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I have always said that Emperor Obama is just a carbon copy clone of Emperor Bush, with the exception that he is a Democrat and Bush is a Republican. This editorial in the NY Times also seems to think that. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/opinion/obamas-betrayal-of-the-constitution.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0 Obama’s Betrayal of the Constitution By BRUCE ACKERMANSEPT. 11, 2014 BERLIN — PRESIDENT OBAMA’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris. Mr. Bush gained explicit congressional consent for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the Obama administration has not even published a legal opinion attempting to justify the president’s assertion of unilateral war-making authority. This is because no serious opinion can be written. This became clear when White House officials briefed reporters before Mr. Obama’s speech to the nation on Wednesday evening. They said a war against ISIS was justified by Congress’s authorization of force against Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that no new approval was needed. But the 2001 authorization for the use of military force does not apply here. That resolution — scaled back from what Mr. Bush initially wanted — extended only to nations and organizations that “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Obama is rightly proud of his success in killing Osama bin Laden in 2011 and dismantling the Qaeda network he built up. But it’s preposterous to suggest that a congressional vote 13 years ago can be used to legalize new bombings in Syria and additional (noncombat) forces in Iraq. In justifying earlier bombing campaigns in Yemen and Somalia, the administration’s lawyers claimed that the 2001 authorization covered terrorist groups that did not even exist back then. They said it sufficed to show that these groups were “affiliated” with Al Qaeda. Even this was a big stretch, and it is not big enough to encompass the war on ISIS. Not only was ISIS created long after 2001, but Al Qaeda publicly disavowed it earlier this year. It is Al Qaeda’s competitor, not its affiliate. Mr. Obama may rightly be frustrated by gridlock in Washington, but his assault on the rule of law is a devastating setback for our constitutional order. His refusal even to ask the Justice Department to provide a formal legal pretext for the war on ISIS is astonishing. Since ISIS poses a new problem for the president, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires him to seek a new mandate from Congress. The resolution, enacted over President Richard M. Nixon’s veto at the end of the Vietnam War, requires the president to obtain congressional assent within 60 days of commencing “hostilities”; if he fails, he must withdraw American forces within 30 days. The administration gave Congress the requisite notice on Aug. 8 that it had begun bombing ISIS, and so the time for obtaining approval runs out on Oct. 7. But Mr. Obama and his lawyers haven’t even mentioned the War Powers Resolution in announcing the new offensive against ISIS — there is no indication that he intends to comply with this deadline. Mr. Obama’s defenders may point to the precedent set by Bill Clinton, who continued the NATO-led bombing of Kosovo in 1999 beyond the 60-day limit without congressional assent. But Mr. Clinton halted the campaign before the 30-day withdrawal period ended. In 2011, when Mr. Obama continued to bomb Libya after the 60-day limit, his lawyers argued that America’s supporting role in the NATO campaign was not substantial enough to quality as “hostilities” under the 1973 resolution. This claim provoked howls in Congress and the legal community, but the death of the Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, took the steam out of the debate before it could be resolved. Even if the Obama line on Libya were accepted, however, it fails to justify his current move. Rather than “leading from behind” by backing NATO, Mr. Obama is now taking the lead in an open-ended campaign, extending from Iraq into Syria, that could last years. If this isn’t commencing “hostilities,” what is? Senators and representatives aren’t eager to step up to the plate in October when, however they decide, their votes will alienate some constituents in November’s midterm elections. They would prefer to let the president plunge ahead and blame him later if things go wrong. But this is precisely why the War Powers Resolution sets up its 60-day deadline: It rightly insists that unless Congress is willing to stand up and be counted, the war is not worth fighting in the name of the American people. If Mr. Obama changes course, as he did last September, and submits to the commands of the War Powers Resolution, Congress can demonstrate that, despite all its dysfunction, it can still rise to the occasion. There are hawks and doves on both sides of the aisle, and leaders of both parties have signaled a willingness to engage in a serious debate. But for now the president seems grimly determined to practice what Mr. Bush’s lawyers only preached. He is acting on the proposition that the president, in his capacity as commander in chief, has unilateral authority to declare war. In taking this step, Mr. Obama is not only betraying the electoral majorities who twice voted him into office on his promise to end Bush-era abuses of executive authority. He is also betraying the Constitution he swore to uphold. Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale, is a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
The N.F.L.’s Absurd Marijuana Policy Remember if the NFL wants to get lots of corporate welfare from Uncle Sam, the NFL must pretend to support the Federal Government's insane, unconstitutional war on drugs. One question I have to ask is when we legalize marijuana for recreation use in Arizona do we really want to give Andrew Myers and his Arizona Dispensary Association a government monopoly on growing and selling marijuana in Arizona???? Like MPP wants us to???? I say hell no. If we go MPP's way Andrew Myers and the members of his Arizona Dispensary Association will be selling us marijuana at the rip off price of $300 and ounce. And we will still be throwing people in prison who have 1.0001 ounces or more of marijuana. We will also be throwing people in prison who grow marijuana. Well people other then Andrew Myers and the members of his Arizona Dispensary Association. If we legalize marijuana in Arizona, and let the free market set the price, in the long run a pound of marijuana shouldn't cost any more then a pound of potatoes or tomatoes. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/opinion/the-nfls-absurd-marijuana-policy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0 The N.F.L.’s Absurd Marijuana Policy By NATE JACKSONSEPT. 8, 2014 LOS ANGELES — VIRTUALLY every single player in the N.F.L. has a certifiable need for medical marijuana. The game we celebrate creates a life of daily pain for those who play it. Some players choose marijuana to manage this pain, which allows them to perform at a high level without sacrificing their bodies or their minds. I medicated with marijuana for most of my career as a tight end from 2003 through 2008. And I needed the medication. I broke my tibia, dislocated my shoulder, separated both shoulders, tore my groin off the bone once and my hamstring off the bone twice, broke fingers and ribs, tore my medial collateral ligament, suffered brain trauma, etc. Most players have similar medical charts. And every one of them needs the medicine. Standard pain management in the N.F.L. is pain pills and pregame injections. But not all players favor the pill and needle approach. In my experience, many prefer marijuana. The attitude toward weed in the locker room mirrors the attitude in America at large. It’s not a big deal. Players have been familiar with it since adolescence, and those who use it do so to offset the brutality of the game. The fact that they made it to the N.F.L. at all means that their marijuana use is under control. Had marijuana become a problem for me, it would have been reflected in my job performance, and I would have been cut. I took my job seriously and would not have allowed that to happen. The point is, marijuana and excellence on the playing field are not mutually exclusive. A good example is Josh Gordon, the Cleveland Browns wide receiver who led the league last year with 1,646 receiving yards, despite missing two games for testing positive for codeine (for a strep throat, he said). He was suspended again late last month for the entire season after testing positive for marijuana. (At least five others were also suspended last year and this year for marijuana, according to the magazine Mother Jones.) Most players are tested once a year under the N.F.L.’s substance abuse policy, between April 20 and Aug. 9. But players who test positive for a banned drug are placed in the league’s substance abuse program, where the testing is more frequent. It is in this probationary program that players tend to falter. Gordon had marijuana in his system. He broke the rules. I understand that. But this is a rule that absurdly equates marijuana with opiates, opioids and PCP. The N.F.L.’s threshold for disciplinary action for marijuana is 10 times higher than the one used by the International Olympic Committee. Nearly 17,000 Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers in 2011, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These are the same pills I was handed in full bottles after an injury. The same pills that are ravaging our cities. The same ones that are creating a population of apathetic adults, pill-popping their way through the day and dead behind the eyes. The same ones that are leading high schoolers to heroin because the pills no longer get them high and are too expensive. Yeah, those. And there’s Josh Gordon, one of the planet’s most successful athletes. He is fit enough to run dozens of offensive plays a game and torch world-class athletes in the process. He memorizes complicated playbooks every week, learns sign language, remembers the coded language the quarterback uses when switching a play at the last second and adheres to militaristic itineraries of life in the N.F.L. He seems like a man in full control of his faculties. In my playing days, the marijuana smokers struck me as sharper, more thoughtful and more likely to challenge authority than the nonsmokers. It makes me wonder if we weren’t that way because marijuana allowed us to avoid the heavy daze of pain pills. It gave us clarity. It kept us sane. The social tide is turning regarding marijuana. As of July, 35 states and the District of Columbia permit some form of medical marijuana, and 18 states and the District of Columbia have decriminalized it. Professional football is a violent trade that could use some forward thinking. The N.F.L. and the N.F.L. Players Association, which agreed to the league’s substance abuse policy in collective bargaining, should rethink their approach. The policy reflects outdated views on marijuana and pain management, punishes players who seek an alternative to painkillers, keeps them in a perpetual state of injury and injury management, and risks creating new addicts. Nate Jackson is the author of “Slow Getting Up: A Story of N.F.L. Survival From the Bottom of the Pile.”
Data on $800 billion in stimulus spending will disappear this year Hmmm ... wonder why this site which helps give us some government transparency is disappearing. OK, I'm not wondering. The crooks in Congress would prefer not to let us see what they are stealing from us. Sadly governments are a lot like religions and they would prefer that you keep logic and reason out of any discussions that involve them. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/data-on-800-billion-in-stimulus-spending-will-disappear-this-year-here-is-why/2014/09/09/ad277ff4-350a-11e4-8f02-03c644b2d7d0_story.html?tid=hpModule_79c38dfc-8691-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394 Data on $800 billion in stimulus spending will disappear this year. Here is why. By Christian Davenport September 9 at 10:32 AM The government Web site created “to foster greater accountability and transparency” in federal stimulus spending has for years allowed anyone with an Internet connection to follow the money. But by the end of the month, the ability to see what entities received contracts and grants through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going to vanish from recovery.gov, officials say, making it impossible to track where the more than $800 billion finally ended up. It’s not because the Web site is going away — that won’t happen for at least another year. Instead, it’s because of a far more strange — and complicated — reason that, some say, exposes a larger problem that could have even greater implications for the billions the government spends . The data will disappear from the site because the government board that oversees the Web site and ensures the stimulus money is spent properly is not renewing its license with Dun & Bradstreet, a major U.S. financial firm that assigns an identification number to all entities doing business with the federal government. When the license expires at the end of this month, those identification numbers — and other associated data — will no longer be available to the government. No numbers, no way to track the money. (Recovery Accountability & Transportation Board) The disappearance of the data would mark a significant change in a program that the Obama administration said would offer unprecedented transparency. On recovery.gov taxpayers can track dollars as they flow from the federal government to the states and down to individual recipients. The site offers an interactive map and advanced search fields that allow users to explore the spending down to the Zip code. But Nancy DiPaolo, chief of congressional and intergovernmental affairs for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, said that it was not fiscally prudent to renew the license and that the board would be forced to take down the recipient data. The cost to renew the license would be between $900,000 and $1.4 million. “Everything will be the same through Sept. 30,” she said. But after then, “all recipient data will be removed from the site. The maps won’t work.” So, for example, users of the Web site would no longer be able to see that Savannah River Nuclear Solutions in South Carolina received the single largest contract under the entire program: $720 million for “facilities and support services.” Making the matter more pressing, the Web site is scheduled to go away when the board expires just over a year from now. Some members of Congress would like to prevent that. Even though the stimulus money is, for the most part, spent, the data should remain publicly available, government watchdogs groups and congressional officials say. Building a second version of the Web site cost up to $18 million. “We’re talking billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money,” said Neil Gordon, an investigator for the Project on Government Oversight. “And in the interest of transparency, we have to see how it was spent, who got it, when and for what. We can’t lose that information.” In a pair of letters to the General Services Administration and the Office of Procurement Policy last week, two influential congressman said the issue shows how overly dependent the government is on Dun & Bradstreet. The contract is “hampered by unfavorable and restrictive terms,” wrote Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Elijah Cummings (D-Md), the chairman and ranking members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. For years, members of Congress and other government officials said they were concerned that the U.S. depends too much on Dun & Bradstreet, a publicly traded, for-profit company that won a sole-source contract to provide the corporate identification numbers, known as DUNS numbers. Those numbers and other business information — such as addresses, parent company and subsidiary information — is owned and controlled by Dun & Bradstreet and only licensed to the U.S. government. Once the contract ends, the information must be deleted from government databases. In 2012, the Government Accountability Office wrote that Dun & Bradstreet “effectively has a monopoly for government unique identifiers that has contributed to higher costs.” Those costs, it noted, have jumped from about $1 million in 2002 to $19 million per year. The total eight-year contract is worth as much as $154 million. The GAO also said that “the government’s reliance on DUNS numbers has increased” in part because “there has been a dramatic increase in the number and type of entities that are required to have DUNS numbers to do business with the government.” Dun & Bradstreet did not respond to requests for comment. Other companies that would like to compete for the contract “have questioned why the government will not consider their products,” the GAO wrote. The answer is because the government can’t. At least not yet. The Federal Acquisition Regulation, the rules for government procurement, requires that contractors use a DUNS number — which can only be provided by Dun & Bradstreet. Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have taken aim at the arrangement. In their letters this week, Issa and Cummings wrote that it “is, on its face, improper.” “In this case, it is clear that it is having specific, identifiable harm on the federal government’s ability to obtain the best value and most favorable terms with the taxpayer’s dollar,” they wrote. The congressmen urged the GSA and the Office of Federal Procurement Policy to remove specific references to DUNS numbers in the acquisitions regulations so that other companies could be considered to provide the service. And they noted that the U.S. Postal Service, which is not subject to the acquisition regulation, did not renew its contract with Dun & Bradstreet in 2008, and saved $6.4 million annually by using a different vendor. The Postal Service said that company is Equifax. In a statement, the GSA said it surveyed the industry in 2012 “in an effort to identify other sources.” Ultimately it “received few responses.” “The agency determined that Dun and Bradstreet was the most suitable option due to the specialized services the company provides.” Christian Davenport covers federal contracting for The Post's Financial desk.
When you got to the government schools, or public schools as most people call them your are brainwashed from 1st grade to your senor year in high school that the government is your friend, and that the police are your friends. Sadly most people believe this brainwashing. Of course once you have been abused by crooked cops or crooked government officials a few times most people figure out that the police are not your friend, and the government is not your friend. http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/09/when-white-friends-dont-believe-what-blacks-go-through-theyre-not-friends/?hpid=z10 When white friends don’t believe what blacks go through, they’re not friends By Mary C. Curtis September 9 at 6:00 AM Mary C. Curtis is an award-winning multimedia journalist in Charlotte, N.C. She has worked at The New York Times, Charlotte Observer and as national correspondent for Politics Daily. Not every stop is about public safety. I still remember it perfectly, more than 10 years later. It’s terrifying to be stopped in your car and approached by first one and then two more white police officers with their hands resting on their holstered guns. I kept my hands in plain sight on the wheel while they inspected my license and registration. On second thought, I recall thinking during the 15-minute stop, perhaps the scruffy sweats and baseball cap that were perfect for my spin class weren’t the best choices when you’re African American and you’ve just bought a red car. (Why didn’t I pick the gray Camry?) I was given a written warning about running a stop sign that I’d actually stopped at, but I knew better than to argue. “Forty-five percent of blacks say they have experienced racial discrimination by the police at some point in their lives; virtually no whites say they have,” according to a recent New York Times/CBS News nationwide poll. (I’m shocked the 45 percent figure isn’t higher, considering the stories African Americans tell each other all the time.) So when I share the trauma of that particular incident and so many like it – fraught interactions that may have involved a son (stopped driving a nice car in our nice neighborhood), nephew or friend – I expect, first of all, that I will be believed. Yet whites are, frequently, disappointingly, incredulous. Very often a “friend’s” reaction that goes something like this: “I don’t think a police officer would stop anyone for no reason at all.” Or: “You must have done something suspicious.” Or my favorite: “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.” I am not some child coming home with some tall tale, and I am certainly not a delusional liar. I don’t expect much. Just nodding and acknowledging my words would be enough. Instead, jumping in to explain what must have really happened before I can finish a sentence means that – whether you realize it or not – you’ve shattered an important bond and traveled the distance from friend to acquaintance. I smile, make a mental note, and change the subject, realizing that with this person, topics from now on will be limited to rating entrées at the latest neighborhood bistro or judging whether the new Scorsese film shows the master back in top form. In the national conversation about race, especially after a well-publicized confrontation like the one in Ferguson this summer, different sides don’t need to agree. But they do have to accept that the other side is speaking sincerely and from the heart. And whites need to believe blacks when we say what we’ve been through. The discussions I’m talking about are those that have the potential to be most effective—ones that happen naturally, among people of different races who already interact with an easy rapport: the women who sweat together at the gym and compare aches and pains, the moms and dads at the PTA with questions about the new coach, neighbors exchanging tips on backyard gardens. It’s people who already share the ordinary, sometime mundane details of life. From there, it should be easy for one side to give the other the benefit of the doubt. (Yes, America is deeply segregated, but most people do have co-workers of different races; there are opportunities for interaction.) That’s why it’s especially disappointing when some of the folks whose kids have enjoyed homemade blueberry pie at my kitchen table are the ones who greet my stories with blank stares or worse, excuses. When they deny my life experience, I know the friendship has its boundaries. These are educated people, but I wonder, were they asleep during history class or did they never read a book about the complicated history of America that makes Ferguson about much more than one 18-year-old, one policeman, and one suburban community? I don’t get upset when a white friend recounts a bad interaction he or she has had with a black person to explain his or her view of me as an exception – much. Though I might recommend that friend get out more. A Public Religion Research Institute survey shows that the social networks of whites are more than 90 percent white, the most homogeneous of any group. I might also ask if judging groups rather than individuals is any way to live life or an efficient way to enforce the law, since 90 percent of those stopped in New York City’s stop-and-frisk routine resulted in nothing but aggrieved citizens. Americans will never have a forthright conversation on race unless people listen with open minds. They have to believe, and be willing to learn. And most of all, they need an empathetic imagination. “When asked whether police forces should reflect the racial makeup of the communities they serve, nearly six in 10 blacks say yes; whites are about evenly divided,” wrote the Times. Would whites feel comfortable living in a predominantly white community policed by an overwhelmingly black force? I’ve been there when guests at a neighborhood holiday party congratulate themselves on living in an integrated community – and I’m the only black guest. Reverse the numbers and reflect; that’s all I ask. Is this conversation – one that depends on racial trust – even possible? Given the episodes I’ve just described, you may wonder that I have any white friends at all. I do. (Insert cliché here.) Amid the more common chats about food and movies and why our kids won’t listen, we have those racial conversations, change each other minds, and agree to disagree. I married one of them. Our styles are completely different, but we respect each other’s experiences and opinions — and that was even before my husband had a black son, or skin in the game, so to speak.
