Homeless in Arizona

Ex-cop charged in grisly plot to kill businessman dies in jail

Sources: Ex-cop charged in plot to kill businessman dies in apparent suicide

By Jennifer Delgado Tribune reporter

10:13 p.m. CST, November 5, 2012

A former Willow Springs officer facing federal extortion charges died early Monday morning in what officials believe is an apparent suicide.

Gary Engel, 61, was pronounced dead at 1:30 a.m. Monday after officials say he hung himself in his McHenry County Jail cell, according to federal authorities. A representative at the McHenry County jail declined comment Monday night.

An investigation into the death is ongoing, U.S. Marshals spokeswoman Belkis Cantor said. Engel was scheduled to appear in Dirksen Federal Court on Tuesday for an arraignment on his charges.

On Friday, authorities said they foiled a grisly extortion plot to kidnap, murder and dismember a businessman flush with cash involving Steven Manning -- who now goes by the name Steven Mandell -- and Engel, who was convicted of a kidnapping in Missouri with Manning decades ago.

The two were arrested Thursday evening as they parked near a Northwest Side office where they thought the kidnapping target had arrived for a business deal, authorities said.

The charges announced Friday alleged that the FBI has been secretly recording Manning since last month discussing the plans to abduct and kill a businessman they believed had access to large amounts of cash from real estate holdings -- referred to by authorities only as Victim 1. Manning speculated that the victim, whom they referred to as “Soupy Sales,” generated as much as $100,000 a month in cash from rental properties.

According to the charges, Manning had confided in another individual -- referred to as Individual A -- who apparently tipped off authorities to the scheme.

Manning and Engel are alleged to have planned to pose as police officers and pretend to arrest the victim on a bogus federal warrant. They then intended to take him to a nearby building they called “Club Med,” which they had remodeled to include a large sink and a counter that could hold several hundred pounds. The two plotted to extort as much as $500,000 from the man, then kill him, drain the blood from the body and dismember him, the charges allege.

Manning, 61, of Buffalo Grove, and Engel of Homer Glen, were charged with attempted extortion and conspiracy to commit extortion.

jdelgado@tribune.com

4 more years of tyranny from Sheriff Joe!!!

To be honest I suspect Paul Penzone is just as much of a Nazi as Sheriff Joe, but I would like to replace Sheriff Joe's reign of terror with a new guy.

Paul Penzone was an undercover narc for the Phoenix Police and the last thing Arizona need is another sheriff that is a big drug war fan.

Source

Arpaio wins sixth term

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Nov 7, 2012 2:17 AM

Joe Arpaio survived what appeared to be the closest challenge he has faced since taking office in 1993, securing an unprecedented sixth term as Maricopa County sheriff.

Arpaio maintained a comfortable lead over challenger Paul Penzone from the time early balloting results began rolling in shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday until Penzone conceded the election a few hours later before a room full of supporters. Some of Penzone’s faithful feared that former Scottsdale police Lt. Mike Stauffer, running as an independent, would siphon votes away from Penzone, a Democrat, and ruin his chances of upsetting Arpaio. But Stauffer hardly made a difference in the race.

The results served as vindication for Arpaio and his supporters, who view the sheriff as a national figure in the immigration-enforcement movement who has stuck to his principles in the face of attacks from attorneys, activists and President Barack Obama’s administration.

The U.S. Justice Department filed a civil-rights lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Office in the spring, accusing the agency of widespread discrimination against Latino residents in the sheriff’s patrol operations and in Maricopa County jails.

The lawsuit came after years of accusations that sheriff’s deputies targeted Latino residents during immigration-enforcement operations, and a nearly constant stream of protests and demonstrations designed to call attention to the allegations against Arpaio’s office.

Those allegations generated unforeseen support from outside Arizona for both sides of the race.

Arpaio raised more than $8.2 million for his campaign, of which about 80 percent came from donors who live outside Arizona.

Penzone raised more than $520,000 from supporters who mainly came from within Arizona, which is more than $400,000 greater than Arpaio’s 2008 opponent, Dan Saban, was able to generate.

A group of labor unions contributed $500,000 to an independent committee that concentrated efforts on registering voters and getting them to the polls in an effort to unseat Arpaio.

But despite all the forces aligned against him, Arpaio’s reliance on his law-and-order reputation, bolstered by a string of TV advertisements reminding voters of his commitment to fighting animal cruelty, dead-beat dads and immigration enforcement, was enough to earn sheriff a sixth term in office.

Arpaio, speaking to a supportive Republican crowd gathered in downtown Phoenix to watch results, said none of his policies will change — particularly his immigration-enforcement efforts.

Those efforts have generated national controversy. But they also have produced for the sheriff financial support largely unheard of for a county candidate.

He also promised to run again in 2016, when he will be 84 years old.

“This is my message to the media: You’re going to have to put up with me for another eight years,” Arpaio said.

Here are the results for the election

Marijuana now legal in Washington State!!!

Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of the evil and unconstitutional "war on drugs".

Source

Washington voters legalize recreational marijuana use

Associated Press Tue Nov 6, 2012 10:35 PM

SEATTLE -- Washington voters legalized recreational pot use on Tuesday, setting up a showdown with a federal government that backs the drug's prohibition.

Initiative 502 sets up a system of state-licensed marijuana growers, processors and retail stores, where adults over 21 can buy up to an ounce. It also establishes a standard blood test limit for driving under the influence.

"Today the state of Washington looked at 70 years of marijuana prohibition and said it's time for a new approach," said Alison Holcomb, campaign manager for the initiative.

Legalization could help bring in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in pot taxes, reduce small-time pot-related arrests and give supporters a chance to show whether decriminalization is a viable strategy in the war on drugs.

The outcome of a related measure in Colorado appeared headed toward passage, and some news outlets in the state earlier in the night had declared that it was approved.

Another measure in Oregon was uncertain.

The Washington state measure was opposed by Derek Franklin, president of the Washington Association for Substance Abuse and Violence Prevention.

"Legalizing is going to increase marijuana use among kids and really create a mess with the federal government," Franklin said. "It's a bit of a tragedy for the state."

The sales won't start until state officials make rules to govern the legal weed industry.

Promoted by New Approach Washington, I-502 calls for a 25 percent excise tax at each stage from the growers on until it is sold in stores to adults 21 and over.

They could buy up to an ounce of dried marijuana; one pound of marijuana-infused product in solid form, such as brownies; or 72 ounces of marijuana-infused liquids.

The cannabis would be subject to testing to establish its THC content, and labeled accordingly.

State financial experts estimate it could raise nearly $2 billion in tax revenue over the next five years, with the money going toward education, health care, substance abuse prevention and basic government services.

When state and federal laws conflict, federal law takes precedence. Federal authorities could sue in an attempt to block I-502 from taking effect. The Justice Department has given no hints about its plans.

The campaign was notable for its sponsors and supporters, who ranged from public health experts to two of the DOJ's top former officials in Seattle, U.S. Attorneys John McKay and Kate Pflaumer.

The effort raised more than $6 million in contributions, with more than $2 million of that coming from Progressive Insurance Co. founder Peter Lewis, who used marijuana to treat pain from a leg amputation.

The ample fundraising allowed New Approach Washington to run television ads through the campaign's final weeks.

Meanwhile, I-502 had little organized opposition. Some in law enforcement and public health are concerned that increased access will lead to increased abuse, especially among teens.

Others who opposed the measure did so because it didn't go far enough, and that the blood test limits were arbitrary and could affect medical marijuana patients. Still others worried about a possible federal-state law clash.

For many voters, it came down to the notion that decades of marijuana prohibition have done more harm than good.

"It's ridiculous to be trying to maintain the law enforcement effort -- all the people, all that money, all those resources -- to prosecute marijuana use," supporter Karla Oman said. "Tax it, legalize it, everybody wins."

Sean Saulter, 30, of Seattle voted for the initiative because he wanted to see the issue go before the U.S. Supreme Court.

For George Cannon, 43, of Seattle, it was an issue of personal freedom. "I'm not into getting into other people's business," he said.

Marijuana - it's now legal in Colorado!!!

Source

Coloradans say yes to recreational use of marijuana

Posted: 11/06/2012 05:04:47 PM MST

By Sadie Gurman

The Denver Post

Voters approved an amendment legalizing recreational marijuana use in Colorado on Tuesday, making this one of two states to end prohibition of the drug but also raising new legal questions and setting up potential court battles.

The historic result, projected by The Denver Post on Tuesday night, drew raucous cheers and applause from the amendment's supporters, who gathered in hundreds at Casselman's in downtown Denver.

"We won! We won!" supporters cried as the results were splashed across a giant screen.

Amendment 64 led late Tuesday night with 53.3 percent voting yes and 46.7 percent voting no, with 1,863,535 votes or about 66 percent of active voters counted, according to the Colorado Secretary of State's office.

"This is really groundbreaking," said Beau Kilmer, co-director of the Rand Drug Policy Research Center. "No modern jurisdiction has ever removed the prohibition on the production and possession of marijuana for recreational purposes. ... Since no one has done this before, there are a lot of uncertainties."

Voters in Washington state approved a similar measure Tuesday; in Oregon a legalization issue failed.

The amendment will allow those 21 and older to purchase up to one ounce of the drug at specially regulated retail stores. Possession would be legal but not public use. Adults could grow up to six marijuana plants at home. It sets up a direct challenge to federal drug law, which regulates it as an illegal substance. Federal authorities have not said how they will respond.

"This demonstrates that the people of Colorado are just as smart as we thought they were," said Mason Tvert, one of the directors of the Yes on 64 Campaign. "They were fed up with prohibition and decided they want a more sensible approach."

Tvert and other supporters of the measure have said it will generate tax revenue for state and local governments. They said it would shed light on the black market for marijuana.

Critics argued that passing the amendment would make Colorado a destination for drug tourists and prompt a federal crackdown. They cited concerns about increased use of the drug by children and more drugged driving.

Among the opponents was Gov. John Hickenlooper, who said in a statement Tuesday night that "the voters have spoken and we have to respect their will. This will be a complicated process, but we intend to follow through. That said, federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug so don't break out the Cheetos or gold fish too quickly."

State criminal penalties for possessing the drug won't disappear until the election is certified, which could take up to two months.

Questions about regulation and enforcement still abound. The first recreational stores would be slated to open in January 2014 and would be separate from existing medical marijuana dispensaries. Local governments could ban marijuana sales and employers could still bar employees from using it.

The amendment doesn't spell out the details of how the commercial marijuana industry will be regulated. It leaves that up to the state Department of Revenue, which would oversee the specialty shops. Proponents envision something similar to the state's system governing medical marijuana, which involves security requirements, the monitoring of plants as they are grown and shipped and auditors who perform site checks.

"Colorado has a lot of work to do quickly in terms of setting up the appropriate rules and structures," said Rosalie Pacula, another co-director for Rand's Drug Policy Research Center. She noted that because the measure is a constitutional amendment, it will have to go back to voters for repairs if there are problems; the legislature will be unable to intervene.

The federal government's response is anyone's guess, she said, but it will likely be resistant. Other experts have said federal agents could arrest individual users, though that would be a departure from their usual focus on large-scale dealers.

In the year before the first stores open, the federal government may choose to challenge the measure in court by arguing that it is pre-empted.

Sadie Gurman: 303-954-1661, sgurman@denverpost.com or twitter.com/sgurman

Mesa may put traffic court on television

In the article Mesa City Councilman Dennis Kavanaugh sounds like a tyrant who expects us serfs to dress up special for the royal government judge in the Mesa traffic court.

Mesa city court administrator Paul Thomas also seems to be a tyrant who assumes everyone is guilty and must prove their innocence with this statement: "Watching people try to wiggle out of traffic citations can be very entertaining at times" [Of course if you ask me watching cops commit perjury, or testilying as they call it to get convictions can also be very entertaining]

Source

Mesa may put traffic court on television

By Gary Nelson The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Nov 6, 2012 10:47 PM

Mesa is planning to televise traffic-court hearings as a way of educating people about how to behave not only on the streets, but in court.

But while city officials are pitching the potentially elucidating aspects of the broadcasts, they admit that there’s entertainment to be had as well.

During a recent discussion of the proposal, City Councilman Dennis Kavanaugh suggested the shows could include videos on “what not to wear in court.”

“Or, come dressed, period,” city court administrator Paul Thomas said.

“Sometimes ... there is a tendency for people not to dress appropriately for a courtroom setting,” Thomas said. “We try to take care of that at the front door as much as we can. ... We’re just trying to err on the side of modesty.” [Please what part of Arizona law allows you to force your modesty standards on us serfs???]

Problems include shirts with inappropriate messages and revealing outfits. Shirts that advertise beer, for example, don’t mesh well with traffic court. [So the First Amendment is null and void in Mesa traffic courts???]

Thomas said the court has no plans to impose a detailed dress code, but hopes the Channel 11 programs would help people know what proper courtroom attire looks like.

Kavanaugh said he has been talking with staffers about the idea for about a year. “We will probably be one of the first municipal courts in the country to do something like this,” he said.

Such broadcasts would not be entirely without precedent. Traffic-court shows have appeared on commercial TV, as far back as the 1950s when a network program called “Traffic Court” featured re-enactments of trials in Los Angeles.

Currently a program on truTV, “Speeders Fight Back,” broadcasts traffic-court trials from Oak Lawn, Ill. And for several years, the ABC-TV affiliate in Providence, R.I., aired highlights from that city’s traffic court in a TV show called “Caught in Providence.”

Thomas said he knows of no other city in the country broadcasting traffic court on its municipal cable channel.

“We run a traffic hearing every 15 minutes,” [If you are running hearings every 15 minutes, it's probably a kangaroo court designed to raise revenue, not dispense justice] Thomas told the City Council’s public-safety committee last month. “Every kind of traffic situation and challenge to the traffic laws that you can imagine occurs in that court.”

Watching people try to wiggle out of traffic citations, he said, “can be very entertaining at times, but I think the educational value is where we want to try to drive this.” [Sounds like the court assumes people are guilty until they prove themselves innocent! Of course traffic courts are usually just kangaroo courts designed to raise money]

There are no privacy concerns, he said, because court proceedings are open to the public. “The public has every right to come and sit in court proceedings as long as they don’t disrupt or challenge the process.”

Still, he said, defendants would be notified that their trials were being recorded for possible use on TV. [So what??? Can they cancel their trial and demand one that won't be televised??? Probably not!!!!]

The only drawback he could envision was the possibility of the public second-guessing decisions made by traffic-court judges. “It could be positive, it could be negative,” he said. “I can’t predict that.” [It should be pretty easy to second guess the judges - "guilty, now pay the fine", because the courts are all about revenue]

Kavanaugh said the educational aspect would be twofold.

First, “whether it’s red-light cameras or intersection issues, it creates an opportunity to explain here’s what the law is.”

Second, he said, it would teach people what to expect in court, with the possible side effect of some people deciding not to challenge their citations. [So I guess it IS about raising revenue - convince the public NOT to challenge their tickets. Hey the royal rulers of Mesa need your money!!!]

Not all hearings would be televised. They would all be taped, and then a Mesa Channel11 staffer would edit them for broadcast. [Great, and how much is that going to cost the taxpayers???]

Steve Wright, Mesa’s public-information director, said the editing could be done on a $55,000 piece of equipment that the city has yet to purchase. The money, he said, could come from private-sector Channel11 sponsors, perhaps aided by a grant from the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.

He said he was skeptical of the idea until he sat in on some trials.

“I didn’t want to leave,” he said. “It was very interesting.”

In one case, he said, a woman successfully defended herself against a ticket because a process server had left the papers with an ex-boyfriend against whom she had a restraining order.

Wright said producing the shows would require about 40 to 50 hours a month, at an annual personnel cost of about $15,000. [Sounds like a waste of $15,000 a month of Mesa taxpayer money!!!]

Channel 11 doesn’t have the staff for that right now, Wright said, but the work could be done by freelancers or college-student interns. He expects the shows to begin sometime in 2013.

The plan would be to produce 12 shows a year. Each would boil about three days of hearings into a one-hour production, with each case being introduced by a narrator who would explain the law and procedures.

Wright said the city’s cable channel has a fairly broad audience, with about 40 percent of Mesa cable-TV viewers in a recent survey saying they watch at least once a week.

The channel has plenty of room on its schedule, Wright said, because there is not enough staff to produce a non-stop stream of original programming. Many programs are shown repeatedly.

He said the city would advertise the court show on its website and in fliers sent with utility bills.

Watching the trials, Wright said, “might make somebody a little more careful about how they drive.”

Washington voters approve I-502 legalizing marijuana

Voters approve I-502 legalizing marijuana

Washington state voters made history Tuesday by legalizing the recreational use of marijuana.

By Jonathan Martin

Seattle Times staff reporter

Washington enthusiastically leapt into history Tuesday, becoming the first state, with Colorado, to reject federal drug-control policy and legalize recreational marijuana use.

Initiative 502 was winning 55 to 45 percent, with support from more than half of Washington's counties, rural and urban.

The vote puts Washington and Colorado to the left of the Netherlands on marijuana law, and makes them the nexus of a new social experiment with uncertain consequences. National and international media watched as vote counts rolled into I-502's election-night party in Seattle amid jubilant cheers.

"I'm going to go ahead and give my victory speech right now. After this I can go sit down and stop shaking," said Alison Holcomb, I-502's campaign manager and primary architect.

"Today the state of Washington looked at 75 years of national marijuana prohibition and said it is time for a new approach," she said.

As of Dec. 6, it will no longer be illegal for adults 21 and over to possess an ounce of marijuana. A new "drugged driving" law for marijuana impairment also kicks in then.

Tuesday's vote also begins a yearlong process for the state Liquor Control Board to set rules for heavily taxed and regulated sales at state-licensed marijuana stores, which are estimated to raise $1.9 billion in new revenue over five years.

Many legal experts expect the U.S. Justice Department, which remained silent during presidential-year politics, to push back and perhaps sue to block I-502 based on federal supremacy.

But Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes said Seattle's U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan told him Tuesday the federal government "has no plans, except to talk."

Initiative 502 ran a disciplined campaign with a tightly focused message, criticizing what it called the failed "war on drugs" without endorsing marijuana use itself.

A study, released late in the campaign, found more than 67,000 arrests for low-level marijuana possession in the past five years in Washington, with African Americans and Latinos arrested at widely disproportionate rates.

I-502 spent heavily, raising more than $6 million, including more than $2 million from Peter B. Lewis of Ohio, chairman of Progressive Insurance.

A broad group of mainstream leaders — including former top federal law-enforcement officials, the King County sheriff, the entire Seattle City Council, public-health experts, African-American leaders and the state labor council — backed the measure. John McKay, U.S. attorney in Seattle under the George W. Bush administration, became a public face of the campaign.

The initiative faced surprisingly little organized opposition. The Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs and a state drug-treatment-prevention group were opposed, but did not raise money to counter I-502's $2.8 million TV-ad spending in October.

At debates, police and treatment providers predicted I-502 would lead to marijuana use, especially among teenagers. "It is a grave social injustice to trade the right of a minority to get 'high' for the right of youth to grow up drug free," said Derek Franklin, president of the drug-treatment group.

The loudest opposition came from some in the medical-marijuana industry, who said they feared being ensnared by I-502's DUI law, which does not exempt patients.

The DUI law also sets a zero-tolerance level for marijuana for drivers under 21, significantly stiffening current law.

Initiative 502 does not change the medical-marijuana law, leading to allegations that opposition from the industry was self-serving.

Tuesday's result was quickly hailed by activists such as Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. He called I-502 "the single most important thing in the marijuana legalization movement in the last 75 years," and predicted it will become a template for other states to confront the federal ban on marijuana.

"That's exactly what happened at the end of alcohol prohibition. I think that's exactly what's going to happen here," Stroup said.

Staff reporter Katherine Long and news researcher Gene Balk contributed.

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com. On Twitter @jmartin206.

Lawyers spar over alleged 'code of silence' in Chicago police beating

Lawyers spar over alleged 'code of silence'

By Annie Sweeney, Chicago Tribune reporter

8:25 p.m. CST, November 6, 2012

It was only because the shocking images were caught on video that Anthony Abbate was arrested, charged and fired from his job as a Chicago police officer for viciously beating a female bartender at a Northwest Side bar while he was off duty in 2007, a jury was told Tuesday.

Attorneys for the bartender, Karolina Obrycka, said the disturbing video made it more difficult for Abbate to hide behind what they allege is a code of silence in the Chicago Police Department that stretches from rank-and-file officers to the superintendent's office and allows officers to act with impunity.

"The city came this close to walking away from one of the biggest black eyes in its history," attorney Patrick Provenzale, who represents Obrycka, said as he held a DVD copy of the infamous footage in his hand and turned toward Abbate. "And this man came this close to walking around the streets of Chicago with a gun and a badge and a blue shirt."

But an attorney representing the city ridiculed the idea that Abbate felt protected that night by a widespread code of silence. The attorney, Barrett Rubens, said Abbate was so drunk that night that he didn't remember anything about the attack.

"It is clear from the video that Anthony Abbate acted out of rage," Rubens said. "… Anthony Abbate did what he did because he was hammered."

After nearly 21/2 weeks of testimony, the federal trial stemming from Obrycka's lawsuit is scheduled to go to the jury Wednesday after Obrycka's legal team gets one final argument. Lawyers for the two sides took turns Tuesday making their case to the jury.

For two hours, Provenzale highlighted the Police Department's alleged shoddy disciplinary history with its officers and zeroed in on efforts by Abbate, his police pals and high-ranking officers to try to cover up or minimize the beating of Obrycka.

Provenzale maintained that the hulking Abbate, without fear of being disciplined because of the code of silence, is seen on the video footage charging at Obrycka after she tried to block him from getting behind the bar. "Nobody tells me what to do," Abbate allegedly said as he tossed the diminutive Obrycka to the floor and repeatedly punched and kicked her.

Provenzale repeatedly referred to Abbate as a "monster" created by the city and noted how two responding officers failed to include Abbate's last name or occupation in their initial report. He also reminded jurors about dozens of phone calls that Abbate and other officers made in the 24 hours after the beating.

Perhaps most damaging was testimony at trial that two officers had Obrycka sign a misdemeanor complaint even before the Cook County state's attorney's office had made a decision about how to charge Abbate.

But Rubens questioned how a code of silence could have logically contributed to Abbate's decision to attack Obrycka. Referring to Abbate's testimony, she noted he said he had downed 14 drinks and was on a mission to get "inebriated" because his dog had died.

"They have to prove to you that the city's policy caused the beating," Rubens said. "If that sounds absurd to you, it should. Because it is. … He wasn't the monster that the city created."

Rubens also aggressively tackled one of the more troubling aspects of the case — the contradictory testimony about whether Chicago police, including some high-level officials, told Cook County prosecutors they wanted to file felony charges in the attack.

Debra Kirby, who was head of the Internal Affairs Division in 2007, testified that she conveyed that to Thomas Bilyk, a Cook County prosecutor who was supervising the Abbate investigation, in a phone call days after the beating.

But Bilyk took the stand and denied that such a conversation even took place.

Rubens noted the size of the Police Department — with 13,500 members at the time — and how individuals can be incompetent, lazy and fail to communicate information.

"That's bureaucracy, not conspiracy," she said.

But she then accused Bilyk of his own cover-up, suggesting he bungled the investigation back in 2007 and was demoted for it. Rubens reminded the jury that a Chicago police detective testified that he wrote a progress report on the case that said Bilyk indicated misdemeanor charges were appropriate.

"He is saying that now because he doesn't want this on him," Rubens said of his testimony. "You think now he is going to come in here and admit he rejected felony charges?"

Abbate's attorney, Michael Malatesta, reminded the jury that his client is being sued over the alleged conspiracy, not the beating.

Malatesta argued he didn't believe Obrycka's lawyers had proved that Abbate was plotting anything with the series of phone calls in the hours after the beating. He urged the jury not to punish Abbate simply because of the ugly beating.

It was a point Malatesta agreed was awkward to have to make.

"His behavior was revolting," he said. "It is very easy to sit in the courtroom and make Tony Abbate the villain. Very easy. … I'm going to ask, as odd as it sounds, that you find in favor of Mr. Abbate."

asweeney@tribune.com

Confessions of a former TSA agent

Confessions of a former TSA agent

By George Hobica

Published March 05, 2012

FoxNews.com

Love them or hate them, Transportation Security Administration agents get a lot of criticism and media attention as they work to keep our skies safe.

No current TSA agents would talk to Airfarewatchdog.com about their job, either on or off the record; but we found a former agent who would. Here's what he told us during a recent interview.

Q: How long were you with the TSA?

A: Two years.

Q: Why did you choose to leave?

A: Plain and simple, I did not agree with the way they were asking me to treat travelers. While the policy is to be polite, but serious, my station took a more aggressive approach. I watched as my colleagues treated passengers as a factory assembly lineup as if people had no feelings or emotions. There is a way to provide top-notch security while being courteous and respectful. The mundane nature of the job and the constant barrage of security mandates force agents into a rut that turns you into a manic robot.

Q: What was the most difficult part of the job?

A: Definitely, the repetitive nature. It eats away at you. The only thing that keeps it interesting is the constant variety of people passing through. And when other agents turn that variety into a burden, it becomes too much to handle. I enjoyed talking with people, wondering where they were traveling to, observing their behaviors, and even watching strangers interact with each other. It really tells you something about society. My colleagues, however, wanted everyone to be uniform and flow through the system without a delay. When there was a hitch in that flow, it disrupted them. That hitch could be anything from an elderly traveler to a businessman with too many electronic gadgets

Q: What are some examples of things that irritated you about your colleagues?

A: When they would bark at people to push their belongings through the belt. There's no need to be mean about it. It was also frustrating how we forced people into a holding pen for secondary screening like cattle until we were ready for them. It's dehumanizing, and I was embarrassed every time I saw someone standing there. Is there not a better way? One of my colleagues refused to say please and thank you during secondary screenings. He'd tell people to lift their arms, show their feet, remove their belt, etc. in such a forceful way, it was offensive. He once told me that he was there to provide safety and security, not to run a charm school.

Q: What are some things that irritated you about passengers?

A: I always found it surprising that people did not know they had to remove shoes, laptops, liquids, etc. Sure, not everyone has the opportunity to travel, but have these people not picked up a newspaper, watched TV, or spoken with someone else who has flown in the past decade? Another thing people would do is empty all of their belongings into the bins at the beginning of the line and not move down to allow other travelers to do the same. They slowed down the entire process since they kept others from moving through the line. Sure it's tough to juggle multiple things at once, but at least tell people that they can go around you.

Q: What was one of the least enjoyable parts of your job?

A: Having to take away bottled drinks, expensive perfumes and lotions, homemade food items, and other personal belongings and throw them in the trash (usually in front of the passenger) while they wondered what it was all about. The liquid ban really consumes much of our screening activity, and perhaps sometimes, to the detriment of our efforts to search for other dangerous items.

Q: Why are so many agents seemingly unfriendly and almost barking their commands at travelers? Do they realize that they're part of the reason many travelers are opting to drive or not travel at all?

A: It really is the repetitive nature of the job. Try standing in the same spot having to repeat the same instructions to people and watch them make the same mistakes repeatedly. It's emotionally exhausting. Like with many jobs, the annoying repetition and confusion of travelers eventually turns into what seems like disinterest on the part of screeners. We really do care about safety, but it just takes its toll on you.

Q: How did passengers treat you?

A: Some are nice and courteous. Especially in the morning, people seem either cheery and warm or simply tired and indifferent. Rarely are they rude in the morning. As the day progresses and people presumably become more stressed from work or other personal situations that may have arisen, they become less friendly and sometimes snappy. We're very, very used to having people roll their eyes at us, make sarcastic comments, and treat us like it's our personal decision to make them adhere to these policies. We're just the ones charged with carrying out policies made by someone else.

Q: If agents are so focused and serious about security screening, why do travelers constantly watch and listen to screeners banter about their day, evening plans, a booty call from last weekend, or your favorite movie? Doesn’t that seem unprofessional? Why should we as travelers put faith and believe in an agency that seems to put little effort into presenting a professional image on the front line?

A: I agree. Agents are entirely unprofessional when they discuss their personal lives in front of passengers, yet you see it at almost every airport. The job is so monotonous, it's the only way to get through the day. Plain and simple. It's almost as if the passengers become invisible. We watch their baggage contents. We monitor them as they pass through the checkpoint. But, otherwise, it's as if the factory of bags and people keeps on moving. I believe half of the agents aren't even aware that passengers are listening to them.

Another man framed for murder by Arizona cops to be released??? Probably!!!

Source

Deal may free Arizona man convicted in 1962 killings

By Richard Ruelas The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Nov 7, 2012 1:42 PM

After serving more than three decades years in prison for a double murder he says he didn’t commit, an Arizona inmate could be a free man as soon as today, his attorneys say.

Though Bill Macumber was convicted of the 1962 shooting a young couple in the desert north of Scottsdale, his attorneys have argued that forensic evidence was flawed, and that his jurors should have heard another key piece of testimony — the repeated confessions of another man.

Macumber was to be transported from prison to a court hearing in Phoenix beginning at 1:30 p.m. today. His attorneys told The Arizona Republic that they had reached an agreement with prosecutors under which his convictions would be vacated, and he would plead no-contest to a lesser charge. That could allow him to be sentenced to the time already served, they said.

Macumber was arrested in 1974 and later convicted. But after his arrest, new questions arose about his guilt.

The Arizona Justice Project, which works to free inmates it believes were wrongly convicted, filed a motion seeking a judge’s intervention in the case.

Jordan Green, an attorney with Perkins Coie who volunteered his time on the case, said it was important to Macumber that he not have to plead guilty to the crimes.

