000 in salary as the sheriff's internal probe continues, based on posted county salaries.

Abram first met Grim after she started dating his father three years ago, prosecutors said. (According to her Sheriff's Department biography, Abram, 53, was married to another man.) She became "good friends" with Grim, 36, a member of the Original Front Hood Crips, a Compton street gang.

In 2010, FBI agents had begun investigating Grim, suspecting that he was the ringleader of a cross-county drug trafficking ring. A sheriff's detective helping with the investigation was reviewing Grim's wiretapped phone calls when he heard a woman's voice he recognized: Abram's.

In the months that followed, authorities continued to target Grim. And on several occasions, Abram interjected herself, prosecutors said. In one instance, a sheriff's deputy, Michael Haggerty, was directed by the FBI to arrest Grim after a traffic stop. In an interview with The Times, Haggerty described Grim as oddly calm for someone in the back seat of a patrol cruiser. "You'll see what happens," Grim said, according to the deputy.

The district attorney's memo details Abram's involvement in the case: Shortly after the arrest, she called the Compton station and asked for Grim to be quickly released from custody. She got his car out of impound and got the fees waived. She also picked Grim up from jail, according to the memo.

Days later, she texted another deputy at the Compton station who considered her a mentor, asking if he knew Haggerty. She told him Haggerty had issued a ticket to a family member of hers and that the court date was approaching. "Feel him out," she reportedly said.

The deputy then approached Haggerty and told him that a friend from the Carson station "who had a lot of clout asked him not to show up in court if he was issued a subpoena," according to the memo. The city attorney dismissed the case, however, so Haggerty was never subpoenaed.

Around that time, the Sheriff's Department began receiving multiple citizen complaints against Haggerty. One of the complainants, the memo states, "admitted that Abram instructed them to make complaints to get Haggerty transferred" out of Compton.

A few months later, another sheriff's deputy arrested Grim on an excessive noise violation. Again, according to the memo, Abram called the station to get Grim released. This time, she asked that he not be moved to the jail and instead be kept at the station, where she picked him up. She was heard later on the wiretap assuring Grim the case wouldn't be filed. "I told someone he'd better take care of it," she said.

The month after that, a deputy at Abram's station ticketed Grim's sister on a traffic violation. Abram approached the deputy and "asked him to make the ticket 'go away,'" according to the memo. She later used her power as a captain to void the ticket.

The favors continued, according to prosecutors. In January last year, Grim called Abram to ask about police activity on his street. She called back minutes later and told him that sheriff's gang enforcement deputies had served search warrants targeting two shooting suspects and planned to serve another the next day.

A few months later, Grim was ticketed again, and he immediately called Abram. She ordered a detective at her station to "look into it," according to the memo, an order he understood to mean that he should get the ticket dismissed.

That month, sheriff's investigators moved in with their sting operation, ensnaring Abram with the phony surveillance plans. She was relieved of duty, along with her niece, Chantell White, a custody assistant at the sheriff's South L.A. station. Investigators discovered that on three occasions, Grim used White to access a law enforcement database to run a friend's name for outstanding warrants, according to the D.A.'s memo.

Last year, federal authorities arrested Grim and several other alleged members of a drug ring suspected of moving marijuana, Xanax pills and pint bottles of codeine with promethazine, also known as "sizzurp" or "purple drank." Grim has pleaded not guilty.

Both Abram and White have repeatedly declined to comment to The Times. In one instance, Abram told a Times reporter before hanging up that she'd never heard of Grim.

Prosecutors gave several reasons for not filing charges against Abram and her niece. It's illegal for police to alert anyone of a warrant before it's served, but only if the purpose of the warning is an attempt to help prevent an arrest or a search. In one of the instances in which Abram warned Grim, he wasn't the subject of the warrant, and she had advised him to make sure his children were inside, an attempt to keep them out of harm's way, prosecutors said.

As for Abram's second tip, when she warned Grim about the phony surveillance operation, prosecutors also concluded no laws had been broken. The D.A.'s office said there is no evidence that Abram was aware of illegal activities by Grim, who prosecutors noted in the memo worked at a trash collection company.

Prosecutors, however, did conclude that Abram broke the law by quashing a ticket for Grim's sister and trying to quash a ticket for Grim. But the one-year statute of limitations for that misdemeanor had expired. The district attorney's office also determined that White may have broken the law by giving Grim information from a law enforcement database, but the statute of limitations on that misdemeanor had also expired.

robert.faturechi@latimes.com

Nogales officer gets jail for underage sex

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Nogales officer gets jail for underage sex

Associated Press Fri Nov 23, 2012 9:07 AM

NOGALES — A former Nogales police officer who had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl has been sentenced to two months in jail and three years’ probation.

Victor Jesus Valenzuela also must register as a sex offender.

The 25-year-old former officer was arrested last year and accused of having sex with the girl 13 times. The Nogales International reports (http://bit.ly/XJIfXl) officials at the girl’s school learned of the affair after the pair broke up and told police.

He pleaded guilty to one count of sexual conduct with a minor last month.

Santa Cruz Superior Court Judge James A. Soto cited his remorse and lack of a record in deciding his sentence Monday.

Valenzuela is the third Nogales officer in four years to be convicted of sex offenses involving underage girls.

Nogales officer gets jail for underage sex

Another ex-NPD officer sentenced for sex offense

Posted: Friday, November 23, 2012 12:00 am | Updated: 5:01 pm, Wed Nov 21, 2012.

By Curt Prendergast

Nogales International | 0 comments

A former Nogales Police Department officer, arrested last year for having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old high school student, was sentenced to three years probation and two months in jail on Monday at Santa Cruz County Superior Court.

Victor Jesus Valenzuela, 25, was the third former NPD officer in the past four years to be convicted and sentenced for sex offenses involving underage girls.

Valenzuela signed a plea agreement on Oct. 15 in which he pleaded guilty to one count of sexual conduct with a minor. If he violates the terms of his probation he could face a prison sentence of up to two years, said Judge James A. Soto.

“I’m placing the defendant on probation because he has no prior criminal record and he seems genuinely remorseful for what he did,” Soto said. “Also, based on the evaluation and my review of the files it is my belief that he is not likely to re-offend in the future.”

In addition to probation and jail time, Valenzuela will have to register as a sex offender and enroll in a sex offender treatment program. He is prohibited from contacting the victim or the victim’s family and will have to pay a $250 assessment fee and $65 monthly probation service fees.

“I just want to apologize for causing such angst to the victim and her family, to my family,” Valenzuela said. “I paid a very heavy price for this. I have lost my job, something that I can never, ever have again.”

“My actions do not reflect the kind of person that I truly am,” Valenzuela said.

He asked Judge Soto for leniency, saying: “I am a man of family and I don’t want to be away from them. I have a lot of friends and family, sir, and I can’t do without them.”

The public seating area in the courtroom held more than a dozen of his friends and family.

“The offense is what it is, but it can be on a scale of: how predatory, how scary is this?” said Valenzuela’s attorney, Michael Storie.

“I know that weighing heavily on this courtroom is that he was a police officer at the time,” Storie said. “This is not him running someone on his computer, finding out where she lives, is she single, these types of things. Those things all are scary, when they use their position and their access to these things to further themselves.

“None of this happened in Victor’s case,” he said.

Instead, Storie said, Valenzuela interacted with the girl through “that whole Facebook sharing friends thing.”

‘Troubling’ trend

“It is troubling to the court, frankly, that there’s been at least two cases before involving police officers that went to prison under similar types of situations,” Soto said during the hearing.

In May 2010, a 29-year-old NPD officer, Mariano Garibay, was arrested for having sex with a 16-year-old member of the department’s Explorers program. Soto eventually sentenced him to two years and three months in prison.

In 2006, a D.A.R.E. officer with the NPD, Ramon Fernando Borbon, was arrested for sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman and sexually abusing another 16-year-old girl in 2005. He was later convicted and sentenced in 2008 to 9 1/2 years in prison.

“I would have thought that sending two other police officers to prison for engaging in sexual activities with minors would have sent a message throughout the police department. And yet here we are again with a third case,” Soto said.

“I don’t understand, frankly, why the officers can’t seem to get the message that you can not be engaging in sex with minors.”

“You should have known better,” he told Valenzuela.

Scottsdale defends trigger happy cops in police shootings

Scottsdale’s legal fees grow in 2 cases

By Laurie Merrill The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Nov 23, 2012 10:11 PM

Scottsdale has agreed to spend more money to defend against lawsuits brought by the families of two men shot by police in separate incidents in 2012 and 2008, bringing the total authorized to date to nearly $1.6 million.

This month, the City Council approved paying up to $75,000 in legal fees for an appeal in the 2008 case of David Hulstedt, 35, who became a paraplegic after two Scottsdale sergeants shot him in the back as he was walking toward his house carrying his 2-year-old daughter, according to court records.

The council also approved spending up to $350,000 in the Feb. 14, 2012, fatal shooting of John Loxas Jr., 50, who was holding his 7-month-old grandson when he was shot and killed by Officer James Peters.

Loxas was the seventh Scottsdale resident Peters had shot in the line of duty since 2002. Six of the suspects died. Peters was granted a disability retirement this year.

The families of Loxas and Hulstedt filed lawsuits seeking damages against Scottsdale officials. Loxas’ family seeks $7.5 million from Peters, the city, Police Chief Alan Rodbell and Detective Brian McWilliams, according to documents prepared for the City Council.

Hulstedt’s family seeks $40 million from the city and 19 police officers and former employees, the documents said.

Both shootings were deemed justified by the Police Department’s Deadly Force Review Board, according to records, as were Peters’ prior shootings while on duty.

A federal judge disagreed with the review board in Hulstedt’s case, finding that “reasonable” officers would not have fired at Hulstedt, who had psychological issues, was unarmed, made no sudden movements and held his daughter.

The judge further said the baby could have been hurt. In fact, the baby did fall 6 feet to the ground and suffered a minor facial injury, according to the ruling. The judge also noted that police did not warn Hulstedt before they fired.

After three of four police-fired bullets struck Hulstedt, police handcuffed and dragged him facedown 400 feet to paramedics, the judge found.

Hulstedt was suffering from anxiety and paranoia when he called Scottsdale police the day he was shot and demanded that U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano come to his house, according to the ruling.

Police ascertained he was having psychological difficulties, but they were concerned about the safety of Hulstedt’s daughter because Hulstedt threatened to “pile-drive” her, according to court documents.

The judge ruled that the officers are not immune from damages stemming from the suit.

“Considering ‘the totality of the facts and circumstances’ in the particular case, no reasonable officer could have believed that shooting David without warning, while he calmly walked back towards his house with (his daughter) over his head, was a proper means of protecting (her) safety,” the judge said in his ruling.

“Neither Sgt. Richard Slavin nor Sgt. James Dorer warned (Hulstedt) that they would shoot him if he did not comply with their commands, and both of them shot him in the back as he was walking away from them and towards the house.”

The council Nov. 13 approved up to $75,000 with the law firm of Osborn Maledon to appeal the judge’s findings to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The partners of the firm, which has experience with appellate litigation in excessive-force cases, will make $370 an hour, according to City Council documents.

It is unclear how much money the city has spent on prior legal action in either the Hulstedt case or Loxas case or in other lawsuits against retired Officer Peters.

The council approved up to $250,000 in attorney’s fees and up to $100,000 in other litigation fees to the law firm of Struck, Wieneke & Love of Chandler to represent Peters in the Loxas shooting. Lead attorney Kathe Wieneke will make $195 an hour, according to City Council documents. Separate counsel was retained for the city and other defendants.

Loxas’ neighbors had called police to his house Feb. 14, 2012, after he waved a gun at them, according to police reports. He was walking back to his house holding his grandson when he was shot, according to court documents.

The lawsuit filed on his family’s behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union claims that Scottsdale police failed to adequately investigate Peters’ prior shootings and that he should not have been armed and on the force the day Loxas was killed.

Republic reporter Beth Duckett contributed to this article.

Sheriff Terry Johnson - North Carolina's clone of Sheriff Joe???

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North Carolina town split over sheriff's treatment of Latinos

By David Zucchino, Los Angeles Times

November 23, 2012, 8:02 p.m.

GRAHAM, N.C. — In this southern mill town, tortillas and bolillos are as common as Carolina barbecue sandwiches. Spanish-language advertisements tout Latino-owned restaurants, garages, churches and used-tire lots, and banners lining the downtown streets proclaim, "Preserving our heritage — promoting our future."

But protesters who gathered downtown last month in Court Square, near the statue of a Confederate soldier, delivered a different message: "We Want Respect" and "Terry Johnson Stop Lying."

Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson's approach to fighting illegal immigration has raised tensions among Latinos in the community. A two-year investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, released in September, found that Johnson and his deputies had violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by engaging "in a pattern or practice of discriminatory policing against Latinos."

Federal officials recently canceled a federal-county immigration policing program, and the standoff is further dividing a community already split by the area's shifting demographics. Alamance County in 1990 had 736 Latinos, and whites made up 80% of the population. Latinos now number 17,000; whites have dropped to 66%.

Latinos have been drawn to Graham by its low-cost housing and its proximity to construction and service-sector jobs in Raleigh, Durham and Greensboro.

The Justice Department report said Johnson supports "an egregious pattern of racial profiling." It said he referred to Latinos as "taco-eaters," ordered deputies to arrest Latino motorists in instances when other drivers only got citations, and once said Mexicans don't mind having sex with 12-year-old girls. Latinos have since held news conferences and rallies and faced off against residents who shout their support for the sheriff.

Johnson, 62, a larger-than-life lawman prone to bombastic statements, denies using the slur and says his comment about 12-year-old girls was a reference to Mexican criminals who ran a prostitution ring.

In a brief statement, Johnson denied any profiling or racist remarks. "The Obama administration has decided to continue to wage war on local law enforcement," he wrote.

Johnson is not giving interviews because of "a threat of litigation," said his lawyer, S.C. Kitchen, who sent a letter to the Justice Department accusing it of "a libelous political attack" that is "full of factual inaccuracies … based on newspaper articles, rumors and gossip."

Kitchen cited 2011 county statistics showing that Johnson's deputies arrested only 64 of the 466 Spanish-speaking drivers they stopped. Of the others, half got citations and half received verbal warnings. The Justice Department said Johnson's deputies were 4 to 10 times more likely to stop Latino drivers than non-Latinos.

Rosalba Santiago Sagrero, 29, an illegal immigrant in Graham, believes she was targeted solely because she is Latino when she was stopped by a deputy in March and led away in handcuffs to face possible deportation. She hired a lawyer, and an immigration judge dismissed a charge of driving without a license, ruling that the sheriff's order for her to appear in court was "improvidently issued."

Suyapa Mejia-Guevara, a legal U.S. resident, said she was humiliated when a deputy recently stopped her and suggested her driver's license was invalid because the photo didn't look like her. The license is valid, said Mejia-Guevara, who was not charged.

"There's a very clear pattern of [Latinos] getting targeted and arrested for minor traffic violations," said attorney Marty Rosenbluth, director of the N.C. Immigrant Rights Project, who has represented Latinos arrested by Johnson's deputies.

Alamance County Atty. Clyde Albright said the only motive the Justice Department and immigrant rights activists have is to embarrass the sheriff and end the immigration policing program.

"The sheriff has always been a figure who draws the bait," said Madison Taylor, editor of the local Times-News. In a recent column, Taylor wrote: "He's a white Southern sheriff prone to saying things every so often a white Southern sheriff shouldn't say."

Johnson, a former state investigator, is serving his third term. In his first campaign in 2002, he ran an ad that featured "Twilight Zone" theme music and railed against "aliens": "They've filled our criminal courtrooms and invaded our schools. They sponge off the American taxpayer by clogging our welfare lines and our hospital emergency rooms."

That same year, Johnson arrested more than 100 Latinos at a local Division of Motor Vehicles office and accused them of using phony documents to obtain driver's licenses. In 2004, according to Hannah Gill, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, Johnson proposed that deputies visit the homes of people with Latino surnames to root out voter fraud.

In 2007, the Alamance County Sheriff's Office joined a federal program that extends federal enforcement powers to local police to target illegal immigrants accused of committing serious crimes. The program was terminated in Alamance County the day the Justice Department report was issued.

Johnson has created a "climate of fear" among Latinos, said Chris Brook, legal director of the state American Civil Liberties Union. He said Latinos are afraid to report crimes for fear of harassment or deportation.

The sheriff has vigorous support from many longtime residents. David Vaughn, the retired athletic director at a local high school, called Johnson "as honest and fair a man as I've ever known, and one who upholds the law."

Vaughn added: "Ninety-nine percent of the community stands solidly behind Sheriff Johnson."

The Alamance County commissioners, all white, also strongly back the sheriff, praising his hard-line stance against illegal immigration.

At the Sheriff's Office, where a portrait of Johnson greets visitors, his spokesman, Randy Jones, said the department had not changed in the aftermath of the investigation.

"We're doing everything the same way as before," Jones said, "because everything we've done has been completely legal."

david.zucchino@latimes.com

NY Times pushes for more gun controls???

Promises on Gun Control

Published: November 23, 2012

President Obama’s fleeting mention of the need for stronger gun controls at a presidential debate last month was hardly the kind of forceful political statement needed to address the scourge of gun violence in this country. Even his tepid remark was considered by the nation’s gun owners as a threat to take away their firearms. In what amounts to a buyers’ panic, they are again ramping up gun and ammunition sales as they did four years ago, convinced that Mr. Obama intends a gun-control crackdown.

Yet in his first term, Mr. Obama did nothing to cross the gun lobby, and he actually signed legislation allowing loaded firearms to be carried in national parks. Let’s hope Mr. Obama shows more courage on guns in his second term. He said during the debate that he would see “if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced” and that we need to look at “other sources of the violence,” like “cheap handguns.” Now it’s time to follow through on those promises.

Wary politicians, including Mr. Obama, will issue statements of mourning for the victims in mass shootings, which seem to happen ever more frequently. But they refuse to say much about 30,000 American lives that are lost each year because of shootings.

Horrific incidents like the massacre in July at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and murder of six others in Tucson last year produced vows in Congress to screen the mentally ill more effectively and to ban battlefield clips of 100 rounds of ammunition that have no place in a civilized country. But there have been more than 60 multiple shooting incidents since the Tucson shooting, and nothing has been done to make such killings less likely in the future.

Mr. Obama talked about starting “a broader conversation” about reducing gun violence. The best place to start is in Congress, which has been grossly negligent toward constituent safety for the past 20 years as it bows to the demands of the gun lobby.

