Monday, April 30, 2018

Golden State Killer captured with help of genealogy website


Could this dampen the current enthusiasm for DNA-based family trees? A Californian serial killer may have been identified by genetic samples that his distant relatives gave to a genealogy website, according to the New Scientist.
While most people would be happy to help track down a serial killer, there are concerns this could be just the beginning of police using commercial genetics services to investigate other, less serious crimes.
Currently, major DNA ancestry companies – such as 23AndMe  – say they generally resist police inquiries, unless they have a court order. However, customers often choose to broaden their search for long-lost branches of their family tree by uploading their raw DNA data into a free site called GEDmatch.
According to The Mercury News, investigators in California used GEDmatch to help identify the suspect they believe to be the so-called Golden State Killer.
This serial killer is thought to have committed more than 50 rapes and 12 murders across California in the 1970s and 80s. This week, investigators arrested Joseph James DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former policeman, and he has been charged with eight counts of murder.
They tracked him down by comparing samples taken from a crime scene decades ago with genetic profiles of individuals on the GEDmatch database.
The Sacramento investigators are not giving out details of how exactly they did this. It’s possible that once they had found a partial match on the database, they then used public records to identify related individuals.
According to The Sacramento Bee, the team’s suspicions were increased by the fact that DeAngelo was in the right age range, and had lived in some of the places where the attacks occurred. Before arresting him, they first covertly took a new DNA sample from an item DeAngelo had discarded, to confirm the DNA match.
A statement recently posted on the GEDmatch website states that people who are concerned about non-genealogical uses of their DNA should not upload their DNA to the database, and should remove any DNA that has already been uploaded.
To read more CLICK HERE


Sunday, April 29, 2018

Ohio's death penalty statute permitting a judge to overturn a death sentence deemed constitutional

The Supreme Court of Ohio ruled that the state's death penalty statute does not violate the Sixth Amendment's [text] guarantee of "the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury[.]" Maurice Mason, a former death row inmate, unsuccessfully challenged the role given to the judge during the sentencing phase of capital punishment cases, reported the Jurist.
The court unanimously upheld Ohio's law as being in line with the requirements laid out by the US Supreme Court [official website] in Hurst v. Florida[opinion]. In Ohio, the jury must first come to a guilty verdict [ORC § 2929.03]. Next, the jury determines the presence of aggravating and mitigating factors [ORC § 2929.04]. Then, the jury itself must make a finding that the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating ones. Only after this finding has resulted in a recommendation of the death penalty does the judge's sentencing discretion come into play. If the judge agrees with the jury's weighing of the relevant factors, the judge may sentence the defendant to death. In the absence of a unanimous jury verdict on any of these questions, or if the judge disagrees with the jury's weighing of the factors, the judge can only hand down a life sentence.
The US Supreme Court has interpreted the Sixth Amendment as requiring every fact necessary for imposition of capital punishment to be determined by the jury. Most recently, in Hurst, the court struck down Florida's capital punishment sentencing scheme. Under the invalidated law, after a jury rendered a guilty verdict, the judge determined whether aggravating factors counseling in favor of the death penalty outweighed mitigating factors counseling against.
Noting the differences between the Florida statute at issue in Hurst and the Ohio statute, the court rejected Mason's interpretation of the Sixth Amendment.
Ohio trial judges may weigh aggravating circumstances against mitigating factors and impose a death sentence only after the jury itself has made the critical findings and recommended that sentence. Thus, “the judge’s authority to sentence derives wholly from the jury’s verdict.” ... Under Ohio’s death-penalty scheme, therefore, trial judges function squarely within the framework of the Sixth Amendment.
Because all of the elements needed for a capital punishment sentence are determined by the jury, the Ohio Supreme Court found the law to be in accordance with Hurst and with the US Constitution.
To read more CLICK HERE

Saturday, April 28, 2018

GateHouse: National Memorial for Peace and Justice promotes reconciliation and healing


Matthew T. Mangino
GateHouse Media
April 27, 2018
In 2008, veteran newscaster Ted Koppel told NPR’s Tell Me More host Michel Martin that “lynchings are a form of terrorism.” Terror that was rooted in a region of the United States fearful of equality for black men and women.
Lynchings were a tool used to oppress freed slaves after the Civil War. They were often committed by mobs who murdered victims with impunity, often joined by law enforcement, sometimes on the very steps of the courthouse.
In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative released a report “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Terror” which documented more than 4,400 lynchings of black people — 800 more than had been previously reported.
Every society has had forms of extrajudicial punishments. The legal and cultural basis for American lynchings were imported from Europe and firmly implanted in colonial America. The origin of the term lynching has been attributed to a Virginian named Charles Lynch. He oversaw an extrajudicial court in a colonial Virginia county that incarcerated Loyalist supporters of the British during the Revolutionary War. Lynch’s name was adopted more for the extrajudicial — not an official sanctioned court — nature of his conduct, not racial underpinnings.
In an effort to begin the healing and raise awareness of the legacy of Southern injustice and brutality the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened this week overlooking the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. The museum is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy.
According to the New York Times, the museum does not rely on conventional historic artifacts and detached commentary. “It is perhaps better described as the presentation of an argument, supported by firsthand accounts and contemporary documents, that the slavery system did not end but evolved: From the family-shattering domestic slave trade to the decades of lynching terror, to the suffocating segregation of Jim Crow to the age of mass incarceration in which we now live.”
It is altogether fitting that the Memorial sits high above the state capitol in Montgomery, which still flies the national flag of the Confederate States of America.
The last lynching in this country occurred in Mobile, Alabama, in 1981. Members of the Ku Klux Klan beat and killed Michael Donald, a young African-American man, and hung his body from a tree. Donald was randomly targeted after a trial in Mobile of a black man accused of killing a white man ended in a mistrial.
One of Donald’s killers, Henry Hays, was sentenced to death and executed in 1997. The execution of Hays was the first in Alabama since 1913 for a white-on-black crime. It was the only execution of a Klan member during the 20th century for the murder of an African-American.
The country is struggling to come to terms with its history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings and segregation. As states and municipalities across the south debate the removal of Confederate monuments, the memorial shines a light on the legacy of racism in the American South.
The memorial is a stark reminder of the horrendous acts that men and women are capable of inflicting on one another. The memorial has a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. According to the Washington Post, etched on each column is the name of a county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.”
Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit organization behind the memorial, said inspiration for the memorial came from the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Germany and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Thinking of America in terms of the Holocaust and Apartheid may be difficult, but racial oppression is an issue the country must face. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice may be the place to continue the process of reconciliation and healing.
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.
To visit the column CLICK HERE


