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Criminal Justice System

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Criminal Justice System

• AP

 The American Civil Liberties Union wants reality TV star Richard Hatch freed from a jail where he has been held on charges of giving unauthorized interviews.   Hatch was taken into custody after giving TV interviews that the federal Bureau of Prisons said it had not approved. He was serving home confinement for failing to pay income taxes on his $1 million prize for winning the first season of the show.

During the interviews, Hatch said the trial judge discriminated against him because he was gay. The ACLU says Hatch has a right to criticize the government.

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Criminal Justice System

• Washington Post

The Supreme Court's unusual hearing Wednesday on the role corporations can play in influencing elections carries the potential not only for rewriting the nation's campaign finance laws but also for testing the willingness of the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to defy the decisions of Congress and to set aside its own precedents.

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Criminal Justice System

• Washington Post

The FBI and a grand jury in Albuquerque have been investigating whether CDR Financial Products, a Beverly Hills-based company, received a contract with the New Mexico Finance Authority because of pressure from Richardson or other state employees. CDR was paid $1.48 million for advising the authority on investment decisions in 2004.

The firm and its president, David Rubin, together gave $100,000 to Sí Se Puede and Moving America Forward, both PACs started by Richardson, shortly before winning the state contract.

 

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Criminal Justice System

• AP

A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld a $102 million judgment against the government for withholding evidence that could have cleared four men who spent decades in prison — including two who died there — for a murder they didn't commit.   "While we reject its finding that the government is liable for malicious prosecution, we uphold the court's alternate finding that the government is liable for intentional infliction of emotional distress," the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said.   The district court judge said FBI agents were trying to protect informants when they encouraged a witness to lie, then withheld evidence they knew could prove Limone and the three other men weren't involved in the Deegan killing.

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Criminal Justice System

• Conor McCarthy

If you haven't heard yet, it's "illegal" to download music online without "paying" for it. It's hard to believe, but being a fan isn't accepted as legal payment anymore. They call it "piracy," and the consequences for it can be very, very dire. Therefore, I've compiled a list of other crimes that I suggest you look into before you decide to download "Sweet Child of Mine" or "Poker Face."

First, let's look at the fines in the only two music piracy trials that have taken place to date. The first is the case of Jammie Thomas, a single mother of four from Minnesota. She downloaded 24 songs off of Kazaa. A jury of her peers decided that she owed the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) almost $2 million for her crimes, a ruling which the Obama Administration recently told a federal judge was constitutionally sound. The second is the case of Joel Tenenbaum, a young grad student at

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Criminal Justice System

• AP

For nearly four hours before she gave birth, Venita Pinckney had a chain wrapped around her swollen abdomen. Her ankles and hands were shackled.

The 37-year-old was in a maximum-security prison for violating parole. An officer told her the use of restraints on pregnant inmates was "procedure."

"I'm saying to myself, 'I feel like a pregnant animal,'" said Pinckney, who gave birth to a boy at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility last year.

 

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Criminal Justice System

• Mari Herreras

On Oct. 15, 2004, Mary Elizabeth Schipke entered the Oracle post office to buy a 47-cent stamped envelope. When she got frustrated with the clerk behind the counter, she told her: "God, I pray a bomb falls on your stupid, fucking head."

Almost a year later, Schipke was convicted of threatening a federal facility with weapons of mass destruction. Schipke describes what she told the clerk that day as an "imprecatory prayer"—basically, a simple curse—but that defense didn't keep her from serving a four-year prison sentence, with the last two years at Carswell, a women's federal medical prison outside of Fort Worth, Texas, that has been the subject of allegations about the questionable care of prisoners with physical and psychiatric conditions.

Although now free and on supervised release, Schipke, 51, continues to fight the federal government—this time, over a DNA sample forcibly removed from her in prison. After her release, priso

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Criminal Justice System

• MSNBC

Make sure you get plenty of sleep before going to court.

Clifton Williams didn't and he's been sentenced to six months in jail for yawning.

"I was flabbergasted because I didn't realize a judge could do that," Williams' father, Clifton Williams Sr., told the Chicago Tribune. "It seems to me like a yawn is an involuntary action."

 

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Criminal Justice System

Drugs, Police & the Law

Jurors have the ability to acquit a defendant if the jurors have no sympathy for the government’s position in a particular case.  Jurors may acquit even if they believe that the defendant is guilty of the crime charged.  The jury “nullifies” a law it thinks is immoral or wrongly applied to a particular defendant.

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Criminal Justice System

• Washington Post

The U.S. attorney's offices in Alexandria and Manhattan are embroiled in intense competition over the opportunity to prosecute Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and his co-conspirators, according to Justice Department and law enforcement sources.