This series of articles should be called "Highway Robbery by the Police" “Why didn’t he just give me a ticket?” Stuart asked the prosecutor. “What was the reason for him harassing me as much as he did?” Mandrel Stuart knows the reason now - the intent of the police was to rob him of $17,550 in cash. Remember boys and girls, if you are "breathing" the police know that is PROOF you committed some type of crime and the police will use that as a reason to seized everything valuable they can find in your car or possession. Don't yell and scream and say it's unfair and unconstitutional, crooked cops use it as an excuse every day to rob motorists they stop. Of course you are right it is unfair and unconstitutional but crooked cops still use it as a lame excuse to rob people. And even worse is the courts frequently agree with these crooked cops. I know a lot of you are afraid to travel in Mexico because you are afraid you will be robbed by crooked cops. Hell, read this article and you will see you have just as much of a chance of being robbed by crooked cops in the good old USA!!!! http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/08/they-fought-the-law-who-won/?hpid=z1 They fought the law. Who won? Written by Robert O’Harrow Jr., Michael Sallah Published on September 8, 2014 Mandrel Stuart and his girlfriend were on a date driving on Interstate 66 toward the District when a Fairfax County police cruiser pulled out of the median and raced after them. The cruiser kept pace alongside Stuart’s old blue Yukon for a while, then followed behind for several miles before turning on its flashing lights. The traffic stop on that balmy afternoon in August 2012 was the beginning of a dizzying encounter that would leave Stuart shaken and wondering whether he had been singled out because he was black and had a police record. Over the next two hours, he would be detained without charges, handcuffed and taken to a nearby police station. He also would be stripped of $17,550 in cash — money that he had earned through the Smoking Roosters, a small barbecue restaurant he owned in Staunton, Va. Stuart said he was going to use the money that night for supplies and equipment. Stop and Seize: In recent years, thousands of people have had cash confiscated by police without being charged with crimes. The Post looks at the police culture behind the seizures and the people who were forced to fight the government to get their money back. The reason for the police stop: Stuart’s SUV had tinted windows and a video was playing in his sightline. He was never charged with a crime, and there was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing. But police took his money because they assumed it was related to the drug trade. Stuart would have to fight the federal government for any chance of getting his money back. “Why didn’t he just give me a ticket?” Stuart asked the prosecutor. “What was the reason for him harassing me as much as he did?” Stuart’s case is among 400 seizures from 17 states examined by The Washington Post to assess how the practice known as “highway interdiction” has affected American drivers. Their experiences, gleaned from legal papers and interviews, contain striking similarities that underscore questions about police power in an era when security has often trumped the rights of individuals. Many of the highway officers involved were trained in the techniques of interdiction after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, some with financial support from the departments of Homeland Security and Justice. The officers were able to seize cash and have their departments share in the proceeds through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Police can also make seizures under their state laws. Their methods often involve the use of minor traffic infractions as pretexts for stops; an analysis of “indicators” about drivers’ intentions, such as nervousness; a request for warrantless searches; and a focus on cash. In most of the cases, police never make an arrest. Some of the drivers had prior run-ins with police and lived their lives in cash economies, paying for everything from food to rent and business expenses with hard currency. Many of them had to engage in long legal struggles to get their money back after officers made roadside judgments about one of the most fundamental of American rights — the right to own property. Police say the stop-and-seizure tactic hurts drug organizations and increases security on the highways. But drivers and their advocates say that all too often it is the innocent who suffer the emotional and financial consequences of misplaced power. “We have been fighting this battle for a number of years . . . but it is just breathtaking to hear what is happening on a grand scale,” said Scott Bullock, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil liberties group in Arlington. “It should not exist in a country that respects fundamental notions of due process.” A cracked windshield In several of the cases reviewed by The Post, police claimed to smell drugs before searching vehicles but did not turn up any. That’s what happened to Vincent Costello, a home-improvement contractor, and his girlfriend, Romilda Demartino. It was May 2010 and the couple were traveling from Queens in New York to Florida. They were stopped on U.S. Highway 17 by a sheriff’s deputy in Charleston County, S.C., who said Costello’s work van had a cracked windshield. Deputy Mason Ashby asked them a series of questions about their travels before bringing up the matter of currency. Ashby is among 88 deputies in the department who have been trained in methods promoted by Desert Snow, the nation’s leading interdiction training firm. Ashby’s boss, Capt. Ransom Williams, moonlights as one of Desert Snow’s trainers. Costello told Ashby the couple had visited a relative and were heading to Pompano Beach, Fla., to fix up a house they had bought in foreclosure. As Ashby listened, he claimed he noticed the odor of marijuana. Based on his “training and experience,” Ashby decided Costello was probably involved in criminal or drug-related activity and sought a search of the van, according to court records. “Why would [they] give anything back if they thought you were guilty?” —Vincent Costello, who agreed to accept a deal from the government for half of his money back. Ashby asked how much currency was in the van. Costello gave a low-ball estimate of $5,000 to $10,000, records show. He agreed to a search because he believed he had done nothing wrong, he told The Post. Ashby did not find any drugs, but he turned up more than $32,000 in the van and seized it through the federal Equitable Sharing Program. Ashby called a fellow deputy who was assigned to a regional U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration task force. The second officer asked Costello why he didn’t leave the money in a bank. Costello said he needed it to buy supplies to fix up the Florida house. In court papers, the police justified their seizure by claiming that Costello was unusually nervous. They also said that Florida is a source of drugs for New York and that drug smugglers often use large amounts of cash. Costello told The Post he could not believe that Ashby and his colleague disregarded the fact that they found no marijuana in the van. Before the couple were permitted to leave, Ashby made Costello hand over the money in his pocket, Costello said. “He turned around and he says, ‘Give me the money out of your back pocket,’” Costello said. “I said, ‘What if the car breaks down?’ The guy has such an attitude with me. He said, ‘You have a debit card. Go find an ATM.’ ” When Costello said he was not leaving without a receipt, the deputy pulled out a scrap of paper and wrote down the sum he was taking: $32,934. Department officials did not return calls seeking comment about the stop. Costello hired a local attorney to get the money back. After making a few calls, the lawyer told him to accept a deal from the government for half of the money. Costello agreed. But his legal fees were $9,000 — leaving him with only about $7,000. None of it makes any sense to him. “Why would [they] give anything back if they thought you were guilty?” he said. Police can also seize cash under their state laws. Matt Lee of Clare, Mich., got snared in an interdiction net in 2011 on Interstate 80 in Humboldt County, Nev. Lee was a 31-year-old college graduate who had struggled to find work and had moved back in with his parents to save money. When a friend promised him an entry-level job as a sales rep at a photo studio in California, Lee’s father, a postal employee, loaned him $2,500 in cash and Lee drove west in a decade-old Pontiac Bonneville. On his third day, Lee was passing through the Nevada desert, wearing aviator sunglasses. A sheriff’s deputy raced up alongside the Bonneville, stared at Lee and then pulled him over. Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputy L.A. Dove, a member of the K-9 drug interdiction unit, has received instruction from the 4:20 Group, a contractor for the DEA and one of the leading interdiction trainers in the country. Dove asked whether Lee was carrying any currency and summoned a K-9 officer. Dove told Lee, who is white, to get out of the car and stand at the edge of the desert, while a dog sniffed for drugs. The deputy told Lee that he didn’t believe his story that he was moving to California, because he was carrying so little baggage, Lee told The Post. Lee has no criminal record. When a search turned up Lee’s remaining $2,400 in cash, Dove and his colleague exchanged high-fives, Lee said. Dove said he was taking the money under state law because he was convinced that Lee was involved in a drug run. Lee was left with only the $151 in his pocket. After he was set free, Lee said his hands were shaking so much that he couldn’t call his parents. “I just couldn’t believe that police could do that to anyone,” Lee told The Post. “It’s like they are at war with innocent people.” Things went downhill for him. Depressed and distracted, Lee botched his final interview and did not get the job he was aiming for in California. He hired a Reno attorney to get his money back and Humboldt County agreed to return it. But the attorney took about half as his fee and costs, $1,269.44, leaving Lee with only $1,130.56. Humboldt sheriff’s officials did not respond to a request to interview Dove. In February, Lee wrote an angry opinion piece about his experiences for the Silver Pinyon Journal, an online news service in Humboldt County. “I intend to throw a spotlight on this little operation they’ve got going on in Humboldt County, Nevada,” he wrote. “I intend to make it as difficult as possible for them to continue with their modus operandi. If they are going to violate civil rights, I’m going to make sure people hear about it.” This year, the department was the focus of media coverage of lawsuits filed by motorists to recover their seized cash, two of which were later settled. Years of savings José Cristobal Guerrero of Raleigh, N.C., was stopped by police in DeKalb County, Ga. He had just visited his brother’s suburban Atlanta home to pick up his two nephews and take them to Mexico to see their grandfather when police blocked his family’s Tahoe SUV in a parking lot. Know your rights: During traffic stops on the nation’s highways, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protects motorists “against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The law also gives police the power to investigate and act on their suspicions. 1. Police have a long-established authority to stop motorists for traffic infractions. They can use traffic violations as a pretext for a deeper inquiry as long as the stop is based on an identifiable infraction. 2. An officer may detain a driver only as long as it takes to deal with the reason for the stop. After that, police have the authority to request further conversation. A motorist has the right to decline and ask whether the stop is concluded. If so, the motorist can leave. 3. The officer also has the authority to briefly detain and question a person as long as the officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person is involved in criminal activity. Reasonable suspicion is based on specific and articulable facts but falls short of the legal standard for making an arrest. 4. A traffic infraction or reasonable suspicion alone do not give police authority to search a vehicle or a closed container, such as luggage. Police may ask for permission to search; drivers may decline. Police do not have to tell drivers that they have a right to refuse. 5. An officer may expand a roadside investigation if the driver’s responses and other circumstances justify a belief that it is more likely than not that criminal activity is occurring. Under this standard, known as probable cause, an officer can make an arrest or search a vehicle without permission. An alert by a drug-sniffing dog can provide probable cause, as can the smell of marijuana. 6. Police can seize cash that they find if they have probable cause to suspect that it is related to criminal activity. The seizure happens through a civil action known as asset forfeiture. Police do not need to charge a person with a crime. The burden of proof is then on the driver to show that the cash is not related to a crime by a legal standard known as preponderance of the evidence. Guerrero, a Mexican national with permanent resident status in the United States, was a construction foreman who once served as a church deacon. But on this day in July 2005, he was caught up in a drug investigation, according to legal documents and interviews. DeKalb Officer Mike DeWald had been watching Guerrero’s brother’s home as a part of an ongoing investigation into one of the tenants. DeWald asked Guerrero a few questions and Guerrero described his family’s travel plans and said he was carrying $13,630, his attorney later said. Police brought a K-9 unit to the scene, and the dog indicated the presence of drugs. The officers emptied the family’s suitcases onto the pavement, court records show. No drugs were found. When DeWald found the money, he seized it and began processing it through the federal Equitable Sharing Program. The money represented several years worth of savings and was intended to pay for land in Mexico and bills for Guerrero’s extended family there, according to his attorney, Josh Stone. Federal prosecutors in Atlanta defended seizing the cash “on grounds that it was furnished or intended to be furnished in exchange for controlled substances.” The prosecutors eventually offered to return half the money, but Guerrero refused. Ultimately, prosecutors agreed to return all the money to Guerrero — but only if he signed an agreement that he would not sue the police or prosecutors. He signed and received his $13,630 in 2008, three years after his money had been seized. The Post found that more than 1,000 people have signed such agreements to get all or part of their money back. In one respect, Guerrero was lucky. His construction firm paid a small amount to make his legal struggle possible, and Stone had agreed to do much of the work without pay. Given the time involved, the legal bills would have been $50,000, Stone said. But he agreed not to press for his fee from the government as part of the settlement. “We didn’t take this case to make money,” Stone said. “Most people don’t have this kind of money to fight these cases.” In a footnote to his court filings, Stone tried to reframe the circumstances to show the authorities why the stop was so wrong. “This case should be extremely troubling for any red-blooded American. Jose Guerrero is a legal immigrant to this Country with a stable and exceptional employment record,” he wrote. “One can only imagine the cries of outrage if Americans were subject to similar treatment by the Mexican authorities.” Sally Quillian Yates, the current U.S. attorney in Atlanta, told The Post that “under our current office practice, we would not have proceeded forward with this case.” DeWald, who now works for the Sandy Springs, Ga., Police Department, said his decision to seize the money was carefully considered and based on the totality of the circumstances. “There was a lot involved in that case,” he said. He added that highway interdiction is an important tool for police, who strive to make lawful seizures. “We’re not out here trying to violate anybody’s rights,” he said. “The Fourth Amendment is something we have to hold dear to our hearts. We have to operate within the scope of the law.” Mandrel Stuart was pulled over in Virginia. The police confiscated $17,550 after finding a tiny amount of residue of marijuana in a bag. (Fairfax County Police Department) Tinted windows When the Fairfax police cruiser turned on its lights, not far from the Fairfax County Parkway in Northern Virginia, Mandrel Stuart did not panic. At 6-feet-1-inch tall and 225 pounds, he was big and genial. At 35, he was experienced in dealing with the police. He had lived a rough life as a young man, with multiple arrests for possessing or peddling small amounts of pot. Officer Kevin Palizzi began by asking about the movie that was still playing on screen inside the vehicle, “Flashdance.” It is illegal to drive with a video playing in sight of the driver. Though Palizzi later said that he initiated the stop because Stuart’s tinted windows appeared to be too dark, he did not have the device needed to check to see whether the tinting was within legal limits, police records show. As his partner began talking with Stuart’s girlfriend, Palizzi asked Stuart to join him behind the SUV, where he began peppering him with questions. Where did he live? What did he do in Staunton? Why was he going to the District of Columbia? What was his criminal history? “He admitted to having been arrested for alot of things in the past,” Palizzi said in the police report. “He kept asking why we were asking so many questions and wanted to know why he was not able to leave already.” Palizzi went to his cruiser to write a summons for the video infraction but not for the tinted windows. A K-9 officer arrived in the meantime, and, as he walked around Stuart’s Yukon, his dog seemed to smell drugs on the left front bumper and wheel. That was what they needed to conduct a search. Palizzi is a member of Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System, an informal national intelligence network started by the founder of Desert Snow, according to documents obtained by The Post. Palizzi trains other officers in the techniques. “He truly is one of the most passionate officers I have ever seen,” Fairfax County police spokesman, Don Gotthardt said. “His passion is to take drugs off the street.” Palizzi did not return calls seeking an interview. During the stop, Palizzi drew on his training to take stock of indicators of possible criminal activity, documents and interviews show. He thought it was suspicious that Stuart’s girlfriend did not know where they were going. He also thought the dash and interior trim of the 12-year-old car were “suspiciously loose,” and he took as evidence a “yellow straw with green residue,” according to his report of the stop. Palizzi and his partner searched the car and found large bundles of cash in a brown paper bag. Palizzi told Stuart and his girlfriend they were taking the vehicle into the station for a more thorough search. According to a record of the stop, he gave them a choice: They could be left on foot at a highway exit or go with police. “They both chose to come with us,” Palizzi wrote. “For safety reasons, they were both searched, handcuffed and transported in the back of our car.” Now Stuart started to fret. Everything felt out of control, even though he had done nothing wrong. “They were going to leave us at the side of the road,” he told The Post. “I am saying to myself, ‘Why are they handcuffing me if I’m not under arrest?’ I didn’t understand it.” A more intensive search of the vehicle at the station turned up only a few flecks of marijuana: 0.01 gram. It was in the bottom of a bag holding DVDs that were there to entertain Stuart’s four kids when he drove them around. The receipt Officer Kevin Palizzi gave Mandrel Stuart for his seized cash. (Shawn Stout) As for the suspicious yellow straw, it turned out to be from a Capri Sun juice pouch that one of his kids had left behind. During further questioning in the station house, Stuart maintained that he was heading into the District on a date with his girlfriend. He also said he was going to a friend’s restaurant to buy kitchen equipment and staples, such as oxtail, goat and cocoa bread, for his own restaurant, the Smoking Roosters. When they asked why he didn’t have a checkbook or credit card, he said he had gotten in trouble over meal taxes and did not have an account. They had searched through his phone and found a street reference to pot in a text. When they asked whether he still smoked pot, Stuart answered yes. More than two hours after stopping Stuart for driving with tinted windows, Palizzi tore off a piece of note paper, wrote down the amount of money he had seized — $17,550 — and gave it to Stuart as a receipt, along with his car keys and phone. And they let him go. Stuart made a phone call: to his mother, asking for help. Stuart faced financial problems almost immediately. He had rent to pay and even bigger electricity bills at his restaurant. He still had to buy supplies for the Smoking Roosters and pay his few employees. He had no credit. And now he had no cash, either. He wanted to get his money back, but he had no idea how to sort through the intricacies of the federal civil forfeiture system, an arcane corner of the American legal world. Though he was never charged with a crime, he would have to prove, in effect, that he made the money legally. Shawn Stout, a lawyer then based in Fairfax, does not know how Stuart found him. But he said it was a lucky thing. Stout was a recent graduate of George Mason University Law School and was looking for cases to take on. He was outraged by what Stuart told him about the stop. “It’s gross,” he said. He took on Stuart under a $1,000 initial fee and began guiding him through the civil legal process. Mandrel Stuart stands in front of his former restaurant — now called the Shack — in Staunton, Va. Stuart won a court case giving him back the $17,550 that was confiscated by Fairfax police under a civil forfeiture law. (Norm Shafer for The Washington Post) In one deposition, Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen Taylor of the Justice Department office in Alexandria asked Stuart more than 300 questions. Drawing on criminal records and other material she had obtained about Stuart, Taylor asked about his work history, his children and his affinity for pot. She brought up earlier run-ins with the law. She asked about his mother and girlfriends and wanted to know why he called his restaurant the “Smoking Roosters” and why he was going into the District. “Me and my lady friend was going up there to pick up some supplies I had already ordered,” he told her, adding later in the session that those included oxtails. “Oxtails? What’s that?” Taylor said. “It’s the tail of a cow,” he said. “It’s real tender.” Last year, prosecutors changed their position and offered to return half the money as part of a settlement. Stuart refused and Stout arranged to take the case before a jury. “Why should the government keep half of his money?” Stout told The Post. In a day-long trial, Stuart took the stand and repeated much of what he had told authorities. The jury deliberated for 35 minutes before ruling unanimously in his favor. In addition to returning his $17,550, the government had to pay Stuart’s legal fees: an additional $11,825.40. Uncounted is the cost to taxpayers of the government’s effort to keep the money. Gotthardt, the Fairfax police department spokesman, declined to comment about the jury’s decision. But he said that interdictions and seizures are effective tools — as long as they are properly used. “There is absolutely the potential for misuse and abuse,” he said. “Fairfax County absolutely would not tolerate misuse and abuse.” Stuart was thrilled to win, but saddened by the 14-month-long episode. Almost a year earlier, saddled with bills and lacking any credit to pay them, he shuttered the two-year-old Smoking Roosters. He had hoped to leave it to his four kids someday. “Did I win? I lost my restaurant,” he said. “I’m not whole.” Now he works in construction. Steven Rich and Alice Crites contributed to this article. Alexia Campbell, Cathaleen Chen, Hoai-Tran Bui, Nagwa Abdallah and Justin Warren also contributed through an investigative reporting program at American University. About this story The Washington Post relied on an array of materials to explore the rise of civil seizures in recent years, with a particular focus on highway seizures made by state and local police. For details about seizures and the techniques employed by police, reporters reviewed more than 400 federal court cases in which owners of cash filed legal appeals to get it back. The Post also examined some seizures made under state forfeiture laws. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, The Post obtained a database from the Justice Department containing details about 212,000 seizures since 1996 through the Equitable Sharing Program, the federal government’s largest asset forfeiture effort. Justice officials did not release data that pinpointed the geographic location of each seizure, so it is impossible to identify precisely how many seizures occur during traffic stops. To focus on roadside stops, The Post looked at cases that were not made at businesses and that occurred without warrants or indictments: 61,998 seizures have met those criteria since Sept. 11, 2001. That group of cases was then compared to a list obtained by The Post of 1,654 departments and agencies with officers who are members of an unofficial police intelligence network known as the Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that is focused on highway stops and seizures. The Post also obtained more than 43,000 Justice Department reports from state and local police departments across the country that participated in Equitable Sharing, along with records provided by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil liberties group, to assess how seizures contribute to department budgets.
When elected officials and government bureaucrats break the law they rarely get punished. I also wonder is AT Tom Horne helping his buddies in the Maricopa County Flood Control District cover up their crimes??? http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/arizona/politics/2014/09/09/attorney-general-drops-investigation-flood-control-district/15319719/ Attorney General drops investigation into Flood Control District Michael Kiefer, The Republic | azcentral.com 9:28 p.m. MST September 8, 2014 The Arizona Attorney General's Office has closed a criminal investigation into whether the Maricopa County Flood Control District violated open-meetings laws by holding a secret meeting to discuss a dispute with a sand and gravel mining company and then tried to cover it up. The investigation was opened after ABC Sand & Rock, a Glendale company that mines in the Agua Fria riverbed, accused Maricopa County and its Flood Control District in a federal lawsuit of trying to put it out of business. The company filed the lawsuit after being sanctioned by the district in 2011 for operating without a permit. The lawsuit was thrown out last November. But in June, AG investigators served a search warrant on the Flood Control District's offices. The Flood Control District oversees dams, retention basins and other flood-control structures and prepares for emergencies, such as Monday's record-setting rainfall. The district also regulates building and businesses in flood plains and river bottoms, such as gravel mining operations. It reports to the county Board of Supervisors. Affidavits for the search warrant sought evidence that the district held a meeting in January 2012 to discuss ABC Sand & Rock but did not post legal notice that the meeting would take place. The affidavit also sought proof that a subsequent posting had been falsified. Those allegations mirror claims made in the ABC Sand & Rock lawsuit. But in a Sept. 2 letter, Assistant Attorney General Ted Campagnolo revealed that the investigation had been closed. Campagnolo wrote in the letter, to attorney Paul Charlton, that the allegations had "non-criminal explanations" and that the investigation would be closed "as to the District and its employees, past and present, for lack of evidence of criminal wrongdoing." The Arizona Republic obtained a copy of the letter on Monday. Charlton was retained by former Flood Control District chief engineer and general manager Tim Phillips, who resigned at the end of May at the request of the county Board of Supervisors, which also serves as the Flood Control District Board. Phillips hired Charlton after media reported that he had been fired because of impending criminal charges. The letter from Campagnolo went on to say: "Subsequent evidence obtained during the investigation also does not support the statement in the affidavit that Mr. Phillips was fired for any reasons related to this investigation." Phillips said he resigned because the supervisors "wanted to go in a different direction." Phillips worked for the district for 17 years, including 10 years as its head. The dispute dated to 2011, when Dave Waltemath, the president of ABC Sand & Rock, applied to renew a long-term permit to mine gravel in the Agua Fria riverbed in Glendale. He included a letter criticizing the district and recent regulatory changes. Phillips told The Republic that ABC had paid the required fees and the permit was ready except for signatures from ABC, which kept it from going into effect. The district then determined that the gravel company was operating without a permit, and continued to do so for 169 days. Phillips had the authority to fine the company up to $10,000 a day, but chose to impose a fine of $1,000 a day, or $169,000. That fine was thrown out by a review board, spurring the county to appeal to the Superior Court, which sent it back to the review board with orders to explain its decisions. But rather than wait out the review board's explanation, Waltemath appealed to the Arizona Court of Appeals and sued in U.S. District Court, alleging that the Flood Control District was violating his rights and trying to put him out of business as retaliation for his criticism of regulations. The lawsuit also alleged that the district held an "ex-parte hearing without notice." In November 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Neil Wake threw out the lawsuit, saying that the gravel company's permit would not have been affected if it had allowed the review board to make its findings. Then the Attorney General's Office launched a criminal investigation. The Attorney General's Office did not explain why the investigation was brought in the first place or why it was dropped. The county supervisors did not comment. Waltemath could not be reached for comment. But on a day when the county was beset by extremely heavy rain, Phillips felt vindicated that the flood control he had planned was put to the test. "For the last 10 years, I've been telling everybody, it's not a question of if it's going to rain, but when. It's kind of bittersweet."
Pumping stations failed at some freeway stations Nothing fails like government!!!!! Our government masters tell us they are here to protect us from bad things, but they failed miserably to protect us from the flooding that occurred in yesterdays monster storm. I am referring specifically to all the freeway water pumps that failed to turn on. Of course our government masters will tell us all these problems will be fixed and everything will work perfectly NEXT time, just like they did last time. http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2014/09/09/pumping-stations-failed-freeway-stations/15319725/ Pumping stations failed at some freeway stations Sean Holstege, Caitlin McGlade and Edward Gately, The Republic | azcentral.com 12:27 a.m. MST September 9, 2014 There were stories of success and failure among the man-made systems created to manage a heavy rain across the Valley Monday. In a Valley unaccustomed to the rain, the historic late-summer deluge of 2014 tested pieces of the public-works infrastructure — and pushed some of them beyond their limits, as pumps failed, freeways and city streets disappeared beneath rising water and some motorists headed into the mouth of the flooding unaware. Those stretches of freeway flooded because pumping stations designed to keep them dry failed at key locations, including along Interstate 10 in west Phoenix, according to early indications from the Arizona Department of Transportation. That left dozens of morning motorists stranded in deep water. "If there was flooding, we likely faced some kind of challenge at the pump station," ADOT spokesman Doug Nintzel said. Some older pumps failed to kick in, while others automatically switched off, he said. Both had to be started by hand. Other parts of the Valley saw stories of success and failure Monday as man-made systems managed heavy rain and runoff. In Mesa, neighborhoods on the north edge of U.S. 60 flooded late in the day as retention basins overflowed. The basins normally hold runoff in conjunction with nearby Arizona Department of Transportation canals along U.S. 60. But both the basins and the canals filled Monday, leaving extra water with nowhere to go. It backed up into a neighborhood off Harris Drive and Harmony Avenue. Mesa officials said it could take two weeks to a month to drain the water, and urged residents to evacuate. The rain deluge had such a strong impact on Phoenix, city officials may be rethinking their standards for flood planning. But Scottsdale officials had reason to cheer: the11-mile Indian Bend Wash flood control project did its job. Pumping stations failed at some freeway stations Floods have deadly, damaging history in Ariz. The Valley's freeway loop system, the newest freeways, also fared well during Monday's soaker. There was water on the roads, but none of the widespread flooding experienced on older highways. Most of the freeway network's 71 pumping stations are designed with three to five individual engines, which are triggered by in-ground sensors. Those sensors act like a float in a toilet tank: When the water rises to a certain level, the pumps kick in. Except on Monday at 1-10 near 43rd Avenue, site of the most dramatic flooding. "The pumps were not turning on automatically," Nintzel said, and it wasn't until 7 a.m., four hours into the downpour, that "troubleshooters manually turned on the engines." Elsewhere, pumps did kick on but couldn't keep up with the volumes of rain and run-off water. Some engines in some pump houses automatically switched off to avoid burning out, Nintzel said. On State Route 51 near Cactus Boulevard, two of the five engines cut out. The station couldn't keep up with the deluge at 60 percent capacity, and the highway was under water by the time crews manually restored full pumping. Farther south near Highland Avenue, one of the five pumps shut off. It was the same story at the Kyrene pumping station, where two of the three engines shut off. "This gets into the challenges you have with an aging infrastructure," Nintzel said, adding that ADOT crews maintain the stations year round, and step up inspections right before the monsoon. Generally speaking, he said, the older the freeway, the older the pumps, and the more maintenance they need. On Interstate 17, one of the oldest stretches of interstate in the country, a pump station is 50 years old, and the engines have to be removed and repaired by specialists in such models. But there may have also been more underlying issues. ADOT's "Highway Drainage Design Manual," published in 2007, says freeway design should handle the amount of water generated by a 100-year flood. A 100-year flood means one that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year, on average. But it states that pumps at "depressed freeways," such as the underpasses that were inundated Monday, should only accommodate a 50-year storm, one that is twice as likely. ADOT designed the pumps to the looser 50-year standard in such locations, Nintzel said. Parts of the Valley saw record rainfall, but until final storm totals are in, it remains unclear if the storm topped the 50-year mark. Valley cities, some with higher standards, appeared to fare better, even though street flooding was widespread. If Monday was a test, Scottsdale's Indian Bend Wash didn't break. The 11-mile wash, completed in 1984 as a flood control project, "worked exactly as it was designed to work," said city spokesman Mike Phillips. The greenbelt stretches north from Paradise Valley down south to the Salt River in Tempe. The wash carried as much as 6,000 cubic feet per second, about one-fifth of what it was designed to handle, city officials said. Once the rain stopped, the wash played a major role is draining city streets and neighborhoods within the Indian Bend Wash watershed, said Ashley Couch, the city's storm water manager and floodplain administer. In Phoenix, the standard to withstand 100-year floods may not be good enough to clear low-lying roads in Laveen and in northern Phoenix and along the Salt River, said Ray Dovalina, street transportation director. He said Phoenix will work with the Flood Control District of Maricopa County and other agencies to assess whether plans for future infrastructure improvements need to be updated to address higher demand. Councilwoman Kate Gallego says the city's needs exceeds available funding. "We'll have to have conversations about how much risk we're willing to take,'' she said. "We need to look hard at what we can do and assume what used to be an extreme event is not an extreme event anymore." Phoennix installed a $20 million conveyance channel in Laveen in the 2000s to help catch the rain that dumps into the area from South Mountain and funnel it to the Salt River. But the area remains on high priority for future flood-control infrastructure improvements. Connie Cone Sexton, Maria Polletta and Megan Finnerty contributed to this report.
You think your going to get a fair trail??? Don't make me laugh!!!! http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_26487505/da-yanks-prosecutor-and-dna-criminalist-off-cold DA yanks prosecutor and DNA criminalist off cold-case murder for having an affair By Tracey Kaplan tkaplan@mercurynews.com Posted: 09/07/2014 05:06:23 PM PDT6 Comments | Updated: about 18 hours ago SAN JOSE -- Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen has yanked a veteran prosecutor off a high-profile homicide assignment for having a secret "physical and emotional'' relationship with a crime lab technician whom he put on the witness stand twice to testify about DNA tests that led to a breakthrough in a 25-year-old cold-case murder, the office confirmed Sunday. Prosecutor Ted Kajani's affair with criminalist Amanda Cardenas began before she testified for him in a May preliminary hearing and June grand jury proceeding. As a result of those hearings, brothers David and Robert Zimmer were held over for trial in the 1989 strangulation of Cathy Zimmer, David's estranged wife. The 38-year-old mother's body was discovered on the floor of the back seat of her car at San Jose's airport, wrapped in a colorful patchwork quilt whose origins are still unknown despite widespread publicity. But Kajani did not inform Rosen of his extramarital affair with the analyst until about 10 days ago and he also failed to divulge it to the accused brothers, in possible violation of his legal obligation to do so -- omissions the brothers' lawyers claim irrevocably taint the prosecution's case. In a brief telephone interview Sunday, Assistant District Attorney David Angel, who runs the office's Conviction Integrity Unit, confirmed that the two employees have been involved in a "physical and emotional'' relationship without the knowledge of the office or the defendants since "somewhat before'' Cardenas first testified for Kajani in late May. Case reassigned It is improper for a prosecutor to have a romantic relationship with a witness in the first place -- and worse, to not disclose that conflict of interest. In this situation, Kajani's affair, at the very least, presents the appearance of impropriety, resurrecting concerns that there are few controls in place to prevent analysts at the previously troubled crime lab run by the District Attorney's Office from tweaking their results to please prosecutors rather than act as independent fact-finders. Kajani declined to comment and Cardenas could not be contacted. The Zimmer murder case has been reassigned to prosecutor Steven Del Porto, who will be ready to go to trial in October, Angel said, adding the office also will review all the cases that Kajani and Cardenas handled jointly. Still, said Angel, the revelations in the Zimmer case have not undermined the office's confidence in Cardenas' DNA results, noting they had also been reviewed by two other crime lab analysts months ago, per the crime lab's normal protocol. The lab found Santa Clara resident Robert Zimmer's DNA on the zipper pull or button of the pants Cathy Zimmer was wearing when her body was discovered. But defense attorneys Michael Cardoza and Steve DeFilippis quickly called for a full investigation, including possible recusal of the District Attorney's Office from the case and retesting of the pants. However, there is no skin-cell DNA left from the same spot on the pants to retest. Cardoza, who represents Half Moon Bay resident David Zimmer, also suggested it is worth exploring whether the DNA could have been purposely planted. "I was astounded to learn this news,'' DeFilippis said, adding that it puts a "huge taint'' on the case. "We have long had suspicions about the credibility of the alleged DNA evidence, which my experts had already dubbed 'the miracle on W. Hedding Street' (location of the Hall of Justice) for reasons that will be far more apparent when this matter reaches trial.'' "Rather thin" The prosecution's case relies heavily on DNA, as well as the fact that David Zimmer was having an affair at the time (with a woman he later married) and benefitted financially from his estranged wife's death. But Judge Ronald Toff, who held David Zimmer over for trial, called the evidence against the estranged husband "rather thin.'' Based in part on that comment, another judge in July allowed David Zimmer to be released on $1 million bail, four months after he was arrested. Robert Zimmer remains in custody. Both are in their late 60s. Rosen has reassigned Kajani -- who was in charge of the cold-case unit for more than three years -- to the less prestigious job of deciding whether to press charges in cases brought to the office for review by law enforcement. Cardenas, an expert in "wearer'' DNA found on clothing, also will no longer handle cold cases, though it is unclear whether she will continue to play what a 2012 office publication called a "key role in maintaining the National DNA Database for Santa Clara County.'' The office declined to comment on whether either employee will face disciplinary sanctions ranging from counseling to suspension to being fired. Kajani also may face a State Bar reprimand if he is found to have suppressed evidence or misled a judge. Contact Tracey Kaplan at 408-278-3482. Follow her at Twitter.com/tkaplanreport.
