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.
Category: Society
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”
Samira Salih al-Nuaimi died last week as she lived: a brave symbol of human rights in a region of religious extremist and oppression. Al-Nuaimi, a mother of three and lawyer, was taken from her home in Mosul by Islamic State fighters and taken to a Sharia court for trial for apostasy in her abandoning of true Islamic teachings. This true Islamic path for ISIS then included days of torture and the executive of Al-Nuaimi.
Continue reading “Islamic State Reportedly Tortures And Kills Human Rights Lawyer”
Christian Pastor Zafar Bhatti has reportedly been shot and killed by a Pakistani policeman, who also wounded another prisoner, 70-year-old Briton Muhammad Asghar. Both are in jail for blasphemy. Bhatti was a human rights activist fighting for the rights of Christians in the country. His death (and the convenient shooting of another alleged “blasphemer”) is viewed as highly suspicious given the past threats against his life from other prisoners and guards.
One month ago, United States District Court Judge Clarke Waddoups handed down his final ruling in favor of my clients in the Sister Wives case. Utah Attorney General, Sean Reyes has now filed his notice of appeal in the case — a move that will take this historic case to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver and potentially to the Supreme Court.
Jeffrey Daday, 36, a Mount Kisco parking cop, is no “nickel and dimer.” No he is a quarter man. On Tuesday, Daday admitted Tuesday that he stole more than $89,000 in quarters during a span of about five years. That is a total of about 365,000 quarters.
Continue reading “New York Parking Employer Admits To Stealing $89,000 in Quarters”
China has long proven to be one of the most destructive nations on Earth for the environment from air pollution that is diminishing the air quality of nations across the ocean to an insatiable market for endangered species products. After President Obama challenged China (the leading producer of greenhouse gases in the world) to match reductions of the West in carbon emission reductions, China refused and demanded massive payments, including Intellectual Property concessions, to convince it to make even greater cut in its pollution. Despite its ascendance into the top of world economics, China continues to suggest that it is another “developing country” and that the West should make the major economic sacrifices for environment. China did commit setting new limits domestically and will be working on joint projects with the United States. The United States has not been a leader in this area for some time but President Obama’s remarks were welcomed by the world environmental community. Conversely, India’s Environmental Minister summed up the obstructionist position of his country by asking “What cuts? That’s for more developed countries. The moral principle of historic responsibility cannot be washed away.” Well, given the rate of rising pollution in India, it will be hard to see anything, let alone cuts, if his country maintains this destructive policy.
There is a new scandal involving alleged police abuse and false statements. The latest case comes out of Red Bank, Tennessee, where critics allege that officers beat a suspect, 24-year-old Candido Medina-Resendiz, without cause and then lied about the incident in official reports. Warning: this story contains foul language from the reporting of the case.
Continue reading “Tennessee Police Accused Of Beating DUI Suspect And Then Lying About Incident”
Outgoing Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai denounced the United States in his farewell speech and insisted that, despite tens of thousands of wounded and dead American service personnel (and over a trillion dollars in aid), the United States has been a curse upon his country. Instead Karzai showered praise on Iran and China as great allies for Afghanistan. This is the man who the CIA openly gave regular suitcases of cash to and led a government where billions simply disappeared.
Continue reading “Karzai Denounces U.S. In Farewell Speech While Thanking China and Iran”
China has continued its crackdown on political speech with a truly disgraceful trial of Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti. The prominent scholar has written about the discontent in his region and lack of rights. The Chinese declared the writings as encouraging separatism. While that would not be a crime in any free nation, China handed him a life sentence after this supporters say that he was denied food and then denied copies of the evidence used against him.
The Obama Administration has quietly opened up the U.S. market to Chinese chicken – a move that alarms some public interest groups. Many consumers avoid China foods, including pet foods, due to a long series of contaminated and poisoned products coming from that country. Now the U.S. will allow four Chinese poultry plants to send processed chicken to American markets while hiding their origin. The problem is that by cooking the chicken, China can avoid new country-of-origins labels (COOL) at delis and other stores — resulting in consumers eating Chinese food products without knowing it.
There is an interesting backlash in California where civil rights leaders are condemning an African-American actress for alleging racism in her encounter with members of the Los Angeles Police Department. Actress Daniele Watts (who was in “Django Unchained”) accused the LAPD of detaining her and her boyfriend because they are a mixed race couple. Witnesses insisted that, in fact, they were having sex in a car in plain view on a street. An audio tape below has further undermined Watt’s claims of racism. She immediately claims that the only reason that they stopped them was race on the audiotape available here. In the midst of the tape, she freaks out in a conversation with her father but admits that they were “making out” in the course of the diatribe. In a true Hollywood moment, Watts is heard saying “I know my rights, I played a cop on TV and I know that when someone asks for ID you aren’t required to give it to them.”