Prometheus 6

An arrest two years ago involving a man found with a kilo of cocaine in his backpack was subsequently thrown out by an Albany County judge, who ruled the cops had no legitimate reason to approach and question the man.

During the hearing that led to that dismissal, Terence L. Kindlon, the defendant's attorney, accused a sheriff's investigator of lying and embellishing his testimony by using precise language -- "I sensed 'criminality was afoot' " -- directly from the Court of Appeals ruling, according to a court transcript. 

Outcry over Sheriff's Department search methods
By BRENDAN J. LYONS, Senior writer
First published: Sunday, March 2, 2008

ALBANY -- Two years ago, Tunde Clement stepped off a bus at the city's main terminal downtown.

Clement, a black man, was carrying a backpack and coming from New York City. That may have been enough to pique the interest of undercover sheriff's investigators scanning the crowd with their eyes.

They cornered Clement and began peppering him with questions.

He was quickly handcuffed and falsely arrested. He was taken to a station to be strip-searched and then to a hospital, where doctors forcibly sedated him with a cocktail of powerful drugs, including one that clouded his memory of the incident.

The actions of police in the minutes that followed would end in controversy rather than with an arrest. They would also leave Shutter, a 28-year-old single mother from Ravena, shaken and angry after one of the officers allegedly inserted his finger into Shutter's vagina on a public street during an apparent search for drugs.

When it was over, "I pulled off down the road and I just cried for probably a half hour," Shutter said. "I called my dad. ... I felt like I had been basically raped."

That's because you were. Raped...

Shutter said she grew increasingly unnerved by her experience with internal affairs -- which is known as the Office of Professional Standards -- because male detectives twice requested she wear clothes from the night of the incident to re-enact the body search.

And serially disrespected.

Police: 'You fit the profile'
By BRENDAN J. LYONS Senior writer
First published: Sunday, March 2, 2008

ALBANY-- The cops in the marked patrol car had circled through West Hill a couple times keeping an eye on their female target.

They were part of the Street Drug Unit, an aggressive squad assigned to help rid Albany's neighborhoods of drug dealers and addicts blamed for much of the city's problems.

It was early evening and already dark when the patrol car's emergency lights flashed in the rearview mirror of Lisa Shutter's Mitsubishi sedan on Quail Street, just off Central Avenue.

The issue is real, and though it is this absurd it's not funny at all.

That link came out of the Luv4self Network

Newark Triple Murder Suspect Gets 8 Years in Assault
By KAREEM FAHIM

NEWARK — Jose Lachira Carranza, one of six suspects accused of killing three people in a playground last summer, was sentenced on Monday to eight years in prison for assaulting two men during a bar fight in 2006.

The bar brawl drew attention soon after the playground killings, when it was disclosed that Mr. Carranza, 29, an illegal immigrant from Peru, could have been detained by federal authorities after his arrest for assault.

Mr. Carranza was also arrested in 2007, before the Newark playground killings, on charges that he sexually assaulted a child over a four-year period.

The bar fight, at Huguito’s, of West Orange, started with a shoving match involving a friend of Mr. Carranza’s, according to witnesses and the police. In the ensuing violence, Mr. Carranza broke bottles and threw chairs, badly injuring several men.

...the supposed distinction between activist liberals and color-inside-the-constitutional-lines conservatives is not only phony but often backward. In its first 200 years, the Supreme Court struck down fewer than 130 acts of Congress; in the past 13 years, it has overturned more than 30, including a piece of McCain's signature campaign-finance law. This behavior is hardly the "humility" McCain argues should be restored to federal courts.

Last year, the court told school districts that they could not adopt voluntary integration plans that use race as a factor in assigning students. Talk about legislating from the bench. I don't recall McCain complaining then that the court was intruding "on policy questions that should be decided democratically." 