I think the problem here is the government has been demonizing marijuana for the past 75 years and many employers are brainwashed about marijuana because of that. Personally I think it is silly for employers to fire people for using marijuana when it doesn't effect their job performance. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/us/legal-use-of-marijuana-clashes-with-workplace-drug-testing.html?hpw&rref=us&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well Legal Use of Marijuana Clashes With Job Rules By JACK HEALYSEPT. 7, 2014 DENVER — Brandon Coats knew he was going to fail his drug test. Paralyzed in a car crash when he was 16, he had been using medical marijuana since 2009 to relieve the painful spasms that jolted his body. But he smoked mostly at night, and said marijuana had never hurt his performance answering customer calls for a Colorado satellite-television provider. So when his employer, Dish Network, asked Mr. Coats to take a random drug screen, he was not surprised when the test came back positive for marijuana. He told his bosses why, but when he got to work the following week, he said, “my card wouldn’t open up the door.” He was fired for violating the company’s drug-free workplace rules, despite having a medical marijuana card. Continue reading the main story “There are a lot of people out there who need jobs, can do a good job, but in order for them to live their lives, they have to have this,” said Mr. Coats, who is 35. “A person can drink all night long, be totally hung over the next day and go to work and there’s no problem with it.” But when it comes to marijuana, Mr. Coats and other users are discovering that marijuana’s recent strides toward the legal and cultural mainstream are running aground at the office. Even as 23 states allow medical or recreational marijuana, employment experts say that most businesses are keeping their drug-free policies. The result is a clash between a culture that increasingly accepts marijuana and companies that will fire employees who use it. Even in Colorado and Washington, the country’s most marijuana-friendly states, a glance at online classified ads lays out an unwelcome landscape for marijuana smokers. “Please do not apply if you are NOT drug free or carry a medical marijuana card,” warns one job listing for a mechanic in Denver. A Chevrolet dealership in the suburb of Aurora tells applicants, “We do screen for medical or recreational marijuana.” In Seattle, a recycling company looking for a welder cautions that they are a “zero-tolerance company including marijuana!!” Employers and business groups say the screenings identify drug-abusing workers, create a safer workplace, lower their insurance costs and, in some cases, are required by law. But marijuana advocates say the prohibitions amount to discrimination, either against people using marijuana to treat a medical condition or against people who smoke it because they simply have the legal right to do so, off the clock and away from the office. “It wasn’t like I was getting high on the job,” Mr. Coats said. “I would smoke right before I go to bed, and that little bit would help me get through my days.” On Sept. 30, he will take that argument before the Colorado Supreme Court in a lawsuit challenging his 2010 firing. For years, courts in Colorado and across the country have ruled against marijuana users, saying that companies have the right to create their own drug policies. But legal experts say that if Mr. Coats prevails — he lost 2-1 in an appellate ruling — his case could transform how businesses must treat marijuana users. Mr. Coats’s lawyer, Michael Evans, argues that Mr. Coats’s use of medical marijuana should fall under a state law that prohibits companies from firing workers for legal, off-duty activities that might rankle an employer. Dish Network argues that smoking marijuana can hardly be considered legal because it breaks federal law. If Dish loses the case, the company wrote in a brief to the court, “Dish (and every other Colorado employer) can no longer maintain a drug-free policy” and companies across the state could risk losing federal contracts because they no longer complied with federal drug-free workplace laws. After Colorado voted in 2012 to allow adults to buy, sell and grow their own recreational marijuana, scarcely any businesses relaxed their own rules, according to a survey by the Mountain States Employers Council, which represents 3,500 companies. Seventy-one percent left their drug-testing policies in place, and 21 percent actually imposed stricter rules. “People were scared they were going to have a stoned work force,” said Curtis Graves, a staff lawyer for the group. A survey by Quest Diagnostics, which conducts millions of drug tests across the country, found that positive results for marijuana rose in both Colorado and Washington in the year after legalization measures passed. In Colorado, the number of urine samples testing positive for marijuana rose to 2.3 percent in 2013 from 1.92 percent in 2012. In Washington, the rates rose to 2.38 percent from 1.94. A positive test result can derail a career, say people who have been fired for marijuana use. In New Mexico, a physician assistant named Donna Smith who had used medical marijuana to treat symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder lost her health care job in February after failing a drug test. The health care provider where she had been working, Presbyterian Health Services, said Ms. Smith had worked for an outside staffing agency and had a temporary assignment with Presbyterian. One condition of that work was a drug screen. “Presbyterian is committed to patient safety and we believe that a drug-free workplace is a key component,” Presbyterian said in a statement. Ms. Smith, who is suing Presbyterian, said she had been able to find only one sporadic job since then, and has cashed out an I.R.A. and spent her savings. “I can’t find any work,” she said. Recently a handful of businesses in Colorado cautiously opened up to marijuana, said Mr. Graves of the Mountain States Employers Council. They decided their fears were overblown, and have asked the group to help them revise their drug-testing policies to remove marijuana from the mix. In Washington State, the Titus-Will network of car dealerships and service centers now tells job applicants they will have to pass a “pre-employment profile test, background check and drug screen (excluding marijuana).” In Colorado, a handful of technology and marketing firms that do not test for drugs have told their employees: Do what you want off the clock, but come to work sober and alert. Even the marijuana industry has grappled with whether to drug-test its employees. Outlawing marijuana use would be the height of hypocrisy. But in a closely scrutinized industry that deals with huge amounts of cash, potent doses of cannabis oil and marijuana-laced foods, businesses say their workers cannot be stoned at work. At Open Vape, which sells marijuana vaporizers, employees take a computer test to determine their baseline cognitive skills. If a worker comes back from a break red-eyed and acting hazy, the company has them take the test, to see if anything is amiss. “Just as we wouldn’t want folks going out and having a two- to three-martini lunch, we shouldn’t have folks going out and smoking a joint during lunch,” said David Kochman, the company’s general counsel. But the message has not gotten through to everyone. Todd Mitchem, who runs a marijuana consulting business, said he recently got a phone call from an man interested in attending a marijuana job fair called CannaSearch in Denver later this month. But the applicant had one question: Would there be a room where people could smoke pot? “The answer is no,” Mr. Mitchem said. “You can’t do that at the job fair.” A version of this article appears in print on September 8, 2014, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Legal Use of Marijuana Clashes With Job Rules. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
As Two Men Go Free, a Dogged Ex-Prosecutor Digs In You think your going to get a fair trial??? Don't make me laugh!!!! http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/us/as-2-go-free-joe-freeman-britt-a-dogged-ex-prosecutor-digs-in.html?hpw&rref=us&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well As Two Men Go Free, a Dogged Ex-Prosecutor Digs In By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.SEPT. 7, 2014 LUMBERTON, N.C. — The most memorable moment of the trial that put Henry McCollum and Leon Brown behind bars for three decades for a hideous 1983 rape and murder was a display of brilliant courtroom theatrics. District Attorney Joe Freeman Britt of Robeson County, who stood 6-foot-6 and came to be known as America’s “Deadliest D.A.,” asked jurors to try to hold their breath for five minutes — the time it took the 11-year-old victim to choke to death, after her killer stuffed her panties down her throat with a stick — to get a small sense of the horror she experienced. The jury came back with two of the more than 40 death penalty convictions Mr. Britt won over almost two decades. Those two convictions were obtained on the basis of inconsistent, soon recanted, confessions from two mentally impaired teenagers who said they had been coerced to sign statements written by interrogators, and testimony by an informer who previously did not implicate the two. They were overturned last week, and Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown were exonerated and set free. Their release concluded a judicial horror story in which the two men were sent to death row though no physical evidence linked them to the murder. At the same time, a serial sex offender who lived less than 100 yards from the crime scene — and who, a few weeks after that murder, would kill a teenage girl nearby in strikingly similar circumstances — was never pursued as a suspect. But if the case was finally closed, the episode reopened ugly memories of what critics say was a merciless criminal justice system that ran roughshod over helpless people for decades in this poor, sprawling, racially volatile county sometime known as the Great State of Robeson. At the heart of that is the legacy of Joe Freeman Britt, who earned a spot in “Guinness World Records” and a “60 Minutes” profile for his prowess in sending people to death row. (Only two were eventually executed. The most infamous was Velma Barfield, 52, who died from lethal injection in 1984 for killing her fiancé by poisoning his beer.) And whereas Mr. Britt, now 79 and retired, once dominated this county and won headlines for convictions, now some on both sides of the courtroom see a different tale. The current district attorney, Johnson Britt, whose grandfather was first cousin to Joe Freeman Britt’s father, suggested that his predecessor could be tyrannical. “He is a bully, and that’s the way he ran this office,” he said. “People were afraid of him. Lawyers were afraid of him. They were intimidated by his tactics. And he didn’t mind doing it that way.” He added: “You treat people with dignity, and you can get a whole lot more done that way than you can by trying to run over people. And that’s part of his legacy, that he ran over people.” In a subsequent interview, Joe Freeman Britt made it clear that Johnson Britt was not his kind of prosecutor, either. “Well, let’s say, if I was a bully, he is a pussy. How about that?” the elder Mr. Britt said. “I think Johnson Britt has been hanging around too much with the wine and cheese crowd.” Of last week’s ruling, which was spurred by a North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission investigation and supported by the younger Mr. Britt, he added: “I thought the D.A. just threw up his hands and capitulated, and the judge didn’t have any choice but to do what he did. No question about it, absolutely they are guilty.” No one ever accused Joe Freeman Britt of being a soft touch, particularly in the era when Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown were tried. Bisected by Interstate 95, the main artery between Florida and New York, Robeson County saw the drug trade come to fill part of the vacuum after textiles vanished and tobacco faded. Even today, Robeson has the state’s highest violent crime rate. Over the years, another element has been a three-way racial split — white, black and American Indian — and complaints from the latter two groups of discrimination by whites who held power despite being a numerical minority. Flash points included protests over the killing in 1986 of an unarmed drug suspect by a deputy sheriff — a son of the sheriff at the time — and what many saw as a hasty, incomplete investigation that found no wrongdoing. Two years later, American Indian activists took 19 hostages at the local newspaper to protest discrimination and corruption in the criminal justice system. Nonetheless, the McCollum and Brown case seems destined to become the signature one of Joe Freeman Britt’s tenure. And to critics, especially the current district attorney, it was remarkable what was overlooked: any pursuit of Roscoe Artis as a suspect. Mr. Artis, who had already served prison time and committed violent sexual assaults, lived next to the soybean field in tiny Red Springs, where the victim was discovered. Investigators found a cigarette there which, at trial in 1984, Joe Freeman Britt implied belonged to one of the killers. Photo Henry McCollum upon his release last week after more than 30 years on death row. Credit Michael Biesecker/Associated Press In fact, recent tests found that the cigarette had Mr. Artis’s DNA, setting off the process that led to the release of Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown. Mr. Artis confessed to and was found guilty of raping and killing another teenage girl in similar circumstances four weeks after — and a short distance from — the murder Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown were charged with. He remains in prison. There is no sign that investigators or prosecutors pursued the theory that he might have killed both girls. “What are the chances of this similar, if not same, crime occurring in this small town, and there not being a connection?” said Johnson Britt. “How could they not make this connection? The same prosecutor handled both trials, 90 days apart. I’m still dismayed.” Also distressing, he said, were violations of the “Brady rule” requiring that exculpatory information be handed over to the defense. Three days before trial, the Red Springs police sought to test a beer can found at the scene for fingerprints of Mr. Artis and L. P. Sinclair, listing both as suspects. The can had two fingerprints, one from the victim, another from neither Mr. McCollum nor Mr. Brown. But mysteriously, tests for the other two men never were performed. None of that was shared with defense lawyers, Johnson Britt said. Nor was the information that Mr. Sinclair, the informer who said Mr. McCollum had admitted killing the girl, had previously said he did not know anything about the murder, and a lie-detector test indicated he was telling the truth. Another concern: the Red Springs police insisted for years that they no longer had any physical evidence. But this summer, Innocence Commission officials discovered evidence at the police station that included hair samples from the scene. No DNA from the newly found evidence matched Mr. McCollum’s or Mr. Brown’s. Kenneth J. Rose, a lawyer for Mr. McCollum and senior staff attorney of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, said the confessions that constituted almost the entire case were false. An investigator knowledgeable about the crime scene and the autopsy attended Mr. McCollum’s interrogation, contaminating a session at which investigators fed his client details, Mr. Rose contends. Taken at face value, he added, the statement from Mr. McCollum purports to show a mentally impaired defendant somehow with precise recall of many crime scene details, including the brand and number of beer cans, and brand of cigarettes smoked by other perpetrators who, the confession states, were also involved. (Two supposed co-conspirators were quickly found to have credible alibis.) “It’s just astounding that people given so much power over other people’s lives, and who can totally destroy people’s lives, are so unwilling to consider facts,” said Mr. Rose, who intends to petition the governor for an innocence pardon. (At Mr. McCollum’s 1991 retrial, one interrogator testified that details of the confession did not come from the police. Another of the investigators on the case, Kenneth Sealey, now the Robeson County sheriff, did not return a phone call seeking comment.) Johnson Britt says there is no indication the police had informed Joe Freeman Britt about Mr. Sinclair’s polygraph results or the aborted fingerprint testing. The elder Mr. Britt said he did not remember either piece of evidence, nor could he recall any investigator suggesting a connection between the murders. He also said he could not understand why much faith is put in DNA evidence, saying Mr. Artis could have dropped the cigarette in the field at a time unrelated to the murder. (At trial, he told jurors that, “lo and behold,” butts at the scene were Newports, which he implied were smoked by the other supposed perpetrators described in one of the confessions.) Nor is he swayed by the argument that the defendants — with I.Q.’s in the 60s and 50s — were too impaired to appreciate the confessions written by investigators that they signed. “When we tried those cases, every time they would bring in shrinks to talk about how retarded they were,” he said. “It went on and on and on, blah-blah-blah.” He chafes, too, at critics who say he pursued verdicts for personal glory. “I’m not proud of the number of death penalty cases I’ve done,” he said, calling them a necessary pursuit. Woody Bowen, a Lumberton lawyer who worked for Joe Freeman Britt for a dozen years, called the McCollum and Brown incarcerations an “unspeakable tragedy.” But he said his former boss was fair and ethical — albeit, stern — and would not have withheld evidence or used coerced confessions. “He was disliked, but it was mostly by lawyers who didn’t like getting whupped,” Mr. Bowen said. Angus Thompson, the public defender here since the 1980s, had a different recollection: Withholding information was common back then. “They didn’t give a darn about Brady,” he said. “There is another book, other than the Guinness Book of World Records, that we all have to face,” Mr. Thompson added. “One of the most dreadful words in the capital case, when a person is convicted and sentenced and put to death, and the judge imposes that death sentence, and I’ve heard it said many times, is, ‘God have mercy on your soul; he’s in your custody, bailiff.’ I hope God has mercy on Joe Freeman Britt’s soul.” Jonathan M. Katz contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/us/the-rise-of-the-swat-team-in-american-policing.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=LargeMediaHeadlineSum&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 The Rise of the SWAT Team in American Policing SEPT. 7, 2014 By CLYDE HABERMAN Posse comitatus is not a phrase that trips lightly off every tongue. It is typically translated from Latin as “force of the county.” Anyone who has ever watched an old Western movie will instantly recognize the first word as referring to men deputized by the sheriff to chase down some varmints who went thataway. (Rappers and their tag-alongs later gave “posse” a different context.) The full phrase is more obscure, but the concept that it embraces is enshrined in American law. The Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878 at the end of Reconstruction and amended but slightly over the decades, prohibits the nation’s armed forces from being used as a police force within the United States. Soldiers, the reasoning goes, exist to fight wars. Chasing local wrongdoers is a job for cops. But many police departments today are so heavily armed with Pentagon-supplied hand-me-downs — tools of war like M-16 rifles, armored trucks, grenade launchers and more — that the principle underlying the Posse Comitatus Act can seem as if it, too, has gone thataway. Questions about whether police forces are overly militarized have been around for years. They are now being asked with new urgency because of the recent turmoil in Ferguson, Mo., where unarmed demonstrators protesting the fatal police shooting of a teenager faced off for a while against mightily armed officers in battle dress and gas masks. What the world saw were lawmen looking more like combat troops in the Mideast than peacekeepers in the Midwest. The militarized nature of modern American policing infuses this first installment of Retro Report, a weekly video documentary series that examines major news stories from the past and explores what has happened since. The focus this week is on SWAT teams, whose numbers have soared across the country, in rugged cities and in sleepy towns. They are the principal beneficiaries of the heavy-duty military equipment that the federal government has supplied since the early 1990s, in a transfer program that has gained steam in recent years with the withdrawal of American ground forces, first from Iraq and soon from Afghanistan. The video traces the rise of SWAT units from their earliest days in 1960s Los Angeles. There, Daryl F. Gates, who would later become chief of that city’s police force, championed a sturdily armed squad of trained officers as an essential tool of law enforcement after the deadly Watts riots of 1965. Mr. Gates fancied the name Special Weapons Attack Team. “Attack” made some elected officials wince, though. What emerged instead was Special Weapons and Tactics — same acronym but sounding somewhat less aggressive. Los Angeles’s SWAT team tested its mettle in 1969 against a local Black Panther militia and again in 1974 during a fierce firefight with the Symbionese Liberation Army, a bizarre but dangerous band of radicals best known for having kidnapped the media heiress Patricia Hearst. Its bona fides thus established, SWAT units spread across the national landscape, romanticized in song and on television. To these units’ defenders, the need could not be more fundamental: The world is dangerous. Some drug lords have weaponry that would be the envy of small armies; the police cannot possibly take them on with mere handguns. Terrorism lurks as an ever-present threat. And sudden menace demanding a well-armed police response can arise even in the most tranquil places. Indeed, the roster of place names identified principally with gun horrors has grown long: Newtown, Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech. On and on. Not surprisingly, critics of militarized policing have a different take. Some are troubled by what a retired District of Columbia police sergeant, Bill Donnelly, once belittled as “commando-chic regalia.” With all that armored gear and firepower, Mr. Donnelly wrote to The Washington Post in 1997, “one tends to throw caution to the wind.” Another skeptic is Peter B. Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University interviewed by Retro Report. Professor Kraska has studied this issue for decades. Originally, he said, SWAT deployment was supposed to be reserved for truly perilous situations — hostage-takings, high-powered shootouts and the like. Now, these teams execute routine warrants in “no-knock” drug raids, bursting into homes with a show of force that often far exceeds the threat to them. The number of such raids has exploded from a few thousand a year in the early 1980s to tens of thousands today. Other critics, like the American Civil Liberties Union, note a stark racial disparity, with blacks and Latinos more likely than whites to be targets. Continue reading the main story In the process, relationships between many police departments and the public they serve are intrinsically altered. Officer Friendly has been replaced by someone looking more like G.I. Joe. The blurring of distinctions between police and the military has troubled people like Lawrence J. Korb, a longtime analyst of national security policies, who was an assistant defense secretary in President Ronald Reagan’s first term. Mr. Korb was not happy when the Reagan administration, in the early 1980s, loosened some restrictions in the Posse Comitatus Act to enable the armed forces to get more involved in the domestic “war on drugs.” His objection was encapsulated in a 1997 interview with The Dallas Morning News. “The military is much more likely to use force of arms because that’s what they’re trained to do,” he said. “The military, to put it bluntly, is trained to vaporize, not Mirandize.” Over the last two decades, SWAT units have become ever more heavily armed. Under the so-called 1033 Program, named for a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, the federal government has transferred vast amounts of military equipment — machine guns and ammunition, helicopters, night-vision gear, armored cars — to local police departments. The process accelerated after the Sept. 11 attacks, under both President George W. Bush and President Obama. Inevitably, some people, including police chiefs, have asked if all this amounts to a solution in search of a problem. Take the transfer of MRAPs, the military term for mine-resistant ambush-protected armored vehicles. How many minefields are there on America’s Main Streets? Also inevitably, mistakes are made. A wrenching example is captured in the Retro Report video, involving a 19-month-old boy who was critically injured in May when a SWAT team in Georgia fired a stun grenade into a house that was the target of a drug raid. The officers were searching for their suspect in the wrong place. Their grenade landed in the infant’s crib. There is yet another inevitability. After all that happened in Ferguson, a backlash against militarized policing has gained force. In late August, Mr. Obama ordered a review of the equipment-transfer program. Senators said they would hold their own hearings this month. It is much too soon, though, to tell if this longstanding law enforcement strategy is truly about to go thataway. Correction: September 8, 2014 A previous version of this article misstated where a SWAT team fired a stun grenade into a house that was the target of a drug raid. The incident happened in Georgia, not Virginia. The video with this article is part of a documentary series presented by The New York Times. The video project was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report has a staff of 13 journalists and 10 contributors led by Kyra Darnton, a former “60 Minutes” producer. It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle. Previous Retro Report videos can be found here, and articles here.
