When the Obama Administration sent in a team to investigate civil rights violations in the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, some of us expressed doubt over the basis for such a charge as well as the timing of the federal move into the case. Indeed, I was highly skeptical of how the case was charged and prosecuted. Now the Washington Post is reporting that, after two years of investigation, Justice officials do not believe that they have sufficient evidence to bring federal charges.
Category: Society
Recently I spoke at Utah Valley University about the private regulation of speech, particularly in businesses curtailing not just workplace speech but speech outside of the workplace. We have discussed such incidents where people were fired for YouTube videos or drunken scenes. This “little brother” problem falls outside of the first amendment which addresses government regulation of speech. As a result, businesses have wide latitude in punishing employees for private conduct, though some states have laws protecting some forms of speech and employment such as voting and political activities. We have a new such case involving a woman in Ontario who shot and posted a video of her berating a neighbor for flying a Mexican flag. The video caused many to be understandably angry with Tressy Capps, who didn’t seem to see how obnoxious she appeared in her own posted video. However, it has not escaped her employer, which proceeded to fire her.
Continue reading “Activist Fired After She Posts Video Berating Family For Flying Mexican Flag”
Now this has the makings for an interesting torts lawsuit. Riders on what is billed as Europe’s longest roller coast in Ripon, England experienced an unexpected fearful element when their car hit a deer — covering the riders in deer blood. “The Ultimate” ride left many hoping for a bit less than the decapitation of a deer.
Continue reading “Roller Coaster Decapitates Deer and Covers Riders In Blood”
Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson has sentenced former Sorrento Police Chief Earl Theriot Jr. to probation with no jail time after he lied to the FBI about an alleged sexual assault of a woman under arrest. Theriot will have to pay just $2,500. No state charges have been brought thus far against Theriot for the alleged assault of the 42-year-old woman who was arrested for public intoxication.
Louis Farrakhan has long been dismissed by most people as a race-baiting crank. However, Farrakhan’s latest missive to his Nation of Islam followers is particularly incendiary. He suggests that ebola and other diseases were developed by the United States to “depopulate” the world of black people. What is dangerous is that thousands actually believe Farrakhan’s conspiracy theories. Notably, this conspiracy is very close to the one being spread among remote villages of Africa where health care workers are being killed because they are viewed as spreading the disease or working for those who created it.
This is Mikie Sawyer, 26, who is accused of being a demonstrably horrible person . . . and an accused felon. Harry Sander, 80, was at Applebee’s when he said Sawyer was speaking loudly with various obscenities. Sander reportedly asked Sawyer politely to stop the foul language in the family restaurant and Sander allegedly proceeded to cuss him out and punch the octogenarian in the face. Please promise me that this will make it to a jury. Hopefully, Sawyer will to take the restaurant’s new slogan literally: “See you tomorrow”.
Warning: this story contains foul language.
I just saw this on Reddit and had to share it. A company issued a report of the death of a man at O’Hare airport, but it turns out that the company was using the death as a hook for more business. The company notes “[t]here could be many reasons for the cause of this man’s death but based on the story one possible reason could be stress. The process of arriving to the airport and boarding the plane can be very stressful.” The solution? The company of course. ParkSleepFly, which appears to be working on a new slogan: “Use Us Or Die.”
While the outgoing Afghan President continues to denounce the United States and praise China and Iran, the Obama Administration has been pressuring Afghanis to allow it to keep roughly 10,000 troops in the country with the obvious commitment to spend billions and billions more on the war. The agreement has now bee signed. This is being heralded as a long-awaited success for the Administration – a curious achievement for those who want us out of the country and money spent on badly needed domestic programs of education, science, and infrastructure.
Over international protests, according to some new sites, Iran has already executed Rayhaneh Jabbari, 26. However, Fox News is reporting that the execution has been delayed. Jabbari claimed that a former Iranian Intelligence Ministry employee tried to rape her and that she stabbed in him the shoulder to escape. Despite the fact that a drink given to her was found to contain a date rape drug, the Iranian officials still wanted her hanged and they have now carried out their intent. As she was being led away to be hanged, a guard showed mercy and gave her his phone to type a final message to her mother. Her reported message below is poignant and tragic as a final goodbye to her mother. [Update: there are both reports that the execution has occurred and that the execution has been delayed. Amnesty is reporting that the execution is “imminent.”]