Friday, April 27, 2018

Texas executes gang member, 9th execution of 2018


The 9th Execution of 2018
Texas executed Erick Davila on April 26, 2018. He was convicted of opening fire at a children’s birthday party in 2008, believing a rival gang member was present and fatally shooting a woman and her 5-year-old granddaughter in a spray of bullets, reported Reuters..
Davila, 31, died by lethal injection at Texas’ execution chamber in Huntsville, a prisons official said.
It was the ninth execution this year in the United States, and the 550th in Texas since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, the most of any state. Texas has put five inmates to death this year.
“I might have lost the fight but I’m still a soldier. I still love you all. To my supporters and family, y’all hold it down,” Davila was quoted by prisons officials as saying in his last statement.
Prosecutors said Davila was a member of the Bloods street gang and drove by the party in Fort Worth, believing that members of the rival Crips gang were there.
Using a semiautomatic rifle with a laser scope, he fired numerous shots into the group while attendees were eating cake and ice cream at the “Hannah Montana”-themed party for a girl, killing Annette Stevenson, 48, and her granddaughter, Queshawn Stevenson, court documents showed.
He also wounded three other children and one woman, according to the documents.
It took jurors about four hours to convict Davila at his trial in 2009.
Texas said he confessed to the killings and told investigators he intended to “have a shoot-‘em-up” and kill the father of Queshawn Stevenson, a rival gang member who was not injured in the attack.
Davila’s lawyers had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the execution, arguing in a last-minute appeal that prosecutors in his trial violated a court decision by hiding evidence favorable to the defense of Davila being high on drugs at the time of the shootings.
They also said it was inappropriate for his former trial judge, now the prosecuting attorney, to seek his execution date.
The court rejected the appeal without providing details, issuing its decision less than 15 minutes before the planned execution time.
To read more CLICK HERE

Thursday, April 26, 2018

Trump's 'lawyer' Michael Cohen to take the 'Fifth' in Stormy Daniels investigation


President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen filed court papers indicating his plan to exercise his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination should he be called to testify in the lawsuit Stephanie Clifford, known as porn star Stormy Daniels, filed against the president, reported the Huffington Post.
Clifford is suing the president over the validity of a nondisclosure agreement she signed just before the 2016 presidential election that barred her from discussing a consensual affair she said she had with Trump in 2006. Cohen, long known as the president’s “fixer,” also issued a payment of $130,000 to Clifford that she called “hush money.” 
Cohen’s declaration states that in light of the FBI’s raid on his home, office and hotel room earlier this month, his counsel has advised him to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights should he be called to testify in Clifford’s lawsuit.
The FBI reportedly seized records relating to Cohen’s payment to Daniels.
To read more CLICK HERE

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Warrant not needed to use dead man's finger to open phone

Police in Largo, Florida, investigating the death of a man shot by one of the department’s officers visited a funeral home last month in an effort to unlock his phone, reported the ABA Journal.
Police held the dead man’s finger to the phone, but were unable to unlock it, the Tampa Bay Times reports. Police said they didn’t believe a warrant was needed because there is no expectation of privacy after death. Experts interviewed by the newspaper agreed.
Linus Phillip had been killed March 23. Police said they had pulled over Phillip’s car at a gas station because of illegally tinted windows and then detected the smell of marijuana in his car, according to past coverage by the Times. Before police could search Phillip, he jumped back in the car and tried to drive away while an officer was still partly in the vehicle, according to the police account. The officer fired his gun in self-defense, then fell out of the car, police said.
Lt. Randall Chaney told the Times that police wanted the phone data for their death investigation as well as a separate drug probe involving Phillip.
Stetson University College of Law professor Charles Rose told the Times that a dead person can’t own property and can’t assert Fourth Amendment protections. “While the deceased person doesn’t have a vested interest in the remains of their body, the family sure does, so it really doesn’t pass the smell test,” Rose said.
Another expert, Remigius Nwabueze of Southampton Law School in England, points to a Michigan decision that found a county medical examiner could take a blood sample from a man killed in a car crash.
“The law has been most cruel, really unforgiving to a dead person,” Nwabueze told the Times. “It provides no entitlement or legal rights after death to a deceased person.”
To read more CLICK HERE

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Feds in Detroit seek death penalty for drug trafficking


Earlier this year federal prosecutors in Detroit filed a rare "Notice of Intent to Seek the Death Penalty" in the case of a gang suspect who is charged with a raft of murderous crimes.
And Billy Arnold, 31, likely won't be the only member of the Seven Mile Bloods to be fighting for life in U.S. District Court in Detroit, according to court officials.
Arnold is one of several members of the gang facing charges where the death penalty may be applied, officials to the Detroit Free Press. The Department of Justice is reviewing those cases to determine whether the death penalty should be invoked, they said.
Although Michigan was the first state to ban the death penalty in state courts — in 1847 — capital punishment can still be sought in federal cases. Arnold was charged in March 2016, along with six other gang members, with murder in aid of racketeering, attempted murder, RICO conspiracy and other crimes. The Seven Mile Bloods gang has been linked in court pleadings to trafficking in prescription pills and to using violence to protect their sales turf.
To read more CLICK HERE

Monday, April 23, 2018

Shame and ignominy in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives

Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R) took aim at his Democratic colleagues, whom he deemed “liberal losers,” in a blistering, eyebrow-raising Facebook post on last week, reported the Huffington Post.
An outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage and other LGBTQ causes,  Metcalfe had particularly harsh words for Democratic Rep. Brian Sims, whom he’s been clashing with for years.
In the post, he blasted Sims ― who became his state’s first openly gay elected state legislator in 2012 ― as a “lying homosexual.” 
Metcalfe didn’t back down from his comments in an interview with The Associated Press on Saturday. He told the AP he mentioned Sims’ sexuality because he believes being gay is “immoral behavior.”
On Friday, Sims shot back at Metcalfe with a cheeky tweet inspired by an iconic moment in “Mean Girls.” 
In a lengthier Facebook post Saturday, he deemed Metcalfe “a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, bigot.” 
“Those of us in Pennsylvania have known this for a long time,” he wrote. “All of those words have definitions. His behavior, his public statements, and his legislation over the years all clearly rise to the level of those definitions.”
To read more CLICK HERE


