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A letter to my CongressCritter on Civil ForfeitureA letter to my CongressCritter on Civil Forfeiture - by Gary Trieste A letter to my CongressCritter on Civil Forfeiture August 30, 2010 by Gary Trieste The Founding Fathers would be turning over in their graves if they knew what the various American governments are doing today in “civil” asset forfeiture. There is nothing civil about it, it is literally highway robbery pure and simple, yet with the power of the State behind it, somehow legitimizing it and calling it legal. Nottingham's Deputy's are legally empowered to steal your property, just because they want to. “Due process” is a laugh inducing punchline. How do they do this? By claiming your property did something illegal, independent of you, and therefore has no right to exist. It must be absorbed by the State. Insane on so many levels. Charging a property with an illegal act retrogrades our legal system back to the logic and worldview of the religious courts of mediaeval Europe, and to today's Islamic courts as well, where an animal or an inanimate thing is magically found responsible for itself. As if animals and things were sentient beings. Property is never apart from its owner, and is an extension always of its owner – to pretend otherwise is both mystical and insulting to the intelligence, and has no place in our system of jurisprudence. I am still shocked that this rendition of reality has been accepted by the American courts. I should not have to explain this to you, but property is never guilty of anything. It is the owner that may or may not be guilty, and that is what we have a criminal justice system for, and yes, even a due process system set up in place to accompany it. Since the courts have been complicit in this insanity, and have accepted magical thinking as perfectly logical, it is left to you as my legislative representative to do something about it. Stop the insanity, or we voters will elect someone who will. We are pissed off as it is, don't make us even angrier.
Don't these government nannies have any real problems to solve???? http://eastvalleytribune.com/arizona/politics/article_51e221c2-691b-11e4-8af5-43d2e6184b26.html Gilbert spa owner wants fish case brought to Supreme Court Posted: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 12:00 pm By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services A Gilbert spa owner wants the U.S. Supreme Court to rule she has a constitutional right to have fish nibble on her customers' toes and charge them for that. Attorney Clint Bolick of the Goldwater Institute said that's the only path now open to Cindy Vong, owner of La Vie salon, after the Arizona Supreme Court refused last week to consider her plea. That left in place a state Court of Appeal ruling which said the state Board of Cosmetology was legally entitled to stop her from using the fish. Bolick said the issue is larger than just Vong. He said its one thing for government to impose restrictions designed to protect public health and safety, but Bolick said the lower court ruling, if left undisturbed, allows state officials to ban an entire business practice. “The issue is really a business's right to exist,” he said. In fact, Bolick said the precedents that would be set here could determine the future of businesses like Uber which use technology to provide alternatives to taxi services. He said while states can impose necessary regulations, they cannot set up barriers that completely ban such services. Donna Aune, executive director of the Board of Cosmetology, said the larger issue at stake here is consumer protection. She said the fish, by their nature, foul the water in which the customers place their feet, leading to possible infection. And Aune said that, given the evidence the board has, an outright ban on the spa fish is the only option. Vong is a licensed cosmetologist and operates La Vie under board rules. In 2008 she set up Spa Fish in a separate part of the business. It uses small Garra Rufa fish — tiny carp with no teeth — to essentially nibble the dead skin off of customers' feet. That got the attention of the Board of Cosmetology, which in 2009 ordered her to stop. Sue Sansom, then the board's director, pointed out that Arizona law gives her agency the power to regulate skin exfoliation. “Any tool or equipment used in a pedicure must be stored in a dry storage and disinfected in a very specific way,” Sansom wrote to Vong. “It is impossible to disinfect the fish coming in contact with your clients' skin in the required manner,” Sansom continued. “You are jeopardizing your clients' health by performing this type of pedicure.” Vong agreed to halt the practice — and then got the Goldwater Institute to sue. In legal arguments to the Court of Appeals, Vong argued the board should have adopted some alternate form of regulation for the practice rather than banning it outright, but Judge Margaret Downie, writing for the unanimous appellate court, said the board was acting within its power to protect public health. Anyway, Downie wrote, it's not like the rules put Vong out of business, as she still can perform other procedures at the salon. Bolick said he believes the Goldwater Institute can convince the nation's high court that the outright ban is unconstitutional. He said that should require a greater justification than for simple regulation. He cited a study done by the health protection agency in the United Kingdom. “There has not been a single documented instance of harm from fish spas in the entire world,” Bolick said. “And that has been confirmed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.” He also said that UK study found the risk to be “miniscule” and can be further reduced by following certain health and safety protocols. Aune dismissed the UK study, saying that health oversight in Europe is not the same as it is here, with no real place for consumers who had developed infections to complain. She said Arizona and other states had a problem about a decade ago when contaminated water used for foot baths resulted in ulcers on the legs of customers. “It was the buildup in the pipes that weren't getting cleaned out each night and each week,” Aune said. She said that, questions of whether the fish themselves can transmit disease, the same problems can develop from having the fish in the water, and Aune said there's really no way to disinfect the water. “Not without killing the fish,” she said. “They dirty the water,” Aune continued. “The water could never stay clear.” Follow Howard Fischer on Twitter at @azcapmedia.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-police-prosecution-20141116-story.html#page=2 Police killing, beating of civilians raise issue of reasonable force By Tina Susman, Maria L. La Ganga contact the reporters A wooden cross on a narrow, tree-lined road marks the spot where Samantha Ramsey died a violent death. Passersby might think the marker, etched with the 19-year-old's name and a yellow smiley face, is a memorial to a car crash victim. They would be wrong. In April, Ramsey was killed when a sheriff's deputy fired four bullets through her car windshield as she left a party on the banks of the Ohio River. Ramsey, who did not have a gun, was dead before her mother got to the hospital. A grand jury took one day to review evidence — including the deputy's testimony that he feared for his life — before declaring the shooting justified. With that, Ramsey's relatives joined the ranks of families who demand answers about why lethal force was used, and who decides what is reasonable use of force. Those questions are in play in Missouri right now, as a grand jury weighs whether to indict police Officer Darren Wilson in the Aug. 9 shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old. The incident sparked months of unrest, which is why the city of Ferguson and the surrounding St. Louis area are braced for possible violence whichever way the jury decides. The hurdles for indicting or convicting a uniformed officer are high, for many reasons. "There's a great deal of deserved respect for the difficulties of being a police officer," said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine School of Law. "There's a desire to give great deference to police officers." As with Ferguson, critics sometimes see law enforcement agencies as reluctant to go after their own members. In Brown's case, the Ferguson Police Department was vilified by protesters after withholding Wilson's name from the public for a week, giving the officer and his family time to relocate while the case was investigated. Moreover, prosecutors depend on police officers as witnesses, and jurors give officers in peril the benefit of the doubt. Police use of force is guided by the 4th Amendment, which protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures. Another legal standard is that police should use no more force than is reasonably necessary. The big question is just what is reasonable. It lies at the heart of Ramsey's case, Michael Brown's, and a long list of similar clashes between civilians and police officers that ended with casualties and accusations. The 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police, caught on video, led to charges against four officers. After a jury trial in 1992, all were acquitted, a decision that sparked violent riots across the city and led to Chief Daryl F. Gates resigning and the LAPD reexamining its use of force. More recently, Kelly Thomas, a homeless man with schizophrenia, was beaten in 2011 by Fullerton police when he wouldn't follow their commands. Thomas died a few days later. That scene also was captured on video — with Thomas shouting, "Dad, help me!" — and led to charges against three officers. Two were acquitted; prosecutors dropped charges against the third. "We all look at it from our own perspective," Chemerinsky said. "Ultimately, either one perceives it as a police officer in a split second using deadly force to protect himself, or a police officer committing murder." Law professor Franklin E. Zimring, who directs the criminal justice research program at UC Berkeley's Earl Warren Legal Institute, said "enormous obstacles" hinder criminal cases involving law enforcement officers. One impediment is the burden of proof, which requires prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an officer acted improperly. That burden "has special force when you have police officers" on trial, Zimring said. Another is the question of what police officers feared would have happened had they not acted, he said. And then there is the he-said-she-said nature of most cases, with publicly trusted authorities up against sometimes marginal victims. "It has to be a really horrendous outlier before you can expect the criminal process to succeed," Zimring said. Zimring has analyzed nearly four decades of FBI statistics on police-involved killings — including cases in which officers also were victims. His research, which has yet to be published, shows an average of 400 civilians, both armed and unarmed, are killed by police in this country each year. It also shows that excessive police violence is usually part of a larger pattern in a law enforcement agency, he said. Police critics in and around Ferguson argue that their region is evidence of such patterned behavior. Rufus J. Tate Jr., former president of the Mound City Bar Assn., a group of African American lawyers, can tick off a list of Missouri cases involving police charged with serious crimes but cleared of charges. "A badge is an American halo," Tate said; it keeps jurors from believing that the men and women assigned to protect them can commit crimes. In the Ferguson case, Officer Wilson has not spoken publicly about what happened, and no direct video of the shooting has surfaced. According to a preliminary police account, the confrontation began when Wilson spotted Brown and a friend and asked them to get out of the roadway. "The deceased became belligerent," the report stated. Wilson opened his door into Brown and the two began to struggle, according to the report. During the confrontation, Wilson's weapon discharged. Brown then ran, and Wilson pursued him. The report said that Wilson fired several times after Brown turned around and ran toward him. Autopsies indicated Brown was shot at least six times. The friend who was with Brown, Dorian Johnson, said Wilson at one point grabbed Brown by the neck and said, 'I'm gonna shoot