The lobby’s defense of unregistered and untracked gun sales at black market flea markets and weekend gun shows is strongly opposed by Americans in opinion polls. In fact, four out of five gun owners see the wisdom of checking on anonymous sellers and buyers.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who was a principal in the 1994 enactment of a 10-year ban on civilian use of assault rifles, intends to propose its reinstatement. “Weapons of war do not belong on our streets, in our classrooms, in our schools or in our movie theaters,” she said after the Aurora killings. This bill affords President Obama an opportunity to follow through on his 2008 campaign promise to work to revive the ban.

Mr. Obama is free of the pressures of campaigning — and free to lead the nation toward sensible laws that can help reduce the flood of guns and related homicides.

The need for strong leadership on this issue is growing as statehouse politicians cave to ever more lethal demands from the gun lobby. State laws allowing students to go armed to class in Colorado, freeing owners in Oklahoma to wear holstered weapons in public, and letting people “stand your ground” in Florida and a score of other states have already damaged public safety immeasurably.

Suit targets human smuggling-law prosecutions

Source

Suit targets human smuggling-law prosecutions

By Jacques Billeaud Associated Press Sat Nov 24, 2012 12:42 PM

Before leading the way for other states to pursue immigration laws, Arizona passed a ban on human smuggling in 2005 that has led to more than 2,100 arrests and drawn criticism for a tactic in which people who pay to be sneaked into the country are charged as conspirators to the crime.

Seventy-five percent of the people charged under the smuggling law in the state’s largest county since 2008 have been charged with conspiring to sneak themselves into the country, drawing complaints from immigrant rights advocates that the statute was intended for often-violent smugglers, not their customers.

“It’s just a misuse of the law,” said Antonio Bustamante, one of the attorneys pushing the lawsuit.

A lawsuit that seeks to bar such conspiracy prosecutions is intensifying as lawyers for the state’s biggest county recently asked a judge to throw out the case and immigrant rights advocates seek class-action status that would let any person charged with conspiracy under the smuggling law to join the case.

The smuggling law was passed in 2005 as lawmakers responded to voter frustration over Arizona’s role as the nation’s busiest immigrant smuggling hub. It marked Arizona’s second major immigration law and was followed in 2010 with a wide-ranging law that required police to make immigration checks in certain cases and inspired similar laws in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Utah.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 2010 law’s requirement that officers, while enforcing other laws, question the immigration status of those suspected of being in the country illegally. But the nation’s highest court barred police from enforcing other parts of the law, including a requirement that immigrants obtain or carry immigration registration papers.

Lawyers challenging the Arizona conspiracy prosecutions say the policy of charging smuggling customers with conspiracy is trumped by federal immigration law. Attorneys defending Maricopa County prosecutors and Sheriff Joe Arpaio against the lawsuit say the tactic doesn’t conflict with federal law and pointed out that Arizona law allows people to be convicted of conspiracy, even when they can’t be convicted of the crime itself.

“The policy has nothing to do with the entrance, or residence, of aliens unlawfully into this country,” Tim Casey, attorney for the county officials, said in court records. “The policy regulates only criminal conduct involving the smuggling of illegal aliens.” Casey didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Several weeks after the smuggling law took effect in August 2005, Maricopa County’s then-top prosecutor issued a legal opinion that said illegal immigrants suspected of using smugglers can be charged as conspirators in smuggling cases.

Despite the heavy criticism from immigrant rights advocates, state courts upheld the legal interpretation of then-Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas. Still, opponents have continued opposing the conspiracy approach in federal court.

Since 2008, Maricopa County prosecutors have charged more than 2,100 people under the smuggling law. Twenty-five percent were charged as smugglers, while the remainder was charged with conspiracy under the human smuggling law.

The federal challenge was dismissed, but was revived in July 2010 when an appeals court ruled that a lower-court judge erred in dismissing organizations and taxpayers who challenged the prosecution tactic.

The remaining challengers are the Arizona Hispanic Community Forum, the Hispanic civil rights group Somos America, Democratic state Sen. David Lujan of Phoenix and Arizona State University professor LaDawn Haglund.

They aren’t seeking money damages and instead are asking a judge to declare the policy unconstitutional and to bar county prosecutors and Arpaio’s agency from bringing conspiracy cases under the smuggling law.

Suit challenges prosecutions under Arizona smuggling law

Suit challenges prosecutions under Arizona smuggling law

Posted: Saturday, November 24, 2012 2:08 pm

Associated Press

Before leading the way for other states to pursue immigration laws, Arizona passed a ban on human smuggling in 2005 that has led to more than 2,100 arrests and drawn criticism for a tactic in which people who pay to be sneaked into the country are charged as conspirators to the crime.

Seventy-five percent of the people charged under the smuggling law in the state's largest county since 2008 have been charged with conspiring to sneak themselves into the country, drawing complaints from immigrant rights advocates that the statute was intended for often-violent smugglers, not their customers.

"It's just a misuse of the law," said Antonio Bustamante, one of the attorneys pushing the lawsuit.

A lawsuit that seeks to bar such conspiracy prosecutions is intensifying as lawyers for the state's biggest county recently asked a judge to throw out the case and immigrant rights advocates seek class-action status that would let any person charged with conspiracy under the smuggling law to join the case.

The smuggling law was passed in 2005 as lawmakers responded to voter frustration over Arizona's role as the nation's busiest immigrant smuggling hub. It marked Arizona's second major immigration law and was followed in 2010 with a wide-ranging law that required police to make immigration checks in certain cases and inspired similar laws in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Utah.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 2010 law's requirement that officers, while enforcing other laws, question the immigration status of those suspected of being in the country illegally. But the nation's highest court barred police from enforcing other parts of the law, including a requirement that immigrants obtain or carry immigration registration papers.

Lawyers challenging the Arizona conspiracy prosecutions say the policy of charging smuggling customers with conspiracy is trumped by federal immigration law. Attorneys defending Maricopa County prosecutors and Sheriff Joe Arpaio against the lawsuit say the tactic doesn't conflict with federal law and pointed out that Arizona law allows people to be convicted of conspiracy, even when they can't be convicted of the crime itself.

"The policy has nothing to do with the entrance, or residence, of aliens unlawfully into this country," Tim Casey, attorney for the county officials, said in court records. "The policy regulates only criminal conduct involving the smuggling of illegal aliens." Casey didn't return calls seeking comment.

Several weeks after the smuggling law took effect in August 2005, Maricopa County's then-top prosecutor issued a legal opinion that said illegal immigrants suspected of using smugglers can be charged as conspirators in smuggling cases.

Despite the heavy criticism from immigrant rights advocates, state courts upheld the legal interpretation of then-Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas. Still, opponents have continued opposing the conspiracy approach in federal court.

Since 2008, Maricopa County prosecutors have charged more than 2,100 people under the smuggling law. Twenty-five percent were charged as smugglers, while the remainder was charged with conspiracy under the human smuggling law.

The federal challenge was dismissed, but was revived in July 2010 when an appeals court ruled that a lower-court judge erred in dismissing organizations and taxpayers who challenged the prosecution tactic.

The remaining challengers are the Arizona Hispanic Community Forum, the Hispanic civil rights group Somos America, Democratic state Sen. David Lujan of Phoenix and Arizona State University professor LaDawn Haglund.

They aren't seeking money damages and instead are asking a judge to declare the policy unconstitutional and to bar county prosecutors and Arpaio's agency from bringing conspiracy cases under the smuggling law.

Bikers rousted at 2011 rally sue police

Bikers rousted at 2011 rally sue police

Associated Press Sat Nov 24, 2012 9:07 PM

FLAGSTAFF - A motorcycle club claims that Arizona’s state police and the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office violated their civil rights after they were rousted at gunpoint at a northern Arizona campsite where a man shot his wife and two others before killing himself.

The Sons of Hell club and 15 of its Yuma-area members or their spouses filed a lawsuit against Arizona Department of Public Safety officers and sheriff’s deputies, claiming they were targeted following the July 22, 2011, shooting. They say they weren’t involved in the shooting and that the officers were trying to collect information for a criminal street-gang database.

The motorcycle-club members were among hundreds of bikers gathered at the Mormon Lake Lodge campground when the shooting happened.

Investigators found two women and two men shot and quickly determined that Christian Tejada got into an argument with his wife, Desiree Tejada, about having guests over for dinner. They say he shot his wife and then turned the gun on their two guests, Edgar and Trina Atzin, killing the couple. He then killed himself.

Desiree Tejada survived being shot six times.

The club was camped in an area away from the shooting, and the suit alleges a drunken camper pointed to the motorcycle club as possibly being involved. The suit says officers quickly discounted the story but went ahead and entered their camp, awakening its members, their wives, girlfriends and family members at gunpoint.

They were held for three hours even though officers knew they weren’t involved, according to the lawsuit.

A sheriff’s spokesman declined to comment to the Arizona Daily Sun. DPS spokesman Bart Graves said Saturday the agency had no comment.

The club and its members filed an amended version of their suit in U.S. District Court earlier this month. They are seeking costs, possible cash compensation, and orders preventing state police and the Sheriff’s Office from targeting motorcyclists because they belong to a club.

Woman photographed riding a manatee in Florida is arrested

Source

Woman photographed riding a manatee in Florida is arrested

By Debbie Goffa

November 24, 2012, 8:25 p.m.

A St. Petersburg, Fla., woman was arrested on a misdemeanor warrant Saturday after being photographed two months ago riding a manatee.

Florida's Manatee Sanctuary Act protects the endangered sea mammal and says in part, “It is unlawful for any person at any time, by any means, or in any manner intentionally or negligently to annoy, molest, harass, or disturb or attempt to molest, harass, or disturb any manatee.”

Ana Gloria Garcia Gutierrez, 53, was taken into custody without incident at a Sears department store where she works, according to the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.

The incident first came to the public's attention when Sheriff Bob Gualtieri held a news conference on Oct. 2 and asked for help in identifying the woman photographed riding the manatee at nearby Fort De Soto Park in late September.

Gutierrez has admitted touching the endangered sea mammal, the sheriff's office said. She told deputies that she was new to the area at the time and didn't know it was illegal to touch a manatee. The manatee was not hurt.

The maximum penalty is a $500 fine and six months in jail. Gutierrez was released on $1,500 bail, the Associated Press reported.

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.

Racist cops shake down anybody with brown skin

Asian-American says Latinos not only ones hit by SB 1070

By Daniel González The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Nov 25, 2012 11:38 PM

Jim Shee says he never experienced discrimination, let alone racial profiling, until his 70th birthday.

Shee, a Paradise Valley real-estate investor of Chinese and Spanish descent, was driving to meet friends for lunch on April 6, 2010, his birthday, when he stopped on a side street in west Phoenix to check a text message.

A Phoenix police officer approached and tapped on his car window.

“Let me see your papers,” Shee says the officer told him.

“That is the very first thing he said,” recalled Shee, now 72.

Shee, whose civil-rights battle against Arizona’s immigration law Senate Bill 1070 is credited with highlighting the law’s impact beyond the Latino community, was taken aback.

Born in Tucson, Shee has been a U.S. citizen all his life. No police officer had ever asked him for his “papers.”

When he asked why he’d been stopped, Shee says the officer told him, “You looked suspicious.”

Less than two weeks later, Shee said, he was profiled again by police.

This time, he was with his Japanese-American wife, Marian, driving back to the Valley after taking her across the border in San Luis, Sonora, to have some dental work done.

On the highway near Yuma, an Arizona Department of Public Safety officer traveling in the opposite direction saw Shee’s car, made a U-turn across the divided highway and pulled him over. Shee was sure he hadn’t been speeding because his cruise control was set below the speed limit.

“Why’d you stop me?” Shee recalls asking the officer.

The officer told Shee the tint on his 2002 BMW was too dark and gave him a repair order.

Shee did not receive a citation in either case. But he believes both stops were motivated by Senate Bill 1070.

“I’ve never really experienced any type of discrimination and then ... wham, bam. Twice,” Shee said, referring to the police stops. “It made me feel like I should carry my passport around all the time.”

At the time, Arizona’s immigration enforcement law was moving through the state Legislature on its way to being signed by Gov. Jan Brewer on April 23, 2010. The most controversial provision of the law requires police to check the immigration status of a person stopped, detained or arrested if there’s reasonable suspicion the person is in the country illegally.

Shee believes the law fostered a climate of discrimination that led police officers to think he might be an illegal immigrant based on his appearance.

Shee joined a civil-rights lawsuit filed in May 2010 against SB 1070 by a coalition of civil-rights and immigrant-advocacy groups. He is one of 10 individuals and the only Asian-American to be publicly named in the lawsuit. The other plaintiffs are Latinos.

The suit is pending in U.S. District Court in Phoenix.

By joining the suit, Shee demonstrated how SB 1070 has affected not just Latinos but also other minority groups, said Jessica Chia, an immigration and immigrant-rights staff attorney at the Asian American Justice Center. In October, the center awarded Shee its national American Courage Award at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.

“He has spoken so publicly and so courageously in the fight against really racist and discriminatory practices,” Chia said. “He has really raised the issue to a national agenda ... for Latinos and Asians but also for citizens and non-citizens, because we all know that the harm of the law is much broader than just one segment of the population.”

Chia said Shee’s involvement in the civil-rights lawsuit is particularly significant because Asians are less likely to speak out against discrimination than other minorities, in large part because they represent a much smaller part of the population.

Although Asians are the fastest-growing minority group in Arizona, they make up just 3 percent of the state’s 6.4 million population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Latinos make up more than 30 percent of the population.

The federal lawsuit’s main claim is that SB 1070 violates the 14th Amendment’s right to equal protection by subjecting minorities to police stops, detention, questioning and arrests based on their race or national origin.

Since the federal lawsuit, police across the state have received training developed by the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board on how to enforce the law without violating civil rights. The training says that language and ethnicity alone do not provide an officer enough reason to contact immigration authorities regarding a suspect’s immigration status, but they can be used to establish reasonable suspicion when combined with other factors.

The civil-rights lawsuit is separate from a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Justice Department. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the most controversial provision of SB 1070 requiring police to question suspected illegal immigrants about their status, could be enforced.

Shee traveled to Washington, D.C., in April to speak out against SB 1070 on the steps of the Supreme Court on the day justices heard arguments in the Justice Department’s lawsuit.

Shee’s father was a Chinese immigrant. His mother’s parents are from Spain. He speaks Spanish fluently and knows some Chinese.

The father of three, Shee is vice president of the Asian Chamber of Commerce. In the 1990s, he founded the Asian Hispanic Alliance, a group that is no longer active.

Madeline Ong-Sakata, executive director of the Asian Chamber of Commerce, said many Asian Americans in Arizona supported SB 1070. Shee’s helped change perceptions of how the law could apply to them, she said.

His involvement also reminded Asian Americans that many of their ancestors came to the U.S. illegally as “paper sons,” she added.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 essentially barred the entry of all Chinese immigrants to the U.S. except for the children of U.S. citizens. To get around the discriminatory law, Chinese men often falsely claimed to be U.S. citizens after the giant 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed government records, then returned to China to bring back “sons” who were not really their children. These children were sons on paper only, thus the name “paper sons.”

“A lot of Asians forget that,” Ong-Sakata said. “They have this false idea that (SB 1070) doesn’t include them and every so often Jim and I have to remind them that a lot of their parents came here illegally through the fake papers.”

What’s more, many Asian Americans ignore the fact that a large number of Asian immigrants are living in the U.S. illegally, she said. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that about one in 10 illegal immigrants in the U.S. is Asian.

Chia said Shee has also drawn attention to the connection between SB 1070 and the U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

“This is really important to us, not only because of the historical link to Chinese exclusion and the Japanese internment, but also because presently, it encourages Arizona law enforcement to stop and question anybody they think looks or sounds foreign and obviously this will have direct impact on Asian citizens and immigrants” she said.

You expect the government to give you a fair trial?? Don't make me laugh!!!!

Trial in boy's death in 2004 drags on

By Michael Kiefer The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Nov 25, 2012 9:46 PM

Maybe Jeffrey Martinson killed his son in 2004, and maybe he didn’t.

But he’s been in custody for eight years awaiting resolution to his case, first lingering in jail because there were not enough qualified defense attorneys to handle a glut of death-penalty cases.

He finally went to trial last year in Maricopa County Superior Court, and last November he was convicted by a jury of first-degree murder. The verdict was thrown out, however, after defense attorneys proved that a jury forewoman had railroaded her peers to find Martinson guilty.

Then the gamesmanship began.

The prosecutor, Deputy County Attorney Frankie Grimsman, tried to quash the original 2004 indictment and recharged Martinson on slightly different counts. That way, she could increase her options for getting a conviction and possibly remove the defense attorneys who got the mistrial from the case, as well as the judge who made the mistrial ruling.

When that didn’t work, she filed numerous motions to have the judge and the attorneys removed from the case. But the trial judge, Sally Duncan, and the Superior Court presiding criminal judge ruled against her on all counts.

On Tuesday, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that Grimsman can, in fact, dismiss the original indictment — unless Duncan wants to amend her findings or hold new hearings to determine if the prosecutor acted in bad faith.

But the battle is not over.

“My instinct is we’ll probably take it up to the (Arizona) Supreme Court,” said Michael Terribile, the lead defense attorney in Martinson’s case.

If the high court declines to review the case or sides with Grimsman, then she could succeed in getting Duncan off the case and earn some leeway in her argument.

The trial has been much discussed in the legal community, and not just because of the rare juror-misconduct mistrial. Court observers describe Grimsman’s tactics as an unprecedented attempt to stack the deck to ensure a conviction.

“It outrageous, it’s misconduct,” said retired Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Kenneth Fields. “They’re trying to improperly influence the outcome of the case.”

Mary Durand, a mitigation expert for death-penalty cases, agreed.

“I’ve been doing this for 42 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said.

A spokesman for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said no one in the office, including Grimsman, would comment on the case because it is pending.

Meanwhile, Martinson, 46, remains in limbo.

Death ruled overdose

In 2004, Martinson was in a custody battle over his 5-year-old son, Josh, on the night Josh died. Martinson — through his lawyers — claimed he found the boy floating in the bathtub and could not resuscitate him. Then Martinson claimed that in his anguish, he tried to kill himself but failed.

An autopsy showed that the boy had muscle relaxants in his bloodstream, and the medical examiner ruled that Josh died of a drug overdose.