Continue reading ““Goodbye, Dear Mum”: Rayhaneh Jabbari Prepares For Execution (Updated)”
We have been discussing the alarming and baffling migration of Muslim men and women from the West to join the blood-soaked Islamic State or ISIS forces as they behead and murder their way through captured territories. While the vast majority of Muslims are disgusted by ISIS, the chilling reality is that there is a large portion of people who do not just support but long to behead and torture other people. Oklahoma is facing precisely that reality in two cases involving Muslim men who appear to identify with ISIS and relish the concept of beheading people in the name of Islam. It is a fatal attraction that may explain the thousands flocking from the West to the ranks of the Islamic State.
Stacey Dean Rambold, 55, is heading back to jail after his resentencing as a sex offender. After a light sentence of just 31 days in jail for the statutory rape of Cherice Moralez, 14, Rambold was given a sentence of 15 years in prison. Moralez committed suicide in 2010 before the case went to trial.
It appears that the Uber Taxi driver discussed today is not the only person who is reportedly using the “she asked for it” defense to sexual assault. The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office is blaming a former state prison clerk for her own rape in litigation against the prison. The 24-year-old typist was working at the state prison at Rockview in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania in 2013 when she was choked unconscious and raped for 27 minutes by Omar Best, an image convicted three times previously of sex-related crimes. Worse yet, Best had been transferred from a different state prison for assaulting a female assistant but the prison still allowed him unsupervised visits with female employees.
Continue reading “The Best Defense? Pennsylvania Blames Prison Employee For Her Own Rape By Inmate”
There is an interesting protest growing on the campus of Brigham Young University where students are opposing a rule imposed by the school. The subject of the protests is rather unique. No it is not a war protest or some other usual campus cause. It is facial hair. The university has banned beards, a curious rule to be sure for a school named after Brigham Young who would have been banned from campus due to his facial hair.
Continue reading “Forever Young: Student Protest BYU Ban on Beards”
Submitted By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
The LGBT community and Facebook are in the midst of a great controversy for Facebook requiring anonymous or aliased members of the Drag Queen community to provide their legal names for their user accounts. The community is concerned that the forced use of their “real” names could lead to discrimination, harassment and hate crimes and that their Drag names are an essential component of their personal identity. Facebook counters that its policy has been in place since the beginning and these policies are necessary to protect the integrity of its service and to bring accountability to its users by requiring actual names within the users’ profiles.
The controversy raised important questions about the role of privacy, anonymity, and free speech in an increasingly public world along with balancing the needs of different segments of our society, and individual choices.
Below is my column on the resignation of Eric Holder as United States Attorney General. For civil libertarians, Holder’s tenure as Attorney General under President Obama has been one of the most damaging periods in our history with a comprehensive attack on various constitutional rights and principles from free speech to the free press to international law. In recent polling by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, Holder was the second most unpopular government official after the positively radioactive Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
As someone who previously called for Holder’s firing after the investigation of various journalists under national security powers, I am hardly one who can offer congratulatory sentiments for such a record. However, much like President Obama, one has to wonder what could have been if Holder had chosen a more principled and less political approach to his office. Holder is resigning the same week that a federal judge ordered the release of “Fast and Furious” documents after the Justice Department was accused of a pattern of delay and obstruction. Holder was previously held in contempt by Congress for his withholding documents and conflicting accounts to an oversight committee looking into the scandal. Indeed, Holder was looking at an even more aggressive period with the possible loss of the Senate and increased GOP seats in the House.
Ironically, Holder came into office trying to distinguish himself from such disastrous predecessors as Alberto Gonzales but proved no less political or blindly loyal to his own president. Indeed, both men fought aggressively to expand the powers of the presidency and national security laws over countervailing individual rights and separation of powers principles. It will be civil liberties and not civil rights that will be the lasting, and troubling, legacy of Eric Holder. The column is below:
Continue reading “The Holder Years and The Perils Of Politics Over Principle In Government”