I confess I haven’t followed this case, and it is highly likely the jury (correction: it was a judge trial) had every reason for deciding as they did. But I hope people understand that just from a gut level it is very hard for black people to reconcile that there was nothing criminal about an innocent young man being gunned down in a hail of bullets.
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. “At times, 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.
The verdict comes 17 months to the day since the Nov. 25, 2006, shooting of Mr. Bell, 23, and his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, outside the Club Kalua in Jamaica, Queens, hours before Mr. Bell was to be married.
What John Stagliano is doing is perfectly legal and falls under the first amendment.
A grand jury has socked Stagliano with eight obscenity violations for selling adult videos online and via unmarked packing envelopes shipped by the U.S. Postal Service. None of the films contain children. This is not a child-porn case.
Since the feds have had minimal luck over the years going after the makers of standard smut, this time they’re taking a kinkier approach, targeting Stagliano for films aimed at fans of fluid fetishes.
At the same time the feds waste money prosecuting this man, we lack funds to go after child abusers.
More than 624,000 computers in the USA have traded child pornography, much of it showing the sexual abuse of very young children, in the past 2½ years, a leading police authority planned to tell Congress at a hearing Wednesday.
Yet federal authorities with limited resources pursue fewer than 1% of the leads, according to a USA TODAY analysis of government data.
Prosecute the free speech of consenting adults doing what they please, but when it comes to protecting children from the worst sort of crime short of murder and hands are tied.
A federal appellate court today ordered former Gov. Don Siegelman released from prison while he appeals his 2006 conviction, saying there are “substantial questions” about his case.
A federal jury in 2006 convicted Siegelman and HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy of federal funds bribery. Prosecutors alleged Scrushy bought a seat on a state board with a $500,000 donation to Siegelman’s lottery campaign.
The judges wrote that Siegelman met both requirements for an appeal bond: He is not a flight risk and his appeal raises a substantial question of law or fact likely to result in reversal or an order for a new trial.
As the gunman was about to open fire, 7-year-old Alexis Goggins lunged from the back seat of the SUV and threw herself across her mom, crying, "Don’t hurt my mother!"
Six bullets from the 9 mm handgun slammed into Alexis, one piercing her right eye. Two slugs hit her mother.
Alexis’ mother pulled through. But two weeks later, Alexis lies in critical condition, blind in one eye. And to her classmates and many people in this city so depressingly familiar with violence, the little girl is a hero.
"She was trying to save me," her mother, Seliethia Parker, 30, told The Associated Press on Monday. "My baby is just an angel to her mother. I thought as the mother, I’d be saving my child. I never thought my daughter would be saving me."
A U.S. Senate aide was arrested Friday after allegedly arranging a lunchtime sexual encounter with a teenage boy, according to federal court records. James McHaney, 28, was nabbed by FBI agents after he arranged the afternoon liaison via a “cooperating witness” working with investigators.
Apparently Sen. Cantwell fired him right away. As opposed to covering it up, like Dennis Hastert.
That’s not why I am a death penalty supporter, but there’s new research.
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.
The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.
The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise. One influential study looked at 3,054 counties over two decades.
“I personally am opposed to the death penalty,” said H. Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University and an author of a study finding that each execution saves five lives. “But my research shows that there is a deterrent effect.”
It should be hard - very hard - to execute someone. But we should have the option.
Former Northern Colorado backup punter Mitch Cozad was sentenced to seven years in prison Tuesday for stabbing the starter in his kicking leg.
Cozad was convicted in August of second-degree assault in the September 2006 attack on Rafael Mendoza. He was acquitted of the more serious charge of attempted first-degree murder.
The 22-year-old Cozad faced up to 16 years in prison.
Mendoza was ambushed outside his apartment on the night of Sept. 11. He couldn’t say who attacked him in the dimly lighted parking lot. He testified the assailant was dressed in black from head to toe and had a hood cinched up so only the eyes were visible.
Prosecutors argued Cozad stabbed Mendoza because he was “obsessed with being the starting punter” and “the big man on campus.”
Hundreds of people who claim they were abused by clergy affiliated with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles can expect to be paid more than $1 million each in a $660 million settlement of their lawsuits. The deal, by far the largest settlement in the church’s sexual abuse scandal, was reached Saturday, said Ray Boucher, the lead plaintiff’s attorney.
…
The settlements push the total amount paid out by the U.S. church since 1950 to more than $2 billion, with about a quarter of that coming from the Los Angeles archdiocese.
When you look at the pattern of abuse and cover-up the Catholic church has used - and still uses (like the way the church shuttled off pedophile protector Cardinal Bernard Law into their protection) - for years now, I do not understand why the government refuses to investigate the entire thing under the RICO statute. It is clearly an organized strategy that has damaged and taken the lives of thousands.
Georgia’s attorney general confirms that he’s trying to keep behind bars a man who was sentenced to ten years in prison for consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17.
A judge today ordered the release of Genarlow Wilson, saying his 10-year sentence for a crime that is now considered a misdemeanor was a “grave miscarriage of justice.”
But Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker says he’s filed notice of appeal of today’s ruling. He says state law doesn’t give a judge the authority to reduce or modify the sentence imposed by the trial court.
The law in question - a 10 year sentence for consensual oral sex between a 15 year old and a 17 year old - is insane as is. But for Thurbert Baker to stil push for his incarceration is just sadistic. Genarlow Wilson does not belong in jail.
The reason I support the death penalty is not because I think it’s a deterrent, but because I believe that some crimes can only be punished by death, still if it’s also a deterrent that’s a positive in my eyes.
