We have seen police in the United States charge people with battery or assault over air kisses, bubbles, hugs, pillow fights, errant french fries, and even flatulence, snowballs, and raspberries. Now a court in Hong Kong convicted a 30-year-old named Ng Lai-ying of assaulting a police officer by hitting him with her breast during a protest in March.
Category: Criminal law
Kevin Maynard, 59, wants to plead guilty and I can understand why. He is charged with a crime that few jurors would not recoil at. He is a worker at the Rhode Island Veteran’s Memorial Cemetery and is accused of stealing more than 150 granite gravestones to pave the floor of his garage and shed.
I am rather perplexed by a ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman to order not just four more years of community service for filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza but continuation of psychological counseling despite the countervailing findings of two experts in the case. Judge Berman was on solid ground in much of his opinion on the conditions of the prior sentencing order. While tough, the defense was trying to curtail key aspects of the order. However, the counseling component does concern me.
The Chinese government is carrying out another infamous sweep of human rights lawyers and activists with over 100 people arrested nationwide. The authoritarian communist regime has offered preposterous excuses for the arrests but the message is clear: human rights will not be tolerated in the worker’s paradise that is China. Indeed, with pollution and corruption choking the life out of the public, the communist rulers still view human rights lawyers as the priority danger for the country.
Continue reading “China Arrests Over 100 Lawyers and Activists In Latest Crackdown on Human Rights”
We have been discussing the national debate over hate crime laws and the standard for investigating particular cases but not others as in the recent case out of Cincinnati. A new controversy has erupted in Chicago where a woman, Susan Pedersen, says that she was attacked in her car with her children in a black neighborhood by a mob yelling that she did not belong in the neighborhood. She is white. However, two alleged attackers were charged only with misdemeanor criminal damage to property. While the case has received relatively little attention and more details would be helpful, critics have charged that a black driver surrounded by a white mob in such a circumstance would have resulted in both a state and federal hate crime investigation. There is also a question of how the police and prosecutors have charged this case generally as a property damage case even without the alleged racist motivation of the mob.
We have been discussing the intolerance shown by countries in the Middle East for free speech, particularly those Muslim countries applying the medieval Sharia law system. Abu Dhabi has again stepped forward to reaffirm its rejection of fundamental principles of free speech. Our Middle Eastern ally has jailed an Australian woman, Jodi Magi, 39, for merely posting a photo on Facebook of a car parked across two disabled parking spaces. She even blurred out the license plate (which most people would not do) in showing the rude conduct of some driver. The driver called police and Magi was arrested for on the truly moronic charge of “writing bad words on social media.” In bringing the charge, the prosecutors in Abu Dhabi confirmed that they are maintaining a faux legal system that recognizes neither basic rights nor basic logic.
Israeli police have reportedly made arrests in the burning of the Church of the Multiplication, in Tabgha on the Sea of Galilee, is where Jesus multiplied five loaves of bread and two fish to feed 5,000 of his followers. The church houses the block of limestone that is venerated as the stone on which the meal created by Jesus was laid. The reported arrest of Jewish religious students reminds everyone that such destructive extremism is not confined to Islam. While the world condemns ISIS for destroying ancient churches and sites, these Jewish students have actively sought to put their own religion in the same disgraceful company. The fire was set on June 18 and destroyed much of the interior of the monastery and the roof. The attackers left graffiti scrawled in red Hebrew lettering on a wall outside the Roman Catholic church read, “Idols will have their heads cut off.”
Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito (left) is moving forward with a controversial plan to decriminalize such offenses as urinating in public — part of an effort to rollback on criminal offenses used by police to stop and detain suspects under the “broken windows” approach of Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. Critics have charged that the murder rate and other crimes are already up under Mayor Bill de Blasio due to the tensions with police and new policies against stop and frisk maneuvers.
It is sometimes difficult to find counsel for people for various reasons: limited means, specialized cases etc. Guido Amsel has a particularly difficult circumstance: he is accused for trying to blow up the last lawyers that he dealt with. The accused bomber told a court in Winnipeg that he cannot secure a lawyer after he was arrested for setting off an explosive device went off in a Winnipeg law firm, severely injuring 38-year-old Maria Mitousis. Mitousis represented his ex-wife.
Continue reading “Alleged Law Office Bomber Tells Court He Is Having Trouble Finding A Lawyer”
The video below shows a driver committing one of the most dangerous and bone-headed stunts captured on tape: driving an Audi in reverse down Laurel Canyon Boulevard in Hollywood. The man did the dangerous maneuver with a woman in the passenger seat.
Continue reading “Police Hunt For Driver Caught on Video Driving Backwards For Miles In Hollywood”
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
Scores of Russian Soldiers are facing trial for desertion after reportedly failing to “volunteer” for military action in The Ukraine.
Gazeta.ru states in a Saturday article that the defendant troops claim to have been pressured to volunteer after first receiving bribes and other benefits from soldiers in uniform, but lacking identifying insignia, to join the action on Ukrainian territory.
A little discussed report by the United States Sentencing Commission has been released with an astonishing figure: Of the more than 2,200 people who received federal sentences for drug possession in fiscal year 2014, almost three-quarters of them were illegal immigrants. In addition, illegal immigrants reportedly made up more than one-third of all federal sentences for all crimes.
Judge Reese Holley of Dickson, Tennessee has agreed to stop conditioning representation of counsel on making donations to his favorite charities or performing public service. What is most astonishing is not that Holley did not know what any first-year law student could tell him but that he has only been reprimanded and will be allowed to continue to serve as a judge in Tennessee after doggedly maintaining such facially unconstitutional and abusive rule. He only received a public reprimand.
A couple years ago, we discussed how police in Iceland killed a man for the first time in history and compared that remarkable record to our own level of police shootings. This week we have another stark contrast out of Norway where police fired only two shots in 2014. They brandished firearms on just 42 occasions in 2014. Their highest rate was only 75 such incidents in 2005 and 2010.
Continue reading “Report: Norwegian Police Fired Just Two Shots in 2014”
Ronald A. Lynn, 52, reportedly has a curious defense in the making for his trial on child pornography charges: he really did not know any of the children personally.