“He made it real clear that he would never change that,” Green said during a phone interview on Tuesday. “That if he had to die in prison, he would do so maintaining his innocence.”

On May 24, 1962, Joyce Sterrenberg and Timothy McKillop were found shot at a “lovers lane” area of what was then open desert near Scottsdale and Bell Roads. Each had two gunshot wounds to the head. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office investigated, but could find no evidence that led them to a suspect.

Macumber was arrested 12 years after the shootings. His estranged wife, who worked at the Sheriff’s Office, told detectives there that Macumber had confessed the killings to her, something he denied.

Authorities charged him with the crime, citing forensic evidence that matched his palm print to one left on the car hood of the victims, and some markings on bullet casings that matched a part of the firing mechanism in a gun Macumber owned.

He was convicted in 1975. But that verdict was tossed out on appeal. Macumber was re-tried in 1976 and was again found guilty.

His defense attorneys at the time tried to introduce the multiple confessions to the crime by another man, Ernest Valenzuela. But the judge ruled them inadmissible because they would have been described only by others — by the time of Macumber’s trial, Valenzuela had died in a prison fight.

The Arizona Clemency Board voted in 2009 to release Macumber. It called the case a “miscarriage of justice” and said it had doubts about Macumber’s guilt.

Gov. Jan Brewer rejected the recommendation to grant clemency.

In a 2011 interview with The Republic, Macumber insisted he was innocent. He blamed his wife and investigators for the case that led to his conviction, but said he did not blame the jury that found him guilty, given the evidence they heard. “They had to convict,” he said. “I understand their decision.”

Azcentral and 12 News will have updates on results of the 1:30 hearing.

William Macumber after 37 years in prison

Source

Arizona man convicted in 1962 murders freed

By Richard Ruelas The Republic | azcentral.com

Thu Nov 8, 2012 12:13 AM

The metal mesh door at the state prison complex in Phoenix slid open and a tall man shuffled through. Relatives of William Macumber, who were gathered in the lobby of the prison, cheered his first steps as a free man. He had spent 37 years in prison. He had been convicted of a murder he insisted he did not commit.

But Macumber, who was found guilty of shooting a young couple to death in the desert north of Scottsdale in 1962, pleaded no contest Wednesday to charges of second-degree murder in a deal with prosecutors that allowed him to walk free the same afternoon.

Macumber, 77, wore a brown-checked Western shirt and bola tie. His attorney said Macumber insisted he look nice on the day he walked out of prison, so his family brought him some favored clothes.

“It’s a big day, but it’s a family day,” he said. It was a polite way of telling the scrum of reporters he wouldn’t say much more.

Macumber’s release came after the Arizona Justice Project, which works to free inmates it believes were wrongly convicted, filed a motion that called into question both the forensic evidence that was introduced in Macumber’s trials, and evidence that was kept out — another man’s multiple confessions to the crimes.

Jordan Green, an attorney who volunteered his time on the case, said it was important to Macumber that he was able to plead no contest, rather than guilty, to the crimes.

“He made it real clear that he would never change that,” Green said. “That if he had to die in prison, he would do so maintaining his innocence.”

But County Attorney Bill Montgomery, during a news conference following the hearing in Maricopa County Superior Court, cautioned against saying Macumber had been exonerated. The no-contest plea still resulted in a felony conviction.

“He’s not innocent,” Montgomery said. “He’s guilty.”

Judge Bruce Cohen, before vacating the convictions and handing Macumber his freedom, said this was not a clear-cut case of an innocent man going free.

“We will never know with certainty what happened on that 1962 night,” he said in court.

Some would say justice was served when Macumber was convicted and sentenced to life, Cohen said.

“Others would argue that these decades serve as a constant reminder of the injustice that at times occurs,” he said.

The shootings

The shootings occurred on May 24, 1962. The bodies of Joyce Sterrenberg and Timothy McKillop were found at a “lovers lane” area of what was then open desert near Scottsdale and Bell roads. Each had two gunshot wounds to the head. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office investigated but could find no evidence that led to a suspect.

Three months later, a 17-year-old named Linda Primrose told the Sheriff’s Office she had information about the murders. She described being with a group of people bent on stealing a stash of drugs.

Her description seemed credible: She gave police detailed descriptions of the crime that included some information that had not been released to the public. She gave police the name of the gunman, whom she mainly knew by his street name. According to court records, the Sheriff’s Office could not locate the people Primrose was with.

Two years later, Scottsdale police arrested a man named Ernest Valenzuela, 20, for a traffic violation. Valenzuela admitted to officers that he killed two people in the desert north of Scottsdale. He repeated his confession to sheriff’s detectives.

Valenzuela matched the description that Primrose had given. But detectives did not connect the dots. Valenzuela was released after spending five days in jail. An attorney with the Arizona Justice Project said detectives dismissed Valenzuela’s murder claims as the rantings of a lunatic.

In 1967, Valenzuela was arrested for murdering a man and raping his wife on the Gila River Reservation. Valenzuela confessed to his federal public defender, Thomas O’Toole, that he also killed two people in the desert north of Scottsdale. O’Toole knew the conversation was protected by attorney- client privilege and did not tell authorities.

Valenzuela was convicted in the Gila River murder and was sent to the federal prison in Leavenworth. He died during a prison fight in 1973.

The 1962 shootings remained unsolved.

In 1974, 12 years after the shootings, Macumber’s estranged wife, who worked at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, told detectives that Macumber had confessed the killings to her.

Macumber denied it during interviews with detectives. But authorities charged him with the crime, citing forensic evidence that matched his palm print to one left on the victims’ car and some markings on bullet casings that matched a part of the firing mechanism in a gun Macumber owned.

Macumber was convicted in 1975, but the verdict was tossed out on appeal. Macumber was retried in 1976.

When O’Toole read that Macumber was accused in the Scottsdale deaths, he asked to testify at his second trial. Valenzuela’s death freed him from his ethical obligation to keep his client’s confession confidential.

But a judge ruled that his testimony — and other testimony of confessions Valenzuela gave to attorneys and psychiatrists — was hearsay and wouldn’t be allowed.

Macumber was found guilty a second time.

In a 2011 interview with The Arizona Republic, Macumber said he did not blame the jury that found him guilty, given the evidence they heard.

“They had to convict,” he said. “I understand their decision.”

The Arizona Board of Executive Clemency voted in 2009 to release Macumber. It called the case a “miscarriage of justice” and said it had doubts about Macumber’s guilt.

Gov. Jan Brewer rejected the clemency recommendation. The board considered the case again in March, with some members voting to recommend clemency.

In April, Brewer replaced a majority of the board’s members. Her office said it was time to bring a fresh perspective to the body.

Duane Belcher, who was ousted after serving as chairman of the clemency board for 20 years, told The Republic at the time that he got the sense that Brewer was unhappy he had voted for Macumber’s release.

Attorneys with the Arizona Justice Project filed a motion for post-conviction relief in February. Among the reasons cited were evolving science that cast doubt on the reliability of palm prints and ballistic evidence. The motion also said that under today’s rules, the jury would have heard about Valenzuela’s multiple confessions.

“Had it heard this evidence,” the motion reads, “(the jury) would not have found Macumber guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The Macumber case was one of the first investigated by the Arizona Justice Project after it was formed in 1999 by defense attorney Larry Hammond. The firm Perkins Coie volunteered to write the motions for a new trial in 2011.

“It’s taken far too long,” said Lee Stein, another attorney who worked on the Macumber case. “But to actually be involved in a matter where a man who spent his entire adult life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and is able to find his way out of prison is overwhelming.”

The future

At the beginning of Wednesday’s hearing, Macumber’s attorneys asked if the shackles around their client’s ankles could be removed. The judge agreed. After unlocking the restraints, a deputy sheriff asked the judge, “Everything off, sir?” Judge Cohen said, “Yes, if you would.” The deputy removed the chain from around Macumber’s waist and released the pink handcuffs.

“Thank you,” Macumber said to the deputy.

Stein and Green declined to say where Macumber would live, citing privacy concerns. Macumber is on medication for heart and stomach issues, his attorneys said. He was briefly hospitalized in 2011 with a staph infection.

Macumber has a son, Ronald, who lives in Denver. But Ronald Macumber said his father would be the one to decide where he wants to live.

Ronald Macumber said he had vivid memories of a loving father who coached his Little League and BMX bike-racing teams. But he hadn’t seen him since age 7, his mother convincing him his father was a brutal killer.

Ronald Macumber received a call from Hammond in 1999 telling him the Arizona Justice Project thought his father might be innocent.

“It took quite a bit of time to realize what had all been done and what the actual truth was,” said Ronald Macumber, 44.

The two formed a connection through prison visits. At first, they discussed the case and evidence.

But as time wore on, the visits became about family. Ronald introduced his daughter, and two years ago, his grandchild to his father.

Ronald Macumber said he has no relationship with his mother, Carol Kempfert, whom he said is living in Washington. Macumber had been using his stepfather’s name, but, in 2010, changed it back to Macumber. Kempfert did not return a call seeking comment Wednesday.

William Macumber was a model inmate. Prison records show only one infraction in 37 years: participating in an unauthorized gathering in 1996.

Green, the attorney, said Macumber taught a class in early American history to other prisoners and, for a time, was allowed to drive himself to a nearby junior college to teach a history class there.

“His capacity to find a way to live life and find some joy while serving 13,850 days in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, it’s unbelievable,” he said. “Absolutely unbelievable.”

But Macumber’s release brought no comfort for the surviving family members of the victims of the 1962 crime.

Judy Michael, who was the sister of Joyce Sterrenberg, said she felt Macumber had several opportunities to make his case in court.

“He’s had two trials, two clemency hearings, and now here he is today to get more justice for himself,” she told the judge. “And where is the justice for us?”

John McCluskey, who was the cousin of Timothy McKillop, asked the judge if the questions surrounding the evidence in this case were so unique that they merited such special attention. “Is this really a precedent-setting case?” he asked.

From the bench, Cohen gave him an answer: “I don’t know the answer to that, sir. It is a valid question.”

Ex-inmate savors 1st breaths of freedom after being falsely imprisoned for 37 years

Ex-inmate savors 1st breaths of freedom

By Richard Ruelas The Republic | azcentral.com

Thu Nov 8, 2012 10:40 PM

On the drive home following his release from prison after serving 37 years for two murders he insisted he didn’t commit, William Macumber looked out the car window marveling at how much Phoenix had changed. The mind-boggling surprises continued right up until he went to sleep, Macumber said, with a bedside lamp that turned on with a tap, rather than a switch.

“The world has passed me by in four decades,” the 77-year-old said Thursday, one day after a court ruling that freed him. “I’m not overly insistent on totally catching up. But I will catch up to the degree I have to.”

On Wednesday, a deal cut with Maricopa County prosecutors vacated Macumber’s two first-degree murder convictions for the 1962 deaths of Joyce Sterrenberg and Timothy McKillop. Macumber, who had been convicted in a 1976 trial, pleaded no-contest to second-degree murder in the deaths. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to have him sentenced to the time he had already served.

Macumber had maintained his innocence since his 1974 arrest and continued to do so at a news conference Thursday.

“I made that statement of innocence, I don’t know, 10,000 times since,” he said, “and I’ll take that statement to the grave.”

Macumber was arrested after his ex-wife, who worked at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, told detectives there that he had confessed the high-profile murder that had gone unsolved for a dozen years. Macumber said Thursday he couldn’t prove his ex-wife framed him, but knows what he believes in his heart. “If I never hear her name again, it’s fine,” he said.

His ex-wife, Carol Kempfert, did not return a call seeking comment this week. She told The Arizona Republic in 2011 that she believed Macumber was manipulating the press and the attorneys trying to free him.

While Macumber was behind bars, his father died, and his three sons stopped talking to him, having been told by their mother that he was a murderer. Macumber has reconnected with one son, Ronald, who lives in Denver. Another son died in June. Macumber said he still hasn’t spoken with his oldest son.

Macumber said his release from prison “may have the effect of changing his mind. ... Only time will tell.”

Macumber didn’t allow himself to grow despondent, finding a way to give his life purpose by teaching history classes to inmates.

Macumber said he often posted quotes on a bulletin board for other inmates to read. His last read this: “Justice, however late, is still justice.”

On his first night of freedom, Macumber dined on pizza at a cousin’s house in Phoenix. He allowed himself to have one beer.

“After 38 years, I was a little bit hesitant to go beyond that point,” he said.

Macumber said he’ll be leaving Arizona in the next few weeks for a fishing trip. He didn’t want to say where he would eventually live, but said he wanted to be an advocate for elderly inmates and for the Arizona Justice Project, the organization that works to free those, like Macumber, it feels were wrongly convicted.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery said during a Wednesday news conference that he still believed Macumber was responsible for the 1962 deaths. Montgomery also said his office would have pursued a new trial had the evidence in the case — fingerprints, shell casings, and a gun seized from Macumber’s home — not been destroyed.

Jordan Green, one of Macumber’s attorneys, said the evidence was most likely destroyed by the courts as a matter of routine.

“The reason Bill Macumber is here today,” Green said, “is that we were ready to prove ... that Bill Macumber is innocent.”

In his motion to the court, Green said new understandings of science discredits the fingerprint and ballistic evidence experts used in the trials to conclusively tie Macumber to the murders. He also argued that, under current rules of evidence, a jury would hear about the repeated and consistent confessions that another man, Ernest Valenzuela, made to police, attorneys and psychiatrists. Valenzuela, who was convicted on federal charges of rape and murder, died in prison in 1973.

“This case is not a technicality,” Green said.

DPS officer’s appeal of lawsuit is questioned

DPS officer’s appeal of lawsuit is questioned

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com

Wed Nov 7, 2012 10:52 PM

A former Arizona Department of Public Safety trooper who has appealed a lawsuit related to his firing by the agency was questioned by federal judges about the basis and merits of his appeal during a brief hearing this week before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Geoff Jacobs, who had worked for the state law-enforcement agency for more than seven years, was fired in 2009 at the recommendation of a DPS commander who found Jacobs had a history of professional misconduct that included writing a fake obituary about an ex-girlfriend and using it as proof of her death so he could transfer an airline ticket in her name to another woman for a tropical vacation.

Jacobs, however, claims he lost his job because of a romance he had with the daughter of DPS Director Robert Halliday, who did not work at the agency when Jacobs was fired, having retired after 35 years before returning as director in early 2010.

A law-enforcement officers appeals board upheld Jacobs’ firing, and he sued the state in summer 2010, alleging defamation and violation of privacy and constitutional rights. He has appealed that suit’s subsequent dismissal to the 9th Circuit.

Various allegations detailed in Jacobs’ lawsuit center on a relationship Jacobs had with Halliday’s daughter, Ami. The two had a tumultuous relationship, and Jacobs’ suit says Ami Halliday alleged that Jacobs secretly videotaped her and posted videos on the Internet, that his roommate pointed a gun at her and that Jacobs assaulted another woman. Glendale police investigated her claims but could not substantiate them, and Jacobs was not charged.

In a telephonic hearing Monday, a three-judge appellate panel from the 9th Circuit repeatedly asked Jacobs’ attorney and one representing the state what exactly the judges were being asked to determine.

Neil Landeen, an attorney representing Jacobs, began to address the panel when Judge Andrew Jay Kleinfeld cut Landeen off and asked whether illegal search-and-seizure issues Jacobs cited in his appeal related to a search of his computer by investigators.

Glendale police searched Jacobs’ computer as part of the investigation into Ami Halliday’s allegations. The search turned up the phony obituary Jacobs sent to an airline to transfer a non-refundable ticket to another woman’s name, which constituted fraud, according to DPS investigators. The investigators might not have learned about the fake obituary had they not seized Jacobs’ computer as part of their investigation into Ami Halliday’s claims to the Glendale Police Department.

Landeen told the panel that Jacobs’ appeal relates to the search of the computer and his belief that the information was illegally seized. His attorney said he is seeking compensatory damages, emotional damages, costs and attorneys fees — not reinstatement to his job with the DPS.

Jacobs’ appeal has merit, Landeen argued, because the law-enforcement appeals board did not consider the constitutional claim when it upheld his firing, leaving the issue open for the Court of Appeals.

The judges were skeptical, however, saying repeatedly that simply because the merit-system board did not cite the constitutional claim in its findings, that did not mean the board failed to consider the issue.

Instead, the appeals-court panel repeatedly asked whether the constitutional issue had anything to do with Jacobs’ firing.

“Presumably, it wasn’t cited because it wasn’t pertinent to anything,” said Judge Marsha Siegel Berzon. “It wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t pertinent, it had nothing to do with the termination.”

Eileen GilBride, an attorney representing the DPS, faced a similar line of questioning from the panel but said Jacobs’ case was weaker than other employee-appeals cases the judges were citing because an independent review board, not DPS investigators, chose to revoke Jacobs’ license to work as a police officer in Arizona.

Jacobs has to live with those results, GilBride said, and he does not deserve any damages.

“He chose his forum, your honor. He chose to challenge his termination in the administrative realm, which gives him a forum, it gives him an appeal, it gives him the right to raise all of his constitutional issues in state court and he decided not to do that,” GilBride said. “It doesn’t allow him to challenge his termination in the admin realm and then give up his state appeal and then go ahead and litigate that in federal court.”

The panel did not indicate when it plans to issue a ruling.

Prosecutor accused of stealing campaign signs elected judge

Prosecutor accused of stealing campaign signs elected judge

Winner put on unpaid leave by state's attorney's office

By Lisa Black, Chicago Tribune reporter

8:05 a.m. CST, November 8, 2012

Lake County prosecutor Patricia Fix celebrated her successful run for a judge's seat Wednesday after her bid was nearly derailed by an investigation into claims that she stole her opponent's campaign signs.

"I am grateful and humbled by the results of this election," said Fix, who thanked her supporters. "For now I am just enjoying this victory and preparing to serve the people of Lake County."

Fix, who has not been charged, has denied she took the signs, saying an overzealous supporter removed them from public or private property and gave them to her.

Fix was placed on unpaid leave from her prosecutor's position Nov. 1. That status remained unchanged Wednesday while the Lake County sheriff's office investigates the allegations, said Lake County First Assistant State's Attorney Jeff Pavletic.

To avoid a potential conflict of interest, any decision to charge Fix would be made by the Illinois attorney general's office or the state's attorneys appellate prosecutor rather than the Lake County state's attorney's office, where Fix works, officials said.

A Gurnee resident and Democrat, Fix won Tuesday's election with 51 percent of the vote, in unofficial totals. Fix, who beat Associate Judge Luis Berrones for the 2nd Judicial Subcircuit seat, will be sworn in Dec. 3.

"It's not uncommon for people four days before the election to drop something ridiculous on (candidates) because there's not enough time to react," said Pete Couvall, first chair of the Lake County Democrats. "What they didn't account for was early voting. By Election Day, a third of the votes were already cast."

If any charges are filed against Fix, it is unclear whether or how it would affect her position as a judge. Elected officials usually vacate their seat if convicted of an "infamous crime" or felony, said Ken Menzel, deputy general counsel for the Illinois State Board of Elections. But some rules differ for judges, he said.

Gurnee police and Lake County sheriff's police confirmed late last week that they were investigating reports that Fix plucked the signs from along a Gurnee road and stowed them in her minivan.

Warren Township GOP Chairman Mike Amrozowicz said he tracked down Fix's van at a courthouse parking garage and found signs in the van after receiving complaints that a woman resembling Fix was seen removing signs.

Fix said at a news conference Friday that she was in the process of returning five signs that had been given to her by a misguided supporter.

The signs stated that the Lake County Bar Association supported Berrones for the judgeship and did not recommend Fix, Amrozowicz said.

The bar association, whose members are lawyers, states on its website that it bases its judicial recommendations on integrity, impartiality, legal abilities, temperament and court management ability.

State Sen. Terry Link, chairman of the Lake County Democrats, last week called the accusations against Fix "politics at its worst" and questioned why she was placed on unpaid leave.

Pavletic on Wednesday declined to say why Fix was not given paid leave, saying: "I think it would be premature to speak, given that there is an investigation given those details. They are all intertwined."

lblack@tribune.com

Maricopa County Deputy Timothy Abrahamson beats up wife's lover???

Arizona deputy assaulted man over affair, officials say

Associated Press Thu Nov 8, 2012 9:08 AM

WEST FARGO, N.D. — An Arizona sheriff’s deputy facing a criminal charge in North Dakota allegedly drove to West Fargo in September and assaulted a man who had an affair with his wife.

Maricopa County Deputy Timothy Abrahamson was taken into custody in Arizona on Wednesday on a North Dakota warrant for aggravated assault. Court documents do not list an attorney for him.

West Fargo police issued a statement providing details of the alleged assault. Authorities say the victim suffered a torn right ear, and facial cuts, swelling and bruising.

The Forum newspaper reported that Cass County prosecutors have granted immunity to another Maricopa County deputy who allegedly rode to West Fargo with Abrahamson, in exchange for the second deputy’s testimony.

Abrahamson is on unpaid leave while he awaits extradition.

Glendale Mom Falsely Imprisoned and Birth Certificate Canceled???

A Glendale Mom Was Falsely Imprisoned; Now the State Wants to Cancel Her U.S. Birth Certificate

By Stephen Lemons Thursday, Nov 8 2012

The eagerness of the state of Arizona to drive all brown people — legal or illegal — from its territory leads to some really backward moves on behalf of officials, high and low.

Add bureaucrats' inherent inability to concede an error to this official policy of ethnic cleansing, enshrined in Senate Bill 1070's dictate of "attrition through enforcement," and you've got a bizarre huckleberry hybrid of a government that resembles Redneck Island crossed with Commie Russia.

Take, for example, the colossal boneheadedness displayed by state officials in the ongoing case of Briseira Torres.

I know, I shouldn't be surprised. After all, these are officials of a state still governed by Governor Jan "We Have Did" Brewer, who recently "endorsed" President Obama by accident while attending the Republican National Convention.

And stupidity, like some other substances best left unmentioned, rolls down hill.

But once Torres was released August 3, following her 4 1/2-month wrongful imprisonment in a Maricopa County jail, I figured Arizona would leave the Glendale mom alone, especially after my column on the case went viral ("Woman Held Because Authorities Thought She Was Illegal," August 9).

Torres, a U.S. citizen with the birth certificate to prove it, had been collared by Arizona Department of Transportation investigator Chris Oberly on March 14 and charged with three counts of forgery.

This, after she tried to pick up the passport she had ordered for her teenage daughter at the federal building downtown.

Oberly and the County Attorney's Office contended that Torres' real name was Brenda Gomez, a Mexican national whose mom fraudulently had obtained a late-registration birth certificate for her when she was a baby.

A former employee with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Oberly testified under oath to a county grand jury that Arizona's Office of Vital Records canceled Torres' U.S. birth certificate in 1999.

As she awaited her date in court, Torres was held non-bondable. See, forgery is a class-four felony in Sand Land, and if authorities think a suspect is in the country illegally, that individual is treated as a murderer and not allowed to make bail.

Torres' lawyers — immigration attorneys Delia Salvatierra and Johnny Sinodis — hit the state's Vital Records Office with a subpoena, seeking all documents the department had for their client.

After weeks of stalling, OVR section manager Robin Glover responded with 18 pages of copies and a sworn statement certifying that they were "all of the documents in possession of the Office of Vital Records" having to do with their client's case.

Significantly, the file contained no indication that Torres' birth certificate had been canceled. Nor was a Mexican birth certificate for Torres in the OVR's file.

With this info, Salvatierra demanded that the case be remanded back to the grand jury.

The judge agreed, noting that during oral arguments the prosecutor had conceded that Torres' Vital Records file "was never obtained [by the County Attorney's Office] and neither the prosecutor nor [investigator Oberly] knew the full contents of that long-form birth certificate."

Deputy County Attorney Daniel Strange — face fully bathed in egg — quickly moved to dismiss the charges without prejudice, meaning he could bring them back later.

However, he later conveyed that he had no intention of doing so.

Smart move, since Torres was considering a lawsuit, as she'd lost her apartment and had been separated from her daughter while wrongfully imprisoned.

I mean, why would any civil servant want to double-down on this idiocy?

Dumb question, as the geniuses at Vital Records have demonstrated.

On August 15, OVR chief Patricia Adams wrote to Briseira Torres (not to "Brenda Gomez," natch) advising her that the OVR had "cancelled and sealed" her birth record in 1999 and had documentation to prove it.

Why didn't the OVR turn over all the documents it supposedly had in response to Salvatierra's previous subpoena?

Why did OVR employee Robin Glover, under oath, previously swear that she was turning over everything in the OVR's possession to Torres' lawyers?

And, here's the biggie, if the OVR had canceled Torres' birth certificate in 1999, as Adams stated in her letter, why had it issued copies of the birth record, most recently on February 2, 2011?

Magnanimously, despite the incompetence displayed by her office, Adams offered Torres the opportunity for a public hearing concerning the canceled birth certificate.

Meantime, Torres' life remained in limbo. She would be unable to re-acquire the ID confiscated by authorities. She had lost her residence while in the slammer, had no job, and no way to hunt for a job or a place to stay.

Fortunately, Torres had Salvatierra, whose head nearly combusted upon seeing Adams' letter. Salvatierra soon contacted the Arizona Attorney General's Office, which acts as the OVR's attorney.

Ultimately, the OVR backtracked and admitted that it had not canceled Torres' birth certificate. The OVR's assigned legal beagle, Assistant Attorney General Don Schmid, stated in one filing that he declined to "support or defend a purported cancellation" of Torres' birth certificate.

Nevertheless, the OVR still wants to cancel Torres' birth certificate.

Why? Well, that's the question I asked Schmid and Glover outside the prehearing conference before Administrative Law Judge Kay Abramsohn in October.

Neither chose to reply. Can't ding them for that, as pursuing this case is nearly impossible to justify.

Abramsohn and both parties agreed to hold the official hearing in late March. Briseira Torres, a U.S. citizen with an un-canceled U.S. birth certificate, despite the bumbling efforts of the Office of Vital Records.

Until then, Torres' birth certificate remains officially un-canceled. She and her lawyers recently stopped by an office of the Motor Vehicles Division to get a new copy of her driver's license, which she achieved with relatively little hassle.

Why did she need her lawyers there? Because she feared that she might be arrested. Remember, in March of this year, she thought she was going to pick up her daughter's passport, when she was handcuffed out of the blue.

Now Torres will be looking for work with her new ID and trying to rebuild a life that was interrupted by her jailing.

I suspect the OVR and the AG's Office want to continue with this travesty in hopes of minimizing the state of Arizona's liability for arresting Torres and keeping her in stir.

But I think it is just making things worse — and further burdening Torres with this game of legal Whack-a-Mole.

In response to my records requests for its policy regarding canceling birth certificates, the OVR, which has 35 employees and an annual budget of $3.6 million, coughed up a very vague document, dated — get this — March 12, 2012, two days before Torres' arrest.

It mostly dealt with voiding a duplicate birth certificate, with a few lines added about what should be in the file of one voided "as the result of an administrative decision."

How should such a decision be reached? It doesn't say.

Interestingly, the only policy that existed before March 12 dealt with duplicate birth certificates. (The OVR claims it canceled four birth certificates last year and four this year so far.)

Torres' U.S. birth certificate is for a home birth, and we now know there's a Mexican record of Torres' birth, as well — created by her father, who was residing in Mexico, estranged from Torres' mother in the United States.

Problem is, the Mexican documentation contains inaccurate info and even lists Briseira as a boy. Nor did Briseria have to be present for the document to be created. Her father may have done it simply to establish her dual citizenship.

There is a lot of genuinely conflicting information in Torres' case. But I was struck by one letter from the Glendale Elementary School District, with records attached that document Torres' attending school there continuously under the name "Briseira Torres" from 1986 to 1995.

OVR employees can't go back in time and watch Torres being born at home. Why would they want to? Let's put it this way: If Torres' parents had been Swedish, I doubt you'd be reading this story right now.

ADHS preventing people from using medical marijuana!!!!

Will Humble preventing people from using medical marijuana!!!!

From this article it sounds like Will Humble and the tyrants at Arizona Department of Health Services are doing everything they can to prevent people from legally using medical marijuana.

The cops and prosecutors tell us they would rather let 100 guilty people get away then have one innocent person be sent to prison.

But that is a bunch of BS.

Sadly it seems to be exactly the opposite of that and for every 100 innocent people that are railroaded by the cops and falsely sent to prison 1 guilty person gets away. And of course that statement is based on the large number of cases where DNA is proving innocent people were railroaded by the cops and sent to death row for crimes they didn't commit. They often spend 10, 20 or 30 years in prison before DNA tests prove they are innocent. A little over a month ago on September 28, 2012, Damon Thibodeaux, a Louisiana death row inmate, was the 300th prisoner free from prison because DNA test proved he was framed for murder.

I suspect the same is true with Will Humble crack team of marijuana haters in the Arizona Department of Health Services. They would rather prevent 100 people who are legally allowed to use medical marijuana from using it, if it means they can prevent one person who isn't legally allowed to use marijuana from getting a prescription.

One interesting question for a lawsuit would be to ask does Will Humbles team of doctor goons review all the other prescriptions written by doctors for narcotics to see that the doctors are not writing invalid prescriptions.

I suspect that Will Humble and Jan Brewer are singling out people with marijuana prescriptions or recommendations as they are called.

Source

Medical-marijuana report offers insight into users, doctors

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Nov 8, 2012 10:54 PM

Arizona health officials want to strengthen the controversial medical-marijuana program to crack down on physicians who improperly recommend marijuana, train physicians who write most certifications and make it easier to revoke patient cards if health officials suspect wrongdoing.