High Court Caricature
By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, May 14, 2008; A19

The court stepped in, summarily overturning laws in 16 states. Tossing aside evidence that the constitutional provision was never intended to apply to the situation at hand, the court instead looked to what it grandly described as the "broader, organic purpose of a constitutional amendment."

Another example of "unelected judges" demonstrating "little regard for the authority of . . . the states" and "even less interest in the will of the people"? Of judges, unconstrained by constitutional text or history, turning to " 'emanations' . . . and other airy constructs the court has employed over the years as poor substitutes for clear and rigorous constitutional reasoning"?

Mr. Webb said Mr. Kilpatrick, whose second term ends in 2009, would not resign, no matter how much pressure the Council applied.

“I have told the mayor, as his lawyer, that he should not consider that under any circumstances,” Mr. Webb said. “He’s made it clear to me that he’s never considered resigning. It has never been an option. It’s not going to be an option in the future.” 

Detroit City Council Votes to Request Removal of Mayor by Governor
By NICK BUNKLEY

DETROIT — The Detroit City Council voted on Tuesday to ask the governor of Michigan to oust the city’s mayor, Kwame M. Kilpatrick, who is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.

Mr. Kilpatrick has defied a demand the City Council made in March that he resign after the disclosure of evidence that he tried to cover up an extramarital affair with his chief of staff.

The Council also voted Tuesday to try to force Mr. Kilpatrick from office on the ground that he violated Detroit’s city charter. Both resolutions passed 5 to 4.

belle lettre @Scatterplot  

I don’t know what the sociological definitions are for constitutes a gang, but the legal definition seems to fit. Just because it doesn’t seem to “fit” with the popular conception of gangs as racial minority “thugs” doesn’t mean that this was a mere “accident” or forgivable aberration in the behavior of otherwise upstanding white citizens. This was not a case of good white people going crazy in a Lord of the Flies moment of sudden norm shifting. If this were a group of young Black, Latino, or Asian men, the gang allegations would not be in dispute. What these men did was reprehensible. Gang rapes, gang killings–group violence is simply abhorrent, and if this was premeditated, as it appears to be (they left one party to go to Kauanui’s house), then this is cold-blooded murder, and if this was part of their gang’s plans to perpetrate violence and terror, then the murder was gang-related.

“They weren’t gangsters,” says Richard Kenvin, 47, a filmmaker who grew up surfing Windansea. “They were gangsta chic.”

Whatever you do, don't call it a gang. 

What seems beyond dispute is that a security guard at the bar asked Mr. Kauanui to leave and that Mr. House and four others — Mr. Cravens; Orlando Osuna, 23; Matthew Yanke, 21; and Henri Hendricks, 22 — later drove to Mr. Kauanui’s home, prosecutors say to retaliate against him.

Mr. Kauanui’s head “buckled up and down like a bobblehead doll” during the fight, Mr. Hendricks told the police. When Mr. Kauanui fell back onto the sidewalk, his head landed on the concrete with what Mr. Cravens described to the police as “a loud thud.”...

As word spread of Mr. Kauanui’s death — he died four days after the beating from head injuries at Scripps Memorial Hospital — more than a dozen people reported assaults by one or more members of the Bird Rock Bandits, most of which involved at least one of the defendants. By the end of last summer, all five men were facing not only charges of first-degree murder, but also the gang allegations.

Pro Surfer’s Death Exposes Beach Town’s Violent Side
By ABBY AGUIRRE

SAN DIEGO — The affluent community of La Jolla has long produced beach cliques, most formed around the inclination of surfers and other beachgoers to guard their local break.

In particular, the locals who frequent Windansea Beach — a storied break once frequented by the professional surfer Emery Kauanui Jr. and a little-known group whose members call themselves the Bird Rock Bandits — are among the most territorial in all of California.

But last spring, Mr. Kauanui was beaten to death, and five young men from La Jolla, all in their 20s, were charged in his murder. In court last week, prosecutors said that because the men were members of the Bird Rock Bandits, they should be prosecuted under tough state laws that apply to criminal street gangs.