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Criminal Justice System

• Washington Post

The maximum-security facility would be jointly run by the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, with each assuming responsibility for different sets of inmates. Officials said such a facility could also house prisoners held in indefinite detention and those cleared for release but who have no country willing to accept them. Those convicted in federal court or military commissions could serve their terms there.

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Criminal Justice System

• FFF / Jacob Hornberger

If the president had chosen to treat the Lackawanna Six as enemy combatants in the global war on terrorism, then he would have had the authority to send the army to attack their position, kill them, take the survivors into military custody, whisk them away to a military dungeon, and keep them incarcerated until the end of the war. That’s the way war works!

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Criminal Justice System

The Arizona Court of Appeals has thrown out the conviction of Harold Fish and chastised the judge who tried the case. Mr. Fish has been released from custody into his family's joyfully waiting arms, while he awaits final resolution of his case.   Fish was the retired school teacher who shot a man who charged at him swinging his arms and yelling threats in a forest outside of Payson. Fish was convicted of second degree murder in 2006, in a trial many thought was grossly unfair, and has spent the intervening three years in an Arizona state prison. He had no prior criminal record of any kind. The Appeals Court ruled, among other things, that Fish should have been allowed to introduce evidence of his homeless attacker's violent past and the vicious histories of the man's dogs which triggered the event.   The case was tried under an old abusive standard, quietly slipped into law without review in 1996 by state prosecutors. This forced a self-defense c

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Criminal Justice System

• NRA

 Imagine getting a great photograph of your hunting partner shooting at a pheasant, then finding out it’s illegal to possess that photo.

Imagine going to the video store to rent a copy of your favorite hunting show, only to find the shelves bare. When you ask the clerk where they are, he tells you that the films are now illegal and that you can’t buy or rent them anymore. 

This may sound like something out of 1984, but in United States v. Robert J. Stevens, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide this fall if photos like the one above, or video that shows hunters shooting at game, violate a 1999 federal law (18 USC  § 48) that bans depictions of animal cruelty.

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Criminal Justice System

• Citizens for Change

The service was fast, the judgments even hastier. Never did Jacqueline Mercado imagine that 4 rolls of film dropped off at an Eckerd Drugs one-hour photo lab near her home would turn her life inside out, threaten to send her to jail and prompt the state to take away her kids.

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Criminal Justice System

• www.walletpop.com

California filed a $222 million lawsuit against the owner of 22 Midas Muffler shops after uncover agents discovered a "massive" scheme in which consumers were charged for unneeded repairs, California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. announced.

"These Midas shops were running a massive bait-and-switch scam, in which customers were lured in with the promise of cheap brake specials and then charged hundreds more for unnecessary repairs," Brown said in a statement. "This investigation revealed a shady and deceptive operation that violated the trust of its customers."
During the four-year investigation, agents found shops owned by Maurice Irving Glad regularly advertised sub-$100 brake specials to lure customers into paying for hundreds of dollars of work that was not needed or, sometimes, not even done.

The lawsuit, filed was filed by Brown along with Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff and Fresno County Dis

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Criminal Justice System

• Boston Herald

U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin sentenced Bernard Madoff to the maximum 150 years in prison today for running the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, calling the crime: “extraordinarily evil.”

“Symbolism is important,” Chin told Madoff at a New York sentencing hearing.

Earlier, Madoff spoke for the first time about the scam, telling Chin: “I will live with the pain and torment (of hurting people) for the rest of my life.”

“I cannot offer an excuse for my behavior,” Madoff said. “How to do excuse deceiving investors? How do you excuse lying to your sons? How do you excuse lying to your two brothers? How do you excuse lying to a wife who stood by me for 50 years.

“There is no excuse for that,” Madoff told the court. “I made a terrible mistake. . . . I’ve left a legacy of shame for my children and grandchildren. I will live with the pain and torment the rest of my life.”

Then, the scammer turned to victims in the courtroom and

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Criminal Justice System

• Washington Post

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.

The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide and make it harder to prove discrimination when there is no evidence it was intentional.

"Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion for the court. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Ali

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Criminal Justice System

• Wendy McElroy

Collectively, the court systems in North America are institutionalized travesties that mete out politics rather than justice; many cases are more about career-enhancement for police, prosecutors and judges than they are about weighing evidence. Indeed, IMO, the court system constitutes the largest barrier to true justice in our society.

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Criminal Justice System

• NY Times

Convicts do not have a right under the Constitution to obtain DNA testing to try to prove their innocence after being found guilty, the Supreme Court ruled. In a 5-to-4 decision, the court found against William G. Osborne, a convicted rapist from Alaska.

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