It appeared to be a murder-suicide, but Martinson was not charged with first-degree premeditated murder, but rather with first-degree felony murder, meaning that prosecutors wanted to prove that Josh died during the commission of another crime, specifically child abuse. Nonetheless, during the trial before Judge Duncan, Terribile and his co-counsel, Treasure VanDreumel, sparred with prosecutor Grimsman over whether Grimsman could present evidence showing premeditation.

In fact, in a later court ruling, Duncan wrote, “The court further finds that the State repeatedly represented to the court that the state did not have sufficient evidence to charge the defendant with premeditated murder while continuing to advance arguments to support a jury finding intent to kill as a basis for convicting the defendant.”

“The court further finds that the state either deliberately disregarded the court’s rulings or acted in a willfully blind manner.”

Terribile and VanDreumel argued that the death was consistent with drowning and that there was DNA on the bottle of muscle-relaxant tablets that could not be identified but could not be eliminated as coming from the boy. The defense maintained the boy may have taken the tablets himself, and Terribile points out that the pills resembled candy.

Martinson was found guilty, and the jury determined that there were aggravating factors that made him eligible for the death penalty. But before the jury could sentence Martinson, a juror came forward to tell Terribile and VanDreumel about what was going on in the jury room. The forewoman was accused of browbeating other jurors into finding Martinson guilty.

In March, after months of hearings, Duncan declared a mistrial based on juror misconduct and improper testimony from a medical examiner that Duncan had mistakenly allowed into the trial. She ordered a new trial.

In June, Terribile attended a routine pretrial hearing at which Grimsman said that the original indictment had been dismissed and that she had taken the case back to a grand jury, this time charging felony murder based on child abuse and an alternative theory of premeditated murder. Under federal law, jurors do not have to reach a unanimous decision on a theory of death — that is, premeditated or felony — as long as they all agree on one or the other.

Grimsman had also dropped the intent to seek the death penalty, and she represented to the judge that new counsel had been appointed. It was news to the judge and to Terribile, but Duncan vacated the trial.

Within weeks, after motions filed by Terribile and VanDreumel, it became apparent that Grimsman had never filed a motion to dismiss the original indictment before the new one was obtained, which is in violation of the state Rules of Criminal Procedure. Duncan reinstated the original indictment.

A flurry of motions

In a subsequent ruling, Duncan reiterated that the prosecutor could not re-indict Martinson for premeditated first-degree murder because she had not presented any new evidence of premeditation, other than a posttrial talk with the mistrial jury, whose members said they thought Martinson intended to kill his son.

Duncan wrote that “absent new evidence or other legally permissible bases, the state cannot seek to indict the defendant, after a trial and after the granting of a mistrial, where the state has previously argued that there is no evidence to support a premeditated murder.”

Furthermore, Duncan ruled that Grimsman could not make arguments that Martinson suffocated the child.

Grimsman filed at least four motions to remove Duncan from the case, claiming she was biased against the prosecution. Duncan refused to recuse herself, and Presiding Criminal Judge Douglas Rayes refused to remove her.

Grimsman then turned to the defense attorneys and again tried to remove Terribile and VanDreumel, this time calling in the head of the county’s Office of Public Defense Services to testify that the attorneys were overpaid and that because the case was no longer a death-penalty trial, the defendant was not entitled to two attorneys.

The matter was argued before Rayes, who sternly detailed the circumstances of Terribile’s appointment to the case. Terribile had long refused to do contract work for the county, but given a dearth of qualified capital-case attorneys and the fact that Martinson was constitutionally at risk of being denied a speedy trial, a former associate presiding criminal judge had persuaded him to take the case at a higher-than-normal rate of pay.

As for the question of two lawyers vs. one for a non-capital case, Rayes noted that the attorneys had split the duties and should not be punished for having a successful outcome in the first trial. He kept Terribile and VanDreumel on the case.

“The state’s bent over backwards trying to get the judge off the case and trying to get us off the case,” Terribile said.

But prosecutors don’t get to pick the defense attorneys they go up against, as Durand pointed out.

“Now anyone who deals with the defense is considered evil,” she said. “I think we’re lost if we can’t provide a fair trial.”

Martinson went back on trial Oct. 1, but Grimsman filed a special action in the Arizona Court of Appeals, and the trial ground to a halt. VanDreumel and Grimsman argued before that court Oct. 24, and theruling came down last Tuesday.

So, Terribile and VanDreumel will ask the Arizona Supreme Court to reconsider whether the original indictment can and should be dismissed.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Martinson remains in jail after eight years without a final determination of whether he belongs there.

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

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????

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.”

Teens get lap dances at party for boy, 16, cops say

Source

Teens get lap dances at party for boy, 16, cops say

Associated Press Thu Nov 15, 2012 9:24 AM

SOUTH GLENS FALLS, New York — Police are investigating reports that exotic dancers performed lap dances on teenagers at a boy’s surprise 16th birthday party in New York state.

Saratoga County District Attorney James says child endangerment is among the potential charges.

South Glens Falls Police Chief Kevin Judd says photos on social networking sites were given to his department by people concerned about the Nov. 3 party.

At least one image shows a scantily clad, tattooed woman clinging upside down to a seated teen as others look on.

Murphy said Thursday that investigators are trying to determine who hired the dancers and if the bowling alley venue served alcohol to any of the 80 adults and teens.

A man at the Spare Time bowling alley says he can’t comment.

Stopping suspicious people is illegal!!!

Source

Profiling flap overblown

Nov. 26, 2012 06:24 PM

Regarding Monday's front-page story "Asian-American says Latinos not only ones hit by SB 1070," Mr. Shee's dealings with Arizona law enforcement and his charge of racial profiling sounds like he is making a mountain out of a mole hill.

I remember being stopped in Boston, Mass., (known as a bastion of liberal thinking) by local police while driving through town with my friend. While our IDs and vehicle IDs were being checked, I asked the officer why he stopped us. He replied that we looked suspicious.

Perhaps a Black man with a large afro and a White man with a pony tail down his back looked like trouble. I don't really care. We did what Mr. Shee should have done: Realized that police are taught to be suspicious of everything out of the norm.

If your window tint is too dark, you will get stopped. If you park on a side street, possibly in a bad area of town, you will get stopped. If you have done nothing wrong, get over it.

Be glad the police are looking out for everyone's safety.

-- Ray White, Phoenix

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

Sadly new President Enrique Peña Nieto promises to continue this insane "war on drugs" which is mostly paid for by the USA ($2 billion to date or $20 for each of Mexico's 100 million people).

Source

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.”

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!

Source

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

Former JP Lester Pearce censured, fined in campaign case

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Former JP Lester Pearce censured, fined in campaign case

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Nov 27, 2012 9:28 PM

Lester Pearce, a former justice of the peace and the brother of ex-state Sen. Russell Pearce, was formally censured for his role in campaigning for his brother and fined $1,500 in a ruling handed down last week.

Lester Pearce, who resigned in April, did not contest the Commission on Judicial Conduct’s conclusion that he accompanied his niece while she gathered petition signatures for one of Russell Pearce’s opponents, nor that he spoke at a political meeting where Russell Pearce’s election was a topic of discussion, according to findings Lester Pearce and the commission agreed to.

Lester Pearce, 67, served as justice of the peace in Mesa from 1997 until he resigned in April to launch an unsuccessful campaign for a seat on the county Board of Supervisors.

Lester Pearce’s violations involving the campaign signatures are related to the candidacy of Olivia Cortes, a Mesa resident whose campaign against Russell Pearce was derailed after allegations that Cortes’ presence on the ballot was designed to draw votes away from Russell Pearce’s main opponent, Jerry Lewis.

Lewis went on to defeat Russell Pearce by 12 percentage points.

According to the agreement, Lester Pearce in early September 2011 accompanied his niece on at least one occasion while she collected nominating-petition signatures for Cortes.

There is some dispute about whether Lester Pearce spoke in support of his brother at a meeting of Legislative District 19 in Mesa that same month, with some claiming he spoke in support of Russell and others saying Lester spoke about the role of judges and the Constitution.

Pearce acknowledged to the commission that his speaking at a political meeting where the recall was a topic of discussion could be construed as political activity, according to the agreement.

Man injured during arrest at Buckeye Walmart files lawsuit

Man injured during arrest at Buckeye Walmart files lawsuit

By Cecilia Chan The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:34 PM

A 55-year-old California man who was accused of shoplifting and knocked into bloody unconsciousness in a Buckeye Walmart last year is suing the town and a police officer.

Jerald Newman’s lawsuit against the town of Buckeye and Officer Kevin Rorke claims false arrest, assault and battery and emotional distress. Newman, his wife, Pamela, and their grandson Nicholas Nava, 13, filed the lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior Court on Nov. 20.

The Newmans are seeking, among other things, compensatory damages, punitive damages and attorney fees.

Buckeye spokesman Bob Bushner declined to comment, saying the town has not been served with the lawsuit.

Pamela Newman, who was contacted at her home in Fontana, Calif., referred all media calls to her Mesa attorney, Todd Nolan.

Nolan could not be reached for comment.

The Newmans, who were visiting relatives in Buckeye, took their grandson to an early Black Friday sale on Thanksgiving Day at a Walmart when the incident occurred.

Rorke used a "leg sweep" to take Newman to the ground at the Buckeye Walmart after an assistant store manager alerted Rorke that Newman had concealed a video game under his shirt, according to Maricopa County Superior Court documents.

Rorke used the maneuver after Newman tried to pull away when Rorke told him he was under arrest and placed one handcuff on his left wrist, the documents state.

According to the lawsuit, Newman had a video game in his hand as a hoard of shoppers began shoving each other and grabbing items from other shoppers.

Newman placed the game in his pant’s waistband as he went to help his grandson, “who was in danger of being trampled,” the suit says.

It further states that Rorke slammed Newman to the ground with such force, it knocked him unconscious, leaving him with a profusely bleeding head wound.

Multiple videos shot by customers showing Newman lying apparently unconscious in a pool of blood went viral on the Internet.

After Newman was released from the hospital, he was booked into jail on a misdemeanor count of shoplifting and a felony count of resisting arrest, court documents show. He was later released on $900 bond, according to the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.

The Arizona Department of Public Safety investigated the use of force on Newman and recommended an assault charge against Rorke but the charge never materialized.

“We declined to file charges based on the lack of reasonable likelihood of conviction,” said Jerry Cobb, spokesman for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

To date, no charges have been filed against Newman either by Buckeye or the county attorney, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit states that due to the incident the couple and their grandson suffered “significant personal injury, emotional distress and psychological trauma, loss of consortium and loss of enjoyment of life.”

The suit also states that Newman sustained losses including medical expenses and lost wages.

Nicholas “suffered the psychological trauma of watching the man who raised him wrongfully arrested, subjected to excessive force and assaulted by a police officer,” the suit adds.

The Newmans have legal custody of Nicholas, who continues to suffer from psychological distress, the suit says.

Lawsuit targets ‘locator’ chips in student IDs

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.

More questions raised on Chicago speed cameras

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More questions raised on Chicago speed cameras

By David Kidwell, Chicago Tribune reporter

6:54 a.m. CST, November 28, 2012 Even as Chicago prepares to test speed cameras next week, problems in Baltimore's 3-year-old camera program are raising questions about one of the bidders for Mayor Rahm Emanuel's controversial proposal that could target speeders in school and park zones over half the city.

Xerox State & Local Solutions Inc., one of two firms selected by the Emanuel administration to test cameras in Chicago, has come under scrutiny in recent months for faulty equipment and thousands of erroneous tickets issued in Baltimore over the past three years.

Judges sided with motorists in more than half of the contested tickets examined in a Nov. 18 investigative report by The Baltimore Sun, which like the Chicago Tribune is owned by Tribune Co. The report followed months of complaints and controversy about Baltimore's program, which is under review by a mayoral task force. The Xerox firm, which is owned by the photocopier giant, is being replaced by another contractor in January.

Xerox officials said its problems in Baltimore account for less than 1 percent of all the tickets issued under the program, and that the cameras have slowed down motorists and reduced accidents.

"We strive for perfection, but on occasion, errors do occur," Xerox spokesman Chris Gilligan said. "When any type of issue arises in the program, we work closely with the municipality to quickly resolve it in a manner that least inconveniences the public, reflecting our strong focus and commitment to customer service."

Emanuel administration officials refused to answer questions about their bidding process this week, including whether they considered the firm's performance in Baltimore. City officials will not even confirm the names of the two companies selected for the testing phase of the camera rollout, citing a need for confidentiality because of the "ongoing procurement process."

The city announced last week that it would test speed cameras at four Chicago locations, to begin Monday and go through Jan. 3. No citations will be issued during the test period.

"A variety of factors determined the test locations, including location within a safety zone, frequency of speed related crashes, and ease of accessibility to power," the city said in a news release issued the day before Thanksgiving. "The systems will be removed after the evaluation period."

Sources involved in the process have confirmed that Xerox and American Traffic Solutions Inc. will each get to test their equipment at two of the locations. Workers were installing equipment at one of the locations assigned to Xerox on Tuesday.

American Traffic Solutions is not without its own controversy. In 2011, officials in Canada returned about $13 million in speeding fines issued by a single faulty camera. The cameras were installed by ATS, but the company blamed the problem on the local government that maintained the cameras.

Last month, a third top contender for the lucrative speed camera contract was disqualified by Emanuel after the Tribune disclosed allegations of corruption in the city's 10-year-old red-light program. Redflex Traffic Systems Inc., which has helped run the $300 million red-light program since its inception in 2003, was eliminated from the bidder list after it acknowledged its failure to report internal allegations of corruption in the Chicago program involving the city official who oversaw the contract.

Those revelations have prompted an ongoing investigation by city Inspector General Joseph Ferguson into the close relationship between Redflex and the city official who oversaw its contract.

Redflex's Australian parent company, trying to salvage the red-light contract with the city, has hired the powerhouse Chicago law firm Sidley Austin to conduct its own investigation. Heading that probe is former Inspector General David Hoffman, who is now a partner at the firm and a mayoral appointee on Emanuel's infrastructure trust board.

City officials, likewise, do not want the Redflex controversy to slow down the mayor's timetable for getting speed cameras up and running. Emanuel is counting on raising at least $20 million from tickets issued to motorists by speed cameras in 2013 to help balance his budget. The mayor has insisted the cameras are for the safety of children and denied critics' claims that it is simply a city money grab.

The cameras, including mobile units, can be placed within one-eighth of a mile of public schools and parks around the city.

Nine potential bidders answered the city's request for proposals, and early questions about how the program would work were centered on a quirk in Illinois law that says children must be visibly present before school zone limits can be enforced. Vendors were stymied by the need to collect photographs not only of a speeding car and its license tag but of children within 300 feet of the violation.

A spokesman for ATS said Tuesday that the resolution so far is simple: School zone citations will be issued only when children are in the photographs. If children cannot be seen in the photos, normal speed limits will be in force.

There will be two test sites on the North Side: Warren Park in the 6500 block of North Western Avenue and Near North Montessori School in the 1400 block of West Division Street. There also will be two test spots on the South Side: McKinley Park in the 2200 block of West Pershing Road and Dulles Elementary School in the 6300 block of South King Drive.

In Baltimore, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake formed a task force to examine the program, the city moved to oust Xerox as its vendor in favor of another company the city says offered a higher return, and officials began an internal review surrounding one camera that persistently produced erroneous tickets. Many of the complaints came from commercial trucking companies that claimed their drivers were repeatedly cited in error, and also that little was done to resolve the issue despite months of repeated complaints.

As part of its investigation of those complaints, The Sun used video time stamps to determine the speeds of vehicles as they passed through the camera's path in eight cases, and then compared them to the speeds listed on the citations. In each case, the newspaper said, the speeds on the citations were overstated and did not warrant a ticket.

Xerox spokesman Gilligan told The Sun that the company conducted an investigation of the camera complaints and "determined that the speeds recorded for an extremely limited number of high-profile vehicles were excessive due to radar effects, most likely reflection off the large metallic surfaces of these vehicles."

"Unfortunately, in these instances, the radar effects were not identified due to human error," Gilligan told the Baltimore newspaper.

Both Xerox and Baltimore officials defend the speed camera program as an effective tool in slowing down motorists and preventing crashes. They said 6,000 erroneous tickets out of 1.6 million issued is minuscule. But most tickets are simply paid by mail and never challenged, records show, meaning it is impossible to determine how many more erroneous tickets might have been issued and paid.

The city acknowledged that during the life of the program, only 19,689 camera-issued speeding tickets were challenged in court. Of those, judges threw out the ticket in 1,897 cases. The Sun reporters reviewed 415 cases overseen by five judges and found that judges had sided with motorists in more than half of those cases.

Xerox Corp., best known for its onetime domination of the photocopier market, entered the speed camera business in 2009 when it acquired Affiliated Computer Services Inc. Prior to Xerox taking it over, Affiliated Computer Services had been plagued by scandals involving its camera programs.

Chicago's longtime red-light camera vendor, Redflex, is now under scrutiny for its close relationship to the former city official who oversaw the contract since it began.

John Bills, who retired in 2011 as the city's managing deputy commissioner of transportation, took a job soon thereafter as a consultant to a Redflex-funded traffic safety group. Bills is also under investigation for accepting a luxury hotel stay from a Redflex executive in 2010 and for his longtime friendship with a Chicago man who got a job with Redflex and collected $576,000 in commissions plus $50,000 annually to be a Redflex customer service representative.

Bills has denied any wrongdoing. Redflex was disqualified from pursuing the speed camera contract because of the hotel stay and because the company failed to report to the city that one of its own vice presidents had made internal allegations of improprieties against Bills in 2010. The company said it hired a Chicago law firm to conduct an "exhaustive" investigation of those allegations, and found them to be without merit. It acknowledges however, that neither Bills nor its customer service representative were interviewed.

Redflex's current contract on the city's red-light program expires Jan. 13, and the city has made no move to replace the longtime vendor, which has collected nearly $100 million in fees from the city since 2003.

dkidwell@tribune.com

Lawsuit expected on immigrant driver’s licenses

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Lawsuit expected on immigrant driver’s licenses

By Daniel González The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Nov 28, 2012 11:36 PM

A group of civil-liberties and immigrant-rights organizations is expected to file a lawsuit today challenging Gov. Jan Brewer’s executive order denying driver’s licenses to young undocumented immigrants approved for federal work permits under President Barack Obama’s deferred-action program.

The lawsuit would mark the first legal challenge against a state for denying driver’s licenses to young undocumented immigrants authorized to live and work temporarily in the U.S. under the program.