Saturday, April 21, 2018

GateHouse: Volatile ‘sneak and peek’ warrants proliferate


Matthew T. Mangino
GateHouse Media
April 20, 2018
The nation’s capital is a living, breathing civics lesson. The Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments are tossed around more in Washington D.C. these days than in the average high school civics class. Nearly every journalist and talking-head has a spin on the nuances of the hottest issue in town, the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unlawful search and seizure.
Setting aside the intricacies of the attorney-client privilege, there are constitutional matters outside the beltway that should raise concern.
Here is something to think about. Federal law permits delayed-notification search warrants commonly referred to as “sneak and peek” warrants. The procedure allows investigators to search a house, business, car, or other property — seize evidence — and not tell anyone, but a judge, about it.
A normal search warrant like the one served on President Donald Trump’s attorney — depending on who you listen to — Michael Cohen requires prosecutors to set forth, in writing, the legal basis for seeking a warrant. This document, commonly referred to as an “affidavit of probable cause” is presented to a judge.
If the judge finds there is a legal basis for the warrant, the request is approved and a written warrant is served on the target of the search. After the search is concluded an inventory of what was seized is handed to the homeowner, car owner or business owner.
Typically search warrants are not secret. Maybe an affidavit can be sealed to protect the identity of witnesses or informants, but a search was always disclosed to the subject of the search. That all changed in 2001.
According to The Oregonian, delayed warrants mean agents can avoid tipping off suspects and jeopardizing an investigation, while potentially provoking them into revealing drug suppliers or other connections when it appears someone has stolen their “stash.”
What that means is that the police can conduct a search and make it appear like a burglary. The “victims” of the burglary can’t go to the police — “someone stole my drugs” doesn’t go over well with investigators.
The concern with delayed notice warrants is that they were never intended for use in domestic criminal activity.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, Congress swiftly passed the Patriot Act, which expanded the powers of federal agents as they prosecuted the war on terror.
Section 213 of The Patriot Act provides for “sneak and peek” search warrants. In the name of fighting terrorism “sneak and peek” warrants, allow law enforcement officers to circumvent Fourth Amendment’s protections.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in 2014 out of approximately 11,000 “sneak and peek” warrants only 51 were used for terrorism. A significant majority were used for domestic drug investigations.
The alleged “victims” of “sneak and peek” warrants scramble when their stash turns up missing. They probably owe money to someone higher-up the chain and they’re mad as hell that someone would rip them off, after all who’d want to steal off a hard-working drug dealer. That scenario can create a lethal firestorm that puts innocent people in danger.
In Oregon, the manager of a storage facility was held at gunpoint by two thugs after the authorities carried out a “sneak and peek” warrant and removed 500 pounds of marijuana from a storage locker.
The owners of the marijuana — having never been served with a search warrant — assumed the manager had something to do with its disappearance.
According to The Oregonian, agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration, deliberately made the confiscation look like a burglary, in an effort to intensify the investigation.
“The danger of violence is obviously real, and this case makes it very evident. Someone could have been killed,” Jonathan Witmer-Rich, a law professor at Cleveland State University told The Oregonian. “I think it illustrates this is a dangerous tactic, and the law is not requiring police to reduce such risks.″
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.
To visit the column CLICK HERE


Friday, April 20, 2018

Alabama executes man who killed federal judge with pipe bomb

The  8th Execution of 2018
Alabama executed 83-year-old Walter Leroy Moody on April 19, 2018 for the 1989 pipe bombing death of a federal judge. He became the oldest inmate executed in the United States since the return of executions in the 1970s.
The execution was delayed about two hours after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a temporary stay about 15 minutes before the scheduled 6 p.m. execution time.
The Supreme Court gave no explanation in its orders for the delay or why it later lifted the stay.
The execution began at 8:16 p.m. and according to prison officials his time of death was 8:42 p.m.
Moody kept his eyes closed and head still throughout the lethal injection execution and did not respond when asked by the warden whether he wanted to make a last statement.
Other than his chest moving during the early part of the execution and his jaw dropping slightly, only once during the event did he move when a few of his left fingers fluttered.
That happened soon after he didn't respond to a consciousness test. The test involves a corrections officer calling out the inmate's name, brushing his left eye brow, and pinching the left arm. It is administered to make sure the inmate is sedated enough to administer the two drugs used to halt breathing and the heart.
One of Moody's attorneys with the federal public defender's office in Montgomery took issue with the execution even though Moody moved less on the gurney than some previous inmates. 
"I have attended two executions. In both, my client moved after the consciousness check. Ron Smith's was more horrific, but both were disturbing, and raise grave concerns about the DOC's (Department of Corrections) process," said attorney Spencer Hahn.
"Further, I'd like to know what they gave him before to knock him out and prevent him from getting to give his last words. There was no dignity in that room. This dishonored the memory of Judge Vance and Mr. Robinson," Hahn said.
Alabama Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn said Moody was not given any sedatives prior to the execution.
In 1991, a federal jury convicted Moody of 71 charges related to the pipe-bomb murders of U.S. 11th Circuit Judge Robert Vance and Georgia civil rights attorney Robert E. Robinson, who also was killed in a pipe-bomb blast two days after the judge. He was sentenced to seven concurrent life sentences and 400 years. The federal trial was conducted in Minnesota.
Moody was placed on death row after a jury convicted him of capital murder at a trial in Alabama five years later for the deadly pipe bomb explosion at Vance's Mountain Brook home that also seriously injured Vance's wife, Helen. The jury recommended 11-1 that the death penalty be imposed and the judge agreed.
Moody has maintained that he did not send the pipe bombs.
To read more CLICK HERE

Thursday, April 19, 2018

DNA transfer has serious implications for the criminal justice system


Back in the 1980s, when DNA forensic analysis was still in its infancy, crime labs needed a speck of bodily fluid—usually blood, semen, or spit—to generate a genetic profile.
That changed in 1997, when Australian forensic scientist Roland van Oorschot stunned the criminal justice world with a nine-paragraph papertitled "DNA Fingerprints from Fingerprints." It revealed that DNA could be detected not just from bodily fluids but from traces left by a touch. Investigators across the globe began scouring crime scenes for anything—a doorknob, a countertop, a knife handle—that a perpetrator may have tainted with incriminating "touch" DNA.
But van Oorschot's paper also contained a vital observation: Some people's DNA appeared on things that they had never touched.
In the years since, van Oorschot's lab has been one of the few to investigate this phenomenon, dubbed "secondary transfer." What they have learned is that, once it's out in the world, DNA doesn't always stay put.
 Objects bearing DNA of a participant who never touched them, reported the Marshall Project. 
In a sense, this isn't surprising: We leave a trail of ourselves everywhere we go. An average person may shed upward of 50 million skin cells a day. Attorney Erin Murphy, author of "Inside the Cell," a book about forensic DNA, has calculated that in two minutes the average person sheds enough skin cells to cover a football field. We also spew saliva, which is packed with DNA. If we stand still and talk for 30 seconds, our DNA may be found more than a yard away. With a forceful sneeze, it might land on a nearby wall.
To find out the prevalence of DNA in the world, a group of Dutch researchers tested 105 public items—escalator rails, public toilet door handles, shopping basket handles, coins. Ninety-one percent bore human DNA, sometimes from half a dozen people. Even items intimate to us—the armpits of our shirts, say—can bear other people's DNA, they found.
The itinerant nature of DNA has serious implications for forensic investigations. After all, if traces of our DNA can make their way to a crime scene we never visited, aren't we all possible suspects?
Forensic DNA has other flaws: Complex mixtures of many DNA profiles can be wrongly interpreted, certainty statistics are often wildly miscalculated, and DNA analysis robots have sometimes been stretched past the limits of their sensitivity.
But as advances in technology are solving some of these problems, they have actually made the problem of DNA transfer worse. Each new generation of forensic tools is more sensitive; labs today can identify people with DNA from just a handful of cells. A handful of cells can easily migrate.
 To read more CLICK HERE