Police intelligence targets cash Or in common English how the cops are using the RICO laws to rob us serfs of money!!!! I guess you could also call it policing for dollars, where the cops get to keep a cut of the money they steal. If you read your history you will find the RICO laws were passed to allow the government to seize all the assets of the Mafia and other organized crimes groups. Congress felt that since the cops couldn't constitutionally dig up enough evidence to convict Mafia criminals and send them to prison they would pass a bunch of unconstitutional laws allowing the government to seize the assets of suspected Mafia criminals. Over time crooked cops and prosecutors figured out they could used these unconstitutional RICO laws aimed at the Mafia on everybody, and that's who we got here. Last but not least much of the stuff in this article reminds me of the "9 Step Reid Method" which most cops in the USA used to question people with. The "9 Step Reid Method" basically replaced beating suspected criminals with rubber hoses to make them talk with beating them with psychological rubber hoses to force them to confess. The "9 Step Reid Method" works so well it routinely gets people to confess to crimes they didn't commit. Just for fun Google "9 Step Reid Method" http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/07/police-intelligence-targets-cash/?hpid=z1 Police intelligence targets cash Reports on drivers, training by firm fueled law enforcement aggressiveness Written by Robert O’Harrow Jr, Michael Sallah Published on September 7, 2014 During the rush to improve homeland security a decade ago, an invitation went out from Congress to a newly retired California highway patrolman named Joe David. A lawmaker asked him to brief the Senate on how highway police could keep “our communities safe from terrorists and drug dealers.” David had developed an uncanny talent for finding cocaine and cash in cars and trucks, beginning along the remote highways of the Mojave Desert. His reputation had spread among police officers after he started a training firm in 1989 to teach his homegrown stop-and-seizure techniques. He called it Desert Snow. Stop and Seize: In recent years, thousands of people have had cash confiscated by police without being charged with crimes. The Post looks at the police culture behind the seizures and the people who were forced to fight the government to get their money back. The demonstration he gave on Capitol Hill in November 2003 startled onlookers with the many ways smugglers and terrorists can hide contraband, cash and even weapons of mass destruction in vehicles. It also made David’s name in Washington and launched his firm into the fast-expanding marketplace for homeland security, where it would thrive in an atmosphere of fear and help shape law enforcement on highways in every corner of the country. Over the next decade, David’s tiny family firm would brand itself as a counterterrorism specialist and work with the departments of Homeland Security and Justice. It would receive millions from federal contracts and grants as the leader of a cottage industry of firms teaching aggressive methods for highway interdiction. Along the way, working in near obscurity, the firm would press the limits of the law and raise new questions about police power, domestic intelligence and the rights of American citizens. In 2004, David started a private intelligence network for police known as the Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System. It enabled officers and federal authorities to share reports and chat online. In recent years, the network had more than 25,000 individual members, David said. “Throughout history law enforcement investigations have been stymied because of law enforcement’s inability to move information and because enforcement entities refuse to work together,” David wrote in a 2012 letter to Black Asphalt members that was obtained by The Post. “This website allows all of us to do that.” Operating in collaboration with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal entities, Black Asphalt members exchanged tens of thousands of reports about American motorists, many of whom had not been charged with any crimes, according to a company official and hundreds of internal documents obtained by The Post. For years, it received no oversight by government, even though its reports contained law enforcement sensitive information about traffic stops and seizures, along with hunches and personal data about drivers, including Social Security numbers and identifying tattoos. Black Asphalt also has served as a social hub for a new brand of highway interdictors, a group that one Desert Snow official has called “a brotherhood.” Among other things, the site hosts an annual competition to honor police who seize the most contraband and cash on the highways. As part of the contest, Desert Snow encouraged state and local patrol officers to post seizure data along with photos of themselves with stacks of currency and drugs. Some of the photos appear in a rousing hard-rock video that the Guthrie, Okla.-based Desert Snow uses to promote its training courses. Annual winners receive Desert Snow’s top honorific: Royal Knight. The next Royal Knight will be named at a national conference hosted in Virginia Beach next year in collaboration with Virginia State Police. In just one five-year stretch, Desert Snow-trained officers reported taking $427 million during highway encounters, according to company officials. A Post analysis found the training has helped fuel a rise in cash seizures in the Justice Department’s main asset forfeiture program. In January last year, David hired himself and his top trainers out as a roving private interdiction unit for the district attorney’s office in rural Caddo County, Okla. Working with local police, Desert Snow contract employees took in more than $1 million over six months from drivers on the state’s highways, including Interstate 40 west of Oklahoma City. Under its contract, the firm was allowed to keep 25 percent of the cash. When Caddo County District Court Judge David A. Stephens learned that Desert Snow employees were not sworn law enforcement officers in Oklahoma, he denounced the arrangement as “shocking,” and he threatened to put David in jail if it continued. The state’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter called for an investigation of the district attorney and criminal charges against Desert Snow employees for impersonating law enforcement officers. “Desert Snow. It sounds like a covert military operation or a street name for designer cocaine. Truth be told, it’s something much more sinister in my modest opinion,” Oklahoma defense attorney Adam Banner wrote in a legal blog, adding that it “seems to amount to little more than a free-for-all cash grab.” District Attorney Jason Hicks set aside more than a dozen convictions relating to the seizures and promised a review. He said he was just trying to offset the loss of federal funding for a drug task force. “I fully believe we are in compliance with state law and, at the time the program was formed, my intent was to see that my investigators received top-notch training and to ensure that we could continue the operation of the drug and violent crime task force,” Hicks said. David A. Harris, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, said highway interdiction now “works just like all the drug interdiction efforts” in the 1990s. “But the focus is on money,” he said. “That makes it all the more insidious.” Desert Snow officials in interviews disclaimed the practice of targeting drivers for money, sometimes known as “policing for profit.” They said that seizing cash is a proven tool for hurting drug and crime organizations. But privately, they promote a book that extols the quest for cash. Ron Hain, a marketing official with Desert Snow and a full-time deputy sheriff in Kane County, Ill., has urged police to use cash seizures to bolster municipal coffers. “In Roads: A Working Solution to America’s War on Drugs,” a book Hain self-published under the pen name Charles Haines in 2011, states that departments can “pull in expendable cash hand over fist.” The firm defends its training as first-rate, and David once likened the firm’s students to special forces operators. “Like the SEAL team, Army Rangers or any other top notch outfit it requires commitment and perseverance to be part of ‘the team,’ ” David wrote in a sales pitch posted on Black Asphalt. Desert Snow officials have taken pains to ensure that Black Asphalt complies with all laws and that its site is securely encrypted, David wrote in his 2012 letter to the membership. He said the system does not store any sensitive information about drivers but only passes it along to law enforcement. Only “certified peace officers” can access the system. After questions arose several years ago about the system’s private ownership, David transferred authority to the sheriff’s office in Logan County, just north of Oklahoma City. David said that more than 16,000 “major incidents” had been reported through the system, leading to hundreds of follow-up investigations, arrests and seized assets. “Over the years I have also received phone calls and letters of gratitude from all levels,” David wrote in 2012. “I have even met with federal people in both Washington D.C. and elsewhere regarding the website and have even received financial contributions for the Black Asphalt from District Attorneys, agencies and federal entities.” DHS spokeswoman Marsha Catron downplayed the department’s involvement, saying in a statement that it has awarded “Desert Snow less than 20 contracts since 2008 for specialized law enforcement training and educational services.” That includes three contracts this year worth more than $268,000 with Customs and Border Protection, one of them in August. Catron defended the use of Black Asphalt. “The network simply allows law enforcement officers to alert fellow agencies about seizures that have been made,” her statement said. “Participation in this network by state, local or federal agencies is voluntary. This kind of networking allows law enforcement agencies to develop leads, corroborate investigative information and aids in the pursuit of criminal enterprises.” She said that Black Asphalt reports no longer contain any personally identifiable information about drivers. DEA spokesman Rusty Payne said that computers at the agency’s El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) once housed Black Asphalt. In a subsequent e-mail, Payne said that agents only used it as a source of information. “We would go in there to grab information,” he said. Payne also told The Post that the DEA had recently stopped using Black Asphalt reports because of concerns that they “would never hold up in court.” Payne said officials at Justice and DEA are now reviewing their use of the system. However, as recently as May, internal Black Asphalt records continued to list officials at the agency, along with officials at DHS, CBP and ICE, as members. Joe David, 61, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. This account is based on interviews with two Desert Snow officials and more than a dozen current and former members of the Black Asphalt network, along with hundreds of internal documents, legal records and the account given by Hain in “In Roads.” David married as a teenager, started a family and worked his way up from the road patrol. He was smart and gregarious, with a close-cropped haircut and a special way with the drivers he encountered. His career began on the hard-baked desert highways of southeast California, where he was assigned soon after joining the California Highway Patrol in 1985. From the start, he was intrigued by the cat-and-mouse game with smugglers. One day, he was driving through Needles, Calif., not far from the Arizona border, when he saw a Ford Thunderbird on the side of the road. The driver and passenger struck David as suspicious. Though he had no evidence of a crime, he asked whether he could search the car. The driver agreed but David’s search was turning up blank — until an old school acquaintance drove up and stopped to watch. The classmate happened to be an automobile upholsterer. David asked him to look at the car and see if anything was amiss in the interior. The classmate spotted an irregularity in the sewing on the seats. Hidden underneath was 44 pounds of cocaine. David was hooked on interdiction. Year after year, he made big seizures. He once found 2,500 pounds of cocaine in a box truck, worth more than $22 million. “Trooper David became a one-man wrecking ball, and terrorized members of drug cartels for years to come,” Hain wrote. David earned the nickname “Canine,” and he claimed that he could smell cocaine concealed among other odors, like detergent, court records show. He began moonlighting as a personal instructor for police who found the prospect of highway interdiction exciting and useful. He started in the late 1980s with informal tutorials over backyard barbecues and later moved the sessions into the family garage. Today, Desert Snow is still a family business that employs his wife and children. From the beginning, David lectured about the damage drugs do to communities and portrayed his students as soldiers on the front lines of a war. “These pioneers realized there is one vital course of action for the local police officer to begin conquering our nation’s continuing battle: knowledge, training in profiles, and the relentless pursuit of narcotics smugglers,” Hain wrote. Facing scrutiny In the early 1990s, as he took on teaching assignments during breaks from his day job, David’s reputation grew. Soon, he was teaching local police for the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center, a clearinghouse for information about drug smugglers and their associates. He also taught for the Drug Interdiction Assistance Program at the Department of Transportation, which focuses on commercial vehicle safety. But his methods came under scrutiny in court. In July 1993, David stopped a man driving a half-ton pickup with tinted windows on Interstate 40 near the California-Arizona border. He asked the driver, a Hispanic man, to roll down the window and hand over his license and registration. David said he thought the driver was suspiciously nervous and he thought he smelled cocaine though the open window, according to court records. David was by now a canine officer, but he didn’t have his dog with him that day. He told the driver to stand on the side of the road and began conversing with him. David eventually told the driver that he was convinced there was a large of amount of cocaine in the truck and asked for permission to search. The driver was reluctant, but he eventually signed a bilingual form giving consent. David found more than 40 pounds of the drug. At a court hearing, the driver’s attorney unsuccessfully argued that the evidence should be suppressed because it was obtained through intimidation. David responded that he behaved appropriately. Prosecutors said he spoke “without coercion in a low-key conversational tone.” But a three-member federal appeals court ordered a new trial for the driver, saying David overstepped his authority to obtain approval for a warrantless search. “Officer David persisted in his ‘low key’ questioning until he got the answer he sought,” the court’s ruling said. “Such persistent questioning is characteristic of a stationhouse interrogation.” The court ruled that David had improperly detained the driver without arresting him. The court did not specify how long he kept the driver on the roadside, but it said David should have given the driver a Miranda warning that he had a right to remain silent after David concluded he was going to arrest him. “Miranda warnings are intended to deter precisely the sort of conduct engaged in by Officer David: isolation, psychological pressure, and relentless pursuit of a confession.” —Court statement “It takes 30 seconds to give Miranda warnings,” the court said. “Officer David delayed giving Miranda warnings in order to subject [the driver] to psychological pressure to make incriminating statements. That was a blatant Miranda violation.” “Miranda warnings are intended to deter precisely the sort of conduct engaged in by Officer David: isolation, psychological pressure, and relentless pursuit of a confession,” the court said. Desert Snow would adopt “Relentless Pursuit” as the firm’s motto. By the late 1990s, David also participated as an instructor in Operation Pipeline, a highway interdiction program run by the DEA that trained nearly 27,000 police in 48 states over more than a decade. The program encouraged the same sorts of techniques that David had long employed on his own: high volumes of stops for minor traffic infractions and conversations with drivers to look for inconsistencies and obtain permission for warrantless searches. David received acclaim for a Pipeline stop of a truck-trailer in 1998. Pulling the vehicle over on a minor infraction — straddling two lanes — David and his partner found 720 pounds of marijuana. About the same time, Democrats in the California statehouse formed a task force to investigate claims that Operation Pipeline was profiling Hispanic drivers. “Pipeline teams are able to pull over a great many cars to find drivers who fit established ‘profiles,’” the task force report said. “If a motorist ‘fits’ the profile, then the officer’s goal becomes to conduct a warrantless search of the car and its occupants, in the hope of finding drugs, cash and/or guns.” The ACLU found that the majority of those stopped nationwide by interdiction programs such as Operation Pipeline were minorities, according to a 1999 report titled “Driving While Black.” “All the evidence to date suggests that using traffic laws for non-traffic purposes has been a disaster for people of color,” said the report, written by Harris, the University of Pittsburgh law scholar. “Law enforcement decisions based on hunches rather than evidence are going to suffer from racial stereotyping, whether conscious or unconscious.” The ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit over such stops, and in 2003 the California Highway Patrol settled, paying $875,000 and agreeing to provide additional training for officers but admitting to no wrongdoing. That year, David retired and began ramping up Desert Snow. The new Department of Homeland Security was forming and a new market was opening up in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Carl Mauger of Desert Snow explains how terrorists can hide explosives to Capitol Police Officer Michael Howde in 2002. He also explains how a Molotov cocktail works. A year later, Desert Snow founder Joe David would make a name for himself with a similar presentation on Capitol Hill. The invitation from Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) in the fall of 2003 paved the way for David and Desert Snow. David took a tractor-trailer to Capitol Hill, where he surprised lawmakers and Capitol Police by revealing myriad cubbyholes for hiding contraband. Once he would have focused on drugs and money. Now he emphasized that the hiding places could be used by terrorists. Funding for Desert Snow soon came from DHS, which provided a grant to help the firm tailor its instruction to counterterrorism. Over the years, the firm has received scores of contracts from DHS, Justice and other federal agencies worth more than $2.5 million. States and localities also have used homeland security grants and seized cash to pay for classes from Desert Snow and its competitors. In 2004, one of the main thrusts of the homeland security efforts was to connect the dots of potential threats through information-sharing. Officials at ICE also began working with the DEA on an initiative to fight cash smuggling through better intelligence and collaboration with local and state police. The effort was framed as a fight against terror financing. “To address this increasing threat, the DEA, IRS [Criminal Investigation] and ICE are working together to initiate a bulk currency program to coordinate all U.S. highway interdiction money seizures,” DEA Administrator Karen Tandy told a Senate panel. That year, David launched Black Asphalt. Run as a private adjunct to the for-profit Desert Snow, Black Asphalt’s goal was to enable highway patrolmen in different states to informally share information about drivers as quickly as possible. David has said he saw the need for such a system when he was a Pipeline instructor and noticed that only a quarter of the highway stops were being reported to anyone. Such information could be valuable to the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center and the 28 federally supported High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) task forces across the nation. “The Black Asphalt was designed to support EPIC, HIDTA and other government programs,” David wrote in his 2012 letter to the membership. Black Asphalt soon attracted thousands of members from across the country. One lauded feature of the site is an extensive “concealment database” of hiding places in vehicles. By 2011, it had more than 30,000 members, according to Hain. Any sworn officer can join after filling out a membership application online for a $19.95 processing fee. State and federal officials who assist in interdiction, such as intelligence analysts, can also be members. “It was built by cops for cops,” David Frye, Desert Snow’s chief trainer and former director of operations at Black Asphalt, told The Post. “It’s a specialized culture.” Using a template developed by Desert Snow, police filed thousands of automated reports through the secure Web site, whether or not the drivers had been charged, documents show. Details included the location of the stop, the vehicle identification number, the names, addresses, Social Security numbers and descriptions of the drivers. In 2005, Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Col. Jeffery B. Miller, left, and Lt. Col. Ralph Periandi listen to the pitch from a tire struck with a wrench to identify the presence of something concealed within it. More than 100 Pennsylvania State Police troopers were being trained by Desert Snow to spot everything from drugs to dirty bombs hidden inside commercial vehicles. Documents and interviews obtained by The Post show that reports were funneled to the DEA, ICE, CBP and other federal agencies. In 2009, the DEA paid $6,700 to Black Asphalt for an improved user interface with the system.. In its law enforcement-only newsletter, the National Bulk Cash Smuggling Center, a part of ICE, describes Black Asphalt as one of “its valuable law enforcement partnerships.” In another part of Black Asphalt, users posted “be on the lookout” reports, also known as BOLOs, to single out certain drivers for police attention in other jurisdictions. The private BOLO reports generally rely on police intuition rather than hard evidence or probable cause. In April, a California Highway Patrol officer stopped a woman driving in a Kentucky car that was littered with food wrappers and energy drinks. He did not believe her statement that she was driving to a funeral and asked her why she didn’t fly. She did not have good answer, he said. So he posted her driver’s license number and urged other police to be on the lookout. “She will be loaded coming back for sure,” he wrote. The July 2011 newsletter of the National Bulk Cash Smuggling Center, a part of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. To meet the growing demand for training, Desert Snow each year has cultivated up to 75 of the most successful and aggressive interdiction police officers from around the country. A part-time job at the firm’s seminars was considered prestigious. Among the trainers are Royal Knights, the stars of the interdiction world. Desert Snow charges as little as $590 for an individual for its three- and four-day workshop of lectures and hands-on training in such subjects as “roadside conversational skills” and “when and how to seize currency.” The firm often sets up its training in hotel conference rooms. The firm’s three-day “Advanced Commercial Vehicle, Criminal & Terrorist Identification & Apprehension Workshop” cost 88 students a total of $145,000, according to a price list posted by the state of New Jersey. Police are taught the techniques that David had refined over the years, including how to assess the driver for signs of nervousness. “As a general rule, the innocent motoring public doesn’t lie to you,” Frye, Desert Snow’s chief trainer and a part-time deputy in Nebraska, said in an interview. If asked in court if it is normal for drivers to be nervous after being stopped by police, they are instructed to say: “While it is true that most people are nervous when stopped by law enforcement, my training and experience has shown that once persons who are not engaged in serious criminal activities learn what type of enforcement action is being taken, their nervousness subsides.” Black Asphalt: The Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System is used to share reports of traffic stops, most related to drug enforcement, among member law enforcement officers and agencies across the country. Indicators that made police suspicious have included: Dark window tinting Air fresheners or their smell Trash littering a vehicle An inconsistent or unlikely travel story A vehicle on a long trip that is clean or lacks baggage A profusion of energy drinks A driver who is too talkative, or too quiet Signs of nervousness, such as sweating, swallowing or redness of face Designer apparel or other clothing that seems inappropriate Multiple cellphones Frye said the firm does not teach racial profiling. “We never have and we never will!” BlackAsphalt.org proclaims on its Web site. “We teach officers to conduct legal traffic stops and how to identify major criminal activity by taking into account the totality of the circumstances on each and every traffic stop.” Frye, who was also a former Nebraska state trooper, said Desert Snow instructors look for “indicators” of criminal activity. Indicators cited in Desert Snow training materials obtained by The Post include air fresheners hanging from rearview mirrors, trash on the floor and the driver’s demeanor, such as being too talkative or too quiet. “Indicators are seemingly innocent things heard, smelled and/or observed during an enforcement encounter, including the contents of the vehicle, what was said, and the manner in which it was said, which when taken in their totality and compared with the innocent motoring public and traffic patterns of that geographic area, along with the officer’s training and experience, show reasonable suspicion or probable cause that criminal activity was, is, or will be taking place,” the material states. A cornerstone of Desert Snow’s instruction rests upon two 1996 U.S. Supreme Court decisions that bolstered aggressive highway patrolling. One decision affirmed the police practice of using minor traffic infractions as pretexts to stop drivers. The other permits officers to seek consent for searches without alerting the drivers that they can refuse and leave at any time. “Police Officers Are Not Required To Inform A Motorist At The End Of A Traffic Stop That He Or She Is ‘Free To Go’ Before Seeking Permission to Search The Motorist’s Car,” the training material says. Desert Snow urges police to work toward what are known as a “consensual encounters” — beginning with asking drivers whether they mind chatting after a warning ticket has been issued. The consensual chat gives police more time to look for indicators and mitigates later questions in court about unreasonably long traffic stops. They’re also instructed in how to make their stops and seizures more defensible to judges. “One Of The Most Critical Areas Scrutinized By The Courts Is The Reason For And The Length Of Any Detention,” the material says. As business boomed, David bought a yacht and a condo in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and invited associates down for fishing trips, interviews and documents show. Starting in 2010, the firm began spending tens of thousands each quarter on the lobbying firm Brandon Associates to stoke interest in interdiction training in Washington — almost $200,000 in all through last year. Brandon Associates has arranged meetings with senior officials at DHS, documents show. Success has not shielded the company from criticism. Some of it has come from current and former Black Asphalt users who felt the site tolerated unprofessional behavior in its secure chat rooms. “We have to start policing ourselves and remembering that we are professionals,” wrote DEA Agent Donald Bailey, now retired, in a chat room. “I have seen some postings and language on here that have made me cringe and can’t believe that it was ever posted.” Computer-generated animations made by a Desert Snow marketing official featuring a cartoon cop called Larry the Interdictor have drawn especially ribald commentary. One is set in a courtroom where Larry insinuates that the defense lawyer questioning him is gay. He testifies that he disdains “Rastafarian douchebags who do nothing all day but smoke weed, live with their mom, and beat off to kiddie porn.” The video prompted hoots from Black Asphalt users online. “omg i’m still rolling!!!! this has got to be the funniest stuff ive ever heard!” one user wrote. “DUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE! That crap is HILARIOUS!” said another. “Thanks for the video laughs,” Joe David wrote. “It was great.” Larry the Interdictor was created by Hain, the Kane County deputy and author of “In Roads.” Hain told The Post said he made some of the videos as a hobby, on his own time. Others were part of a monthly marketing initiative at Desert Snow “to deliver information and statistics in an entertaining format,” he said. He said he did not write all the scripts but declined to detail who did. The Black Asphalt report narratives sometimes went on for 400 words or more, and included an officer’s intent and attitude toward defendants. Some of them were meant to be humorous and earthy. This one, about a $2.5 million cash seizure, went out to 18 DEA agents: “The driver starred [sic] blankly to the ditch, more than likely with visions of himself running through it,” one Black Asphalt report said. “But as he was fantasizing about freedom, it gave me another good look at his carotid and he was thumping. Crazy thing, but my mouth went dry. I could see that this guy was truly scared, and all I could think was ‘oh boy this is going be good.’ ” Law enforcement authorities in several states began cautioning that Black Asphalt might run afoul of laws requiring prosecutors to disclose any relevant case information to criminal defendants. In several interviews with The Post, Black Asphalt members said they did not share the reports with their superiors or prosecutors because they did not think they had to. In 2012, Kurt F. Schmid, executive director of the federal HIDTA task force in Chicago, wrote in a letter to the International Association of Chiefs of Police that such reports are “outside the bounds of [law enforcement] information flow” and so would not be made available to defendants. “Courts around the country are extremely vigilant at ensuring appropriate disclosures are made to defense counsels at criminal trials,” said the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Post. Frye has recently said in a posting on Black Asphalt that officers can address any disclosure issues by sharing Black Asphalt reports with their prosecutors. “The whole discovery argument is BS and ultimately comes down to the officer working with their prosecutors to determine what they need for each case,” he wrote. Iowa and Kansas prohibited police from filing reports into the system. Kevin Frampton, director of investigative operations at the Iowa Department of Public Safety, wrote on March 1, 2012, that the state attorney general determined that state police “sharing intelligence or investigative information with a private company creates an increased risk for civil and criminal liability for officers and the department.” Civil forfeiture cash seizures Under the federal Equitable Sharing Program, police have seized $2.5 billion since 2001 from people who were not charged with a crime and without a warrant being issued. Police reasoned that the money was crime-related. About $1.7 billion was sent back to law enforcement agencies for their use. Money sent back to local police in the United States for seizures made alone or with others On June 11, 2012, Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Gilg in Nebraska warned in a letter to state law enforcement there that such reports “may, in fact, violate state criminal law(s) and citizens’ civil rights and liberties” because they contained law-enforcement sensitive information and personal data on citizens. Hoping to maintain confidence in the system and provide an official imprimatur, David and Frye in 2012 asked the Logan County Sheriff’s Department in Guthrie, Okla., to take control of the Black Asphalt system. “Since taking control of Black Asphalt Law Enforcement Network in August of 2012 the entire website has been overhauled, updated, and improved,” Logan County Sheriff Jim Bauman wrote in an open letter to police. In an interview, Frye acknowledged that he and other Desert Snow trainers were on loan to Logan to help run the system. A search of the term Black Asphalt on Google takes computer users to the Desert Snow site. David and Frye also have sought guidance from the Bureau of Justice Assistance at the Justice Department. David P. Lewis, a senior policy adviser at Justice, said it was “a positive step” that the network had gone under the authority of Logan County, according to a December 2012 letter obtained by The Post. Lewis said the network was then being used by 12,000 officers who accessed the system 1,000 times a day, an apparent decline from previous years. “We recognize the unique and innovative nature of the Black Asphalt Web site and its efficacy for law enforcement,” Lewis wrote. “However, it is not a criminal intelligence system” subject to federal law. Lewis pointed out it did not meet federal standards for police intelligence systems, which require police to evaluate the information for relevance and a “reasonably suspected” link to criminal activity. It made 11 recommendations for improving the site, including requiring that BOLOs “be limited to situations of ‘significant investigative interest’ ” and “be based on ‘credible and reliable’ information.” In June, the Logan County Sheriff’s Office announced that it was handing over control of Black Asphalt to the sheriff’s office in Kane County. The point of contact is Deputy Ron Hain, the author of “In Roads” and the creator of Larry the Interdictor. About this story The Washington Post relied on an array of materials to explore the rise of civil seizures in recent years, with a particular focus on highway seizures made by state and local police. For details about seizures and the techniques employed by police, reporters reviewed more than 400 federal court cases in which owners of cash filed legal appeals to get it back. The Post also examined some seizures made under state forfeiture laws. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, The Post obtained a database from the Justice Department containing details about 212,000 seizures since 1996 through the Equitable Sharing Program, the federal government’s largest asset forfeiture effort. Justice officials did not release data that pinpointed the geographic location of each seizure, so it is impossible to identify precisely how many seizures occur during traffic stops. To focus on roadside stops, The Post looked at cases that were not made at businesses and that occurred without warrants or indictments: 61,998 seizures have met those criteria since Sept. 11, 2001. That group of cases was then compared to a list obtained by The Post of 1,654 departments and agencies with officers who are members of an unofficial police intelligence network known as the Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that is focused on highway stops and seizures. The Post also obtained more than 43,000 Justice Department reports from state and local police departments across the country that participated in Equitable Sharing, along with records provided by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil liberties group, to assess how seizures contribute to department budgets. Also check out this cartoon
If you ask me this is a waste of our tax dollars and almost certainly unconstitutional entrapment. The cops run ads in local newspapers or websites where the cops pretend to be prostitutes who are over 18 and are selling illegal sexual services. Of course they arrest anybody who responds to their ads offering illegal sex. Even worse the cops then try to up the crime from a misdemeanor to a felony, by claiming the imaginary prostitute is under 18, say 14 or 16 and if the john agrees they arrest him for a felony. Last but not least the penalties are rather draconian. According to this article you can get up to 24 years in prison for soliciting sex from an under age prostitute. Jesus, the cops shouldn't even be arresting people for the victimless crime of prostitution. Much less wasting our tax dollars running ads in websites offering illegal sexual services from imaginary prostitutes. http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2014/09/08/underage-solicitation-leniency-studied/15269919/ Is justice system lenient on underage solicitation? Megan Cassidy, The Republic | azcentral.com 11:42 p.m. MST September 7, 2014 A recent national study that points to judicial leniency for men who solicit sex from minors has been criticized by the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, whose prosecutors say the report reached flawed conclusions based on misguided assumptions about the application of sex-trafficking laws. The "Demanding Justice," report, released by anti-sex-trafficking group Shared Hope International and Arizona State University, researched the criminal-justice outcomes of those suspected of soliciting sex from minors — or from police decoys posing as minors — a crime they say is responsible for fueling the sex-trafficking industry. The crime of soliciting sex from a minor in Arizona carries a sentence of up to 24 years, but researchers say a Phoenix-area convict may more realistically expect an average of 4.7 years behind bars or a median term of 90 days. The study examined typical amounts of time served, both by median and by average, in three other metro areas. It found that the median time served was 180 days in the D.C.-Baltimore area, 88.5 days in Seattle and 14 days in Portland, Ore. It found that the average time served in these metro areas was 1.3 years in D.C.-Baltimore, 154 days in Portland and 86 days in Seattle. The study additionally criticized the criminal-justice system for failing to prosecute the defendants under sex-trafficking statutes. "The research shows that when they're arrested ... at state level, that they're not facing the full force of the law," said Linda Smith, president and founder of Shared Hope International. Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery said this is a flawed conclusion. In a statement released shortly after the study's debut, Montgomery criticized the small sample size that the study relied upon — 24 cases in Arizona — and stressed that 17 of these cases involved an undercover sting operation. Researchers defended their methods of study. It has been only in the past three to four years that most states have enacted severe penalties for the those convicted of soliciting sex from minors, Smith said, and the study had limited subjects with which to work. So researchers tapped into 134 cases from four sites whose agencies have devoted extensive resources to anti- demand law enforcement. Montgomery said Arizona's sex-crime statutes, including recent changes to address human trafficking that were signed into law earlier this year, are designed to incarcerate dangerous and repeat offenders, especially predators of children. "While the deterrent effect of sting operations utilizing undercover officers posing as 17- or 16-year-old minors cannot be overstated, punishments for first-time offenders caught in stings where they cannot actually have sex with a minor must be distinguished from offenders who can and/or do pay for sex with minors," he added. The debate underscores fundamental differences between groups that would presumably share the same goal of prosecuting predators of children. Shared Hope International advocates say men who solicit sex from undercover officers posing as minors are just as culpable as those who are successful in reaching an actual minor, but Maricopa County prosecuting attorneys believe that lack of a real victim does, and should, play a role in the criminal-justice process. This scenario has been visible in some of the Valley's most highly publicized cases, many of which involved undercover officers and were pleaded down to lesser offenses. Michael Gilliland, a former Sunflower Farmers Market CEO who was arrested in a 2011 sting, was sentenced to two 15-day terms after pleading guilty to misdemeanor pandering. Jerry Marfe, a former high-school teacher who was caught in a December sting, was sentenced to 15 days in jail followed by 10 years of probation. Marfe was one of 30 who were netted in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office operation. All were initially charged with one or two counts of class-2 felony child prostitution, but of those sentenced to date, 18 ended up pleading to lesser counts of pandering, class-6 child prostitution or child/ vulnerable-adult abuse. Three others pleaded to charges of class-2 or class-3 felony child prostitution. Maricopa County Attorney's Office spokesman Jerry Cobb said higher felony convictions are often handed to repeat offenders. Cobb said Shared Hope advocates fail to consider the nuances and realities of these types of cases in the realm of a criminal-justice system. Defense attorneys and several suspected buyers in these cases have rebuked the "predator" designation because of the method used for arrests. Police often rely on decoys to sweep the streets of would-be buyers. Undercover officers post ads on 18-and-over websites but later make it known that the "girl" is underage. Many defendants say they were seeking an of-age prostitute — a misdemeanor offense that turns into a serious felony when the girl is underage. "Ninety-nine percent (of johns) — they're looking for an adult," said defense attorney Mark Nermyr in an earlier interview with The Arizona Republic. "At some point, the officer sneaks age in the conversation, and that changes it from a misdemeanor — 10 days in jail — to a felony. It's not doing anything to combat child prostitution." But Smith argued that there are signs that many of the defendants intend to have sex with teens. "You're not allowed to run over somebody while under the influence of alcohol and say, 'Oops, I didn't know I drank too much,' " she said. The study operates on the notion that tougher, enforced penalties will act as a deterrent for buyers. So researchers view the issue in terms of economics: shrink the demand, reduce the supply. "If there's no market because the buyer stayed home with his own family, then the traffickers would not be out there preying on the children in our neighborhood," Smith said. Smith said it is up to police, prosecutors and judges to enforce the laws to the fullest extent, but she said a culture of tolerance for buyers is pervasive and must be reversed. Montgomery said the serious crimes of child prostitution and sex trafficking warrant an informed discussion to craft public-policy solutions. "Unfortunately, this report missed a prime opportunity to provide members of the community with accurate and actionable information to facilitate this discussion," he said.