What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument — whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.
The reports have horrified death penalty opponents and several scientists, who vigorously question the data and its implications.
So far, the studies have had little impact on public policy. New Jersey’s commission on the death penalty this year dismissed the body of knowledge on deterrence as "inconclusive."
But the ferocious argument in academic circles could eventually spread to a wider audience, as it has in the past.
"Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it," said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. "The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect."
Clearly winning a championship trumps stopping a sex criminal.
A former high school principal was indicted Wednesday on charges that he failed to report on-campus sex crimes to protect a star running back who eventually led his team to a state title.
Dwight Bernard, the former head of Northwestern High School, turned himself in after the indictment was released. He was taken to Miami-Dade County Jail and officials said he was posting $10,000 bond.
Maryland has this reputation as one of the sleepier members of the mid-Atlantic region, but once in a while a news story comes along to alter that perspective.
Rosibel Aparicio Jandres, age 45, of Germantown, Maryland, was sentenced today to 24 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release for conspiracy to transport hundreds of prostitutes to Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, announced United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein. U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams, Jr. also ordered that Jandres forfeit $20,000 in proceeds from the sale of 1207 Kirklynn Avenue in Takoma Park; the residence located at 19325 Frederick Road, Germantown, Maryland; and $8,185 in cash seized on November 16, 2005.
According to the plea agreement presented to the court, from April 2003 to November 16, 2005 Rosibel Aparicio Jandres conspired with her husband, Manuel Jandres, her sister Olinda Aparicio and Olinda’s daughters, Elsy Aparicio and Dorinalda Aparicio a/k/a "Dorinalda Aparicio Gonzalez," and son Eliazor Aparicio and Jair Francis, to transport hundreds of women from New York and New Jersey to Maryland and employ them as prostitutes.
When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut, mainly for the glamour and the adventure of the undertaking. Who knew the entire process also included crazy astronaut love triangles?
An astronaut drove 900 miles and donned a disguise to confront a woman she believed was her rival for the affections of a space shuttle pilot, police said. She was arrested Monday and charged with attempted kidnapping and other counts.
U.S. Navy Capt. Lisa Nowak, 43, who flew last July on a shuttle mission to the international space station, was also charged with attempted vehicle burglary with battery, destruction of evidence and battery. She was denied bail.
I gave up on my dream when I realized that a lot of math is involved. A lot. But I don’t think this kind of behavior is covered in NASA manuals.
A deputy press secretary with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was arrested Tuesday night and charged with trying to “seduce” a 14-year-old Polk County girl over the Internet, sheriff’s officials said.
Brian J. Doyle, 55, didn’t know he was communicating with an undercover Polk County sheriff’s detective, officials said.
Doyle was arrested at his Silver Springs, Md., home on 23 Polk County charges. He is accused of using his computer to seduce a child and transmitting harmful materials to a minor.
The judge overseeing the fraud and conspiracy trial of Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay and former CEO Jeffrey Skilling on Thursday rejected their last-minute bid to halt the trial, saying they couldn’t credibly argue the jury pool is too biased when the panel hasn’t been chosen.
Just like good Republicans, they’re claiming nonexistent bias.
In case you haven’t heard, former DC mayor and current DC council member Marion Barry has once again tested positive for cocaine. As usual, people in DC seem to be turning a blind eye towards this.
This is the moment where I point out that I live in Maryland, and that I’m from Maryland and I just work in D.C. Gawd.
In all likelihood Tookie Williams will be executed tonight. The thing is, he expressed no remorse - he maintains that he’s innocent - and the jury didn’t say “death penalty unless you reform yourself”. The people he’s convicted of killing remain dead, and a jury of his peers has made their sentence. There’s no exculpatory evidence that even remotely says he didn’t do the crime.
I just saw this man on CNN, and he claimed he’s not bitter. I don’t know how he couldn’t be bitter.
A man who has spent nearly 25 years in prison for Cobb County rape was ordered to be released Thursday after DNA tests showed another man committed the crime.
At the end of the 15-minute hearing before Superior Court Judge Dorothy Robinson, Peter Neufeld, an attorney for Robert Clark and co-director of the Innocence Project, patted Clark on the back and said, “You’re free to go, fella.”
A smiling Clark hugged and kissed family members, repeatedly saying, “I told you. I told you.”
Man, I don’t get some of the Monday Morning quarterbacking going on in this air marshal shooting in Miami. I feel bad for the guy and his family, but someone starts saying they have a bomb and then doesn’t listen to law enforcement on the plane? You are going to be taken down. The kind of labored thought process people are foisting on law enforcement is a perfect recipe for getting people killed, quite frankly.
As someone who is a strong supporter of the death penalty, I agree with this decision made by Gov. Warner
In a statement issued Tuesday evening, Warner said the destruction by an Arlington clerk of DNA evidence that might have cleared Lovitt on appeal convinced him that Lovitt should spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole, rather than be executed. Lovitt would have been the 1,000th person executed in the United States since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.
I think if you support the death penalty, you should also be in favor of making executions as iron-clad as possible. This case, from what I’ve read, didn’t fit that mold.
The hunt is on tonight to find whoever cut the leg off a pit bull. The abused dog was found wandering the streets of Atlanta this week.
The bone exposed on its hind leg — likely chopping it off with an axe. Veteranarians say the wound was no accident — that it was a clean cut with something very sharp. They suspect someone wanted the pit bull to fight, but the dog was too gentle.
C.K. and I firmly support knocking the block off the psycho who did this to this poor animal.