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Parents sue Sandy Hook truther Alex Jones


Families of two children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School have filed lawsuits in Texas against controversial radio talk show host Alex Jones for continually claiming the massacre never happened, the Hartford Courant reports. 
Neil Heslin, the father of Jesse Lewis, and Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah Pozner died in the massacre, filed separate lawsuits in Travis County, Tx. The lawsuits allege that Jones’ constantly calling the parents “crisis actors” and insisting the shooting was a false flag operation has defamed them and led to victims’ families receiving death threats. 
The lawsuits were filed in Texas because Jones media company, Infowars, is based in Austin. Both lawsuits seek more than $1 million in damages from Jones, Infowars and a related company, Free Speech Systems LLC.
Jones has been a controversial figure and one of the leading voices in the Sandy Hook truther movement, a group that claims the Dec. 14, 2012 shooting never occurred. Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people, including 20 first graders, inside the school that day using an AR-15 before killing himself with a handgun. Noah Pozner and Jesse Lewis were in separate classrooms.


Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Virtually no chance the average person will ever use a gun in self-defense


The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
It's a common refrain touted by gun rights advocates, who argue that using guns in self-defense can help save lives. But what is the actual number of defensive gun uses?
According to the Pew Research Center, 48 percent of gun owners say they own a gun mainly for protection. But for years, experts have been divided over how often people actually use guns in self-defense. The numbers range from the millions to hundreds of thousands, depending on whom you ask.
The latest data show that people use guns for self-defense only rarely. According to a Harvard University analysis of figures from the National Crime Victimization Survey, people defended themselves with a gun in nearly 0.9 percent of crimes from 2007 to 2011, reported NPR.
David Hemenway, who led the Harvard research, argues that the risks of owning a gun outweigh the benefits of having one in the rare case where you might need to defend yourself.
"The average person ... has basically no chance in their lifetime ever to use a gun in self-defense," he tells Here & Now's Robin Young. "But ... every day, they have a chance to use the gun inappropriately. They have a chance, they get angry. They get scared."
To read more CLICK HERE


Mangino discussed Michael Cohen Search Warrant on WFMJ-TV21 Weekend Today

Watch my interview on WFMJ-TV21 Weekend Today regarding President Trump and his attorney Micheal Cohen.
To watch the interview CLICK HERE

Monday, April 16, 2018

Black student knocks on door for directions after missing school bus, homeowner shoots at him


Fourteen year old Brennan Walker went looking for help at at a suburban Detroit home when he missed his school bus.  
Walker was trying to walk the bus route to Rochester High School after he woke up late and missed his bus. His mom had taken his phone away, so he didn't have that with him to get directions. So he knocked on a stranger’s door for help --the homeowner shot at him, reported FOX2.
"I got to the house, and I knocked on the lady's door. Then she started yelling at me and she was like, 'Why are you trying to break into my house?' I was trying to explain to her that I was trying to get directions to Rochester High. And she kept yelling at me. Then the guy came downstairs, and he grabbed the gun, I saw it and started to run. And that's when I heard the gunshot," he says.
Thankfully, the man missed. Brennan kept running, hid, then cried.
"My mom says that, black boys get shot because sometimes they don't look their age, and I don't look my age. I'm 14; but I don't look 14. I'm kind of happy that, like, I didn't become a statistic," he says in retrospect.
Oakland County Sheriff Deputies arrived soon after to the home on South Christian Hills Drive and took the woman's husband into custody.
Lisa was at work when she got the call. She says her husband is deployed in Syria, so she was assuming she was getting a call about him until she realized they were calling about Brennan. She dropped everything and immediately went to the substation to be with her son. 
That's where investigators told her the family's Ring doorbell recorded the encounter. Investigators watched the video with Brennan and his mom. She says the video confirmed their suspicions. 
"One of the things that stands out, that probably angers me the most is, while I was watching the tape, you can hear the wife say, 'Why did "these people" choose my house?'" she says, before taking a long pause. "Who are, "these people?" And that set me off. I didn't want to believe it was what it appeared to look like. When I heard her say that, it was like, but it is [what it looks like]."
To read more CLICK HERE

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Overall decrease in capital punishment worldwide


A new report released by Amnesty International shows an overall decrease in capital punishment during 2017, reported the Catholic News Agency.
However, the group reported, many countries are still implementing executions which ignore international law.
Amnesty International released the report this week, highlighting the execution and death penalty rates around the globe.
The organization particularly applauded sub-Saharan Africa, where multiple countries have made strides in reducing or eliminating capital punishment in 2017.
“Now that 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have abolished the death penalty for all crimes, it is high time that the rest of the world follows their lead and consigns this abhorrent punishment to the history books,” said Salil Shetty, secretary general for Amnesty International.
To read more CLICK HERE

Saturday, April 14, 2018

GateHouse: No Mr. President, the attorney-client privilege is not dead


Matthew T. Mangino
GateHouse Media
April 14, 2018
“Attorney-client privilege is dead!” President Donald Trump tweeted this week after the office of his attorney Michael Cohen was raided by the FBI.
The attorney-client privilege protects most communications between a client and attorney, permitting those communications to be kept confidential and certainly not accessible to law enforcement or prosecutors.
To avail oneself of the privilege, the client and attorney must have a relationship with regard to a specific matter. A client cannot claim to a have an attorney for “all matters.” If an attorney is hired for a bankruptcy, the client’s conversations about tax evasion may not be protected.
The attorney-client privilege insures that a client can speak candidly with his lawyer, providing information necessary to develop an effective legal strategy for a specific matter.
President Trump has said that he did not know what Cohen was doing with respect to the alleged payments to Stormy Daniels — payments that appear to be the focus of the search on Cohen’s office, home and hotel room. He has said he was unaware of the payments and did not know why the payments were made.
The president’s announcement of the death of the attorney-client privilege is a bit premature. The only way that Trump can invoke the attorney-client privilege is if he retained Cohen for the specific purpose of negotiating with, or paying-off, Stormy Daniels.
During the raid of Cohen’s office, according to the New York Times, the FBI took computers, cell phones, business records and other documents related to the Daniels payment, and a $150,000 payment made by the National Enquirer, to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who says she also had an affair with Trump.
In addition, Cohen is known to tape and store telephone conversations, reported the Washington Post. Those tapes may now be in the possession of the FBI.
If those communications show that President Trump knew about hush money paid to the women and conspired to deliver it, that could be construed as evidence of facilitating unreported contributions to his campaign — a felony.
Even if Trump has an attorney-client relationship with Cohen there are exceptions to the privilege.
The crime-fraud exception provides that communications with an attorney made in furtherance of criminal activity are not protected. You can tell your attorney about your own criminal conduct and that will be privileged. But you can’t use communications with your attorney to help you commit ongoing or future criminal acts.
If paying hush money to Daniels or McDougal is a crime and that crime was committed by Cohen with the president’s consent, the privileged is waived.
The larger issue is that the United State Attorney for the Southern District of New York was able to get a search warrant. In order to get a search warrant the U.S. Attorney must apply to a federal judge or magistrate. The application for a search warrant would be filed with an affidavit of probable cause. That affidavit must contain sufficient information to convince the judge to approve the warrant.
There is no question that it is unusual for a U.S. Attorney to seek documents from a lawyer that may contain information relating to a client. The DOJ does not take that responsibility lightly. A U.S. Attorney needs the approval of a supervisor before seeking a search warrant for such sensitive material.
Since the potential client in this case is the President of the United States the review went all the way to the top — sort of. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself from the special counsel probe of Russia meddling in the 2016 election. The second in command at the DOJ, Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein, approved the search warrant.
Latrice Bridges Copeland, a law professor at Penn State University told the Washington Post, “This is a big deal.” Bridges Copeland believes that the approval of the search warrant signals that the attorney and client — in this case Cohen and Trump — may have been working together in furtherance of a crime. “It’s not easy to make that showing to the court and get a search warrant on and attorney.”
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.
To visit the column CLICK HERE