The Marijuana Users Bill of RightsI got this from Dave Wisniewski's post in No25mileRule on Facebook The Marijuana Users Bill of Rights Posted by Ed Rosenthal on Friday, August 29, 2014 In mid-August I attended Seattle Hempfest. It was the first Hempfest since the implementation of I-502, which passed by popular vote in 2012 and “legalized” marijuana in the State of Washington. What Washington has is not legalization and it is clear to me we must define what legalization really means to users of marijuana through a Marijuana Users Bill of Rights before any more legalization laws of this kind pass. This year’s festival was probably the lamest one held in Seattle since the end of the Drug War. It was a marijuana festival with only two small designated consumption areas and although there were no cops around, most people (with the exception of yours truly) didn’t light up in public areas. Instead people snuck behind vendor tents, lit up backstage or down by the water – out of sight – remembrances of high school past. All the result of I-502. Don’t let anyone say this is legalization. Nothing is legal except possession of under an ounce of store-bought marijuana. In Washington State, legalization means possession of 28 grams is legal, 29 is a misdemeanor and 40 grams or more is a felony. Smoking in public is a misdemeanor. Home growing is a felony. The state commission is trying to eliminate medical marijuana as a separate category. Patients will be subject to the same confiscatory taxes as adult users. Driving with a minimum amount of non-intoxicating analog in blood results in a DUI. I call this the “Chauffer Employment Act” because no one who uses regularly can pass the blood test. As you can see, this is hardly legalization. It was the big lie put together by do-gooder social activists who were ignorant about the issue, took no advice from stakeholders and worked mainly with prosecutors and their kind. As a result, the law is awful, stinks of pork juice, and actually worsens the situation of the average Washington State marijuana user. This is why marijuana users should never vote for a bill that prosecutors and cops like, it’s just not in their interest. Now, some of the same people who brought this travesty to Washington State are attempting to carpetbag their way into California to create the same sort of “legalization”. It will not happen. No pasaran! It’s up to the people who have a stake in this issue, the marijuana users, to create a bill that creates a realistic, workable law that protects the interests of the people—whether or not they use marijuana. It’s not our job to placate the criminal justice system, they have no stake in this and they have no expertise to add to the discussion. The only thing they have been taught is how to recognize marijuana, bust people for it, and sadistically ruin people’s lives in a job that they chose. Most of them have irrational prejudices against marijuana and have, at best, ambivalent attitudes about people who use it. When the 2016 initiative passes in California, cops won’t have to be concerned about enforcing the law because they will not be enforcing a law. Instead marijuana will be subject to civil regulation, not criminal. Cops will be able to get back to protecting and serving their communities. Some people, such as the Washington State wimps, want us to keep the cops happy. Pardon me, but I don’t think we have to compromise with them. We have the votes and, though they might grunt and squeal, I feel about as willing to compromise with the criminal justice system as it has with us in this 77-year fight. Marijuana will be legal and the cops will not be part of the solution. As Amy Poehler is renowned for saying, “I don’t fucking care if you like it.” My main concern is that we create an initiative that will pass and be effective. So, after talking with other activists, I developed the Marijuana Initiative Bill of Rights. I think that we can develop a consensus around this and work outwards from there. Hopefully this can be used as a template for the 2016 California Initiative and other initiatives around the country. The Bill of Rights of Marijuana Users 1.) All current marijuana laws prohibiting possession, use, sales and production shall be repealed and this law will replace them. 2.) Cannabis will be placed under civil authority and regulation. Criminal penalties will apply only to a limited number of activities. 3.) All residents shall have the right to grow their own marijuana and to share it with family and friends. 4.) Medical marijuana shall be manufactured and provided separately than adult-use and a marijuana recommendation shall be treated as a prescription by the state. Medical dispensaries will be permitted in all jurisdictions. 5.) Adult-use stores shall be allowed on a county and city basis. They will be prohibited only by a vote of the people to prohibit them. 6.) Manufacture and processing shall be permitted in all cities and counties, and licenses to do so shall be granted when the zoning and appropriate permits are secured. These permits and the zoning laws shall not be designed to restrict the opening or continued existence of these enterprises. 7.) Adult use shall be permitted on private premises at the owner’s discretion; “public” smoking bans may apply to streets and other public property. In 1972 the first California Marijuana Initiative proclaimed as its goal, FREE, LEGAL, BACKYARD MARIJUANA—it still rings true! In the past, Marijuana Policy Project and Drug Policy Alliance have been very influential in the funding of state marijuana initiatives. If you like the ideas expressed here write to Drug Policy Alliance and Marijuana Policy Project and tell them that you will settle for nothing less. It is important that they understand the opinions of marijuana users who they say they are trying to help. Here is a sample message: I am a marijuana user concerned about the implications of Washington’s “legalization” law and I don’t want that sort of legalization in [your state]. I want you to know I will not support an initiative, or a politician that supports an initiative, that is not in line with the Marijuana Users Bill of Rights. Sincerely, Your Name
A letter to my CongressCritter on Civil ForfeitureA 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.
Your property is guilty until you prove it innocent‘Your property is guilty until you prove it innocent’ Just another way the police steal your money. I didn't look at this movie, but I did read the related article in the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/national/your-property-is-guilty-until-you-prove-it-innocent/2014/09/06/9b4fb7fa-35e2-11e4-9f4d-24103cb8b742_video.html
Police terrorists have been using RICO laws long before 911 to steal our money and assets both at the Federal levels and state levels. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/stop-and-seize/?hpid=z1 Stop and seize Aggressive police take hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes Written by Michael Sallah, Robert O’Harrow Jr., Steven Rich Published on September 6, 2014 After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called on police to become the eyes and ears of homeland security on America’s highways. Local officers, county deputies and state troopers were encouraged to act more aggressively in searching for suspicious people, drugs and other contraband. The departments of Homeland Security and Justice spent millions on police training. The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back. Stop and Seize: In recent years, thousands of people have had cash confiscated by police without being charged with crimes. The Post looks at the police culture behind the seizures and the people who were forced to fight the government to get their money back. Part 2: One training firm started a private intelligence-sharing network and helped shape law enforcement nationwide. (Coming Monday) Part 3: Motorists caught up in the seizures talk about the experience and the legal battles that sometimes took more than a year. (Coming Tuesday) Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of “highway interdiction” to departments across the country. One of those firms created a private intelligence network known as Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that enabled police nationwide to share detailed reports about American motorists — criminals and the innocent alike — including their Social Security numbers, addresses and identifying tattoos, as well as hunches about which drivers to stop. Many of the reports have been funneled to federal agencies and fusion centers as part of the government’s burgeoning law enforcement intelligence systems — despite warnings from state and federal authorities that the information could violate privacy and constitutional protections. A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities. “All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym. Hain is a marketing specialist for Desert Snow, a leading interdiction training firm based in Guthrie, Okla., whose founders also created Black Asphalt. Hain’s book calls for “turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods.” Cash seizures can be made under state or federal civil law. One of the primary ways police departments are able to seize money and share in the proceeds at the federal level is through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Asset forfeiture is an extraordinarily powerful law enforcement tool that allows the government to take cash and property without pressing criminal charges and then requires the owners to prove their possessions were legally acquired. The practice has been controversial since its inception at the height of the drug war more than three decades ago, and its abuses have been the subject of journalistic exposés and congressional hearings. But unexplored until now is the role of the federal government and the private police trainers in encouraging officers to target cash on the nation’s highways since 9/11. “Those laws were meant to take a guy out for selling $1 million in cocaine or who was trying to launder large amounts of money,” said Mark Overton, the police chief in Bal Harbour, Fla., who once oversaw a federal drug task force in South Florida. “It was never meant for a street cop to take a few thousand dollars from a driver by the side of the road.” To examine the scope of asset forfeiture since the terror attacks, The Post analyzed a database of hundreds of thousands of seizure records at the Justice Department, reviewed hundreds of federal court cases, obtained internal records from training firms and interviewed scores of police officers, prosecutors and motorists. Civil forfeiture cash seizures Under the federal Equitable Sharing Program, police have seized $2.5 billion since 2001 from people who were not charged with a crime and without a warrant being issued. Police reasoned that the money was crime-related. About $1.7 billion was sent back to law enforcement agencies for their use. The Post found: There have been 61,998 cash seizures made on highways and elsewhere since 9/11 without search warrants or indictments through the Equitable Sharing Program, totaling more than $2.5 billion. State and local authorities kept more than $1.7 billion of that while Justice, Homeland Security and other federal agencies received $800 million. Half of the seizures were below $8,800. Only a sixth of the seizures were legally challenged, in part because of the costs of legal action against the government. But in 41 percent of cases — 4,455 — where there was a challenge, the government agreed to return money. The appeals process took more than a year in 40 percent of those cases and often required owners of the cash to sign agreements not to sue police over the seizures. Hundreds of state and local departments and drug task forces appear to rely on seized cash, despite a federal ban on the money to pay salaries or otherwise support budgets. The Post found that 298 departments and 210 task forces have seized the equivalent of 20 percent or more of their annual budgets since 2008. Agencies with police known to be participating in the Black Asphalt intelligence network have seen a 32 percent jump in seizures beginning in 2005, three times the rate of other police departments. Desert Snow-trained officers reported more than $427 million in cash seizures during highway stops in just one five-year period, according to company officials. More than 25,000 police have belonged to Black Asphalt, company officials said. State law enforcement officials in Iowa and Kansas prohibited the use of the Black Asphalt network because of concerns that it might not be a legal law enforcement tool. A federal prosecutor in Nebraska warned that Black Asphalt reports could violate laws governing civil liberties, the handling of sensitive law enforcement information and the disclosure of pretrial information to defendants. But officials at Justice and Homeland Security continued to use it. Justice spokesman Peter Carr said the department had no comment on The Post’s overall findings. But he said the department has a compliance review process in place for the Equitable Sharing Program and attorneys for federal agencies must review the seizures before they are “adopted” for inclusion in the program. “Adoptions of state and local seizures — when a state and local law enforcement agency requests a federal seizing agency to adopt a state and local seizure for federal forfeiture — represent an average of only 3 percent of the total forfeiture amount since 2007,” Carr said. The Justice Department data released to The Post does not contain information about race. Carr said the department prohibits racial profiling. But in 400 federal court cases examined by The Post where people who challenged seizures and received some money back, the majority were black, Hispanic or another minority. A 55-year-old Chinese American restaurateur from Georgia was pulled over for minor speeding on Interstate 10 in Alabama and detained for nearly two hours. He was carrying $75,000 raised from relatives to buy a Chinese restaurant in Lake Charles, La. He got back his money 10 months later but only after spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer and losing out on the restaurant deal. A 40-year-old Hispanic carpenter from New Jersey was stopped on Interstate 95 in Virginia for having tinted windows. Police said he appeared nervous and consented to a search. They took $18,000 that he said was meant to buy a used car. He had to hire a lawyer to get back his money. Mandrel Stuart, a 35-year-old African American owner of a small barbecue restaurant in Staunton, Va., was stunned when police took $17,550 from him during a stop in 2012 for a minor traffic infraction on Interstate 66 in Fairfax. He rejected a settlement with the government for half of his money and demanded a jury trial. He eventually got his money back but lost his business because he didn’t have the cash to pay his overhead. “I paid taxes on that money. I worked for that money,” Stuart said. “Why should I give them my money?” Mandrel Stuart talks about being stopped by Fairfax County police last year and having $17,550 confiscated under a civil forfeiture law, while sitting in his former restaurant, now known as the Shack in Staunton, Va. Stuart was never charged with a crime and, as a result of having the money taken, lost his restaurant, the Smoking Roosters. Stuart recently won a court case giving him back the $17,550. (Norm Shafer for The Washington Post) In defense of seizures Steven Peterson, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who arranged highway interdiction training through a company called the 4:20 Group, said that patrol officers used to try to make their names with large drug busts. He said he saw that change when agency leaders realized that cash seizures could help their departments during lean times. “They saw this as a way to provide equipment and training for their guys,” Peterson said. “If you seized large amounts of cash, that’s the gift that keeps on giving.” There is no question that state and federal forfeiture programs have crippled powerful drug-trafficking organizations, thwarted an assortment of criminals and brought millions of dollars to financially stressed police departments. Advocates of highway interdiction say it plays an important role in protecting the public and that officers take care to respect the rights of citizens. “We don’t go hunting for money in general,” said Sandy Springs, Ga., Officer Mike DeWald, who has served as a trainer for 4:20. “I never have been pressured to go after money. We are in pursuit of the criminal element.” Police trainers said that their work has helped make the country safer by teaching police to be more vigilant in identifying drug smugglers and terrorists. “9/11 caused a lot of officers to realize they should be out there looking for those kind of people,” said David Frye, a part-time Nebraska county deputy sheriff who serves as chief instructor at Desert Snow and was operations director of Black Asphalt. “When money is taken from an organization, it hurts them more than when they lose the drugs.” These screen grabs were taken from a promotional video for Desert Snow posted on YouTube by user InRoadsBook. (YouTube) Frye and Desert Snow’s founder, a former California highway patrolman named Joe David, defended Black Asphalt, which David started in 2004. They said they have taken steps in recent years to ensure that the informal police network complies with state and federal laws. David declined to speak to The Post. “The Black Asphalt is not flawless, however the intent behind it is,” David and Frye wrote in a letter in 2012 sent to police and obtained by The Post. “The information being moved through the system has proven itself reliable on hundreds of occasions. Much more reliable than any criminal informant. The results have been staggering. It has proven itself an extremely valuable tool for law enforcement.” Hain, Desert Snow’s marketing official, said “the operational and software platforms of the Desert Snow site and Black Asphalt site are completely separate.” He said Black Asphalt is “a secure system for intelligence sharing” and does not store information. “No personal identifying information from seizure reports have ever been collected or stored by the Black Asphalt,” Hain said. “The Black Asphalt software is simply a pass-through system that allows the user to input data, which is then sent directly, via e-mail, to a select group of law enforcement (i.e. local investigators, ICE Bulk Cash Smuggling Center, DEA agents, etc.). Again, none of the personal information is held within the system, only the summary of the seizure. And then the seizure narratives are only maintained for 21 days before they get purged.” The Post obtained hundreds of Black Asphalt records from law enforcement sources with access to the system. Among Black Asphalt’s features is a section called BOLO, or “be on the lookout,” where police who join the network can post tips and hunches. In April, Aurora, Colo., police Officer James Waselkow pulled over a white Ford pickup for tinted windows. Waselkow said he thought the driver, a Mexican national, was suspicious in part because he wore a University of Wyoming cap. “He had no idea where he was going, what hotel he was staying in or who with,” Waselkow wrote. The officer searched the vehicle with the driver’s consent but found no contraband. But he was still suspicious, so he posted the driver’s license plate on Black Asphalt. “Released so someone else can locate the contraband,” he wrote. “Happy hunting!” Waselkow’s department did not respond to a request for an interview. The Post’s review of 400 court cases, which encompassed seizures in 17 states, provided insights into stops and seizures. In case after case, highway interdictors appeared to follow a similar script. Police set up what amounted to rolling checkpoints on busy highways and pulled over motorists for minor violations, such as following too closely or improper signaling. They quickly issued warnings or tickets. They studied drivers for signs of nervousness, including pulsing carotid arteries, clenched jaws and perspiration. They also looked for supposed “indicators” of criminal activity, which can include such things as trash on the floor of a vehicle, abundant energy drinks or air fresheners hanging from rearview mirrors. One recent stop shows how the process can work in the field. In December 2012, Frye was working in his capacity as a part-time deputy in Seward County, Neb. He pulled over John Anderson of San Clemente, Calif., who was driving a BMW on Interstate 80 near Lincoln. Frye issued a warning ticket within 13 minutes for failing to signal promptly when changing lanes. “The results have been staggering. It has proven itself an extremely valuable tool for law enforcement.” —David Frye and Joe David, talking about the Black Asphalt network in a 2012 letter to police He told Anderson he was finished with the stop. But Frye later noted in court papers that he found several indicators of possible suspicious activity: an air freshener, a radar detector and inconsistencies in the driver’s description of his travels. The officer then asked whether the driver had any cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin or large amounts of cash and sought permission to search the BMW, according to a video of the stop. Anderson denied having drugs or large amounts of cash in his car. He declined to give permission for a search. Frye then radioed for a drug-sniffing dog, and the driver had to wait another 36 minutes for the dog to arrive. “I’m just going to, basically, have you wait here,” Frye told Anderson. The dog arrived and the handler said it indicated the presence of drugs. But when they searched the car, none was found. They did find money: $25,180. Frye handcuffed Anderson and told him he was placing him under arrest. “In Nebraska, drug currency is illegal,” Frye said. “Let me tell you something, I’ve seized millions out here. When I say that, I mean millions. . . . This is what I do.” Frye suggested to Anderson that he might not have been aware of the money in his vehicle and began pressing him to sign a waiver relinquishing the cash, mentioning it at least five times over the next hour, the video shows. “You’re going to be given an opportunity to disclaim the currency,” Frye told Anderson. “To sign a form that says, ‘That is not my money. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it. I don’t want to come back to court.’ ” Frye said that unless the driver agreed to give up the money, a prosecutor would “want to charge” him with a crime, “so that means you’ll go to jail.” An hour and six minutes into the stop, Frye read Anderson his Miranda rights. Anderson, who told Frye he worked as a self-employed debt counselor, said the money was not illicit and he was carrying it to pay off a gambling debt. He would later say it was from investors and meant to buy silver bullion and coins. More than two hours after the stop had begun, he finally agreed to give up the cash and Frye let him go. Now Anderson has gone to court to get the money back, saying he signed the waiver and mentioned the gambling debt only because he felt intimidated by Frye. A magistrate has ruled at a preliminary step in the case that Frye had reasonable suspicion to detain Anderson. Frye said he always follows the law and has never had a seizure overturned. Legal scholars who viewed the video of the stop told The Post that such practices push constitutional limits. Officers often are taught not to tell the driver they have a right to leave at any time after a traffic stop is concluded. But extended stops in which the officer uses psychological pressure on the driver without charges or Miranda warnings can cross the line. “Encouraging police to initiate searches for the purpose of seizing cash or other assets, rather than to seize evidence to be used in a prosecution, is a dangerous development,” said Clifford Fishman, a law professor at Catholic University and former New York City prosecutor. “It is particularly troubling if police officers are trained to manipulate the suspect into forfeiting the assets or waiving the right to contest the search.” David A. Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, said Frye’s stop crossed the line when he detained the driver while summoning a canine. “You cannot elongate the stop to bring in the dogs,” he said. “In doing that, you’re detaining the person without probable cause. That ain’t kosher.” Court filing from John Anderson's case in which his seized cash is named as the defendant. (Court documents) A tool in the drug war Civil asset forfeiture law is among the more unusual areas of American jurisprudence. It does not involve evidence of a crime or criminal charges. It is a civil action against an object, such as currency or a boat, rather than a person. It has its basis in British admiralty law, which allowed the taking of a ship to recover damages. In 1970, Congress turned the federal civil asset forfeiture law into a weapon against the illegal drug trade, allowing for the seizure of aircraft, boats and vehicles used to transport drugs. The federal law was eventually expanded to include cash tied to drug trafficking and to allow the money to be shared with local and state police, who could keep up to 80 percent of the seized assets. When police make a seizure, a federal agency must approve or “adopt” it for inclusion in Justice’s Equitable Sharing Program. It was a much more effective tool for federal prosecutors than criminal forfeiture, which required the conviction of a defendant with proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Most significantly, the law places the burden of proof on the property owner to demonstrate that an object is not tied to criminal activity. As the drug trade ramped up throughout the 1980s, money deposited into Justice’s federal forfeitures fund increased from $27 million in 1985 to $556 million in 1993. (It reached $2.6 billion in 2007.) Some of that increase was driven by Operation Pipeline, a nationwide DEA program launched in 1986 that promoted highway interdiction training for state and local police. Several newspapers later wrote exposés about innocent people being caught up in the forfeiture net and police spending on luxuries. The Orlando Sentinel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for pointing out that the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office had used state seizure laws to take $8 million from motorists, nine out of 10 of them minorities. The attention prompted Congress to reform federal seizure laws in 2000, allowing owners to be reimbursed for their legal fees after successful lawsuits. But a key reform was cut. It would have removed what some lawmakers called the “perverse incentive” to target cash — the sharing of money between the feds and locals. It died after police and Justice waged a “voracious lobbying” campaign, according to former representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.). “We didn’t have the votes,” said Frank, who is still an ardent critic of asset forfeiture. “There is this terrible unfairness. It is about as fundamental a denial of their constitutional rights as I can think of.” After Sept. 11, 2001, civil forfeiture and the war on drugs became entwined with efforts to improve homeland security. Smugglers of all kinds turned away from airports because of the tightened security and took to the nation’s interstate highway system. With federal encouragement, police from small towns, rural counties and big cities sought specialized training. Among those that met the demand was Desert Snow, a family-owned company founded in 1989 by Joe David, a California highway patrolman. Other firms also stepped up, including the 4:20 Group, Caltraps, Hits, Diamondback Training, and Global Counter-Smuggling Training Consultants. Soon more than a dozen companies were competing for millions in state and federal grants and contracts, along with fees from local departments across the country. The training had an immediate effect in some areas. After the Kansas Highway Patrol arranged sessions through Desert Snow for state and local police in 2005 and 2006, the amount of cash flowing into police budgets from seizures nearly doubled, from an average of $2.6 million a year between 2000 and 2006 to $4.9 million a year after 2007. Amount seized increases over time '01'12$0$50$100$150$200$250$300millionCash seizedCash sent to state Note: Partial data for 2001 and 2012. Source: A Washington Post analysis of Department of Justice data. After 25 Wisconsin State Patrol officers received training from Desert Snow in 2010, the agency’s cash seizures the following year more than doubled to $585,657. “It creates a surge period,” said Sgt. Nate Clarke, a state patrol supervisor. “These guys get all fired up because they’re seeing photo after photo of seizures on the PowerPoints.” The number of agencies participating yearly under Equitable Sharing went up 22 percent to 2,842 between 2003 and 2007, while cash seizures without search warrants or indictments during that period rose more than 50 percent, to $242 million. Under the Obama administration, police have made more than 22,000 such seizures worth about $1 billion through the Justice Department program. Federal support helped drive the surge. In Florida, Indiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin alone, police spent a total of at least $1 million during the last decade in Justice and Homeland Security grants for Desert Snow training. The DEA, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and others spent an additional $2.5 million in contracts on Desert Snow training for police, records show. The DEA also paid more than $2 million for training from the 4:20 Group. Individual local and state police forces across the country paid millions more for the training using seized cash, one of the uses permitted by Equitable Sharing rules. The police trainers estimate they have taught more than 50,000 police officers in the more aggressive techniques during the last decade. Some trainers say they worry that an overemphasis on seizing money has distorted policing. “Over a period of a single decade, the culture was now totally changed,” said Shawn Pardazi, a detective in Pearl, Miss., and owner of Global Counter-Smuggling Training Consultants and a former Desert Snow trainer. As the demand for training grew, the competition among the firms for business became fierce. “It’s all about the money,” said James Eagleson, owner of the 4:20 Group, who also once worked at Desert Snow. David Smith is an Alexandria, Va., attorney and a former federal prosecutor. He has tried to reform asset forfeiture laws and represented Benjamin Molina, who had $18,000 confiscated from him during a traffic stop in Emporia, Va. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post) Getting the money back Decisions that police make during brief roadway stops take motorists who challenge the seizures a year on average to resolve, according to a Post analysis. For 350 owners, it took more than two years to get their money back. Last year, Ming Tong Liu, 55, a Chinese-born American from Newnan, Ga., was stopped on I-10 in Alabama for driving 10 miles over the speed limit while heading to Louisiana to buy the Hong Kong Chinese restaurant in Lake Charles for himself and his investors — two daughters and another relative. A Mobile County sheriff’s deputy gave Liu a ticket for speeding and asked for permission to search the car. The deputy found $75,195 in a suitcase in the back seat, neatly wrapped in white napkins and placed in a black plastic bag and then took the money after the deputy said Liu gave conflicting accounts of his travel plans. The deputy took Liu to a sheriff’s department office and called for an officer from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which stood to share in the money. Liu’s attorney, Rebecca Ding-Lee, said the officers overstepped their authority, held Liu for nearly two hours and searched his car unlawfully without a warrant. “He cannot speak English,” she said. “He didn’t understand what the police said.” Ten months after the cash was seized, customs officials agreed to return the money, documents show. Police often rely on drug-sniffing dogs to justify warrantless searches when a driver refuses to give consent. In 48 cases examined by The Post, dogs alerted to the presence of drugs but the officers found only money. In October 2008, Benjamin Molina, 40, a permanent resident from El Salvador, was traveling through Virginia on I-95 when an Emporia police officer pulled him over for tinted windows. A carpenter, Molina was going from North Carolina to his home in Perth Amboy, N.J. The officer wrote him a warning ticket and began asking him questions, including whether he had cash in the car. Molina told the officer that he was shopping for a used car and had $18,000 in his pockets. Molina’s face began to tremble, which police said they took as a sign of possible wrongdoing. Molina said his cheek twitched from medication he was taking for a health condition that included kidney disease. Molina also had duct tape in his car, which police said is “commonly used by traffickers.” Know your rights: During traffic stops on the nation’s highways, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protects motorists “against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The law also gives police the power to investigate and act on their suspicions. 1. Police have a long-established authority to stop motorists for traffic infractions. They can use traffic violations as a pretext for a deeper inquiry as long as the stop is based on an identifiable infraction. 2. An officer may detain a driver only as long as it takes to deal with the reason for the stop. After that, police have the authority to request further conversation. A motorist has the right to decline and ask whether the stop is concluded. If so, the motorist can leave. 3. The officer also has the authority to briefly detain and question a person as long as the officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person is involved in criminal activity. Reasonable suspicion is based on specific and articulable facts but falls short of the legal standard for making an arrest. 4. A traffic infraction or reasonable suspicion alone do not give police authority to search a vehicle or a closed container, such as luggage. Police may ask for permission to search; drivers may decline. Police do not have to tell drivers that they have a right to refuse. 5. An officer may expand a roadside investigation if the driver’s responses and other circumstances justify a belief that it is more likely than not that criminal activity is occurring. Under this standard, known as probable cause, an officer can make an arrest or search a vehicle without permission. An alert by a drug-sniffing dog can provide probable cause, as can the smell of marijuana. 6. Police can seize cash that they find if they have probable cause to suspect that it is related to criminal activity. The seizure happens through a civil action known as asset forfeiture. Police do not need to charge a person with a crime. The burden of proof is then on the driver to show that the cash is not related to a crime by a legal standard known as preponderance of the evidence. Sources: Jon Norris, criminal defense attorney; David A. Harris, University of Pittsburgh law professor; Scott Bullock, civil liberties lawyer, Institute for Justice; Department of Homeland Security. The officer asked Molina, who had no criminal history, to hand over the cash. The officer placed the money in an envelope, which he set down on the ground alongside two empty envelopes. A dog called to the scene sat down next to the envelope with the cash, indicating the presence of drugs, according to police. The police took the money, but Molina took steps to get it back. He hired David Smith, an Alexandria attorney and former federal prosecutor who once headed the federal government’s forfeiture program in the Eastern District of Virginia. After Molina appealed, a federal prosecutor refunded the money. It took four months. Smith said the Molina case is an example of the kind of overreach that the civil asset forfeiture reforms passed by Congress in 2000 were aimed at preventing. “This type of police bounty hunting is antithetical to everything our criminal justice system is supposed to stand for,” said Smith, who helped craft the reform legislation. Among the indicators police look for are rental cars, which are often used by smugglers. On Nov. 1, 2011, Jose Jeronimo Sorto and his brother-in-law, Victor Ramos Guzman, were driving a rented sedan on I-95 south of Richmond when a Virginia state trooper stopped them. Both were lay leaders of the Pentecostal Nuevo Renacer church in Baltimore. They were carrying $28,500 in church funds meant for the purchase of land to build a church in El Salvador and a trailer for a new congregation in North Carolina. Their experience has been cited as a case study in civil forfeiture abuse by The Post’s editorial page, the New Yorker magazine and others. Unknown until now in the public debate is the fact that the trooper who made the stop, C.L. Murphy, is a top interdiction trainer for Virginia State Police and Desert Snow, as well as a member of Black Asphalt. Murphy told Sorto and Guzman that they were speeding and following too closely. Murphy said Guzman told him about the cash and consented to a search of the car. Guzman, 39, of Sterling, Va., said he showed the trooper documents indicating that he belonged to a tax-exempt church, and he said the cash had been collected from congregation members. But Murphy disregarded their explanations, saying they contained inconsistencies. He called Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which accepted the seizure for the Equitable Sharing Program, and he escorted the men to a nearby police station. He did not issue a ticket but seized the cash after Guzman signed a waiver. Three lawyers agreed to represent the church members for free. Three months later, they received a check from ICE for $28,500. Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller would only say, “The facts of the stop speak for themselves.” ICE spokeswoman Marsha Catron defended the seizure, saying in a statement “the situation was indicative of bulk cash smuggling” and that Guzman consented by signing a waiver for the money. “Both the male driver and passenger disclaimed ownership of the money and provided inconsistent and contradictory statements,” Catron said. She added: “Money was ultimately returned to Mr. Ramos Guzman after he provided documentation that the cash belonged to his church.” Guzman told The Post he was truthful to the trooper the entire time. The experience left him shaken. “They didn’t give me a chance to explain,” Guzman said. “There was no way out.” Alice Crites contributed to this report. Also contributing were Alexia Campbell, Cathaleen Chen, Hoai-Tran Bui, Nagwa Abdallah and Justin Warren, who were attached to The Washington Post’s Investigative Unit through a partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. About this story The Washington Post relied on an array of materials to explore the rise of civil seizures in recent years, with a particular focus on highway seizures made by state and local police. For details about seizures and the techniques employed by police, reporters reviewed more than 400 federal court cases in which owners of cash filed legal appeals to get it back. The Post also examined some seizures made under state forfeiture laws. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, The Post obtained a database from the Justice Department containing details about 212,000 seizures since 1996 through the Equitable Sharing Program, the federal government’s largest asset forfeiture effort. Justice officials did not release data that pinpointed the geographic location of each seizure, so it is impossible to identify precisely how many seizures occur during traffic stops. To focus on roadside stops, The Post looked at cases that were not made at businesses and that occurred without warrants or indictments: 61,998 seizures have met those criteria since Sept. 11, 2001. That group of cases was then compared to a list obtained by The Post of 1,654 departments and agencies with officers who are members of an unofficial police intelligence network known as the Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that is focused on highway stops and seizures. The Post also obtained more than 43,000 Justice Department reports from state and local police departments across the country that participated in Equitable Sharing, along with records provided by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil liberties group, to assess how seizures contribute to department budgets.