Health officials also want to study how effective marijuana is in treating debilitating conditions, such as cancer, and examine whether marijuana affects opiate dependency, impacts vehicle-traffic injuries and impacts pregnancy outcomes and breastfeeding. Such studies would require changes to the law, which restricts the scope of information state health officials can obtain from physicians and patients. [And of course the politicians are NOT allowed to make any changes to the law because of a prior voter initiative which was passed after the politicians passed a law revoking Arizona's first medical marijuana law. So the question is why is Will Humble wasting our tax dollars doing these studies?]

The recommendations are contained in the state’s inaugural report of the medical-marijuana program, approved by voters in 2010 to allow people with certain debilitating medical conditions, to use marijuana. They must obtain a recommendation from a physician and register with the state, which issues identification cards to qualified patients and caregivers.

The new report covers April 2011 through June and includes for the first time, in a comprehensive format, a detailed breakdown of the types of physicians that are recommending medical marijuana.

During that time period, the Department of Health Services received 41,476 applications — both renewals and new submissions — and approved about 98 percent. Because of the report’s time frame of more than a year, some cardholders may have been counted twice in that number —when they initially applied and when they renewed their annual card.

There were 29,804 total active cardholders reported, which included 28,977 qualifying patients and 827 caregivers.

Most patients cited one medical condition while less than a quarter reported two or more conditions. About 70 percent of patients cited “severe and chronic pain” as their only medical condition.

The report states that 475 physicians recommended marijuana for the 28,977 patients. Ten of those physicians certified nearly half of all patients.

Eighty naturopaths, who combine traditional medicine and natural medical approaches to treat patients, certified 18,057 patients while 332 medical doctors certified 8,574 patients. Sixty-one osteopaths certified 2,329 patients and two homeopaths certified 17 patients.

State Department of Health Services Director Will Humble said he was disappointed that so few physicians were writing so many marijuana recommendations.

“I had hoped that we wouldn’t have this tight concentration of specialties who are writing these,” he said.

Humble said the numbers raise concerns that patients are seeking recommendations from “certification mills” instead of primary-care doctors who are generally more well-versed about individual patients’ medical histories. He said medical doctors may be less willing to write marijuana certifications because they didn’t study marijuana as a treatment in medical school. [And of course medical schools don't teach doctors how and when to prescribe marijuana because it's still and illegal drug per Federal law, so we have a Catch 22 here. And I suspect Will Humble hopes that that Catch 22 can be used prevent doctors from writing medical marijuana prescriptions]

Humble said the figures bolstered his belief that state health officials should develop intense training for high-volume certifiers, along with licensing medical boards to ensure physicians are not breaking the law. He also wants to be able to more quickly identify physicians who are improperly recommending pot.

Humble also wants to explore the idea of temporarily suspending patients’ cards if officials suspect wrongdoing and want to investigate. [So Will Humble wants patients to be assumed guilty till they prove their innocence. That's typical of government tyrants!] Currently, cards remain active until a final decision is made, “thus, providing immunity to potential misuse” of the law, the report says.

His agency will soon spend more than $1.2 million to, in part, weed out physicians who improperly recommend marijuana to patients as well as to help train marijuana-dispensary staff, hire private accountants or auditors to examine dispensary financial statements and hire private attorneys to assist the department with legal issues arising from the program. [Wow, it seems like Will Humble is doing everything possible to flush Prop 203 which is Arizona's medical marijuana law down the toilet]

The ADHS will also continue to fund a $200,000 contract with the University of Arizona College of Public Health to, in part, review published research about the effectiveness of marijuana in treating medical conditions.

Humble believes the expenses will help the state keep the medical-marijuana program as “medical” as possible.

Will Humble's report on medical marijuana

Appeals court screws police beating victim out of $205,000

Ariz. appeals court rules in Peoria man's jail beating lawsuit

Associated Press Fri Nov 9, 2012 11:05 AM

PHOENIX— The Arizona Court of Appeals has upheld most of the civil damages awarded to a Peoria man in his lawsuit against two Maricopa County jail officers.

A county civil jury in July 2010 found two sheriff’s detention officers liable for malicious prosecution, abuse of process and civil rights violations and awarded $855,000 to Delano Yanes.

In a 17-page ruling Thursday, the state appeals court affirmed the award of $650,000 to Yanes for malicious prosecution. But the court reversed the award of $205,000 for punitive damages and attorney fees.

Yanes was accused of killing his 11-month-old son in September 2003. He claimed he was beaten by the two detention officers when booked into the downtown Phoenix jail.

Yanes was acquitted in 2006 and filed suit against the detention officers in 2007.

Sheriff Joe loves Mexicans???

Source

Arpaio tries mending rift with Latinos

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Nov 9, 2012 11:34 PM

As it became apparent Tuesday that Sheriff Joe Arpaio was going to secure a sixth term in office, he was his usual brash self, taunting the media and promising to run again in four years.

Then, surprisingly, he did something he doesn’t often do. He made a peace offering to his most ardent critics. He said he hoped to repair relations with a Latino community angered by his hard-line policy of arresting undocumented immigrants, his frequent criticisms of Hispanic advocacy groups and allegations by the U.S. Justice Department that his agency engaged in racial profiling.

Can his attempt at diplomacy work?

Carlos Sierra, a Republican who helped organize a coalition that sought to register Hispanic voters and oust Arpaio, said the olive branch offered on Election Night was broken from the start.

“You remember exactly what he said: ‘As long as they don’t yell at me.’ If he’s trying to reach out, he already kind of insulted us by saying we only shout at him,” Sierra said. “I think the damage is done. I’m sure there are some people in the Hispanic community who might meet with him. He’s not bringing anything to the table for us. He’s already said he’s not going to change.”

Arpaio said the problem comes down to communication — and his inability to accurately get his message out. He believes local media are biased against him and are twisting his words.

In a wide-ranging post-election interview, Arpaio said the past two years have presented challenges that made his sixth general-election victory his most satisfying. And though the sheriff admitted making mistakes in recent years, mainly in his management choices, he does not think his approach to immigration enforcement is one of them.

Arpaio still believes that mass deportation of undocumented immigrants would work if the country’s leaders put their minds to it and that his rigid enforcement of state laws targeting identity theft and human smuggling is a reasonable solution.

If given the chance, Arpaio said, he also could explain past statements that seem to portray undocumented immigrants as dirty and disease-prone drains on society — words that could thwart his chances for reconciliation with the Hispanic community.

“That’s exactly why I want to talk to them,” he said. “I can explain the swine-flu furor that occurred in the media. That’s why I want to communicate, to let them know why we are doing things — not through the media and demonstrations.

“They may come up with an idea and say, ‘Wait a minute, maybe we can do this … maybe we can deal with the Mexican ambassador, Sheriff, if we have this medical problem. Maybe we can work through customs and everything else.’ Great. OK. Let’s do it.”

But he said their willingness to meet him “is not there.”

“The hatred with certain groups, it’s hard to negotiate,” Arpaio said.

There is a healthy amount of distrust on both sides.

The Rev. Warren Stewart co-founded the Black/Brown Coalition of Arizona with Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox earlier this year. Stewart was also among a group of Black leaders who wrote a letter to Arpaio in December asking the sheriff to resign after a jail death dovetailed with the release of a Justice Department report saying the Sheriff’s Office was involved in some of the most egregious examples of racial profiling investigators had encountered.

Arpaio mocked and ignored the group’s request.

Stewart said that if Arpaio is serious about rebuilding relationships with his critics in minority communities, he could start by writing a letter to the Black/Brown Coalition with an offer to meet.

“His desire to reach out could be an answer to a prayer for reconciliation and for cooperation in Maricopa County as it relates to the immigration issue and to people of color,” Stewart said. “One of my Christian duties is to reach out to those who are opponents, those who could be labeled as enemies, to bring peace. Our goal is peace. It’s never been anti-Arpaio. It’s been anti-Arpaio because he’s disturbing the peace.”

The Rev. Oscar Tillman, president of the Maricopa County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, joined Stewart last December on the steps of the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix, where they called for Arpaio’s resignation.

Tillman, who for years has had a professional relationship with Arpaio and other sheriff’s administrators, said his decision to join was driven in part by Arpaio going out of town instead of tending to more pressing matters at home when an inmate died after a scuffle with officers in the Fourth Avenue Jail.

On Wednesday, Tillman called to congratulate Arpaio on winning re-election and to deliver a message: “You’ve got to deal with me for another four years,” Tillman said.

“There are people today congratulating (President Barack) Obama who hated him. When you deal with reality, you don’t have time to deal with secondary issues.

“If you want to make changes and create some type of cooperation, you cannot say that too much bad blood has been there. Let’s face it, if we said that to Japan or Germany, where would we be?”

Peace and reconciliation are words that politicians often use after elections. But beyond the ethical or moral desire to foster a more tranquil environment, there is some question as to whether Arpaio could secure a seventh term without votes from the Hispanic community.

With several hundred thousand votes remaining to be counted late this week, Arpaio maintained a lead of more than 80,000 votes over his Democratic challenger, Paul Penzone. While comfortable, that margin is a far cry from Arpaio’s 2008 defeat of Dan Saban, whom he bested by 172,000 votes.

When his declining margins come up, Arpaio is quick to produce typewritten notes on results of all six of his campaigns.

“I always hover around 52, 56 (percent),” Arpaio said. “What’s changed? This is a landslide.”

According to exit polls, the percentage of Hispanic voters in Arizona crept higher this year compared with the previous presidential election, rising to 18 percent from 16 percent, Tucson-based pollster Margaret Kenski said.

“Eighteen percent isn’t too staggering compared to the huge base of conservatives he has. Rather than the percent of Hispanics, I would look at the changing attitudes on immigration that have been found in the polls lately,” Kenski said. “To me, that’s more important than the percentage of Hispanics.

“That means it isn’t a fight between the Hispanics and the authorities. There are allies out there in the White community who think a hard line against all illegal aliens is not going to be a productive route to go.”

With that in mind, Kenski said, Hispanic leaders should look carefully at Arpaio’s offer to improve relations. If those leaders refuse to meet, it can make them appear intractable and alienate some in the community who might otherwise support them, she said.

“No matter how obnoxious he may have been, I think it’s a mistake for Latino leaders to say, ‘We’re not coming to the table,’” Kenski said. “It’s always better to talk. What’s their alternative? Wait for him to die?”

Sierra offered another option that might disappoint those hoping Arpaio’s victory and discussions of comprehensive federal immigration reform would bring a detente after years of political warfare.

“We’re not giving up,” Sierra said. “We’re still marching. No one wants to give up. I think if there is a possibility to recall him, I would be very surprised if we didn’t start working on that.”

Sierra noted that the campaign for sheriff had cost Arpaio most of the $8million he raised to run. “At the very least, we left him broke,” he said.

Sheriff Joe's "drug war" goons will soon have machine guns?

Source

Suspected illegal immigrants arrested in pot bust

The Republic | azcentral Sat Nov 10, 2012 4:43 PM

Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office reported Saturday the arrest of three undocumented immigrants, who authorities allege were transporting 3,500 pounds of marijuana in a vehicle.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio said the increasing number of drug smugglers and the danger they pose to his deputies has prompted him “to issue automatic weapons in the near future to all my deputies, including those detectives who work in the higher drug traffic areas like the desert in the near future.”

Deputies estimated the latest seizure of marijuana to be worth $2 million.

The sheriff’s office did not say in its press release when or where the traffic stop and arrests were made.

Deputies arrested Melchicedec Nini-Cabrera, 41, Eucario Salano-Nino, 49, and Jesus Ismael-Birgen, 30, all from Mexico.

All three were booked into Fourth Avenue Jail, facing felony charges of possession and transportation of marijuana, officials said.

The arrests resulted after a week of investigating by the Sheriff’s Office Drug Suppression Task Force.

Secret Service shakes woman down for wishing Obama was dead!!!

This reminds me of the case where the Secret Service locked up Kevin Walsh in a mental institution for 6 months for also wishing the President was dead. That President was Bush, not Obama.

Source

Woman fired for Obama racial slur on Facebook

Updated 10:03 a.m., Friday, November 9, 2012

TURLOCK, Calif. (AP) — A California woman has been fired and reported to the Secret Service for her President Barack Obama racial slur and assassination comment on Facebook.

The Modesto Bee (http://bit.ly/TPtRc5) says 22-year-old Denise Helms of Turlock posted the inflammatory comments on the social media site shortly after the president's re-election on Tuesday.

She used the n-word in referring to Obama and wrote that maybe he will be assassinated this term.

Helms then told a Sacramento TV station that she wouldn't mind a bit if someone assassinated Obama.

Helms was fired Thursday from her job at the Stone Cold Creamery store.

Store director Chris Kegle says the comments are disgusting.

Secret Service Agent Scott Gillingham in Sacramento says the incident is being investigated.

Threats against the president can lead to felony charges.

___

Information from: The Modesto Bee, http://www.modbee.com

-------------------------------

http://www.modbee.com/2012/11/08/2448491/obama-threat-gets-woman-fired.html

Obama threat gets Turlock woman fired, reported to Secret Service

By Marijke Rowland

mrowland@modbee.com

TURLOCK -- A Turlock woman who posted inflammatory comments on Facebook about President Barack Obama has been fired from her job and reported to the U.S. Secret Service.

Turlock resident Denise Helms, 22, posted shortly after the president's re-election Tuesday on her Facebook page, "And another 4 years of the (n-----). Maybe he will get assassinated this term..!!"

The post quickly made the rounds on social media, prompting Sacramento TV station Fox 40 to interview her about her comments Wednesday night. PG Ice Cream 1

Modesto Bee - Denise Helms at Cold Stone Creamery in May

She told the Fox 40 reporter: "I didn't think it would be that big of a deal. … The assassination part is kind of harsh. I'm not saying like I would go do that or anything like that, by any means, but if it was to happen, I don't think I'd care one bit."

Helms has since deleted the post and posted again about the incident. It reads: "So apparently my post last night about Obama got onto Twitter and Fox 40 came and interviewed me cause apparently a lot of people in Sacramento think I'm crazy and racist. WOW is all I got to say!! I'm not racist and I'm not crazy. just simply stating my opinion.!!!"

But the incident and surrounding outrage caused her to lose her job at Cold Stone Creamery, where she had worked for less than a year. Turlock Cold Stone Creamery store director Chris Kegle said he was shocked to read her racist slur and see her accompanying interview.

"We found her comments to be very disgusting, and they do not reflect our opinions here," Kegle said. "We never saw anything from her at work like those comments."

When he arrived Thursday at the store on Monte Vista Avenue, he said, there were more than 20 angry voice mails about Helms.

"We made the decision because of her comments, but also the community feedback," he said. "We are very into working with the community and doing community service. So when your community does not like you because of an employee, that's bad. We have a business to run."

Helms also caught the attention of the Secret Service. Agent Scott Gillingham from the Sacramento office said he was not familiar with Helms' case specifically, but he would check out her posting and the Fox 40 report. He said threats against the president are a felony under U.S. Code Section 871.

It reads: "Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail or for a delivery from any post office or by any letter carrier any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States, the President-elect, the Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President of the United States, or the Vice President-elect, or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat against the President, President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

Gillingham said his office would be assigned to review any report from Turlock, but he would not comment further on any possible investigation into her posting.

"We get a lot of these kinds of referrals, especially off of the Internet," he said.

Helms graduated from Placer High School in 2008, according to her Facebook page, and has the Romney/Ryan 2012 page among her "likes." She is not listed as a registered voter in the state registry database.

Helms could not be reached for comment by The Bee. She told Fox 40 she wasn't aware she could be investigated by the Secret Service for her post.

"OK, but what did I do wrong? That's fine if they want to," she told the reporter. "But I don't understand what I did wrong."

Bee staff writer Marijke Rowland can be reached at mrowland@modbee.com or (209) 578-2284.

Constitution allows Congress to police poachers in Africa????

I bet the Supreme Court will say the interstate commerce clause, which they routinely use to justify all the other unconstitutional acts of Congress.

Source

US to increase anti-poaching efforts as elephants, rhinos die in jaw-dropping numbers

By Associated Press, Published: November 9

NAIROBI, Kenya — Alarmed that rebel militias could be profiting from a sharp increase in the poaching of elephants and rhinos, the U.S. plans to step up efforts to build a global coalition to combat the illegal wildlife trade, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says.

Speaking before animal activists and several international ambassadors, Clinton told a crowd in Washington on Thursday that poachers are using helicopters, night vision goggles and automatic weapons to hunt down wildlife. She wants world leaders to increase their focus on combating the problem and said that she and President Barack Obama will speak to Asian leaders about it next week at the East Asia Summit.

“Some of you might be wondering why a Secretary of State is keynoting an event about wildlife trafficking and conservation,” Clinton said on Thursday, before answering her own question: “Over the past few years wildlife trafficking has become more organized, more lucrative, more widespread and more dangerous than ever before.”

Elephants across Africa are being slaughtered by the thousands for their ivory tusks, which are shipped to Asia, particularly China, and made into ivory trinkets. In Tanzania alone, 10,000 elephants a year are said to be killed by poachers.

Rhino horns are in great demand globally, particularly in Southeast Asia, ground up for use as alleged aphrodisiacs and in traditional medicines or turned into decorative dagger handles.

Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of Save the Elephants, said Clinton’s speech “signifies the will of the United States to tackle the scourge of wildlife poaching and elevates the issue internationally. Now it remains to share awareness with the Chinese and for the U.S. and China to exert joint leadership to lower the demand for ivory before it is too late.”

Yao Ming, the oversized basketball star from China, visited Kenya in August to raise awareness in China about the animal deaths required to supply ivory to China’s middle class. He is taking part in a film called “The End of the Wild.”

Clinton said the U.S. will reach out to leaders around the world to forge a consensus on wildlife protection. The U.S. also plans to launch initiatives and expand and strengthen enforcement of wildlife laws. She noted with regret that the U.S. is the second-largest destination market for illegally trafficked wildlife.

Elsewhere on Friday, a South African court sentenced a Thai national to 40 years for selling rhino horns. Chumlong Lemtongthai pleaded guilty to paying prostitutes who posed as hunters to harvest rhino horns, which were then sold on Asia’s traditional medicine market, according to the South African Press Association. At least 458 of South Africa’s endangered rhinos have been illegally killed this year — a record number.

___

Associated Press reporter Carley Petesch in Johannesburg contributed to this report.

Judge who beats his daughter returns to the bench

Suspended judge from video of daughter's beating returns to bench

Associated Press Sun Nov 11, 2012 1:51 PM

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas -- A Texas judge shown in a video beating his teenage daughter in 2004 returns to the bench this week after the Texas Supreme Court lifted his suspension.

The justices reinstated Aransas County Court-at-Law Judge William Adams on Tuesday. That was a year after the court suspended him when a video of him beating of his daughter became an Internet sensation.

Aransas County District Clerk Pam Heard tells the Corpus Christi Caller-Times (http://bit.ly/WUYqkc) that Adams is scheduled to preside over the next regular court-at-law docket in Rockport on Wednesday.

However, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services will no longer present him with cases involving violence with children.

Adams doesn’t come up for re-election until 2014. The sheriff’s office says it will enhance security the day he returns to work.

———

Information from: Corpus Christi Caller-Times, http://www.caller.com

Source

Aransas County court Judge Adams returns to work as daughter continues speaking out

By Mark Collette

Posted November 10, 2012 at 1:40 a.m.

ARANSAS COUNTY — Aransas County Court-at-Law Judge William Adams has been in and out of the courthouse in Rockport preparing for next week's docket, while his daughter made another national television appearance Friday.

Adams was reinstated by the Texas Supreme Court after a yearlong paid suspension resulting from a judicial conduct inquiry.

The State Commission on Judicial Conduct investigated after his daughter posted a video on YouTube that she secretly recorded seven years earlier, showing the judge whipping her with a belt and dishing out a verbally abusive, threatening and obscenity-laced tirade when she was 16.

The video also showed Adams' then-wife, Hallie Adams, striking their daughter, Hillary. The women have since reconciled and continue to paint Judge Adams as an abuser unfit for the bench.

The judge, who remarried this summer, has downplayed the video as a ploy by a conniving ex-wife embroiled in a custody battle over their youngest daughter, and a vengeful Hillary, 24, cut off from his finances. He said they capitalized on him losing his temper after his daughter illegally downloaded music.

TV APPEARANCE

On her appearance on the Jane Velez-Mitchell show on HLN Friday, Hillary Adams said she was "unimaginably upset and hurt" that her father had been reinstated.

"It's not only about me, my mother and my sister," she said. "This is about every person in the world who has been treated as subhuman by an abuser."

Adams continues to maintain a low profile and hasn't commented publicly since around the time the video was released.

In September, the commission publicly warned Adams, finding the video cast doubt on his ability to be impartial. It also warned the judge against a pattern of demeaning behavior toward attorneys in his court. The commission chose not to take the rare step of recommending the Supreme Court remove him from the bench.

During the inquiry, commissioners heard from lawyers who appeared regularly in the court at law. Though half of them thought the video damaged his ability to be effective in family law and child abuse cases, they all said he had been a knowledgeable and fair judge who ruled based on law.

Police and prosecutors reviewed the Adams video but did not pursue criminal charges, citing statutes of limitation.

Courthouse officials said Adams likely will preside over the next regular court-at-law docket on Wednesday.

SECURITY WELCOMED

The sheriff's office has beefed up security because the video's initial release triggered an outpouring of public reaction, including threats to the judge and courthouse employees. Sheriff Bill Mills couldn't be reached for comment.

District clerk Pam Heard said she welcomes the new measures, which include limited access points and metal detectors. She doesn't expect any problems Wednesday, but said the security is needed anyway at the courthouse, given the emotional nature of family law cases, which include divorces and custody disputes.

"Everything is different now in this day and age and you always have to worry about it," Heard said.

Concerns that Judge Adams' troubles would trigger a wave of appeals and recusal motions from attorneys in family law cases haven't born out so far, Heard said.

"Judge Adams' rulings are probably some of the least appealed in our area," she said.

When he returns, he no longer will hear cases brought by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services that involve violence with children, per the agency's request.

Under state law, county officials have no control over the employment and little control over the salary of an elected judge. Adams' term runs through 2014. He has received about a year's salary and allowances while on suspension, roughly $150,000. The decision to pay him during his suspension was the result of an agreed motion between the Commission on Judicial Conduct and Judge Adams.

ABC15: Valley police ignore evidence in thousands of rape cases

ABC15: Valley police ignore evidence in thousands of rape cases

Posted: Sunday, November 11, 2012 11:30 am

By David Biscobing and Lauren Gilger, ABC15 | 2 comments

Stacked in police warehouses across the Valley, there are thousands of rape cases with DNA samples that have never been tested, an ABC15 Investigation found.

Experts said it’s critical evidence that is being ignored by law enforcement, leaving suspected rapists on the street and victims without answers.

"I think you’re looking at a jurisdiction that’s not responding effectively to sexual assault," said Sarah Tofte, a national advocate with the Joyful Heart Foundation who studies how police handle rape case evidence.

The ABC15 Investigators spent four months researching this story, sending out dozens of public records requests and reviewing hundreds of pages of documents, police reports and court records.

The TV station will air a series of special investigations starting Monday this week.

The reports will specifically focus on whether or not police have tested evidence in what’s called a "sexual assault evidence kit."

When victims report rapes or sexual assaults, they are given an exam and swabbed all over their body to collect a suspect’s DNA left by semen, saliva or other bodily fluids.

The DNA evidence collected is stored in those kits, which are kept in freezers at Valley police storage facilities.

ABC15 has discovered there are thousands of sexual assault kits that have never been tested, including at least 800 kits at East Valley departments.

"An untested kit, for us, is about lost justice for rape victims," Tofte said.

DNA that is gathered and stored in sexual assault evidence kits can be entered into state and federal databases and matched directly to DNA profiles of convicted offenders and arrestees, including suspects of other rapes.

So if a kit isn’t tested, police lose the chance to connect that DNA to other attacks, someone who’s already been arrested or someone who will be arrested in the future.

In their series of reports, ABC15 will:

• Confront top law enforcement officials with the numbers.

• Share emotional stories from victims and their families about their fight for justice.

• Reveal the number of untested kits for each law enforcement agency, including East Valley departments.

• Show how a serial rapist could have been stopped earlier if DNA evidence had been tested.

The stories are being reported by ABC15 Investigator Dave Biscobing and produced by Lauren Gilger.

The first airs Monday night at 10 p.m. on ABC15 (KNXV-TV).

City Hall admits improper taping of reporters

Source

City Hall admits improper taping of reporters

Says 2 incidents were mistakes

By Robert Channick, Chicago Tribune reporter

7:27 a.m. CST, November 12, 2012

After incidents in which phone conversations with Chicago Tribune reporters were recorded without their consent by City Hall officials, a city attorney has insisted that there is no widespread practice of such taping and that steps have been taken to ensure it does not happen again.

Recording a conversation without the consent of all parties is a felony in Illinois.

"This failure was due to inadvertence — not some practice or plan to record interviews without consent," Stephen Patton, the city's corporation counsel, wrote Saturday in a letter to the Tribune, which had sent a letter to the city Friday demanding that such recordings cease.

The issue reached a public forum last week when a court filing in a wrongful death lawsuit against the city raised questions about whether a city spokeswoman had recorded Tribune reporters without their consent as they conducted a phone interview with Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy in October 2011.

And in separate incidents this past September, city spokespeople twice recorded a Tribune reporter as he conducted phone interviews with a top city official involved in Mayor Rahm Emanuel's controversial speed camera program. The spokespeople acknowledged that they independently recorded the interviews without asking the reporter for consent.

Gerould Kern, senior vice president and editor of the Tribune, declined to comment Friday about the recordings. Instead, he cited the letter sent by Tribune Co. attorney Karen Flax to Patton, demanding that city officials cease recording Tribune reporters without consent. The letter also asked that the city preserve copies of all recorded conversations and turn them over to the Tribune.

In its response Saturday, the city said it was unclear whether there would be any tapes to turn over. While City Hall acknowledged the two improper September recordings, it insisted they were mistakes.

"What we have told city employees is that our position is that you follow the law," City Law Department spokesman Roderick Drew said Friday. "And when this issue was brought to the city's attention, we reminded employees to continue following the law."

Sierra investigation

Top Emanuel press aides have acknowledged it is their practice to record media interviews of city officials on controversial topics, though often it is obvious because it happens in person. Emanuel communications director Sarah Hamilton said in September that she always informs reporters when she is recording them on the phone.

But doubts have been raised about whether Hamilton indeed followed the law last year when she was top spokeswoman for the police department, which was dealing with controversy over police Officer Gildardo Sierra.

In October 2011, the Tribune wrote about Sierra after he shot three men — two fatally — in three separate incidents over six months. McCarthy told the Tribune that the first two shootings were justified but that Sierra should have been taken off the street before the third shooting.

The victim of that third shooting, Flint Farmer, was killed. His girlfriend and others are suing Sierra and the city.

In a deposition in that suit, McCarthy said he and Hamilton had a conference call with two Tribune reporters, Jeremy Gorner and Steve Mills, who were investigating the Sierra shootings. Gorner and Mills were in a conference room, talking on a speakerphone. A third Tribune reporter, Stacy St. Clair, was also in the room, listening to the interview.

Last month, the city turned over to the plaintiff's lawyers an audio recording and transcript of the conference call showing no evidence that McCarthy or Hamilton sought consent to record the Tribune reporters.

"Absent from the audio and the transcript was evidence of the parties' consent," according to a court filing last week by the plaintiff's attorney, Craig Sandberg. The filing also notes that during the deposition, McCarthy was asked about the circumstances surrounding the recording.

"Supt. McCarthy testified that Sarah Hamilton (now press secretary for Mayor Rahm Emanuel) made the audio recording," the motion states. It continued, "Supt. McCarthy confirmed that he (personally) did not obtain consent to record the telephone conference from Messrs. Mills and Gorner. He did not know whether Ms. Hamilton obtained consent from Messrs. Mills and Gorner."

The three Tribune reporters said Friday they do not recall any request for consent to record the interview

"I don't remember them saying that, and I would have because it's an unusual request," St. Clair said. "I don't think anyone has ever asked me to record a phone conversation."

The three Tribune reporters also said they did not record that interview.

Hamilton did not respond to a request for comment Friday, deferring to Drew, who said that while it was her normal practice to ask for consent before recording, she could not say with "absolute certainty" whether she did so in this case.

Speed camera story

In September, two city spokespeople acknowledged that they recorded Tribune reporter David Kidwell's phone interviews with Scott Kubly, Chicago's managing deputy commissioner of transportation, without Kidwell's consent.

After the story about the city's speed camera initiative was published on Sept. 11, Kidwell received a voice mail message from city spokesman Peter Scales disputing the accuracy of a Kubly quote, and saying he had a recording of the conversation.

Kidwell then called Kathleen Strand, a spokeswoman involved in the earlier Kubly interview, and she acknowledged recording that conversation as well.

Kidwell said he was not asked for his consent to record either interview.

Hoping to set the record straight regarding the disputed quote, Kidwell requested a copy of the tape from Strand.

"Kathleen calls me back about a half-hour later and says that portion of the tape had been inadvertently erased — it was gone," Kidwell said Friday.

Kidwell said he did not record either interview.

Both Scales and Strand later admitted to another Tribune reporter that they had recorded the conversations without permission, but they said their aim was to record Kubly, not Kidwell.

Firing back against the Tribune's complaint, City Hall said the newspaper had failed to get consent for a taped interview with a city official Friday.

Tribune transportation reporter Jon Hilkevitch recorded a phone interview Friday with Oswaldo Chaves of the Chicago Department of Transportation. Scales and one other person were also present, according to Drew.

