Archive for the 'Law' Category

Here’s the video that’s been making the rounds on YouTube, a confrontation between an Oklahoma state trooper and an emergency medical technician who was taking a patient to a hospital:

Incredibly, it was Maurice White Jr., the EMT, who faced charges after the incident. Predictably, White and Daniel Martin, the trooper who tried to arrest White, gave differing accounts of the incident:

Read the rest of this entry »

By now, you’ve probably heard that those scary terrorists that the FBI picked up in New York were just another collection of disaffected misfits who met up with an FBI provocateur (sorry, informant), who supplied the group with money and ideas, and who promised to provide weapons as well.

The similarity between this case and previous “homegrown terror” investigations led journalist David Neiwert to compare the plots with an eye toward discovering whether or not a terror suspect’s race plays a part in the decision to prosecute. Turns out, there’s very good evidence that it does:

A federal law enforcement official described the plot as “aspirational” — meaning that the suspects wanted to do something but had no weapons or explosives — and described the operation as a sting with a cooperator within the group.

“It was fully controlled at all times,” a law enforcement official said.

In other words, these guys had neither the means nor the wherewithal to actually pull off any of these attacks. And an FBI informant helped them take action. We’ll see if this case withstands the obvious entrapment defense that the men’s attorneys are about 99.9% certain to use.

And that word, “aspirational” — where have we heard that before? Oh yeah.

That was the word U.S. Attorney Troy Eid of Colorado used when he announced his decision not to pursue the case of the white-supremacist tweakers who were caught trying to kill Barack Obama in Denver. He called their plot “more aspirational than operational”.

The Colorado case wasn’t the only one involving white terror suspects that wasn’t pursued because the plot was “aspirational”:

– The skinheads arrested in Tennessee for plotting to kill Obama too. Remember their plan?

According to the ATF, Cowart and Schlesselman planned to suit up in white tuxedoes and top hats and then massacre 88 black people, 14 by decapitation, including Obama among their targets.

– The Alabama militiamen who plotted to go on an anti-Latino killing rampage:

The heavily armed Alabama Free Militia planned to attack a group of Hispanics in Blount County and had orders to open fire immediately if they saw the feds coming, an ATF agent said Tuesday.

– The far-right “Patriot” who constructed a sodium cyanide bomb capable of killing hundreds.

– The ex-Army Ranger who planned an anti-abortion killing spree.

Notice one thing about these cases? They were similarly “aspirational,” but at the time of the arrests, all of the suspects possessed weapons and/or bomb materiel.

And yet, as in the case in Denver, authorities either refuse to pursue such cases or they downplay them and suggest that the lack of apparent competence is reason to not take them seriously.

When the suspects aren’t white, though, we see a different pattern:

Read the rest of this entry »

From CNN:

A Florida man threw a 4-month-old boy out the window of a moving car Tuesday after a fight with the infant’s mother, investigators said.

Emanuel Murray’s body was found by a passing motorist on Interstate 275 early Tuesday morning, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department said. His mother’s ex-boyfriend, 20-year-old Anthony McTear Jr., has been charged with first-degree murder, the department said.

I suspect the prosecutors in this case will charge McTear with aggravated murder, which can get you the death penalty in Florida.

Now is not the time to play Johnnie Cochran

Some fun lovin’ guys in Cedar Rapids, Iowa are upset because they got roughed up by the police:

“They had me handcuffed in my house, but drug me out by my feet. That’s how I got this,” Kenneth Reed said. “I did get a couple of knees in the back which I didn’t deserve. I was being really cooperative except for not letting them in my house without a warrant.”

“They didn’t show us a warrant. They didn’t read us our rights or nothing. They didn’t follow procedure at all,” Parker Andersen said. “I dropped my shoe and tried to pick it up. They slammed me to the ground and choked me out. That wasn’t procedure at all.”

Andersen has a scar from a taser used to get him under control. The two young men argue police were too aggressive.

Wow, those cops WERE pretty aggressive. And what’s all this about busting into a house without a warrant?

But as it turns out, the police appear to have acted within the law:

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember how Robert Bork, crusader against lawsuits, filed a ridiculous million dollar suit over a slip-and-fall injury? It would appear that Justice Antonin Scalia is following in Bork’s footsteps.

After Scalia questioned the need to protect private information, law professor Joel Reidenberg of Fordham University had his students collect a 15-page dossier filled with some of Scalia’s private information. Scalia was not pleased:

“Professor Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any,” the justice says, among other comments.

In response, Reidenberg tells the ABA Journal that the information gathered by his class about Scalia was all “publicly available, for free,” and wasn’t posted on the Internet by the class or otherwise further publicized.

It looks to me like Reidenberg was perfectly responsible. His class broke no laws, and didn’t publicize their findings. They didn’t violate Scalia’s privacy, but instead alerted Scalia to the scope of his own vulnerability. What upset Scalia is not irresponsibility, but the fact that personal details that the general public has no business knowing are freely available to anyone who wants them.

But even though Scalia doesn’t seem to think it’s right for people to be snooping into his personal information, he still supports their right to snoop into yours.

We see that a second British bobby (this time a giant of a sergeant) is suspended from duties as a result of another video coming to light shows how he summarily dealt out his own “justice” with a young female who allegedly swore at him during the G20 protests.