Sure medical marijuana is legal in Arizona, but Uncle Sam's Federal goons can still arrest and jail you for victimless marijuana crimes if they want to. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/04/legal-marijuana-workers/15000903/ Legal pot, murky jobs: Marijuana laws put workers in tough spot Trevor Hughes, USATODAY 9:23 p.m. EDT September 4, 2014 DENVER-- Every time he goes to work, Harvard-trained lawyer Andrew Freedman faces federal prosecution thanks to the source of his paycheck: Colorado's burgeoning marijuana industry. Freedman, the governor's chief marijuana adviser, faces prison time if federal prosecutors decide to step in. That's because federal law still considers marijuana as dangerous as heroin or cocaine, and prosecutors could easily bring drug-trafficking charges if they choose. Freedman's salary is paid by the taxes collected on legal marijuana sales. "I'm in murky territory every day," Freedman said. He's not alone. Tens of thousands of marijuana growers, bud tenders, edibles makers, store owners and couriers working in Colorado and Washington and any of the other 21 states and the District of Columbia that have legalized recreational or medical marijuana face the same penalties. USATODAY What's that smell? Legal marijuana growing in Colorado The risk is even greater for dozens of former cops and soldiers working as armed guards in the marijuana industry because federal drug-trafficking laws prescribe far stiffer penalties for anyone using a firearm while handling drugs and money. Several of the guards interviewed by USA TODAY say they chose to work for Blue Line acknowledged the legal risks they're taking, but said it was safer than being shot at by insurgents or dealing with violent criminals daily. So far federal prosecutors have held off bringing charges against security firms protecting and servicing the marijuana industry, even though they're aware of the flagrant violations. USA TODAY in July published numerous photos of a Colorado-based security-firm workers carrying pot, cash and weapons -- photos federal agents and prosecutors confirm they saw. Blue Line Protection Group's supervisor of operations, Matt Karr, waits in the armored car as Philip Baca (not pictured) makes a delivery at a marijuana dispensary in Colorado. As of Jan. 1, state residents can legally buy and possess up to an ounce of marijuana at a time. (Photo: Matthew Staver for USA TODAY) The situation highlights the tenuous balance federal prosecutors strike as they monitor the sale of legalized marijuana. Marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, even though voters in Colorado and Washington have allowed adults to possess and consume it for fun. Federal officials say they're trying to balance state law while keeping pot out of the hands of kids and profits away from drug cartels. Marijuana-industry workers acknowledge the risks they're taking, but say they're assuming federal prosecutors will leave them alone as long as they keep to the strictest interpretation of the state law. "If you touch the product, then you're at risk for federal prosecution," said Michael Jerome, a spokesman for Blue Line Protection Group, which provides armed guards to transport marijuana and cash for pot-shop owners. "That's why we're trying to make it safe and legitimate and responsible, so we can respect the wishes of the voters of the state of Colorado and keep the federal government out of it." Blue Line, like many of the approximately 100 other security firms, explains the situation to new hires in the several states it operates. Pay for a Blue Line store guard starts at $13 an hour, but can go up rapidly based on assignments, like cash transport and management, that only workers with extensive prior experience can snag. For former soldiers, in particular, working for Blue Line is a way to acclimate to civilian life and build a resume. USATODAY Colorado tightening edible pot rules "We don't keep any secrets from prospective employees, because we don't want them to get into a situation they'll regret in the future or that will get them into potential legal problems," Jerome said. "But if enough states come online, then the hope is that the feds will finally change the legal standards related to marijuana; or, at the very least, there will be so many people operating in the lawful state industries that any federal enforcement action would be met with huge public backlash and potential legal action from the states." The federal government's actions are guided generally by what's known as the Cole Memo, issued in 2013 by Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole. The memo notes that while Congress has decreed that marijuana is a "dangerous drug," the federal Department of Justice has limited resources and would prioritize enforcement efforts away from states that have created frameworks for legal marijuana. USATODAY Marijuana farmers markets budding trend on West Coast In Colorado, U.S. Attorney John Walsh's office has generally avoided wading into the state's legalized marijuana marketplace, even though every grower, store owner, store clerk and purchaser is violating federal marijuana laws. Walsh did not respond to a request for an interview on the topic, and his staff in a statement said they are "constantly assessing where our limited federal law enforcement resources are best used…" Arguing that paying pot taxes is tantamount to self-incrimination, one Colorado attorney and marijuana advocate has sued the state over tax payments he says are illegal. Rob Corry, a longtime pro-marijuana crusader, acknowledges that his lawsuit has the potential to force the collapse of Colorado's legal marijuana industry if a judge strikes down the taxation system. The lawsuit is ongoing. "There can be no possible scenario where a person paying said marijuana-specific taxes can also be in full compliance with federal law, related to the activities upon which the taxes are paid," the suit argues. Other federal officials say the recognize the conundrum created by the conflict between state and federal laws, but say the fact marijuana remains federally illegal is no surprise to anyone. "When you go into the business, and you know it's federally illegal, you're taking your chances," said Tom Gorman, who runs the federally funded Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force. "That's the problem when the state legalizes something that remains illegal at the federal level."
Michigan ex-cop charged with abusing kids on duty More of the old "Do as I say, not as I do" from our religious leaders, government masters and police??? http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/06/ex-cop-charged-with-sexual-misconduct/15200595/ Michigan ex-cop charged with abusing kids on duty Associated Press 12:56 p.m. MST September 6, 2014 FLINT, Mich. — Authorities are asking people to step forward if they believe they were assaulted as children by a Flint police sergeant who is charged with sexual misconduct while on duty in the 1990s. Lawrence Woods, now 66 and retired, appeared in court Friday on charges of first-degree criminal sexual conduct. He was returned to jail without bond. "There were incidents inside the police department and out on the street in police vehicles and on city property," Sgt. Karl Petrich said. Searches at four homes where Woods has lived or stayed revealed hundreds of images of child pornography taken by him, Petrich said. Two women claim Woods sexually assaulted them when they were minors, but police are looking for more potential victims, Petrich said. "We understand the allegations are very serious," defense attorney Frank Manley told the Flint Journal. "Obviously, we are in the initial portion of our investigation, but we expect to have a successful outcome." A hearing to determine if there's probable cause to send Woods to trial is set for Oct. 2. If convicted, the mandatory minimum sentence would be 25 years in prison. The Journal reported that Woods joined the Flint department in 1975, although the year of his retirement was not immediately known. He was honored by a homeowners association in 1986 for capturing burglary suspects while working as a part-time security guard.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." H. L. Mencken Yea, Goldwater was a "war monger", but Johnson followed in his footsteps with the Vietnam War. Kind of like the Bush/Obama thing. Bush was a war monger, and Obama was an alleged peacenik that followed the footsteps of war monger George Bush. http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/arizona/politics/2014/09/07/daisy-ad-political-attack-remembered/15233151/ 'Daisy Girl' political ad still haunting 50 years later Dan Nowicki, The Republic | azcentral.com 11:03 p.m. MST September 6, 2014 Fifty years on, the most famous, or notorious, political attack ad in U.S. history hasn't lost its explosive punch. For nearly 30 seconds, a freckled, brown-eyed girl — unmistakably a redhead even though the scene is in black and white — counts as she plucks petals from a daisy on an idyllic August day in New York City's Highbridge Park. When she gets to 10, a chilling voice-over countdown begins. The frame freezes and the camera zooms into a close-up of the child's eye. As the countdown hits zero, a nuclear bomb detonates with a mushroom cloud. "These are the stakes," says President Lyndon Johnson. "To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." A narrator implores voters to support Johnson on Election Day: "The stakes are too high for you to stay home." Johnson's 1964 Republican opponent was never mentioned by name, but the target was clear: conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who had been in the news for controversial comments about atomic warfare and held an uncompromising stance toward the Soviet Union and communism. The 60-second spot was broadcast only once, 50 years ago today, on Sept. 7, 1964, during a screening of the 1951 biblical drama "David and Bathsheba" on NBC's "Monday Night at the Movies." Unsuspecting viewers had never seen anything like it, and the outcry was immediate. Monique Luiz talks about the role she played in a famous political ad called "Peace Little Girl" for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. (Photo: Cheryl Evans/The Republic) Goldwater and his fellow Republicans were furious at what they saw as unprecedented scaremongering in a presidential campaign. Decades later, Goldwater supporters still nurse grudges over the commercial and respond angrily when it's mentioned, even though it is a stretch to say, as some critics maintain, that the ad derailed the Arizonan's always-slim chances of defeating Johnson so soon after President John F. Kennedy's assassination. "You have to remember it was only two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we came very close to nuclear destruction," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics and the co-producer of an upcoming PBS documentary tentatively titled "Bombs Away: LBJ, Goldwater and the 1964 Campaign That Changed It All." "To see a little girl explode into a mushroom cloud really touched people's deepest fears about the nuclear age." Now considered a classic that continues to be studied, debated and imitated, the ad was produced by the "Mad Men"-era New York agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. The ambitious firm by the early 1960s had gained an avant-garde reputation for its innovative Volkswagen Beetle ("Think Small") and Avis rental car ("We Try Harder") campaigns. Kennedy was impressed with their work and signaled he wanted the agency for his 1964 re-election effort. DDB became the first firm to apply creative Madison Avenue principles to political advertising, which up to then had been characterized largely by predictable talking heads and reserved messaging tactics. In the 1960 White House race, for example, Republican Richard Nixon's ad campaign largely consisted of a series of TV spots that featured him sitting on his desk and commenting on federal spending, civil rights, the economy and foreign policy. Although the "Daisy" ad was not the first political attack ad, it is credited, or blamed, for helping usher in relentless negativity in campaigning. "This was something entirely new in American politics," said Robert Mann, a professor of mass communication at Louisiana State University and the author of the 2011 book "Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds: LBJ, Barry Goldwater, and the Ad That Changed American Politics." "This was a campaign that gave creative control to an ad firm, which is something that had not happened very often," he said. "By and large, up to that point, the campaigns told the ad firms, 'Here's what we want you to do.' It was all pretty staid and fact-based and appealing to reason. Certainly not to emotion." 'Daisy' living in Phoenix The groundbreaking commercial's official title was "Peace, Little Girl," but history forever associates it with the anonymous 3-year-old tot from Pine Beach, N.J., who starred in it: "Daisy Girl." In 1964, she was Monique Corzilius, who under the professional name "Monique Cozy" had a brief but prolific career as a child model. Today she is Monique Luiz, 53, a human-resources supervisor at a downtown Phoenix bank. Her modeling success is documented in a family scrapbook compiled by her father, Frederick Corzilius, who died in 2012. From the age of 1½ to about 7 or 8, she appeared in ads for Kodak, Velveeta, Lipton, Hostess, Prudential Insurance and other products in mass-circulation magazines such as Life, Look,Reader's Digest, McCall's and Redbook. Monique even made the cover of the Sept. 25, 1964, issue of Time via an image of the "Daisy" commercial. Because of her age at the time, Monique doesn't remember many details about her starring turn as the "Daisy Girl," which marked her television-commercial debut. Partly because her family lived in France for several years, she never even got around to actually seeing the ad until around the year 2000, although its controversy had long been part of family lore. "I did what my parents told me to do," Monique recalled in a recent interview with The Arizona Republic at her Phoenix home. "And actually my parents didn't even know what it was about. They didn't even know it was a political commercial. I already knew how to count, I think to 50, and my mom was told to teach me to count backwards. And I struggled with that." In the summer of 1964, the Corzilius family had no idea Monique would make history by answering a casting call. Per Mann's book, Monique won the "Daisy Girl" part after competing with roughly 30 other kids. She and her parents were pleased with the $100 she made from the shoot, but the family wasn't prepared for the uproar once the "Daisy" spot aired. Not only did her parents not realize that their daughter had appeared in an ad for Johnson, but "my mom preferred Goldwater," Monique said. Her father's scrapbook includes a letter to the editor clipped from the family's local newspaper. "Monday night I witnessed a political advertisement on Channel 4 TV that in my opinion should not only be stopped, but those responsible should be arrested," fumed writer Frank D'Aiello of Roselle Park, N.J. Monique remembered her "worrywart" grandmother urging the family to keep quiet about her participation in the commercial, given the blowback and bad publicity. They largely did. "My grandmother was super-nervous about the fact that there were so many people bad-mouthing my parents and me," Monique said. "She was really worried because people were saying, 'How could any parents let their children be in a commercial like that? How could you let your child blow up?' ... So that's kind of how I grew up." Avoided connection When Monique moved to Arizona in 1983, she was keenly aware she had relocated to the heart of Goldwater Country. Goldwater, who died in 1998, represented the state for five terms in the Senate, from 1953 to 1965 and from 1969 to 1987. By the 1980s, Goldwater had evolved into an elder GOP statesman, and his bitter race against Johnson was seen in retrospect as a precursor to President Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980. Goldwater's 1964 landslide loss, though dramatic, steered the Republican Party in a more conservative direction that continues today. Because of the negative connotations still associated with the "Daisy" ad, Monique avoided any connection to the commercial or to Goldwater. She even declined to shop at Goldwaters, the department-store chain founded by Goldwater's grandfather, even though the Goldwater family hadn't owned it for years. "I don't know for sure that this commercial actually changed the outcome, but a lot of people are under the impression that it did," she said. Monique might have stayed out of the story if family members in 2009 hadn't become aware of an imposter "Daisy Girl" claiming to have appeared in the ad. The phony was featured on CONELRAD, a website devoted to Cold War politics, propaganda and pop culture that includes an exhaustive archive of interviews, documents and audio and video files related to the "Daisy" ad. Bill Geerhart of CONELRAD traveled to Arizona to meet with Monique and her father and concluded that he had been "duped" by the other woman, who also gave a 1998 interview as the "Daisy Girl" to CBS. Geerhart was persuaded by Monique's physical resemblance to the girl in the commercial, and by the paycheck stubs, contracts and other ephemera Frederick Corzilius kept. "There is zero doubt in my mind that Monique Corzilius was the one who was in the ad," Geerhart said. It was important to her father that Monique reclaim her rightful legacy as the only true "Daisy Girl." "He was super-proud of it," Monique said. "He's the one who kept saying, 'You should do something.' He's the one who really pushed for CONELRAD, or Bill, to come and gave him the proof." In October 2011, Monique made a rare public appearance in Louisiana at an event for the publication of Mann's "Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds" book. There she learned she is a celebrity among political-history nerds. "It was really strange for me," Monique said. "They had me sign the books 'Monique Cozy, the Daisy Girl.' So I felt really famous for that weekend." 'Cutting-edge' John Geer, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and an expert on negative political ads, said the legend surrounding the "Daisy" commercial has continued to grow to the point it is probably better known today than it was in 1964. The spot was clever in its economical use of dialogue and ability to indict Goldwater as a dangerous choice without using his name, he said. "It absolutely was cutting-edge for its time," said Geer, author of "In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns." "And frankly it remains the standard for subtlety because attack ads tend to be meat axes," he said, while the "Daisy" ad "uses a stiletto." Goldwater also compared the "Daisy" ad to a knifing, even though the Democrats ran it as a paid TV advertisement only once. "Why just once? Why not a dozen times?" Goldwater would write in a 1988 memoir. "The answer is that if you stab a man in the back deeply enough once, you can murder him." The message of the frightening spot was "Barry Goldwater would blow up the world if he became President of the United States," he wrote. Judy Eisenhower, who was Goldwater's secretary in 1964 and later served as his Senate chief of staff, recalled Goldwater was "livid" after he saw the "Daisy" ad. "He called Lyndon Johnson and told him in 'Goldwater language' what he thought of him and how dishonest it was," Eisenhower recalled. "The senator was just beside himself, because it was so distorted. It was so untrue." Goldwater decried the ad on the campaign trail, too. "The homes of America are horrified and the intelligence of Americans is insulted by weird television advertising by which this administration threatens the end of the world unless all-wise Lyndon is given thenation for his very own," he said later in September 1964. Haunted by words Still, Goldwater helped create the environment that made the ad resonate. Known for his candor, Goldwater was haunted by his own words. The public record was full of his statements that contributed to a perception that maybe his finger shouldn't be on the nation's nuclear button. At a time when Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were high, Goldwater joked about lobbing a nuclear missile into "the men's room" of the Kremlin. He defended, at least in theory, the use of low-yield tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam, and drew intense criticism for suggesting that he would give NATO "commanders" the authority to use nuclear weapons in the case of an emergency. America was on edge, and Goldwater's comments about nuclear weapons "just frightened the hell out of everybody," said Sid Myers, the DDB senior art director who collaborated on the "Daisy" ad with copywriter Stan Lee and soundman Tony Schwartz, both of whom are no longer living. "They gave us a big blue binder of every speech that Goldwater made, and we just went through it," Myers told The Republic. "We took his words and made commercials out of them. Like when he said the United States would be better off if we sawed off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea. Well, we visually did that line and it was very, very effective." Lloyd Wright, the Democratic National Committee's media coordinator, was in the room when Johnson screened the ad at the White House in advance of its airing. Wright developed the 1964 Democratic communications strategy along with Bill Moyers, Johnson's special assistant who went on to become a well-known CBS and PBS broadcaster. Everybody was taken aback by "the sheer power" of the "Daisy" ad, Wright recalled. "As we would refer to Goldwater, he kept shooting from the lip," Wright said. "He would say things that would give us ammunition. In nearly all of our ads, we didn't make any claims against him much. We just let him do it himself." Contrary to popular belief, the "Daisy" ad was not yanked off the air because of complaints. In fact, the Goldwater camp's outrage amplified the impact of the $25,000 ad buy because it drew more attention to the spot. That made it a news story. "It was so powerful that the reaction was so enormous and impactful that all three networks ran it in their newscasts the next two or three nights," Wright recalled. "It did its job, we thought, and we didn't need to spend more money to buy more time when it was getting free play." Myers also made the point that Goldwater and the Republicans made the situation worse for themselves by carping about it. "They just blew it out of proportion," he said. "It only ran once, but it ran a million times on the news." Nastiness lamented Mann, who wrote the definitive book on the "Daisy" ad, described the entire DDB campaign, which included 27 commercials, as revolutionary and worth remembering as a body of work. All of the spots were innovative and creative, several were arguably as hard-hitting as "Daisy," and many were devastating to Goldwater. It just happens that "Daisy" turned out as the most striking spot of an ahead-of-its-time campaign, he said. One ad spot showed two hands tearing a Social Security card in half to warn seniors about Goldwater's Social Security reform plan. But as effective as the DDB attack ads were, they didn't bring down Goldwater, who most historians agree never had much of a prayer of ousting Johnson from the White House. However, the ad barrage "smothered" the GOP nominee after he emerged damaged from a divisive Republican National Convention in which he came across to many as too extreme to win the presidency, Mann said. By relying so heavily on Goldwater's own words and voting record, the ads made it impossible for Goldwater to rehabilitate his far-right image in advance of the Nov. 3, 1964, general election. "The myth is that the spot destroyed his campaign," Mann said. "It really didn't, but it eliminated any chance that his campaign would get off the ground." Looking back after a half of a century, some of the figures involved with the "Daisy" ad lament the nastiness they may have helped unleash. "(Moyers) and I both have come to, I think, regret the impact that it had," Wright told The Republic. "I later worked with AARP, and when Goldwater came back into the Congress, I developed high regard for him. I hardly knew him at the time of the campaign, of course." As for Monique Luiz, she doesn't follow politics much these days. The reason? Too much "trash-talking" on TV. "It's frustrating, and they say this ad helped contribute to that a lot," Monique said. "Oh, my gosh, I hate that. Not that I did it personally, but the ad that I was in contributed to it. So that's kind of disappointing." ON THE BEAT Dan Nowicki covers national politics, with an emphasis on the U.S. Senate and presidential races. He is a longtime student of U.S. political history and a collector of campaign memorabilia. How to reach him dan.nowicki@arizonarepublic.com Phone: 602-444-8275 Twitter: @dannowicki
Five No Compromise Issues On Legalizing MarijuanaFive No Compromise Issues On Legalizing Marijuana 1. We should be able to possess ANY amount of marijuana1. If we are going to legalize marijuana people should be able to possess any amount of marijuana. It is insane to partially legalize marijuana, but continue to throw people in prison for possessing more then some set amount of marijuana. Why on earth should people be arrested and sent to prison if they have more then 1.00 ounces, 2.50 ounces or some other silly arbitrary amount of marijuana? Is somebody going to be considered a law abiding honest citizen if they have 1.00 ounces or less of marijuana, while they will be considered an insane, homicidal maniac criminal if they have 1.01 ounces or more of marijuana? That's silly!!! It's like saying it should be legal to have 6 cans of beer, but possession of a 7th can of beer will send you to prison for a year. I suspect that MPP, Andrew Myers and his Arizona Dispensary Association want these silly possession limits so they can use them to jail anybody that they think is cutting into their government monopoly on growing and selling marijuana. From the point of MPP, Andrew Myers and his Arizona Dispensary Association if you have over 1.00 ounces of marijuana they will use that to automatically assume you are a criminal that is competing with their government monopoly on growing and selling marijuana and they will then have the police arrest and jail you to stop you from competing with them. v To me that is the only reason MPP and Andrew Myers came up with these silly limits on the amount of marijuana a person is allowed to possess. So that MPP and the marijuana dispsenaries can use these limits to have anybody that competes with THEIR marijuana monopoly jailed and put out of business. 2. If we are going to legalize marijuana people should be allowed to grow any number of marijuana plants they want. Again it's insane to partially legalize marijuana, but continue to throw people in prison for growing marijuana. Is somebody going to be considered a law abiding honest citizen if they smoke marijuana, but they will be considered an insane, homicidal maniac criminal if they grow a few marijuana plants? Again that's silly!!!! Are marijuana plants a danger to society? Marijuana plants are no more of a danger to society then oleanders, caster beans, morning glory plants and other plants that will kill you eat them, but which are legal to grow. If we don't let people grow their own marijuana plants the insane war on drugs will continue with police sending people to prison for the victimless crime of growing marijuana plants. I suspect that MPP, Andrew Myers and his Arizona Dispensary Association want to make it illegal for people to grow marijuana so they can use the police to enforce their govenrment monopoly on growing and selling marijuana. If it is illegal to grow ANY amount of marijuana then MPP, Andrew Myers and his Arizona Dispensary Association members can use the police to arrest and shut down anybody that they think is competing with them who is growing marijuana. Again this ban on growing marijuana isn't because marijuana plants are dangerous, it's because it's an easy way for the marijuana dispensaries to used the police to enforce their monopoly on growing and selling marijuana. Again if we don't legalize the growing of marijuana the insane war on drugs will continue and people will rot in prison for the victimless crime of growing marijuana. 3. Governments routinely use oppressive tax laws to stop activities which would be unconstitutional for them to ban. That is why we need to make it illegal for the government to slap any special taxes on marijuana or marijuana related activities. I won't complain if the govenrment is allowed to slap a sales tax on marijuana as long as it applies to ALL other products sold and not just to marijuana. A prefect example of this is when U.S. Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema who at the time was a member of the Arizona legislator tried to flush the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act or Prop 203 down the toilet by slapping a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana. That tax would have increased the cost of medical marijuana from $300 and ounce to $1,200 an ounce bankrupting many people who need to use medical marijuana. For all practical purposes the outrageously high tax would have made medical marijuana illegal by making the price too high for most people. A second example is when marijuana was made illegal at the Federal level they didn't pass a law banning marijuana. They knew that would be unconstitutional. Instead they made marijuana illegal with a tax law called the "1937 Marihuana Tax Act". I think that law required tax licenses for people to sell marijuana. Next they stopped issuing the tax licenses which effectively made marijuana illegal. The first law which Congress passed to make drugs like heroin and cocaine illegal was also a tax law. That was the "1914 Harrison Narcotic Tax Act". In the 1930's Congress also used tax laws to do an end run around the Second Amendment and make machine guns illegal. I believe that law slapped a $200 tax on machine guns, which at the time you could buy mail order from a Sears catalog for $10 to $50. The $200 tax on machine guns was 4 to 20 times what a machine gun cost at the time. And of course that outrageously high tax effectively made machine guns illegal for most people. If we are going to prevent government tyrants from making marijuana illegal by taxing the krap out of it we must forbid them from slapping special taxes on marijuana. 4. If we are going to legalize marijuana we must also demand that all people in prison for marijuana crimes be releases. We also need to demand that all people convicted or arrested of victimless marijuana crimes also be given full pardons for the crimes and have their records cleared so they are not labeled as a criminal for the rest of their life. I doubt if MPP, Andrew Myers and his Arizona Dispensary Association will have any arguments against this issue. 5. We must also forbid police, prosecutors and other govenrment entities in Arizona from partnering with the Federal government, Indian governments or foreign governments in any wars on marijuana. Sadly the "war on drugs" is nothing but a "jobs program" for police officers and a "government welfare program" for police departments. The "war on drugs" is all about money. I suspect if we end the "war on marijuana" for government entities, they will immediately turn around and start working with Uncle Sam arresting people for Federal marijuana crimes. Of course they won't do that because marijuana is a dangerous drug that causes crime. They will do that to get a share of the money Uncle Sam doles out for cops who arrest people for victimless "drug war crimes". To prevent this we must forbid Arizona government entities from partnering with any other government entity that arrests people for marijuana related crimes.