you.'" As Brown ran away, Wilson shot him in the back, according to Johnson and another witness. Johnson said Brown then stopped, turned with his hands up, and said, "I don't have a gun, stop shooting!" Helmet cameras, dashboard cameras and social media have put a spotlight on cases that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. The seconds before Samantha Ramsey's shooting were captured by a video camera on the car of Boone County Sheriff's Deputy Tyler Brockman, who was responding to another call around 2 a.m. when he came upon a rollicking outdoor party. Brockman told a grand jury he decided to check on drivers leaving the bash because he suspected some were drunk. Ramsey's white sedan can be seen attempting to pull onto a dark, two-lane road from a gravel patch. Brockman, who is outside his car, walks toward Ramsey in an attempt to stop her. She keeps moving as the deputy moves alongside her car. Both disappear from view. The shooting was not caught on video, but the aftermath was. Smoke billowed from a ditch where Ramsey's car came to rest. A female passenger staggered into view and dropped to the ground, burying her face in her hands. A young man who was also in the car walked across the road, then fell to his knees, clutched his head in his hands, and rocked back and forth. A statement released that day by the sheriff's department said Brockman fired in self-defense after Ramsey accelerated, endangering the deputy. Some witnesses, including the female passenger, disputed the official account in interviews with local media. They questioned how Brockman, 29, ended up on the car hood and asked why he could not have found a nonlethal way to stop Ramsey. When the grand jury reviewed the case on Nov. 6, Brockman testified that he had no choice but to jump onto the hood to avoid being run down. In a gripping account, Brockman said he held onto the hood and stared through the windshield at Ramsey. He said he felt cold air on his back as the engine revved. "And at that point I go, 'I'm going to die, she is about to kill me, I, I'm going to die,'" Brockman said, according to transcripts released after the grand jury decision. "And, and I went, 'no, I'm not going to die here, I'm not going to die like this, I'm not going to die on River Road.' "And I reached down and I grabbed my pistol and I put it up to the window and I fired," said Brockman, who suffered a broken foot in the melee. A toxicology report showed Ramsey had marijuana in her system and a blood-alcohol level of 0.120%. In Kentucky, drivers younger than 21 are considered to be under the influence at .02% blood-alcohol level. Brandi Stewart is convinced her daughter was trying to pull to the side of the road, not to flee or to hit Brockman, and that the deputy overreacted. She said nothing excuses the pumping of four bullets into her daughter at close range. "She was my only daughter. She was my baby," said Stewart, who learned of the shooting when the phone rang around 3:30 a.m. on April 26. The last place she saw her daughter alive was in the small white house they shared in Covington, Ky., a working-class city near downtown Cincinnati. Ramsey was in the bathroom putting on mascara, getting ready to go out for the evening. Ramsey, a cheerleader in high school, was known for her habit of bringing home strays — both pets and people, her mother said. "I raised more friends of hers than I care to count," said Stewart, a nurse who raised Ramsey and her two older brothers in Covington. In an interview Thursday, one week after the grand jury decided not to indict Brockman, Stewart showed little sign of anger at the deputy. In fact, Stewart said she was praying for Brockman and his family. Her anger is reserved for a system that allows law enforcement agencies to investigate their own, she said. "Do I think there's a good ol' boys club? Yes, I do," she said. "Do I think they cover up for their own? Yes, I do." Five days after Ramsey died, Boone County Sheriff Michael Helmig asked Kentucky State Police to investigate the shooting amid allegations it should be reviewed by an outside party. The state police refused in part because too much time had passed since the incident, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, quoting department spokesman Sgt. Michael Webb. "When there's a few days of time that has elapsed, where the scene has been cleaned up, it's been compromised, and witnesses aren't around ... it would make it basically impossible for us to investigate thoroughly and effectively," Webb told the newspaper. Ramsey was buried May 2 beside her father, Robert Ramsey, who died of a heart attack last year. On a recent afternoon, the hilltop grave was decorated with an American flag and cheery signs of autumn: a bunch of orange flowers and two smiling scarecrows. Brockman returned to work Nov. 10. tina.susman@latimes.com maria.laganga@latimes.com
Cell phone privacy rights: When can police search? Look motherf*cker, I got a gun and a badge and that means you ain't got no Constitutional rights. If you don't let me search your phone I am going to search it anyhow and then commit perjury and say you gave me consent to search it if I find anything. Sadly that's how the system works. The bottom line is you should ALWAYS refuse to consent to let the police do anything. The police are your enemy and want to put you in prison. Don't help these criminals with guns and badges. http://www.mercurynews.com/my-town/ci_26945365/cell-phone-privacy-rights-when-can-police-search Cell phone privacy rights: When can police search? By Matthias Gafni Bay Area News Group Posted: 11/15/2014 02:02:43 PM PST You've been stopped and a police officer asks to search your cellphone. What should you do? [Say NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, .......... NO] This question gained relevance last month after Dublin California Highway Patrol Officer Sean Harrington was caught stealing and sharing explicit cellphone photos of female suspects, charges he subsequently confessed to. Carrying small computers with immense amounts of personal data in your pocket can leave a person open not only to predators, but sometimes to cops, experts say. So with more than 90 percent of Americans owning cellphones, just what privacy rights do you have? "Cellphone users have stronger privacy protections on their phone, both technically and legally, than ever before," said Hanni Fakhoury, Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney. "But people need to know their rights, and police need to respect them." As Fakhoury noted, the U.S. Supreme Court just this summer provided some clarity on the issue of cellphone privacy. Here's a look at the rules. Can police search your cellphone? Not without a warrant. In Riley vs. California, the high court found that searching a smartphone's data does not fall under law enforcement's right to search a suspect, such as frisking them or checking their wallet. The unanimous ruling clearly seems to apply to any searches of digital devices such as tablets, watches or other wearable computer products. The justices acknowledged the decision would hamper law enforcement's efforts to combat crime. However, Chief Justice John Roberts, in his ruling, rejected the argument that a cellphone was akin to a suspect's wallet. That "is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon," he wrote. "The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought," Roberts concluded. "Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cellphone seized (during) an arrest is accordingly simple -- get a warrant." So, you've been arrested -- what happens to your phone? A phone -- along with other personal effects like wallets, keys and purses -- is usually taken, cataloged and kept safe until the suspect is released. Officers can also confiscate a phone they intend to search and keep it until they obtain a warrant. "Generally, if you're handcuffed in the back of a squad car you will not have (access to) your cellphone," said Jim Dudley, a criminal justice lecturer at San Francisco State and retired deputy chief of patrol for San Francisco police. "You don't want somebody in custody to have a phone. They can contact a confederate or destroy evidence." When can law enforcement search your phone? There are three ways police can search a phone: if you consent, if your parole or probation conditions allow a search or if they get a warrant. (Harrington had none of these.) "If they obtain the suspect's consent, then the police can absolutely search," said Fakhoury. The Supreme Court ruling provides a caveat for law enforcement: It can search a phone, even without a warrant, if there's an imminent threat that evidence will be destroyed or another person is in danger, Fakhoury said. If you have not been arrested, the controls are even tighter. This issue came up in the Dublin CHP investigation, when Contra Costa District Attorney's Office inspector Darryl Holcombe confiscated the phone of Officer Robert Hazelwood, who has not been arrested, during a meeting. Investigators believe Hazelwood received explicit photos from Harrington, according to court records. Harrington has been charged with two counts of felony computer theft. During his interview, Hazelwood verbally agreed to a search of his phone, but then declined to sign the consent form. Holcombe confiscated the phone and sought a warrant. "Based on the evidence I had reviewed, I believed Hazelwood's phone could contain evidence of a felony," Holcombe wrote in a search warrant request. "Furthermore, I believed that since Hazelwood was aware, or would soon become aware of the nature of the investigation, any evidence related to the felonies ... on the phone might be lost should it not immediately be seized and preserved pending the issuance of a court order." After the warrant was obtained, Holcombe searched the phone and found explicit photos sent to Hazelwood from Harrington, along with salacious text messages between the men about the female suspects' images. For Fakhoury, the fact that Hazelwood was not under arrest is a gray area. "I'd argue there's no consent," he said. "As an officer, you'd think he would have known better than to consent or say and do anything without a lawyer. And if the cops can't keep this sort of thing straight, its doubtful your more typical arrestee would." Should you ever reveal your password? And if you do, does that mean police can search your phone? If a suspect asks an officer to obtain an emergency contact from his or her phone and provides the password, the officer only has the right to search the contact list for that number, experts said. Harrington violated that law, according to court records, when a DUI suspect gave him her password so she could get an emergency phone number to call. While he had access, Harrington went through her device and forwarded six racy photos to his own phone. In addition, suspects do not need to reveal passwords to officers, privacy attorneys said. "You're allowed to say, 'No,'" said Chris Conley, ACLU's policy attorney based in San Francisco. "However, even giving them your password is not consent (to search the phone)." Even if law enforcement gets a warrant to search a phone, attorneys have argued that suspects do not need to reveal their passwords because it would violate their Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. "That's still being worked out in court," Conley said. The password defense does not extend to phones unlocked with fingerprints. Courts have found fingerprints are not protected by the Fifth Amendment, Fakhoury said, and a person would be required to unlock a phone to comply with a search warrant. Do cellphone warrants need to be specific or does a court order allow investigators to search the entire device? In the Hazelwood warrant request, the Contra Costa DA inspector was specific, asking the judge permission to review photographs of two female arrestees, texts in which CHP officers discuss the photos and "contextual data." It included a nine-page affidavit in support of the search. There are no situations under the law that allow officers to share illegally obtained photos or other information from cellphones, experts said. "Even had they had a warrant to look at the pics, they are not allowed to forward to their friends," Conley said. "There's no circumstance or legal justification for sharing with other officers because they found racy pictures." Contact Matthias Gafni at 925-952-5026. Follow him at Twitter.com/mgafni.