Hilkevitch sent a follow-up email to Scales to confirm the spelling of Chaves' name, noting that it wasn't clear on his recorder. City officials contend that the recording was made without their consent.

"They are 100 percent certain, the three people that were involved in the interview, that they were not asked, nor were they aware, it was being taped," Drew said.

In an email Friday to Tribune editors, Hilkevitch said that while there was no evidence on his tape that he asked for consent, he routinely tells subjects when he is recording, and believes he did so in this case. He also noted that he conducted the interview by cellphone and that the initial call dropped out and had to be re-established, suggesting that the notification might have been lost in transmission.

While federal law permits the recording of telephone calls and conversations with the consent of at least one of the parties, Illinois is one of 12 states requiring two-party consent, according the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a Virginia-based nonprofit organization.

Don Craven, a Springfield-based media attorney, said the city recordings appear to be a violation of the law. He said eavesdropping violations are considered minor offenses in many states, but not in Illinois.

"They occasionally get prosecuted, but in many places other than Illinois it's not a felony," Craven said.

An exemption might offer some cover for the city in the McCarthy taping. The Illinois statute allows police officers to record conversations while engaged in a variety of law enforcement duties, such as traffic stops. [A double standard, cops who what to nail crooked citizens can tape record the citizens, but citizens who want to nail crooked cops can't tape record the cops] Recording journalists who are interviewing a police superintendent, however, is fuzzy at best, according to Clay Calvert, a journalism professor at the University of Florida.

"While there is an exemption for recording by police officers, they have to be acting within the scope of their law enforcement duties," Calvert said. "I really wouldn't think that would apply to that particular case."

Tribune reporter John Chase contributed.

rchannick@tribune.com

Twitter @robertchannick

Murder charges dropped because cops didn't honor 5th Amendment rights

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Police ignored San Mateo murder suspect's requests for attorney, judge and experts say

By Joshua Melvin

jmelvin@bayareanewsgroup.com

Posted: 11/11/2012 06:24:08 PM PST

REDWOOD CITY -- A judge's dismissal of murder charges against a man believed to have gunned down an East Palo Alto activist, according to legal experts, was a tough call that revealed some troubling police tactics.

However, it's highly likely prosecutors will either appeal the decision or again file charges against Gregory Elarms, 60, of Pittsburg, in the killing of David Lewis, 54. District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe's office is expected to announce its decision at a Tuesday court hearing on the case, which stems from the June 2010 shooting in a parking lot behind Hillsdale Shopping Center in San Mateo.

The turbulence in the case started last Tuesday when San Mateo Superior Court Judge Stephen Hall threw out the murder charge during pretrial motions. Because police ignored or brushed off Elarms' repeated requests for a lawyer and attempts to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, the judge ruled that Elarms' confession to the killing was not admissible evidence.

Several experts from Santa Clara University Law School said Hall's decision was a close call.

Normally police have to inform suspects of their rights to remain silent and an attorney -- better known as Miranda rights -- when they are taken into custody. But for Elarms that moment is vague. He is the one who contacted police Dec. 18, 2010, and told them he had information about the killing. Elarms then asked San Mateo detectives, who told him he was not under arrest, to pick him up so they could protect him.

It was only after Elarms confessed to the killing, after hours of police questioning, that he was read his rights.

Santa Clara Law professor Gerald Uelmen said Miranda rights apply to people in police custody, and Elarms was apparently free to go. Yet police completely ignored his requests for a lawyer or changed the subject when he brought it up. At one point Elarms said he needed "legal advice" but Lt. David Peruzzaro and Sgt. Rick Decker responded by saying they had been working the case hard for the past six months.

"Really ignoring his statements, as if they were never made, is not appropriate," Uelmen said. "They were playing games with this guy."

Prosecutors say police legally collected the confession and added they have additional evidence against Elarms. Chief Deputy District Attorney Karen Guidotti said Elarms' son testified before a San Mateo County grand jury that his father confessed the killing to him. That evidence alone, she said, should allow the case to proceed.

Prosecutors have also argued that Elarms guided the contact with police. Elarms called police, said he had information about Lewis' killing and stated his life was in danger. He wanted police to protect him from "would-be conspirators and assassins," Hall wrote. Elarms was later committed to Napa State Hospital for months because of mental competency issues, though doctors decided in the spring he was well enough for trial.

Lewis was shot once in the abdomen as he walked from his parked car toward the mall entrance on the evening of June 9, 2010. As Lewis lay dying, Officer Steve Robinson recorded him saying his killer was named "Greg." The pressure to solve the slaying, which occurred in the relatively safe Peninsula city, was intense. Though Lewis was a former junkie and stickup man, he later cofounded a revolutionary drug treatment center in East Palo Alto called Free at Last.

Elarms is being held without bail.

Contact Joshua Melvin at 650-348-4335. Follow him at Twitter.com/melvinreport.

Cops have a God given right to park illegally???

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Roadshow: Cop's wife defends officers' parking at red curbs while on duty

By Gary Richards

grichards@mercurynews.com

Posted: 11/12/2012 07:58:39 AM PST

Q About cops parking in red zones, I can't tell you how many times my husband has not finished his breakfast, lunch or dinner because he had to run out to a call. Police officers in most areas don't get a lunch hour. They have to eat when they can. They can just be sitting down and have ordered their food and have to run out to a call. If they have to go to a parking garage to get their car, I hope it's not me waiting for help.

Karen Mace

Wife of an officer

A Me, too. I think we have more important things to fret about than a cop parked at a red curb while eating lunch.

Q The issue of police parking in red zones is just another case of folks getting worked up about something and expressing their righteous indignation because they have nothing better to get worked up about. This is a no-brainer.

Of course police need to have unobstructed and quick access to their cruisers. It makes no difference if they are actively investigating an incident or having coffee. It's what happens next. If a report comes in that they need to respond to, it's ridiculous to insist they have to walk a block back to their car. If you were the one in need, you'd want them to be able to respond as quickly as possible. Right?

Jeff Sprague

Cupertino

Iran prosecutor: Blogger died in police custody

Iran prosecutor: Blogger died in police custody

Associated Press Mon Nov 12, 2012 9:14 AM

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s state prosecutor confirms that a jailed blogger died in police custody last week, and wounds were found on his body.

It’s the first official confirmation of Sattar Beheshti’s death in custody.

The U.S. State Department and a press freedom group have called for investigation of the “suspicious death.”

Prosecutor Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi says wounds were found in five places on Beheshti’s body. Also, there was a copy of a letter of complaint in his name against his interrogator.

Ejehi’s remarks were reported by the semi-official Mehr news agency Monday.

Beheshti was detained Oct. 31 for alleged cybercrimes. Iran’s judiciary chief has ordered an inquiry into his death.

Dozens of bloggers and journalists have been arrested in crackdowns on dissent in Iran in recent years.

Phoenix to allow rent-a-cops to write light rail tickets???

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Freeloaders on light rail become Phoenix's new focus

By Dustin Gardiner The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Nov 12, 2012 10:59 PM

Four years after light-rail trains began running in Phoenix, city officials are looking to clamp down on freeloaders taking advantage of its “honor system” for fare payments.

The city wants to give private security guards the authority to ticket passengers who don’t pay a fare — currently, only police officers and their assistants are allowed to issue such civil citations.

Voters will be asked to approve the change in a March special election.

The crackdown on fare evaders has already begun. Almost a year ago, Metro light rail, the agency that runs the Valley’s rail system, began using contract security guards to patrol the Phoenix leg of the line. Private guards still can’t write tickets, but they can warn riders and turn them over to police.

Since the change, the number of fare citations given to Phoenix light-rail users has soared, from as few as zero in some months to 47 per month on average.

Phoenix Councilwoman Thelda Williams has been among those pushing for stricter enforcement. She said there has long been a perception that Phoenix doesn’t ticket offending riders as readily as Tempe and Mesa, a claim she said seems to be supported by fare-revenue numbers.

“Everybody I know that rides the train says, ‘I never see anyone pay,’” Williams said. “I’ve heard this for years.”

City Council members voted unanimously last week to put a proposition on the ballot for the March12, 2013, special election, asking voters to authorize the city manager to hire private security workers to give citations on public transit.

Because the change requires an amendment to the city charter, it must be approved by residents.

Phoenix’s motivation seems clear: Figures from Metro show that Phoenix has had a higher fare-evasion rate, a measurement of passengers who don’t pay fares before riding, than Mesa and Tempe, where security guards can give citations on the rail line.

But city officials said the plan to use private security workers isn’t just meant to capture fare revenue. By primarily using contract workers to check fares and patrol rail cars, sworn police officers and their assistants can focus on more serious crimes.

Security guards would be able to issue only civil citations to riders, including those who don’t pay fares, those who use tobacco on the train or those who cross the tracks illegally.

Hillary Foose, a spokeswoman for Metro, said the change would be more financially efficient and allow for greater visibility of security guards on light rail.

She said riders will continue to notice an increasing presence on the rail line in Phoenix.

“We’re on the upswing in terms of our level of effort,” Foose said, noting that a dramatic increase in ridership has, at times, stretched enforcement efforts. “Security is one of those areas where we’ve been challenged to keep up with the growth.”

The Police Department has also stepped up its efforts on light rail, working with other city departments and non-profit groups to launch a program targeted at repeat offenders, who are often homeless riders with mental-health and substance-abuse problems.

Members of the Police Transit Enforcement Unit have created a system to track problem riders who’ve often been caught not paying fares, drinking alcohol or creating other problems on the rail.

This approach allows the city to eventually ban repeat offenders from the system and more easily arrest its most troublesome riders.

Phoenix has 20 unneeded cops and firemen???

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Phoenix fire, police team to aid NY

By Megan Thompson The Arizona Republic - 12 News Breaking News Team Mon Nov 12, 2012 3:19 PM

Twenty members of the Phoenix Fire and Police officials were sent to New York City Monday morning to help with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

New York City officials asked the All Hazards Incident Management Team for help. The department said the team will coordinate the use of more than 5,000 pieces of equipment, including generators, dump trucks and forklifts, according to city officials who spoke at a press conference at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

The unit will be there for two weeks, relieving a team currently stationed at the Citi Field in Queens staging site. The crew will be tracking and managing resources from that site.

Incident Commander Scott Krushak said the unit plans to track and use the resources effectively for the citizens.

“It’s not over there,” Krushak said. “We won’t be the last team going out there.”

Mayor Greg Stanton said New York specifically asked for Phoenix’s recruits.

“We know they will do our city proud,” Stanton said.

Krushak said the team is highly trained and prepared for their tasks at hand.

“This will go on for a very long time,” Krushak said.

Ex-ICE official gets prison in child-porn case

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Ex-ICE official gets prison in child-porn case

Associated Press Mon Nov 12, 2012 1:21 PM

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — A former top U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in Florida has been sentenced to 70 months in prison on a federal child pornography charge.

Anthony Mangione faced a minimum of five years in prison after pleading guilty in July to using his home computer to receive and transmit images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

Mangione ran ICE’s South Florida operations from 2007 to 2011, including numerous child pornography investigations. He retired a few months after investigators searched his home and office computers in April 2011.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel reports that Mangione told a U.S. District judge on Friday that he began having problems with drinking and prescription pills about three years ago.

Prosecutors wanted Marra to sentence Mangione to 87 months in prison.

Petraeus hoped affair would stay secret

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Petraeus hoped affair would stay secret and he could keep his job as CIA director

By Sari Horwitz, Kimberly Kindy and Scott Wilson, Published: November 12

FBI agents searched the home of the woman at the center of the scandal involving former CIA director David H. Petraeus on Monday evening, carrying away boxes and bags of material and taking photographs inside her home in Charlotte.

A senior law enforcement official said the agents were searching for any classified or sensitive documents that may have been in the possession of Paula Broadwell, a former military officer and Petraeus biographer whose extramarital affair with him led to his resignation Friday.

Local television stations showed agents carrying boxes out of the two-story brick house Broadwell shares with her husband, a radiologist, and two young sons. Agents also appeared to be taking photographs inside the house.

Broadwell has not been seen at the home or commented since the news of Petraeus’s resignation broke Friday. On Monday, she hired a prominent Washington defense lawyer, Robert F. Muse.

The search was the latest chapter in the story of Petraeus’s fall from grace. It came on the same day that two longtime military aides to Petraeus said that he did not intend to resign until it became clear that his extramarital affair with Broadwell would become public after the first phase of the FBI investigation of his e-mail accounts.

While investigating complaints from a woman in Tampa that Broadwell had sent her threatening e-mails last summer, the FBI discovered explicit e-mail exchanges between Petraeus and Broadwell that exposed their affair. The investigation also raised questions about whether Broadwell may have possessed classified material, and the search Monday night was related to that, the senior law enforcement official said.

“I don’t think it’s a game changer,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on an ongoing investigation. “It was done to resolve things with a greater level of confidence.”

In a farewell letter last week to CIA staff members, Petraeus ­described his affair with Broadwell as behavior that is “unacceptable both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours.” The statement and others from his allies in the days that followed created an impression that he had stepped down of his own volition, and out of a sense of moral obligation.

But some of his closest advisers who served with him during his last command in Iraq said Monday that Petraeus planned to stay in the job even after he acknowledged the affair to the FBI, hoping the episode would never become public. He resigned last week after being told to do so by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. on the day President Obama was reelected.

“Obviously, he knew about the relationship for months, he knew about the affair, he was in it, so yes, he was not going to resign,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and Petraeus’s executive officer during the Iraq “surge,” who spoke Monday with the former general for about half an hour. “But once he knew it was going to go public, he thought that resigning was the right thing to do. There is no way it would have remained private.”

Steven Boylan, who served as Petraeus’s public affairs officer during that same period in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, said the retired four-star general “felt he had to [resign] once he knew it would be made public. He didn’t feel he could lead the organization with this being out there.”

A more detailed timeline of the events that upended the career of one of the nation’s most accomplished military officers emerged from interviews with former Petraeus advisers, people close to Broadwell, law enforcement officials, and people close to Petraeus family friend Jill Kelley, who received harassing e-mails from Broadwell.

The new information shows that Petraeus told Broadwell this summer to stop sending the harassing e-mails after Kelley told him about them. Law enforcement officials said the e-mails indicated that Broadwell was jealous of Kelley’s friendship with Petraeus. His warning came about the same time Petraeus ended the affair with Broadwell.

The intrigue grew early Tuesday when the Pentagon announced it was investigating between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of “potentially inappropriate” e-mails between Kelley and Gen. John R. Allen, who succeeded Petraeus as the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

A senior defense official told reporters traveling to Australia with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that the Pentagon was still reviewing the e-mails and declined to comment on the nature of the relationship between Allen and Kelley.

In an interview Monday, Kelley’s brother said his sister, a volunteer military liaison in Tampa who is friends with Petraeus and his wife of 38 years, Holly, had no idea that her complaint to the FBI would lead to the end of Petraeus’s career. There are still unanswered questions about the sequence of events. Over the weekend, Kelley hired Washington lawyer Abbe Lowell and Broadwell hired Muse. Both lawyers have declined to comment.

Although Petraeus has left his post and his biography has been removed from the CIA Web site, congressional leaders continued Monday to demand that he be prepared to testify in a hearing this week on the events surrounding the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Petraeus met Broadwell in 2006 at Harvard, where she was a graduate student writing a dissertation on leadership. They began corresponding, and when he moved to Tampa in 2009 as head of the U.S. Central Command, she became a frequent visitor.

At the same time, Petraeus and his wife became friends with Kelley and her husband, Scott. They attended parties with the Kelleys, and Jill Kelley spent time at the military base as a volunteer. Petraeus’s posting was cut short when Obama tapped him in June 2010 to become commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan after Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal was forced to resign.

Broadwell, a West Point graduate like Petraeus who had spent more than a decade as an Army officer before leaving, visited him several times for extended stays. She had decided to turn her dissertation into a biography of the general, which was published this year as “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.”

Several of Petraeus’s aides said they were surprised — and concerned — by how much access the general granted Broadwell during her visits. But Mansoor and others say the affair began only after Petraeus left the military in mid-2011 to become CIA director.

“It began as a mentor-mentee relationship,” Mansoor said. “At some point, it morphed into a more personal relationship. But the physical aspects of the relationship happened a couple months after he got to the agency.”

Beyond the military, the two shared an interest in fitness and the study of leadership. When they were apart, e-mail served as their communication method of choice, with hundreds of mes­sages passing between them through various and sometimes anonymous accounts.

By late spring of this year, however, the relationship appeared headed for trouble.

In Tampa, Kelley began receiving a series of what she described to a friend as bizarre e-mails from an anonymous account. They did not specifically cite Kelley’s connection to Petraeus but warned that her advances toward him would have to stop or she would be exposed. Associates of Petraeus and Kelley have said they have been nothing more than social friends.

“They attended events together. They spend Christmas at each other’s homes,” Boylan said. “There was nothing untoward. No affair-like thing between them. They were strictly friends.”

Kelley was alarmed enough by the e-mails that in June she told a friend who worked as an FBI agent in Tampa about them. The agent took her concerns to the bureau, where investigators traced the messages to Broadwell.

In examining her e-mail account, investigators found messages from Petraeus of a highly personal nature. The FBI suspected the communications were being sent by someone who had hacked into the CIA director’s personal account.

The mistake apparently came in part from steps Petraeus and Broadwell took to conceal their relationship. According to the Associated Press, instead of sending e-mails to each other’s accounts, the two composed the messages and then left them in a “draft” folder where they could be accessed with a shared user name and password. The method, often used by terrorists, makes it harder to trace e-mail traffic. But in this case, it may also have fueled law enforcement concerns that a hacker was accessing the accounts.

The FBI informed Kelley that Broadwell was the sender and Kelley said she did not know her, according to a person close to Kelley.

At some point this summer, Kelley told Petraeus about the e-mails and named Broadwell as the person who had sent them. Apparently in response, the CIA director sent e-mails to Broadwell telling her to stop the harassment, two law enforcement officials said.

Mansoor, who during his last tour in Iraq spent 15 months in a bedroom adjacent to Petraeus’s, said the affair ended four months ago. That roughly coincides with the time Petraeus discovered that Broadwell was sending the ­e-mails to Kelley, although Mansoor would not say who ended the relationship.

“This is someone who spent his entire career in the military, and he is used to having people around him who have shared bonds and experience,” Mansoor said. “He had that with her, and she made herself available to him.”

When confronted by FBI agents about the e-mails, Broadwell, 40, acknowledged the affair and turned over her computer. Petraeus, 60, also acknowledged the relationship in his interview with the FBI.

Kelley’s brother said that his sister dined and shopped regularly with Holly Petraeus, and that she had no idea her complaint would eventually reveal an extramarital affair. David Khawam, a lawyer in New Jersey, said his sister called him Sunday and told him to turn on the news, which featured her role in the unfolding investigation.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Khawam said his sister told him. “I’m the victim here. But it still feels awful.”

In late summer, the FBI informed senior Justice Department officials about the case. A department spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, declined to say when Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was informed.

After reviewing the investigation, federal prosecutors decided there was no evidence that warranted charges against Broadwell or Petraeus. The senior law enforcement official said Monday night that the case remains open.

Broadwell was interviewed the week of Oct. 21, and Petraeus was interviewed on Oct. 29. During his interview, he was told that he would not be charged and the FBI did not suggest that he resign, law enforcement officials said.

What remains unclear is why, after it was decided that criminal charges would not be filed, the FBI informed Clapper about the investigation. Another question is why the notification was made on Election Day about a case the Justice Department had declined to pursue weeks earlier.

At some point during the summer, the Tampa FBI agent whom Kelley had first approached for help was taken off the investigation. Frustrated and concerned that an inquiry into what he thought may be a possible national security breach had not progressed, he got in touch with the office of Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.). Reichert passed the information on to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

“I was contacted by an F.B.I. employee concerned that sensitive, classified information may have been compromised and made certain Director Mueller was aware of these serious allegations and the potential risk to our national security,” Cantor said in a statement.

Cantor contacted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III on Oct. 31, and a week later Clapper told Petraeus he needed to resign.

“I don’t know if it would have taken this course without Cantor,” a person close to the inquiry said.

Karen DeYoung, Carol D. Leonnig, Julie Tate and Greg Miller contributed to this report.

Top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Is Linked to Petraeus Scandal

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: November 13, 2012 418 Comments

PERTH, Australia — Gen. John R. Allen, the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has become ensnared in the scandal over an extramarital affair acknowledged by David H. Petraeus, a former general. General Allen is being investigated for what a senior defense official said early Tuesday was “inappropriate communication” with Jill Kelley, a woman in Tampa, Fla., who was seen by Mr. Petraeus’s lover as a rival for his attentions.

In a statement released to reporters on his plane en route to Australia early Tuesday, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said that the F.B.I. on Sunday had referred “a matter involving” General Allen to the Pentagon.

Mr. Panetta turned the matter over to the Pentagon’s inspector general to conduct an investigation into what a defense official said were 20,000 to 30,000 pages of documents, many of them e-mails between General Allen and Ms. Kelley, who is married and has children.

A senior law enforcement official in Washington said on Tuesday that F.B.I. investigators, looking into Ms. Kelley’s complaint about anonymous e-mails she had received, examined all of her e-mails as a routine step.

“When you get involved in a cybercase like this, you have to look at everything,” the official said, suggesting that Ms. Kelley may not have considered that possibility when she filed the complaint. “The real question is why someone decided to open this can of worms.”

The official would not describe the content of the e-mails between General Allen and Ms. Kelley or say specifically why F.B.I. officials decided to pass them on to the Defense Department. “Generally, the nature of the e-mails warranted providing them to D.O.D.,” he said.

Under military law, adultery can be a crime.

The defense official on Mr. Panetta’s plane said that General Allen, who is also married, told Pentagon officials he had done nothing wrong. Neither he nor Ms. Kelley could be reached for comment early Tuesday. Mr. Panetta’s statement praised General Allen for his leadership in Afghanistan and said that “he is entitled to due process in this matter.”

But the Pentagon inspector general’s investigation opens up what could be a widening scandal into two of the most prominent generals of their generation: Mr. Petraeus, who was the top commander in Iraq and Afghanistan before he retired from the military and became director of the C.I.A., only to resign on Friday because of the affair, and General Allen, who also served in Iraq and now commands 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan.

Although General Allen will remain the commander in Afghanistan, Mr. Panetta said that he had asked President Obama to delay the general’s nomination to be the commander of American forces in Europe and the supreme allied commander of NATO, two positions he was to move into after what was expected to be easy confirmation by the Senate. Mr. Panetta said in his statement that Mr. Obama agreed with his request.

Gen. Joseph A. Dunford, the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps who was nominated last month by Mr. Obama to succeed General Allen in Afghanistan, will proceed as planned with his confirmation hearing. In his statement, Mr. Panetta urged the Senate to act promptly on his nomination.

The National Security Council spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said in a statement on Tuesday that Mr. Obama also believes that the Senate should swiftly confirm General Dunford.

The defense official said that the e-mails between Ms. Kelley and General Allen spanned the years 2010 to 2012. The official could not explain why there were so many pages of e-mails and did not specify their content. The official said he could not explain how the e-mails between Ms. Kelley and General Allen were related to the e-mails between Mr. Petraeus and his lover, Paula Broadwell, and e-mails between Ms. Broadwell and Ms. Kelley.

In what is known so far, Ms. Kelley went to the F.B.I. last summer after she was disturbed by harassing e-mails. The F.B.I. began an investigation and learned that the e-mails were from Ms. Broadwell. In the course of looking into Ms. Broadwell’s e-mails, the F.B.I. discovered e-mails between Ms. Broadwell and Mr. Petraeus that indicated that they were having an extramarital affair. Ms. Broadwell, officials say, saw Ms. Kelley as a rival for her affections with Mr. Petraeus.

The defense official said he did not know how General Allen and Ms. Kelley knew each other. General Allen has been in Afghanistan as the top American commander since July 2011, although before that he lived in Tampa as the deputy commander for Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East.

The defense official said that the Pentagon had received the 20,000 to 30,000 pages of documents from the F.B.I. and was currently reviewing them.

The defense official said that at 5 p.m. Washington time on Sunday, Mr. Panetta was informed by the Pentagon’s general counsel that the F.B.I. had the thousands of pages of e-mails between General Allen and Ms. Kelley. Mr. Panetta was at the time on his plane en route from San Francisco to Honolulu, his first stop on a weeklong trip to the Pacific and Asia. Mr. Panetta notified the White House and then the leaders of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees.

General Allen is now in Washington for what was to be his confirmation hearing as commander in Europe. That hearing, the official said, will now be delayed.

After arriving in Perth Mr. Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia for a United States-Australian security and diplomatic conference. Asked by a reporter while pausing for photos with Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Gillard if General Allen could remain an effective commander while under investigation, Mr. Panetta said nothing.

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was also in Perth for the defense meetings and had no comment on the investigation of General Allen. “I do know him well and I can’t say,” General Dempsey said of General Allen late on Tuesday after returning from an official dinner with the Australian officials, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Panetta.

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.

Concern Grows Over Top Military Officers’ Ethics

Concern Grows Over Top Military Officers’ Ethics

By THOM SHANKER

Published: November 12, 2012

WASHINGTON — Along with a steady diet of books on leadership and management, the reading list at military “charm schools” that groom officers for ascending to general or admiral includes an essay, “The Bathsheba Syndrome: The Ethical Failure of Successful Leaders,” that recalls the moral failure of the Old Testament’s King David, who ordered a soldier on a mission of certain death — solely for the chance to take his wife, Bathsheba.

The not-so-subtle message: Be careful out there, and act better.

Despite the warnings, a worrisomely large number of senior officers have been investigated and even fired for poor judgment, malfeasance and sexual improprieties or sexual violence — and that is just in the last year.

Gen. William Ward of the Army, known as Kip, the first officer to open the new Africa Command, came under scrutiny for allegations of misusing tens of thousands of government dollars for travel and lodging.

Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair, a former deputy commander of the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan, is confronting the military equivalent of a grand jury to decide whether he should stand trial for adultery, sexual misconduct and forcible sodomy, stemming from relationships with five women.

James H. Johnson III, a former commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, was expelled from the Army, fined and reduced in rank to lieutenant colonel from colonel after being convicted of bigamy and fraud stemming from an improper relationship with an Iraqi woman and business dealings with her family.

The Air Force is struggling to recover from a scandal at its basic training center at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, where six male instructors were charged with crimes including rape and adultery after female recruits told of sexual harassment and sexual assault.

In the Navy, Rear Adm. Charles M. Gaouette was relieved of command of the Stennis aircraft carrier strike group — remarkably while the task force was deployed in the Middle East. Officials said that the move was ordered after “inappropriate leadership judgment.” No other details were given.

While there is no evidence that David H. Petraeus had an extramarital affair while serving as one of the nation’s most celebrated generals, his resignation last week as director of the Central Intelligence Agency — a job President Obama said he could take only if he left the Army — was a sobering reminder of the kind of inappropriate behavior that has cast a shadow over the military’s highest ranks.

Those concerns were only heightened on Tuesday when it was revealed that Gen. John R. Allen, the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, is under investigation for what a senior defense official said was “inappropriate communication” with Jill Kelley, the woman in Tampa, Fla., who was seen as a rival for Mr. Petraeus’s attentions by Paula Broadwell, who had an extramarital affair with Mr. Petraeus.

The episodes have prompted concern that something may be broken, or at least fractured, across the military’s culture of leadership. Some wonder whether its top officers have forgotten the lessons of Bathsheba: The crown of command should not be worn with arrogance, and while rank has its privileges, remember that infallibility and entitlement are not among them.

David S. Maxwell, a retired Army colonel now serving as associate director for security studies at Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, said that the instances of failed or flawed leadership “are tragic and serious,” but that he doubts there are more today, on a relative scale, than in the past.

Mr. Maxwell noted that Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, both wartime presidents, fired many more generals than Presidents George W. Bush or Obama. “These general and flag officers are humans,” he said. “Faced with stress, and a very complex combat environment, people make mistakes. These incidents do not represent the vast majority of our senior leaders.”

Like the troops, wartime commanders are separated from family for long periods, and the weight of responsibility — in a business where the metric of failure is a body bag, not the bottom line — bears heavily.

Still, with drivers and staff, private quarters and guaranteed hot meals, the lifestyle of the top echelon of commanders on the battlefield offers a significant buffer from the hourly rigors of frontline combat endured by the troops. So explanations differ for the lapses.

Paul V. Kane, a Marine Corps Reserve gunnery sergeant who is an Iraq veteran and former fellow of Harvard University’s International Security Program, believes the military is not the only institution facing a problem. “The country is suffering a crisis of leadership — in politics, in business and in the church, as well as in the military,” he said. “We have lots of leaders, but we have a national deficit in true leadership.”

He acknowledged that the post-9/11 stress on the military, from enlisted personnel to commanders, has fractured the very souls of people in uniform. “When you pull people out of family life, repeatedly, over the course of a decade, you are going to fray their most basic relationships with spouses, with children, with their own personal code,” Mr. Kane said.

Other national security experts warn that a decade of conflict shouldered by an all-volunteer force has separated those in uniform — about 1 percent of society — from the rest of the citizenry. Such a “military apart” is not healthy for the nation because the fighting force may begin to believe it operates under rules that are different from those the rest of civilian society follows, and perhaps with a separate set of benefits, as well.

“Our military is holding itself to a higher standard than the rest of American society,” said Kori N. Schake, an associate professor at West Point who has held senior policy positions at the Departments of State and Defense.

“That is beautiful and noble,” she added. “But it’s also disconcerting. Sometimes military people talk about being a Praetorian Guard at our national bacchanal. That’s actually quite dangerous for them to consider themselves different and better.”