Friday, April 13, 2018

PA Gov. Wolf calls for criminal justice reform


Gov. Tom Wolf is calling on lawmakers to pass a package of initiatives designed to reform the state's criminal justice system, reported the Carlisle Sentinel.
The initiatives include bail and pre-trial reforms.
They would also adopt a standard assessment tool for sentencing, create clean slate legislation to allow those convicted to re-enter society after being released, and make sure those without money have access to legal help.
Pennsylvania is the only state that does not provide state funding to a public defender system.


Thursday, April 12, 2018

Scientists call for increased research and resources for forensic science


With forensic science facing mounting scrutiny as it plays an increasingly prominent role in the administration of justice, six scientists who recently served on the National Commission on Forensic Science are calling on the scientific community at large to advocate for increased research and financial support of forensic science as well as the introduction of empirical testing requirements to ensure the validity of outcomes, reported Phys.org. 
"Forensic reform is challenging because the field of law is based on historical precedent, whereas science builds on itself to advance continuously," says Thomas Albright, professor and director of Salk's Vision Center Laboratory who has studied why eyewitnesses fail. "But if the ultimate goal of a legal system is to deliver justice, then forensic evidence should be based on up-to-date methods that have been scientifically validated."
Since the 1990s, when DNA exonerations revealed problems with some forensic disciplines, various groups have been calling for reform. This led to a landmark 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that found many forensic practices were highly subjective and paved the way for the 2013 establishment of the National Commission on Forensic Science to examine such practices. A number of independent scientists served on the commission, along with forensic scientists, attorneys, judges and law enforcement personnel, from 2013 to 2017 when the Department of Justice declined to renew its charter.
Six of the independent scientists—Albright, Suzanne Bell of the University of West Virginia; Sunita Sah of Cornell University; S. James Gates, Jr., of Brown University; M. Bonner Benton of the University of Arizona and Arturo Casadevall of Johns Hopkins University—write in the new paper that the complex methodologies of forensic science, which range from DNA analysis to pattern recognition to chemical composition, must be subjected to scientific testing rather than relying on historical precedent. They cite the example of bite-mark identification, which has been scientifically discredited and has resulted in false convictions, but continues to be accepted in U.S. courts due to precedent.
"In many forensic procedures, such as fingerprint or footprint or bullet matching, decisions about the similarity of visual patterns are made by people—and people make mistakes," says Albright, who holds the Conrad T. Prebys Chair in Vision Science. In 2017, Albright published a paper in PNAS about an NAS study on eyewitness testimony that described why identification errors occur and how they can be prevented. "We encourage the scientific community to welcome forensic scientists into their ranks to help identify the causes of forensic failures, predict when they might occur and lend support to developing strategies to mitigate or prevent them," says Albright.
To read more CLICK HERE

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

CA Sheriff: It is cheaper for police to kill a suspect than 'cripple'


The sheriff of Kern County, California with the highest rate of killings by police in the U.S. once said it is “better financially” for local authorities if officers kill suspects rather than badly injure them, reported the Guardian.
Sheriff Donny Youngblood, who is currently running for re-election, made the remarks while addressing rank-and-file officers during his first campaign in 2006. Video of the meeting was recently found by an officers’ union.
“You know what happens when a guy makes a bad shooting on somebody and kills them? Three million bucks and the family goes away after a long back and forth,” Youngblood said.
He went on to say: “Which way do you think is better financially – to cripple them or kill them – for the county?” An unidentified man offscreen said “kill them”, to which Youngblood replied: “Absolutely. Because if they’re crippled we get to take care of them for life. And that cost goes way up.”
The sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
To read more CLICK HERE

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

President Trump: 'Why don’t I just fire Mueller?'


President Donald Trump has once again lambasted the ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and chastised Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the probe, reported the Huffington Post.
Trump appeared to directly float the idea of firing special counsel Robert Mueller at the start of his military leadership meeting on Monday, calling the special counsel’s investigation a “disgrace” and defending his firing of former FBI Director James Comey as the “right thing” to do.
“Why don’t I just fire Mueller?” Trump asked in response to a reporter’s question. “Well, I think it’s a disgrace what’s going on. We’ll see what happens, but I think it’s really a sad situation ... Many people have said you should fire him. Again, they found nothing, and in finding nothing, that’s a big statement.”
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Monday, April 9, 2018

President Trump's comments and the facts on crime and justice are not compatible


President Trump made 24 false or misleading claims in two recent public speeches, says the Washington Post Fact Checker. Here is a roundup by The Crime Report of several pertaining to crime and justice: 
1) The President said, “We started building our [Mexican border] wall … We have $ 1.6 billion… and we’ve already started.” The spending bill Trump signed last month includes $1.6 billion for fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, not for Trump’s wall, the Post says. Parts of this all-fence project date to 2009, long before Trump took office.
2) Trump said that, “A very important, and respected, in some circles, Democrat, said we want to get rid — we should get rid of our Second Amendment.” Trump was referring to retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who actually is a Republican.  
3) Speaking of the bump-stock accessories for guns, Trump said, “We got rid of the bump stocks. The bump stocks, now, are under very strict control, which I think everybody agrees is fine.” Actually, the administration has proposed to ban bump-stock accessories for firearms, but the rulemaking process takes time and the ban is not finalized. 
4) On federal judges, the president said he had appointed 145  district judges. In fact, since Trump took office, the Senate has confirmed 14 appellate judges, 14 district judges, and one Supreme Court justice. Another 45 district court nominees and 10 appellate court nominees are awaiting confirmation. Trump has set a record with judicial appointments, but it’s more modest than he portrays.
To read more CLICK HERE


