Most prisoners would be delighted when they are told that they are going to an “open prison” and it appears that the Ford Open Prison in England has lived up to its name. Ninety inmates from the prison in West Sussex, including a murderer Robert Donovan, who reportedly escaped four years ago. Other escapes include inmates like Michael “Skull Cracker” Wheatley, who had 23 previous convictions for robbery, two for attempted robbery and 18 for related firearms offenses.
Category: Criminal law
We have previously discussed the move in some states to jail parents of truant children. It is part of the criminalization of America where pet peeves of politicians are ramped up to criminal offenses to make a point. Now, Eileen DiNino, 55, of Reading, Pennsylvania has died while serving one of these ridiculous sentences. The mother of seven died in jail after serving half of her 48-hour sentence.
Hamza Ali Ben Ali just may be the most obnoxious and least intelligent arrestee this week on our blog. He is set to be sentenced after he taunted police in a dangerous high-speed motorcycle race and then posted the video on YouTube. His lawyer would later insist that the police could not prove it was Ali. However, he was wearing an electronic bracelet with a GPS after a prior conviction and pending deportation proceedings. The police were able to match the GPS locations with the video to convict the Algerian citizen. UPDATE: The sentence is in. He received four years in prison for his stunt.
The United States has been widely criticized for sentences that continue to rise across the federal and state criminal codes. Politicians love to increase sentences to advance their public persona as “tough-on-crime” leaders. Now, Canada has granted a Florida mother asylum from the United States over what the immigration court viewed as an excessive sentence. Denise Harvey, 47, was convicted of five counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor in 2008. The minor was the 16-year-old friend of her son. She and her family fled to Canada to avoid 30 years in jail for the sexual relationship.
Below is my column that ran this week in Al Jazerra on the one-year anniversary of the Snowden scandal. It is hard to believe that it has only been one year given the number of investigations, promised reforms, and articles. I previously wrote a piece explaining why a pardon or commutation would not be inconsistent with prior cases, but that still seems unlikely. While I disagree with Snowden’s release of classified information that could harm the country, I do believe that his case is more nuanced than his critics have suggested. What is fascinating is that, after a year, we appear no closer to a consensus on what Snowden represents.
Continue reading “Edward Snowden: Whistleblower or Traitor?”
The Florida Supreme Court is considering a case that raises the limits of state law in a case with a facially excessive sentence. Ronald Williams, 29, fired five shots in the air to scare off what he said were four gay men flirting with him. He was conviction in 2010 of four counts of aggravated assault. However, the trial judge said that state law required that each count — effectively each bullet — be sentenced consecutively rather than concurrently. The result is an excessive 80 year sentence.
The video below is going viral on the Internet and purportedly shows Andrea Mears, 23, getting interestingly irate over a man flying a drone on a public beach. The beach is reportedly Hammonasset Beach in Madison, Connecticut. She is heard calling the police and objecting to his filming people. She is shown holding the man’s equipment and then the scene turns violent. During the fight, she is quoted as saying “Yeah! That’s what you get you little pervert.” However, it turns out that it would be Mears who would be arrested.
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw)-Weekend Contributor
It is an agonizing story, and a book has been written about it and a movie was also recently made about it. The story I am referring to is the story of Philomena Lee who at the age of 19 gave birth to a baby boy, out-of-wedlock, at the Sean Ross Abbey in County Tipperary, in Ireland. If you are unfamiliar with the story, Philomena became pregnant out-of-wedlock after being raised in a convent after her mother died at the age of 6. Her father kept 3 boys at home and put Philomena and her two sisters in the convent because he was unable to care of all of them.
After she left the convent at age 18, she became pregnant and was sent to the Sean Ross Abbey where her son was born and three years later, was adopted and moved to America. If you have seen the movie or read the book you know what happened to her son, who she never saw alive again. But the story of Philomena is not the main focus of this article. Philomena was one of thousands of Irish women who were forced by religious beliefs and societal pressures to hide their “sin”. However, what happened to some of the children who did not get adopted? Continue reading “How Many Children Died to Protect the Honor of the Catholic Church?”
By Mark Esposito, Weekend Guy
Carol Anne Bond was overjoyed to learn that her best friend, Myrlinda Haynes, had become pregnant. That joy was short-lived when she learned that the father was none other than her husband,Clifford Bond. The Philadelphia woman embarked on a course of revenge that would result in federal charges for deploying chemical weapons and a trip to the United States Supreme Court. Passed in 1998, the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act, enabled Congress to enforce the terms of an international treaty banning deployment of some chemical weapons. Taking advantage of that law, federal prosecutors charged Bond with obtaining two chemicals which together or separately could have killed her pregnant rival.
Continue reading “The Chemistry of Revenge: Bond v. U.S. – A Study In The Carpenters And Treaties”
There is a controversy surrounding another confrontation between a police officer and a citizen over filming officers in public. We have been following the continuing abuse of citizens who are detained or arrested for filming police in public. (For prior columns, click here and here). Despite consistent rulings upholding the right of citizens to film police in public, these abuses continue. The latest story has a weird twist. Critics are alleging that, after Michael Burns had a confrontation with Lakeland officer Javier Perez, the officer allegedly placed an anonymous call to claim that Burns was masturbating in his car.
We have previously discussed of former Broward Circuit Judge Ana Gardiner who had a secret intimate relations with a prosecutor trying a capital murder case in her court in 2007. She has now been disbarred despite her earlier resignation from the court. That is far harsher punishment than what was received by former assistant state attorney Howard Scheinberg, who was suspended for two years due to the relationship.
Magdalena Brojek, a mother of two from Enniskillen, Ireland, has been sentenced to three months in jail after admitting that she made up a gang rape by three Lithuanian men to cover up an affair with a man who she met online. It was only the first lie that she told before admitting the truth.
Continue reading “Irish Woman Jailed After Rape Allegations Found To Be Hoax”
Police in Manchester have decided not to press charges against Steven Peers who was arrested for impersonating an officer. The twist is that Peers was wearing a pig mask at the time and a toy bobby’s helmet. Peers is an electrical engineer who uses his comic character ‘Officer 666’ to highlight the “violence, corruption and bad behavior.”
There is a statistic that I ran across today that I found quite remarkable. Legal cannabis sales in the United States are expected to reach as high as $2.57 billion this year. That is only the sales for medical marijuana in the 21 states allowing its sale. At the same time, Colorado is reporting a continuing increase in legal marijuana sales with $19 million in recreational pot sale for March — up from $14 million from February. The figures reveal the greatest challenge for opponents. As revenues and experimentation increases, there will be greater pressure for legalization. Businesses are likely to take note of a 2.5 billion dollar industry that has taken hold even with the limitations of medical marijuana and less than half of the states participating. Both the money and the public response appear to be moving in favor of the legalization movement.
I have previously written about my concerns over the elimination of basic rights of due process at universities for students accused of sexual assault or harassment under pressure from the Obama Administration. That pressure continues to build this year with the Obama Administration investigating dozens of universities and threatening to take away federal funds if they do not remove certain protections under their rules of adjudication. Now a North Carolina judge has issued a rare order enjoining Duke University from expelling a male student, Lewis McLeod, who was accused of raping a female freshman. The concern over the lack of due process afforded the accused is of course a continuation of the criticism of Duke over its handling of the infamous Duke lacrosse team case. I have previously written about my view that Duke abandoned not just those students but any sense of due process or fairness in joining the mob accusing them of raping a stripper.