In extreme cases, say some military officers and Pentagon officials, the result of this “military apart” is that commanders may come to view their sacrifice as earning them the right to disregard rules of conduct.

They note that if anything positive emerges from an era of increased scrutiny of misbehavior, it will be an invigorated effort to hold the officer corps to account for the way troops are led in combat, for the way the treasury is spent, for the way military leaders wear the mask of command.

And they warn that the problem may get worse before it gets better. While most of the more notable improprieties have been alleged against officers of the ground forces, the Navy, which has not been the fulcrum of the wars of the last decade, is also showing strain. A study by the Navy Times found more than 20 commanding officers were fired this year for inappropriate behavior and misconduct.

“The Navy’s time in the stress tester is coming,” said Peter D. Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University. “The number of ships is dropping. The number of tours will increase. Reliance on the Navy instead of the Army to back up foreign policy will become greater over the next decade than the last. If the Navy is cracking under a past decade of strain, what will it mean for the Navy when it is in the hot seat?”

Is Arizona spending the right amount of money on prisons

I think this article was in last weeks Tempe or Chandler Arizona Republic.

I couldn't find the online version of the article.

Sound Off

Arizona Republic

November, 2012

Is Arizona spending the right amount of money on prisons, and why?

In as much as a substantial portion of those in prison are there for committing victimless crimes, it is probable that the state spends too much on prisons.

For instance, the laws against marijuana make crimes out of consensual behavior. Marijuana consumption is no more harmful than alcohol consumption. Criminalizing it creates victimless crimes.

The expense of enforcing the laws against this substance is unnecessary and wasteful. Not only are taxpayers burdened with funding this misguided policy, but lives are needlessly wrecked. Decriminalizing marijuana use would save lives and reduce the cost of operating state prisons.

John Semmens, lifelong non-toker.

UAE tightens its laws on Web activism

UAE tightens its laws on Web activism

By Brian Murphy Associated Press Tue Nov 13, 2012 9:08 PM

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- The United Arab Emirates set stricter Internet monitoring and enforcement codes Tuesday that include giving authorities wider leeway to crack down on Web activists for offenses such as mocking the country’s rulers or calling for demonstrations.

The measures are another sign of tougher cyber-policing efforts by Western-backed leaders across the Persian Gulf amid growing concerns over perceived political or security threats since the Arab Spring uprisings.

The Web clampdowns, however, have brought outcry from rights groups and media freedom advocates that claim Gulf authorities are increasingly muzzling free expression in the name of preserving the powers of the ruling clans from Kuwait to Oman.

The new UAE codes also raise questions about potential new red lines for the country’s huge expatriate workforce in which parodies and pointed criticism of the UAE are common fodder on websites. It’s unclear, too, whether the codes could put a chill on media coverage of sensitive issues such as the rising profile of Islamist factions.

The UAE has not faced any street protests during the Arab Spring upheavals, but authorities have stepped up arrests and pressure on groups including an Islamist organization, Al Islah, that official claim seeks to undermine the country’s ruling system. In September, Dubai’s police chief, Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, warned of an “international plot” to overthrow the Gulf governments by Islamists inspired by the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Many of the codes in UAE’s updated Internet law focus on issues such as online fraud, privacy protection and efforts to combat prostitution. But a major section spells out sweeping limits and possible prison terms for any posts “to deride or to damage the reputation or the stature of the state or any of its institutions,” including the rulers and high officials across the UAE — a federation of seven semiautonomous emirates.

It also outlaws “information, news, caricatures or any other kind of pictures” that authorities believe could threaten security or “public order.” These include Web posts calling for public protests or “disobeying the laws and regulations of the state.”

The decree, issued by the UAE President Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, came just hours after the UAE was elected to a three-year seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council.

In an apparent response to the worldwide chaos touched off in September over a video clip denigrating the Prophet Muhammad, the new codes said jail terms are possible for any Internet posts that “display contempt” for Islam or any other faith.

Across the Gulf, other authorities have stepped up prosecutions against online activists and others. Earlier this month, a Bahraini man was sentenced to six months in prison on charges of insulting the Gulf nation’s king in Twitter posts. In September, a journalist-blogger in Oman received a one-year prison term for alleged anti-government writings.

Obama signs secret directive to help thwart cyberattacks

Source

Obama signs secret directive to help thwart cyberattacks

By Ellen Nakashima, Updated: Wednesday, November 14, 8:27 AM

President Obama has signed a secret directive that effectively enables the military to act more aggressively to thwart cyberattacks on the nation’s web of government and private computer networks.

Presidential Policy Directive 20 establishes a broad and strict set of standards to guide the operations of federal agencies in confronting threats in cyberspace, according to several U.S. officials who have seen the classified document and are not authorized to speak on the record. The president signed it in mid-October.

The new directive is the most extensive White House effort to date to wrestle with what constitutes an “offensive” and a “defensive” action in the rapidly evolving world of cyberwar and cyberterrorism, where an attack can be launched in milliseconds by unknown assailants utilizing a circuitous route. For the first time, the directive explicitly makes a distinction between network defense and cyber operations to guide officials charged with making often rapid decisions when confronted with threats.

The policy also lays out a process to vet any operations outside government and defense networks and ensure that U.S. citizens’ and foreign allies’ data and privacy are protected and international laws of war are followed.

“What it does, really for the first time, is it explicitly talks about how we will use cyber operations,” a senior administration official said. “Network defense is what you’re doing inside your own networks. . . . Cyber operations is stuff outside that space, and recognizing that you could be doing that for what might be called defensive purposes.”

The new policy, which updates a 2004 presidential directive, is part of a wider push by the Obama administration to confront the growing cyberthreat, which officials warn may overtake terrorism as the most significant threat to the country.

“It should enable people to arrive at more effective decisions,” said a second senior administration official. “In that sense, it’s an enormous step forward.”

Legislation to protect private networks from attack by setting security standards and promoting voluntary information sharing is pending on the Hill, and the White House is also is drafting an executive order along those lines.

James A. Lewis, a cyber expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, welcomed the new directive as bolstering the government’s capability to defend against “destructive scenarios,” such as those that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta recently outlined in a speech on cybersecurity.

“It’s clear we’re not going to be a bystander anymore to cyber attacks,” said Lewis.

The Pentagon now is expected to finalize new rules of engagement that would guide commanders when and how the military can go outside government networks to prevent a cyberattack that could cause significant destruction or casualties.

The presidential directive attempts to settle years of debate among government agencies about who is authorized to take what sorts of actions in cyberspace and with what level of permission.

An example of a defensive cyber operation that once would have been considered an offensive act, for instance, might include stopping a computer attack by severing the link between an overseas server and a targeted domestic computer.

“That was seen as something that was aggressive,” said one defense official, “particularly by some at the State Department” who often are wary of actions that might infringe on other countries’ sovereignty and undermine U.S. advocacy of Internet freedom. Intelligence agencies are wary of operations that may inhibit intelligence collection. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has defined cyberspace as another military domain — joining air, land, sea and space — and wants flexibility to operate in that realm.

But cyber operations, the officials stressed, are not an isolated tool. Rather, they are an integral part of the coordinated national security effort that includes diplomatic, economic and traditional military measures.

Offensive cyber actions, outside of war zones, would still require a higher level of scrutiny from relevant agencies and generally White House permission.

The effort to grapple with these questions dates back to the 1990s but has intensified as cyber tools and weapons become ever more sophisticated.

One of those tools was Stuxnet, a computer virus jointly developed by the United States and Israel that damaged nearly 1,000 centrifuges at an Iranian nuclear plant in 2010. If an adversary should turn a similar virus against U.S. computer systems, whether public or private, the government needs to be ready to preempt or respond, officials have said.

Since the creation of the military’s Cyber Command in 2010, its head, Gen. Keith Alexander, has forcefully argued that his hundreds of cyberwarriors at Fort Meade should be given greater latitude to stop or prevent attacks. One such cyber-ops tactic could be tricking malware by sending it “sleep” commands.

Alexander has put a particularly high priority on defending the nation’s private sector computer systems that control critical functions such as making trains run, electricity flow and water pure.

But repeated efforts by officials to ensure Cyber Command has that flexibility have met with resistance — sometimes from within the Pentagon itself — over concerns that enabling the military to move too freely outside its own networks could pose unacceptable risks. A major concern has always been concern that an action may have a harmful unintended consequence, such as shutting down a hospital generator.

Officials say they expect the directive will spur more nuanced debate over how to respond to cyber incidents. That might include a cyberattack that wipes data from tens of thousands of computers in a major industrial company, disrupting business operations, but doesn’t blow up a plant or kill people.

The new policy makes clear that the government will turn first to law enforcement or traditional network defense techniques before asking military cyber units for help or pursuing other alternatives, senior administration officials said.

“We always want to be taking the least action necessary to mitigate the threat,” said one of the senior administration officials. “We don’t want to have more consequences than we intend.”

Software allows cops to search for your face with surveillance cameras

Instant facial recognition tech a two-edged sword

Retailers can use FaceFirst surveillance software to quickly identify potential shoplifters. But such technology raises privacy concerns.

By Laura J. Nelson, Los Angeles Times

November 14, 2012

By the time Joe Rosenkrantz took his seat in his company's conference room, a video camera had already handled the introductions.

An image of Rosenkrantz taken as he walked toward his chair instantly popped up on a nearby TV screen.

"FaceFirst has found a possible match," the caption read. "Joe Rosenkrantz, Founder and CEO."

The process took less than a second, a demonstration of a capability that developer FaceFirst says could transform facial-recognition technology into an everyday security tool.

It addresses one of the key drawbacks in the current generation of video surveillance systems. Such identification technology has been limited to airports and casinos, where security officials have to wait several minutes for the software to identify terrorists or card counters.

But the technology is too expensive for most businesses and too slow to alert store owners or building owners about shoplifters or unwelcome visitors.

"It doesn't do me any good if I'm able to look at a face with a camera and five minutes later, there's a match," said Paul Benne, a security consultant who has recommended that his clients use FaceFirst in high-security areas. "By then, the person's gone."

FaceFirst hopes to leverage the speed of its software to gain military contracts, Chairman Peter Wollons said. But the company's main target is retailers. The software can be installed in almost any high-definition video camera, making it easy for stores to identify potential shoplifters — as well as big spenders.

And that is worrying privacy advocates. Although it isn't much different from retailers pulling personal shopping information from credit cards, the added feature of having a face instantly attached to that data is worrisome, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"I see no reason for retail to know everything about us," Lynch said. "People who show their face in public aren't thinking about how their image is being stored or connected with other data."

FaceFirst's technology marks a dramatic advancement for an industry that 10 years ago seemed like it would never make the transition from science fiction to real life. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, officials in Tampa, Fla., and at Boston's Logan International Airport installed cameras designed to identify criminals. Within a year, both had scrapped their systems.

It took five more years before facial-recognition technology was reliable enough to be used for security measures, but such systems have been mainly limited to law enforcement and government use. More than 70% of biometrics spending comes from law enforcement, the military and the government.

This year, the industry is projected to gross an estimated $6.58 billion, according to data from IGB, a biometrics analysis company. But that amount is expected to grow to $9.37 billion by 2014 as the technology becomes more affordable, faster and adaptable for nongovernmental uses.

FaceFirst founder Rosenkrantz started developing biometric technology as a way to remember a friend who was on one of the hijacked planes in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Several of the terrorists were later identified in an airport surveillance video.

"I couldn't stop thinking about ways this could have been avoided," Rosenkrantz said. "I realized that with the right technology, we could have saved lives."

He tinkered with existing algorithms and operating systems for more than two years in his Calabasas garage before founding FaceFirst. The company is a subsidiary of Camarillo military contractor Airborne Biometrics Group Inc. Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, an $18-billion investment company in Los Angeles, has invested in the development of the FaceFirst technology.

The company's success depends on the wide availability and decreasing prices of computer processors, Rosenkrantz said.

The software program takes a number of steps in less than a second to make an identification, starting with a freeze-frame of the live video feed. The software zooms in on the face, using the distance between the eyes as a guide.

Then an algorithm encodes the face based on distinct patterns and textures. The software cross-references that information with a database of similarly encoded images, which it can comb through at a rate of 1 million comparisons a second.

The database could include Homeland Security's terrorist watch list or a proprietary file generated by the user. When the system finds a match, it sends an alert to desktop computers and mobile devices.

National chains are particularly interested in using the technology, said Wollons, FaceFirst's chairman, because it helps them identify shoplifters. The retail industry lost an estimated $34.5 billion to shoplifting last year.

Other clients include security and surveillance companies, with whom FaceFirst has signed nondisclosure agreements, Wollons said. But inside FaceFirst's conference room, a row of baseball caps shows the agencies he's talked to: LAPD, U.S. Border Patrol, U.S. Navy, Department of Defense.

Last year FaceFirst installed cameras at the Panama City, Panama, airport that tap into FBI and Interpol databases to identify suspected murderers and drug dealers. A law enforcement agency in San Diego now issues hand-held devices with cameras that use FaceFirst to match suspects against a database shared among 51 federal, state and local law agencies.

In addition, FaceFirst has signed a deal with Samsung that will make it the official provider of facial-recognition services on Samsung's surveillance cameras.

But as business grows, so do questions over how companies deal with biometric information and privacy concerns.

Privacy laws are the same for facial-recognition cameras as normal surveillance cameras, said Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. People have a reasonable expectation of privacy in places that aren't open to the public, such as bathrooms, hotel rooms and their own homes. Anywhere else is fair game.

The Federal Trade Commission issued guidelines last month telling companies to be more transparent about how they collect and store information. No such guidelines exist for law enforcement agencies.

FaceFirst doesn't provide the "watch list" databases. Its system only stores information about people when they register as a match.

At a Senate privacy hearing this summer, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said he was worried that law enforcement would be able to use new technology — like the facial-recognition binoculars that the Justice Department is developing — to identify protesters and suppress free speech.

"You don't need a warrant to use this technology on someone," Franken said. "You might not even need to have a reasonable suspicion that they're involved in a crime."

Benne, the security consultant, often doesn't tell his clients that he's using FaceFirst technology because they don't always want to know. The level of sophistication is hard for people to swallow, he said.

"Bad things will happen, and the public will cry out for more to be done," Benne said. "A lot of it may not be very palatable right now, but as perpetrators try to do more things in more ways, we have to be prepared."

laura.nelson@latimes.com

Cops routinely commit perjury to bust suspected "drug war" criminals?

In the article LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck seems more concerned that his cops are being fired because they committed perjury, then the fact that his cops tried to illegally frame Guillermo Alarcon after illegally searching him.

Source

2 LAPD officers guilty of perjury in drug case

Jury finds former Officer Evan Samuel and suspended Officer Richard Amio lied in court. A mistrial is declared on a third officer's charges.

By Andrew Khouri, Los Angeles Times

November 14, 2012, 5:37 a.m.

Two Los Angeles Police Department officers lied under oath during a drug possession case four years ago, a Los Angeles County jury decided Tuesday.

The trial revolved around competing interpretations of a grainy, black and white video that the prosecution argued sharply contradicted sworn testimony from three officers regarding the discovery of cocaine. The video, the prosecution argued, showed the officers conspired to convict Guillermo Alarcon Jr. on drug charges.

"It's always tragic when police officers throw away their freedom and careers." LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said after the jury's verdict. "They lost sight of the fact that the ends never justify the means and that they must always police constitutionally… That is the great slippery slope of policing. It always has been and likely always will be."

As the verdict was read, former Officer Evan Samuel and suspended Officer Richard Amio showed no reaction. After the jury left the downtown Los Angeles courtroom, Samuel's mother blew her nose into a white tissue, her eyes filled with tears.

The jury found the two officers guilty on one count of conspiracy each and multiple counts of perjury. Samuel faces a maximum prison sentence of more than five years, while Amio faces more than four years.

Sentencing is scheduled for Dec. 12.

The jury deadlocked on conspiracy and perjury charges against a third officer, Manuel Ortiz, voting 11 to 1 for a guilty verdict. Judge Kathleen A. Kennedy declared a mistrial on those charges. Prosecutors have not yet decided whether to retry Ortiz, who has also been suspended.

Amio and Samuel testified in 2008 that while on patrol the previous year, they recognized Alarcon, a suspected gang member, in front of his East Hollywood apartment. The two officers said they chased him into the building's carport, where he threw a small black box against a trash bin. When it hit the ground, they said, the object cracked open and Samuel picked it up. Inside, they testified, they found rock and powder cocaine.

But in the video — which begins after Alarcon is in custody — officers search for more than 20 minutes before finding an object that prosecutors contended held the cocaine.

After the prolonged search, officers also appear to discuss opening the object and later say it contains cocaine.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Geoffrey Rendon told jurors during closing arguments that the officers conspired to deliver Alarcon to the court system "based on a set of lies."

The prosecution's key evidence was the video. At one point in the video, an officer tells another to "be creative in your writing," after the box was recovered, apparently alluding to an arrest report that would be written.

"Oh yeah, don't worry, sin duda ('no doubt')," comes the reply from another officer.

"The video," Rendon said, "doesn't lie."

Defense attorneys for the officers disputed that notion, saying the video didn't capture the entire story.

Attorney Ira Salzman, who represents Samuel, told jurors last week that the officers had already recovered the drugs when the video begins. The tape came from a security camera at the building managed by Alarcon's mother.

In the video, the officers were simply looking for additional evidence and the object recovered in the video was a piece broken off the black box that was recovered earlier, the defense argued.

Outside court Tuesday, Salzman said the video was either started too late or intentionally edited to obscure the portion where he said his client recovered the drugs.

But jurors rejected that argument.

"It just shows the power of video," Salzman said.

Outside of court, Alarcon's civil attorney Luis Carrillo hailed the verdict and said his client was not a gang member.

"It's a good day for justice all around the country," he said. "This verdict upholds the principle of equal justice under the law for everybody."

andrew.khouri@latimes.com

Times staff writer Joel Rubin contributed to this report.

Jury finds in favor of bartender in cop bar beating case, 'Justice was served'

Jury finds in favor of bartender in cop bar beating case, 'Justice was served'

By Annie Sweeney and Jason Meisner Tribune reporters

6:54 a.m. CST, November 14, 2012

A federal jury today found in favor of a female bartender who was beaten by an off-duty Chicago police officer in a notorious 2007 attack captured on security cameras.

Jurors held both the city and Abbate responsible. The jury awarded the bartender, Karolina Obrycka, $850,000 in compensatory damages, which her attorneys will collect from the city, they said after the verdict.

Obrycka’s lawyers contended a code of silence protected former Chicago cop Anthony Abbate from punishment until the damning videotape was made public.

Obrycka contended during the trial that Abbate, other officers and higher-ups tried to cover up and minimize her February 2007 beating as part of an unofficial "code of silence" policy within the department.

The trial in federal court came nearly six years after Abbate attacked Obrycka at Jesse's Short Stop Inn when he went behind the bar.

The eight-woman, three-man jury found that Abbate was part of the conspiracy to cover up the beating and that the Police Department had a widespread code of silence that emboldened Abbate to beat up Obrycka. The videotape of Abbate pummeling a woman about half his size marked one of the most embarrassing chapters in recent Chicago Police Department history and contributed to the resignation of then-Superintendent Philip Cline.

Fearful that the department would not discipline Abbate, Obrycka’s lawyers have said they released the videotape to the news media, causing an Internet sensation with the graphic images.

The verdict in the high-stakes trial came after two days of deliberations and a complicated, lengthy trial that saw more than three dozen witnesses offer contradictory and colorful testimony about the beating in Jesse’s Short Stop Inn on the Northwest Side.

At the center of the trial was the allegation that a long-standing code of silence protects officers who use excessive force or engage in other misconduct. As a result, Obrycka’s lawyers maintained that Abbate acted with impunity in the bar because he was unafraid of consequences, the result of the blue wall of silence as well as department’s history of ineffective discipline action against wayward officers.

Just days after the tavern owner installed security cameras, Abbate went into a rage when Obrycka tried to prevent him from coming behind the bar. Abbate, who testified he was drunk after downing multiple alcoholic drinks and shots, tossed Obrycka to the floor and then whaled away at her with his fists and feet.

“Nobody tells me what to do,” Abbate was heard proclaiming on the videotape repeatedly played in court during the three-week trial.

City attorneys argued that Abbate’s actions were simply the result of his being so drunk. He was too intoxicated to think a code of silence would protect him, they said.

Obrycka’s lawyers urged the jury to hold Abbate personally liable for his role in the alleged cover-up that followed the beating. Abbate allegedly threatened to plant cocaine and falsely charge Obrycka if she complained about the beating or released the videotape. Obrycka’s lawyers contended the cover-up even stretched high into Police Department ranks.

At trial, high-level officials from the Police Department and the Cook County state’s attorney’s office clashed over who wanted to aggressively prosecute Abbate. He had originally been charged with just a misdemeanor – a move that one top prosecutor said his office knew nothing about and could have jeopardized plans to charge Abbate with a felony. But police officials contended that same prosecutor had voiced support for a misdemeanor.

“Speechless,” Obrycka said moments immediately after the verdict was read. “I am very happy justice was served. It's finally over.”

asweeney@tribune.com jmeisner@tribune.com

E-mail: Horne allies weighed tracking rival donors

And remember Tom Horne is the jerk who asked Jan Brewer to flush Prop 203 down the toilet so he could continue sending pot smokers to prison.

Source

E-mail: Horne allies weighed tracking rival donors

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Nov 14, 2012 9:43 PM

Shortly after Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne was elected to office, campaign volunteers who later became his employees discussed tracking state employees who contributed to his Democratic opponent, new records say.

On Nov. 22, 2010, Charles “Chuck” Johnson, now an assistant attorney general, e-mailed Horne confidante Carmen Chenal and three other women about creating a spreadsheet of employees who donated to Felecia Rotellini’s campaign.

The document was contained in a new batch of investigative records the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office released Wednesday to The Arizona Republic.

The records stem from the agency’s joint investigation with the FBI into allegations that Horne illegally coordinated with an independent expenditure committee run by his political ally and current employee Kathleen Winn during the 2010 election.

Each has denied wrongdoing.

Separately, Horne has disputed statements his former human-resources adviser Susan Schmaltz made to the FBI that Horne was preoccupied with the political loyalties of his employees.

Schmaltz told investigators that Horne kept lists of employees’ political affiliations and campaign contributions to Rotellini and that he directed staff to hire some supporters.

But Johnson’s e-mail suggests some of those closest to Horne were intent on tracking employees’ political affiliations. Horne was not copied on the e-mail.

The e-mail reads:

“Can you do a spread sheet of each State employee who contributed to Felecia’s campaign? I can do it manually (either cut & paste or original typing), but just wondered if you could do it electronically, faster, more detailed, & more reliable. By date, amount (in kind or dollars), name & position would be helpful.

“This is very confidential stuff. We don’t want anyone to get the misimpression that such contributions will get a person fired, but it is just one management tool to be utilized in determining who may have divided loyalties in light of Felecia’s announcement that she’ll be running against Tom in 2014 & actively campaigning for something/someone in 2012.”

It is unclear whether the spreadsheet was ever created and, if it was, by whom. In a statement, Horne said he never “possessed any list of employee party affiliation.” He stated that employees did not face retaliation because of their contributions to Rotellini and that “many” employees who supported her have been promoted, adding that names of campaign contributors are public record.

Johnson worked for former Attorney General Terry Goddard but was fired for reasons not disclosed to the public. Johnson helped Horne in his effort to become attorney general, and Horne hired him. Copied on the e-mail were Chenal; Linnea Heap, the attorney-general employee whose car Horne was driving during a March 27 fender bender; Special Agent Lauren Buhrow; and project specialist Mila Makal.

The other records released Wednesday largely focused on personal e-mails to and from campaign workers regarding the 2010 election, as well as opposition research against Rotellini.

That research could again come into play.

Both Rotellini and Horne last week told The Republic that they are considering running for attorney general in 2014.

But they may have competition from Goddard, who confirmed to The Republic on Wednesday that he, too, is considering a potential return to the state prosecutor’s office.

Border Patrol under scrutiny for deadly force

Source

Border Patrol under scrutiny for deadly force

Associated Press Wed Nov 14, 2012 7:39 PM

NOGALES, Ariz. — A pair of Mexican drug smugglers in camouflage pants, bundles of marijuana strapped to their backs, scaled a 25 foot-high fence in the middle of the night, slipped quietly into the United States and dashed into the darkness.

U.S. Border Patrol agents and local police gave chase on foot — from bushes to behind homes, then back to the fence.

The conflict escalated. Authorities say they were being pelted with rocks. An agent responded by aiming a gun into Mexico and firing multiple shots at the assailant, killing a 16-year-old boy whose family says was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Oct. 10 shooting has prompted renewed outcry over the Border Patrol’s use-of-force policies and angered human rights activists and Mexican officials who believe the incident has become part of a disturbing trend along the border — gunning down rock-throwers rather than using non-lethal weapons.

The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General has launched a probe of the agency’s policies, the first such broad look at the tactics of an organization with 18,500 agents deployed to the Southwest region alone. The Mexican government has pleaded with the U.S. to change its ways. And the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has questioned the excessive use of force by Border Patrol.

At least 16 people have been killed by agents along the Mexico border since 2010, eight in cases where federal authorities said they were being attacked with rocks, said Vicki Gaubeca, director of the ACLU’s Regional Center for Border Rights in Las Cruces, N.M.

The Border Patrol says sometimes lethal force is necessary: Its agents were assaulted with rocks 249 times in the 2012 fiscal year, causing injuries ranging from minor abrasions to major head contusions.

It is a common occurrence along the border for rocks to be thrown from Mexico at agents in the U.S. by people trying to distract them from making arrests or merely to harass them — particularly in areas that are heavily trafficked by drug smugglers and illegal immigrants.

Still, Gaubeca balks at what she and others deem the unequal “use of force to use a bullet against a rock.”

“There has not been a single death of a Border Patrol agent caused by a rock,” she said. “Why aren’t they doing something to protect their agents, like giving them helmets and shields?”

The Border Patrol has declined to discuss its use of lethal force policy, but notes agents may protect themselves and their colleagues when their lives are threatened, and rocks are considered deadly weapons.

Kent Lundgren, chairman of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers, recalled a time in the 1970s when he was hit in the head while patrolling the border near El Paso, Texas.

“It put me on my knees,” Lundgren said. “Had that rock caught me in the temple, it would have been lethal, I have no doubt.”

It is extremely rare for U.S. border authorities to face criminal charges for deaths or injuries to migrants. In April, federal prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence to pursue charges against a Border Patrol agent in the 2010 shooting death of a 15-year-old Mexican in Texas.

In 2008, a case was dismissed against a Border Patrol agent facing a murder charge after two mistrials. Witnesses testified the agent shot a man without provocation but defense attorneys contended the Mexican migrant tried to hit the agent with a rock.

Mexican families have filed multiple wrongful death lawsuits, and the U.S. government, while admitting no wrongdoing, has paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars. Last year, the family of the illegal immigrant killed by the agent whose murder case was dismissed reached an $850,000 settlement. The agent remains employed by Border Patrol.

Even the Mexican government has asked for a change in policy, to no avail, though Border Patrol points out that Mexico has put up no barriers in its country and does little to stop the rock throwers.

“We have insisted to the United States government by multiple channels and at all levels that it is indispensable they revise and adjust Border Patrol’s standard operating procedures,” Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said in a written statement.

Elsewhere around the world, lethal force is often a last resort in such cases. Israeli police, for instance, typically use rubber bullets, water cannons and tear gas to disperse rock-throwers.

“There is no such crowd incident that will occur where the Israeli police will use live fire unless it’s a critical situation where warning shots have to be fired in the air,” said Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.

Border Patrol agents since 2002 have been provided weapons that can launch pepper-spray projectiles up to 250 feet away. The agency did not provide statistics on how many times they have been used, but officials are quick to note agents along the U.S.-Mexico border operate in vastly different scenarios than authorities in other countries.

They often patrol wide swaths of desert alone — unlike protest situations elsewhere where authorities gather en masse clad in riot gear.

Experts say there’s little that can be done to stop the violence, given the delicacies of the diplomacy and the fact that no international law specifically covers such instances.

“Ultimately, the politics of the wider U.S.-Mexico relationship are going to play a much bigger role than the law,” said Kal Raustiala, professor of law and director of the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA. “The interests are just too high on both sides to let outrage from Mexico, which is totally understandable, determine the outcome here.”

Officials at the Border Patrol’s training academy in Artesia, N.M., refused comment on all questions about rock-throwing and use of force.

At the sprawling 220-acre desert compound, prospective agents spend at least 59 days at the academy, learning everything from immigration law to off-road driving, defense tactics and marksmanship.

“We’re going to teach them … the mechanics of the weapon that they’re going to use, the weapons systems, make them good marksmen, put them in scenarios where they have to make that judgment, shoot or not shoot,” said the training academy’s Assistant Chief Patrol Agent James Cox.

In the latest scenario, the two smugglers were attempting to climb the fence back into Mexico, while Border Patrol agents and Nogales Police Department officers ordered them down.

“Don’t worry, they can’t hurt us up here!” one suspect yelled to the other. Then came the rocks.

The police officers took cover, but a Border Patrol agent opened fire through the fence on Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, who was shot at least seven times, according to Mexican authorities. A Mexican official with direct knowledge of the investigation said the teenager was shot in the back. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the case.

The Border Patrol has revealed little information as probes unfold on both sides of the fence that separates Nogales, Ariz., from Nogales, Sonora. The FBI is investigating, as is standard with all Border Patrol shootings, and the agency won’t comment “out of respect for the investigative process,” said U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Michael Friel.