Saturday, April 7, 2018

GateHouse: GAO finds racially disproportionate discipline in schools

Matthew T. Mangino
GateHouse Media 
April 6, 2018
Black students are disciplined at school more often and more harshly than white students according to a report, issued this week by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
In 2014, President Barack Obama released guidance on school discipline in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice.
According to the guidance, public schools are prohibited, by federal law, from discriminating in the administration of student discipline based on protected characteristics — race, gender, disability and sexual orientation.
When the guidance was released, incidents of school violence had already begun to decrease overall, but schools were still struggling to create positive, safe environments. The guidance was in response to the significant numbers of students who miss class due to suspensions and expulsions — even for minor infractions of school rules. Students of color and students with disabilities were disproportionately impacted.
This week’s report is the first government-sponsored analysis of discipline policies since the Obama administration urged schools to examine the disproportionate rates of student punishment.
GOP members of Congress have argued that the Obama-inspired guidance has led to more school violence because students who may have otherwise been removed from school have continued to cause mayhem. Republicans have even tried to link the guidance to the recent mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The GAO report appears to support Obama’s concerns.
According to the report, the issue of who gets disciplined and why is complex. The GAO suggests that studies they reviewed demonstrate that implicit bias — stereotypes or unconscious associations about people — on the part of teachers and staff may cause them to judge students’ behaviors differently based on the students’ race and sex.
Studies show that discipline decisions can result in certain groups of students being more harshly disciplined than others.
According to the GAO, one study found that black girls were disproportionately disciplined for subjective interpretations of behaviors, such as disobedience and disruptive behavior. A separate study used eye-tracking technology to show that, among other things, teachers gazed longer at black boys than other children when asked to look for challenging behavior based on video clips.
The GAO found that during the 2013-14 school year, black students accounted for 15.5 percent of all public school students, but represented about 39 percent of students suspended from school.
Removing students who misbehave from school is counterintuitive. In “From the School Yard to the Squad Car: School Discipline, Truancy, and Arrest,” published in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence in 2014, a connection was found between mandated leaves of absence from school and the likelihood of arrest for juveniles.
The researchers found that youth are more likely to be arrested on days they are suspended from school. The increased likelihood of arrest is strongest among youth who do not have a history of criminal behavior.
According to the Journal of Counseling and Development a suspension is more likely to cause a child to drop out of high school than any other factor, including low socioeconomic status, not living with both biological parents, a high number of school changes, and having sex before age 15. Students who are expelled from school are even less likely to graduate from high school.
The consequences of not graduating from high school are severe, according to the American Bar Association. Children who do not finish high school are 3.5 times more likely to be arrested as adults. Additionally, approximately 82 percent of the adult prison population is composed of high school dropouts.
The GAO report is a step in the right direction and should vindicate the concerns of the Obama administration, while quelling the rumblings that federal discipline guidance for school districts is unwarranted or overreaching.
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.
To visit the column CLICK HERE

Dallas County, Texas bail hearings conducted in secret

The Dallas County Jail books about 67,000 people every year, a population roughly equal to that of the Houston suburb Missouri City, reported the Texas Tribune.
The conveyor belt driving Dallas County’s hulking jail complex, the seventh largest in the country, operates in a courtroom deep inside the Lew Sterrett Justice Center downtown. That’s where magistrates hold around-the-clock hearings to determine bail. On any given day, about 70 percent of the jail’s roughly 5,000 inmates are there because they can’t afford the price tag placed on their pretrial freedom. Arrestees say that before they enter bail hearings, jailers warn them that the price could increase if they talk without permission. The hearings often last less than 60 seconds.
Though the bail hearings have serious ramifications for defendants, they are largely conducted in secret. Attorneys, family members, community activists and journalists are not allowed inside these court proceedings. The Dallas County Sheriff’s Department says that’s because guards “need to focus on the safety of the inmates and magistrate judge.” In January, lawyers with the ACLU of Texas, Civil Rights Corps and the Texas Fair Defense Project sued Dallas County officials on behalf of several poor people, many of them homeless, who were stuck in jail because they couldn’t afford bail. The lawsuit alleges this system of “wealth-based detention” lets rich defendants buy their freedom and violates poor arrestees’ constitutional rights to equal protection and due process.
The attorneys are also suing on behalf of two advocacy groups, Faith in Texas and the Texas Organizing Project (TOP), which have tried and failed for months to gain access to Dallas County’s bail hearings. Faith in Texas organizer Brittany White says, “They’re making decisions about someone’s freedom in secret.”
Elizabeth Rossi, an attorney with Civil Rights Corps, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, alleges that Dallas County is violating the First Amendment rights of community members who want to monitor court hearings. “These hearings result in the mass pretrial detention of poor people and people of color,” Rossi said. “Dallas must open these hearings so that a bright light can be shed on the devastating, mass violations of civil and human rights that are happening in the jail every day.”
For several weeks, I asked multiple Dallas County departments to explain why the public can’t view these bail hearings; none would discuss the matter, citing the pending bail lawsuit. Dallas County felony court judge Brandon Birmingham, a defendant in the case, wouldn’t comment either, but he has in the past escorted at least one reporter to the jail to observe hearings. Citing his busy schedule, Birmingham wouldn’t do the same for me during a trip to Dallas in late March, though he offered to help sometime in the future. Sheriff’s department spokesperson Melinda Urbina later sent me an email stating Birmingham “did not obtain permission from us to allow an observer to enter,” and that bail hearings are closed to the public for security reasons.
It’s not hard to imagine why Dallas County likes to conduct its bail hearings in private. In Harris County, video footage of hearings, which are open and recorded, has become critical evidence in a nearly identical lawsuit and also bolstered advocates’ campaign to build public support for reform. Footage of magistrates browbeating poor defendants was even cited in the federal court ruling that declared Harris County’s bail practices unconstitutional last year.
The footage also inspired state Senator John Whitmire, D-Houston, to file a complaint with the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, which in January issued rare public admonishments against three Harris County magistrates for refusing to consider other conditions of release for poor people, such as so-called pretrial bonds that use monitoring instead of cash to make sure that defendants show up for court. The fallout from those videos has even raised the question of whether elected judges lied about Harris County’s bail practices.
Rossi argues that closed-door legal proceedings are just one reason Dallas County’s bail system is arguably worse than Houston’s. In Dallas, according to the lawsuit, poor arrestees languish even longer in jail. Rossi says that her group has found indigent people charged with petty crimes stuck in lockup for nearly two weeks on $500 bail, still without a lawyer or court date. She says she never encountered that kind of neglect, “where someone appears to get lost in the jail,” in Harris County.
In February, a federal appeals court largely upheld a groundbreaking ruling in the Harris County case that declared it unconstitutional to jail people before trial just because they’re too poor to pay bail. The ruling concluded that a heavy reliance on cash bail exacerbates racial disparities in the criminal justice system and leads to an unacceptable pattern of “sentence first, conviction after.” The ruling also cited research showing that people in jail are much more likely to plead guilty and face longer jail sentences compared to those who can afford to pay for pretrial release.
To read more CLICK HERE


Friday, April 6, 2018

Toll jumping can now be a felony in Pennsylvania


Drivers who routinely don’t pay tolls in Pennsylvania could be convicted of a felony, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Keystone State’s Turnpike Commission has begun to file criminal charges against motorists it deems egregious scofflaws. The recent initiative involves enlisting local prosecutors to pursue theft-of-services criminal cases, which reach felony status when the sum owed exceeds $2,000.