http://www.mercurynews.com/internal-affairs/ci_26946755/internal-affairs-sjpd-brass-got-free-tickets-niner Internal Affairs: SJPD brass got free tickets to Niner preseason games By the Mercury News Posted: 11/15/2014 06:05:00 PM PST Controversy continues over the San Jose Police Department's domestic violence investigation of 49ers defensive lineman Ray McDonald after prosecutors last week declined to charge him. Both Chief Larry Esquivel and Assistant Chief Eddie Garcia have been rapped for their acceptance of tickets to 49ers preseason games as part of the team's annual law enforcement appreciation day. Esquivel and Garcia both attended a 2013 game and reported it on their annual financial disclosure statements listing gifts of significant value they received as public officials. Garcia attended the same event this year, this time with Deputy Chief Jeff Marozick. The chiefs have since repaid the team for the tickets. That came after controversy over an off-duty sergeant working security for the team. The sergeant was at McDonald's house when officers arrived on the domestic violence call, which raised questions about the department's ties to the Niners. The department has since indefinitely barred officers from working for the team. But the city manager's office said in a memo last week that city employees are expressly prohibited from accepting sports tickets and any other gifts valued over $50. "The tickets were a mistake," spokesman David Vossbrink said. "We're making sure our staff are aware of the fact." Two anonymous complaints also were sent to the city's independent police auditor, LaDoris Cordell, about the chiefs' acceptance of the tickets. Cordell argued that accepting tickets to team games constitutes a violation of the department's duty manual -- and that reimbursement does not negate that. Garcia had earlier contended that SJPD didn't get special treatment from the team, noting that other Bay Area cops, prosecutors and judges also attended the event. The Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office, however, said none of its staff involved in the McDonald case attended the law enforcement appreciation games. San Jose city employee unions think they have found a new foothold in their ongoing legal battle to overturn voter-approved pension reform measures. The latest turn of the Measure B wheel came last week when an administrative law judge at the state Public Employment Relations Board ruled that the City Council needed to rescind its vote that placed the pension reform measure on the June 2012 ballot. But the judge lacked the power to overturn the actual election results, so the measure stands. Sound like a pointless exercise? But it may not be The city expects to appeal the ruling to the full Public Employment Relations Board, a process that could take years. If the ruling is upheld, the unions could then go to Superior Court and ask a civil judge to throw out the entire Measure B, including the voter results. That's something the labor groups are already trying to do through a separate lawsuit currently in the appeals court. City Attorney Rick Doyle acknowledged the risk of the second case but said that ultimately, with a few more legal rounds to go -- and the ongoing possibility of an out-of-court settlement -- that the latest ruling was "not the end of the world." "I think it's tough to have a court throw that out," Doyle said. "Voters spoke and we're trying to make it work." But Christopher Platten, the union's attorney, said simply that the ruling "kills Measure B." The administrative law judge, Eric Cu, concluded in making his ruling that the city did not negotiate in good faith before putting the measure on the ballot. That's an argument the employee groups have been making all along, and one the city has repeatedly denied. Liccardo's mayoral election: steppingstone to nowhere? Well, there goes Sam Liccardo's career in politics. By edging out Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese for the job of San Jose mayor, the 44-year-old San Jose city councilman has won the seat where careers go to die. With one notable exception, no San Jose mayor has gone on to hold higher office -- or any other office, for that matter -- in more than 40 years. And in terms of political history, that's pretty much forever. Of course, that exception is a big one: Norman Mineta served as San Jose mayor from 1971 to 1975 and went on spend the next 20 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and stints as the U.S. secretary of commerce and U.S. secretary of transportation. (Sherman Otis Houghton, who sat in the mayor's seat in 1855 and 1856 -- several years after statehood -- also served in Congress, from 1871-75.) But if you look around Mineta's portrait on the wall in City Hall, it's a political graveyard. Ron James and the late Janet Gray Hayes never served in office after being mayor. Tom McEnery ran for Congress in 1994 but lost a close race to Zoe Lofgren, who had the good sense never to be San Jose's mayor. There were high hopes for Susan Hammer, who made a speech at the 1996 Democratic Convention. But she never again ran for office. Similarly, political watchers saw a potential future in Sacramento for Ron Gonzales, who previously had been a county supervisor, but he left office under a cloud and with an indictment that was later dismissed. Today, he's the CEO of the Hispanic Foundation of Silicon Valley and seems to have no regrets about leaving the political arena. And after eight bruising years battling budgets and public-employee unions, Chuck Reed has often said that he looks forward to his next job as a retired mayor. If Liccardo had any hopes for public employment beyond his early 50s, losing might have been his best shot. Political watchdog fines Councilman Campos San Jose Councilman Xavier Campos will be up to $5,500 lighter when he leaves office at the end of the year, as the state's political watchdogs have ruled the embattled politician broke the rules when he ran for office in 2010. The ruling by the California Fair Political Practices Commission comes after it had been investigating Campos over the past year in response to concerns raised over his controversial campaign for the District 5 council seat. In that race, campaign mail against opponent Magdalena Carrasco incorrectly and illegally portrayed her as a communist, and Campos won the June primary by a razor-thin margin. Campos friend and former employer George Shirakawa Jr., the disgraced former county supervisor, has been charged with helping to send out the mailers. Voters kicked Campos out of office, giving Carrasco a resounding win in a rematch this June. Now the FPPC has determined Campos and then-campaign treasurer Linda Delgado -- the mother of one of Shirakawa's children -- improperly documented campaign contributions in violation of three FPPC codes. Campos and Delgado are responsible for the $5,550 total proposed fine, which the commission is expected to approve on Nov. 20, and it's unclear how or if they'll split it up. Campos didn't respond to IA's request for comment. Internal Affairs is an offbeat look at local and state politics. This week's items were written by Robert Salonga, Mike Rosenberg, Sal Pizarro and Paul Rogers. Send tips to internalaffairs@mercurynews.com, or call 408-920-5782.
The people would have never approved the Constitution if they knew it was going to mean we would have jackbooted police thugs spying on us 24/7 Last you only need undercover cops to arrest people for victimless crimes. Victimless crimes that should be legal. Victimless crimes like "drug war crimes", which at the Federal level are unconstitutional per the 10th Amendment. (Could somebody please tell that to the Supreme Court) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/us/more-federal-agencies-are-using-undercover-operations.html?hpw&rref=us&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover Operations By ERIC LICHTBLAU and WILLIAM M. ARKINNOV. 15, 2014 WASHINGTON — The federal government has significantly expanded undercover operations in recent years, with officers from at least 40 agencies posing as business people, welfare recipients, political protesters and even doctors or ministers to ferret out wrongdoing, records and interviews show. At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover officers dress as students at large demonstrations outside the courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity, according to officials familiar with the practice. At the Internal Revenue Service, dozens of undercover agents chase suspected tax evaders worldwide, by posing as tax preparers, accountants drug dealers or yacht buyers and more, court records show. At the Agriculture Department, more than 100 undercover agents pose as food stamp recipients at thousands of neighborhood stores to spot suspicious vendors and fraud, officials said. Undercover work, inherently invasive and sometimes dangerous, was once largely the domain of the F.B.I. and a few other law enforcement agencies at the federal level. But outside public view, changes in policies and tactics over the last decade have resulted in undercover teams run by agencies in virtually every corner of the federal government, according to officials, former agents and documents. Continue reading the main story Plainclothes Forces in the United States Agencies across the federal government have undercover teams to monitor threats, fraud, theft and other illegal activity. Supreme Court Police Monitor activists and detect possible terrorist attacks or criminal activity during protests near the Supreme Court building. National Aeronautics and Space Administration Focus on counterintelligence of NASA employees and contractors, as well as theft or illicit trafficking of technology. Small Business Administration Identify organizations involved in committing fraud and abuse of federal lending and contracting programs. Department of Energy Protect the movement of nuclear materials within the United States. Government Accountability Office Verify vulnerability assessments of government agencies, airports, borders, railroads and other related sectors. Internal Revenue Service Investigate money laundering, identity theft and also bank, mail and tax fraud. Department of Agriculture Root out illegal food stamp transactions by individuals and businesses or any financial fraud involving U.S.D.A. programs. Some agency officials say such operations give them a powerful new tool to gather evidence in ways that standard law enforcement methods do not offer, leading to more prosecutions. But the broadened scope of undercover work, which can target specific individuals or categories of possible suspects, also raises concerns about civil liberties abuses and entrapment of unwitting targets. It has also resulted in hidden problems, with money gone missing, investigations compromised and agents sometimes left largely on their own for months. “Done right, undercover work can be a very effective law enforcement method, but it carries serious risks and should only be undertaken with proper training, supervision and oversight,” said Michael German, a former F.B.I. undercover agent who is a fellow at New York University’s law school. “Ultimately it is government deceitfulness and participation in criminal activity, which is only justifiable when it is used to resolve the most serious crimes.” Some of the expanded undercover operations have resulted from heightened concern about domestic terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But many operations are not linked to terrorism. Instead, they reflect a more aggressive approach to growing criminal activities like identity theft, online solicitation and human trafficking, or a push from Congress to crack down on more traditional crimes. At convenience stores, for example, undercover agents, sometimes using actual minors as decoys, look for illegal alcohol and cigarette sales, records show. At the Education Department, undercover agents of the Office of Inspector General infiltrate federally funded education programs looking for financial fraud. Medicare investigators sometimes pose as patients to gather evidence against health care providers. Officers at the Small Business Administration, NASA and the Smithsonian do undercover work as well, records show. Part of the appeal of undercover operations, some officials say, is that they can be an efficient way to make a case. “We’re getting the information directly from the bad guys — what more could you want?” said Thomas Hunker, a former police chief in Bal Harbour, Fla., whose department worked with federal customs and drug agents on hundreds of undercover money-laundering investigations in recent years. Mr. Hunker said sending federal and local agents undercover to meet with suspected money launderers “is a more direct approach than getting a tip and going out and doing all the legwork and going into a court mode.” “We don’t have to go back and interview witnesses and do search warrants and surveillance and all that,” he added. But the undercover work also led federal auditors to criticize his department for loose record-keeping and financial lapses, and Mr. Hunker was fired last year amid concerns about the operations. ‘A Critical Tool’ Most undercover investigations never become public, but when they do, they can prove controversial. This month, James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., was forced to defend the bureau’s tactics after it was disclosed that an agent had posed as an Associated Press reporter in 2007 in trying to identify the source of bomb threats at a Lacey, Wash., high school. Responding to criticism from news media advocates, Mr. Comey wrote in a letter to The New York Times that “every undercover operation involves ‘deception,’ which has long been a critical tool in fighting crime.” Just weeks before, the Drug Enforcement Administration stoked controversy after disclosures that an undercover agent had created a fake Facebook page from the photos of a young woman in Watertown, N.Y. — without her knowledge — to lure drug suspects. And in what became a major political scandal for the Obama administration, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed guns to slip into Mexico in 2011 in an operation known as Fast and Furious that involved undercover operations. In response to that episode, the Justice Department issued new guidelines to prosecutors last year designed to tighten oversight of