Marco Gonzalez lives in Nogales, Ariz., just across the road from the border fence. He called police to report seeing suspicious men in dark clothes running through his neighborhood.

He didn’t see the shooting, but he heard the gunshots. His kids thought they were fireworks.

“It affects me a lot,” Gonzalez said in Spanish. “Nothing like this has happened since I’ve lived here. It causes a lot of fear.”

The teen’s mother claims her son was just walking past the area a few blocks from home and got caught in the crossfire. None of the training, political maneuvering or diplomatic tip-toeing matters to her. She just wants her boy back. She just wants answers.

“Put yourself in my place,” Araceli Rodriguez told the Nogales International. “A child is what you most love in life. It’s what you get up in the morning for, what you work for. They took away a piece of my heart.”

———

Associated Press writer Brady McCombs contributed to this report from Phoenix. Josef Federman contributed from Israel.

Reps. Ron Paul, Barney Frank Ask Obama To Respect Pot Legalization Laws

Reps. Ron Paul, Barney Frank Ask Obama To Respect Pot Legalization Laws

by Eyder Peralta

November 14, 2012 4:25 PM

Reps. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Barney Frank (D-Mass.) are asking the White House to respect the voters of Colorado and Washington, who decided that recreational marijuana use should be legal.

In a letter sent to President Obama, they wrote:

"We have sponsored legislation at the federal level to remove criminal penalties for the use of marijuana because of our belief in individual freedom. We recognize that this has not yet become national policy, but we believe there are many strong reasons for your administration to allow the states of Colorado and Washington to set the policies they believe appropriate in this regard, without the federal government overriding the choices made by the voters of these states.

"Respect for the rights of states to set policies on those matters that primarily affect their own residents argues for federal noninterference in this case, as does respect for the wishes of the voters – again, on matters that primarily affect those in the relevant electorate. Additionally, we believe that scarce federal resources – law enforcement, prosecutorial, judicial, and penal – should not be expended in opposition to the wishes of the voters of Colorado and Washington, given the responsibility of all federal officials to find ways to withhold unwise or unnecessary expenditures."

In an interview with Rolling Stone Obama said he can't simply ignore federal law when it comes to pot.

"What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana," he told the magazine. "I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana — and the reason is, because it's against federal law. I can't nullify congressional law.

"I can't ask the Justice Department to say, 'Ignore completely a federal law that's on the books. What I can say is, 'Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage. As a consequence there haven't been prosecutions of users of marijuana for medical purposes."

Comienzan a absolver en Washington casos de posesión de marihuana

Comienzan a absolver en Washington casos de posesión de marihuana

En previsión a implementación de la ley 502.

Autoridades de tres condados en el estado de Washington comenzaron a absolver casos de detenidos por posesión de pequeñas cantidades de marihuana, en previsión a la implementación de la ley 502 que autoriza el consumo "recreativo".

El procurador de distrito en el condado de Clack, Tony Golik, informó que su oficina empezó a absolver casos de detenidos que tienen por lo menos 21 años de edad y que habían sido detenidos por posesión de hasta una onza (30 gramos) de marihuana.

La Iniciativa 502 que permite por primera vez en el país el consumo "recreativo" de la droga fue aprobada en la elección del pasado 6 de noviembre y entrará en vigor el próximo 6 de diciembre.

Golik dijo carecer de un número estimado de detenidos que saldrían libres al absolverles por cargos de posesión de pequeñas cantidades de marihuana.

Washington y Colorado, los primeros

El vocero de la gobernadora, Cory Curtis, dijo al diario The Seattle Times que Gregoire viaja a Washington para atender otros asuntos pero desea recibir consejo del subprocurador general sobre la ley que aprobó el electorado en la elección de hace una semana.

"Necesitamos de su dirección. Nuestro objetivo es respetar la decisión de los electores, pero necesitamos que nos den claridad" con relación a la implementación de la ley, dijo Curtis.

Los estados de Washington y Colorado se convirtieron el martes en los primeros en la historia estadounidense en aprobar leyes que autorizan el consumo de marihuana con fines "recreativos", es decir sin la justificación de consumir la droga como terapia.

La Agencia Federal Antidrogas (DEA) advirtió en breves reacciones que a las iniciativas estatales prevalece la ley federal de control de sustancias controladas y la marihuana sigue siendo una substancia controlada.

With pot legal, police worry about road safety

Sadly, I suspect the states that legalize marijuana will go for raising revenue, rather then keeping the public safe from stoned drivers and set a ridiculously low DUI standard for people that smoke marijuana.

When drunk driving first became a crime in the early 1900's most states set the standard at .15, and at that level I certainly am too drunk to operate anything. For me that is about 5 beers on an empty stomach. And I am real drunk after drinking 5 beers.

Next most states lowered the limit to .10 at the request of the Federal government that gave them bribes. At .10 it takes me 3 beers to get legally drunk on an empty stomach. With 3 beers I consider myself to be slightly drunk. I have a little buzz, but I am not smashed out of my mind.

Last most states again lowered the limit to .08 again a result of the Federal government giving them money or bribes. With that standard I am legally drunk after having 2 beers. I serious doubt that my driving is impaired after having two beers, although I suspect if I was tested my reaction times might be a bit lower. But my reaction times would be lower if I had a headache, and I don't think it is right for the government to arrest me for DUI because I have a headache.

Currently the DUI standards for people in Arizona who use illegal drugs are also draconian and all about raising revenue and have absolutely nothing to do with safety. In Arizona if they find any measurable trace of any illegal drug in your body you are consider DUI or DWI.

However Arizona's medical marijuana law is pretty reasonable and doesn't assume you are guilt of DUI or DWI just because you have marijuana in your body. It says:

"A REGISTERED QUALIFYING PATIENT SHALL NOT BE CONSIDERED TO BE UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF MARIJUANA SOLELY BECAUSE OF THE PRESENCE OF METABOLITES OR COMPONENTS OF MARIJUANA THAT APPEAR IN INSUFFICIENT CONCENTRATION TO CAUSE IMPAIRMENT"

Of course Prop 203 was written by real live human beings who think people should be allowed to smoke marijuana, not government bureaucrats who have a vested interest in jailing people and stealing their money when they catch them smoking pot.

Source

With pot legal, police worry about road safety

Associated Press Thu Nov 15, 2012 10:50 AM

DENVER — It’s settled. Pot, at least certain amounts of it, will soon be legal under state laws in Washington and Colorado. Now, officials in both states are trying to figure out how to keep stoned drivers off the road.

Colorado’s measure doesn’t make any changes to the state’s driving-under-the-influence laws, leaving lawmakers and police to worry about its effect on road safety.

“We’re going to have more impaired drivers,” warned John Jackson, police chief in the Denver suburb of Greenwood Village.

Washington’s law does change driving under the influence provisions by setting a new blood-test limit for marijuana — a limit police are training to enforce, and which some lawyers are already gearing up to challenge.

“We’ve had decades of studies and experience with alcohol,” said Washington State Patrol spokesman Dan Coon. [That is true, but the alcohol standard has been set artificially low to raise revenue, rather then keep drunk people off of the road. The current standard is in most states is .08, but when DUI was first invented in the early 1900's the standard was .15 which is much more realistic] “Marijuana is new, so it’s going to take some time to figure out how the courts and prosecutors are going to handle it. But the key is impairment: We will arrest drivers who drive impaired, whether it be drugs or alcohol.”

Drugged driving is illegal, and nothing in the measures that Washington and Colorado voters passed this month to tax and regulate the sale of pot for recreational use by adults over 21 changes that. But law enforcement officials wonder about whether the ability to buy or possess marijuana legally will bring about an increase of marijuana users on the roads.

Statistics gathered for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed that in 2009, a third of fatally injured drivers with known drug test results were positive for drugs other than alcohol. Among randomly stopped weekend nighttime drivers in 2007, more than 16 percent were positive for drugs. [And those test are very misleading. A person who smoke regularly can test positive for marijuana literally a month after they last used it. On the other hand a person who doesn't use marijuana on a regular basis will only test positive for a few days after the last time they smoked pot. A person who smoke pot will only be impaired for 4 or 5 hours while they will test positive for marijuana for days or months.]

Marijuana can cause dizziness and slowed reaction time, and drivers are more likely to drift and swerve while they’re high.

Marijuana legalization activists agree people shouldn’t smoke and drive. But setting a standard comparable to blood-alcohol limits has sparked intense disagreement, said Betty Aldworth, outreach director for Colorado’s Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol.

Most convictions for drugged driving currently are based on police observations, followed later by a blood test.

“There is not yet a consensus about the standard rate for THC impairment,” Aldworth said, referring to the psychoactive chemical in marijuana.

Unlike portable breath tests for alcohol, there’s no easily available way to determine whether someone is impaired from recent pot use.

There are different types of tests for marijuana. Many workplaces test for an inactive THC metabolite that can be stored in body fat and remain detectable weeks after use. But tests for current impairment measure for active THC in the blood, and those levels typically drop within hours.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says peak THC concentrations are reached during the act of smoking, and within three hours, they generally fall to less than 5 nanograms per milliliter of blood — the same standard in Washington’s law, one supporters describe as roughly equivalent to the .08 limit for alcohol. [And sadly that .08 alcohol limit is more about raising revenue for the government then about safety. When DUI was first invented the legal limit was .15 in most states, and over the years has been lowered to .08 in most states at the request of the Feds who gave and still give states that lowered the limit money]

Two other states — Ohio and the medical marijuana state of Nevada — have a limit of 2 nanograms of THC per milliliter. Pennsylvania’s health department has a 5-nanogram guideline that can be introduced in driving violation cases, and a dozen states, including Illinois, Arizona, and Rhode Island, have zero-tolerance policies. [But for Arizona medical marijuana patients there is no set standard. Cops have to prove they are DUI with other means]

In Washington, police still have to observe signs of impaired driving before pulling someone over, Coon said. The blood would be drawn by a medical professional, and tests above 5 nanograms would automatically subject the driver to a DUI conviction.

Supporters of Washington’s measure said they included the standard to allay fears that legalization could prompt a drugged-driving epidemic, but critics call it arbitrarily strict. They insist that medical patients who regularly use cannabis would likely fail even if they weren’t impaired.

They also worry about the law’s zero-tolerance policy for those under 21. College students who wind up convicted even if they weren’t impaired could lose college loans, they argue.

Arizona Parks chief Bryan Martyn convicted in March fight

Pinal County Supervisor Bryan Martyn convicted in March fight

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Parks chief Bryan Martyn convicted in March fight

By Craig Harris The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Nov 15, 2012 10:45 PM

FLORENCE -- Bryan Martyn felt he was defending his honor when he lost his cool and pushed another man at a community festival earlier this year. Now, the Arizona State Parks director is a convicted criminal.

Martyn, who became parks director May1, was found guilty Thursday of one count of disorderly conduct, a Class1 misdemeanor, following a 21/2 hour bench trial before Magistrate Katherine Kaiser in Florence Municipal Court.

Kaiser imposed an $813 fine. Martyn faced up to six months in jail and fines of up to $2,500. The judge did not say how she arrived at the amount of the fine. She declined to answer questions from a reporter after the hearing.

“I’m disappointed in the outcome,” Martyn said after sentencing. “But I’m anxious to move forward with Arizona State Parks.”

Martyn said he does not expect the conviction to have any influence on his job. He said he notified his bosses, Gov. Jan Brewer and Arizona State Parks Board Chairman Walter Armer.

Brewer could not be reached for comment. Armer downplayed the incident and said he supports Martyn.

“I think he’s doing a great job,” Armer said in a telephone interview. “In my estimation, it was a relatively minor incident. My feeling is, we will keep moving forward. He has some great ideas and a heck of a lot of enthusiasm for state parks.”

Martyn said in an interview that he didn’t believe his offense rose to the level of a crime.

“I got into an argument with a guy, and all of a sudden it becomes criminal,” Martyn said.

Martyn was convicted of pushing Christopher White on March10 at Anthem Community Park near Florence after the two got into a brief dispute after shaking hands. Martyn, during the trial, said he politely confronted White for calling him a “liar” on a website that White had operated and that he pushed White away while they were shaking hands.

But witnesses said Martyn was aggressive toward White, and one said she was afraid because Martyn would not back down and there were children present.

At the time of the fight, Martyn was a member of the Pinal County Board of Supervisors and was actively promoting a controversial mine in Florence as head of the Pinal Truth Squad. The proposed mine has divided the town, with some residents concerned that the mine would pollute the groundwater. Those favoring the mine say it would create jobs.

White did not testify Thursday. During the trial, it was disclosed that White had called Martyn a “liar” after attending a Pinal Truth Squad meeting a few days before the festival in the park where the shove occurred. White also called Martyn a “liar” when they got into a dispute at the park.

For months, Martyn and Florence Mayor Tom Rankin engaged in a dispute over Curis Resources’ attempt to develop an underground mine in the town. Curis also partially funded the Pinal Truth Squad, which attacked Rankin in the past mayoral race. Rankin and the Florence Town Council oppose the mine.

Martyn said before the trial that he believed the only reason it was going forward was because of his support for the mine.

He raised the issue of the Town Council’s influence with the court system, pointing out in a change-of-venue request this summer that the council had the power to hire and fire the town attorney who prosecuted him and the magistrate presiding over his case.

Martyn has said that created a conflict for the court.

Though White also was charged in the case, Kaiser granted a change of venue for him in May. She sent White’s disorderly-conduct case to Casa Grande Municipal Court, where it was dismissed.

At Thursday’s trial, Kaiser rejected objections by Martyn’s attorney, Gary Husk, that Town Attorney James Mannato was using hearsay evidence to build the case against Martyn.

When Mannato objected to Husk’s attempts to use hearsay evidence to support Martyn, however, the judge ruled in favor of the town prosecutor and disallowed some of Husk’s questions for a witness.

Mannato and Husk verbally sparred with one another throughout the trial, resulting in Husk saying in his closing argument that the two attorneys had more heated conversations than what occurred between Martyn and White.

Mannato, in his closing argument, said that Martyn was to blame for his behavior and that elected officials should react more professionally to public criticism.

“If you can’t take the heat, then you need to get out of the kitchen,” Mannato said.

Martyn would not comment on the fairness of the court hearing. He said that he paid the fine and that it’s unlikely he will appeal.

City pays $2,500 to man who flipped off officer

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City settles with man who flipped off officer

Associated Press Thu Nov 15, 2012 3:20 PM

OREM, Utah — A man who was pulled over and cited after flipping off a Utah police officer in 2010 has agreed to drop his complaint after the city of Orem agreed to pay him $2,500 in damages and promised not to ticket anyone else for the obscene gesture.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah had threatened a lawsuit on behalf of Seth Dame, saying an officer violated Dame’s constitutional right to express himself after Dame flipped him off on June 25, 2010.

“Allowing police to detain and charge people for impolite behavior would grant police wide discretionary power to harass people they do not like,” said John Mejia, Legal Director of the ACLU of Utah, in a statement Thursday. “Any police overstep of power to crack down on expression, even rude expression, is therefore worth serious attention.”

The city declined to prosecute the case, but ACLU claimed the incident violated Dame’s First Amendment free speech rights and his Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful search and seizure.

In the settlement, Orem agrees it shouldn’t have stopped Dame solely for giving the finger, and won’t do so in the future. The police department also agreed to continue training its officers about First Amendment protection.

“We do view this as a one-time, isolated incident, and don’t anticipate it happening it again,” Orem City Attorney Greg Stephens said.

The settlement provides $2,500 in attorneys’ fees to the ACLU, and $2,500 in damages to Dame.

Officials with the Orem city attorney’s office didn’t immediately return a request for comment Thursday.

The ACLU notes similar cases have been settled in Pennsylvania and Kansas.

“Various courts have concluded that using your middle finger to express discontent or frustration is expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment,” Mejia said. “We are very pleased that Orem has responded to our efforts to ensure that everyone’s free speech rights are protected.”

Tom Horne legal proceedings to begin Jan. 22

And remember Tom Horne is the jerk who asked Az Governor Jan Brewer to declare Prop 203 null and void so he could continue throwing people that smoke medical marijuana in prison.

Source

Tom Horne legal proceedings to begin Jan. 22

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Nov 15, 2012 3:51 PM

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne and his employee, Kathleen Winn, are scheduled to defend themselves against allegations of campaign-finance violations starting Jan. 22.

According to a notice from the Arizona Office of Administrative Hearings, proceedings before Judge Tammy Eigenheer are expected to conclude by Jan. 29. The proceedings are Horne and Winn’s opportunity to present their sides of the case.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery has accused Winn and Horne, the state’s top law-enforcement official, of deliberately breaking campaign-finance laws during Horne’s 2010 bid for office by coordinating with an independent expenditure committee Winn oversaw. Montgomery’s conclusion came after a 14-month investigation by county investigators and the FBI.

Montgomery has said investigators found e-mails and phone records showing Horne, a Republican, was involved with Business Leaders for Arizona, which raised and spent more than $500,000 to run TV ads blasting Horne's Democratic opponent, Felecia Rotellini, in the closing days of the tight race.

Coordination between candidates and independent expenditure committees is illegal.

Horne and Winn have denied all of the accusations against them and have said they will be vindicated through legal proceedings.

In UK, Twitter, Facebook rants land some in jail

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In UK, Twitter, Facebook rants land some in jail

Associated Press Thu Nov 15, 2012 9:44 AM

LONDON — One teenager made offensive comments about a murdered child on Twitter. Another young man wrote on Facebook that British soldiers should “go to hell.” A third posted a picture of a burning paper poppy, symbol of remembrance of war dead.

All were arrested, two convicted, and one jailed — and they’re not the only ones. In Britain, hundreds of people are prosecuted each year for posts, tweets, texts and emails deemed menacing, indecent, offensive or obscene, and the number is growing as our online lives expand.

Lawyers say the mounting tally shows the problems of a legal system trying to regulate 21st century communications with 20th century laws. Civil libertarians say it is a threat to free speech in an age when the Internet gives everyone the power to be heard around the world.

“Fifty years ago someone would have made a really offensive comment in a public space and it would have been heard by relatively few people,” said Mike Harris of free-speech group Index on Censorship. “Now someone posts a picture of a burning poppy on Facebook and potentially hundreds of thousands of people can see it.

“People take it upon themselves to report this offensive material to police, and suddenly you’ve got the criminalization of offensive speech.”

Figures obtained by The Associated Press through a freedom of information request show a steadily rising tally of prosecutions in Britain for electronic communications — phone calls, emails and social media posts — that are “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character — from 1,263 in 2009 to 1,843 in 2011. The number of convictions grew from 873 in 2009 to 1,286 last year.

Behind the figures are people — mostly young, many teenagers — who find that a glib online remark can have life-altering consequences.

No one knows this better than Paul Chambers, who in January 2010, worried that snow would stop him catching a flight to visit his girlfriend, tweeted: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your (expletive) together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high.”

A week later, anti-terrorist police showed up at the office where he worked as a financial supervisor.

Chambers was arrested, questioned for eight hours, charged, tried, convicted and fined. He lost his job, amassed thousands of pounds (dollars) in legal costs and was, he says, “essentially unemployable” because of his criminal record.

But Chambers, now 28, was lucky. His case garnered attention online, generating its own hashtag — (hash)twitterjoketrial — and bringing high-profile Twitter users, including actor and comedian Stephen Fry, to his defense.

In July, two and half years after Chambers’ arrest, the High Court overturned his conviction. Justice Igor Judge said in his judgment that the law should not prevent “satirical or iconoclastic or rude comment, the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, banter or humor, even if distasteful to some or painful to those subjected to it.”

But the cases are coming thick and fast. Last month, 19-year-old Matthew Woods was sentenced to 12 weeks in jail for making offensive tweets about a missing 5-year-old girl, April Jones.

The same month Azhar Ahmed, 20, was sentenced to 240 hours of community service for writing on Facebook that soldiers “should die and go to hell” after six British troops were killed in Afghanistan. Ahmed had quickly deleted the post, which he said was written in anger, but was convicted anyway.

On Sunday — Remembrance Day — a 19-year-old man was arrested in southern England after police received a complaint about a photo on Facebook showing the burning of a paper poppy. He was held for 24 hours before being released on bail and could face charges.

For civil libertarians, this was the most painfully ironic arrest of all. Poppies are traditionally worn to commemorate the sacrifice of those who died for Britain and its freedoms.

“What was the point of winning either World War if, in 2012, someone can be casually arrested by Kent Police for burning a poppy?” tweeted David Allen Green, a lawyer with London firm Preiskel who worked on the Paul Chambers case.

Critics of the existing laws say they are both inadequate and inconsistent.

Many of the charges come under a section of the 2003 Electronic Communications Act, an update of a 1930s statute intended to protect telephone operators from harassment. The law was drafted before Facebook and Twitter were born, and some lawyers say is not suited to policing social media, where users often have little control over who reads their words.

It and related laws were intended to deal with hate mail or menacing phone calls to individuals, but they are being used to prosecute in cases where there seems to be no individual victim — and often no direct threat.

And the Internet is so vast that policing it — even if desirable — is a hit-and-miss affair. For every offensive remark that draws attention, hundreds are ignored. Conversely, comments that people thought were made only to their Facebook friends or Twitter followers can flash around the world.

While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that First Amendment protections of freedom of speech apply to the Internet, restrictions on online expression in other Western democracies vary widely.

In Germany, where it is an offense to deny the Holocaust, a neo-Nazi group has had its Twitter account blocked. Twitter has said it also could agree to block content in other countries at the request of their authorities.

There’s no doubt many people in Britain have genuinely felt offended or even threatened by online messages. The Sun tabloid has launched a campaign calling for tougher penalties for online “trolls” who bully people on the Web. But others in a country with a cherished image as a bastion of free speech are sensitive to signs of a clampdown.

In September Britain’s chief prosecutor, Keir Starmer, announced plans to draw up new guidelines for social media prosecutions. Starmer said he recognized that too many prosecutions “will have a chilling effect on free speech.”

“I think the threshold for prosecution has to be high,” he told the BBC.

Starmer is due to publish the new guidelines in the next few weeks. But Chambers — reluctant poster boy of online free speech — is worried nothing will change.

“For a couple of weeks after the appeal, we got word of judges actually quoting the case in similar instances and the charges being dropped,” said Chambers, who today works for his brother’s warehouse company. “We thought, ‘Fantastic! That’s exactly what we fought for.’ But since then we’ve had cases in the opposite direction. So I don’t know if lessons have been learned, really.”

Groups: Pinal jail bad for immigrants

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Groups: Pinal jail bad for immigrants

By Bob Ortega The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Nov 15, 2012 10:12 PM

A national coalition of advocacy groups has named the Pinal County Jail one of the country’s 10 worst immigration-detention facilities and is asking the Obama administration to direct Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to stop contracting with the jail.

The Detention Watch Network wants ICE to end contracts with 10 facilities around the country, all run by private-prison operators or county jails, “where conditions are so appalling they’ve reached a tipping point,” said Andrea Black, executive director of the network.

In a report issued Thursday, the network echoed criticisms leveled earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties Union, which in June threatened to sue ICE and the Department of Homeland Security over conditions at the Pinal County Jail. More generally, both groups seek broader reform of detention practices.

“The federal government said three years ago that the use of jail-like facilities is punitive and not appropriate for people who are just being held for civil rather than criminal proceedings,” said Victoria Lopez, director of ACLU of Arizona, adding that reforms of the immigration-detention system promised by the Department of Homeland Security in 2009 have not materialized.

ICE contracts for 625 of the 1,540 beds at the Pinal County Jail. Among the specific issues raised by the ACLU and Detention Watch:

Jails are meant for short-term detention, but some immigrants have been held at the Pinal County Jail for as long as three years.

Detainees don’t have meaningful access to the outdoors, as required by law, but are limited to exercising in rooms with four high walls and a single mesh window.

Detainees complain of poor sanitation and hygiene, including receiving food on dirty trays, finding worms in food, finding bugs and worms in faucets, receiving dirty laundry and being overcrowded with as many as 10 other men in one cell and only one toilet.

Immigrants at the jail complain that medical-care requests are often denied or delayed arbitrarily, and that mentally-ill detainees routinely are placed in segregation, leading to deterioration of their mental states.

Contact visits aren’t allowed at the jail. Visiting family members sit in front of a video screen in a central area, while the detainee sits in a separate video booth outside the cell block. Detainees also complain of exorbitant charges for phone calls, saying they may pay $10 for a three-minute call.

Detainees also complain of punitive and abusive treatment. Detention Watch cited “punitive tactics like placing them on lockdown, searching cells and issuing disciplinary write-ups for minor issues such as not making a bed, not moving quickly enough, or saving a piece of fruit from their meal … at times result in placement in segregation and/or the loss of the few privileges given, such as access to purchase items at the commissary.”

ICE responded to questions from The Arizona Republic with a written statement that it is reviewing the Detention Watch reports and has offered to meet with the authors. ICE said that “it is disappointing that the reports appear to be built primarily on anonymous allegations that cannot be investigated or substantiated, and many second-hand sources and anecdotes that pre-date the agency’s initiation of detention reform.” The statement also said that ICE is working to improve conditions and oversight, and to make it easier for detainees to report problems.

In an Oct.12 letter from ICE to the ACLU, the agency said it was considering transfers for 21 detainees who had been at the jail for more than six months, that it would grant some contact visits on a case-by-case visit at another nearby facility and that ICE had negotiated a new contract in which detainees would pay $7.50 for a 20-minute out-of-state call.

But Gary Mead, ICE executive associate director, said the agency was unaware of many of the detainee complaints raised by the ACLU.

Azadeh Shahshahani, director of the ACLU’s National Security/Immigrants’ Rights Project, said that detainees fear retaliation if they complain about jail conditions. Detention Watch cited allegations that Pinal County Jail guards threatened to issue disciplinary write-ups and report those to the immigration courts if detainees filed complaints.

The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office didn’t respond directly to questions about the ACLU and Detention Watch’s allegations, or whether it had taken steps to address them. In a written response, spokesman Tim Gaffney said that media are allowed to visit the facility, that staff are well-trained and that “we provide a very clean and safe environment for all who are detained in our facility.”

Gaffney pointed out that the jail received accreditation in the National Sheriffs’ Association’s Jail Accreditation Pilot Program in 2011. The program evaluates jails’ compliance to 594 legal-based guidelines. The association serves sheriffs’ offices through education, training and law-enforcement resources.

Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., one of 30 members of Congress who has requested a General Accounting Office investigation of conditions at immigration detention centers, said, “We do need to address the immigration detention system within the context of immigration reform, but we shouldn’t wait to remedy problems that we know are occurring in these centers. At a time of enormous budget deficits, it doesn’t make sense for taxpayers to be on hook for $120 a night to put people up in these detention facilities.”

The other nine jails and prisons targeted by Detention Watch Network are: Etowah County Detention Center, Ala.; Houston Processing Center, Texas; Polk County Detention Facility, Texas; Stewart Detention Center, Ga.; Irwin County Jail, Ga; Hudson County Jail, N.J.; Theo Lacy Detention Center, Calif.; Tri-County Detention Center, Ill., and Baker County Jail, Fla.

Woman with child drives onto Sky Harbor Airport runway

Source

Woman with child drives onto Phoenix runway

By Chris Cole The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Fri Nov 16, 2012 8:13 AM

A woman with a child in her car drove a car out onto a runway at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport late Thursday night, authorities said.

The driver rammed her 1997 Saturn into an airport gate and drove onto an active runway about 10 p.m., according to the Phoenix Police Department.

Phoenix police responded quickly by stopping the car and taking the woman into custody, police said.

Authorities believe the driver was showing signs of impairment, police said.

The driver and the child weren’t injured, police said.

Airport operations were shut down for a couple minutes, but flights didn’t experience delays or any danger because of the driver’s actions, said Deborah Ostreicher, Deputy Aviation Director for Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

All security procedures were followed exactly as they should have been, Ostricher said.

The investigation is ongoing, police said.

Wonder how come the TSA thugs who guarantee our airport safety by taking away our toe nail clippers and fingernail polish didn't stop this women???

Just joking. Those TSA thugs don't make airports safe. It's just a jobs program for overpaid and under worked government thugs.

Source

Woman with child drives onto Phoenix runway

By Chris Cole The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Fri Nov 16, 2012 4:18 PM

A woman suspected of crashing through a gate and driving onto the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport late Thursday night was reportedly unaware her two-month-old child was in the car, according to court documents and authorities said on Friday.

Koko Nicole Anderson, 21, was arrested on suspicion of aggravated DUI and criminal damage after she rammed her 1997 Saturn into an airport gate at Sky Harbor and drove onto an active runway about 10 p.m., according to the Phoenix Police Department.

Anderson drove her car through a gate at the East Economy parking lot, where she continued through Gate 119, which led to a secured section. The gate was under repair and in the process of closing when Anderson drove through it, court documents said.

Anderson continued driving into the secure area and onto a runway, according to documents.

Phoenix police responded within two minutes, police said.

Anderson drove into an empty construction port-a-potty and didn’t stop until she ran into another gate to a fuel farm area, documents said.

Authorities found Anderson with a pacifier in her mouth and her son in the back seat. Police took her into custody after she didn’t immediately leave her car, according to documents.

Anderson told police that she wanted her “flip flop,” documents said.

Anderson also told police that she didn’t know her son was in the car with her and she didn’t know she was at the airport, police said.

Authorities believe Anderson was high on something, but it’s unclear what that was, police said.

Anderson was taken to a local hospital and released after evaluation, documents said.

Her son was uninjured and turned over to Child Protective Services, according to documents.

Anderson caused an estimated $20,000 worth of damages to the fence and gates at the airport, according to court documents.