The men have pleaded not guilty, suggesting that Mr. Kauanui’s death was an accident, and they deny that their group is a gang. At a hearing that began Wednesday, in San Diego Superior Court, their lawyers are seeking to have the gang-related allegations — so-called enhancements that can result in much stiffer penalties at sentencing — dropped.

“They are as much a gang as any fraternity,” said Mary Ellen Attridge, the lawyer for one of the men, Seth Cravens, 22.

Those who favor continuing these policies have not met their burden of proving their efficacy in fighting crime. Nor have they have persuasively justified the yawning racial disparities.

Our young darlings from the middle class are using heroin on Long Island nowadays. Get them and the racial imbalance will straighten itself out pretty quickly.

Racial Inequity and Drug Arrests

The United States prison system keeps marking shameful milestones. In late February, the Pew Center on the States released a report showing that more than 1 in 100 American adults are presently behind bars — an astonishingly high rate of incarceration notably skewed along racial lines. One in nine black men aged 20 to 34 are serving time, as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.

After nearly six years, R. Kelly child pornography trial seems like a go
Judge hints that proceeding will start Friday as scheduled
By Stacy St. Clair

Tribune reporter

10:58 PM CDT, May 8, 2008

R. Kelly finally will have his day in court, nearly six years after first being indicted on child pornography charges.

The R&B superstar, 41, is accused of videotaping himself engaging in sex acts with a girl prosecutors say could be as young as 13. He has pleaded not guilty.

In discussing that drug bust at San Diego State University, Reason Magazine's Matt Welsh asks:

I always wonder what happens to these guys who are arrested in their early 20s for meeting a sliver of the insatiable undergraduate demand for pot-smoking. I was never any dealer, nor much of a user, but I've known and worked with quite a few perfectly successful people who dealt drugs in college. I have also known a couple who were unlucky (and/or careless) enough to get carted off to jail, but those guys I lost track of. (Though through the magic of Google I see one former mushroom-dealing colleague running a successful business in Texas, so hopefully it all turned out well.)

So I leave the question open to the floor: What ever happened to your drug dealing friend or aquaintance who got arrested in or around college?

There's such fear of Black violence in these situations, and so little history of it.

I'm not prepared to think about the utility of officially sanctioned protests today. It needs to be considered, though.

216 Held in Protests of Police Acquittals
By THOMAS J. LUECK

In the largest public protest against the acquittal of three detectives in the shooting death of Sean Bell, 216 people were arrested on Wednesday in carefully orchestrated demonstrations that halted traffic at busy intersections in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the police said.

The demonstrations, described by the Rev. Al. Sharpton as “pray-ins,” played out on a bright spring afternoon as boisterous displays of civil disobedience in which people signed up to be arrested, assuring organizers and lawyers that they were carrying proper identification to show to the police.

Once positioned at the intersections, demonstrators dropped to their knees or sat and prayed briefly before hundreds of police officers escorted them to buses and police vehicles.

"The server was not secure at all. It indicates that these people that are doing the crime today, they are not security experts, they are not computer science experts.

"They are people who are buying the crime toolkits ... software packages that hackers, the smart people, are selling," he told Reuters.

"The person that operated this server had no clue on security, he had no clue about how to configure a Web server. He just took a ... toolkit and started to use it and in three weeks he managed to have this fortune, this treasure on his server." 

Web firm sounds alert on criminal data trove
Tue May 6, 2008 1:38pm EDT

By Mark Trevelyan, Security Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) - A Web security firm said on Tuesday it had tipped off international banks and police after finding a huge trove of stolen business and personal data amassed on a server in the space of just three weeks.

Finjan Inc said it had notified the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, police in various countries and more than 40 financial institutions in the United States, Europe and India about the discovery of the so-called "crimeserver".

"This server was running for about three weeks and within this period it managed to collect 1.4 gigabytes of data. It is indeed the largest treasure we've found in this very short time," Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer of the California-based firm, said in a phone interview from Israel.

