We recently discussed the decision by the Los Angeles district attorney not to charge officers who shot up a vehicle of an innocent man because they were acting in “an atmosphere of fear and extreme anticipation.”Officers were on edge in the search for cop-killer Christopher Dorner (right). We now have a decision in the shooting that proceeded the McGee case where eight Los Angeles police officers fired over 100 times. Margie Carranza, then 47, was cut by flying glass while her then 71-year-old mother, Emma Hernandez was shot in the back. You guessed it. No one will be fired or even suspended.
Category: Society
We only recently passed the 19,000,000 mark last December but we just hit 20,000,000, according to WordPress. Congratulations everyone. We have had a terrific month with a sharp increase in traffic and subscribers on Twitter. These milestones are coming faster and they give us a chance to look at the spread of our regular readers and commentators.
The United States for the Fourth Circuit has ruled that North Carolina’s “Choose Life” license plates are unconstitutional since the state has rejected the alternative pro-choice plates from citizens like “Respect Choice.” It is an important and clearly well-founded decision by Judge Wynn in Aclu of N.C. v. Tata, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 2573. The case was an appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina and the earlier decision of Senior Judge James C. Fox, who ruled in favor of the Plaintiff.
Woody Allen continues to be a virtual fountain of interesting criminal and civil cases. Over the weekend, Allen responded to an op-ed in the New York Times in which his adopted daughter, Dylan, 28, who accused him again of sexual abuse. In Allen’s responsive op-ed, he again denies the allegations and blames an overzealous prosecutor. While unnamed, it could only former Litchfield State’s Attorney Frank Maco. Now Maco is suggesting that he may now sue Allen for defamation.
Continue reading “Former Prosecutor Announces That He May Sue Woody Allen Over Child Abuse Column”
Sometimes one has to acknowledge the possibility that there is a God . . . with a wicked sense of humor. In Iraq, a commander at a terrorist camp was teaching a class on suicide bombings with a belt packed with explosives. There is now an opening on the faculty after the instructor accidentally blew himself up with his suicidal students. It was a case of Publish or And Perish.
It is my honor to introduce the newest member of our blogging community: Wayne Joseph Owens. Wayne is the son of Claire Duggan and Dewayne Owens. Claire is not only a regular on our blog but the moving force behind our annual Three Little Pigs Murder Trial for elementary school children (Claire not only organizes the event but actually has played various roles at the trial). Wayne entered the world at 4:32 am on 2/2/14 (nice numerology). He weighed in at 6 lbs. 1oz.
There is an interesting torts case out of Pennsylvania where Donald H. Adams III has won a $5 million settlement in a products liability against Poly-San, a portable toilet manufacturer and installer. Adams was left a quadriplegic after two of his relatives decided to play a prank on him by rocking the port-a-potty with him inside only to watch it tip over. The case in the Sullivan County Court of Common Pleas, Adams v. Poly-San, raised interesting elements of superseding forces and negligence. Notably, the case also included his relatives as defendants with the company as well as the toilet installer, Lewis Crawford. (Portable toilets shown are not involved with the company or case)
In 2012, we discussed the embarrassingly transparent decision of the Democratic Party leadership to simply ignore the vote of the 22,000 delegates to refuse controversial changes to refer to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and add a reference to God. The move was viewed as necessary to secure Jewish votes and appeal to religious voters. The delegates however opposed on repeated voice votes — well short of the needed to two-thirds of the delegates. As shown in the video, in calling for a voice vote, the leadership was shocked and called for a new vote that came out the same way. The leadership just declared the vote as having passed by two-thirds acclamation. It was an embarrassing but telling moment for those who view the two parties as controlled by a small elite group of self-serving power brokers. Now, researchers at the University of Iowa in Iowa City have concluded that voice votes may not only politically but practically useless despite Robert’s Rules of Order.
Continue reading “Ayes and Nayes [and Neverminds]: Iowa Study Questions Value Of Voice Votes”
Submitted by Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
Recent nominations highlight the continuing spoils system of politicians returning favors for fundraising. A few appointments highlight this practice has not ended. Appointing the unqualified to the diplomatic service on the mere reward for political fundraising raises the question of importance our government places on foreign policy between the United States and other Nations. Some recent appointments highlight the fact that diplomatic credentials are not necessarily the most important criterion. Continue reading “Soap Opera Diplomacy: The U.S. Government Continues To Field Unqualified Ambassadors Who Were Once Large Election Fundraisers”
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw)-Weekend Contributor
On February 7th, 2014, the sad reports were compiled from the deadly day before. On Thursday, February 6th, at least 24 people were shot and 14 of them were killed. Two of the dead were small children. The shootings and killings were from cities and towns all across the country. A 17 month old girl was accidentally shot by her 3 year old brother in North Carolina.