Airport operations were shut down for a couple minutes, but flights didn’t experience delays or any danger because of the driver’s actions, said Deborah Ostreicher, Deputy Aviation Director for Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

All security procedures were followed exactly as they should have been, Ostreicher said.

Source

Mother: Sky Harbor Woman Has Mental Health Issues

By BOB CHRISTIE and JACQUES BILLEAUD Associated Press

PHOENIX November 17, 2012 (AP)

The 21-year-old woman who crashed through a gate at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and drove on the runway with her infant son in the car has a history of mental illness, her mother says.

The security breach was the latest in a series of similar mishaps across the country that have raised questions whether the nation's airports are truly secure.

The woman rammed the partially open airport gate around 10 p.m. Thursday and started crossing the runway, police spokesman Sgt. Trent Crump said. Officers forced the car to stop after a few minutes and detained the driver.

The airport said no aircraft were nearby at the time and no passengers were in immediate danger. Airport operations were stopped for about 15 minutes.

KoKo Nicole Anderson, from nearby Mesa, was booked into jail on aggravated DUI and criminal damage charges. Police suspect she had taken an unknown drug and don't believe she was impaired from alcohol. A drug-recognition expert was called to the scene shortly after her arrest.

However, the woman's mother, Bebe Anderson, told The Associated Press late Friday that she doesn't believe her daughter was under the influence of alcohol or drugs. She explained that her daughter has a history of mental illness.

"She's not going to be stable until she gets on medication. I'm so scared. I'm at a loss of how to help her," Bebe Anderson said, noting that her daughter suffers from a bi-polar disorder. "I'm just really hoping someone can advocate for her."

Police told television station KPHO that they were aware of the younger Anderson's possible mental health issues and that she would be evaluated.

Her child — a 2-month-old boy — was in a car seat. He wasn't hurt and has been turned over to relatives. Crump said Anderson was so impaired she didn't even know her son was in the car.

"We don't believe her intent was to harm here," Crump said. "We believe it's impairment and poor decision making."

Such incidents are troublesome because a vehicle that crashed into a jetliner landing or taking off could cause a catastrophe, whether it was an intoxicated driver behind the wheel or a terrorist, said Jeff Price, an aviation professor at the Metropolitan State University of Denver and former assistant security director at Denver International Airport.

Airports in general need to think about adding barriers that automatically pop up if an unauthorized vehicle enters a gate as part of an overall upgrade of perimeter security that also includes better detection systems, he said. He noted that Sky Harbor meets federal security standards.

The incident was the latest involving vehicles crashing through the Phoenix airport's gates or fences and getting onto its runways. Sky Harbor spent $10 million to upgrade its perimeter security and access gates after a man being chased by police in 2005 crashed a stolen pickup through a gate and drove onto the runways, passing several jets on a taxiway. In 2003, two teens in a stolen car crashed through a perimeter fence and drove onto the airfield. Both incidents caused brief closure of aircraft operations.

In Thursday night's incident, an airport operations worker was testing the gate when the small sedan crashed through, Sky Harbor spokeswoman Deborah Ostreicher said. The worker promptly notified police and the control tower, which ordered a halt to air traffic operations.

As the car made it onto a runway, Anderson lost control, then took off again, Crump said.

A police probable cause statement said she then hit a portable toilet and kept driving until an officer rammed her car and caused it to spin around and crash into a fence.

Police found Anderson in the car with a pacifier in her mouth. All she told officers was that she wanted her flip-flop shoe.

The airport's operators are satisfied with its fence security and Sky Harbor exceeds federal security standards, Ostreicher said. She said the airport has no plans to beef up fence security, but will work with federal authorities to see if there are other things the airport could be doing.

"The important thing to know here is that what was supposed to happen happened," Ostreicher said.

Ostreicher conceded it's possible that Anderson could have reached a plane, but also noted that there was no aircraft leaving or departing the area at the time.

Similar examples have occurred at airports around the country.

A man crashed his SUV through a locked gate at Philadelphia International Airport on March 1 and drove down a runway at speeds of more than 100 mph as a plane was fast approaching him from behind. The incident caused a major disruption, forcing air traffic controllers to put dozens of flights into holding patterns and delaying the departures of dozens more. He was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

In Grand Junction, Colo., a driver smashed through a fence while under the influence of alcohol in 2008 before getting stuck atop electrical equipment.

And in September, an apparently mentally unstable woman drove through a fence onto the West Oahu Kalaeloa Airport in Hawaii and asked to see the airplanes. After she was denied, she drove toward a taxing Air Force C-17 transport, but was stopped.

Earlier this year, a man swam ashore at New York's Kennedy Airport after his personal watercraft ran out of gas. He climbed a security fence and made his way onto the airport. Officials immediately beefed up security after the Aug. 13 incident, which did not trigger an intrusion detection system.

Most airports don't have intrusion systems like the one at JFK, but they should be added, Price said.

Beefing up airport gates by adding pop-up barriers would also address vulnerability like that exposed at Sky Harbor Thursday night.

Normal practice for airport workers is to allow the gate to close once they've driven though so another car can't follow it onto the airfield, Price said. But as Thursday night's incident shows, that's not always possible.

Military bases often use pop-up barriers, and Los Angeles International Airport had added some, Price said.

"What we're trying to do is keep somebody from intentionally coming onto the field and driving into a plane, whether that's because they were drunk and accidentally hit the plane or they intentionally wanted to try and hit the aircraft," Price said.

"Frankly, you don't need to fill a car with explosives and drive it into a plane on the airfield. All you have to do is manage to get on the field and hit the plane while it's on takeoff or landing and you're going to have a catastrophe."

———

Associated Press writer Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, N.M., and researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this report.

Source

Updated: Mesa mom with baby drives onto airport runway

Posted: Friday, November 16, 2012 2:45 pm

Associated Press

A woman driving with her infant son in her car crashed through a gate at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and drove on the runway in the latest in a series of similar mishaps across the country that have raised questions whether the nation's airports are truly secure.

The woman rammed the partially open airport gate around 10 p.m. Thursday and started crossing the runway, police spokesman Sgt. Trent Crump said. Officers forced the car to stop after a few minutes and detained the driver.

KoKo Nicole Anderson, 21, from nearby Mesa, was booked into jail on aggravated DUI and criminal damage charges. Police suspect she had taken an unknown drug.

The child — a 2-month-old boy — was in a car seat. He wasn't hurt and has been turned over to relatives. Crump said Anderson was so impaired she didn't even know her son was in the car.

"We don't believe her intent was to harm here," Crump said. "We believe it's impairment and poor decision making."

Such incidents are troublesome because a vehicle that crashed into a jetliner landing or taking off could cause a catastrophe, whether it was an intoxicated driver behind the wheel or a terrorist, said Jeff Price, an aviation professor at the Metropolitan State University of Denver and former assistant security director at Denver International Airport.

Airports in general need to think about adding barriers that automatically pop up if an unauthorized vehicle enters a gate as part of an overall upgrade of perimeter security that also includes better detection systems, he said. He noted that Sky Harbor meets federal security standards.

The incident was the latest involving vehicles crashing through the Phoenix airport's gates or fences and getting onto its runways. Sky Harbor spent $10 million to upgrade its perimeter security and access gates after a man being chased by police in 2005 crashed a stolen pickup through a gate and drove onto the runways, passing several jets on a taxiway.

In 2003, two teens in a stolen car crashed through a perimeter fence and drove onto the airfield. Both incidents caused brief closure of aircraft operations.

Anderson had smashed her Saturn sedan into another gate at a nearby parking lot just minutes before, then continued driving and ended up on an airfield access road, police and Sky Harbor officials said at a press conference on Friday.

Sky Harbor spokeswoman Deborah Ostreicher said an airport operations worker was testing the gate as it was closing when the small sedan crashed through. The worker promptly notified police and the control tower, which ordered a halt to air traffic operations.

As the car made it onto a runway, Anderson lost control, then took off again, Crump said.

A police probable cause statement filed in support of the criminal charges said she then hit a portable toilet and kept driving until an officer rammed her car and caused it to spin car around and crash into a fence.

She did not get out of the car after it stopped, and police found her with a pacifier in her month. All she told officers was that she wanted her flip-flop shoe.

Ostreicher said no aircraft were nearby at the time and no passengers were in immediate danger. Airport operations were stopped for about 15 minutes.

The airport's operators are satisfied with its fence security and that Sky Harbor exceeds federal security standards, Ostreicher said. She said the airport has no plans at this point to beef up fence security, but will work with federal authorities to see if there are other things the Phoenix airport could be doing.

"The important thing to know here is that what was supposed to happen happened," Ostreicher said, noting that once Anderson drove into the secure area, the person testing the gate alerted others and officers arrested her promptly.

Ostreicher conceded it's possible that Anderson could have reached a plane, but also noted that there was no aircraft leaving or departing the area at the time.

Similar examples have occurred at airports around the country.

A man crashed his SUV through a locked gate at Philadelphia International Airport on March 1 and drove down a runway at speeds of more than 100 mph as a plane was fast approaching him from behind. The incident caused a major disruption, forcing air traffic controllers to put dozens of flights into holding patterns and delaying the departures of dozens more. He was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

In Grand Junction, Colo., a driver smashed through a fence while under the influence of alcohol in 2008 before getting stuck atop electrical equipment. And in September, an apparently mentally unstable woman drove through a fence onto the West Oahu Kalaeloa Airport in Hawaii and asked to see the airplanes. After she was denied, she drove toward a taxing Air Force C-17 transport, but was stopped.

Earlier this year, a man swam ashore at New York's Kennedy Airport after his personal watercraft ran out of gas. He climbed a security fence and made his way onto the airport. Officials immediately beefed up security after the Aug. 13 incident, which did not trigger an intrusion detection system.

Most airports don't have intrusion systems like the one at JFK, but they should be added, said Price.

Beefing up airport gates by adding pop-up barriers would also address vulnerability like that exposed at Sky Harbor Thursday night.

Normal practice for airport workers is to allow the gate to close once they've driven though so another car can't follow it onto the airfield, Price said. But as Thursday night's incident shows, that's not always possible.

Military bases often use pop-up barriers, and Los Angeles International Airport had added some, Price said.

"What we're trying to do is keep somebody from intentionally coming onto the field and driving into a plane, whether that's because they were drunk and accidentally hit the plane or they intentionally wanted to try and hit the aircraft," Price said.

"Frankly, you don't need to fill a car with explosives and drive it into a plane on the airfield. All you have to do is manage to get on the field and hit the plane while it's on takeoff or landing and you're going to have a catastrophe."

___

Associated Press researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this report.

Testilying is a job requirement for cops???

Source

Univision show: Glendale police were racially profiling

By D.S. Woodfill, Bob Ortega and Melissa Blasius The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team

Fri Nov 16, 2012 9:57 PM

The Glendale Police Department is denying a 30-year veteran officer racially profiled a news producer as the Spanish-language Univision Network reported.

The network stood by its news segment that aired on the nationally televised show Primer Impacto on Monday. It was intended to illustrate if there were police officers in the Valley who were engaging in racial profiling.

The news piece interviewed several Hispanic residents who said profiling is a fact of life for them.

Police in September began enforcing a portion of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, which requires officers engaged in a lawful stop, detention or arrest shall, when practicable, ask about a person’s legal status when reasonable suspicion exists that the person is in the U.S. illegally.

Andrea Sambuccetti, the reporter in the segment, told viewers that she put one of her producers in a beat-up red sedan and sent him out onto the streets to see if he would be pulled over.

Sambuccetti said during her narration, which was in Spanish, that the producer had a clean driving record and the car’s registration was up to date.

According to the broadcast, about a minute into videotaping on Oct.30, the decoy car was pulled over by a Glendale police officer after stopping at a stop sign at 59th and Glendale avenues.

“We have all the papers in order, and the evidence that we haven’t committed any traffic violation is recorded on our cameras,” Sambuccetti told viewers.

Sambuccetti and a camera operator confronted the officer and asked him the reason for the traffic stop.

The officer, who Glendale police said was Jamie Nowatzki, told Sambuccetti he pulled the driver over because he sat at the stop sign for an extended period of time and was impeding other vehicles from passing through the intersection, which a written statement from the department repeated.

“From Officer Nowatzki’s vantage point, he clearly observed a red sedan at a stop sign for an unreasonable amount of time, causing two cars to drive into the opposing lane to get around the vehicle,” the statement said.

It went on to say he was impeding traffic “for several minutes” and that other drivers were blocked, including one who honked his horn. Nowatzki issued a warning and let the driver go.

Police officials said the news footage that appeared on TV “appeared to be heavily edited and did not show the entire incident, including the amount of time the red sedan impeded traffic.”

Pilar Campos, an executive producer of Primer Impacto, said he reviewed raw footage of the video and the vehicle was only stopped at the stop sign for a couple of seconds.

“We don’t see it in the video,” he said.

Police officials said they stand behind Nowatzki and the segment was “misleading, inflammatory, and apparently intends to portray the Glendale Police Department in a negative light by suggesting we engage in racial profiling.”

Yale football player sues cops over Taser incident

Yale football player sues cops over Taser incident

Associated Press Fri Nov 16, 2012 12:17 PM

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A Yale University football player is suing New Haven police, saying he was seriously injured when they used a Taser on him during a nightclub raid in 2010.

Jordan Jefferson filed the lawsuit in New Haven Superior Court against the city, former police Chief Frank Limon, and officers who participated in the raid at Alchemy/Elevate nightclub. He said he suffered post concussive syndrome, headaches, blurred vision and other injuries.

Jefferson is listed on the Yale football team website as a 6-foot-3, 225-pound senior tight end.

Police assaulted Jefferson by repeatedly using a Taser, hitting him with fists and a baton/club and kicking him, despite the fact he was not resisting arrest, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit, which seeks more than $15,000 in damages, alleges civil rights violations, failure to provide adequate training, supervision and discipline of police officers and assault.

“If police had used common sense, judgment and exercised a reasonable approach, my client would not have been injured,” said William Dow III, Jefferson’s attorney.

Charges against Jefferson, including assaulting police, were dismissed, according to the lawsuit.

An attorney for the city said he is aware of the lawsuit and will respond at the appropriate time.

Police were conducting liquor and safety compliance checks at several downtown clubs at the time.

An internal affairs probe of the raid found no need to discipline officers. But city officials said at the time the handling of the raid raised significant issues, including inadequate planning and supervision of the inspection, inadequate control of the space, lack of a clear policy regarding cellphone use during an inspection and lack of training on when it is appropriate for officers to escalate verbal commands, including the use of profanity.

Limon said an assistant chief who was supervising the operation and has since retired lost control of the inspection.

“It was poor planning, poor decision making and poor leadership,” Limon said last year. “I take full responsibility and the department has learned some valuable lessons.”

Limon said the department implemented uniform inspection procedures, stepped up training and created a policy permitting citizens to video record police activity as long as the recording does not interfere with ongoing police activity or jeopardize safety.

The raid sparked 37 complaints of verbal abuse, unlawful detention and excessive force involving the arrest of a club patron. The internal investigation concluded the patron was resisting arrest and that officers did not use excessive force.

Pinal deputy faces charge after bar fight

Source

Pinal deputy faces charge after bar fight

He's put on leave amid inquiry

by Lindsey Collom - Nov. 16, 2012 10:58 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

A Pinal County sheriff's deputy tapped to be a fill-in department spokesman is fighting a disorderly-conduct charge after an off-duty incident outside a Tempe bar where, police say, he punched another patron.

Richard "Hank" Mueller, 30, was put on paid administrative leave Oct. 22 pending an internal investigation and is expected to remain on leave through at least Dec. 14. He is scheduled for a Nov. 28 hearing on the misdemeanor charge in Tempe Municipal Court.

According to Tempe police records released this week, surveillance video captured Mueller and another man in a heated exchange that resulted in Mueller punching the man in the face about 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 12. The victim told police he was intervening for a female friend who was getting unwanted attention from Mueller at the Firehouse, a bar and grill at University Drive and Mill Avenue.

Police said there was "no clear assault" because Mueller may have been defending himself. According to the report, video showed Mueller holding the man at arm's length before the punch. The man -- who told police he slapped Mueller's hand away because he didn't like to be touched -- was not charged in the incident.

The Firehouse manager told police that Mueller had been causing problems throughout the night by taunting and threatening the bar security guards. One female employee complained that Mueller was "creeping her out," according to the police report.

Firehouse employees called 911 after one confrontation, but police were not dispatched because Mueller appeared to have left. They called police a second time after the fight in the alley.

In their reports, officers described Mueller as being intoxicated and irrational. None of them identified Mueller as a Pinal County sheriff's deputy or a law-enforcement officer.

Mueller was cited and released after promising to appear in court. It was not clear whether Mueller drove away, but the report indicated he was advised to get a ride home.

Mueller declined to comment when reached by phone Friday.

He was one of several Pinal sheriff's employees who appeared in a commercial supporting Sheriff Paul Babeu's candidacy for U.S. House, a race Babeu left in May to run for re-election.

Mueller was hired as a deputy in January 2009, the month Babeu first took office. Before joining the Sheriff's Office, Mueller had been a detention officer with the Chandler Police Department -- Babeu's former employer, from which he drew several members of his command staff -- and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.

Mueller graduated at the top of his class from the police academy. A review of his personnel file and disciplinary records revealed multiple blemishes. In one performance review, Mueller's supervisor said the deputy "didn't always (use) good tact, good judgment and common sense to resolve conflict (and) at times it may escalate out of control. Mueller still needs to work on this as he generates quite a few complaints when it comes to dealing with calls for service."

His judgment was also questioned in an incident that began as a traffic stop and escalated to the forced entry and warrantless search of an apartment. In the incident, Mueller and at least one other officer held the occupants at gunpoint.

Mueller said he had kicked in the door because he and another officer thought they smelled marijuana. Mueller told internal-affairs detectives that he believed the driver who ran from him fled into the apartment but later admitted he wasn't sure.

His patrol commander recommended Mueller serve an 80-hour suspension without pay.

"This shows a clear lack of understanding (of) PCSO policy, constitutional rights and established case law on Deputy Mueller's part," the supervisor wrote. "He became over zealous and lost his ability to make sound judgment. This lack of judgment placed the citizens of Pinal County, the other deputies and officer working with him in harm's way, while placing the Sheriff's Office in a position of great risk and liability."

Chief Deputy Steve Henry, however, ordered Mueller to take 20 hours of unpaid leave and required him to take a class on search and seizure. He cited Mueller's inexperience and praised him for his "honesty and virtue" in reporting the incident to his supervisor.

"It is evident there would have never been an investigation without this virtuous act," Henry wrote.

Our government masters lied about Libya attack??

Source

Petraeus testifies, believed Libya attack was terror

By Kimberly Dozier Associated Press Fri Nov 16, 2012 9:13 AM

WASHINGTON — Former CIA Director David Petraeus told lawmakers on Friday he believed all along that the deadly Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya was a terrorist attack, a congressman said, as the former general faced Congress for the first time since he resigned over an extramarital affair.

Republican Rep. Peter King told reporters that Petraeus focused his remarks during the closed-door hearing on the Libya attack, which killed the U.S. ambassador. Republicans have claimed that the White House misled the public on what led to the violence by blaming it at first on protests over an anti-Muslim film produced in the U.S.

Lawmakers said Petraeus told them that CIA talking points written after the attack in Benghazi referred to it as a terrorist attack. But Petraeus said the reference was removed by other federal agencies that made changes to the CIA’s draft.

The retired four-star Army general, once one of the country’s most respected military leaders, entered the Capitol through a network of underground hallways, away from photographers and television cameras. CIA directors typically walk through the building’s front door.

Petraeus is under investigation by the CIA for possible wrongdoing in his extramarital affair, though that wasn’t the subject of Friday’s hearings.

Petraeus made no comment on the affair to lawmakers, but he was asked if it would have any impact on his testimony and he said no, King said. King said Petraeus didn’t seem affected by the week’s developments.

As for the attack, “He was definitely fully aware of what was going on,” King said.

Five days after the attack, the Obama administration sent U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on the Sunday news shows to describe it as a spontaneous protest over the anti-Muslim video. Rice relied on initial intelligence that proved incorrect, and she’s now under attack by some Republican senators who vow to block her if she’s nominated as secretary of state when Hillary Rodham Clinton steps down.

Lawmakers have been interviewing top intelligence and national security officials in trying to determine what the intelligence community knew before, during and after the attack. They viewed security video from the consulate and surveillance footage by an unarmed CIA Predator drone that showed events in real time.

Petraeus was appearing before the House Intelligence Committee and its Senate counterpart.

“Director Petraeus went to Tripoli and interviewed many of the people involved,” said Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein.

As for Petraeus testifying shortly after his resignation amid a sex scandal, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said, “He’s a tough individual, and I am sure he will handle it to the best of his ability.”

Petraeus has acknowledged an affair with a woman later identified as his biographer, the married Paula Broadwell. The resignation of the former U.S. commander in both Iraq and Afghanistan stunned Washington, which once had buzzed with talk about a possible run for president in his future.

The FBI began investigating the matter last summer but didn’t notify the White House or Congress until after the Nov. 6 election.

In the course of investigating the Petraeus affair, the FBI uncovered suggestive emails between Afghanistan war chief Gen. John Allen and Florida socialite Jill Kelley, both of them married. President Barack Obama has put Allen’s promotion nomination on hold.

Top national security officials were on Capitol Hill on Thursday to grapple with fallout from the sex scandal as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta asked service chiefs to review ethics training for military officers.

Lawmakers went forward with a hearing on the nomination of Gen. Joseph Dunford to replace Allen in Afghanistan. But with Allen’s own future uncertain, they put off consideration of his promotion to U.S. European Command chief and NATO supreme allied commander. Allen had initially been scheduled to testify.

Leading administration officials, meanwhile, met privately with lawmakers for a third straight day to explain how the Petraeus investigation was handled and explore its national security implications. Among those appearing before the House Intelligence Committee were Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Acting CIA Director Michael Morell.

Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the committee’s top Democrat, said after the hearing that he was satisfied that the FBI had behaved properly in not notifying the White House or lawmakers about the inquiry sooner, in keeping with rules set up to prevent interference in criminal investigations.

The CIA on Thursday opened an exploratory investigation into Petraeus’ conduct. The inquiry “doesn’t presuppose any particular outcome,” said CIA spokesman Preston Golson.

Petraeus, in his first media interview since he resigned, told CNN that he had never given classified information to Broadwell. The general’s biographer also has said she didn’t receive such material from Petraeus.

But the FBI found a substantial number of classified documents on Broadwell’s computer and in her home, according to a law enforcement official, and is investigating how she got them. That official spoke only on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about the case. The Army has suspended her security clearance.

Source

Give us truth on Benghazi

Nov. 17, 2012 12:00 AM

The Republic | azcentral.com

Evidence (as it slowly dribbles out) demonstrates that an awful lot of the confusion over the Sept. 11 attacks on Americans at Benghazi, Libya, began with the Obama administration. And over the months since the attacks resulting in the murders of four Americans, the administration has done very little to clear things up.

Closed-door meetings by congressional intelligence committees are not helping. From Republicans and Democrats, we get conflicting accounts of what was said. This is a sure-fire recipe to promote skepticism and conspiracy theories. Americans need a lot more candor. A lot more transparency.

Let us see the videos. Let us hear the phone calls. Let us hear from the key figures, read the contemporaneous accounts. Whether this is done through a select committee or open hearings of the intelligence committees doesn't matter. Just make it all available.

Only then can we clear up the questions. Were warnings ignored? Were precautions taken? Why was the response to the attack so inadequate? Did the White House intentionally seek to cast the attacks as something they were not to mislead Americans?

The latest evidence is a camelback-breaker:

On Friday, former CIA Director David Petraeus reportedly told lawmakers in a closed meeting that the Benghazi "talking points" recited by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on the Sunday-morning talk shows differed substantially from the information his agency provided the White House.

Rice declared, repeatedly and emphatically, on Sept. 16, that the best information available from intelligence sources was that public outrage spurred by an anti-Muslim video prompted demonstrations that led to the violence.

According to Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., Petraeus told lawmakers he knew almost immediately the attacks were planned and conducted by Ansar al Sharia, a terrorist group sympathetic to al-Qaida.

The CIA provided the White House with analysis indicating Ansar al Sharia's involvement, Petraeus reportedly said. But by the time Rice showed up on the talk shows, those "talking points" had evolved into something else.

Why? Who was the editor?

Let us not fool ourselves about what has brought us to this point. It isn't a tawdry sex scandal. And it certainly isn't the fault of Sen. John McCain, who is keeping his eye on the essential fact that four Americans are dead and our leaders contradict themselves about how and why they died.

Obama and his aides have aggressively thickened the fog of acrimony these past months regarding events in Benghazi. Regarding what the White House knew the night of the attacks and in the immediate aftermath, Obama has been far, far less than helpful.

Public hearings are now the only resolution. Let us see the truth.

Critican a Patrulla Fronteriza por muerte de joven

Critican a Patrulla Fronteriza por muerte de joven

por BRIAN SKOLOFF - 11/14/2012

The Associated Press

NOGALES, Arizona, EE.UU. - Dos mexicanos, vestidos con pantalones camuflados y cargando paquetes de marihuana ceñidos a sus espaldas, treparon una cerca de 7,5 metros (25 pies) de altura, que marca la frontera. A la mitad de la noche, se adentraron silenciosos en territorio estadounidense.

Agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza y de la policía local los persiguieron a pie entre arbustos y casas, hasta volver al muro fronterizo.

El conflicto se intensificó. Los agentes estadounidenses dicen que fueron agredidos a pedradas. Uno respondió apuntando su arma hacia territorio mexicano y haciendo varios disparos contra el presunto atacante.

Mató a un adolescente de 16 años, que según su familia simplemente estaba en el lugar y momento equivocados.

Los hechos del 10 de octubre han reavivado las críticas a las políticas de la Patrulla Fronteriza sobre el uso de la fuerza, y han indignado a defensores de los derechos humanos, lo mismo que a funcionarios mexicanos, quienes consideran que el caso es parte de una tendencia preocupante en la frontera: disparar contra quienes lanzan piedras en vez de dispersarlos por medios no letales.

La Oficina del Inspector General del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional ha abierto una investigación sobre las políticas de la agencia. Se trata de la primera indagación de este tipo sobre las tácticas de una organización que tiene emplazados a 18.500 agentes tan sólo en el suroeste del país.

El gobierno mexicano ha instado a las autoridades estadounidenses a modificar sus métodos de operación. Y la Oficina del Alto Comisionado de Naciones Unidas para los Derechos Humanos (OACDH) ha cuestionado los excesos en el uso de la fuerza por parte de la Patrulla Fronteriza.

Al menos 16 personas han muerto a manos de los agentes en la frontera mexicana desde 2010, incluidas ocho en casos en que las autoridades federales señalan que fueron atacadas con piedras, dijo Vicki Gaubeca, directora del Centro de Derechos en la Frontera en Las Cruces, Nuevo México. Esa organización es parte de la Asociación Nacional para la Defensa de Derechos Civiles (ACLU, por sus siglas en inglés).

La Patrulla Fronteriza asegura que a veces resulta necesario el uso de fuerza potencialmente letal. Sus agentes fueron atacados a pedradas en 249 ocasiones durante el año fiscal 2012. Muchos sufrieron desde pequeñas laceraciones hasta golpes graves en la cabeza.

En la frontera, es común que la gente lance piedras contra los agentes estadounidenses, en busca de intimidarlos o distraerlos para que no realicen arrestos, particularmente en zonas muy utilizadas por los traficantes de drogas o inmigrantes.

Pero Gaubeca y otros activistas destacan una inequidad en el uso de la fuerza cuando "se emplea una bala contra una piedra".

"No ha habido una sola muerte de un agente de la Patrulla Fronteriza a consecuencia de una piedra", aseguró Gaubeca. "¿Por qué no se hace algo para proteger a los agentes, como dotarlos de cascos y escudos?"

La Patrulla Fronteriza se niega a discutir a detalle sus políticas de uso de fuerza potencialmente mortal, pero destaca que los agentes deben protegerse y cuidar a sus colegas cuando sus vidas están en riesgo. Considera que las rocas son armas letales.

Kent Lundgren, presidente de la Asociación Nacional de Ex Agentes de la Patrulla Fronteriza, recordó que en la década de 1970 fue alcanzado por una piedra en la cabeza cuando realizaba un recorrido de vigilancia cerca de El Paso, Texas.

"Caí de rodillas", dijo Lundgren. "Si esa piedra me hubiera golpeado en la sien, el golpe habría sido fatal, sin duda".

Es sumamente raro que los agentes fronterizos estadounidenses enfrenten cargos penales por lesiones o muertes de inmigrantes. En abril, los fiscales federales consideraron que no había evidencias suficientes para fincarle cargos a un agente de la Patrulla Fronteriza por la muerte a tiros de un mexicano de 15 años en Texas.

En 2008, se desechó un caso que vinculaba a un agente de la Patrulla Fronteriza con una muerte, después de dos juicios nulos. Algunos testigos declararon que el agente baleó a un hombre sin provocación alguna, pero la defensa respondió que el inmigrante mexicano trató de propinar una pedrada al acusado.

En tanto, familias mexicanas han presentado múltiples demandas por muertes derivadas de actos considerados imprudentes, y el gobierno estadounidense, aun sin admitir actos indebidos, ha pagado cientos de miles de dólares para dejar atrás esos casos. El año pasado, la familia del inmigrante sin permiso de residencia en Estados Unidos que fue muerto por el agente en el caso desechado llegó a un arreglo por 850.000 dólares. El agente sigue trabajando para la Patrulla Fronteriza.