undercover operations and other “sensitive” investigative techniques, officials said. Before prosecutors approve such tactics, the previously undisclosed guidelines require that they consider whether an operation identifies a “clearly defined” objective, whether it is truly necessary, whether it targets “significant criminal actors or entities,” and other factors, the officials said. Peter Carr, a department spokesman, said that undercover operations are necessary in investigating crime but that agents and prosecutors must follow safeguards. “We encourage these operations even though they may involve some degree of risk,” he said. Those guidelines apply only to the law enforcement agencies overseen by the Justice Department. Within the Treasury Department, undercover agents at the I.R.S., for example, appear to have far more latitude than do those at many other agencies. I.R.S. rules say that, with prior approval, “an undercover employee or cooperating private individual may pose as an attorney, physician, clergyman or member of the news media.” An I.R.S. spokesman acknowledged that undercover investigators are allowed to pose in such roles with approval from senior officials. But the agency said in a statement that senior officials “are not aware of any investigations where special agents have ever posed as attorneys, physicians, members of the clergy or members of the press specifically to gain information from a privileged relationship.” The agency declined to say whether I.R.S. undercover agents have posed in these roles in an effort to get information that was not considered “privileged,” meaning the type of confidential information someone shares with a lawyer or doctor. José Marrero, a former I.R.S. supervisor in Miami, said he knew of situations in which tax investigators needed to assume the identity of doctors to gain the trust of a medical professional and develop evidence that is tightly held. “It’s very rare that you do that, but it does happen,” Mr. Marrero, who has a consulting firm in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and continues to work with federal agents on undercover investigations, said in an interview. “These are very sensitive jobs, and they’re scrutinized more closely than others.” Oversight, though, can be minimal. A special committee meant to oversee undercover investigations at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, for instance, did not meet in nearly seven years, according to the Justice Department’s inspector general. That inquiry found that more than $127 million worth of cigarettes purchased by the bureau disappeared in a series of undercover investigations that were aimed at tracing the black-market smuggling of cigarettes. In one investigation, the bureau paid an undercover informant from the tobacco industry nearly $5 million in “business expenses” for his help in the case. (The agency gained new authority in 2004 allowing it to take money seized in undercover investigations and “churn” it back into future operations, a source of millions in revenue.) Financial oversight was found lacking in the I.R.S.’s undercover operations as well. Detailed reviews of the money spent in some of its undercover operations took as long as four and a half years to complete, according to a 2012 review by the Treasury Department’s inspector general. Wires Crossed Across the federal government, undercover work has become common enough that undercover agents sometimes find themselves investigating a supposed criminal who turns out to be someone from a different agency, law enforcement officials said. In a few situations, agents have even drawn their weapons on each other before realizing that both worked for the federal government. “There are all sorts of stories about undercover operations gone bad,” Jeff Silk, a longtime undercover agent and supervisor at the Drug Enforcement Administration, said in an interview. “People are always tripping and falling over each other’s cases.” Mr. Silk, who retired this year, cited a case that he supervised in which the D.E.A. was wiretapping suspects in a drug ring in Atlanta, only to discover that undercover agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were trying to infiltrate the same ring. The F.B.I. and the New York Police Department were involved in the case as well. To avoid such problems, officials said, they have tightened “deconfliction” policies, which are designed to alert agencies about one another’s undercover operations. But problems have persisted, the officials said. It is impossible to tell how effective the government’s operations are or evaluate whether the benefits outweigh the costs, since little information about them is publicly disclosed. Most federal agencies declined to discuss the number of undercover agents they employed or the types of investigations they handled. The numbers are considered confidential and are not listed in public budget documents, and even Justice Department officials say they are uncertain how many agents work undercover. But current and former law enforcement officials said the number of federal agents doing such work appeared to total well into the thousands, with many agencies beefing up their ranks in recent years, or starting new undercover units. An intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the agency alone spent $100 million annually on its undercover operations. With large numbers of undercover agents at the F.B.I. and elsewhere, the costs could reach hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In a sampling of such workers, an analysis of publicly available résumés showed that since 2001 more than 1,100 current or former federal employees across 40 agencies listed undercover work inside the United States as part of their duties. More than half of all the work they described is in pursuit of the illicit drug trade. Money laundering, gangs and organized crime investigations make up the second-largest group of operations. Significant growth in undercover work involves online activity, with agents taking to the Internet, posing as teenage girls to catch predators or intercepting emails and other messages, the documents noted. The F.B.I., Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon all have training programs for online undercover operations. Defendants who are prosecuted in undercover investigations often raise a defense of “entrapment,” asserting that agents essentially lured them into a criminal act, whether it is buying drugs from an undercover agent or providing fraudulent government services. But the entrapment defense rarely succeeds in court. In terrorism cases — the area in which the F.B.I. has used undercover stings most aggressively — prosecutors have a perfect record in defeating claims of entrapment. “I challenge you to find one of those cases in which the defendant has been acquitted asserting that defense,” Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, said at an appearance this year. The Times analysis showed that the military and its investigative agencies have almost as many undercover agents working inside the United States as does the F.B.I. While most of them are involved in internal policing of service members and defense contractors, a growing number are focused, in part, on the general public as part of joint federal task forces that combine military, intelligence and law enforcement specialists. At the Supreme Court, all of the court’s more than 150 police officers are trained in undercover tactics, according to a federal law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity because it involved internal security measures. At large protests over issues like abortion, small teams of undercover officers mill about — usually behind the crowd — to look for potential disturbances. The agents, often youthful looking, will typically “dress down” and wear backpacks to blend inconspicuously into the crowd, the official said. At one recent protest, an undercover agent — rather than a uniformed officer — went into the center of a crowd of protesters to check out a report of a suspicious bag before determining there was no threat, the official said. The use of undercover officers is seen as a more effective way of monitoring large crowds. A Supreme Court spokesman, citing a policy of not discussing security practices, declined to talk about the use of undercover officers. Mr. German, the former F.B.I. undercover agent, said he was troubled to learn that the Supreme Court routinely used undercover officers to pose as demonstrators and monitor large protests. “There is a danger to democracy,” he said, “in having police infiltrate protests when there isn’t a reasonable basis to suspect criminality.” Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.
D.C. police plan for future seizure proceeds years in advance in city budget documents We are not armed robbers, we have guns and badges!!!! Yea, tell that to they people they robbed!!!! And of course this is another one of the reasons the Founders gave us the Second Amendment. The government criminals in this article are 10,000 times worse then King George. http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/dc-police-plan-for-future-seizure-proceeds-years-in-advance-in-city-budget-documents/2014/11/15/7025edd2-6b76-11e4-b053-65cea7903f2e_story.html?hpid=z4 D.C. police plan for future seizure proceeds years in advance in city budget documents This is the sixth installment in the “Stop and Seize” investigative series. By Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Steven Rich November 15 at 5:40 PM D.C. police have made plans for millions of dollars in anticipated proceeds from future civil seizures of cash and property, even though federal guidelines say “agencies may not commit” to such spending in advance, documents show. The city’s proposed budget and financial plan for fiscal 2015 includes about $2.7 million for the District police department’s “special purpose fund” through 2018. The fund covers payments for informants and rewards. The financial details emerged Wednesday, when the D.C. Council’s judiciary committee unanimously voted to forward a bill that would overhaul asset forfeiture laws in the nation’s capital. The bill would raise the threshold of proof required for a forfeiture, bolster the rights of individuals whose property has been taken and require that proceeds from seizures under federal law go into the city general fund, rather than directly to the police department. The full council is set to vote on the bill Tuesday. Council member Tommy Wells, chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, said police should not have a financial incentive to make seizures. He said the bill addresses problems that are common across the country. “All across the nation, law enforcement agencies are directly benefiting from forfeiture,” said Wells (D-Ward 6), who is leading the effort to reform asset forfeiture in the District. “In those places, forfeiture proceeds go directly to the law enforcement entity, creating at best the appearance of a conflict of interest, and at worst, an unchecked incentive for slush funds.” In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, an aggressive brand of policing called “highway interdiction,” which involves authorities seizing money and property during traffic stops, has grown in popularity. Thousands of people not charged with crimes are left fighting legal battles to regain their money. (Gabe Silverman/The Washington Post) Civil forfeiture laws permit local and state police to take cash, cars, homes and other property from people suspected of involvement in drug trafficking or other wrongdoing without proving a crime has occurred. Police can make seizures under state or federal laws. Since 2009, D.C. officers have made more than 12,000 seizures under city and federal laws, according to records and data obtained from the city by The Washington Post through the District’s open records law. Half of the more than $5.5 million in cash seizures were for $141 or less, with more than a thousand for less than $20. D.C. police have seized more than 1,000 cars, some for minor offenses allegedly committed by the children or friends of the vehicle owners, documents show. When D.C. police seize cash or property under District law, the proceeds go into the city’s general fund. But proceeds of seizures made under federal law go directly to the police department through the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, which allows local departments to join with federal agencies in forfeitures and keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds. District financial records show that D.C. police receive about $670,000 annually from the Equitable Sharing Program. About $30,000 in proceeds from forfeitures under District law go into the general fund. Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr declined to discuss civil asset forfeiture practices in the District. He said police agencies can participate in the program only if they comply with its guidelines. Among other things, the guidelines say that agencies “should not ‘spend it before you get it’ or budget anticipated receipts. Receiving agencies may not commit to the spending of sharing monies for a certain purpose in advance.” In a statement, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said the department is not building its budget with the proceeds of civil seizures but is using them “to augment the reward pool of funding and confidential fund programs (witness protection, rewards for information in homicides).” Lanier said the department’s focus is not on generating revenue but on “removing the profit gained from facilitating a crime. By forfeiting those assets, the expansion of criminal activities can also be reduced.” The council’s reform effort began last year after the Public Defender Service for the District filed a class action lawsuit against the city, alleging that police violated the constitutional rights of residents in the process of seizing their cars. Among other things, the Public Defender Service focused on a city requirement that vehicle owners post bonds of up to $2,500 before they were permitted to challenge seizures. In August 2013, all parties agreed to put the lawsuit on hold as the District worked to modify its forfeiture laws. Wells said the proposed bill would create a fairer system under District law by scaling back the bond requirement, creating a clearer appeals process and imposing a requirement for notifying property owners within 10 business days of a seizure. But the bill has been opposed by law enforcement officials, partly for the same reason other reform efforts across the country have been stymied: money. The officials also said it would create an administrative burden. In addition to tightening oversight and the rules for civil seizures, the District proposal would cut back on revenue. “Enacting this Bill would almost certainly decrease the number of successful forfeiture cases, which would lead to a loss of significant forfeiture revenues,” D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan warned in a statement to the council last year. Nathan, who has resigned effective Monday, did not respond to a request for an interview. But a knowledgeable official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are ongoing said that Nathan was addressing an earlier version of the bill. The official said the attorney general’s office thinks that the current version is an improvement but declined to provide details. The bill would require that the federal proceeds from seized property go into the city’s general fund rather than to the department. Because the Equitable Sharing Program requires that seizure proceeds go to the department, D.C. police would effectively be blocked from participating in the program and using the federal law. That would force city police to make all seizures under District law, which already requires that seizure proceeds go into the general fund. Wells said the general fund provision in the bill cannot take effect until fiscal 2019, because the city has already budgeted the anticipated proceeds to that point. “That is personally offensive to me,” said Wells, whose council term ends in January. “I want to make it fair. There is a financial incentive not to do that.” In a fiscal impact statement Wednesday, the city’s chief financial officer, Jeffrey S. DeWitt, said that the bill “could reduce federal resources received by the District by approximately $670,000” each year if the general fund provision takes effect. Wells and the Public Defender Service contend that the department’s aggressive use of seizure laws — originally intended to fight drug kingpins and deprive them of ill-gotten riches — has had a disproportionate impact on the poor and working class. One case cited by the Public Defender Service involves Sharlene Powell, who had worked for three decades as a Postal Service employee. She loaned her car to her son, who was stopped and arrested on a misdemeanor drug offense. Prosecutors dropped the charges, but District police kept the car. To get her car back, Powell had to pay a $1,772 “penal sum” bond to challenge the seizure, the Public Defender Service said in a statement last year to the judiciary committee. In response to questions about seizures, the police department directed The Post to a general order signed by Lanier called “Handling and Accounting for Seized and Forfeited Property.” The document, which spelled out procedures police should follow, was released two days before a council hearing in July 2013 about civil asset forfeiture. “We know this has been getting a lot of attention nationally, and we agree that there have been troubling practices around the country,” Lanier said in her statement. “These programs must have strong oversight and supervision.” Darpana Sheth, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm that advocates for seizure reform, said the District bill could have a wide impact. “Short of eliminating civil forfeiture entirely, this bill is a good model to strengthen protections for property owners and remove the profit incentives that have been fueling the District’s aggressive seizing of people’s property,” she said. More from the “Stop and Seize” series: Part 1: Aggressive police take hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes Part 2: Pollice intelligence targets cash Part 3: They fought the law. Who won? Part 4: Asset seizures fuel police spending Part 5: Highway seizure in Iowa fuels debate about asset-forfeiture laws
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/more-veterans-press-va-to-recognize-medical-marijuana-as-treatment-option/2014/11/15/51666986-6a7b-11e4-b053-65cea7903f2e_story.html?hpid=z4 More veterans press VA to recognize medical marijuana as treatment option Amy Rising, an Air Force veteran, smokes medical marijuana. She says the drug helps her deal with severe anxiety after four years at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, where she coordinated bombings and other missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Kevin Cook/For The Washington Post) By Emily Wax-Thibodeaux November 15 at 6:09 PM Every morning, former Air Force senior airman Amy Rising makes breakfast for her second-grader, drives him to school and returns home to prepare what she calls her medicine. She suffers from severe anxiety after four years working in the frenetic global command center at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, coordinating bombings and other missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rising says she has found a treatment that helps her cope. But her local Veterans Affairs hospital does not provide it — because her medicine is a joint. At a time when the legalized use of marijuana is gaining greater acceptance across the country, Rising is among a growing number of veterans who are coming out of the “cannabis closet” and pressing the government to recognize pot as a legitimate treatment for the wounds of war. They say it is effective for addressing various physical and psychological conditions related to military service — from chronic back pain and neuropathic issues to panic attacks and insomnia — and often preferable to widely prescribed opioid painkillers and other drugs. Researchers in the United States and several other countries have found evidence that cannabis can help treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and pain, although studies — for instance, looking into the best strains and proper dosages — remain in the early stages. Veterans are lobbying for more states to legalize cannabis for medical use — 23 states and the District allow this — but the primary target is the federal government and, in particular, the Department of Veterans Affairs. The federal government classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, the same as heroin and LSD, deeming that it has no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. That means that VA, which runs the largest network of hospitals and health clinics in the country, cannot prescribe pot as a treatment, even for veterans who live in a state where medical marijuana is legal. VA says that its physicians and chronic-pain specialists “are prohibited from recommending and prescribing medical marijuana for PTSD or other pain-related issues.” Medical staff are also prohibited from completing paperwork required to enroll in state marijuana programs because they are “federal employees who must comply with federal law,” said Gina Jackson, a VA spokeswoman. The swelling chorus of veterans who want to take advantage of marijuana but can’t reflects the growing disconnect between more tolerant state policies and the federal government’s unwillingness to budge. Advocates such as Rising say it is urgent that the federal government recognizes marijuana as a treatment because there are so many veterans of recent wars. Although Rising did not serve in Afghanistan or Iraq, she said the pressure of her work was intense. “What was really hard about working in command was never being able to see the damage you did on the ground,” she said. “You start to think about all the orphans and widows you created, and that you do hit civilians.” Without marijuana to treat what she says is PTSD, Rising said she feels “like the Incredible Hulk and that danger is around every corner and that my nerves could explode.” After dropping off her son at school on a recent morning, she prepared a pair of blunts. She took some pot out of a jar, dumped the guts of two Dutch Masters cigars and re-rolled them with the marijuana. Then she slipped her blue Air Force jacket over her blue and white flower-print dress and went into her suburban back yard to smoke, putting her long, blond curls behind her ears. Medical marijuana is legal for treating some conditions where Rising lives. She declined to identify her home state except to say it is in the Mid-Atlantic. “It’s not about getting stoned. It’s about getting help,” she said. “The VA doesn’t have any problem giving us addictive pharmaceutical drugs by the bagful.” Winning acceptance for medical marijuana, she said, involves convincing the government that there is more to the movement than “Cheech and Chong, a stoned vet burning one down to Bob Marley tunes.” If veterans report their use of marijuana to VA, they could face criminal charges if they live in a state where it is illegal. And though few have indeed been charged, the mere possibility has spawned a culture of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” said Michael Krawitz, a former Air Force staff sergeant and the director of Veterans for Medical Cannabis Access. VA medical staff have warned that this culture is making for a dangerous situation, especially as more states legalize medical marijuana, because doctors do not know about all of the medications their patients are using. Patients are not routinely given drug tests, but those who are prescribed large amounts of opiates and risk overdosing can be asked to undergo screenings, which can turn up marijuana use. In 2011, VA issued a directive that said patients who were participating in state marijuana programs for pain cannot lose their VA benefits. VA added that it is up to individual patients to craft their “treatment plans” in consultation with their doctors. Some patients say their VA doctors are making them choose between their prescription drugs and marijuana. “Doctors and administrators wrongly assume that the use of marijuana along with opiates is unsafe,” Krawitz said. A study published last month in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine reported that “people already taking opioids for pain may supplement with medical marijuana and be able to lower their painkiller dose, thus lowering their risk of overdose.” The study, written by Marcus A. Bachhuber, a researcher at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and several colleagues, found that “medical cannabis laws are associated with significantly lower state-level opioid overdose mortality rates.” Scott Murphy, a retired Army specialist who is the head of Veterans for Safe Access and Compassionate Care, has been compiling a petition asking that marijuana no longer be classified as a Schedule I drug. “Veterans in states without medical marijuana laws feel they need to lie to their physicians for the justifiable fear of losing their earned benefits,” Murphy writes in the petition. To counter widespread perceptions about pot users, Murphy makes sure to wear a suit when he lobbies on Capitol Hill and in his home state of Massachusetts, where medical marijuana is legal for some uses. “I won’t wear a tie-dyed shirt with a marijuana leaf,” he said. Murphy served in Iraq for more than a year, working in field artillery and training Iraqi police officers. He said the physical stress of lugging heavy military equipment contributed to degenerative arthritis and bone pain in his leg, hip and wrist, and he began taking morphine, muscle relaxers and Oxycontin. “It never took away the pain,” he said. “I was at the point where I just wanted my leg to be taken off.” Then, two years ago, he started using a liquid form of cannabis that he puts under his tongue. “I was able to go eight hours without taking my medication,” he said. Several VA doctors who specialize in pain management and PTSD said in interviews that they are eager for more research on the medical benefits of marijuana. The doctors, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they do not have permission from VA to discuss marijuana with the news media, said they feel frustrated because prescription drugs are not helping patients who are suffering. “Anecdotally we know it works, and more and more studies are saying this,” said one VA doctor, a PTSD expert who leads a large East Coast VA pain center. “But we aren’t allowed to study it.” Researchers at New York University’s Langone Medical Center are developing the first generation of cannabis-related medications targeted for PTSD, according to Alexander Neumeister, a professor of psychology and radiology who is supervising three drug trials. He said research has found that people with PTSD have lower levels of cannabinoid receptors in the brain. These receptors, called CB1, are activated when a person uses marijuana. “We are throwing the wrong pills at the problem and keep doing it,” Neumeister said. “It’s upsetting. It’s heart-breaking and it’s just wrong.” He warned that marijuana for PTSD and pain is “not ready for prime time yet,” because there must be more research into the proper doses and the most effective strains. Some veterans are not waiting for the studies to be finished. Mark DiPasquale, a 39-year-old retired Marine staff sergeant who served in Iraq from 2005 to 2007, said marijuana was his “exit drug.” To treat back and bone injuries as well as PTSD, he said he had gone on 22 medications, including opioids and anti-anxiety medication. “I realized none of these were working and I was about to be a father. I was so jacked up on every pharmaceutical,” he said. DiPasquale looked for alternatives. He decided to use marijuana, inhaling it with a vaporizer, to stop drinking alcohol and to adopt a largely vegan diet (he occasionally eats fish). The regimen has worked, he said. But he added that he has to spend a lot of money and time buying marijuana “from people I trust or seeing if a random cousin has some.” DiPasquale, who lives in New York — where voters have approved medical marijuana — wishes VA would consider dispensing pot. “It’s not like, ‘Let’s smoke a joint and feel better,’ ” he said. “We want to do it the right way.” Emily Wax-Thibodeaux is a National staff writer who covers veterans, veterans' affairs and the culture of government. She's an award-winning former foreign correspondent who covered Africa and India for nearly a decade. She also covered immigration, crime and education for the Metro staff.