The lawsuit could affect other states that have also denied driver’s licenses to non-citizens protected from deportation under the program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

The lawsuit is expected to be filed by the Arizona and national chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the National Immigration Law Center.

The same groups are involved in an ongoing civil-rights lawsuit challenging Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law, Senate Bill 1070.

The organizations have scheduled a news conference for this morning on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University to announce a “major lawsuit against the state of Arizona.” The groups have declined to discuss the lawsuit.

But several immigration lawyers said the ACLU and other groups have been working on a legal challenge since Brewer issued her executive order on Aug. 15, the day the federal government began accepting applications for the deferred-action-from-deportation program.

“This lawsuit and the state having to defend that lawsuit has been long expected,” said Gerald Burns, a Chandler immigration lawyer who represents several young undocumented immigrants who have applied for deferred action under the program.

The deferred-action program, announced by Obama on June 15, allows young undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to apply for a two-year reprieve from deportation. Those approved for the program by meeting criteria, including graduating from high school or obtaining a GED diploma, and passing a criminal-background check, also receive a federal employment-authorization document, or work permit.

Immigrant advocates say deferred-action recipients need driver’s licenses to travel to school and jobs.

As many as 1.7 million undocumented immigrants under 31 brought to the U.S. before they were 16 could be eligible for the program, including 80,000 in Arizona.

A total of 308,935 undocumented immigrants had applied for deferred action nationally, including 11,074 in Arizona, as of Nov. 15, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

A total of 53,273 nationally have been approved, according to the DHS.

Obama’s program was seen as an election-year move aimed at winning back the support of Latino voters disappointed with his failure to get immigration reforms, including a legalization program for the nation’s 11million undocumented immigrants, passed during his first term in office as promised. The program is credited with helping Obama win re-election with more than 70 percent of the Latino vote.

Brewer, meanwhile, has taken a hard line on immigration. Her order was seen as a way of rebuffing Obama’s deferred-action program as political payback after he asked the Justice Department to file a lawsuit challenging SB 1070, which Brewer said was needed because the federal government had failed to stop illegal immigration.

“They changed the rules in the middle of the game when it came to driver’s licenses and they did it as a political reaction to DACA,” Burns said.

In her executive order, Brewer directed all state agencies to take steps to ensure that any undocumented immigrants granted deferred action would not receive any public benefits from the state, including driver’s licenses. As a result, the Arizona Department of Transportation’s Motor Vehicle Division determined that the agency would not give driver’s licenses to anyone with a federal employment-authorization document obtained through Obama’s deferred-action program.

State law requires anyone applying for a driver’s license to prove their presence in the United States is authorized under federal law. Brewer has argued that the employment-authorization documents issued to deferred-action recipients don’t meet state law because DHS officials have said the documents don’t give undocumented immigrants any sort of legal status, just the ability to live and work in the U.S. temporarily without the threat of being deported.

But Brewer’s order contradicts the state’s long-standing policy of granting driver’s licenses to non-citizens, including illegal immigrants, with the same employment-authorization documents granted to deferred-action recipients, said Regina Jefferies, a Phoenix immigration lawyer and chair of the Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

For years, the federal government has granted work permits to non-citizens for a variety of reasons, including to illegal immigrants with deportation-cancellation cases pending in Immigration Court.

Last week, The Arizona Republic and its broadcast partner 12 News reported that over the past eight years, Arizona has issued licenses and state ID cards nearly 40,000 times to non-citizens who had federal employment-authorization documents, according to data obtained through a public-records request from the MVD. The data also showed that since Brewer’s order, the state has issued more than 1,000 driver’s licenses or ID cards to non-citizens with work permits while denying licenses to those with work permits issued through Obama’s program.

Burns, the Chandler lawyer, said it does not make sense politically to continue to deny driver’s licenses to deferred-action recipients in light of a growing push by Republicans in Congress to legalize undocumented immigrants to attract Latino voters after Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s defeat in November.

On Tuesday, retiring Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, introduced legislation that would let young undocumented immigrants earn permanent legal status, but not citizenship, if they graduate from college or serve four years in the military.

“Does it really make sense for the state of Arizona to fight and expend resources on this?” Burns said. “The rest of the U.S. is moving towards doing something about comprehensive immigration reform.”

Muzaffar Chishti, of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University School of Law, said four states in addition to Arizona have taken action to deny driver’s licenses to deferred-action recipients: Nebraska, Texas, Michigan and Mississippi.

None has faced a legal challenge.

Four other states, California, Massachusetts, Georgia and Wisconsin, specifically allow deferred-action recipients to get driver’s licenses.

Scottsdale cop has sex at work 50 times????

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Former Scottsdale police officer accused of sex on duty may face sanctions

By Laurie Merrill The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Nov 28, 2012 5:40 PM

A former Scottsdale police officer accused of having sex 50 times while on duty and lying about it faces possible sanctions from a state police standards board.

Trevor Anderson, 43, an 11-year Scottsdale Police Department veteran, resigned in July in the wake of allegations that he had engaged in sexual relations for more than a year with a woman he met on the job, according to a report by The Arizona Peace Officers Standards and Training Bureau.

The relationship lasted until the woman became pregnant and ended badly, according to the report. The woman, who did not have the baby, filed a complaint against him, asking that he work in another district as she didn’t want him responding to her residence for either official or unofficial business, according to the report.

Earlier this month, the board voted to initiate proceedings in the case, which could ultimately result in sanctions ranging from suspension to the revocation of Anderson’s certification, which would prevent him from ever working as a police officer in Arizona, according to the board report.

Now that the board has initiated proceedings, Anderson has several options, according to board officials. He can request a hearing, voluntarily surrender his certification, stipulate as to the facts and face sanctions, or do nothing, which could also result in sanctions or loss of certification, according to board officials.

Anderson, who was also a Yuma police officer from 1994-2001, met “Ms. L” in March, 2011 after she called police concerning a problem with a then-boyfriend, the report says.

About a month later, Ms. L called Anderson, and Anderson responded in person, the report says. The next month, Anderson, who is not married, visited Ms. L at the Three Palms Motel while on duty and in full uniform in a marked Scottsdale police car and “engaged in sexual intercourse,” the report says.

“During Scottsdale police internal affairs interviews, Ms. L told investigators that she and Officer Anderson had met over 100 times with the majority of the meets involving sex while Officer Anderson was on duty,” the report says.

“Ms. L estimated they had engaged in sexual intercourse at least 50 times.”

When confronted by a sergeant on July 29, Anderson admitted to having sex while on duty and to lying about handcuffs he had given Ms. L, the report says. He resigned the next day before he was interviewed by internal affairs officers, it says.

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.

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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.

Feds steal mans helicopter for trivial reason!!!

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An Eccentric Ad Man Loses His Helicopter to the Feds

By Ray Stern Thursday, Nov 29 2012

The 69-year-old Oklahoma ad man lives in the posh Forest Highlands Golf Club in Flagstaff half the year, his hometown of Tulsa the other half. Billboards are the main business of Stokely Outdoor Advertising, the company he and his wife started in 1978. The family also owns the Stokely Event Center in Tulsa, which is rented out for weddings and other midsize events.

"When you have a helicopter, there's a certain amount of jealousy," Stokely says, after New Times reaches him by phone at his Tulsa office. "It's human nature."

Jealousy isn't responsible for Stokely's legal troubles involving his helicopter, and Stokely's not exactly saying it is. But he's acutely aware of how an un-helicoptering public might perceive his hobby — especially now, when his quarter-million-dollar toy is seized and he faces felony charges alleging he flouted federal air rules.

Though he admits he has no excuse for flying without a pilot's license, he maintains that his troubles are rooted in misunderstanding.

The problem began on October 12, 2011, when a report about a suspicious pilot came into the Flagstaff office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations.

A man had been seen on numerous occasions filling five-gallon fuel containers at the Winslow-Lindbergh Regional Airport, loading them into a Robinson R44 helicopter and stashing them around the forests near Flagstaff and Winslow. Agents began a probe immediately.

As Stokely explains it, a user of the Winslow airport saw him taking the gas cans, and "his imagination ran away from him," leading the man to make the report to the government.

In fact, the stashing of fuel containers was innocent behavior: It allowed Stokely to visit more of the Arizona hideaways he loved without worrying about whether he'd make it back to the airport.

"Very few people have the luxury of exploring the desert" like a helicopter owner can, he says. "You can check out caves. You get to fish places nobody else can get to."

He also uses his chopper for business and charity, taking advertising clients in Tulsa or schoolkids in Arizona for rides.

Stokely says he's one of the most experienced helicopter pilots in the country, having logged more than 13,000 hours in the air. The R44 is his sixth helicopter.

If he were to run low on fuel, he'd use his GPS to find the coordinates of one of the fuel-containers he'd hidden.

"I've got gas stations all over the desert," he says with a chuckle.

Homeland Security agents soon learned that the pilot wasn't engaged in anything sinister — like drug-dealing or terrorism — only harmless fishing and exploring.

Though their initial fear proved unfounded, agents discovered that the Federal Aviation Administration had denied Stokely's medical certificate in March 2011; he wasn't allowed to fly until he got it reinstated. Doctors believed he might be suffering from dementia (though Stokely sounded entirely lucid when New Times interviewed him).

Even worse, agents saw something that disturbed them when they visited Flagstaff's Pulliam Airport on October 17, 2011, to view Stokely's helicopter: The R44's official tail number, N7513Q, had been altered with a piece of black tape, making the "Q" look like an "O." No aircraft was registered under the altered number.

The next day, investigators watched as an "unidentified elderly man" — apparently Stokely — performed "some of type of work" on the chopper's tail, court records state. A day later, agents saw that the R44's tail number had been changed back to its registered number, and Stokely took off in the chopper with two other men. The airport's operation manager told agents that Stokely had informed Pulliam he'd be flying to Tulsa that day, with stops in Nevada and Utah.

The agents took the information to a grand jury, which on May 30, 2012, indicted Stokely for displaying a false or misleading registration on an aircraft and piloting the helicopter without a valid airman's certification.

But the feds needed a stronger case. Stokely's son, also a trained pilot, was next to Stokely in the chopper and could have been the pilot for the October 19, 2011, flight. According to Stokely, the U.S. Attorney's Office never told him about either the grand jury indictment or a subsequent arrest warrant.

Indeed, instead of arresting Stokely, agents conducted surveillance at the Flagstaff airport to see if they could catch him flying. On July 30, 2012, they saw Stokely roll up in his blue BMW, climb into the pilot's seat of the helicopter, lift off the tarmac, and fly away to the southwest.

A few minutes later, Stokely received a call over his radio from the flight tower. The controller told him someone had crashed into his parked car, that the police had arrived, and that Stokely needed to land immediately.

Stokely says he was "skeptical" but landed anyway. As he approached his BMW, which was still in good shape, six agents "popped up" and yelled that Stokely was under arrest. An agent handcuffed the businessman behind his back, and when Stokely complained, he says the guy told him, "It's not supposed to feel good."

He spent 34 hours behind bars until he was processed and released. His trial has been postponed until next month, but he's hoping that prosecutors cut him a deal. He'd gladly give up the helicopter to stay out of jail, he says.

Stokely denies that he altered his tail number. He says he puts tape over the numbers to make them easier to clean after they've been dirtied by the helicopter's black exhaust smoke. After a flight, he'd strip off the tape to reveal the clean numbers — but on the day the agents observed him, he forgot to take off the little piece that covered part of the "Q."

"It was an accident," he maintains.

He claims he never flew the R44 himself after his pilot's license was revoked, saying, on July 30, his intention had been only to take a 10-minute flight to ensure the vehicle was performing perfectly before his son was scheduled to fly it to Tulsa. Finally, Stokely also denies he has dementia, chalking up his failures to convince FAA doctors that he was flight-worthy to nervousness and poor math skills. On the contrary, he says, he's in great shape and "very few men can stay with me mentally or physically."

Stokely first says the FAA medical exam was triggered by complaints that he buzzed the Forest Highlands country club with his helicopter. A Forest Highlands resident interviewed by New Times says several people complained to the club after Stokely flew about 50 feet over the driving range and performed a 360-degree turning maneuver.

But Stokely calls back later to say he'd gotten his timelines wrong — the FAA medical check was routine and had nothing to do with the overflight.

"I got past the golf-course issue," he says.

Reid Pixler, an assistant U.S. Attorney handling the forfeiture of Stokely's helicopter, says government seizure of an aircraft is not unusual in cases that allege altering a tail number, though he agrees most such cases involve "international drug-dealing." Still, Pixler says, after going through the facts in the Stokely case, he believes it's "appropriate" that Stokely forfeit his helicopter.

Whatever Stokely's upcoming punishment, he doesn't plan for it to end his flying career.

"I have used up six helicopters in my lifetime," he says. "I'm sure that, in the future, there will be a number seven or number eight."

Cook County fails to curb overtime costs

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Cook County fails to curb overtime costs

By Cynthia Dizikes and Todd Lighty, Chicago Tribune reporters

November 29, 2012

As Cook County officials scramble to find ways to raise money — taxing guns, gambling machines and cigarettes — they have been unable to bring burdensome overtime costs under control.

County officials for years have promised to rein in overtime, but a Tribune analysis of payroll records shows they have largely failed, shelling out about $65.4 million in fiscal year 2011, a 1 percent drop from 2008.

The Tribune found that more than 100 county workers made at least $50,000 in overtime last year, with one hospital chef boosting his yearly paycheck to almost $118,000.

Stroger Hospital nurse Luzvilla Tortola led all county employees in overtime, making an extra $94,142 to nearly double her salary to about $190,000.

She was among 58 employees — nurses, pharmacists, a dietitian and an electrician — whose overtime made their 2011 paychecks fatter than that of Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle, who made $153,031.

Tortola said she has worked back-to-back 16-hour shifts in Stroger Hospital's neonatal intensive care unit, adding that a shortage of nurses drives up overtime costs.

"I know you want to cut overtime because there is no budget, but that is wrong," Tortola said. "You are not dealing with dummies, you are dealing with lives."

For decades, county officials have struggled to cut back on excessive extra work hours, which stress the county's resources and experts say can put workers, hospital patients and jail inmates at risk.

County lawmakers in 2005, concerned about financial and safety issues, placed a cap on the number of overtime hours employees could work in a year. But the Tribune found that hundreds of employees from 2008 through 2011 routinely exceeded that limit.

Preckwinkle, who took office in late 2010, said officials are tackling overtime among a number of workplace issues.

"We understand that we have a constellation of issues here around who shows up, whether they get overtime, how often they use family and medical leave, all that," Preckwinkle said. "It became apparent to us in the first two years that these are issues that we have to address."

Preckwinkle has cut overall county spending by about $100 million since taking office, and she eliminated the despised penny-on-the-dollar sales tax increase passed under her predecessor, Todd Stroger.

But other county fees and taxes continue to rise.

County commissioners this month approved a $2.95 billion budget for next year that places a $25 tax on new gun sales, a 1.25 percent use tax on out-of-county purchases of more than $3,500, a $1,000-a-year tax on slot machines and $200-a-year tax on video gambling terminals.

Those taxes, coupled with some fee increases, are projected to raise $41.7 million — about $24 million less than what the county spent on overtime last year.

But Preckwinkle's administration says that spending is coming under control, estimating that overtime in 2012 will drop by about $4 million.

Highest overtime

Overtime is highest in the Cook County Health and Hospitals System. The system, which serves as a safety net for the poor and uninsured, runs Stroger and Provident hospitals, Oak Forest Health Center and 16 health care clinics.

The Health and Hospitals System accounted for about 61 percent of the total overtime paid. And in each of the last four years, the health system has exceeded its budget for overtime, running up about $40 million a year.

Dr. Ram Raju, who in fall 2011 became chief executive officer of the county's health system, said overtime is "a concern" of his and he is working to reduce it.

However, Raju said he expected that overtime levels would remain roughly the same in 2012, for a variety of reasons, including nagging nurse shortages, staffing for May's NATO summit and increased violence that led to an uptick in emergency room visits.

"It is not one thing," he said. "(There are) so many different facets to this overall issue."

Experts say excessive overtime can harm patient care.

The American Nurses Association cited a 2004 federal study that concluded that working long days increases the likelihood of medical mistakes. The study, commissioned by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that nurses who work shifts longer than 121/2 hours were three times more likely to make an error.

Working more than 40 hours in a week also "significantly increased" the risk of mistakes, according to the study. More than half of the errors involved administering medication to a patient.

Cap ignored

In response to a 2005 Tribune story about excessive overtime, Cook County commissioners unanimously approved a policy that capped workers' overtime hours. The policy prohibits employees from working more than 624 hours of overtime per year, except in emergencies.

The Tribune's analysis of 2011 payroll records, however, found that 396 county workers — 303 of them in health care — eclipsed the 624-hour cap.

Preckwinkle and Raju said they were unaware of the overtime cap.

Commissioner Larry Suffredin, D-Evanston, said he was surprised Preckwinkle and Raju did not know of the cap and that he was disappointed that overtime hours were still an issue.

"The reason we passed that ordinance was because we thought it wasn't healthy for anybody to work those kind of hours," Suffredin said. "It opens us up to greater liability on a number of fronts, potential workers' compensation and potential lawsuits."

Tortola was paid last year for 1,411 hours of overtime, averaging more than 27 extra hours every week. She was one of three nurses, all at Stroger Hospital, who logged more than 1,400 extra hours.

Tortola said she often volunteers to work overtime because she is the main breadwinner in her family and also financially supports relatives in the Philippines.

"It's something that I want to do," Tortola said. "I need it financially. That is the No. 1 reason you need to do overtime."

Nurses at Stroger Hospital, the system's flagship facility, accounted for the 10 biggest overtime earners.

Although Illinois law prohibits mandatory overtime except in emergencies, the nurses union said nurses at times feel pressured to work longer hours.

"They say they're not forcing you to work overtime, but you can't walk away from your patient," said Martese Chism, chief nurse representative for the union at Stroger Hospital. "You know, you could say, 'No.' But you don't want to go home, you know, sleep with that on your conscience if something happens."

Christine Zook, the National Nurses Organizing Committee's labor representative at the health system, said that if the county wants to decrease overtime, officials need to hire more nurses.

Health and Hospitals System officials estimate there are nearly 250 nurse vacancies systemwide, which they plan to fill in the next few months.

"They are not hiring enough people to make up for attrition, and they are (making up for) it with overtime," Zook said. "A lot of nurses will work overtime, but you get burned out at some point and you just can't do all the hours. So it is a pretty dire situation."