Since when do America's laws apply to every country on the planet??? Don't these Federal cops have any criminals to hunt down in the USA??? http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ex-usc-professor-sex-boys-20140905-story.html Ex-USC professor pleads guilty to having sex with boys overseas A former USC professor once on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted fugitives list pleaded guilty Friday to flying to the Philippines and having sex with several underage boys he groomed online. Walter Lee Williams, 65, admitted engaging in illegal sexual contact with minors in foreign places, entering the plea during a brief appearance before U.S. District Judge Phillip S. Gutierrez. As part of a plea, federal prosecutors agreed to recommend that the onetime eminent professor of gender and sexuality studies serve no more than five years in a federal prison. He also would be subject to 10 years supervision upon release and must pay $25,000 in restitution to his seven victims. Williams will be sentenced Dec. 15. He was apprehended within a day of making the FBI's Most Wanted List in June 2013 after he was indicted on sex crimes involving two 14-year-old boys in the Philippines. He was captured in the Mexican coastal town of Playa del Carmen after a resident recognized his photo from a newspaper. Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Michel Moore said Williams' conduct came to light three years ago when a person concerned about the safety of children contacted authorities. Williams taught anthropology, gender studies and history at USC for about two decades until he quit in 2011. Under the guise of academic research on sexuality in the Southeast Asia/Pacific region, he repeatedly traveled to the area. Federal prosecutors alleged that the author and Fulbright Award winner used those trips to have sex with underage boys. Investigators believe he has at least 10 victims across Southeast Asia, aged 9 to 17. Williams engaged in webcam sex sessions with two boys, aged 13 and 14, in the Philippines in 2010. The next year, he traveled to the country and had sex with both boys and a 15-year-old boy, according to the plea agreement. He was 62 at the time. While there, he also had sexual contact with three other 16-year-old boys, records show. When he returned to Los Angeles International Airport on Feb. 11, 2011, he was "intercepted," and child pornography was found on him. The professor fled Los Angeles a week after being interviewed by the FBI. An attorney for USC last year provided the FBI with materials the professor donated to the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives that contained "lascivious visual depictions of minors," according to the plea agreement. FBI agents also obtained similar images from Williams' former home. Recognition for Williams' work included the USC General Education Outstanding Teacher Award in 2006. Follow Southern California crime @lacrimes and @katemather.
San Jose cops shake down man for videotaping police murder The main difference between the Mafia and the police is that people involved with the Mafia will readily admit that they are criminals. On the other hand while most police officers don't consider themselves criminals, but think they have a God given right to commit crimes because they have a gun and a badge. On paper we have lots of Constitutional rights, but those rights are worthless if the police and government don't honor them. Sadly the police consider the Bill of Rights nothing more then a roll of toilet people which they use to wipe their *sses with. http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_26476508/san-jose-man-alleges-cops-tried-seize-his Shooting by San Jose police: Man alleges cops tried to seize his phone for recording scene By Robert Salonga rsalonga@mercurynews.com Posted: 09/05/2014 03:22:53 PM PDT SAN JOSE -- A San Jose resident who was one of several people recording the aftermath of an officer-involved shooting in South San Jose last month is alleging he was intimidated and threatened with detainment for refusing to surrender his cellphone or delete the images he took. The allegations are contained in an Aug. 21 internal-affairs complaint filed by Andrew Payne and comes as the issue of recording police performing their duties in public has gained national attention in light of the civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Earlier this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Riley v. California that warrantless searches and seizures of cellphones and their contents during an arrest were unconstitutional. A yellow evidence marker sits next to the drill reportedly held by a woman who was shot by a police officer. A yellow evidence marker sits next to the drill reportedly held by a woman who was shot by a police officer. (Patrick Tehan, Bay Area News Group) Because Payne was not under arrest at the time he said police demanded his phone, there's little ambiguity in this case, said Margaret Russell, a constitutional law professor at Santa Clara University. "They can't seize and search cellphones of criminal suspects, so they definitely can't do that to someone in the street," she said. Police declined to comment on the complaint, citing the ongoing internal-affairs investigation, which can take up to one year to complete. An internal police bulletin was sent out in July on the heels of the Riley decision to inform all sworn staff about the new search-and-seizure rules. Payne said he was out for a jog the morning of Aug. 14 when he came upon the scene where San Jose police, responding to a 911 call involving a weapons threat, shot and killed a 19-year-old San Jose woman near Blossom Hill Road and Playa del Rey. He said he was one of several people taking pictures and recording video with their cellphones who were approached by officers at the scene asking if anyone had witnessed the police encounter. But unlike some of the other people, Payne said he refused to hand over his phone for officers to search or give them his personal information. He said he was approached a few minutes later by Sgt. Teresa Jeglum, who is the sole officer named in his complaint. Payne said Jeglum asked him if he was taking pictures, and when he answered affirmatively, told him to clear them from his phone. "She told me, 'You either need to delete those photos or I'm confiscating your cellphone,' " Payne said. "I told her she couldn't do that, and then she reached to grab my phone." He said he later relented to officers' requests for his personal information after they asked him if he wanted to go to police headquarters. "They threatened to detain me if I didn't give them my info," Payne said. Payne said he spoke with a lieutenant after the encounter and said he just wanted an apology. He said he got a call from Jeglum, but instead of an apology, he got an assertion that she was trying to protect her officers. That didn't hold water with Payne, who said he was singled out. "There were 20 people there with cellphones, and they harassed me when I didn't cooperate," he said. Payne filed his police complaint with the city's Independent Police Auditor, which then forwarded it to SJPD's internal-affairs division. LaDoris Cordell, the IPA and a retired judge, said the SJPD duty manual makes clear that as long as they are not interfering with police duties, citizens are free to record officers working in public view. "Police officers everywhere are subject to increasing scrutiny by the public in light of recent officer-involved shootings around the country. The result is that policing and cellphone recordings by the public are the new norm," Cordell said. "They are here to stay." Russell noted that anecdotes about clashes between citizens and police over cellphone recordings have been on the rise nationally. She said what might need some judicial clarity is what constitutes police interference when it comes to recording. "People may record even if it embarrasses or angers or upsets the police officer," she said. "But what does it mean to interfere with performance of a police officer?" Ultimately, the issue could be control of the recordings, since some police departments across the country have long had dashboard cameras in patrol cars and more agencies are implementing body-worn cameras, including SJPD. Cordell said the added cameras from the public only work toward increased police transparency. "It is my hope that police officers will not simply accept, but welcome these recordings by the public," she said. "If they do, it will be a major step toward building trust between the community and the police." Payne said he hails from a family of law-enforcement officers -- his father is a lieutenant with the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office -- and says they're all firmly behind him. "I'm totally for police officers," Payne said. "But I'm also for civil rights." Contact Robert Salonga at 408-920-5002. Follow him at Twitter.com/robertsalonga. This article is the:
Anything the American Emperor says makes it legal - F*ck the Constitution & Bill of Rights Well, at least that's how Emperor George W. Bush seems to feel about it. Same goes for Emperor Obama. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/legal-memos-released-on-bush-era-justification-for-warrantless-wiretapping/2014/09/05/91b86c52-356d-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html Legal memos released on Bush-era justification for warrantless wiretapping By Ellen Nakashima September 6 at 12:15 AM The Justice Department released two decade-old memos Friday night, offering the fullest public airing to date of the Bush administration’s legal justification for the warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails — a program that began in secret after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The broad outlines of the argument — that the president has inherent constitutional power to monitor Americans’ communications without a warrant in a time of war — were known, but the sweep of the reasoning becomes even clearer in the memos written by then-Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, who was head of President George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel. “We conclude only that when the nation has been thrust into an armed conflict by a foreign attack on the United States and the president determines in his role as commander in chief . . . that it is essential for defense against a further foreign attack to use the [wiretapping] capabilities of the [National Security Agency] within the United States, he has inherent constitutional authority” to order warrantless wiretapping — “an authority that Congress cannot curtail,” Goldsmith wrote in a redacted 108-page memo dated May 6, 2004. The program, code-named Stellar Wind, enabled the NSA to collect communications on U.S. soil when at least one party was believed to be a member of al-Qaeda or an al-Qaeda affiliate, and at least one end of the communication was overseas. Its existence was revealed in 2005 by the New York Times, setting off great controversy, and the program was finally brought under court oversight in 2007. “What these memos show is that nearly three years after President Bush authorized the warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ e-mails and phone calls, government lawyers were still struggling to put the program on sound legal footing,” said Patrick Toomey, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the memos through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. “Their conclusions are deeply disturbing,” he said. “They suggest that the president’s power to monitor the communications of Americans is virtually unlimited — by the Constitution, or by Congress — when it comes to foreign intelligence.” Goldsmith argued that Congress’s 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed shortly after the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States provided “express authority” for the warrantless program. “In authorizing ‘all necessary and appropriate force,’ ” he reasoned, the AUMF necessarily applied to electronic surveillance, including domestically. He also asserted that the authorization can be read to “provide specific authority . . . that overrides the limitations” of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law passed in 1978 that required a court order to wiretap an American or any person on U.S. soil. So broad is the president’s Article II power, that he can conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence purposes without congressional approval “even in peacetime,” Goldsmith stated, citing Supreme Court cases and the Federalist papers. In a second memo, dated July 16, 2004 , Goldsmith argued that a Supreme Court decision reached weeks earlier, involving a U.S. citizen named Yaser Esam Hamdi captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, bolstered the reasoning of his first memo. Five justices in the decision, he said, agreed that Hamdi’s detention was authorized because it is a “fundamental” and “accepted” incident of waging war, he said. “Because the interception of enemy communications for intelligence purposes is also a fundamental and long-accepted incident of war, the [AUMF] likewise provides authority for Stellar Wind,” he said. The Hamdi decision, Toomey noted, did not make any mention of wiretapping or intelligence collection on U.S. soil. The memos were written at a time of high-level internal debate about the legality of the surveillance programs. And the unredacted portions do not reveal much analysis about what was reported to have been at the time the most controversial of the programs: the NSA’s bulk collection of e-mail metadata, or mass gathering of information such as the to-from lines in an e-mail. In March 2004, the OLC concluded the e-mail program was not legal, and then-Acting Attorney General James Comey refused to reauthorize it. That refusal resulted in a dramatic showdown that month between Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in the hospital with a severe pancreatic ailment, and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who had rushed to Ashcroft’s hospital bedside in a futile attempt to persuade him to reauthorize the e-mail program. In July 2004, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorized the program under a theory that bulk e-mail collection could be relevant to a terrorism investigation. That program was shut down in 2011. “Unfortunately, the sweeping surveillance they sought to justify is not a thing of the past,” Toomey said. “The government’s legal rationales have shifted over time, but some of today’s surveillance programs are even broader and more intrusive than those put in place more than a decade ago by President Bush.” The warrantless program was placed under statute in 2007 and 2008 by Congress. The current program, known as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, gives the government authority to collect communications on U.S. soil when the target is believed to be a foreigner overseas — not just for purposes of countering terrorism, but also for broader foreign intelligence purposes.
Would you pay $8 for a Big Mac? Maybe we should raise the minimum wage to $100 an hour, or even $1,000 and hour. That' would make everybody rich!!!! Yea, sure!!!! http://www.azcentral.com/story/laurieroberts/2014/09/04/fast-food-protests/15080507/ Would you pay $8 for a Big Mac? Laurie Roberts, columnist | azcentral.com 4:19 p.m. MST September 4, 2014 Protests are underway in Phoenix and 149 other cities across the country today, as fast-food workers take to the streets, hoping to get their pay raised to $15 an hour. In New York City, about 400 people gathered outside a McDonald's in Times Square during rush hour, chanting and briefly blocking traffic. About two dozen were arrested. Another two dozen were arrested outside a Chicago McDonalds. In Phoenix , four people were arrested Tuesday afternoon as 100 or so protesters gathered at 24th Street and Van Buren. The "Fight for $15" protests are being organized by Service Employees International Union, to call attention to the plight of the fast-food worker. While the movement doesn't appear to have much momentum, it did get a boost this week from President Obama. "If I were busting my butt in the service industry and wanted an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, I'd join a union," Obama said, during a Labor Day appearance in Milwaukee. [Of course Obama will say ANYTHING to pick up a few votes or to climb in the popularity polls] It's easy to sympathize with fast-food workers who are trying to support a family on $7.90 an hour. But it's unrealistic to think that a demand to double their salary will get them what they want. A better standard of living, that is. More likely, it'll land many of them out of a job, unless people really are willing to pay $6 to $8 for a Big Mac. Or unless the executives and franchisees who run these fast-food operations are willing to fall back a few rungs on their own standard of living. Yeah, that's going to happen. Seems to me a more realistic demand would be for a call to penalize these companies that expect taxpayers to subsidize their business model by paying their employees so poorly that they wind up on welfare. [Hey, nobody's forcing the government to give out millions or probably billions in welfare. These people should be happy they are getting free welfare paid by us taxpayers] Researchers at the University of California estimate that the state's fast-food workers and their families collect $7 billion in public assistance each year. And you thought fast food was cheap. Or how about a demand that our leaders in Washington and at our state capitols figure out what it would take to entice businesses to create decent jobs with living wages? [You mean those idiots in Washington know how to run things better then McDonalds??? Yea, sure. About the only thing those idiots, oops, I mean very smart crooks in Washington D.C. know how to is fleece us tax payers. Those crooks know next to nothing about honest hard work] This may sound callous but America doesn't need $15-an-hour burger flippers. We need an economy that provides real jobs with the possibility of advancement and the promise of decent benefits. Of course, such jobs would require a better educated workforce. Fortunately, we in Arizona have a Legislature that is committed to making an investment in edu ... Oh never mind.
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/2014/09/04/virginia-bob-mcdonnell-wife-convicted-corruption-fraud-bribery/15082453/ Ex-Va. Gov. McDonnell, wife guilty of public corruption Associated Press 3:21 p.m. MST September 4, 2014 RICHMOND, Va. — Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife were convicted Thursday of using his office to promote a dietary supplement in exchange for gifts in a public corruption case that derailed the career of a onetime rising Republican star. A federal jury convicted Bob McDonnell of 11 of the 13 counts he faced; Maureen McDonnell was convicted of nine of the 13 counts she had faced. Sentencing was scheduled for Jan. 6. Both bowed their heads and wept as a chorus of "guilty" kept coming from the court clerk. Widely considered a possible running mate for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential campaign, McDonnell was reduced to living with the family's priest in a church rectory during the trial. Now he and his wife face up to 20 years in prison for each conspiracy, fraud and bribery conviction. Sentencing was scheduled for Jan. 6. The couple left the courtroom separately and remained apart. Bob McDonnell left first and walked into a witness waiting room; Maureen McDonnell came out later, hugging one of her daughters while weeping loudly. She went into a separate waiting room. The couple was charged with doing favors for a wealthy vitamin executive in exchange for more than $165,000 in gifts and loans. They also were charged with submitting fraudulent bank loan applications, and Maureen McDonnell was charged with one count of obstruction. The trial was a sensation in political circles in Washington, just over the Virginia state line, as lawyers for McDonnell and his wife provided intimate details of the breakdown of their marriage in hopes of convincing jurors that they could not have conspired because they were barely speaking. "This is a difficult and disappointing day for the commonwealth and its citizens. Public service frequently requires sacrifice and almost always requires financial sacrifice," said Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Virginia. The former governor testified in his own defense, insisting that he provided nothing more than routine political courtesies to former Star Scientific CEO Jonnie Williams. Maureen McDonnell did not testify. His testimony and that of others exposed embarrassing details about Maureen McDonnell's erratic behavior and the couple's marital woes as the defense suggested they could not have conspired because they were barely speaking. Williams testified under immunity that he spent freely on the McDonnells in order to secure their help promoting his supposed cure-all, the tobacco-derived anti-inflammatory Anatabloc. Among the gifts were nearly $20,000 in designer clothing and accessories for Maureen McDonnell, a $6,500 Rolex watch for her husband, $15,000 in catering for one of their daughter's wedding, free vacations and golf outings. Williams also provided three loans totaling $120,000. As the gifts were being given, the McDonnells attended various Anatabloc promotional events and hosted a luncheon at the governor's mansion that the company billed as a product launch. Williams also was allowed to invite several of his associates to a reception for Virginia health care leaders at the mansion, and McDonnell arranged meetings for him with two state health officials as he was taking preliminary steps to seek state-backed research on Anatabloc. No applications for research grants were ever submitted. Prosecutors claimed that the McDonnells turned to Williams because they were grappling with credit card debt that once topped $90,000 and annual operating shortfalls of $40,000 to $60,000 on family-owned vacation rental properties. Two of the loans totaling $70,000 were intended for the two Virginia Beach rent houses. Williams said he wrote the first $50,000 check to Maureen McDonnell after she complained about their money troubles and said she could help his company because of her background selling nutritional supplements. A number of witnesses, including the former governor, said Maureen McDonnell despised being first lady and was prone to angry outbursts that prompted mansion staff to threaten a mass resignation. Bob McDonnell said he began working unnecessarily late to avoid Maureen's wrath and revealed that the two were living apart during the trial. The defense also introduced a September 2011 email from McDonnell to his wife lamenting the deterioration of their marriage, complaining about her "fiery anger" and begging her to work with him to repair the relationship. Defense attorneys said Maureen McDonnell had a "crush" on Williams, who preyed on her vulnerability. Several witnesses described their relationship as inappropriate and flirtatious. None suggested it was physical, and Williams testified that it was not. He said his relationship with both McDonnells was all about boosting his business.