Lethal mix: Lawyers’ mistakes, unforgiving law Years ago I read an article where a Texas prosecutor didn't have a problem with an innocent man being executed by the Great State of Texas. The prosecutor said that the guy, even thought he was innocent, got a fair trial, and so he deserved to be executed by Texas. When the people that run the criminal injustice system think like that you have to realized the criminal justice system is going to screw over lots of innocent people. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/11/15/last-chance-pleas-from-death-row-often-tossed-over-late-filings/?hpid=z1 Lethal mix: Lawyers’ mistakes, unforgiving law Investigation finds that 1996 law created procedural hurdles, causing many inmates to lose access to final appeal Written by Ken Armstrong, The Marshall Project Published on November 15, 2014 In 1992, Kenneth Rouse, an African American man with an IQ between 70 and 80 — “borderline intellectual functioning,” in the clinical parlance — prepared to stand trial in North Carolina on charges that he had robbed, murdered and attempted to rape a white, 63-year-old store clerk. Rouse’s lawyers questioned the prospective jurors to try to expose any racial or other bias they might have against the defendant. But several years after the all-white jury convicted Rouse and recommended a death sentence, his defense team made a stunning discovery. One of the jurors, Joseph S. Baynard, admitted that his mother had been robbed, murdered and possibly raped years before. Baynard had not disclosed this history, he said, so that he could sit in judgment of Rouse, whom he called “one step above a moron.” Baynard, who used a racial slur when referring to African Americans, added that he thought black men raped white women for bragging rights. As claims of juror bias go, the evidence could hardly have been stronger. But Rouse’s final appeal was never heard. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Rouse’s lawyers had just one year after his initial state appeal to petition for a last-resort hearing in federal court. They missed the deadline by a single day. A federal appeals judge wrote that it was “unconscionable” for her court to reject Rouse’s case because of such a mistake by his court-appointed lawyers. But dozens of lawyers have made the same mistake, and most of their clients, like Rouse, have not been forgiven by the courts for missing the deadline. An investigation by The Marshall Project shows that since President Bill Clinton signed the one-year statute of limitations into law — enacting a tough-on-crime provision that emerged in the Republicans’ Contract with America — the deadline has been missed at least 80 times in capital cases. Sixteen of those inmates have since been executed — the most recent was on Thursday, when Chadwick Banks was put to death in Florida. By missing the filing deadline, those inmates have usually lost access to habeas corpus, arguably the most critical safeguard in the United States’ system of capital punishment. “The Great Writ,” as it is often called (in Latin it means “you have the body”), habeas corpus allows prisoners to argue in federal court that the conviction or sentence they received in a state court violates federal law. For example, of the 12 condemned prisoners who have left death row in Texas after being exonerated since 1987, five of them were spared in federal habeas corpus proceedings. In California, 49 of the 81 inmates who had completed their federal habeas appeals by earlier this year have had their death sentences vacated. The prisoners who missed their habeas deadlines have sometimes forfeited powerful claims. Some of them challenged the evidence of their guilt, and others the fairness of their sentences. One Mississippi inmate was found guilty partly on the basis of a forensic hair analysis that the FBI now admits was flawed. A prisoner in Florida was convicted with a type of ballistics evidence that has long since been discredited. Just last month, Mark Christeson, a Missouri inmate whose lawyers missed the habeas deadline in 2005, received a stay of execution from the Supreme Court just hours before he was set to die by lethal injection. In a court brief filed on Christeson’s behalf, 15 former state and federal judges emphasized that he had not even met the appellate attorneys handling his federal case until after the filing deadline had passed. “Cases, including this one, are falling through the cracks of the system,” they wrote. “And when the stakes are this high, such failures unacceptably threaten the very legitimacy of the judicial process.” The 80 death-penalty cases reviewed here were largely culled from databases of federal court opinions, but they also include other, unpublished rulings that were known to capital defense attorneys and advocates interviewed around the country. They represent just a fraction of the habeas appeals foreclosed by the 1996 law, which also applies to non-capital cases. Like Rouse, who is still awaiting execution in North Carolina, two other inmates missed the habeas deadline by a single day, and for the most banal reasons. One attorney made the mistake of using regular mail instead of an overnight courier; another relied on a court’s after-hours filing system, which turned out to be broken. But many of the other habeas petitions from condemned inmates were late by hundreds of days, or even thousands. (On average, those lawyers missed the deadline by 853 days, or more than two years and four months.) In one case, the attorney was more than 11 years late. Some of the lawyers’ mistakes can be traced to their misunderstandings of federal habeas law and the notoriously complex procedures that have grown up around it. Just as often, though, the errors have exposed the lack of care and resources that have long plagued the patchwork system by which indigent death-row prisoners are provided with legal help. The right of condemned inmates to habeas review “should not depend upon whether their court-appointed counsel is competent enough to comply with [the] statute of limitations,” one federal appeals judge, Beverly B. Martin, wrote in an opinion earlier this year. She added that allowing some inmates into the court system while turning others away because of how their lawyers missed filing deadlines was making the federal appeals process “simply arbitrary,” she added. Meanwhile, the problem that the habeas deadline was intended to solve — the ever-lengthening delays in the carrying out of death sentences — has grown steadily. In 1996, the average time from sentencing to execution was 10 years and five months, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 2012, the latest year for which the same figure is available, the delay had stretched to 15 years and 10 months. Passing habeas reform The 1996 law that set the one-year statute of limitations on habeas appeals was one of the signal compromises that Clinton forged on domestic policy in the aftermath of the sweeping Republican victory in the 1994 midterm elections. Some Republicans had advocated for habeas corpus reform for years, mainly as a way to streamline and limit death-row appeals. The idea struggled to gain traction, but it became a small element of the Contract with America championed by then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who was on his way to becoming House speaker. After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the proposal found new life as part of antiterrorism legislation embraced by both parties. That pairing created political tension, both between the major parties and within them. Some Democrats supported the antiterrorism measures but viewed the habeas restrictions as the unnecessary circumscribing of a fundamental right. Some Republicans backed the habeas restrictions but feared the possible government excesses that might come from expanding surveillance authorities and other law enforcement powers also included in the measure. “Why is it necessary to link the death penalty and the constitutional guarantees of habeas corpus to a terrorism bill?” Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-Mass.) asked during the debate in the House. “This is just a political deal. It is a political deal to get votes on the right.” By the mid-1990s, American support for the death penalty had climbed to 80 percent, its highest point since Gallup began polling on the issue in the 1930s. Public patience with the appeals process also was waning as the typical time between sentencing and execution stretched to more than a decade. “Somehow, somewhere, we are going to end the charade of endless habeas proceedings,” the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), declared in the debate over the antiterrorism law. “And this bill is going to do it.” But important changes in the legal landscape already were raising concerns among some civil libertarians. One opponent of the habeas proposal, Rep. Melvin Watt, a North Carolina Democrat, cited the advent of DNA evidence and the fact that some prisoners were being exonerated up to 15 years after their trials. Congress, he said, was proposing “to compromise the most basic thing — innocence — for political expediency.” Four former U.S. attorneys general who were opposed to the legislation — two Democrats and two Republicans — wrote to Clinton to urge that any filing deadlines on habeas petitions take effect “only upon the appointment of competent counsel.” As supporters of the bill lined up four competing attorneys general behind their position, Hyde announced that he had a “celebrity to trump all of those attorneys general” on the matter. “His name,” Hyde said, “is President Clinton.” Clinton, who had initially opposed linking habeas reform to the antiterrorism measures, changed his mind — as he had on key facets of welfare reform, criminal sentencing and other domestic policies. As he began campaigning for reelection, he described the delays in death-penalty litigation as “ridiculous.” The streamlining of appeals should begin with the Oklahoma City bombing cases, he announced. The ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden of Delaware, introduced amendments to soften several of the habeas restrictions in the bill. But he left the one-year filing deadline in place, and he supported the bill when it came to the floor. At one point, he proposed to limit the one-year deadline to only federal prisoners, but he eventually supported the bill that came to the floor without that change. The legislation passed the Senate by a vote of 91 to 8, and it cleared the House by a margin of more than two to one. Myriad mistakes The hurried and often convoluted draftsmanship of the law’s habeas provisions began to come under criticism almost as soon as it took effect. The ambiguities of the measure left a host of questions for the courts to answer, and with each passing year, the relevant case law has grown more complex. Under the 1996 law, the one-year statute of limitations to file a federal habeas petition is supposed to begin after the conclusion of an inmate’s direct appeal, which is filed in the state courts. The direct appeal — the first of three levels of possible appeals — must focus on the trial record. It can argue, for example, that an important objection by the defense counsel should have been sustained rather than overruled. Post-conviction petitions, which include federal habeas corpus appeals, can go beyond the trial to deal with anything from new evidence to the discovery of juror misconduct. Lawyers who do post-conviction work in capital cases face a daunting array of challenges: They must typically reinvestigate the evidence for both guilt and punishment; canvass witnesses called and uncalled; plumb a defendant’s criminal, social and family history; and round up and study thousands of pages of records. They must also navigate an ever-shifting landscape of appellate deadlines and procedures, identify promising issues and craft a detailed petition — all while under the pressure of defending a client whose life may depend on their success. Yet while the law guarantees that indigent death-row inmates have a court-appointed attorney in federal habeas corpus proceedings, it does not stipulate that the attorney must be competent. The Constitution guarantees the effective assistance of counsel at trial, but gives no similar assurance for lawyers doing habeas work. Some of the same federal judges who are responsible for appointing habeas counsel have later traced the failure of such attorneys to meet the filing deadline to their inexperience, indifference, ineptitude or illness — and to myriad combinations thereof. Motions or petitions filed properly in the state courts can suspend the federal deadline. But sometimes the motions are filed improperly, with lawyers neglecting to secure authorization to practice in a given court or failing to pay a required filing fee. In at least three cases since 1996, attorneys filed papers in the wrong court. One appellate attorney discovered that his predecessor missed the habeas deadline after failing to even order the client’s case file. Another attorney, who insisted that he had read the relevant case file, was later found to have never picked up the voluminous records from a state repository. In some of the 80 cases, mistakes by judges compounded those of defense attorneys. The lawyer for Richard Hamilton, who was convicted in 1995 of raping and murdering a 23-year-old nursing student after kidnapping her from a supermarket parking lot in Lake City, Fla., thought Hamilton had more time to file than he really did. So did a local judge, who told Hamilton not to worry. “It has been resolved,” the judge said, to which Hamilton replied: “If you say so, that’s good enough for me.” In two cases out of Texas, U.S. district court judges granted requests for a filing extension — setting, in effect, what appeared to be a new deadline — then enforced the old deadline after the petition was filed. “Parenthetically, this court may have erred in assuming that it had the authority to extend the statutory deadline,” one judge later acknowledged. Sometimes, courts waited too long to appoint habeas counsel. In California, where the courts have struggled mightily to find attorneys for capital appeals, at least six inmates received an attorney only after their deadline had passed — by more than five