Raju acknowledged that relying on overtime to maintain staffing levels was a "flawed strategy."

But he said overtime has not had a negative impact on patients, saying he balances patient care with nurses' fatigue.

"Sometimes I need to walk a fine line between both," Raju said. "We will make sure that we are able to provide care, at the same time ... I don't want burnout nurses."

Sheriff's OT increases

The sheriff's office, the second-largest county agency behind the hospitals system, has seen overtime increase about 25 percent in 2011 compared with 2008.

The big driver of overtime is the sprawling Cook County Jail, which houses about 9,700 inmates, a couple of thousand of whom have complex mental health issues. Of the 44 sheriff's employees who totaled more than 624 hours of overtime last year, 37 worked in the jail.

A correctional sergeant, Annette Thomas, worked more overtime hours than any other sheriff's employee — 1,445. Thomas could not be reached for comment.

Frank Bilecki, a sheriff's spokesman, said jail overtime will come down with the hiring of more than 700 correctional officers, currently under way.

The hiring of more correctional officers is the result of a 2010 agreement between the sheriff and the U.S. Department of Justice, which had found squalid and unsafe conditions at the jail. Until those hires can be fully made, correctional officers have to work overtime to make sure the jail meets federal guidelines, Bilecki said.

"For the safety of detainees, staff and visitors, a certain number of correctional officers need to be in place to secure the jail," he said.

One of the biggest overtime earners was not a jail employee but a sheriff's police radio technician, Stephen Pamon. Pamon logged 1,442 overtime hours last year, according to payroll records. He worked so much overtime that he more than doubled his salary to nearly $112,000.

Pamon said there was a good reason for that. He said his work was part of a federal grant, the Urban Area Security Initiative — a Homeland Security grant program. The program is to improve regional emergency preparedness in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Under the program, the county will be reimbursed for all of Pamon's overtime, said Undersheriff Zelda Whittler. "We are on top of overtime, and we're addressing it by being fiscally responsible," she said.

What's Pamon done with the extra money? "I don't have time to spend it because I'm working so much," he said.

Another energetic employee was Robert L. Scott, a chef at then-Oak Forest Hospital. Scott's regular salary in 2011 was $64,822.44, but with overtime he was paid $117,983.96 — boosting his salary by about 82 percent.

He said he resented questions about how much he earned in overtime, saying he should be congratulated for working so hard.

Scott, who has since retired, said he earned his overtime because people failed to come to work.

"When people don't show up for work, you need overtime," he said. "When you are involved in patient care, you can't just abandon these people.

"I believe in this country when a person works, you must get paid, not with some slap on the back or a pat on the butt," Scott said.

cdizikes@tribune.com tlighty@tribune.com Twitter @cdizikes Twitter @tlighty

Woman charged for sex with human skeleton

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Woman charged for sex with human skeleton

Published: 20 Nov 12 13:19 CET

A woman in western Sweden who was arrested after police found skeletons in her apartment has now been charged for using the bones as sex toys, a hobby she claimed was motivated by an interest in history.

“I have never heard of a case like this and neither have my colleagues, so I dare to say that this kind of case is quite uncommon,” prosecutor Kristina Ehrenborg-Staffas told The Local.

A 37-year-old woman, who was arrested in September, was formally charged on Tuesday at the Gothenburg District Court for the crime of “violating the peace of the dead” (brott mot griftesfriden).

The prosecutor could not explain how the woman had managed to collect almost an entire skeleton, but explained that the human remains had been used in an “unethical” way.

"In the confidential section of the investigation we have material which indicates she used them in sexual situations," the prosecutor told the TT news agency.

The woman is believed to have used the human bones for sexual gratification. The evidence that the prosecution presented to the press on Tuesday included two CDs labelled “My necrophilia” and “My first experience” which contained a number of document files and pictures.

However, a psychological evaluation of the woman shows that she is not mentally ill, at least not in any legal sense of the term.

“Some of the photos show a woman licking a skull," Ehrenborg-Staffas told The Local.

"We claim it’s her, but she claims it's someone else and that she found the pictures on the internet.”

The prosecutor believes the woman is "fascinated" with death.

“She has a lot of photos of morgues and chapels, and documents about how to have sex with recently deceased and otherwise dead people,” Ehrenborg-Staffas told The Local.

“You have to ask yourself why she would have those pictures.”

Meanwhile, Katarina Öberg, head of the centre of Andrology and Sexual Medicine at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, admitted that this was the first time she had heard of such a case in Sweden.

“During my ten years I have never had a patient with necrophilia. Although, I guess it is not really something that one confesses to having,” she told The Local.

Evidence also included pictures from a morgue, which were found in a secret compartment in the woman's home, alongside body bags and a drill.

Police emphasized, however, that they had no proof the woman had been digging up graves, according to TT.

The woman pleaded not guilty and claimed she had not done anything illegal.

“She admits to having the bones, but says she collected them out of a historical and archaeological interest,” Ehrenborg-Staffas said.

According to the prosecution, the woman has also sold skulls over the internet.

The latest transaction was between the woman and a person in Uppsala, eastern Sweden. The buyer had allegedly stocked up on three skulls and a spine.

The strange case came to the attention of police by chance after they were informed that a gunshot had been fired from the woman’s apartment in September.

She had also reportedly bragged to some nearby children about keeping knives and dead people in her apartment.

When officers entered her apartment, they immediately called for back-up after finding skeleton parts and knives in the woman’s living room.

At first the woman was arrested on suspicion of murder, but these charges have now been changed to violating the peace of the dead.

If found guilty, the woman faces penalties ranging from fines up to a maximum of two years in prison.

Eric Johansson

(news@thelocal.se)

Source

Woman Charged For Allegedly Having Sex With Skeleton In Sweden

By Emily Thomas Posted: 11/20/2012 4:37 pm EST

A woman in southwestern Sweden took “boning” to a new level, police contend, and may face up to two years in the slammer.

The 37-year-old woman is accused of necrophilia and was formally charged on Tuesday at the Gothenburg District Court for the crime of “violating the peace of the dead."

Police were initially notified that a gunshot had been fired from the woman’s apartment in September, which led to the alleged discovery of 100 skeleton parts in her apartment.

While searching her home, the police reportedly also found a CD titled "My Necrophilia" as well as photographs in which a woman is shown being intimate with the skeleton’s parts, including licking a skull, according to the Swedish news agency TT.

However, the woman has denied the charges, claiming she collected the bones out of historical interest, according to the AP.

"In the confidential section of the investigation we have material which indicates she used them in sexual situations," the prosecutor Kristina Ehrenborg-Staffas told the TT news agency.

“Some of the photos show a woman licking a skull," Ehrenborg-Staffas told The Local, a Swedish newspaper. “She has a lot of photos of morgues and chapels, and documents about how to have sex with recently deceased and otherwise dead people,” she told them.

According to the prosecution, the woman has also sold skulls over the internet.

Other police evidence discovered in the woman’s apartment included pictures from a morgue, discovered in a concealed compartment in the woman's home, along with body bags and a drill.

Mom charged over teen’s nude Facebook photo

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Mom charged over teen’s nude Facebook photo

By Sophia Voravong (Lafayette, Ind.) Journal and Courier Thu Nov 29, 2012 11:55 AM

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A woman is accused of deliberately posting a nude photo of her teenage daughter on the girl's Facebook page.

The girl's face, breasts and genitals were clearly visible, investigators said.

The mother, Lynda A. Rusk, 50, was charged Wednesday in Tippecanoe Circuit Court here with child exploitation, a Class C felony, and possession of child pornography, a Class D felony.

A warrant has been issued for Rusk's arrest.

Rusk could not be reached for comment and no one answered the phone at a number listed for her.

The accusations against her stem from an incident that happened a year ago, on Nov. 8, 2011. It took a year to bring charges because of time required to subpoena Facebook, Rusk and her daughter's cellphone provider, along with time needed to review the paperwork and evidence, according to Detective Mark Pinkard of the Lafayette Police Department.

"We wanted to make sure to do everything we could for this young lady," Pinkard said of the victim, who is younger than 18. "A major concern was you never know who saw the photo. Anyone could have saved it or took a screenshot.

"Once something is posted online, it's out there forever," he said.

Because of that possibility, Lafayette police contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for assistance. Investigators thus far have not found the photo posted elsewhere, Pinkard said.

The investigation began Nov. 8, 2011, when the girl's teacher contacted police over concerns of her well-being.

The girl had been staying with her grandparents since Nov. 1, 2011. But on the morning of Nov. 8, Rusk removed her from school. No one had heard from the girl since, according to a probable cause affidavit.

Though Rusk's daughter took the photo using an Apple iPhone, Rusk allegedly had possession of the cellphone when the picture was uploaded to Facebook, Pinkard said.

Information provided by Facebook and the cellphone provider helped build a timeline and a case against Rusk, Pinkard said.

He credited a friend of the victim, who made attempts to contact her after seeing the photo.

Following is a summary of what took place, according to an affidavit:

When interviewed by police, Rusk told officers that she checked her daughter into a counseling center in Terre Haute, Ind., about 90 miles southwest of Lafayette after noticing the girl's nude photo on Facebook at 5 a.m. Nov. 8, 2011.

However, the picture was first uploaded via a mobile device that afternoon at 2:34 p.m. The daughter was at the Terre Haute counseling center from 11 a.m. Nov. 8 to 7 p.m. Nov. 9, and she told detectives that her mother had confiscated the iPhone.

When confronted with contradicting information, Rusk allegedly claimed to not use Facebook or an iPhone -- though she had an iPhone herself -- and that if she had uploaded the picture, it was an "accident."

Detectives used cellphone records and towers to track the iPhone's location and route to Terre Haute from Lafayette, then back to Lafayette from Terre Haute on Nov. 8.

If convicted on the child exploitation charge, Rusk could face six to 20 years in prison.

The affidavit does not specify a motive, and the police department said its policy is to not comment on a suspect's motive.

Pinkard advises people who come across illegal material on Facebook or other social networking sites to flag it immediately and contact local police. [Hey hunting down nerds that post dirty photos on Facebook is a lot safer then hunting down real criminals like bank robbers!!!! And the pay is the same!!!]>span>

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

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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’s latest towing contract is illegal???

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Mesa's latest towing-contract proposal may be illegal

By Gary Nelson The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Nov 30, 2012 8:59 AM

Turns out there’s just one slight problem with Mesa’s latest towing-contract proposal.

It’s probably illegal.

The scheme emerged during a long City Council study session in June, the umpteenth effort by Mesa’s governing body to settle an issue that has created only headaches — and sometimes lawsuits — for the city for years.

The issue is which towing companies the city will call to clear wrecks and stolen or abandoned vehicles.

Mesa doesn’t pay the companies for that service — the vehicles’ owners do. Still, the city gets involved because it wants someone to care for necessary tows, but on the other hand doesn’t want multiple companies showing up at a crash and fighting over the job.

For years, Mesa gave that business to one company citywide. When that arrangement resulted in legal action and allegations of City Hall corruption in the middle of the past decade, the council divided the city into four zones, divvying up the business geographically.

The contracts under that arrangement expired in 2010, and the city sought bids for new ones. But that process snagged when one company’s bid fouled up Mesa’s pricing formulas and city staffers changed them without telling either the council or the towing companies.

The ensuing brouhaha led to another (unsuccessful) lawsuit against the city and a more than two-year extension of the old contracts.

In June, the council came up with a new idea: Leave the four zones in place, but invite every towing company in Mesa to participate in a “lottery” system. The city would set towing prices, and every company meeting minimum qualifications would get calls in one or more zones on a random basis.

That raised the hackles of All City Towing, which sent Mesa a letter outlining potential legal and other problems with the city’s so-called “request for qualifications.”

All City Towing, formerly Cactus Towing, currently has the contract in two of Mesa’s towing zones. The other zones are served by Valley Express Towing and Apache Sands Towing.

All City’s letter alleges that the proposed lottery system violates the Mesa City Charter and state law.

The charter specifies that procurement is to be conducted only through invitations for bids or requests for proposals.

Further, the letter says, state law requires that towing contracts be awarded on the basis of competitive bidding.

All City raised numerous other issues with the lottery proposal, contending that it:

Does not require companies to verify they have adequate resources for towing and storing vehicles.

Removes the requirement for a performance bond and does not require bidders to submit audited financial statements.

Has no safeguards against the same entity submitting bids under multiple names, in effect increasing the odds of one operator getting a particular towing call.

Does not require bidders to show compliance with applicable federal laws.

Deputy City Manager John Pombier said in a recent City Hall e-mail that “the lottery violates state law, so we are regrouping.”

That means that the council will revisit the issue in a public meeting in December or January, after first being briefed by the city’s legal staff in an executive session, Pombier said.

That could mean reconsideration of the two schemes the council rejected in June — continuing with the current system of awarding one vendor per zone; or going to three zones with one or more companies qualified in each, and being called for tows on a systematic rotating basis.

The police department said in June that the rotation system would create considerable extra work because the department would have to track which companies are in line for the next towing call.

Another option — one that caused the city considerable legal grief in previous years — is to give one company towing rights for the entire city.

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

Source

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

For the last 6 years Felipe Calderon has terrorized Mexico with his American funded war on drugs which has resulted in the murders of 50,000+ Mexicans. The 50,000+ murders is a conservative figure. Some people guess that more then 100,000 people have been murdered in Felipe Calderon insane war on drugs.

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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.

Federal prisons urged to grant early releases

Federal prisons urged to grant early releases

By David Crary Associated Press Fri Nov 30, 2012 9:58 PM

NEW YORK -- Two advocacy groups say the U.S. Bureau of Prisons should grant more early releases to incapacitated and terminally ill prisoners, calling current policies sometimes “cruel as well as senseless.”

The report, issued Friday by Human Rights Watch and Families Against Mandatory Minimums, says the Bureau of Prisons oversees more than 218,000 inmates but has recommended an average of only two dozen compassionate releases a year since 1992.

The BOP’s budget is $6 billion, and care of ailing and aging prisoners is a major factor in rising expenses. The report says one way to curb these costs would be increased use of compassionate release for prisoners posing minimal risk to public safety.

The BOP requires prisoners to be within 12 months of death or profoundly and irrevocably incapacitated to be eligible for compassionate release consideration. It generally does not make motions to the courts on nonmedical grounds, though the report says this could be done — for example, for prisoners seeking early release to care for dying family members.

Bureau’s response

Human Rights Watch senior adviser Jamie Fellner, a co-author of the report, said Congress in 1984 granted federal courts the authority to reduce sentences under “extraordinary and compelling” circumstances. However, the report says federal prisoners can’t seek such a sentence reduction from the courts on their own; only the BOP has the authority to file a motion requesting judicial consideration of early release.

“Justice sometimes requires compassion, even for people who have broken the law,” Fellner said. “But prison officials prevent judges from deciding when compassion requires a sentence reduction. This is unfair to the prisoners and costly to the country.”

The Bureau of Prisons said it reviews each early-release request on a case-by-case basis and takes into consideration information provided by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“It is the bureau’s responsibility to consider public safety” when determining whether to pursue these motions, the BOP statement said.

One such example

The report cites several examples of inmates who unsuccessfully sought to have early-release requests considered by the courts.

Among them is a 73-year-old inmate in North Carolina who has served half of a 20-year federal sentence for sexually touching a child, taking lewd pictures and possessing child pornography. Because of a spinal condition, the inmate is now permanently paralyzed below his upper chest and will require skilled nursing care until he dies, according to the report. The report says the prison warden rejected his bid to be considered for early release, contending that he was still deemed a threat to society who deserved to stay imprisoned out of deference to his victim.

Though the new report is generally critical of BOP policies, it said the BOP’s new director, Charles Samuels, has expressed interest in reforming the program. It noted that the number of release cases forwarded to the courts had risen slightly under his leadership.

Acknowledging opposition

The report urges Congress to change the existing law, which gives prisoners no right to challenge decisions in court. It also says the Bureau of Prisons should bring compassionate release motions to court whenever a prisoner presents compelling arguments, regardless of whether prison officials believe early release is warranted.

The report acknowledges that many Americans oppose early release, especially for offenders who inflicted serious harm on victims. But it argues that a prison sentence that initially seemed justified may become disproportionately severe because of changed circumstances, such as grave illness.

“Keeping a prisoner behind bars when it no longer meaningfully serves any legitimate purpose cannot be squared with human dignity and may be cruel as well as senseless,” the report says.

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.”

Judges challenge O.C. ban on sex offenders

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Judges challenge O.C. ban on sex offenders

By Nicole Santa Cruz, Los Angeles Times

December 1, 2012

A panel of Superior Court judges has challenged a controversial 2011 Orange County law that bans sex offenders from parks, beaches and even some roadways and asked the state Court of Appeal to review the measure.

On Friday, the district attorney's office, which has pushed cities across the county to join in adopting a version of the sex offender ban, vowed to continue enforcing it.

"I believe that protecting children from sex offenders is one of the highest priorities in law enforcement," Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas said in a statement.

But Sheriff Sandra Hutchens has asked her department to stop enforcing the law, and Lake Forest, one of many cities that adopted its own ordinance, is considering repealing it.

The judges overturned the conviction of Hugo Godinez, a registered sex offender who was ordered to serve 100 days in jail for attending a Cinco de Mayo party at Mile Square Park, a county facility, in Fountain Valley in 2011. Noting that restrictions on sex offenders are up to the state Legislature, the judges certified the case for transfer to the state Court of Appeal, which has until Dec. 15 to accept it.

Since 2011, nearly half the 34 cities in Orange County have adopted a version of the county ordinance, and of those, almost half are being challenged in the courts.

To persuade cities to enact their own laws, the district attorney's office has sent ranking prosecutors and administrators to city council meetings to talk with municipal leaders.

"The effectiveness of this law will never show up on a statistic," Susan Kang Schroeder, chief of staff for the district attorney, said in a past interview. "Because a sex offender did not show up in a park, a child did not get raped or molested."

Orange County appears to be the lone county in the state to ban all registered sex offenders — even those who haven't been convicted of a crime against children — from going to a county beach or spending time in a county park. And although registered sex offenders can apply for an exemption for work or a family gathering, few have been approved.

"Such a patchwork of local ordinances poses tremendous risk to the offender who may not be aware of each regulation in each city, or indeed even know the precise location of city borders," the judicial panel ruled.

The decision also says that the county law is detrimental to citizens, and that "any gain to an individual local community from its own specific ordinance is outweighed by the substantial risk to the transient citizens of the state."