Botched-execution report calls for more training How much training do you need to commit a government sponsored murder????? When the government murders people they should quit trying to give the impression that they are just giving the person a nice tranquilizer that will put them to sleep and that they will wake up the next day after a good nights sleep. Murder is murder, even it if is a "legal" government sponsored murder. And we shouldn't try to sugar coat that fact. Sure there are a lot of *ssholes that deserve the death penalty. But sadly mistakes will be made and innocent people will be executed. Which is why I am against the death penalty. Currently about 400 people have been freed from death row after DNA testing proved they were framed by the police for a crime they didn't do and sentenced to death. Personally I suspect that is just the tip of the iceberg. http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/04/oklahoma-botched-execution-report/15070355/ Botched-execution report calls for more training AP 2:36 p.m. MST September 4, 2014 OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma turned to a 15-year physician and a medical technician with 40 years' experience to put Clayton Lockett to death, yet his execution still went awry. Now, investigators are recommending more training for executioners, blaming Lockett's flawed, lengthy lethal injection on April 29 on poor placement of intravenous lines and a warden's decision that modesty was more important than monitoring Lockett for signs of trouble. The three drugs administered were not a factor, the state said. The findings and recommendations of the governor-requested, state-handled investigation highlight the difficulty that death penalty states face in making sure the people performing a grim medical procedure are properly prepared to see it through. "Is there some things that need to be improved? Absolutely," Oklahoma Department of Public Safety Commissioner Michael C. Thompson said Thursday after his agency released the findings of its investigation. "We think that the IV was a big issue with the execution." Out of modesty, no one monitored an intravenous line that had been placed in Lockett's groin before the start of his execution, a job that is the normal duty of Oklahoma State Penitentiary Warden Anita Trammel, who decided to cover Lockett's body — and the IV — with a sheet. "Those involved with the execution stated that they could have noticed the problem earlier if they had been monitoring the insertion site during that time," lead investigator Capt. Jason Holt said. Lockett, 38, writhed and moaned before he was declared dead 43 minutes after the first drug was administered. Gov. Mary Fallin ordered the review; most typically take 10 to 15 minutes. The medical team could not find suitable veins in Lockett's arms, legs, neck and feet, leading them to insert it in his groin, the report said. When it became apparent the execution wasn't progressing normally, the execution team pulled back the sheet and noticed a swelling larger than a golf ball near the injection site. State prisons director Robert Patton began rewriting the state's execution guidelines following Lockett's execution and was receptive to the DPS recommendations, Fallin said Thursday afternoon. Three executions have been set for November and December, the first on Nov. 13, but Fallin said the recommendations must be implemented first. "If I am assured as governor that those protocols are in place … then we can look forward to returning to executions," Fallin said. "But until all of those protocols have been put in place, we won't be having executions." Corrections spokesman Jerry Massie said Patton had no immediate comment. But Thompson echoed Fallin earlier Thursday: "The last thing we want to do is rush this and have an issue come up where we're not prepared for an execution." Oklahoma used the sedative midazolam for the first time in Lockett's execution, but Thompson said all three drugs — midazolam, vercuronium bromide and potassium chloride — worked as planned. "At the end of the day, despite the circulation issues that we had, the drugs did what they were designed to do," he said. Midazolam was also used in lengthy attempts to execute an Ohio inmate in January and an Arizona prisoner last month. Each time, witnesses said the inmates appeared to gasp after their executions began and continued to labor for air before being pronounced dead. Thompson said no single person was to blame for the foul-ups and no charges are being considered, leading critics to charge that the report does not address accountability. "It protects the chain of command," said Assistant Federal Public Defender Dale Baich, an attorney who represents 21 death row inmates who have sued the state Department of Corrections to block their executions. "Once the execution was clearly going wrong, it should have been stopped, but it wasn't," Baich said in a statement. "Whoever allowed the execution to continue needs to be held accountable." Patton, who had halted the execution, had said Lockett died of a heart attack, but autopsy results released last week said he died from the drugs. Lockett had been convicted of shooting Stephanie Nieman, 19, with a sawed-off shotgun and watching as two accomplices buried her alive in 1999. Thompson said the victim should not be forgotten while exploring the manner of Lockett's death. "Victims have rights. They don't get the attention they deserve," Thompson said. Lockett's execution was to be the first of two held back-to-back on April 29, but the second one for Charles Warner was postponed. The report recommended Oklahoma hold executions at least seven days apart, noting that the prison warden believed that the planned double execution caused "extra stress" for staff members.
More of the old "Do as I say, not as I do" from our religious leaders, government masters and police??? http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/pinal/2014/09/05/police-corrections-officer-says-killed-mother/15114523/ Police: Corrections officer says he killed mother Maribel Castillo, The Republic | azcentral.com 10:50 p.m. MST September 4, 2014 A corrections officer in Florence turned himself in to authorities Thursday in connection with the fatal shooting of his mother, police say. Alexander A. Santiago, 41, who reportedly resigned from the Arizona Department of Corrections on Thursday night, admitted to a sergeant that he had shot someone, according to a Florence Police Department statement. The sergeant, whose name was not released, noticed a suspicious man — Santiago — walking through the back parking lot of the police department at about 10 a.m., the statement said. After questioning Santiago, officials found a woman with a fatal gunshot wound to the head in the 400 block of E. Eighth Street in Florence. Police identified the woman as Sean M. Lafitte, 61, Santiago's mother and roommate. Police say Santiago told them he shot his mother because of his anger issues. Florence Police Department detectives are leading the investigation in conjunction with the Pinal County Attorney's Office. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Don't fret over losing Tesla??? F*ck that!!!! We should be celebrating. Our elected officials won't be taking the krap out of us to give millions of our hard earn tax dollars as corporate welfare to the millionaires that run Telsa!!! http://www.azcentral.com/story/robertrobb/2014/09/04/tesla-nevada/15093221/ Don't fret over losing Tesla Robert Robb, columnist | azcentral.com 2:52 p.m. MST September 4, 2014 I suppose the handwringing over losing the Tesla battery plant to Nevada is inevitable. It shouldn't be. Many market analysts think Tesla has grossly overestimated future demand for batteries for electric cars. And the electric car market itself depends on the continuation of large federal subsidies. Markets that depend on the decisions of politicians are inherently risky. Tesla honcho Elon Musk specializes in such markets. So, it was not surprising that he was looking for massive subsidies for his battery plant. He let it be known that he expected the winning state to pick up about 10 percent of his buildout costs, up to a cool $500 million. Musk apparently believes that government puts the "free" into "free enterprise." Tesla, however, is cool. And our politicians and economic development bureaucrats swoon over cool. It was embarrassing to see them act like teenage girls seeing the Beatles for the first time when a manufacturer of a component part for Apple announced it was coming to town. An economy, however, is not built on cool. Nor is healthy, sustainable economic growth built on government handouts to a handful of favored companies. Healthy, sustainable growth is built on individuals and companies who see economic opportunities here that don't require special government assistance to pencil out. Whose only individualized need from government is to have their required governmental approvals for operating processed fairly and expeditiously. There are tens of thousands of such companies grinding it out in Arizona each and every day. Some of them are cool. Most of them are not. But they are all important. Healthy, sustainable economic growth comes from developing broad-based policies that allow the tens of thousands of none-favor-seeking businesses to prosper and multiply, not tossing government money at a few demanding celebrity companies. Arizona used to understand that. We seem to have forgotten it lately. Reach Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com. Follow him on Twitter at @RJRobb.
How moms become murderers (without touching the kids) My dad was a real *sshole and I got beat for a lot of trivial crimes. Crimes like "saying hi wrong", or "acting funny", whatever those crimes are. My view was that my dad was an *sshole and he was going to find any lame excuse to beat me regardless of how I behaved. But that doesn't mean my mom was a criminal or an *sshole. Of course if I grew up today, my mom would probably be arrested for child abuse because of my dads crimes. Personally I think the police are more interested in carving notches in their guns for the number of arrests they make so they can use the arrest statistics to get raises, brownie points or claim to be heroes for all the arrests they make. And I think that is what the editorial that follows is all about. http://www.azcentral.com/story/laurieroberts/2014/09/05/child-abuse-death-annie-carimbocas/14988957/ How moms become murderers (without touching the kids) Laurie Roberts, columnist | azcentral.com 6:03 a.m. MST September 5, 2014 This month comes justice for a little girl named Annie and I'm hoping the right people are paying attention. The mothers out there, the ones who turn a blind eye to boyfriends who brutalize their children. The ones who are too scared or too deluded or just too resigned to protect their children. The ones who too often sacrifice the life of a child for the company of what passes for a man. Are they watching? Anays "Annie" Carimbocas had just turned 3 when her mother, Crystal, met Jose Gonzalez-Dominguez on New Year's Eve 2009. Within two months they were living together, along with Carimbocas' three children and her mother, Anna. Within seven, the first outward signs of trouble emerged. In July 2010, Anna called Mesa police after seeing her granddaughter's bruised cheek and hearing from the little girl that Dominguez had punched her. Naturally, Carimbocas sided with her boyfriend rather than her daughter. Court records indicate she told an older daughter, then 7, to tell police that she'd thrown a toy at her little sister. In September 2010, Carimbocas, Dominguez and the kids moved to a one-bedroom apartment, one away from the children's grandmother. Within weeks, Annie was taken to the hospital. Both of her eyes were swollen and one was blackened. Her scalp was swelling and she had broken blood vessels in her ear. Carimbocas explained that Annie had fallen but the hospital wasn't buying it. Unfortunately, Child Protective Services was. Caseworkers found no evidence of abuse and walked away. Eight months later, Annie was dead. By then, Carimbocas had had another child – her fourth – and was working two jobs to support the family while Dominguez stayed home with the kids. Until suddenly, there was one fewer to watch. On May 13, 2011, Carimbocas finished her night shift at Arby's and arrived home around midnight. An hour later, she realized that Annie wasn't breathing and called 911. Annie died on the way to the hospital. Dominguez told police that he'd taken the kids to the apartment's pool that afternoon and that Annie had fallen or possibly that one of her sisters had injured her. But the pool was closed for renovations that day and as for Annie's injuries? Well, they went beyond anything inflicted by other little girls. The child had two skull fractures, extensive head injuries and various internal injuries. She had 14 rib fractures and a fractured pelvis, all in various stages of healing. Annie Carimbocas died of "blunt force trauma", the injury of choice of so many live-in boyfriends. Too many. Her 8-year-old would later tell police that Dominguez regularly beat Annie and even stomped on her. This, for the apparently unforgivable crime of looking like her grandmother, the one who had called police. On the day Annie was supposedly falling on the pool steps, her sister told police that she saw Dominguez punch the child in the stomach three times as she lay on the couch and later hit her after she took a shower. Annie's sister also told police that her mother knew what Dominguez was doing, but that her mother refused to do anything and even forced the older daughter to take the blame when police came calling. Last month, a jury found both Dominguez and Carimbocas guilty of first-degree murder and child abuse. Dominguez, for beating the child and Carimbocas for failing to protect her daughter. While Carimbocas never laid a hand on the child, she also never offered a hand to her child and that, in Arizona, is enough to make her a murderer. That's something a few other mothers might want to ponder, next time they're blessed with a boyfriend who beats up babies. Next up to be tried for first-degree murder: Susan Witbrach. She stands accused of standing by while her daughter, Schala Vera, was savagely beaten by her boyfriend, Dauntorian Sanders, in 2009. The three year old died while trying to hide behind a toilet in the bathroom, with bruises covering every inch of her body. Mothers, be warned. "If we can tie the victim's death to the underlying felony child abuse charge (in this case, failure to protect), we charge first-degree murder," Jerry Cobb, spokesman for the Maricopa County Attorney's Office told me. A jury is now weighing whether Dominguez should be put to death for taking Annie's life. Then later this month, Carimbocas will be sentenced. She faces 35 years in prison – or more. This, for the unpardonable crime of doing nothing.
Don't these pigs have any real criminals to hunt down???? The guy has got 200,000 dirty pictures on his computer. So what!!!!! Unless he is raping the children in the photos that shouldn't make him a criminal!!! I probably have 200,000 dirty photos of porn star Jenna Jamison on my computer. That doesn't make me a criminal. Why should it make Dennis Edward Crabtree a criminal. Last the cops accused Dennis Edward Crabtree but he wasn't involved with any children. Why??? I think Arizona law says that if you have a dirty photo of a child, then that makes you guilty of molesting the child in the photo. That logic is rubbish. Looking at a sexy picture of a person doesn't make you guilty of raping or molesting the person any more the looking at a photo of a bank makes you guilty of robbing the bank. Maybe the guy is a pervert, but the government shouldn't be locking him in prison unless he is a pervert that also commits crimes that hurt people. http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/mesa/2014/09/05/mesa-child-porn-arrest/15125221/ Police: Mesa man had more than 200,000 child-porn images Agnel Philip, The Republic | azcentral.com 7:46 a.m. MST September 5, 2014 Internet detectives arrested a Mesa man accused of holding the largest collection of child pornography investigators have found this year. Investigators arrested a man in Mesa on Thursday who admitted to having over 200,000 pornographic images of children in his home, according to a Phoenix police spokesman. The collection of child pornography was the largest that Arizona Internet Crimes Against Children investigators had found this year, said Sgt. Trent Crump, a Phoenix police spokesman. Dennis Edward Crabtree, 64, told police he had been collecting the images, and that he was sexually attracted to children, according to Phoenix investigators. Police said he was also making copies of the images on DVD's. Police said they found cameras, child figurines and pictures of children in Crabtree's home, which is located near the intersection of Broadway and Lindsey roads, Crump said. Investigators will interview a group of young girls with whom they said Crabtree may have had contact, Crump said. Crabtree denied having physical contact with any young children, according to investigators, and he was arrested on suspicion of 10 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. Crump said Internet Crimes Against Children investigators are asking for anyone with information on Crabtree to contact detectives at 623) 466-1828.
Residents raise concerns about Tempe policing It ain't about making Tempe safer, it's about raising revenue busting people for trivial crimes. One person said that they got 3 tickets for trivial bicycle violations which will cost the person $800 in fines. "I incurred $800 in three bicycle tickets during separate stops during last year's Safe and Sober in a matter of two weeks" http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe/2014/09/05/residents-concerned-tempe-policing-speak-council-meeting/15113253/ Residents raise concerns about Tempe policing Dianna M. Náñez, The Republic | azcentral.com 7:22 a.m. MST September 5, 2014 Some residents say Tempe's recent public-safety campaigns make them feel like they are living in a "police state," but the officers who patrol the streets say the proactive policing will save lives. A group of residents who oppose the Tempe Police Department's heightened "Safe and Sober" patrols planned to take their complaints to the Tempe City Council meeting tonight. A social-media invite on the Maple - Ash - Farmer - Wilson Neighborhood Facebook page that encouraged residents to voice their gripes was titled "Tell Officer Buzzkill to Buzz off." The post, in part, reads: "We're sick of the police state. We're sick of a cop on every corner. We're sick of being afraid to walk to the liquor store because of police harassment. We're sick of the cops beating jaywalkers and shooting kids on the street." Police officers from Tempe and east valley police agencies start their patrols around the ASU campus hoping to reduce student drinking and driving accidents. 12 News "We're sick of the city turning downtown into a no-fun zone. We're sick of being punished for the frats' bad behavior. Stand with us. Drink with us! Cancel safe & sober for good. Before it's too late." The message is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the sentiment is sincere, said Tempe resident Cathie Mancini, 46. "My greatest concern is there's a privacy issue that I feel is violated in having armed officers in uniform knocking on doors in neighborhoods or setting up policing operations," said Mancini, who grew up in Tempe and lives in the Mitchell Park neighborhood south of downtown Tempe. "I feel that's over-policing." Mancini said she will attend the council meeting to ask the Tempe City Council to give residents: "A say in how our community is policed—we want a seat at the table." Tempe police officials have said the city's recent Welcome Walk and Safe and Sober campaigns are a response to residents who were concerned about Arizona State University students' safety after a string of high-profile crimes in recent years, loud college or fraternity parties and alcohol-related injuries. The Welcome Walk in August was a partnership between ASU police and staff and Tempe police and city workers. Lt. Michael Pooley, a Tempe police spokesman, said officers wanted to introduce themselves and get to know the people living in their community. They reminded college students of the city's loud-party rules. They warned residents and students about the Safe and Sober campaign, a three-week crackdown on impaired driving and underage drinking involving 17 police agencies. Safe and Sober launched Aug. 21 and will continue through Friday. Pooley said police have received positive feedback on the efforts. Tempe police have found that beefing up policing early in the ASU semester can curb students' unruly and dangerous behavior, especially for freshman, who are new to the community. "Every year, you get a brand new influx of freshmen," Pooley said. "Ten thousand new students who are away from home for the first time, they start doing things that they typically wouldn't do." Crime statistics Tempe police released Aug. 25, after the first three days of Safe and Sober, showed that dozens of impaired drivers were taken off Tempe streets. "The results indicate we are on the right path and continuing with the campaign is in the best interest of community safety," a Tempe police statement said. Tempe police tallied 392 arrests, including 146 for driving under the influence, 35 for minor possession of alcohol, 112 for minor consumption of alcohol and 99 categorized as "other" arrests. But for some, the statistics only reveal part of the picture. Christopher Paul, 37, said he believes some residents are being unfairly targeted. Paul, who lives in the Maple Ash neighborhood, south of downtown Tempe, said that the wave of police officers patrolling streets aren't just ticketing drunk drivers. "I incurred $800 in three bicycle tickets during separate stops during last year's Safe and Sober in a matter of two weeks," he said. Paul believes Tempe and the other Arizona public-safety agencies manning Safe and Sober are motivated in part by a revenue boost that comes with the increased ticketing. But fines are the least of Paul's worries. He said he fears that, as a minority, he is more likely to be targeted by police. Paul said he is Native American. "It's dangerous bringing 17 police organizations into a community," he said. "Me, being a brown person — minorities are getting arrested more, beat up more and killed more by police. That's why I'm scared." Mancini said that she spoke with Tempe police and explained that neighborhoods were on edge because the Tempe Welcome Walk, involving armed uniformed officers knocking on doors, took place during the Ferguson, Missouri, protests that flared after a police officer fatally shot an unarmed African-American teenager. Mancini said she has asked Tempe police for a demographic breakdown of the Safe and Sober crime statistics, but has yet to receive that information. "How many stops without arrests were made?" she said. "How many innocent people were harassed? We've never been able to get the demographics on age, ethnicity, those types of things." Mancini said she serves as an advocate on an oversight commission for the Arizona Department of Corrections, but she still fears speaking out against the police department. She wonders how many others in the community remain silent. "I come from a law-enforcement family, and I'm still terrified they're (the Tempe Police Department) going to flag me," she said. "We need to create a forum where we can feel confident about speaking up and working together with the police." Pooley said Tempe police officers understand residents' fears. "For people who are afraid when they see that many officers, that's not our intention," Pooley said. "We want people to come to Tempe. Tempe's a great place to be." Pooley encouraged residents with concerns to call the police. Communication will help residents and police build trust and understanding, he said "We're normal people. We have families that we go home to. We have our own fears," he said. "We're public servants, we're here to treat people fair."
Billy Hayes made some comments related to Andrew Myers. I was going to click on it and like it along with make a comment about it. But I clicked on the wrong thing and lost the articles. I think he said you should vote against any thing Andrew Myers supports. If I read the comment correctly I agree with him 100 percent. Sure Andrew Myers wants to legalize marijuana for recreational use like most of us do. That that doesn't make Andrew Myers a good guy. It also seems like Andrew Myers wants to get a government monopoly on growing and selling marijuana so that him and his Arizona Dispensary Association can sell the rest of us marijuana at ripoff prices of $300+ an ounce. From what I have heard Andrew Myers is responsible for writing Prop 203, which is Arizona Medical Marijuana Act. If you ask me Prop 203 sucks the big one. If you ask me Prop 203 is nothing more then a government welfare program for medical marijuana dispensaries. And it just turns out that Andrew Myers who wrote Prop 203 is also the head of the Arizona Dispensary Association whose members will benefit from that government monopoly on growing and selling marijuana. Did Andrew Myers write Prop 203 with the intention of using it to make himself and the members of the Arizona Dispensary Association rich by selling the rest of us medical marijuana at $300+ an ounce??? I don't know you will have to ask Andrew Myers to get the answer to that question. But if you ask me Andrew Myers isn't a "freedom fighter", but rather a self serving business man who wants to get a government monopoly on growing and selling marijuana to make himself rich by selling the rest of us over priced marijuana at $300+ an ounce. At the July 2014 Arizona NORML meeting Andrew Myers said something to the effect that medical marijuana was slightly over priced and that once the laws of supply and demand kick in medical marijuana wouldn't cost a penny over $200 and ounce. What rubbish!!!! If marijuana is fully legalized and the government doesn't slap outrageous taxes on marijuana a pound of marijuana shouldn't cost any more then a pound of tomatoes or potatoes. Which means we would be paying $2 for a pound of marijuana not the $200 and ounce or $3,200 a pound that Andrew Myers thinks is a perfectly reasonable price for members of his Arizona Dispensary Association to sell us marijuana at.
Trust us, we are not corrupt - Honest - Swear to God - IRS http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2014/09/04/why-did-the-irs-clean-out-lois-lerners-blackberry-after-probes-began/?tid=hpModule_14fd66a0-9199-11e2-bdea-e32ad90da239&hpid=z15 Why did the IRS clean out Lois Lerner’s Blackberry as probes began? By Josh Hicks September 4 at 6:00 AM Congress had little opportunity to debate the Internal Revenue Service’s missing-e-mail controversy while on break during the past month, but lawmakers will have plenty to talk about when they return next week. One question likely to come up is why the IRS wiped out Lois Lerner’s Blackberry shortly after congressional staffers interviewed the then-IRS official about suspected targeting of conservative groups. So far, the IRS has provided no answer. The issue came to light last month after U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ordered the IRS to explain its efforts to recover emails that went missing when the former official’s hard drive crashed in 2011. Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner appeared before Congress on May 22, 2013. She invoked her Fifth Amendment right rather than testify about the IRS targeting matter. (Pete Marovich/Bloomberg) Sullivan is presiding over a lawsuit against the IRS from the conservative legal group Judicial Watch, which wants to obtain Lerner’s e-mails. The organization suspects that the Blackberry may contain duplicates of communications that were lost when Lerner’s hard drive crashed in 2011. In response to the judge’s order, a top IRS official said in a signed declaration that the agency has no record of attempting to recover data from the mobile device. IRS attorney Thomas J. Kane said in a separate declaration that the agency “removed or wiped clean” information from the Blackberry in June 2012, shortly after congressional staffers questioned Lerner about the targeting allegations and in the same month that the IRS inspector general began examining the issue. Kane offered no explanation for why the IRS “removed or wiped clean” the data, and the IRS did not respond to the same question when asked by The Washington Post on Wednesday. The inspector general ultimately determined that the IRS inappropriately applied extra scrutiny to certain nonprofit groups based on their names and policy positions during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. The independent watchdog launched an investigation of the missing e-mails after they became known to Congress in June, but he has released no details about the probe at this point. Nonetheless, a lawyer for the Justice Department shed some light on the investigation during a status hearing for the Judicial Watch case in July, saying the inspector general’s office was examining Lerner’s computer and Blackberry and trying to recover information from them. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified before Congress this summer that the agency tried unsuccessfully to recover information from Lerner’s hard drive after the device failed. He said the IRS then sent the hard drive away for destruction or recycling, in line with agency protocol. Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment right to not testify at two congressional hearings about the IRS targeting matter, but she and her attorney have said she did nothing improper or illegal during her time with the agency. Josh Hicks covers the federal government and anchors the Federal Eye blog. He reported for newspapers in the Detroit and Seattle suburbs before joining the Post as a contributor to Glenn Kessler’s Fact Checker blog in 2011.
Police unions are just as corrupt as teachers unions???? While Bob Ferrante seems to be right about teacher's unions he doesn't seem to understand that the police unions are just as corrupt as the teacher's unions. Police officers rarely get more then a slap on the wrist, if that much for crimes that would send civilians to prison for many years. Almost every time an unarmed person is murdered by the police the murder is ruled as justified. I suspect the police unions have a good deal of responsibility for that. http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/letters/2014/09/03/labor-unions-pro-con/15037177/ NOT ALL UNIONS ARE EQUAL Retired union worker Angel Rodriguez talks about all the good things these labor groups did more than 45 years ago and I strongly agree. However, he completely fails to talk about the disgraceful organizations most of them have become over the years. I am in complete support of all law enforcement and firefighters unions everywhere. But others, such as teachers unions, AFSCME, SEIU, are a different story. Is Mr. Rodriguez aware of the infamous union "rubber rooms" where a teacher cannot be fired? And what about unions under contract with employers opposing the right of new employees to choose whether to become a member and have dues deducted from wages. I understand his personal bias, but that's no excuse for omitting the negative side of unions. — Bob Ferrante, Phoenix
I wonder how the government bureaucrats in the "public schools" or more correctly "government schools" ever find time to teach the children anything. They seem to be more concerned with doing politically correct rubbish like this. http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/weird/2014/09/04/girl-shame-suit-school/15071397/ Mom: Girl forced to wear 'shame suit' at school Michelle Quesada, WTLV-TV, Jacksonville, Fla 9:41 a.m. MST September 4, 2014 ORANGE PARK, Fla. — A mother claims her daughter was forced by her school to swap her too-short skirt for what she calls a "shame suit." When 15-year-old Miranda Larkin went to Oakleaf High School in a black skirt about three to four inches above her knees on the third day of school, she didn't know she was in violation of the dress code. She says a teacher sent her to the school nurse who said she had to put on a neon yellow T-shirt and bright red sweat pants with the words 'DRESS CODE VIOLATION' written across both. "She just points at me from across the hall, and says, 'Your skirt is too short,' " Miranda said. Miranda just moved to Clay County from Seattle and was on her third day at a new school. Her mother, Dianna Larkin, said the outfit was humiliating. "She put on the outfit in the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror and just broke down. She started sobbing and broke out in hives," said Dianna Larkin. A Clay County School District representative says students who violate the dress code are given the option to stay in their clothes and go to in-school suspension, wear the sweats and T-shirt as punishment and go to class, or arrange for someone to bring them other clothes. Larkin says she was only given one option. "I feel that by putting a kid in an outfit that says what they did wrong across their chest and down their leg is taking their private records and making them public and that's a clear violation of their privacy rights." added the teen's mother. Larkin was able to leave school early and not face suspension. She says she's filing a complaint with FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, for making her daughter's discipline public. The Clay County School District says the intent of the outfit is to get students back to class as quickly as possible. The School Board attorney said in a statement that after consulting with other districts, the policy has been deemed suitable. "(The outfit) is not displaying a discipline record to the public," the statement said. "If we took off the words the other students would still know that the prison orange T-shirts were for dress code violations. I think that the practice is OK." |