years in two cases. Then there are lawyers who have failed even more basic scrutiny. Some of the attorneys appointed to the 80 cases include an Alabama lawyer who was addicted to methamphetamine and was on probation for public intoxication and a Louisiana lawyer who suffered from a neurological and physiological disorder so debilitating that he was asked to leave his firm. One attorney in Texas had twice before been reprimanded for misconduct, while another Texas lawyer had twice been put on probation by the state bar. Two weeks after being appointed in the capital case, he was put on probation again. In Mississippi, Willie Jerome Manning’s first appointed attorney withdrew, citing his “most limited knowledged [sic] and familiarity with post-conviction proceedings at all.” A second attorney also withdrew, citing his lack of qualifications. A third attorney was appointed — by a court order that was misfiled, adding to the delays — seven months after Manning’s habeas deadline. Two other men facing death sentences complained that their lawyer had a drinking problem — and they had the same lawyer. “Damn near fell out of his chair,” one of the inmates wrote of the man in a letter to the lawyer’s co-counsel. As deadlines approached, some inmates pressed their attorneys for information. “I’m getting a little worried,” one wrote. Another pleaded, “I want to know what’s going on!” In several cases, courts have shown that prisoners who schooled themselves in habeas law have sometimes demonstrated a better understanding of legal intricacies than their lawyers. “[P]lease file my 2254 Habeas Petition immediately,” one defendant wrote in a typical plea to his lawyer. “Please do not wait any longer . . . again, please file my 2254 Petition at once.” The Supreme Court took note of the phenomenon in the case of Albert Holland, who was sentenced to death for the 1990 murder of a Florida police officer who tried to arrest him. “Holland was right about the law,” the justices wrote. His lawyer, they added, “was wrong about the law.” In the tracing of blame, the case of Mississippi death-row inmate Alan Dale Walker offered a triple bank shot. Attorneys for the state put a wrong date in a court filing. The Mississippi Supreme Court incorporated that error into an opinion. An attorney for Walker then used the opinion to calculate the filing deadline. Walker had a second attorney who had separately calculated the deadline, without relying on the court’s opinion. He came up with a different date — but his date was wrong, too. The struggle to find capable lawyers for capital cases has been particularly visible in a handful of states with large numbers of death-row inmates. Since its death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Florida, for example, has bounced from one troubled arrangement to another for the provision of post-conviction counsel. Of the 80 capital cases with a missed deadline, Florida has 37 — the most of any state by far. The state originally asked private lawyers to do the work free; it got few takers. It then established a special government office to do the work but shifted much of the load to a registry of private attorneys after lawmakers complained about the delays and the cost. In 1998, the state also set a cap on the number of hours per case those lawyers could bill (840) and the rate they could charge ($100 per hour). Michelle Kraus used the post office in Fort Wayne, Ind., to mail an appeal for a client, but it arrived one day late. (Taylor Glascock for The Washington Post) The complexities of habeas law often have challenged even the most conscientious defense attorneys. Michelle Kraus is an experienced defense attorney in Fort Wayne, Ind., who concentrates almost entirely on trial work. At the request of a lawyer friend, she signed on to assist with a state-level appeal for Gregory Scott Johnson, who had been convicted in 1986 of beating an 82-year-old woman to death. But after her friend left the case, Kraus wound up taking it to federal court, where she confronted a steep learning curve. “It was overwhelming, getting grounded in it,” Kraus says. She got the standard text on habeas practice and procedure — at that point, the two volumes ran to some 2,000 pages — and read it front to back. She also traveled to Atlanta to attend a one-week seminar on capital litigation, taught by some of the country’s leading experts. Kraus devoted long hours to Johnson’s petition, which included a claim that prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that might have reduced Johnson’s culpability and perhaps spared him the death penalty. She dropped the petition in the mail three days before deadline, but it arrived one day late. “Counsel bungled the job,” the federal appeals court wrote in 2004. Instead of using first-class mail, Kraus should have opted for FedEx or a courthouse messenger, the court said. The person held accountable would be Johnson. “[L]awyers are agents,” the court wrote. “Their acts (good and bad alike) are attributed to the clients they represent.” Telling Johnson about her mistake — and how he would be punished for it — “was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Kraus says. She stayed on the case — “he forgave me,” she says — and was with Johnson for his last meal before he was executed in 2005. But Kraus has declined to do any more habeas work since then. “The pitfalls are there, and I fell into one,” she recalled. “And it was horrible.” Sometimes, even legal organizations that are usually lauded for the quality of their capital work have faced criticism. In a Georgia case, a federal judge chastised lawyers with the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit that opposes the death penalty and provides free legal support to prisoners in capital cases. The Southern Center lawyers had left the case well before an inmate’s habeas petition was due, but the judge argued that they should have done more to find replacement counsel and to help the inmate determine the filing deadline. One of the authors of the two-volume legal guidebook on habeas practice, James S. Liebman, a law professor at Columbia University, says the complexity and vagueness of the 1996 law has given lawyers all kinds of procedural nuances over which to fight. An important result has been that prosecutors have more ways to get a petition thrown out on procedural grounds — an advantage that they have seized “energetically and assiduously,” Liebman says. The guidebook, now in its sixth edition, has grown over the years to 2,700 pages. "There are more and more pages,” he said, but “less and less justice." Confronted with late filings, courts have embraced a remedy called “equitable tolling,” which allows judges to waive a missed deadline in some circumstances. But courts limit its application to extraordinary situations, and the standard has been applied unevenly around the country. Plain negligence — or a “simple gaffe,” as the court labeled the mistake Kraus made — generally will not merit a judge’s forbearance. But abandoning clients or lying to them often will constitute grounds for setting the deadline aside. In the 80 capital cases, courts have granted equitable tolling in about a third. At least three of the inmates whose habeas petitions were reviewed went on to receive new trials. The courts usually won’t forgive a missed deadline if an attorney misinterpreted the law, a mistake that gets categorized as negligence. But a federal court in Ohio did so in the case of Michael Keenan, a landscaper who was convicted of murdering a young man found in a Cleveland park. “He would have been executed,” Keenan’s lead defense lawyer, Vicki Werneke, said in an interview. “He came dangerously close to getting his whole case dismissed.” When Werneke came onto the case in 2008, after Keenan had been granted equitable tolling, the state’s case was already showing signs of unraveling. In 2012, a U.S. district court judge considered Keenan’s habeas petition and ordered a new trial. Citing the state’s “egregious prosecutorial misconduct” in withholding evidence, an Ohio county judge later ruled that prosecutors can’t retry Keenan, allowing him to go free. The state’s appeal of that ruling is now pending before the Ohio Supreme Court. When a deadline is missed, an inmate’s federal appeal can be lost — no matter the strength of the argument for a new trial, and even if the late filing can be attributed more to hard luck than ineptitude. The law requires that prosecutors turn over evidence favorable to the defense before trial. But it wasn’t until 22 years after William Kuenzel was condemned in Alabama that his appellate attorney received police notes and grand jury testimony undermining the prosecution’s case. Kuenzel was convicted in 1988 of murdering a convenience-store clerk. But in 2010, the state disclosed that an alleged accomplice originally told police he was with someone else, and that the only eyewitness who identified Kuenzel at trial had told grand jurors she “couldn't really see a face.” With such revelations, Kuenzel's claim of innocence has attracted an array of prominent supporters. Three former district attorneys — Robert M. Morgenthau of Manhattan, Gil Garcetti of Los Angeles and E. Michael McCann of Milwaukee — filed a brief with the Supreme Court saying the newly surfaced evidence "completely eviscerated" a prosecution case that they characterized as “weak, to say the least." Kuenzel’s backers have also mounted a polished publicity campaign arguing that he is innocent, including a video with actor Sam Waterston, who played a prosecutor on “Law and Order.” Although Kuenzel now has potentially strong grounds for an appeal, he still lacks a court to hear them — his lawyer missed the federal filing deadline by nearly three years. 15 YEARS EARLIER105DEADLINE51015 YEARS LATER Habeas petition deadline fell more than eight years after sentencing. Sentenced Lawyers missed his habeas deadline by nearly three years after it was decided he had not properly filed a motion. When the 1996 law took effect, Kuenzel had one year to file his habeas petition. But the law included a provision that would suspend the normal one-year statute of limitations if an inmate had a “properly filed” petition pending in state court, essentially stopping the clock on the appeals process. A petition that Kuenzel had filed in an Alabama circuit court had been dismissed as untimely in 1994, but then restored to the docket in May 1996. This led Kuenzel and his attorney to believe he had a “properly filed” state petition pending, and that the countdown toward the appeals deadline had paused. But three years later, the circuit court reversed itself again at the request of state prosecutors, which was interpreted by a federal court to mean that the clock had been ticking all along. “It is just the most grievous injustice,” says David Kochman, an attorney who has been working on Kuenzel’s appeal since 2004. “If any case was crying out for review, it was this case.” The state has written in court files that the newly disclosed evidence “fails to even come close” to exonerating Kuenzel. “It is time for this case to finally come to an end,” wrote the state, which two months ago asked for an execution date to be set. Sentenced to death at 26, Kuenzel is now 52. In a letter to this reporter last month, he wrote that he felt like he was listening to an old grandfather clock as it wound down, knowing he would be killed when it stops. He can’t rewind the clock, he said, because “the courts have shut the hole.” The Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, home to the state’s execution chamber. (Todd Spoth for The Washington Post) Guarding against racial prejudice On April 17, 1996, as then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued against any weakening of habeas corpus protections in the pending antiterrorism bill, the New York Democrat reminded his colleagues that the matters at hand were more profound than mere legal procedures. “We are dealing here, sir, with a fundamental provision of law, one of those essential civil liberties which precede and are the basis of political liberties,” Moynihan said. Quoting from a letter that several former attorneys general had written to President Clinton, he cast the federal courts’ ability to review state-court decisions under habeas corpus as an essential guarantee: “It has a proud history of guarding against injustices born of racial prejudice and intolerance, of saving the innocent from imprisonment or execution, and in the process, ensuring the rights of all law-abiding citizens.” Two days before Moynihan’s speech on the Senate floor, one of the jurors who voted to send Kenneth Rouse to his death, Joseph Baynard, signed an affidavit acknowledging that he had deliberately withheld the fact of his mother’s murder so that he could get on the jury. Baynard, who died last year, acknowledged in the affidavit that his decision in the Rouse case might have been colored by “bigotry.” A Duke University law student who interviewed the former juror for Rouse’s appeal also filed a separate affidavit detailing Baynard’s racial invective. At that point, Rouse’s case was still in the state courts, which ultimately denied him a new trial. His one-year habeas deadline came on Feb. 7, 2000, and his lawyers, who miscalculated the date, filed their petition on his behalf one day too late. While the American public often complains about criminal defendants winning their legal cases on technicalities, the opposite is often true, says Gretchen Engel, a habeas expert who had advised Rouse’s defense team and provided the correct filing date: “What they don’t realize is how often people lose on technicalities, or in ways that would offend most people’s sense of justice.” Despite the federal courts’ refusal to hear his case, Rouse got one more chance in 2009, when the North Carolina legislature passed the Racial Justice Act, allowing condemned prisoners to challenge their sentences if they could demonstrate that racial bias had played a role. Rouse filed a motion to have his case reviewed under the act. But in 2013 — after four other death-row inmates had succeeded in getting their sentences reduced to life without parole under the new provision — the state legislature repealed the law altogether. Rouse’s motion is still pending. It is unclear if it will ever be heard.
