There is an interesting lawsuit in France by six survivors of the January attack by Islamic extremist Amedy Coulibaly at the Hyper Casher Jewish supermarket in Paris. The six people were mortified after learning that French media broadcasted their hiding location in a refrigerator while Coulibaly was looking for hostages and threatening to kill them all.
A new study has raised the disturbing question of whether we are substantially under-estiminating the annual death toll from air pollution, which currently stands at around 3.4 million a year. The reason is the failure to measure the lethality of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), emitted during fossil fuel burning.
Anthony Stokes became a cause célèbre in 2013 when he was turned down for a heart transplant because of his “history of non-compliance” from juvenile delinquency to low grades to other bad habits. A public campaign led to a reversal of the decision and he received the heart transplant recently. He is now dead after going on a crime spree, including the attempted shooting of an elderly woman and running over a pedestrian.
Detective Patrick Cherry, a member of the elite Joint Terrorism Task Force, will not be fired over his notorious scene with a New York cabbie who honked at him for attempting to park on the West Side Highway without signaling. The tirade was captured by a sympathetic passenger of the Uber driver and posted on YouTube. The video is below. The police has said that the use of the car’s lights and sirens — and the abusive yelling at the cabbie — is not a firing offense.
Continue reading “New York Detective Will Not Be Fired Over Tirade Captured on YouTube”
Indiana resident DelRea Good probably thought she was doing what police often recommend. When she saw the lights of Porter County Sheriff’s Department Patrolman William Marshall, she opted not to stop on a dark country road at night but drove to a lit area less than a mile away. For that decision, Marshall charged her with a felony of resisting arrest.
Three Tennessee middle school students have been suspended from Highland Oaks Middle School in Memphis in the latest example of schools policing social media, a trend that I have criticized in the past. In this case, the students posted a mug shot of teacher Tiffany Jackson after she was arrested for driving on a suspended license. This is a publicly available photo and it is obvious why students would send it to each other on Instagram. Yet, the school suspended the students anyway.
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There is an interesting case out of Coral Springs, Florida where a woman on probation allegedly videotaped her rape by former parole officer Zachary Thomas Bailey, 50. The brazen criminal conduct alleged in the case has led police to search for more victims. It may also raise collateral civil litigation over whether the state officials knew or should have known of the actions of this man.
Continue reading “Florida Parole Officer Charged After Parolee Films Alleged Rapes In Home”
There is a bizarre legal tiff between political operatives in Philadelphia over who came up with an attack strategy to save the career of Democratic Mayor John Street in 2003. Street was implicated in a “pay-to-play” scandal. While he was not charged, a slew of his associates and fundraisers were. Now, Philadelphia campaign consultant Frank Keel has sued Obama presidential campaign adviser David Axelrod over Axelrod’s claim that he came up with the attack strategy that saved Street. Keel insists that Axelrod is taking credit for the idea of attacking the George W. Bush Administration to spin the scandal. While that strikes me as a pretty obvious strategy, it appears a defining moment that both men want to claim. Keel also sued Penguin Random House.
This week, I appeared on the CNN special addressing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in Indiana. While I have been a long-standing supporter of same-sex marriage, I raised concerns over the dismissive treatment of religious concerns over the scope of anti-discrimination laws and how they may curtail free exercise of religion. I have previously written both columns and academic work on this collision between the two areas of law. In the program, I raised an example of the growing conflicts that we discussed earlier on this blog of a bakery that refused to make a cake deemed insulting to homosexuals while other bakers are objecting to symbols that they view as insulting to their religious views. This issue also came up with an advocate for LGBT rights on the show:
We have previously discussed the criticism of reporters, newspapers like the New York Times, and international groups that President Obama has run one of the most hostile Administrations in history to press freedom and public openness. Now that Democratic stalwart, the Washington Post, has joined in the chorus of critics, detailing the secretive, almost Nixonian culture of the Obama Administration in a new article.
There is an interesting case out of Pennsylvania where a former partner at a Pennsylvania law firm and former county bar association president has been revealed as never having attended law school. Kimberly Kitchen, 45, allegedly forged her law license as well as her bar examination results and her attendance at Duquesne University. Kitchen is now facing criminal charges, though some have objected that she is being let off lightly.
We recently discussed the savage murder of Avijit Roy, a Bangladesh-born U.S. citizen, in Bangladesh by Islamic extremists. Now, another blogger who wrote about Islamic extremism has been hacked to death. Washiqur Rahman Mishu, 27, was hacked and stabbed to by the Islamists in broad day light in Tejgaon Industrial area of Dhaka.
Continue reading “Second Blogger Murder In Broad Daylight By Islamic Extremists in Bangladesh”
We previously discussed the terrible case of Sureshbhai Patel who was seriously injured after former Madison (Alabama) police officer Eric Sloan Parker slammed him face first into the ground during a confrontation. Parker is now charged on the state level and facing a civil lawsuit. Now he has been charged with violating Patel’s civil rights. As we have discussed before, the question is whether such federal charges are necessary or warranted. Obviously, while based on the same conduct as the state charges, the charges are different. On the state level, it is assault while on the federal level it is the denial of federal rights. The Supreme Court has rejected double jeopardy attacks on such back-to-back charges, but these cases still raise the same concerns of multiplication of charges.
There is a bizarre criminal case in the making in Alabama where an aunt was having trouble speaking with her 19-year-old niece who had barred her from access to Facebook where she was connecting with strange men. The aunt proceeded to gain access by friending her as a fictional man. To her horror, her niece proceeded to try to get her (in her role as a man named Tre “Topdog” Ellis) to kill her and her family, including the family dog. The aunt went to the police and Marissa Williams is now in jail.