A 13-year-old was accidentally shot and killed while playing with a shotgun in the state of Washington. In Seattle, Washington, a man was shot and killed by a fellow tenant. A man in his 30’s was shot several times and critically wounded in Owasso, Oklahoma. A 18 year man was shot and killed at his uncle’s home in South Carolina. These and others were all wounded or killed by gunfire on February 6th, 2014. Just one sad day out of many. Continue reading “All In a Day’s Work”
By Mark Esposito, Weekend Contributor
A 2009 report by the National Research Council (NRC) passed quietly into the night (except in legal and forensic circles) while barely garnering more than a ripple in the public’s psyche. It should have been a tidal wave given news last December that a 48-year-old New Jersey man, Gerard Henderson, who spent 19 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, was done in by faulty crime lab work. Henderson was convicted largely on “bite mark” evidence. Bite mark evidence is a process used to exam indentations and anomalies on a victim’s body and ostensibly made by human teeth which are then matched to a defendant’s dentures in an effort to prove that he/she was the perpetrator of the crime. Convicted in 1995, Henderson proved that state testing of the bite marks on the back of 19-year-old victim, Monica Reyes, was deeply flawed and conducted without sufficient safeguards to insure its reliability.
Independent forensic scientists working for Project Innocence could not reproduce findings by the state crime lab which is the gold standard for scientific verifiability. Henderson became one of the more than two dozen people wrongfully convicted of rape or murder since 2000 as a direct result of flawed bite mark evidence analysis all duly attested to as accurate by the local crime lab.
Continue reading “Think You Can Rely On Your Local Crime Lab For The Unvarnished Truth? Think Again”
by Charlton “Chuck” Stanley, Weekend Contributor
Last week, I reported on the deliberate misfiling, destruction, and throwing away files at the Records Center in St. Louis. Although an audit showed several employees were outside normal limits for error rates, only two were serious enough to warrant charges.
As I described in the earlier story last week, one of the men, 28-year-old Lonnie Halkmon, entered a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of destruction of government records. Halkmon was sentenced to forty hours of community service and two years probation. He could have gotten up to six months in jail on that charge.
Engram was responsible for the destruction of more than a thousand records. He destroyed some of them, threw 241 away in the woods near the Center, and took others home with him where he tossed them in the trash.
Continue reading “Second Worker at the Military Records Center in St. Louis Sentenced”
By Mark Esposito, Weekend Contributor
Teen idol and Canadian citizen Justin Bieber just entered the consciousness of serious adults but it wasn’t for his singing or making their teenage daughters swoon. No, Justin set the world ablaze due to a pot smoke-filled airline cabin and a felony arrest for egging a neighbor’s house. And lest you think the American Congress has better things to do than follow the shenanigans of today’s latest pop star, think again. At least one senator has called for his deportation and an on-line petition to jump-start that process has gathered 100,000 signatures.
By Mark Esposito, Weekend Contributor
http://www.miamisburg.org/stuff_noahs_ark.htm
In America, almost every child is taught the story of Noah who, in response to a message from on-high, crafted a wooded ark and gathered the planet’s fauna to save them from destruction for sins known and unknown. We don’t teach kids that most ancient civilizations recount the same story of the Great Flood that swamped the planet but with their own cultural take on the topic. Now a recent archeological find from Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) is creating a buzz that might change that. Found on a cuneiform tablet, the story of the Mesopotamian Noah differs only slightly from the Hebrew version of the legend. The Christian Bible tells the tale of Noah who gathers his family to build an ark shaped much like our modern-day boats, with one long keel and sides tapering at each end. The Bible details the blueprint straight from that chief engineer in the sky:
The recent trial of Amanda Knox has highlighted serious flaws in the Italian legal system ranging from shoddy investigatory standards to sentence aggravators based on defense arguments (implication other parties) to criminal penalties for defaming the police or prosecution. While we often discuss the flaws in our own system, the Knox litigation has been an embarrassment of legal process. However, the system does apparently police misconduct by judges in public statements, an area of recurring concerns in this country by justices and http://jonathanturley.org/2013/05/07/judge-in-casey-anthony-case-publicly-proclaims-his-belief-in-her-guilt-and-dishes-on-case/ alike. Florence judge Alessandro Nencini made comments after the trial on the defendants and defense strategy that has triggered not only an investigation but raised new defense arguments for reversal.
Continue reading “Judge In Amanda Knox Trial Under Investigation For Post-Verdict Comments”