Thursday, April 5, 2018

Study: Black students disciplined more often and more harshly than white

Black students continue to be disciplined at school more often and more harshly than their white peers, often for similar infractions, according to a new report by Congress’s nonpartisan watchdog agency, which counters claims fueling the Trump administration’s efforts to re-examine discipline policies of the Obama administration. reported the New York Times.
The report, issued by the Government Accountability Office, is the first national governmental analysis of discipline policies since the Obama administration issued guidance in 2014 that urged schools to examine the disproportionate rates at which black students were being punished.
Critics of the Obama-era guidance have questioned whether students of color suffer from unfair treatment under school discipline policies. The G.A.O. found that not only have black students across the nation continued to bear the brunt of such policies, but the effects were also felt more widely than previously reported — including by black students in affluent schools.
Additionally, the agency found that school suspensions began to fall the year before the Obama administration urged schools to move away from the overuse of such measures, undermining claims that the guidance forced schools to cut suspensions. While the Obama administration’s aggressive civil rights investigations did reveal that black students were subjected to harsher treatment than their white peers for similar infractions, the G.A.O. found that it did not impose any new mandates on districts to reduce their suspension rates.
The findings are likely to bolster arguments for preserving the 2014 guidance and undercut conservative claims that the guidance has resulted in federal overreach and a decline in school safety.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos hosted groups of educators and advocates for and against the disciplinary guidance, the 12th set of round tables the department has held in the past year — and the first Ms. DeVos attended in person.
Nina Leuzzi, a prekindergarten teacher at a Boston charter school, said she kept her word to her class of 20, predominantly minority 4-year-olds, in making her case to the secretary for why the guidance should stay. When the children asked her why she was traveling to Washington, she told them it was to keep them safe.
“Rescinding this would send the message that there is no longer a concern about discrimination in our schools,” Ms. Leuzzi said.
Nicole Stewart, a former vice principal in San Diego, told Ms. DeVos that pressures to reduce suspensions had made schools dangerous. She said administrators did not expel a student with a knife at her school because he had a disability. Weeks later, he slit a student’s throat, she said.
“It is no wonder that our kids don’t think that rules and consequences apply to them,” Ms. Stewart said. “We are not modeling what consequences look like in the real world.”
To read more CLICK HERE

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

The Cadaver King: Racism, opportunism or both?


Elie Mystal’s New York Times book review of “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist,” by the Washington Post journalist Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington, a law professor at the University of Mississippi, provides insight to an interesting twist on the impact of “junk science", particularly in the South.
In The Cadaver King there is no murder mystery. The book details the wrongful convictions of two men, Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, in the separate murders of two girls in the same rural Mississippi town in the early 1990s. But the real killer of both 3-year-olds is revealed to the reader before the wrong men are even put on trial. We are also spared the anguish of wondering if the system will ever get it right, for we know the men have already been freed thanks to the work of the nonprofit criminal exoneration organization the Innocence Project.
The crime having been solved early on, Balko and Carrington devote the bulk of the book to pulling back the curtain on the justice system’s little-known but systemic problem that put Brewer and Brooks behind bars: faulty and biased forensic evidence. Junk science convicted these men; real science set them free. The inability of judges and jurors to tell the difference is why innocent men languish in jail while the prosecutors who put them there run for higher office.
Mississippi would have been better served by the actual actors from “CSI” conducting its forensic investigations than the autopsy specialist Steven Hayne and his “sidekick,” the bite-mark analyst Michael West. The book isn’t even really about exposing these men, as they’re already disgraced. Instead, Balko and Carrington have written a cry for help: “What happened in Mississippi may be the most wide-reaching scandal to date. Few states have encountered revelations that strike as forcefully at the very foundation of its criminal justice system. And few states’ public officials have shown less concern or taken less action after having learned of the problem.”
But, like so many who have demanded criminal justice reform, the authors are likely to fail. Not because they’re wrong, or because not enough judges and lawyers and politicians know they’re right. But because fixing the problem is just too hard.
The real tension in Balko and Carrington’s book is why it’s too hard — whether our society’s tendency to incarcerate innocent individuals results from basic incompetence, or bald racism.
The authors propose an answer: “There’s no question that Hayne and West thrived in a system that was created and honed during Jim Crow, and that for decades was used to reinforce the segregated social order. There’s also no question that the system’s problems continue to disproportionately affect minority and poor populations across the state. But no one has described Hayne as a racist. … Instead, Hayne could be described more as an opportunist.”
The bigotry in our criminal justice system is one of its key features, not an unfortunate bug. Mississippi wouldn’t allow quack science to convict the wrong people if white citizens primarily bore the burden. The namesake “bad guys” in this book are allowed to exist because their work puts black men behind bars, not in spite of it.
What’s the remedy for a person who has been convicted based on so-called science that we now know to be faulty, corrupt or both? One doesn’t need a law degree to answer that question. Common sense or a modicum of human decency suggests that those found guilty based on bad evidence deserve justice. But to grant all such retrials would be too much for this country’s criminal courts to bear.
To read more CLICK HERE

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Louisiana's racist origin for non-unanimous criminal verdicts