Since we can’t think of anything else to say that we didn’t say a few days ago regarding our once highly regarded and respected police, we’ll let The Guardian’s cartoonist, Steve Bell’s picture do the talking this time.

Here’s a quick cut & pasted taster about this most recent example of an obviously “broken” British police service.

A police sergeant seen in video footage apparently hitting a woman during the G20 protest in London has been suspended, Scotland Yard has said.

The officer appears to hit the woman in the face with his hand and then the leg with his baton after she swears at him.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission - already investigating the death of Ian Tomlinson during the 1 April protests - is examining the case.

The Lib Dems say it shows there is a systemic problem and want an inquiry.

Officers ‘accountable’

The latest video footage featuring the female protester has been passed to the IPCC, a Scotland Yard spokesman said.

“The officer has been identified and suspended pending further investigation. The officer works as a sergeant in the territorial support group,” he added.

Earlier, police said the apparent actions of the officer featured in the footage raised “immediate concerns”.

Read the rest of this report and see this sickening incident for yourself.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

Bush’s undead administration continues to suck the blood from America’s most cherished institutions

Remember when Bush and his henchmen politicized the Justice Department by turning it over to a bunch of young ideologues from Pat Robertson’s “university”? To no intelligent person’s surprise, many of the Bush-era prosecutors have been screwing up a lot of prosecutions with their incompetence and disregard for the law:

• Federal Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly recently removed a Justice Department lawyer from a Guantanamo detainee case for flouting several deadlines, then lambasted his supervisor for submitting a “shockingly revisionist” sequence of events to the court.

• In Miami last month, federal Judge Alan Gold complained of “flagrant violations” by prosecutors who did not disclose the existence of secret recordings of a defense lawyer for a doctor charged with prescription fraud.

• Another federal judge in Washington, John Bates, last year cited a failure to turn over evidence as he ordered a new trial for a man convicted of illegal business dealings with Iran. Bates said he had “grave concerns” about the government’s actions, which “severely prejudiced” the defendant’s fair trial rights.

• And in a separate Gitmo case, Sullivan also lashed out at the government, vowing that “someone’s going to pay a price” for withholding evidence.

So the policy of passing over the most qualified applicants from the most prestigious law schools in favor of mediocre ideologues from the recently accredited Regent University had the unexpected effect of seriously damaging the professionalism and effectiveness of the Justice Department. Who could have foreseen that?

If you belong to that bunch of barmpots who habitually condemn all American lawyers as being nothing but a load of lying, money grabbing mofos, don’t bother reading further. We’d hate to waste both your time and ours.

However, if you’re not so stupid as to all too easily swallow such silly shit, you’ll probably choose to continue.

A Report from Gaza

Strong Indications of Israeli War Crimes

By NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD

Gaza City.

We are a delegation of 8 American lawyers, members of the National Lawyers Guild in the United States, who have come here to the Gaza Strip to assess the effects of the recent attacks on the people, and to determine what, if any, violations of international law occurred and whether U.S. domestic law has been violated as a consequence. We have spent the last five days interviewing communities particularly impacted by the recent Israeli offensive, including medical personnel, humanitarian aid workers and United Nations representatives.

In particular, the delegation examined three issues: 1) targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure; 2) illegal use of weapons and 3) blocking of medical and humanitarian assistance to civilians.

Targeting of Civilians and Civilian Infrastructure

Much of the debate surrounding Israel’s aerial and ground offensive against Gaza has centered on whether or not Israel observed principles of proportionality and distinction. The debate suggests that Israel targeted Hamas i.e., its military installations, its leaders, and its militants, and in the process of its discrete military exercise it inadvertently killed Palestinian civilians. While we have found evidence that Palestinian civilians were victims of excessive force and collateral damage, we have also found troubling instances of Palestinian civilians being targets themselves.

The delegation recorded numerous accounts of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, in the head, chest, and stomach. Another common narrative described Israeli forces rounding civilians into a single location i.e., homes, schools which Israeli tanks or warplanes then shelled. Israeli forces continued to shoot at civilians fleeing the targeted structures.

If that snip has tempted/interested you enough to read the rest of this remarkably revealing report, then please be our guest.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

From MSNBC:

For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses.

The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench.

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.

Prosecutors say Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, Western PA Child Care LLC. The judges were charged on Jan. 26 and removed from the bench by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court shortly afterward.

No company officials have been charged, but the investigation is still going on.

The high court, meanwhile, is looking into whether hundreds or even thousands of sentences should be overturned and the juveniles’ records expunged.

Among the offenders were teenagers who were locked up for months for stealing loose change from cars, writing a prank note and possessing drug paraphernalia. Many had never been in trouble before. Some were imprisoned even after probation officers recommended against it.

Many appeared without lawyers, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1967 ruling that children have a constitutional right to counsel.

If these judges don’t spend the rest of their lives in prison, then there’s something very wrong with our justice system.

Today, Israel’s government defied it’s own supreme court’s ruling, which yesterday ordered the government to allow the international media into Gaza to report on the effect of the air strikes on Palestinians.

At the time of typing this, Israel’s government is still deliberately defying it’s own supreme court’s binding legal order.

We wonder why?

Not.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)