McCain Will Seek Judges Like Roberts, Alito
By REUTERS

Filed at 6:15 a.m. ET

WINSTON-SALEM, North Carolina (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Tuesday he would appoint judges in the mold of conservatives John Roberts, Samuel Alito and former Chief Justice William Rehnquist if he were elected in November.

In an excerpt from a speech McCain was to give in Winston-Salem on Tuesday, the Arizona senator said he would "look for accomplished men and women with a proven record of excellence in the law, and a proven commitment to judicial restraint."

"I will look for people in the cast of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and my friend the late William Rehnquist -- jurists of the highest caliber who know their own minds, and know the law, and know the difference," McCain said.

Police Data Shows Increase in Street Stops
By AL BAKER

Despite criticism about aggressive policing, New York City police officers stopped more people on the streets during the first three months of 2008 than during any quarter in the six years the Police Department has reported the data.

The 145,098 stops from January through March — up from 134,029 during the same quarter a year earlier — led to 8,711 arrests and put the Bloomberg administration on course for the highest annual total. The numbers also reflect an increased reliance on a practice that has become an emotional flashpoint, particularly after the fatal police shooting of Sean Bell in 2006.

“The way the war on drugs has been pursued is one of the biggest reasons for the growing racial disparities in criminal justice over all,” said Ryan S. King, a policy analyst with the Sentencing Project, who wrote its report, which focuses on the differential arrest rates, not only between races but also among cities around the country. Some cities pursue urban, minority drug use far more intensively than do others.

Racial Disparities Found to Persist as Drug Arrests Rise
By ERIK ECKHOLM

More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.

Some welcome the end of the moratorium.

“We’ll start playing a little bit of catch-up,” said William R. Hubbarth, a spokesman for Justice for All, a victims rights group based in Houston.

“It’s not like we have a cheering section for the death penalty.” Mr. Hubbarth said. But, he added: “The capital murderers set to be executed should be executed post-haste. It’s not about killing the inmate. It’s about imposing the penalty that 12 of his peers have assessed.”

Cripes, what a liar. It certainly is about killing the inmate. You are a cheering section for the death penalty. You just know how horrible that sounda.

After Hiatus, States Set Wave of Executions
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HUNTSVILLE, Tex. — Here in the nation’s leading death-penalty state, and some of the 35 others with capital punishment, execution dockets are quickly filling up.

Less than three weeks after a United States Supreme Court ruling ended a seven-month moratorium on lethal injections, at least 14 execution dates have been set in six states between May 6 and October.

“The Supreme Court essentially blessed their way of doing things,” said Douglas A. Berman, a professor of law and a sentencing expert at Ohio State University. “So in some sense, they’re back from vacation and ready to go to work.”

Microsoft device helps police pluck evidence from cyberscene of crime
By Benjamin J. Romano
Seattle Times technology reporter

Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB "thumb drive" that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.

A New Look at Race When Death Is Sought
By ADAM LIPTAK

About 1,100 people have been executed in the United States in the last three decades. Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, accounts for more than 100 of those executions. Indeed, Harris County has sent more people to the death chamber than any state but Texas itself.

Yet Harris County’s capital justice system has not been the subject of intensive research — until now. A new study to be published in The Houston Law Review this fall has found two sorts of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty there, one commonplace and one surprising.

The unexceptional finding is that defendants who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks. More than 20 studies around the nation have come to similar conclusions.

Bell’s Family and Friends, With Rising Anger, Say Fight Is ‘Far From Over’
By JOHN ELIGON

Nicole Paultre Bell, the woman who was to marry Sean Bell the day he was killed in a hail of 50 police bullets, vowed on Saturday to continue demanding accountability for his death, delivering her remarks in a tone that was a departure from her more familiar gentle demeanor.