Louisiana's unique law that allows a jury to send a person to prison for life without the consent of all 12 jurors did not happen by accident, reports the New Orleans Advocate.
The drafters of the state constitution Louisiana adopted in 1898 said they aimed to “perpetuate the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race in Louisiana,” primarily by scrubbing from the rolls nearly all of the roughly 130,000 black people then registered to vote.
But delegates knew they couldn’t simply ban black people from the voting booth or jury service without running afoul of the 14th and 15th amendments. The U.S. Supreme Court had explicitly said so. Instead, the jury laws those delegates drew up allowed for convictions with only nine of 12 jurors agreeing, meaning that if one, two or even three black people made it onto a jury, their votes wouldn’t matter.
These days, 10 votes are required for conviction instead of the original nine, and today’s defenders of split verdicts say Louisiana’s law now stands not for racism but for efficiency, by limiting hung juries and potential retrials.
But the effects are the same, according to an exhaustive, first-of-its-kind analysis by The Advocate.
The Advocate reviewed about 3,000 felony trials over six years, turning up 993 convictions rendered by 12-member Louisiana juries in which the newspaper was able to document the jury votes.
The remainder included trials ending in hung juries, those halted by last-minute plea deals, lesser felony trials with six-member juries and many others with scant records.
Although the majority-verdict law disadvantages all defendants, the newspaper’s review found that its effects on black people accused of crimes are especially profound. It acts as a capstone to a trial system that becomes more tilted against black defendants at each stage: when jurors are summoned, when they’re picked for juries, and in deliberation rooms where voices of dissent can be ignored.
Black people make up roughly one-third of the population in Louisiana, but they comprise two-thirds of state prisoners and three-fourths of inmates serving life without parole. Louisiana, America’s incarceration capital, also leads the nation by far in these life sentences, nearly all of them the result of jury verdicts.
The newspaper’s analysis found that 40 percent of trial convictions came over the objections of one or two holdouts. When the defendant was black, the proportion went up to 43 percent, versus 33 percent for white defendants. In three-quarters of the 993 cases in the newspaper's database, the defendant was black.
In many cases, black defendants are not being judged by juries “of their peers” — at least not racially speaking. The newspaper scrutinized what happened to nearly 41,000 prospective jurors who reported for duty in felony trials in nine of the state’s 10 busiest courthouses and found that these jury pools were whiter than their communities, and the juries picked from them were whiter still.
The average jury in East Baton Rouge Parish, for instance, has nearly two fewer black people than it would if the panel reflected the population. In St. Tammany Parish, juries have about half as many black members as the parish's population.
Oregon, the only other state to allow split verdicts in felony cases, demands unanimity when the charge is murder.
If that 10-2 scenario arose in any of the other 49 states, the judge likely would order the jurors to keep working until one side swayed the other to reach unanimity — or until the deadlock was too hopeless to break. Then, the judge would declare a hung jury and a mistrial.
Yet another possible outcome would be a compromise, with the jurors settling on a verdict of manslaughter rather than murder.
It’s hard to predict which way the chips would fall, even for some dissenting jurors themselves.
To read more CLICK HERE


Monday, April 2, 2018

Trump administration will not release pregnant immigrants from detention


The Trump administration will no longer seek to automatically release pregnant immigrants from detention -- a move in line with the overall efforts by the administration to hold far more immigrants in custody than its predecessors, reported CNN.
The change in policy could pave the way for more pregnant women to be held in detention facilities while they await lengthy court proceedings about whether they can stay in the US, facilities that are already decried by critics for tough conditions. The decision comes as immigration advocates have assailed the administration's efforts to hold more immigrants in detention writ large and its increased arrest of noncriminal immigrants.
The change in policy was sent by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to Congress on Thursday morning and later announced in a conference call with reporters. The policy was first finalized in December, officials said.
According to Philip Miller, a top official in ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations, as of March 20, there were 35 pregnant women in detention in ICE's custody. Since December, 506 pregnant women have been detained, Miller added.
He said it was difficult to estimate how many more pregnant immigrants would be detained under the new policy. Immigrants who are caught trying to cross the border illegally already are required to be in detention -- although once they pass a threshold test for asylum claims, the government can choose to release them. He also could not say how the policy applied to nursing mothers.
To read more CLICK HERE

Sunday, April 1, 2018

Can President Trump pardon himself? Richard Nixon's legal team said no

Laurence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, was chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007 and is vice-chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was chief White House ethics lawyer for President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011 and is chair of CREW. They wrote in the Washington Post:

Can a president pardon himself? Four days before Richard Nixon resigned, his own Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opined no, citing “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.” We agree.
The Justice Department was right that guidance could be found in the enduring principles that no one can be both the judge and the defendant in the same matter, and that no one is above the law.
The Constitution specifically bars the president from using the pardon power to prevent his own impeachment and removal. It adds that any official removed through impeachment remains fully subject to criminal prosecution. That provision would make no sense if the president could pardon himself.
The pardon provision of the Constitution is there to enable the president to act essentially in the role of a judge of another person’s criminal case, and to intervene on behalf of the defendant when the president determines that would be equitable. For example, the president might believe the courts made the wrong decision about someone’s guilt or about sentencing; President Barack Obama felt this way about excessive sentences for low-level drug offenses. Or the president might be impressed by the defendant’s subsequent conduct and, using powers far exceeding those of a parole board, might issue a pardon or commutation of sentence.
Other equitable considerations could also weigh in favor of leniency. A president might choose to grant a pardon before prosecution of a person when the president believes that the prosecution is not in the national interest; President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon in part for this reason.
Or a president may conclude that even if a person may have committed a crime, he was acting in good faith to protect the national interest; President George H.W. Bush pardoned former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger in the Iran-contra affair in part for this reason.
In all such instances, however, the president is acting as a kind of super-judge and making a decision about someone else’s conduct, the justice of someone else’s sentence or whether it is in the national interest to prosecute someone else. He is not making a decision about himself.
Self-pardon under this rubric is impossible. The foundational case in the Anglo-American legal tradition is Thomas Bonham v. College of Physicians, commonly known as Dr. Bonham’s Case. In 1610, the Court of Common Pleas determined that the College of Physicians could not act as a court and a litigant in the same case. The college’s royal charter had given it the authority to punish individuals who practiced without a license. However, the court held that it was impermissible for the college to receive a fine that it had the power to inflict: “One cannot be Judge and attorney for any of the parties.”
The Constitution embodies this broad precept against self-dealing in its rule that congressional pay increases cannot take effect during the Congress that enacted them, in its prohibition against using official power to gain favors from foreign states and even in its provision that the chief justice, not the vice president, is to preside when the Senate conducts an impeachment trial of the president.
The Constitution’s pardon clause has its origins in the royal pardon granted by a sovereign to one of his or her subjects. We are aware of no precedent for a sovereign pardoning himself, then abdicating or being deposed but being immune from criminal process. If that were the rule, many a deposed king would have been spared instead of going to the chopping block.
We know of not a single instance of a self-pardon having been recognized as legitimate. Even the pope does not pardon himself. On March 28, 2014, in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis publicly kneeled before a priest and confessed his sins for about three minutes.
President Trump thinks he can do a lot of things just because he is president. He says that the president can act as if he has no conflicts of interest. He says that he can fire the FBI director for any reason he wants (and he admitted to the most outrageous of reasons in interviews and in discussion with the Russian ambassador). In one sense, Trump is right — he can do all of these things, although there will be legal repercussions if he does. Using official powers for corrupt purposes — such as impeding or obstructing an investigation — can constitute a crime.
But there is one thing we know that Trump cannot do — without being a first in all of human history. He cannot pardon himself.
To read more CLICK HERE