Lake Forest, which enacted a sex offender ordinance in January, will consider at Tuesday's City Council meeting whether to become the first city to overturn its law.

A city report said that the ordinance has not had an "appreciable effect" because there is a small population of sex offenders in Lake Forest, deputies have yet to cite anyone for breaking the law and the sheriff has been effective in monitoring registered offenders in the area.

The city report also said that there appears to be a "consensus" developing in Orange County courts that the law cannot be upheld.

Fountain Valley has decided to delay enacting the ordinance, said Alan Burns, the city attorney. The city of about 50,000 initially approved an ordinance in October, but the action went no further.

"We're digesting what's happening in the courts right now," Burns said.

Though Mile Square Park — where Godinez attended the Cinco de Mayo party — is in Fountain Valley, the facility is county parkland and subject to county rules.

Critics of the ordinances, such as Janice Bellucci of California Reform Sex Offender Laws, say that the ruling from the judicial panel paves the way for registrants to visit parks, beaches and harbors without the fear of being arrested or fined.

"As far as the sex offender laws, I think it's the beginning of the end," she said.

Schroeder said Friday that the prosecutors' office realized that getting the ordinances passed would be difficult. In the last year, Schroeder has attended council meetings to push cities to adopt a version of the county's law.

On Tuesday, she said, she will be in Lake Forest to try to convince the city to keep it.

nicole.santacruz@latimes.com

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

Will Enrique Peña Nieto continue Felipe Calderon's insane drug war???

I hope not, but from articles like this it sounds like Enrique Peña Nieto will continue the American financed Mexican drug war, which is really a war on the people of Mexico, like the American drug war is a war on the citizens of the USA.

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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."

U.S. Marshal accused of ethics violation

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Marshal accused of ethics violation

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Dec 2, 2012 10:58 PM

A U.S. Marshals agent who was responsible for coordinating a $124 million annual contract with Corrections Corporation of America in Florence is facing criminal charges in federal court over an attempt to secure a job with the private-prison operator.

Thomas B. Bullen, 58, is on unpaid leave from the Marshals Service pending the outcome of the agency’s administrative investigation into his conduct, said David Gonzales, U.S. marshal for Arizona.

Bullen referred a request for comment to his attorney, who did not return repeated messages. Bullen pleaded not guilty to the allegations at a hearing in October and is due to go to trial in the spring.

Bullen served as chief administrative officer for the Marshals Service from 2006 until early 2011, according to court documents, when he was demoted and assigned to oversee the agency’s contract with the CCA, whose Florence facility holds defendants in federal cases awaiting trial

“What I do now is oversee a $4 billion, 20-year contract with (the CCA). … I go throughout the facility and compare the contract with what they are doing,” Bullen wrote of his job, a description included in court documents.

“I make surprise inspections at all times of the day or night; and file reports with the Arizona U.S. Marshals Service and also confer with the Office of Federal Detention Trustee in Washington, D.C.”

One of Bullen’s primary contacts was a woman referred to in court documents as “M.C.”

About nine months into his new job, Bullen learned that M.C., who worked as the health-services administrator at the CCA, was going to retire, prompting Bullen to approach her about applying for the job.

Bullen applied for the job in October 2011, interviewed in November and was offered the job later that month.

The day he received the job offer, Bullen notified his supervisor that he was going to take a position with the CCA.

“This e-mail was the first time that anybody at the USMS had received notice of Bullen’s possible departure,” according to court documents.

The indictment notes that Bullen received ethics training, which included instructions barring federal employees from seeking employment that conflicts with their official duties, including a session the month before he started seeking the position with the CCA and another in 2008.

“During that training, Bullen was specifically instructed that ‘if an employee who participates personally and substantially in a federal procurement exceeding $100,000 is contacted by a vendor/bidder with an offer for employment,’ the employee must ‘refuse the offer and report the contact in writing to a supervisor,’” according to court documents.

Federal prosecutions for conflict of interest are relatively rare, averaging about 13 cases in each of the last five years, according to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

None has originated in Arizona.

The most frequent prosecutions were for employees charged with violating the same section of the U.S. Criminal Code that Bullen is accused of violating, and they are typically resolved with guilty pleas, probation and fines.

Prison time is rare but is exercised in some cases.

In 2009, a Georgia woman was sentenced to three years in prison following a three-day trial in which prosecutors proved she was using her position with the Department of Veterans Affairs to place mentally ill veterans in an assisted-living facility in which she had a financial interest.

Cop gets 3 months probation for stealing from the public

Source

Former Phoenix officer sentenced in theft case

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Dec 3, 2012 10:28 PM

The allegations involving former Phoenix police Officer George Contreras spanned six years, were publicly tied to the mysterious death of another Phoenix officer, and spawned at least one federal lawsuit.

But the courtroom was nearly empty when he was sentenced for theft early Monday morning in a case related to off-duty work.

There were a handful of supporters on Contreras’ side, and a lingering question on the mind of the former patrolman accused of coordinating the security work by off-duty officers.

Contreras was among a group of Phoenix officers indicted in 2010 on allegations that they were paid for off-duty security work that they did not perform at a south Phoenix housing complex.

Contreras’ case was the only one not dismissed.

“When we had discussions, one of the things Mr. Contreras asked me was who the victims were in this case,” prosecutor Liliana Ortega told the court.

Ortega told the court the victims were the companies listed on the indictment and members of the public whose trust in law enforcement was eroded after the allegations were aired.

Contreras’ supporters have said previously that he was the victim in this case, the subject of a witch hunt orchestrated by Phoenix police administrators.

Contreras told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Karen O’Connor that the allegations cost him his job with the police, the guitar shop he ran in south Phoenix, his reputation and his family.

He asked O’Connor to waive further punishment in the matter.

“I’ve paid more than my share,” Contreras said.

Instead, O’Connor sentenced Contreras to three months unsupervised probation after accepting his no-contest plea to a single count of theft.

O’Connor dismissed the remaining counts, which alleged that Contreras had controlled an enterprise intent on defrauding the apartment complex.

Contreras has also paid more than $6,000 in restitution. He resigned from the police force in 2008.

Last November, a Maricopa County grand jury indicted Contreras on three counts of fraud and illegal control of an enterprise after investigators presented evidence suggesting Contreras and his employees — other police officers — were paid by the apartment-complex owner for hours of off-duty security work that they did not perform.

Contreras was originally indicted with three other Phoenix officers in 2010 on similar charges, but the case was sent back to a grand jury after a judge determined that testimony originally presented could have violated the officers’ due-process rights.

Contreras was the only officer to be re-indicted. Prosecutors dismissed charges against his former co-defendants: Steven Paul Peck, Benjamin Hugh Sywarungsymun and Aaron Lentz.

Those three officers filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in the summer accusing the state’s current and former attorneys general and their staffs of conspiring to present false evidence to a grand jury, malicious prosecution and infliction of emotional distress related to the criminal allegations.

The federal civil-rights lawsuit also states that police released information about the theft allegations while noting that deceased Phoenix police Sgt. Sean Drenth would have been among those indicted in November 2010, had he still been still alive.

Drenth was one of more than 24 officers who, for more than a year, were under investigation in the reported theft while working off-duty at the south Phoenix housing complex.

Drenth’s body was discovered in a parking lot near the state Capitol in October 2010. He died of a gunshot wound to the head.

The case remains open with Phoenix police, but late last year, the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Drenth’s death a suicide.

“The PPD announced that all officers investigated by (the Attorney General’s Office) were required to produce DNA samples as part of the investigation into the circumstances surrounding Sgt. Drenth’s death, creating a false impression that plaintiff officers were responsible for Sgt. Drenth’s death,” the federal lawsuit states.

Drenth’s family members have been told that Phoenix police were sharing information on the case with FBI investigators in Virginia.

Contreras’ attorney, Jay Beckstead, said media coverage of the allegations against Contreras and Drenth’s involvement in the case led to Contreras being ostracized.

“The innuendo being that somehow my client was involved in that situation,” Beckstead told the court. “He absolutely was not.”

Contreras said after the court proceeding that The Arizona Republic was “not big enough” to air all his grievances about his treatment by prosecutors and the media as the allegations made their way through court.

Contreras declined further comment, saying he had to go to his new job, where he is not allowed to use the phone.

State Bar investigates Attorney General Tom Horne

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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.

It's illegal for anybody but cops to direct traffic????

Source

Off-duty police officers

By ANDREA HILAND

Thu, Nov 29 2012 7:56 AM

Often we see police officers helping out large crowds of people navigate in and out of parking lots. It may be at a high school football or basketball game, a church function, or other large gatherings. This question, from Theresa, ponders about the funding of these situations.

Question: Why do off-duty police officers direct church traffic? How are they funded? It seems like the difference between church and state is not being honored.

Answer: Arizona Republic reporter JJ Hensley explains how this works: “Nearly every state law-enforcement agency allows their officers to work in an off-duty capacity with restrictions including the number of hours they can work and what types of businesses they can work for. Many agencies allow their officers to wear uniforms during off-duty jobs, in fact some require it, and the businesses prefer it because it lends an air of authority that a security guard or plain-clothes officer doesn’t possess.

“Business owners, law-enforcement administrators and even libertarians seem to agree that businesses that generate a high-call volume for police should pay for police to patrol their business. It’s seen as good business compared with the alternative, which would be having on-duty patrol officers visit those businesses throughout their shifts.

“The jobs are lucrative and the practice is widespread, so seeing a uniformed officer controlling traffic outside a church is no more an endorsement of that religion than seeing an officer outside a convenience store would be an endorsement of Circle K.”

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

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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

Fort Hood shooting judge removed for showing bias

I believe many civilian judges are former prosecutors which in my opinion should NEVER happen.

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Fort Hood shooting judge removed for showing bias

Associated Press

8:28 a.m. CST, December 4, 2012

FORT WORTH, Texas -- A military judge has been thrown off the Fort Hood deadly shooting case after an appeals court found that his treatment of the suspect, including an order to have the man forcibly shaved, indicated a lack of impartiality.

It was not immediately clear what impact the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces ruling Monday would have on the long-delayed military trial of Maj. Nidal Hasan. The Army psychiatrist is charged with 13 counts of murder in the 2009 shooting rampage.

Hasan appealed after Col. Gregory Gross ordered that he must be clean-shaven or forcibly shaved before his military trial, which was supposed to begin three months ago. It has been on hold pending the appeals. Hasan has argued that his beard is a requirement of his Muslim faith. Facial hair violates Army regulations.

An Army appeals court upheld the shaving requirement in October, but on Monday the appeals court said the command, not the judge, is responsible for enforcing grooming standards.

Gross had repeatedly said Hasan's beard was a disruption to the court proceedings, but the military appeals court ruled there was insufficient evidence to show that was true.

"Should the next military judge find it necessary to address (Hasan's) beard, such issues should be addressed and litigated anew," judges wrote in the ruling.

Gross found Hasan in contempt of court at six pretrial hearings because of his beard and sent him to a trailer to watch the proceedings on a closed-circuit television. The appeals court's ruling also vacated the contempt of court convictions.

The court said it was not ruling on whether the judge's order violated Hasan's religious rights.

Lead defense attorney Lt. Col. Kris Poppe said the judge showed a bias against Hasan when he asked defense attorneys to clean up a court restroom after Gross found a medical waste bag, adult diaper and what appeared to be feces on the floor after a June hearing. Hasan, who is paralyzed from the waist down after being shot by police on the day of the shootings, has to wear adult diapers — but the mess in the restroom that day was mud from a guard's boots, Poppe said.

"In light of these rulings, and the military judge's accusations regarding the latrine, it could reasonably appear to an objective observer that the military judge had allowed the proceedings to become a duel of wills between himself and (Hasan) rather than an adjudication of the serious offenses with which (Hasan) is charged," judges wrote in the ruling.

Fort Hood officials said late Monday that proceedings in the case will resume after a new judge is appointed by the Army's highest legal branch. This indicates Army prosecutors will not appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hasan faces the death penalty if convicted in the shootings on the Texas Army post that killed 13 people and wounded more than two dozen others.

Judge orders father of 9 to stop having children

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Judge orders father of 9 to stop having children

Updated 8:25 a.m., Tuesday, December 4, 2012

RACINE, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin father of nine who's behind on child support payments has been ordered by a judge not to have any more children until he can show that he can provide for them.

Racine County prosecutors say 44-year-old Corey Curtis, who fathered the children with six women, owes nearly $100,000 in back child support and interest.

The Journal Times (http://bit.ly/TFFhi1) says Judge Tim Boyle on Monday sentenced Curtis to three years of probation for failing to pay child support, with the condition that he is not to procreate until he can show he can support his children.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2001 upheld an appeals court ruling that affirmed a similar probation condition in Manitowoc County. The justices ruled that David Oakley's constitutional right to procreate wasn't eliminated because he could still reproduce — if he supported his children.

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Deadbeat dad sentenced to probation, ordered not to procreate

KRISTEN ZAMBO kristen.zambo@journaltimes.com

RACINE — Looking across the courtroom at a deadbeat dad of nine, who owes almost $100,000 in back child support and interest, a judge on Monday lamented not being able to prohibit certain men from breeding.

“This has come up before,” Racine County Circuit Court Judge Tim Boyle began. “It’s too bad the court doesn’t have the authority to sterilize.”

Before him was Corey Curtis, 44, of Racine. Curtis had fathered nine children with six women, Boyle said, and was in the hole on child support payments for his youngsters.

Assistant District Attorney Rebecca Sommers said Curtis owed about $50,000 in back child support, plus another $40,000 in interest.

“Common sense dictates you shouldn’t have kids you can’t afford,” Boyle said, voicing frustration.

That’s when Sommers piped up that Boyle did have authority to restrict Curtis’ future breeding. She said a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling found that a judge may, as a condition of a person’s probation, order the defendant not to have another child unless he can show he can support that child.

“I will make that a condition of the probation,” Boyle said immediately, sentencing Curtis to serve three years’ probation.

Curtis pleaded no contest in October to one count each of felony bail jumping and failure to pay child support, which is a misdemeanor, court records show.

“He is not to procreate until he can show he can provide for them,” Boyle ordered, adding Curtis must show he can financially support all nine of his existing children, as well.

Defense attorney Robert Peterson said that probation condition was not recommended in Curtis’ pre-sentencing investigation report, compiled by Wisconsin Department of Corrections probation agents.

“I’m not following the PSI,” Boyle said, a slight smile spreading across his face.

Court records show that Curtis has remained free on a $500 signature bond since June 2011, when he was charged.

Sommers declined to comment after the hearing.

In July 2001, Wisconsin Supreme Court justices upheld a Court of Appeals ruling that affirmed the probation condition stemming from a Manitowoc County case. In that case, a man had been charged with seven counts of intentional failure to support his nine children, according to the Supreme Court ruling in State vs. Oakley.

The justices ruled in that case that defendant David Oakley’s constitutional right to procreate wasn’t eliminated. He still could reproduce — if he made child support payments, according to the ruling.

“This case is about a man who intentionally refuses to pay support regardless of his ability to do so. That was the dilemma faced by the sentencing court, and that is what led to the court’s order,” wrote Justice Jon Wilcox.

Judge rules Arizona’s medical-marijuana law is constitutional

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.

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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.''

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

I agree with her 100 percent. Well except for the part about taxing marijuana. Why should some worthless government bureaucrat at the state capital who hasn't worked and honest day's work in his life get a $1 tax every time you smoke a joint???

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!!!

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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.

Jan Brewer murders another prison inmate!!!!

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Arizona inmate executed for girls’ murders

By Michael Kiefer The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Dec 5, 2012 11:52 AM

FLORENCE — Convicted murderer Richard Dale Stokley, was executed Wednesday morning at the Arizona State Prison complex in Florence for the 1991 murders of two Cochise County teenage girls.

Stokley, 60, spent Tuesday meeting with his attorneys and reading letters sent by friends. At 6 p.m., he had his last meal of porterhouse steak, french fries, okra, cauliflower, salad, fruit and ice cream.

At 10 a.m. Wednesday, the execution team began setting intravenous lines, but had difficulty setting the two lines required and had to cut into the femoral vein in his leg.

Witnesses watching on closed-circuit TV said that Stokley joked with the execution team and was heard saying, “I do wish I could die doing something meaningful. You know, this seems such a waste.”

But when the curtain from the execution chamber opened at 10:52 a.m., Stokley had no last words and did not even look in the direction of the witnesses.

He was pronounced dead at 11:12 a.m.

"He was a coward from the beginning and he died a coward," said Patty Hancock, the mother of one of the girls. "He never looked at us."

It was the sixth execution for Arizona this year, and the third in which a man was executed and his accomplice in murder, Randy Brazeal, 41, is already out of prison and living as a free man.

"It could have been Brazeal on that table and not him," Hancock said.

Stokley was 38 in 1991, when he and 19-year-old Randy Brazeal took two 13-year-old girls from a Fourth of July weekend fair in the southeastern Arizona town of Elfrida.

They drove the girls, Mandy Meyers and Mary Snyder, out into the desert and raped and murdered them, then threw their bodies down an abandoned mineshaft.

Brazeal saved his own life by entering into a plea agreement before DNA analysis could prove his role in the rapes and murders. He claimed that Stokley had done the killing. Brazeal pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Brazeal, now 41, was released in July 2011 and moved to Arkansas, where he married.

When reached by phone for comment last week, he said, “Good riddance to him,” referring to Stokley.

Stokley went to trial, and prosecutors in the Cochise County Attorney’s Office proved that Stokley had raped and killed one of the girls and Brazeal raped both and killed one. The girls had been strangled and stomped and stabbed in the eye.

Stokley’s attorneys at the Federal Public Defender’s Office petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court on claims that Stokley’s initial appellate attorney abandoned his case and that his punishment was disproportionate to that of his co-defendant, Brazeal. But the court denied both petitions Tuesday afternoon, clearing the way for the execution.

Arizona has already executed five Death Row prisoners this year: Robert Moormann, Robert Towery, Thomas Kemp, Samuel Lopez and Daniel Cook.

The Arizona Attorney General’s Office has asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for another Death Row prisoner, Edward Schad, who murdered a Bisbee man in 1978.

And Dale Hausner, the so-called Serial Shooter convicted of six murders in 2005 and 2006 in metropolitan Phoenix, is undergoing psychological evaluation to determine whether he is competent to waive appeals of his death sentences to speed up his execution date.

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

How do you spell revenue? Disabled parking tickets!!!