Incluso el gobierno mexicano ha pedido sin éxito un cambio en las políticas. La Patrulla Fronteriza ha criticado que las autoridades mexicanas no erijan barreras en su lado de la frontera y emprendan pocas acciones para evitar las agresiones a los agentes.

En un comunicado, la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores de México afirmó que ha insistido ante el gobierno estadounidense, mediante diversos canales y a todos los niveles, para que se realice una revisión "indispensable" de los procedimientos y estándares operativos de la Patrulla Fronteriza.

En otros lugares del mundo, la fuerza letal suele considerarse un último recurso. Por ejemplo, la policía israelí suele emplear balas de goma, chorros de agua a presión y gases lacrimógenos para dispersar a las muchedumbres que les lanzan piedras.

Micky Rosenfeld, vocero de la policía israelí, dijo que los agentes abren fuego sólo como un último recurso y después de hacer disparos al aire.

Desde 2002, los agentes fronterizos estadounidenses han recibido armas capaces de disparar proyectiles que rocían gas pimienta, incluso a 75 metros (250 pies) de distancia. La agencia no dio estadísticas sobre cuántas veces se han usado esos proyectiles. Sin embargo, los funcionarios estadounidenses destacan que los agentes en la frontera con México operan en escenarios muy distintos a los que se aprecian en otros países.

Suelen patrullar zonas desérticas en solitario, algo que resulta distinto a las situaciones de protestas, donde las autoridades están agrupadas y protegidas con equipamiento antimotines.

Los expertos consideran que muy poco puede hacerse para detener esta violencia, ante la índole delicada de estos asuntos para la relación diplomática entre los dos países, y debido a que ninguna ley internacional contempla específicamente estos casos.

"A final de cuentas, la política en la relación entre Estados Unidos y México desempeñará un papel mucho más importante que la ley", dijo Kal Raustiala, profesor de derecho y director del Centro Burkle de Relaciones Internacionales en la Universidad de California en Los Angeles. "Hay demasiados intereses de ambas partes para permitir que la indignación totalmente comprensible en México sea la que determine el resultado aquí".

___

El periodista de la AP, Josef Federman, contribuyó a este reporte desde Israel.

Sadistic LA cops share photos of people they beat up???

Source

Sheriff's officials probe exchange of photos of bloodied faces

By Robert Faturechi and Jack Leonard, Los Angeles Times

November 16, 2012, 4:39 p.m.

After a violent confrontation with a teenage suspect, a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy took a photo of the man's bloodied face and texted it to Sgt. Eric Gonzalez, a friend who worked at Men's Central Jail.

A few hours later, Gonzalez responded by sending his own photo of a battered suspect: a jail visitor who had been kicked, punched and pepper-sprayed by deputies.

The man in Gonzalez's photo had two black eyes, one swollen shut, and blood streaming down his face.

"Looks like we did a better job," Gonzalez wrote his colleague. "Where's my beer big homie."

"Hahaha," the deputy responded, according to a text message exchange reviewed by The Times.

Sheriff's officials are now investigating whether Gonzalez violated the department's rules by bragging about the man's injuries. The altercation between the jail visitor and deputies supervised by Gonzalez has also drawn scrutiny from the FBI, which began investigating the incident last year as part of its wide-ranging probe of the county's troubled jails.

Prosecutors had initially charged the visitor, Gabriel Carrillo, with battery and resisting deputies based on the jailers' statements. But they later dropped the case. The district attorney's office concluded earlier this year that the deputies appeared to use necessary force on Carrillo.

In an interview with the Times, Gonzalez said his text message is being misconstrued and was not intended as a boast. He said he sent the photograph to determine whether his colleague recognized the visitor as someone who had recently run from him. The accompanying message, he said, was a joke unrelated to the injuries suffered by either man.

"Is this something to laugh about? Absolutely not," Gonzalez said.

The probe comes amid intense public scrutiny of the department's jails and allegations of abuse and other misconduct by custody deputies. A blue-ribbon commission recently concluded that sheriff's managers fostered a culture in which deputies were permitted to beat and humiliate inmates, cover up misconduct and form aggressive deputy cliques.

Internal department memos obtained by The Times show that top sheriff's officials raised alarms about deputies meting out "jailhouse justice" against inmates and supervisors conducting shoddy use-of-force investigations. Sheriff Lee Baca recently agreed to sweeping reforms aimed at reducing the violence.

The investigation into Gonzalez's text exchange is focusing on photographs of two men who are brothers.

Robert Carrillo was injured when he was arrested by two anti-gang deputies in an alleyway in the City of Commerce on Feb. 24, 2011.

Two days later, Gabriel Carrillo went to visit his brother at Men's Central Jail. In the waiting area, deputies learned he had a cellphone, a violation of jail visiting rules. He was handcuffed and escorted to a nearby break room, which also serves as a booking area when visitors are under arrest.

There are conflicting accounts about what happened next.

Carrillo said several deputies beat him and pepper sprayed him while he was handcuffed. He alleged in a lawsuit that he was kicked and punched until he blacked out, even though he wasn't resisting.

Deputies said they removed a handcuff from Carrillo's wrist so he could be fingerprinted, at which point Carrillo swung an elbow at a deputy and began fighting and then tried to flee from the room.

Gonzalez said that, as a supervisor, he stood by and directed the deputies involved in the fight, ordering them to pepper spray and punch Carrillo until he was under control and handcuffed. The sergeant said that during the struggle Carrillo injured some of the deputies and spat a mixture of blood, saliva and pepper spray on one, creating fears the deputy could contract a disease, such as hepatitis or AIDS.

"We're not trying to hurt him. We're trying to control him. He's trying to hurt us," Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez said he learned immediately after the incident that Carrillo had been at the jail to visit his brother. He said he began making calls to learn more about Robert Carrillo's arrest and found out that two others who had been with him fled the scene.

Gonzalez said he called the anti-gang deputy who made the arrest. The deputy, an old friend, texted him the photograph of Robert Carrillo. The photo was a close-up shot of him with a bloodied, bruised nose and scratches and scrapes to his face.

Gonzalez said he doesn't know why his colleague sent him the photo. "Why do guys do stupid things?" he said. "I don't know."

Three hours after receiving the photograph, Gonzalez texted back a booking photo of Gabriel Carrillo, which showed his injured face, along with the text message saying "we did a better job."

Gonzalez insisted that he sent the photograph as part of official law enforcement business to determine whether Gabriel Carrillo was one of the two people who had run away when his brother was arrested. The accompanying message, he said, was intended to tease his friend about how the jail deputies had not allowed their suspect to flee the scene, whereas his friend had let his two suspects get away.

Sheriff's investigators interviewed Gonzalez last year about the force used against Gabriel Carrillo but did not bring up the texts, Gonzalez said. The sergeant said he voluntarily told them about the messages when the investigators asked whether there was anything they didn't know about the incident that might embarrass the department.

Gonzalez said he mentioned the texts out of concern that someone might misunderstand their meaning. "I'm a police officer. I think five steps ahead," he said. "Could it be taken out of context? Absolutely. Would I do it again? Absolutely not."

Gonzalez has been on leave since January as the internal investigation continues, said sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore.

"If something like this turns out to be true, it could very well lead to a person's termination," Whitmore said.

robert.faturechi@latimes.com

jack.leonard@latimes.com

Lawsuit against Lake County prosecutor advances

Source

Lawsuit against Lake County prosecutor advances

By Dan Hinkel, Chicago Tribune reporter

November 18, 2012

Successful lawsuits against prosecutors are rare, but an exonerated former murder suspect has cleared an early obstacle in his attempt to hold Lake County prosecutors legally liable for his ordeal.

Jerry Hobbs spent five years in jail awaiting trial after he confessed to killing his 8-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old friend in Zion in 2005. Though DNA indicated his innocence in 2007, prosecutors continued to press charges until the evidence led authorities to another man in 2010 and Hobbs was freed.

Ruling recently on a motion to throw out Hobbs' lawsuit against police and prosecutors, U.S. Circuit Judge Joan Lefkow declined to dismiss Hobbs' claims that prosecutors violated his rights by aiding police in coercing a confession and then using his words as evidence against him.

Lefkow noted that prosecutors enjoy broad immunity from civil suits related to acts undertaken while preparing or trying a case. But she decided Lake County State's Attorney Michael Waller and his top deputies did not have immunity because Hobbs' suit claims that they took an active role in helping officers interrogate him, allegedly coaching them on how to persuade him to confess on camera.

Experts said Hobbs' lawsuit slips through a gap in immunity created when prosecutors take investigative roles traditionally reserved for police, who are more legally vulnerable. While prosecutors might perceive benefits in supervising officers as they try to build sound cases, experts said doing so also creates opportunities for people who are exonerated to sue.

"(Suing a prosecutor) is a daunting task … but it can be done," said Peter Neufeld, co-founder and co-director of the New York-based Innocence Project, a group that works to free inmates it believes are innocent.

James Sotos, a lawyer for the prosecution, said the motion to dismiss is only an early step in the case. He noted that Lefkow didn't judge the evidence related to Hobbs' claims but only allowed the suit to move on. Sotos has said prosecutors acted in good faith in the case.

"The ruling does not suggest that the court is crediting Hobbs' case, only that the case moves to the next phase, at which (point) each side will have the chance to present their evidence," he said.

Lefkow's ruling was not a complete victory for Hobbs, as she threw out parts of the lawsuit on the basis of statutes of limitations and other portions because they didn't contain legally valid claims.

Waller, who will retire next month after a little more than two decades in office, could not be reached for comment.

The incoming state's attorney, fellow Republican Mike Nerheim, has vowed to reform an office that has suffered a streak of legal losses in prosecutions contradicted by DNA evidence. In Hobbs' case and three others, Waller and his deputies continued to insist on the suspect's guilt after blood or semen evidence indicated his innocence.

Each time, prosecutors floated a theory as to how the evidence arrived at the scene incidentally. All four cases collapsed, but only after the original suspects had spent a total of 60 years in jail.

Another of the former inmates cleared by DNA, Juan Rivera, also sued Waller in late October. Rivera was released from prison in January after serving 20 years of a life sentence for allegedly killing 11-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan in 1992.

Hobbs' trouble started shortly after he found the bodies of his daughter, Laura, and her friend Krystal Tobias in a Zion park in May 2005.

Suspicious of Hobbs' discovery of the bodies and his extensive criminal record, officers held him for roughly 24 hours and accused him repeatedly of stabbing the girls. In his confession, Hobbs said he beat Laura when she defied his orders to come home, and, when Tobias rushed him with a knife, he disarmed her and killed them both.

In 2007, defense lawyers learned of semen evidence in Laura Hobbs' body that didn't match her father. Prosecutors argued that the evidence wasn't relevant because she played in a spot where couples went to have sex.

That theory took a hit in 2010, when the evidence was linked in a national DNA database to Jorge Torrez, who had been charged with a series of attacks on women in the Washington, D.C., area, including an abduction and rape. Torrez, 16 at the time of the slayings, lived near the girls in Zion and was a close friend of Tobias' half-brother before joining the Marines after high school.

Torrez was charged in May in Lake County with the Zion slayings.

He is now serving five life sentences for the Washington attacks, and also faces trial in the 2009 slaying of 20-year-old Navy Petty Officer Amanda Snell, who lived on the same military base that he did. Federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in that case.

dhinkel@tribune.com

FBI investigation reveals bureau’s comprehensive access to electronic communications

The police that are spying on you probably read this email before you did!!!!

Remember if you are doing something illegal you certainly should not be talking about it in an email or posting it on the internet where federal, state, county, and local city cops watch our every move.

You can encrypt your emails with something like PGP, but I suspect if you piss the Feds off enough they are willing to spend big bucks to get the folks at the NSA to decrypt your messages.

And last but not least your telephone isn't that safe either. The police routinely illegally listen to our phone calls without the required "search warrants".

Remember any time you use a cell phone you are also using a radio transmitter and EVERYTHING you say is broadcast onto the airwaves for anybody to listen to.

Source

FBI investigation of Broadwell reveals bureau’s comprehensive access to electronic communications

By Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima, Published: November 17

The FBI started its case in June with a collection of five e-mails, a few hundred kilobytes of data at most.

By the time the probe exploded into public view earlier this month, the FBI was sitting on a mountain of data containing the private communications — and intimate secrets — of a CIA director and a U.S. war commander. What the bureau didn’t have — and apparently still doesn’t — is evidence of a crime.

How that happened and what it means for privacy and national security are questions that have induced shudders in Washington and a queasy new understanding of the FBI’s comprehensive access to the digital trails left by even top officials.

FBI and Justice Department officials have vigorously defended their handling of the case. “What we did was conduct the investigation the way we normally conduct a criminal investigation,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Thursday. “We follow the facts.”

But in this case, the trail cut across a seemingly vast territory with no clear indication of the boundaries, if any, that the FBI imposed on itself. The thrust of the investigation changed direction repeatedly and expanded dramatically in scope.

A criminal inquiry into e-mail harassment morphed into a national security probe of whether CIA Director David H. Petraeus and the secrets he guarded were at risk. After uncovering an extramarital affair, investigators shifted to the question of whether Petraeus was guilty of a security breach.

When none of those paths bore results, investigators settled on the single target they are scrutinizing now: Paula Broadwell, the retired general’s biographer and mistress, and what she was doing with a cache of classified but apparently inconsequential files.

On Capitol Hill, the case has drawn references to the era of J. Edgar Hoover, the founding director of the FBI, who was notorious for digging up dirt on Washington’s elite long before the invention of e-mail and the Internet.

“The expansive data that is available electronically now means that when you’re looking for one thing, the chances of finding a whole host of other things is exponentially greater,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-­Calif.), a member of the House intelligence committee and a former federal prosecutor.

In this case, Schiff said, the probe may have caused more harm than it uncovered. “It’s very possible that the most significant damage done to national security was the loss of General Petraeus himself,” Schiff said.

Not the usual boundaries

The investigation’s profile has called attention to what legal and privacy experts say are the difficulties of applying constraints meant for gathering physical evidence to online detective work.

Law enforcement officers conducting a legal search have always been able to pursue evidence of other crimes sitting in “plain view.” Investigators with a warrant to search a house for drugs can seize evidence of another crime, such as bombmaking. But the warrant does not allow them to barge into the house next door.

But what are the comparable boundaries online? Does a warrant to search an e-mail account expose the communications of anyone who exchanged messages with the target? [Warrants, who needs stinking warrants. We will just do an illegal search and laugh when the illegal search causes you to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers to get it throw out. Remember the police are criminals who routinely break the law in an effort to put other criminals in jail. If cops didn't routinely commit perjury they wouldn't have a slang word for it which is testilying!!!]

Similarly, FBI agents monitoring wiretaps have always been obligated to put down their headphones when the conversation is clearly not about a criminal enterprise. [Do you really think an FBI agent is going to put down the headphones and miss out on all that potentially incriminating dirt???] It’s known as minimization, a process followed by intelligence and law enforcement agencies to protect the privacy of innocent people.

“It’s harder to do with e-mails, because unlike a phone, you can’t just turn it off once you figure out the conversation didn’t relate to what you’re investigating,” said Michael DuBose, a former chief of the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section who now handles cyber-investigations for Kroll Advisory Solutions.

Some federal prosecutors have sought to establish a “wall” whereby one set of agents conducts a first review of material, disclosing to the investigating agents only what is relevant. But Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor who consults on electronic surveillance issues, said he thinks “that’s the exception rather than the rule.” [I suspect this is more about convincing juries that the FBI didn't do something illegal, and I doubt if it stops the cops from doing anything illegal.]

It’s unclear whether the FBI made any attempt to minimize its intrusion into the e-mails exchanged by Broadwell and Petraeus, both of whom are married, that provided a gaping view into their adulterous relationship.

Many details surrounding the case remain unclear. The FBI declined to respond to a list of questions submitted by The Washington Post on its handling of personal information in the course of the Petraeus investigation. The bureau also declined to discuss even the broad guidelines for safeguarding the privacy of ordinary citizens whose e-mails might surface in similarly inadvertent fashion.

The scope of the issue is considerable, because the exploding use of e-mail has created a new and potent investigative resource for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement demands for e-mail and other electronic communications from providers such as Google, Comcast and Yahoo are so routine that the companies employ teams of analysts to sort through thousands of requests a month. Very few are turned down. [Remember what I said about NEVER using email to talk about anything you do that illegal. The article just said the FBI routinely gets Google and Yahoo to help them spy on you!!!!]

Wide access to accounts

Although the Petraeus-Broadwell investigation ensnared high-ranking officials and had potential national security implications, the way the FBI assembled evidence in the case was not extraordinary, according to several experts.

The probe was triggered when a Florida socialite with ties to Petraeus and Gen. John R. Allen, the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, went to the FBI in June with menacing e-mails from an anonymous sender. [Even if you use an anonymous email the cops will almost certainly get the IP address that the email was sent from which probably will point to you!!!!]

Schiff and others have questioned why the FBI even initiated the case. Law enforcement officials have explained that they were concerned because the earliest e-mails indicated that the sender had access to details of the personal schedules of Petraeus and Allen.

The FBI’s first pile of data came from Jill Kelley, who got to know Petraeus and Allen when she worked as an unofficial social liaison at the military base in Tampa where both men were assigned.

In early summer, Kelley received several anonymous e-mails warning her to stay away from Allen and Petraeus. Kelley was alarmed and turned over her computer to the FBI; she may also have allowed access to her e-mail accounts.

The e-mails were eventually traced to Broadwell, who thought that Kelley was a threat to her relationship with Petraeus, law enforcement officials said. But the trail to Broadwell was convoluted.

Broadwell reportedly tried to cover her tracks by using as many as four anonymous e-mail accounts and sending the messages from computers in business centers at hotels where she was staying while on a nationwide tour promoting her biography of Petraeus. According to some accounts, the FBI traced the e-mails to those hotels, then examined registries for names of guests who were checked in at the time. [See they can hunt down anonymous emails based on the IP address that sent them]

The recent sex scandal that's rocked the armed forces and the CIA has highlighted an often-unseen problem in military families: Marital infidelity. Anthony Mason and Rebecca Jarvis speak with two Army wives to understand if infidelity is the military's dirty little secret.

Once Broadwell was identified, FBI agents would have gone to Internet service providers with warrants for access to her accounts. Experts said companies typically comply by sending discs that contain a sender’s entire collection of accounts, enabling the FBI to search the inbox, draft messages and even deleted correspondence not yet fully erased.

“You’re asking them for e-mails relevant to the investigation, but as a practical matter, they let you look at everything,” said a former federal prosecutor who, like many interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition on anonymity because the FBI inquiry is continuing.

FBI agents can then roam through every corner of the account as if it were their own. [Which is why you should NEVER post illegal stuff on the internet!!!!!!]

The capability to scour e-mail accounts has expanded the bureau’s investigative power dramatically, even in crimes previously seen as difficult to prosecute. For example, officials said, the ability to reconstruct communications between reporters and their sources helps explain why the Obama administration has been able to bring more leak prosecutions than all of its predecessors combined.

E-mail searches vary in scope and technique, from scanning contents for key words “to literally going through and opening every file and looking at what it says,” a former Justice Department official said.

Law enforcement officials said the FBI never sought access to Allen’s computer or accounts. It’s unclear whether it did so with Petraeus. But through Kelley and Broadwell, the bureau had amassed an enormous amount of data on the two men — including sexually explicit e-mails between Petraeus and Broadwell and questionable communications between Allen and Kelley.

Petraeus and Broadwell had tried to conceal their communications by typing drafts of messages, hitting “save” but not “send,” and then sharing passwords that provided access to the drafts. But experts said that ruse would have posed no obstacle for the FBI, because agents had full access to the e-mail accounts.

As they pore over data, FBI agents are not supposed to search for key words unrelated to the warrant under which the data were obtained. But if they are simply reading through document after document, they can pursue new leads that surface.

“Most times, if you found evidence of a second crime, you would stop and go back and get a second warrant” to avoid a courtroom fight over admissibility of evidence, a former prosecutor said. But in practical terms, there is no limit on the number of investigations that access to an e-mail account may spawn.

‘Because of who it was’

There is nothing illegal about the Petraeus-Broadwell affair under federal law. Were it not for Petraeus’s prominent position, the probe might have ended with no consequence. But because of his job — and the concern that intelligence officers caught in compromising positions could be susceptible to blackmail — the probe wasn’t shut down.

“If this had all started involving someone who was not the director of the CIA . . . they would have ignored it,” said David Sobel, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group. “A bell went off because of who it was.”

That consideration triggered a cascade of additional quandaries for the Justice Department, including whether and when to notify Congress and the White House. The FBI finally did so on election night, Nov. 6, when Deputy Director Sean Joyce called Petraeus’s boss, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.

After being confronted by Clapper, Petraeus agreed to resign.

President Obama said last week that there was “no evidence at this point, from what I’ve seen, that classified information was disclosed that in any way would have had a negative impact on our national security.”

But the data assembled on Allen and Petraeus continue to reverberate. The FBI turned over its stockpile of material on Allen — said to contain as many as 30,000 pages of e-mail transcripts — to the Defense Department, prompting the Pentagon inspector general to start an investigation.

The CIA has also launched an inspector general investigation into Petraeus and his 14-month tenure at the agency, seeking to determine, among other things, whether he used the perks of the position to enable his affair with Broadwell.

If it follows its own protocols, the FBI will hold on to the data for decades. Former officials said the bureau retains records for 20 years for closed criminal investigations, and 30 years for closed national security probes.

Sari Horwitz and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

LA cops have some "stun gun fun" on a handcuffed woman

Source

LAPD officer Tasered woman in handcuffs, records show

November 18, 2012 | 11:44 am

Four Los Angeles police officers are under scrutiny after one Tasered a handcuffed woman while joking with others at the scene, according to interviews and law enforcement records.

The video taken of the December 2010 arrest shows Officer Jorge Santander firing the Taser without warning and later displaying a Superman logo he wore on his chest beneath his uniform, according to records. Off camera, another officer is heard laughing and singing.

Santander then appeared to lie about the incident repeatedly in written reports. The three other officers who witnessed him stun the woman corroborated his version of events when first questioned and failed to tell supervisors that a video of the encounter existed, records show.

According to a memo written by a prosecutor in the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, the incident began when two officers, Steven Bauman and Jose Lepe, were dispatched to a parking lot behind a Hollywood nightclub around 1:30 a.m. on Dec. 4, 2010, when a couple reported a drunk woman inside their car.

After the woman refused to leave voluntarily, records show, the officers arrested her on suspicion of public intoxication.

The officers requested a female officer be sent to assist, which is when Santander arrived with his partner, Georgeta Buruiana, who searched the woman, records showed. For reasons not explained in a D.A. memo of the event, Santander and Buruiana would transport the woman to a nearby station for booking.

Bauman had turned on a personal video camera and focused it on Santander and Buruiana as they led the woman over to their patrol car. She resisted getting in — something she had also done when Lepe tried to seat her in the back of his patrol car.

As before, officers shoved the woman into the seat, but she managed to stand back up. Without warning, Santander placed a Taser against the woman's torso and fired it twice, according to the prosecutor's account of the video. The woman fell face-down onto the seat.

Immediately after he delivered the shocks, Santander stated that the woman had kicked him in the stomach. It was not possible to tell from the video if the claim was true, the memo said. The D.A. memo details Santander displaying the Superman logo but does not say exactly when in the chronology it occurred.

As the woman lay in the car kicking and yelling, the video showed the officers discussing how to move her into a seated position. Santander climbed into the front seat and is heard warning the woman that she will be shocked again if she doesn't comply, the prosecutor wrote. The officer then reached back toward the woman with the Taser and, according to the memo, appeared to place it against her arm as the weapon's red activation light illuminated, although it was unclear if he pulled the Taser away before the electrical charge began.

When a sergeant arrived at the scene, Bauman turned off the camera. Santander told the supervisor simply that he had used the Taser on the woman twice because she had kicked him and had tried to kick out the windows of the patrol car. The three other officers corroborated that version of the encounter and none mentioned Bauman's video, the memo said.

Sometime later in the day, Santander wrote an account of firing his Taser for the woman's arrest report. In it he said he had fired the Taser only twice and warned the woman that she would be stunned before firing the Taser the first time. He also alleged that she had kicked him in the chest with such force that she knocked him off balance. Both claims — about the warning and being knocked off balance — were proven false by the video, the prosecutor wrote.

Santander amended the arrest report a few days later, saying that it had been Bauman, instead of himself, who warned the woman about the Taser. That, too, was untrue according to the video, the memo concluded. Santander also added mention of firing the Taser from the front seat but said he had used it only to scare her with the noise of the electrical charge.

Word of the video reached a supervisor only after Santander asked an officer if he had seen it and that officer reported the conversation to a higher-up.

The woman declined to speak to investigators about the incident on the advice of her attorney. The Times could not reach her for comment, and the officers involved did not respond to requests for comment.

Police officials confirmed that Police Chief Charlie Beck is seeking to have Santander and the three others fired. All four were suspended with pay until August this year, when the department concluded an internal investigation and Beck ordered each of them to go before discipline panels, which has the power to fire officers.

One officer's hearing is underway, and the others are expected in the coming months, Cmdr. Andrew Smith said.

The nearly two-year delay in passing judgment on the officers was a result, in part, of the seriousness of the case. Santander's actions were disturbing enough to police investigators that they postponed the internal inquiry in order to present the case to the district attorney's office for possible criminal charges.

The D.A.'s office concluded last year that the video and other evidence were not conclusive enough to prove that Santander had committed any crimes, according to the prosecutor's memo. Prosecutors also declined to charge the woman.

The incident marks the fourth time in the last few months that cases have come to light in which LAPD officers are accused of using force on suspects who had been restrained. The civilian Police Commission, which oversees the LAPD, has launched an independent inquiry into cases of Taser use and other types of non-lethal force by officers.

Data Doctors: Are my emails private from government agencies?

The answer is - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

Data Doctors: Are my emails private from government agencies?

Posted: Monday, November 19, 2012 8:00 am

By Ken Colburn, Data Doctors

Q: What is Metadata? And after the scandal of General Petraeus, are our emails private from government agencies? - Jeremy

A: E-mail has always been one of the least secure methods of transmitting data electronically and this recent scandal shows that even being tech-savvy isn’t much help.

When an e-mail message is created and sent, the message passes through a number of mail servers (think of them as post offices for snail mail) and a record of where the message came from and where it went (via IP addresses) is also created by virtually every device that handles the message.

Since most messages are sent in plain text, it’s technically possible for anyone or any system to read your message anywhere along the way (which is why e-mail encryption is important for sensitive messages). The reality is that most companies have very strict systems in place to keep just anyone from accessing those messages, but the opportunity still exists. [That is BS - Any person with computer administrative powers can read your emails. This is typically a "root" user in the UNIX or Linux worlds. But email administrators without "root" powers can also read your emails]

The information about the message, a.k.a. the ‘metadata’ is how the scandal was exposed. If we continue the snail mail analogy, the post office stamps mail to help route it and DNA or fingerprints on the outside of an envelope can be used to help track down the sender of the mail without ever opening the mail. [Again he is oversimplifying things. This so called 'metadata' is part of the email. It's at the very beginning of each email, and if you can read it, you can also read the email.]

Petraeus, the Director of the CIA, knew that sending and receiving e-mail from an anonymous account wouldn’t be safe, so he used a method commonly used by terrorists and teenagers: create draft messages, but never send them.

If two people have the username and password for the same account, they can create messages for each other that don’t leave the usual trails described above. They save them as draft copies so the other can log in and read the draft, then respond in-kind without ever sending a traceable message. [Well that is almost right. When the message is created, edited or read it does travel over the internet and someone that is monitoring your internet traffic could read it]

Had this been the only communication from the involved parties, they would likely never have been discovered but as usual, human error exposed the affair.

The jealous mistress sent harassing e-mails from an anonymous account to another woman she thought was being flirtatious, which is a criminal violation and began the unravelling of the affair.

The government can’t read your private messages without some level of due process, except in rare situations, but the process is what so many privacy advocates are concerned about. [That is in theory. In reality the FBI and Homeland security police are just as crooked as the criminals they hunt and they routinely illegally read people email, and after they discover a crime they will commit perjury and make up a lame excuse to get the search warrant they were supposed to have before they read your emails]

The current laws were created when electronic storage was expensive and we all tended to use one device and delete things to save space. Today, storage is cheap and we use a plethora of devices that in turn create more records that we tend to keep for much longer periods.

Under current laws, any e-mail that is 6 months old or older can be requested if a criminal prosecutor signs the request. If the message is less than 6 months old, a court order from a judge is required. [But that won't stop a crooked cop from illegally reading your data]

In either case, something that the courts recognize as probable cause has to trigger the request when it comes to the averages citizen. If someone suspected that Petraeus was having an affair, that wouldn’t have been enough to allow the FBI to start requesting access to his personal e-mail accounts.

His mistress’ harassing emails which violated part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is what opened to door and eventually lead to the exposure of the affair to the world.

The lessons to be learned from this scandal are that e-mail has never been or will never be a secure way to communicate with others, if you want to make it more difficult for the government to access your messages, make sure you delete them before they are 6 months old and no matter how secure you think you are, all it takes is one simple human error (or jealous mistress) to render your ‘security system’ useless. [While that might be "technically" right, it is wrong in reality. Just because YOU logically delete one of your emails doesn't mean it is physically deleted from the server that keeps your message. And even if you logically delete a message, but it still physically exists on a server the police can read it. The same is true with files on your personal computer. While you may logically delete a file, it frequently continues to exist on your computer and if it does exist the police can still read it.]

[The bottom line is if you have something that you want to remain private DON'T put it on the internet where 2 billion people might be able to read it.]