Why doesn't the American government limit it's business to AMERICA!!!! Not the Antarctic and Arctic??? Wonder if we have any plans to invade and bomb people in either the Antarctic and Arctic??? Also this is a good example of how if "global warming" really exists it will be good for the worlds population. The article says there is 10% of the worlds oil supply buried under the polar ice caps, just waiting for "global warming" to free it up. http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/nations-big-icebreaker-endures-age-26843031?singlePage=true Nation's Last Big Icebreaker Endures Despite Age SAN FRANCISCO — Nov 12, 2014, 12:39 AM ET By ELLEN KNICKMEYER Associated Press Associated Press The last U.S. icebreaker capable of crushing through the thickest ice of the Antarctic and Arctic resumed its mission after the latest repairs to postpone its already past-due retirement. Climate change makes the 38-year-old Polar Star Icebreaker's science and security missions ever more vital, according to scientists and other backers of rebuilding the country's dwindling ice fleet. The ship headed home to Seattle on Tuesday before starting its new assignment, said Coast Guard Spokeswoman Chief Warrant Officer Allyson Conroy. Earlier Tuesday, crew members of the U.S. Coast Guard's Polar Star Icebreaker drilled before leaving the former naval shipyard at Mare Island, across the bay from San Francisco. Shipyard workers replaced worn, 18-foot-high propellers for refitting and carried out other work on the country's sole remaining heavy icebreaker, now eight years beyond its scheduled decommissioning date. The icebreaker is expected to head for Antarctica shortly after Thanksgiving. By late January, the Polar Star will loom over the western Antarctic on its key annual mission — breaking through ice for the yearly resupply of U.S. researchers at the McMurdo Research Station and another research center at the South Pole. With 75,000 horsepower and a hull strong enough to batter through six feet of ice at running speed, the Polar Star is the only operational U.S. vessel capable of getting the food, fuel and research material to the two Antarctic research stations. If they "didn't get that resupply, it would shut down or severely curtail the amount of science" at the two U.S. Antarctic centers, Capt. Matt Walker, the Polar Star's commander, said Monday afternoon from the Polar Star, with the icebreaker's gangway up for departure. "It puts a huge weight of responsibility that we cannot fail, we cannot suffer catastrophic casualty to our equipment, because the resupply of McMurdo wouldn't occur," Walker said. "We have no redundancy in the U.S. system." Engine troubles in 2010 took the only other heavy U.S. icebreaker, the Polar Sea, out of service. The U.S. Coast Guard has one other icebreaker, a medium-size one, which mainly works in the Arctic. The National Science Foundation has a still-lighter icebreaker for research. The Russian government, by contrast, has 18 icebreakers, including four, nuclear-powered and operational heavy icebreakers. Russia on Monday announced the planned start of work on a new icebreaker to supply that country's growing military presence in the Arctic and tug Russian combat ships through Arctic ice. While the Obama administration, Congress and the Coast Guard all say maintaining at least one heavy icebreaker is essential for maintaining U.S. security and science, no funding proposals have yet gained momentum to have a new heavy U.S. icebreaker built before age forces the Polar Star out of service, any time from five to 20 years from now. Without active heavy icebreakers, "the control of the Arctic is in the hands of Russia," California U.S. Rep. John Garamendi, the ranking Democrat on the House subcommittee that oversees the Coast Guard and maritime affairs, said Tuesday. The Arctic is estimated to hold more than 10 percent of the world's undiscovered oil reserves, nearly one third of undiscovered gas reserves, and remains a strategically critical area for the United States, congressional researchers said earlier this year. Melting ice means traffic has increased in the Bering Strait, between Russia and Alaska, 118 percent since 2008. More melting means more vessels will be coming within harm's way of ice. Meanwhile, researchers say study of the 1.5 million-year-old ice of the Antarctic is critical to tracking the Earth's increasingly variable weather and the course of man-made climate change. For American researchers, too, growing differences this year between the Russian and U.S. governments over Ukraine, Syria and other foreign-policy matters are increasing doubts about the Russia-U.S. logistical cooperation in science that bloomed after the Cold War seem more uncertain. "The idea of sharing space stations or icebreakers with them — you feel a little less secure relying on them, because of the tensions, and the fact we're sort of poking each other in the eye lately," said Ted Scambos, senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado and a veteran Antarctic researcher. For Walker, the Polar Star's captain, each yearly run to the Antarctic is a run at unlocking critical secrets held in its ice. "I think it's critical to humankind to be able to conduct the research work that they do in the Antarctic," he said. "It's fundamental to be able to predict or ascertain information about the climate change. The only place you can get that kind of information is Antarctica."
http://www.azcentral.com/story/lindavaldez/2014/11/14/death-with-dignity-option-right-for-arizona/18996107/ 'Death with dignity' option right for Arizona Linda Valdez, columnist | azcentral.com 7:43 p.m. MST November 15, 2014 A man in Carefree, AZ. wonders why the death of a convicted killer raised more questions than the prolonged and excruciating deaths of his mother and his wife. Donald J. Dingledine e-mailed me after I wrote about the medically assisted death of Brittany Maynard Nov. 1. She is the 29-year-old woman with terminal brain cancer whose video about why she planned to use Oregon's "death with dignity" law has had more than 15 million views on YouTube. I suggested that Arizona needs a law similar to Oregon's. Vermont and Washington also have a protocol for physician-assisted suicide. A few people were outraged. They said only God gets to make the decision about when somebody dies, and nobody should meddle with the Almighty's plans. But Dingledine, who lives in Carefree part of the year, has a different perspective. He lost both his mother and wife this year. "I am glad this subject is getting more attention in Arizona," he wrote. Then he drew a parallel that might make some people flinch. He recalled the July 23 execution of double-murderer Joseph Rudolph Wood, who took nearly two hours to die after being given a controversial cocktail of lethal-injection drugs. Dingledine noted that observers said it was "excruciating" to watch the process. But "two hours is nothing" compared with the pain he witnessed, he said. The murderer's death drew an international outcry. Gov. Jan Brewer ordered an investigation. Yet average, law-abiding people in Arizona often die long and excruciating deaths because of state law. Where's the investigation? Where's the outrage? Where is our death with dignity law? Dingledine's mother, Doris J. Dingledine, died in Illinois in Jan. 29. She was 90 years old and had refused an operation that could have resulted in the amputation of her leg. "The last four days were especially bad but I had the support of my two brothers and sister and we all understood those were her wishes. Two Hours?" he wrote. After his mother's funeral, his wife was diagnosed with throat cancer. "We have a home in Carefree so decided to seek treatment in the Phoenix area," he wrote. "By May there was no recovery in sight. In June . . . she announced that she no longer wanted feeding (through the tubes)." He tried talk her out of it, but "the decision was hers and she stood by it," he said. Then, he said, came "the hardest days of my life." "I gave her the drugs to 'keep her comfortable' and watched as the last four days she was unresponsive and her lungs filled up with fluids as she choked to death. This time, I was by myself as I watched my wife of 31 years pass away. Excruciating?" Diana L. Dingledine died at home in Carefree on July 9, at age 65, after a "battle with cancer," according to her obituary in the Peoria, Ill. Journal Star. Her husband broke down several times when I called to talk to him about his e-mail. The pain is new and very raw. Dingledine said Diana told him she didn't want to die the way his mother did. "I said: I don't know that we have any options." In Arizona, there are no options. You can say no to medical care. But you can't say yes to death with dignity – even if a terminal illness promises to strip you of every semblance of dignity as it takes you on a slow one-way ride into the abyss. Even if you know what's in store and you want to spare yourself and your loved ones. This is everybody's concern because it can be anybody's fate. Anybody's mother. Anybody's spouse. People die every day after excruciating suffering that neither they nor their families would choose. Yet these human tragedies don't get the attention that the death of one murderer garnered. "Our society doesn't need to be doing this to people," Dingledine told me. Our society needs to talk about that botched execution. But we also need to have a conversation about what our laws to do terminally ill people and their families. It won't be easy. Dingledine is deep in grief. I didn't really want to ask him whether wishing for a kinder exit for his wife violated the decision-making prerogative of the Almighty. But I did ask. "That's such a weak argument," he said. "The decision was made long before she choked on her own fluids. . . God already made that decision months before." For him, it was about doing the best thing for his wife: "She didn't want to go like that." But in Arizona, she didn't have a choice.
How do you make people eat healthy??? Tax the krap out of them??? Well at least that's the line of BS the royal rulers on the Navajo Nation Council are using for this 2% tax. I thought it was only us White folks who screwed the Indians. I was wrong on that. The Navajo Nation Council is doing a pretty good job of screwing their own people. http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/arizona /2014/11/15/navajo-lawmakers-approve-junk-food-tax/19086489/ Navajo lawmakers approve junk food tax Associated Press 12:21 p.m. MST November 15, 2014 WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. — The Navajo Nation Council approved a tax on junk food sold on the country's largest reservation, tribal officials announced Friday. Lawmakers voted 10-4 on the last day of a two-day special session Friday to impose a 2 percent sales tax on items such as cookies, chips and sodas. If signed into law by President Ben Shelly, the "Healthy Dine Nation Act of 2014" would remain in effect until 2020. American Indians and Alaska Natives as a whole have the highest age-adjusted prevalence of diabetes among U.S. racial and ethnic groups, according to the American Diabetes Association. According to the proposal, the revenue generated by the new tax would go into a Community Wellness Development Projects Fund. The Navajo Nation Division of Community Development would channel the funds to various projects among the nation's 110 chapters. The projects would include farmers' markets, vegetable gardens and exercise equipment. The Dine Community Advocacy Alliance estimated a junk-food tax would result in at least $1 million a year in revenue. The Tribal Council previously failed to pass the legislation in April and Shelly vetoed the measure earlier this year. In the past, Shelly said he supports the proposal's intent but questioned how the higher tax on snacks high in fat, sugar and salt would be enacted and regulated. Supporters say the tax is another tool in their fight for the health of the people. Advocates such as the Dine Community Advocacy Alliance vowed to revive it. "The Healthy Dine Nation Act is the beginning of addressing the dominate culture of unhealthy foods on our Navajo Nation, while creating opportunity for health and wellness initiatives across all chapters," group member Denisa Livingston said in a statement. Shelly has 10 days to consider approved legislation once the resolution is sent to his office. Native Americans are more than twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to have the disease that was the fourth leading cause of death in the Navajo area from 2003 to 2005, according to the Indian Health Service. Native children ages 10 to 19 are nine times as likely to be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, the IHS said. |