Source

Phoenix police target disabled-parking violators

Tom Tingle/The Republic

By Alicia Canales Special for The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Dec 5, 2012 10:18 PM

As the holiday season continues, Phoenix police Officer Walter Olsen said he expects an increase in citations for people illegally parking in disabled-parking spaces.

Olsen leads the Accessibility Compliance Enforcement program, which has 12 volunteers who go out to private lots, like grocery stores or shopping centers, and check the plates or placards of cars parked in the disabled-parking lots.

“Disabled parking is not a privilege,” Olsen said. “It’s a necessity.”

Every fall and winter, Olsen sees the increase in citations. So does Garvin “Smitty” Smith, an ACE volunteer since 2004.

“With the holiday season, more people are out shopping, more people are filling the lots and people, I guess, are in a rush and park there,” Smith said.

Olsen said the Phoenix Police Department issued 2,071 disabled-parking citations and generated $269,631 in fine revenue in 2011. He said the ACE program was responsible for about half the citations.

Olsen said other cities from across the country have looked at Phoenix’s program to try to replicate it. He believes they’ve found success because “it’s a lot harder to find (violators) than it used to be.”

When the program started about 12 years ago, ACE issued about 3,000 citations a year, he said.

“We don’t do it for the revenue,” he said. “We do this for people to try to be compliant.”

Educating the public

The ACE volunteers are a component of the Save Our Space Parking Campaign, started in 2000 by Phoenix and the Phoenix Mayor’s Commission on Disability Issues.

Jennifer Longdon, chairwoman of the mayor’s commission, said the commission raises awareness and helps residents understand the importance of having accessible disabled-parking spaces.

“I hope, one day, people stop abusing the parking spaces and the education catches up to this,” Longdon said. “I’m hoping people will realize these spaces serve a purpose and are vital to the individuals who need them.”

Longdon said proximity to the building and the striped safe-access area are crucial to those with disabilities. Longdon, who uses a wheelchair said others sometimes do not realize how important the safe-access area is.

“If I can’t get my ramp down, I can’t get out of the vehicle,” Longdon said. “How can I interact with the community, go to the store, visit church, get coffee at a local coffee shop if I can’t get out?”

Volunteers lend a hand

Olsen said parking issues can make emotions run high.

“Nice people sometimes lose their minds over parking tickets,” he said. “It’s sad, unfortunately.”

However, Olsen said, police haven’t had a “significant incident” involving confrontations with drivers in the 12 years they’ve used the volunteers: “They do a phenomenal job of walking away.”

On the flip side, Olsen, Smith and ACE volunteer Joanne Woodfill said other Phoenix residents have told them they are glad officers and volunteers care about people parking illegally in disabled-parking spaces.

“It’s one of the rare tickets that while I’m writing it, a lot of folks come up to me and say, ‘Thank you,’” Olsen said. “I don’t get tired of writing that ticket.”

Olsen, who calls himself a “badged advocate for people with disabilities,” said he writes these kinds of tickets every day.

The volunteers also can write citations and warning notices.

The warning notices let the driver know if he or she has an expired or improperly displayed disability placard or plate or parked in a disability-access aisle.

Woodfill, 75, said ACE volunteers check the license plate first. If there is not a proper handicap plate, they look for the placard hanging from the rear-view mirror. If the serial number matches, they move on.

If it’s a red placard, which lasts for six months, they check the expiration date. Blue placards are good for five years.

Smith, 67, said they call the Police Department to check if the placards are valid.

A citation for illegally parking in a disabled space costs between $288 and $562. Parking in the striped disability-access aisle also is subject to a citation.

Smith said the city can dismiss citations if, for example, the person is disabled and simply forgot to hang the placard.

The volunteers have to go through the same hiring process as a civilian police officer.

They go through an interview, background check and a lie-detector test. If they are accepted, Olsen asks volunteers to work 16 hours a month.

Volunteers decide which days they want to work and normally work four hours a day. Along with writing citations, they also go to court and testify if someone wants to argue about the ticket.

“It’s something that has to be done,” Woodfill said. “It’s something people don’t realize someone who needs it really needs it.”

By the numbers

In 2011, the Phoenix Police Department issued: 2,071 disabled-parking citations.

The city collected $269,631 in fine revenue related to those charges.

About 46 percent of the money collected goes to the state.

Several years ago, the city passed an ordinance raising the fines for illegal use of designated disabled parking spaces from $140 to a minimum fine of $288 to as high as $562.

The public can call 602-534-SPACE (7722) to report violations.

Sources: Phoenix, Phoenix police

Former corrections officer arrested in unlawful sexual conduct

Former corrections officer arrested in unlawful sexual conduct

By Amber McMurray The Arizona Republic-12 News breaking News Team Thu Dec 6, 2012 12:55 AM

A former corrections officer with the Arizona Department of Corrections was arrested Monday on suspicion of six counts of unlawful sexual conduct with a person in custody, officials said.

Stephen Andrew Bearden was employed at the Arizona State Prison Complex- Perryville from June 2009 until he resigned in August, officials said.

Bearden was arrested at his home in Surprise where he lived with his mother, officials said.

Police: Gun found in Ill. lawmaker’s carry-on bag

Source

Police: Gun found in Ill. lawmaker’s carry-on bag

Associated Press Wed Dec 5, 2012 7:04 PM

CHICAGO — A veteran Illinois state senator was arrested Wednesday after allegedly trying to board a flight from Chicago to Washington with a gun and ammunition in a carry-on bag, authorities said.

Sen. Donne Trotter, a Chicago Democrat who recently announced he would run to replace Jesse Jackson Jr. in the U.S. House, was carrying an unloaded .25-caliber Beretta handgun and a magazine clip with six bullets when he tried to board a flight at O’Hare International Airport, according to Chicago police.

Trotter, who is part the Illinois Senate’s Democratic leadership, was charged with a felony.

The gun and clip were found in an outside zippered pocket of Trotter’s garment bag during routine X-ray screening, according to a Chicago police report.

Trotter told Transportation Security Administration officers that he uses the weapon for work as a security officer at a Chicago security and detective firm. He said he worked late Tuesday night and did not realize the weapon was in the bag when he packed for his Wednesday morning flight, the police report said.

Messages left by The Associated Press for Trotter on his cellphone and at his office in Chicago were not immediately returned.

Trotter, 62, was charged with a Class 4 felony, which carries a penalty of one to three years in prison upon conviction. He was expected to appear in Cook County bond court Thursday, Cook County State’s Attorney’s office spokeswoman Tandra Simonton said.

Police said Trotter would spend Wednesday night in a police lockup.

Trotter is licensed to carry a weapon and has a Firearm Owner’s Identification card, Chicago police spokeswoman Melissa Stratton said.

Trotter was carrying a “firearm control card,” issued by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, that allows him to carry a weapon during work hours and for no more than an hour commuting to or from work. A department spokeswoman said a security company helped Trotter obtain the card.

The card is issued after completion of 20 hours of classroom firearm instruction and 20 hours of firearm handling training.

Trotter — known for wearing bowties and sometimes riding his motorcycle to Springfield — served in the Illinois House from 1988 to 1993, and since then in the Illinois Senate, where he chairs the Democratic majority caucus.

Under former Senate President Emil Jones, he was the Senate Democrats’ budget negotiator and known as a cool, calm presence in the often-contentious budget debates during the tenure of ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who is now imprisoned on corruption charges.

Trotter previously ran for Congress in 2000, a race in which both he and then-state Sen. Barack Obama lost to U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush.

He was born in Cairo, in far southern Illinois, earned an undergraduate degree from Chicago State University and a law degree from Loyola University. He is married and has four children.

Parking meters are all about REVENUE

Source

L.A. affirms drivers who park at broken meters will be ticketed

By Wesley Lowery, Los Angeles Times

December 6, 2012

Los Angeles motorists beware: If the parking meter won't take your change, find another spot.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to uphold a policy that makes it illegal to park at spaces with broken meters. City transportation officials said violations issued at non-working meters generate about $5 million a year in revenue for the city.

The action exercises an option for cities to override a new state law that greatly limits the practice of issuing tickets to drivers who park at malfunctioning meters. Under the state law, motorists may park for free at broken meters up to the maximum time allowed for the space.

The council reaffirmed the city's 2-year-old policy of ticketing cars at flawed meters on a 12-1 vote, with Councilwoman and mayoral candidate Jan Perry the lone opponent.

Officials said that allowing the state law to take effect would cost the city a sizable chunk of ticket and parking fee revenue, and would encourage meter vandalism.

"Meter vandalism has become extremely rare," said transportation department official Dan Mitchell. Since the city began switching to meters that take credit cards and coins — and banned parking at broken meters — only about five meters each month have required repairs, he said.

Before 2010 — when Los Angeles allowed free parking at broken meters — roughly 10% of the city's parking meters were broken at any time, Mitchell said.

But vandalism problems declined sharply when the city began replacing its roughly 40,000 parking meters with more advanced devices that include red stickers warning that tickets will be issued when meters are broken.

The meters, which are expected to be installed citywide by the end of the year, automatically message transportation employees of operational problems and are typically back in service within three hours, officials said.

The updated meters have cut down on parking complaints in his district, Councilman Bill Rosendahl said. "The technology we now have employed is rather fantastic," he said.

The state law requires cities to post notices on meters if they ticket when the devices are broken. Sponsors of the legislation said their primary objective was to force cities to alert drivers when they risk getting a ticket.

"It's really fair to the driving public. If the parking meter is broken and if you can't physically pay, then you shouldn't be ticketed," said state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord), who sponsored the state law.

Cities had adopted inconsistent policies that created confusion and frustration, DeSaulnier said. In some cities, an inoperable meter meant a few hours of free parking, he said. In others, it meant an expensive parking ticket.

"The main objective of this law is to make sure motorists know the rules," said Steve Finnegan, government affairs manager for Auto Club of Southern California, which backed the broken meter bill.

Councilman Tom LaBonge praised the new meters, but cautioned his colleagues against utilizing technological advances that could erase time left on a meter when a car pulls away. That would be going too far, he said.

"I think there is a certain joy in life in the city of Los Angeles when you pull up to a parking meter [and] there is a little bit of time left on it," he said. "I think the city needs that joy." wesley.lowery@latimes.com

Law professors file motion against erasing 'code of silence' verdict

Law professors file motion against erasing 'code of silence' verdict

7:33 a.m. CST, December 6, 2012

Two law professors who focus on police accountability have filed a motion opposing Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s move to erase a federal jury’s recent finding that a “code of silence” exists in the Chicago Police Department.

The professors from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University law schools filed the motion late Tuesday seeking to intervene in the case involving the infamous videotaped beating of a female bartender by an off-duty officer. They want to submit written arguments “addressing the public’s interest in ensuring that the city not be permitted to ‘buy its way out of this judgment.’”

Lawyers for Emanuel’s administration filed a joint motion with former bartender Karolina Obrycka on Monday, asking U.S. District Court Judge Amy St. Eve to set aside the jury’s Nov. 13 verdict in favor of Obrycka. She Öwould be paid the $850,000 award she won in the trial without fear of losing an appeal, and the city has said removing the judgment that a code of silence exists would help them defend against other police misconduct lawsuits.

The law professors, Craig Futterman of the University of Chicago and Locke Bowman of Northwestern, both have brought numerous misconduct cases against the Police Department during their careers. Futterman currently represents clients in a suit related to the department’s defunct Special Operations Section, and has said the code of silence judgment could aid his case.

A status hearing on the motion to vacate the judgment has been set for Friday morning before St. Eve. It was originally scheduled for Monday.

dheinzmann@tribune.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.

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.

TSA screener accused of stealing iPads at JFK

TSA screener accused of stealing iPads at JFK

Associated Press Thu Dec 6, 2012 9:26 AM

NEW YORK — A Transportation Security Administration screener has been arrested on charges he swiped iPads and other electronic devices from passengers’ luggage at John F. Kennedy Airport.

Port Authority spokesman Steven Coleman said Wednesday that 32-year-old Sean Henry, of Brooklyn, was nabbed in a sting operation using decoy bags in cooperation with the TSA.

Coleman says Henry was arrested after leaving work carrying in his backpack two planted iPads and other electronic devices. He says stolen items were also found in Henry’s home.

The 10-year veteran of the federal agency was arrested on charges

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.”

More red-light cameras in Scottsdale

Source

More red-light cameras in Scottsdale part of 5-year contract

By Laurie Merrill The Republic | azcentral.com

Fri Dec 7, 2012 10:58 AM

More red-light cameras, new portable units and additional electronic-feedback boards are among traffic-enforcement changes in store for Scottsdale motorists under a new five-year contract the City Council approved this week.

Cameras will be added to eight intersections under the contract with American Traffic Solutions Inc., whose current five-year agreement with the city expires Dec. 31.

The city chose ATS over Redflex Traffic Systems Inc. after an “extensive evaluation,” according to a City Council report.

“The vendor contract allows us to continue to operate photo-enforcement cameras at multiple fixed locations and two mobile photo-enforcement vans and two smaller mobile units that will focus on school zones,” said Officer David Pubins, a police spokesman.

New electronic-feedback signs will be installed ahead of all fixed-speed midblock photo-enforcement locations, Pubins said. They alert drivers and give them a chance to slow down.

The city will pay Scottsdale-based ATS $1.2 million the first year of the new contact, the same it paid this year, the city report said.

Officials said the program is essentially self-supporting, citing revenue generated from traffic penalties. In fiscal year 2010-11, the program put about $925,000 back into city coffers, the report said.

Under the contract, new sites for cameras that detect red-light runners include:

• Scottsdale and McDowell roads, southbound.
• Hayden and Thomas roads, eastbound.
• Greenway-Hayden Loop and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, eastbound.
• Loop 101 and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, eastbound.
• 64th or 68th streets and Thomas Road, eastbound.
• Thompson Peak Parkway and Bell Road, southbound.

A fixed speed camera will be added to Alma School and Dynamite roads, east and westbound, and at 124th Street and Via Linda Road, east and westbound, the report said.

The city plans to deactivate certain cameras, Pubins said.

These include:

A left-turn camera at Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard.

Intersection-safety cameras at Scottsdale and Cactus roads, Hayden and McDowell roads, and Scottsdale Road and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, Pubins said.

“We anticipate that the process to deactivate existing locations along with going live at the new locations to be slow and methodical and may take up to 18 months,” Pubins said. “Our goal is to publicize any new location that begins enforcement with a 30-day education period prior to citations being issued.”

Under the contract, the city would reduce the number of mobile speed vans from four to two, but at the same time add two portable speed units, which would be used mostly in school zones and places where the vans are too large, Pubins said.

The city has more than 300 deployment locations, including more than 50 schools zones, according to the report, which says that the remaining sites are distributed based on citizen complaints and high-collision intersections.

“The program has been successful in getting drivers to slow down and drive safer. The purpose is to change driver behavior to get them to voluntarily comply with the law,” said Bill Moloney, Scottsdale’s photo-enforcement program manager.

The cameras first were installed in 1997 to reduce the number of traffic accidents, which had grown to 24,000 over the previous five years, a 71 percent jump.

More than 14,000 people were injured over that five-year period, and 87 of the crashes were fatal, the report said.

Collisions declined 24 percent over the most recent five years in locations with fixed cameras, Pubins said.

-------

Percent decrease in collision rates at certain key intersections between 2007 and 2012

• Scottsdale and McDowell roads, 20 percent.
• Scottsdale and Thomas roads, 12 percent.
• Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard, 20 percent.
• Scottsdale and Cactus roads, 16 percent.
• 90th Street and Shea Boulevard, 25 percent.
• Scottsdale Road and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, 27 percent.

Source: Scottsdale police, court, attorney and transportation officials

Phoenix City Council is just as corrupt as the Phoenix Police??

Source

Phoenix officer: Officials impeded his supervisory duty

By Cecilia Chan and Dustin Gardiner The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Dec 7, 2012 10:19 PM

A Phoenix police sergeant is claiming two city officials hindered his supervision of a police detective who was later accused of sexual misconduct with two underage boys.

Sgt. Mark Schweikert recently filed a 22-page complaint with the city’s Equal Opportunity Department accusing high-ranking city officials of creating a hostile work environment in his supervision of Officer Christopher J. Wilson.

Wilson was the Police Department’s liaison with the city’s gay community. In August, he was arrested on suspicion of having sexual relations with a 14-year-old and 17-year-old boy. Officials believe Wilson met the older boy through his liaison duties. Wilson now sits in jail, awaiting a Feb. 11 pretrial conference.

Schweikert said that Councilman Tom Simplot and Assistant Police Chief Tracy Montgomery questioned him if he contradicted Wilson’s decisions. He said Montgomery “seemed extra critical” of his work after he had admonished Wilson for an inappropriate behavior.

The city’s Equal Opportunity Department is investigating the complaint. Sgt. Tommy Thompson, a police spokesman, declined to comment, saying the issue is on-going.

Schweikert outlines numerous disciplinary and communication issues involving Wilson over two years. Schweikert says Montgomery and Simplot, who are both openly gay, protected Wilson from concerns about his performance and undermined the department’s chain of command.

Several gay-community leaders had grumbled about Wilson, including that he was not responsive to community concerns and “was arrogant (and) unapproachable,” Schweikert said in his complaint. He said he felt he was unable to address Wilson’s work performance without being retaliated against.

Schweikert said Wilson had often talked about his close relationship with Simplot, bragging that he was Simplot’s “workout partner.” The complaint portrays Wilson as using his friendship with Simplot to undermine his supervisor.

However, Simplot said he never interfered with Schweikert’s supervision of Wilson. The councilman said his office regularly worked with Schweikert because it was the police liaison’s job to attend gay-community events in the district.

“I think we all have realized that Officer Wilson manipulated the gay community,” Simplot said, calling Wilson a pedophile. “We had a predator in our midst, and nobody saw it.”

A recent memo from Police Chief Daniel V. Garcia to City Manager David Cavazos stated that Garcia had no information supporting Schweikert’s allegation that Simplot had interfered in the department.

“I am not aware of any involvement by Councilman Simplot in attempting to influence Sgt. Mark Schweikert in supervising the police duties of former Detective Chris Wilson,” Garcia wrote.

Most of Schweikert’s complaints were directed against Montgomery, whom he accused of interfering in his unit, the Community Response Squad. Schweikert said such instances of interference have created a hostile work environment.

“It is my perception that Chief Montgomery is using her position to develop information on my work performance to discredit my reputation because she does not agree with the business-oriented decisions I make, which involve the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender community,” Schweikert said.

Schweikert said that Wilson was able to “act autonomously and independently from his chain of command” because he was protected by Montgomery.