Joseph Guzman, who was shot more than a dozen times while sitting next to Mr. Bell, followed her to the microphone and spoke in somber tones of the emotional whiplash of the previous 24 hours.

Ms. Paultre Bell and Mr. Guzman spoke publicly on Saturday for the first time since a judge on Friday acquitted three detectives charged in the shooting of Mr. Bell in November 2006 outside a strip club in Jamaica, Queens, where he had celebrated his bachelor party.

US Reps. Gregory W. Meeks, Rangel, Towns, Clarke and Cheeks Kilpatrick, New York State Senate Minority Leader Malcolm A. Smith and Southeast Queens Elected Officials Issued a Joint Statement on the Sean Bell Verdict

Congressman Gregory W. Meeks

JAMAICA, N.Y., April 26 -- "A year and a half ago, three police officers fired a total of 50 bullets at three unarmed and innocent young men, killing Sean Bell and severely wounding Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield. This incident occurred in the morning of what was supposed to be Sean Bell's wedding day. The past seventeen months have been extremely difficult for Nicole Paultre Bell, Sean Bell's fiancee, his daughters, and his parents, William and Valerie Bell.

"It appeared that the evidence presented by the prosecution during a six week trial was compelling and conclusive. Yet, the verdict rendered by Judge Arthur Cooperman this morning acquitted all three officers of all charges.

A Decision of Many Words Put the Fateful Ones Last
By MICHAEL WILSON

Criminal verdicts almost always contain either one word or two. The Sean Bell verdict ran 1,164 words, a methodical and unusual look into a judge’s examination of the burden of proof by the people of the County of Queens.

“The court did not view the victims or the N.Y.P.D. as being on trial here,” Justice Arthur J. Cooperman said in a packed courtroom Friday in delivering his verdict on the detectives charged in Mr. Bell’s death. But much of the most damning language was indeed directed at the victims, both at behavior that the judge saw as fomenting the tension that led to the shooting, and then at statements on the stand that he found dubious.

versus

The Fear Behind the Badge
By KYLE K. MURPHY

Mr. Bell was killed and two of his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, were seriously wounded in a fusillade of 50 bullets. The police, who were conducting a prostitution sting, said that Mr. Bell tried to drive over an undercover detective. The officers fired because they thought one of the Bell party had a gun.

Since no gun was found in the vehicle, it is clear that the police officers made a tragic mistake. They even violated department guidelines, which prohibit using deadly force against someone in a vehicle unless he is threatening an officer’s life by means other than the vehicle, such as firing a gun at the same time. But in the end, what they did was not criminal.

3 Detectives Acquitted in Bell Shooting
By MICHAEL WILSON

Three detectives were found not guilty Friday morning on all charges in the shooting death of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 police bullets outside a club in Jamaica, Queens.

Justice Arthur J. Cooperman, who delivered the verdict, said many of the prosecution’s witnesses, including Mr. Bell’s friends and the two wounded victims, were simply not believable. “The testimony of those witnesses just didn’t make sense,” he said.

His verdict prompted several supporters of Mr. Bell to storm out of the courtroom, and screams could be heard in the hallway moments later. The three detectives — Gescard F. Isnora, Michael Oliver and Marc Cooper — were escorted out of a side doorway. Outside, a crowd gathered behind police barricades, occasionally shouting, amid a veritable sea of police officers.

Judge Rules on Terrorism Watch Lists
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

A federal magistrate judge in Chicago has ruled that protecting state secrets is not a valid argument for the government to refuse to tell American citizens whether they are on the terrorism watch list, the Terrorist Screening Database. The ruling, signed on April 16 but made public by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois on Wednesday, ordered the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. to give the court the files regarding the 10 Muslim or Arab-American plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit starting in 2005, seeking court protection from what they contend is unwarranted harassment at the border. The magistrate judge, Sidney I. Schenkier of Federal District Court, said the court could review the information to decide whether it should remain classified. The F.B.I. said it had no comment.