Montgomery could not be reached for comment Friday night.

In the days before Wilson’s arrest on suspicion of sexual misconduct, Schweikert said that he had become concerned about Wilson’s mental outlook because he “appeared to be distant and disconnected over recent weeks” but that he couldn’t justify a request for a work-fitness evaluation.

The city has refused to release Schweikert’s complaint, which was leaked to several news outlets.

Baby Gabriel's mom, Elizabeth Johnson got railroaded???

I suspect there is a good chance she is guilty, but despite that I never thought there was enough evidence to PROVE she committed the murder.

For all we know Baby Gabriel might still be alive. His body has never been found.

Yes everybody suspects Elizabeth Johnson did it, but I always that that in American courts you needed evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to convict a person.

Source

Baby Gabriel's mom to serve more than 2 years in prison

By Michael Kiefer The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Dec 7, 2012 10:34 PM

Even at the last minute, there was a deal on the table for Elizabeth Johnson from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office: Tell us where Baby Gabriel is, and we’ll recommend a sentence of time served.

Johnson did not respond to the offer. Instead, she was sentenced to 5.25 years in prison, with credit for the nearly three years she has already been in jail.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Kreamer also sentenced Johnson to four years of probation. With good behavior, she could be released in two years and three months.

But the baby is still missing.

Gabriel disappeared in December 2009 when he was 8months old. Johnson first told the baby’s father, Logan McQueary, that she had killed him and dumped his body in the trash. Then she told police that she had given him to a couple in a park in San Antonio.

She stuck to that story on Friday in Maricopa County Superior Court.

“Though I would never want to harm Gabriel, I realize I did harm him by taking him away from Logan and giving him away in San Antonio,” she said.

Her maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather spoke on her behalf, as did her twin brother, Robert. They described a “train-wreck upbringing” by an alcoholic mother who left the twins on the grandmother’s doorstep. Johnson and her brother were orphaned at an early age and passed through as many as seven foster homes, they said.

Johnson’s family and her attorney, Marc Victor, theorized that Johnson gave the baby away rather than submit him to the kind of childhood she had experienced.

“She’s never seen a mom,” Victor said. “She doesn’t know what a mom is.”

Victor asked that Johnson be sentenced to probation on all counts.

Before Kreamer sentenced her, he said, “In those circumstances, it’s a wonder you got through it at all.”

Johnson, 26, wore jailhouse stripes and handcuffs linked to chains as she listened. Occasionally she sobbed, as when her grandmother described her mother’s drowning.

And when she faced Kreamer, she tried to explain her actions and finally said, “Regardless of my side, it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day, Gabriel is still missing.

“I do deserve the maximum, I do,” she blurted out.

When he addressed the court, McQueary said, “She should stay in jail until Gabriel is found or serve the maximum sentence.”

Kreamer explained that he could not jail Johnson until she revealed Gabriel’s whereabouts. Nor did he give her the maximum 9.5 years that she faced. He cited the great harm done to McQueary and his family and sentenced her to consecutive sentences of 3.5 years for custodial interference and 1.75 years for unlawful imprisonment. Then he imposed a four-year “probation tail.”

In December 2009, Johnson was involved in a custody dispute with McQueary. She had tried to give the child up for adoption to a local woman, Tammi Smith, but McQueary fought it.

Then, according to police and trial testimony, on Dec. 18, 2009, Johnson took Gabriel and drove to San Antonio to avoid shared custody with McQueary. Two days later, a Maricopa County judge awarded custody to McQueary, but Johnson and the baby were gone.

That day, Johnson checked into a hotel, and witnesses in depositions claimed she had the baby with her. Prosecutors also used photos Johnson had taken of Gabriel to prove that he was still alive and with her over the next several days.

But on Dec. 27, 2009, Johnson was seen without the baby while boarding a bus for Florida. That same day, she sent text messages to McQueary saying she had killed the child.

“I suffocated him. I covered him up with a towel, and I suffocated him, and he turned blue, and I put him in his diaper bag, and I put him in the trash can,” she said when McQueary reached her on her phone.

When Johnson was arrested in Miami, she claimed not to know where the baby was. She told police she had given him to a couple she had met at a park in San Antonio, but she was never able to provide names or descriptions of the couple.

She was charged in Maricopa County with kidnapping, custodial interference and conspiracy to commit custodial interference. She was not charged with murder, because if she had killed Gabriel, it would have occurred in another jurisdiction, namely Texas. The child has never been found, and though presumed dead, the murder investigation was muddied by a San Antonio detective who improperly found his way into Johnson’s jail cell and extracted statements from Johnson outside the presence of her attorneys.

That incident compromised Johnson’s relationship with her attorneys, and she fired several before settling with Victor. Johnson also underwent a court-ordered psychological evaluation to determine if she was competent to stand trial.

The trial began Sept. 20. Victor presented little in the way of defense, rarely cross examining the prosecution’s witnesses. Yet, when the jurors came back from deliberation they found Johnson guilty of unlawful imprisonment, custodial interference and conspiracy to commit custodial interference. Had she been convicted of kidnapping, she could have faced 27.5 years in prison.

In July, Tammi Smith was sentenced to 30 days in jail and three years’ probation on counts of forgery and conspiracy to commit custodial interference. She was in court on Friday morning for a probation review hearing.

Republic reporter Haley Madden contributed to this article.

Chicago loves and supports crooked cops???

City, lawyers clash in case of off-duty Chicago cop who beat bartender

By Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune reporter

December 8, 2012

A federal jury's landmark verdict in the videotaped beating of a female bartender by an off-duty Chicago police officer was "ambiguous" and could be misused in future lawsuits to win damages that would cost taxpayers millions of dollars, a city attorney argued in court Friday.

But a group of lawyers who handle police misconduct cases blasted that assertion, calling the city's attempt to get a federal judge to vacate the judgment on the jury's finding a "shameful exercise" designed to protect the status quo.

The legal wrangling illuminated the high-stakes nature of the Nov. 13 verdict that a "code of silence" exists within the Police Department as well as how the ramifications of the jury's decision could spread far beyond former Officer Anthony Abbate and bartender Karolina Obrycka.

"There is a public interest at stake here," attorney Locke Bowman of Northwestern University's MacArthur Justice Center told U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve. "The verdict is important. ... It is the sum product of all those hours (of trial), and it's not right to just wipe it away."

City attorneys, meanwhile, said they are not trying to change the verdict at all. They are simply asking St. Eve to vacate the judgment in the case — her final order that allows Obrycka to be awarded $850,000 in damages. The move would keep future plaintiffs' attorneys from filing lawsuits citing the Abbate case as a legal precedent, according to the city.

St. Eve gave Bowman and attorney Craig Futterman of the University of Chicago Law School until Tuesday to file an amicus brief laying out why they think she should keep the judgment intact. She told city lawyers to be prepared to file a response later next week and promised that her decision would be swift.

Earlier this week, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration agreed to immediately pay Obrycka the $850,000 awarded by the jury instead of continuing the court fight potentially for years with an appeal. In exchange, Obrycka signed on to the city's motion asking St. Eve to vacate the judgment she issued after the verdict.

Obrycka's attorney, Terry Ekl, downplayed the impact that vacating the judgment would have on future cases. If the city had appealed the award, it might have been years before Obrycka saw any money, he said.

"This is a woman with a family and a son who is just trying to make ends meet," Ekl said. "I think in its simplest form, this became really a no-brainer for us."

The city battled Obrycka's lawsuit for more than five years, arguing that Abbate's attack — caught on security video — was the action of an off-duty officer and not the responsibility of the Police Department. Ekl said he offered to settle the case several times for much less than what the jury eventually awarded but that the city refused.

After two weeks of testimony, attorneys for both sides spent days hammering out the wording of the instructions that would go back to the jury during deliberations. The jurors eventually found by a preponderance of the evidence that the city "had a widespread custom or practice of failing to investigate and discipline its officers and/or of a police code of silence."

Scott Jepson, an attorney for the city, argued Friday that it was the jury's "ambiguous" verdict itself that could open the door to damaging lawsuits. It was unclear which of the three propositions the jury found — the failure to investigate, failure to discipline or the existence of the code of silence, he said.

"Vacating the judgment eliminates the uncertainty and risk of other plaintiffs trying to misuse the verdict," Jepson said. "This courtroom right now is packed with plaintiffs' attorneys. They are champing at the bit."

Jurors did not respond to requests for comment Friday, but one member of the panel, Joseph Lentino, 66, a retired physician, told Tribune columnist John Kass this week that he felt it had been clearly established that a code of silence existed within the Police Department.

"It became very clear to us, after reviewing all the testimony, that there was some type of agreement among police not to rat out their fellow officers," Lentino said.

Bowman said the verdict should have been "a wake-up call" to the city and that the appropriate response would have been to sit down and try to figure out how to change the department for the better.

"Instead, the city of Chicago stands up and says, 'Let's get rid of this (verdict) because it's going to aggravate us in future cases and we really don't need to be bothered by it.'"

jmeisner@tribune.com

Cop who robbed and murdered drug dealers to be executed?

But I still am against the death penalty. Lots of innocent people have been executed and as long as we have a death penalty innocent people will continue 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.”

Merry Christmas from the TSA goons

Medical pot was been legalized and nothing happened???

Prior to the election in which the people voted to legalize medical marijuana with Prop 203 the police and government bureaucrats told us that the world would end as we know it if medical marijuana was legalized.

Of course medical pot is now legal and absolutely NOTHING has happened.

I suspect if we can get unbiased crimes statistics from the cops it will show that there has been absolutely no increase in crime do do medical marijuana being legalized in Arizona

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

This judge was drunker then a skunk. He was at 0.229 percent.

The judge also did a few Oxycodone pills to give him a little opiate buzz in addition to the liquor induced high.

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

Lawsuit over forced DNA in Phoenix officer’s death

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

Court strikes down Illinois concealed carry law

Court strikes down Illinois concealed carry law

Associated Press Tue Dec 11, 2012 11:27 AM

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — In a big victory for gun rights advocates, a federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down a ban on carrying concealed weapons in Illinois — the only remaining state where carrying concealed weapons is entirely illegal.

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said state lawmakers have 180 days to write a new law that legalizes concealed carry.

Gun rights advocates long have argued that the prohibition against concealed weapons violates the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment and what they see as Americans’ right to carry guns for self-defense. The court majority on Monday agreed, reversing lower court rulings against a lawsuit that had challenged the state law.

“The Supreme Court has decided that the amendment confers a right to bear arms for self-defense, which is as important outside the home as inside,” Judge Richard Posner wrote in the court’s majority opinion. “The theoretical and empirical evidence (which overall is inconclusive) is consistent with concluding that a right to carry firearms in public may promote self-defense.”

He continued: “Illinois had to provide us with more than merely a rational basis for believing that its uniquely sweeping ban is justified by an increase in public safety. It has failed to meet this burden.”

The court ordered its ruling stayed “to allow the Illinois legislature to craft a new gun law that will impose reasonable limitations, consistent with the public safety and the Second Amendment as interpreted in this opinion, on the carrying of guns in public,” Posner said.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office said it was reviewing the ruling and would comment Tuesday.

The leader of the Illinois State Rifle Association, Richard Pearson, praised the federal court’s decision and said the state could have a new concealed carry law by early next month. A bill has already been written by Rep. Brandon Phelps of Harrisburg that includes provisions for background checks, field provisions and other issues, Pearson said.

“We are extremely pleased with the ruling,” Pearson said. “Now that the court has ruled … we will work as soon as possible with legislators to craft a concealed carry bill for the state of Illinois.”

He said lawmakers could consider it and pass it during a weeklong legislative session in January if they wanted to.

The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed by former corrections officer Michael Moore of Champaign, farmer Charles Hooks of Percy in southeastern Illinois and the Bellevue, Wash.-based Second Amendment Foundation.

Woman gets 30 days in jail for leaving child in a park

Source

Mesa mom sentenced for leaving child in park during 'a manic sexual rage'

Posted: Tuesday, December 11, 2012 4:41 pm

Associated Press

A Mesa woman accused of child abuse for allegedly leaving her daughter in a park for four hours while she had sex has been sentenced to 30 days in jail and four years of supervised probation.

Maricopa County court records show Commissioner Margaret Benny sentenced Laurie Lee Kelly on Tuesday.

In August, prosecutors had said Kelly left the 6-year-old girl in Evergreen Park with transients. She had bought beer for them and asked them to watch her daughter while she "went to make money."

When police arrived at the park, Kelly reportedly was found sitting in a grassy area with a man.

Prosecutors had said Kelly told police that she had sex with a couple of men while her daughter was being watched by strangers. She allegedly said she had "a manic sexual rage" that she couldn't control.

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.

California workers misused $613,000 in taxpayer funds

California workers misused $613,000 in taxpayer funds, report finds

By Patrick McGreevy, Los Angeles Times

December 11, 2012, 9:12 p.m.

SACRAMENTO — State employees misused $613,000 in taxpayer funds through bribery schemes, mail fraud, waste, and improper billings for travel and pay, officials said Tuesday.

The misdeeds were detailed in a report by state Auditor Elaine Howle on whistle-blower investigations concluded by her office in the last two years. "This report details nine substantiated allegations involving several state departments,'' Howle wrote to Gov. Jerry Brown.

The biggest loss occurred in the bribery case, in the Los Angeles offices of the state Franchise Tax Board and the Secretary of State. In each office, an employee engaged in a kickback scheme with the owner of a courier service that shorted the state of nearly $250,000 in public money overall, the report said.

The employees' job required them to issue letters or certificates that let businesses know whether they were in good standing with the state agencies. The workers were supposed to charge a $15 to $20 processing fee for each one. Instead, they waived the fees and took bribes from the courier in exchange for the documents.

"To avoid paying this fee, the courier paid $300 to $400 a week to Employee 1 to supply him with letters for his clients," the audit report said, adding that the employee used Franchise Tax Board computers to create up to seven letters daily for the courier's clients from 2007 through 2009.

Howle said both of the state employees and the business owner were convicted of bribery. One employee received a seven-day jail sentence, the other received three years' probation and the courier was sentenced to 14 days in jail.

The three were also ordered to pay $227,000 in restitution, but prosecutors said they could not immediately determine whether any of it has been paid. The two state employees were fired.

Margarita Fernandez of the auditor's office cited state whistle-blower laws in declining to identify the two state workers. But the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said those who pleaded guilty to one felony count each of accepting a bribe were Franchise Tax Board employee Terri Denise Hudgies, 49, and Secretary of State program technician Rosa Cordova-Miller, 56.

Howle said loose controls on office operations contributed to the thefts.

The auditor's investigators found that two other employees participated in the scheme and were fired but not criminally charged. Two more were disciplined for knowing about the fraud but not reporting it, and a fifth was disciplined for telling others about the investigation.

Other findings in the report included:

• A former accounting technician for the state Employment Development Department and two accomplices were convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud for illegally directing nearly $93,000 in unemployment insurance benefits to the two accomplices.

• The state Athletic Commission overpaid nearly $118,700 to 18 employees for two years by inappropriately paying them overtime.

• A Fish and Game Department supervisor improperly directed the use of state funds to purchase more than $53,800 in goods and services and spent an additional $5,000 without being able to show that the expenditures were for a state purpose.

• The California Correctional Health Care Services improperly paid 23 employees $55,000 in travel benefits after a manager approved reimbursements for their commutes and for expenses incurred near their homes and headquarters.

• An official in the office of the president at the University of California wasted $6,000 on improper travel, including unnecessary expenses during a five-day trip to a conference in England. The conference was held in Birmingham for five days, but the official billed the state for three of the days in London, saying he stayed there to get a better airline fare home.

• An employee at the California Department of Education misused state time and equipment when he posted nearly 4,900 comments on the Sacramento Bee's website during state time. Investigators said he averaged about 25 comments a day but posted up to 70 comments one day.

"The employee claimed that for the majority of 2011, he had a significant amount of available time because he had no assigned tasks to complete,'' the auditor's report said.

The worker voluntarily left the department, according to spokeswoman Tina Jung, who declined to identify the employee.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

America the worlds biggest police state!!!!!

For Lesser Crimes, Rethinking Life Behind Bars

Rates of incarceration for working-age men, 18 to 64

White 1 in 87

Black 1 in 12

Prison Population rates per 100,000 people

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."

College mascot who killed bear cited for not wearing orange

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College mascot who killed bear cited for not wearing orange

Associated Press

Posted: 12/12/2012 08:52:56 AM PST

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- A West Virginia University mascot who got in trouble for using his uniform musket to kill a bear has been cited for another problem -- not wearing blaze orange during the bear hunt.

Mountaineers mascot Jonathan Kimble wears buckskin and a coonskin cap and fires the musket -- loaded with black powder but minus ammunition -- at home athletic events.

Kimble, 24, wasn't wearing the required hunter orange when he shot a black bear Dec. 3. The kill was legal but triggered a public outcry after Kimble posted a video online.

State Division of Natural Resources spokesman Hoy Murphy says hunters are required to wear 400 square inches of the high-visibility color for safety reasons.

WVU ordered Kimble to stop using his university-issued weapon on hunting trips after the video became public. He contends hunting with the gun is a Mountaineer mascot tradition, but he agreed to stop using it.

"While Jonathan Kimble's actions broke no laws or regulations, the university has discussed this with him, and he agrees that it would be appropriate to forgo using the musket in this way in the future," said WVU spokesman John Bolt.

Kimble accompanied more than a dozen friends and family on the trip in Pendleton County. In the video, Kimble is shown firing the musket at the bear in a tree.

"Let's go Mountaineers!" Kimble yells afterward.

Kimble said Friday that he's been hunting all his life and this was the first black bear he's ever killed. He said all his friends have congratulated him for that.

"Hunting can be a controversial topic," Kimble said. "I apologize to any of those who took offense to the video. It definitely wasn't my intent to offend anybody."

Some WVU fans stood behind Kimble.

"This is a smart young man from West Virginia who did nothing wrong, who was celebrating who he is," said Robert Hickman, who holds two degrees from WVU and lives near Fairmont.

"If you're from West Virginia and you love the outdoors, or if you hunt or don't hunt, or if you fish or don't fish, it is a celebration of this state. As a former WVU graduate, I'm thrilled to death with him. Happy as can be."

The Mountaineer mascot first appeared at athletic events in the 1936-1937 school year. The Mountaineer is selected each year and the mascot's outfit is custom tailored to fit the winner.

Last February, the bearded Kimble was chosen from among 13 applicants.