The firearm used in the Sacramento massacre was converted into an automatic weapon

A stolen firearm used in the mass shooting in Sacramento that killed six and wounded 12 on Sunday was converted to be used as a fully automatic weapon, reported the Los Angeles Times.

Authorities did not offer more details about the weapon. But it is possible to convert a handgun into an automatic weapon that can fire like a machine gun. 

There had been suspicion that an automatic weapon was used in the shooting because video of the incident recorded rapid fire. When the gunfire was over, 18 people had been wounded, six fatally.

Officials estimate at least 100 shots were fired.

Investigators have obtained a social media post made on Saturday by one suspect, Smiley Martin, in which he wields the stolen gun, according to law enforcement sources.

That post has since been removed. The Times didn’t independently review the post.

Sacramento police announced Martin’s arrest Tuesday. In a statement, they said Martin, 27, was among the seriously injured and remained hospitalized under police custody. He will be booked at the Sacramento County Jail on suspicion of “possession of a firearm by a prohibitive person and possession of a machine gun” as soon as his medical care is completed, police said.

Martin’s brother, Dandrae Martin — previously identified by police as Dandre Martin — was arrested early Monday. The 26 year old was booked on suspicion of assault with a firearm and being a felon in possession of a gun.

Videos have emerged of the shooting in downtown Sacramento that underscore the chaos of the situation.

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SCOTUS makes it a little easier to sue for malicious prosecution

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday in favor of a Brooklyn man who said he had been falsely accused by police officers of resisting arrest, saying he could sue for malicious prosecution under a federal civil rights law, writes Adam Liptak of The New York Times.

The vote was 6 to 3, with the majority deciding only the narrow question of what the man, Larry Thompson, had to show to meet a requirement that there was a favorable termination of the prosecution against him. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, said it was enough that prosecutors had dropped the charges, rejecting the view that Mr. Thompson had to demonstrate that there had been some affirmative indication of his innocence.

The case started in 2014, as Mr. Thompson, a Navy veteran and longtime postal worker, was living with his fiancée, their newborn baby girl and Mr. Thompson’s sister-in-law who, Justice Kavanaugh wrote, “apparently suffered from a mental illness.”

When the baby was a week old, the sister-in-law called 911 and accused Mr. Thompson of sexually abusing the infant, citing a red rash on her buttocks that turned out to be diaper rash. When four police officers arrived, Mr. Thompson refused to let them in without a warrant.

They entered anyway, tackling Mr. Thompson and pinning him to the floor. The officers handcuffed and arrested him. While he was in jail for two days, one officer filed a criminal complaint charging Mr. Thompson with resisting arrest. Prosecutors eventually dropped the charges.

Mr. Thompson sued the officers under an 1871 federal civil rights law known as Section 1983 that allows citizens to sue state officials, including police officers, over violations of constitutional rights. He said the officers had violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable seizures.

Lower courts dismissed his malicious prosecution claim, saying that a precedent of the federal appeals court in New York required him to show “that the underlying criminal proceeding ended in a manner that affirmatively indicates his innocence.”

Even as he ruled against Mr. Thompson in 2019, however, Judge Jack B. Weinstein of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn said the precedent “can and should be changed.” Judge Weinstein died last year.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote that malicious prosecution law in 1871 generally did not require more than dismissal of charges to overcome the requirement of a favorable termination.

 “Requiring the plaintiff to show that his prosecution ended with an affirmative indication of innocence would paradoxically foreclose” a Section 1983 claim, he wrote, “when the government’s case was weaker and dismissed without explanation before trial, but allow a claim when the government’s evidence was substantial enough to proceed to trial.” 

The ruling was narrow and incremental, and Justice Kavanaugh noted that it left police officers with other ways to defeat “unwarranted civil suits,” notably including qualified immunity, the doctrine that requires plaintiffs to show not only that the officer had violated a constitutional right but also that the right had been “clearly established” in a previous ruling.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority opinion.

In dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the majority had failed to demonstrate the federal law allowed malicious prosecution claims at all, saying that Justice Kavanaugh had stitched together “elements taken from two very different claims: a Fourth Amendment unreasonable seizure claim and a common-law malicious-prosecution claim.”

“In fact,” he wrote, “the Fourth Amendment and malicious prosecution have almost nothing in common.”

Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch joined Justice Alito’s dissent in the case, Thompson v. Clark, No. 20-659.

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Mangino a guest on WFMJ-TV21 Weekend Today

 Watch my interview on WFMJ-TV21 Weekend Today with Lindsay McCoy.

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'Crowdfunding for justice' amateur sleuths put there money where their interests are

Last January, Carla Davis was on LinkedIn when she saw an intriguing post: “Identify the Victim of 1978 Tennessee Murder,” reported The New York Times.

Ever since the man’s burned remains were found on a campground outside Nashville, the authorities had been trying to figure out who he was and who had killed him. After 42 years with no leads, the local sheriff’s office wanted to try a relatively new technique pioneered in the Golden State Killer case, combing through consumer genetic databases to find the man’s relatives, however distant, to triangulate his identity. The local sheriff couldn’t afford it, so a genetics lab called Othram was panhandling on the internet.

Othram’s founder and chief executive, David Mittelman, a metaphor-loving geneticist, compares the forensic money request to Kickstarter. “Instead of a product, you’re getting justice for a family,” he said. “We’re crowdfunding for justice.”

That phrase has traditionally meant funding bail or legal bills for the accused, but Othram was seeking $5,000 to sequence the victim’s DNA. On a whim, Ms. Davis, a wellness coach who lives in Dubai, donated the remaining $3,897.52 needed.

She didn’t stop there. Over the last year, Ms. Davis has given more than $100,000 to Othram, as if it were a charity rather than a venture-backed start-up, primarily for cold cases in Mississippi, her birth state.

“A friend told me I should just invest in the company,” Ms. Davis said. “It didn’t matter to me that it wasn’t tax-deductible. These families have waited so long for answers.”

Ms. Davis is part of a growing cohort of amateur DNA detectives, their hobby born of widespread consumer genetic testing paired with an unquenchable desire for true crime content. Why just listen to a murder podcast when you can help police comb through genealogical databases for the second cousins of suspected killers and their unidentified victims?

So far donors around the country have given at least a million dollars to the cause. They could usher in a world where few crimes go unsolved — but only if society is willing to accept, and fund, DNA dragnets.

It’s hard to commit a crime, or do anything, without leaving some DNA behind. While crime scenes may include incriminating genetic evidence from perfectly innocent people, “probative” DNA — material that is clearly relevant to an investigation, such as a bloodstain — can be a powerful clue. But only if investigators can match it to the right person.

The case of the Golden State Killer, who committed 13 murders and dozens of rapes in California, went unsolved for decades, until the F.B.I. decided in 2018 to use DNA evidence from a sexual assault to build out the perpetrator’s likely family tree. The resulting identification and prosecution of a 72-year-old former police officer proved the value of what’s called “forensic genetic genealogy.”

What made the investigation possible was GEDmatch, a low-frills, online gathering place for people to upload DNA test results from popular direct-to-consumer services such as Ancestry or 23andMe, in hopes of connecting with unknown relatives. The authorities’ decision to mine the genealogical enthusiasts’ data for investigative leads was shocking at the time, and led the site to warn users. But the practice has continued, and has since been used in hundreds of cases.

Because many local agencies lack the resources to participate, philanthropists have stepped in to help. A group of well-off friends calling themselves the Vegas Justice League has given Othram $45,000, resulting in the solving of three murder-rape cases in Las Vegas, including those of two teenage girls killed in 1979 and in 1989.

 “We want to help the police and the community just knock these out,” said Justin Woo, an online marketer who founded the Las Vegas group. “It’s not quite ‘Minority Report,’ where you’re predicting and stopping, but if you get these people off the street through the DNA stuff, it’s really helpful.”

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With record homicides Philadelphia looks at new approach to investigating shootings

In most cities that saw a surge in homicides during the pandemic, it's the worst it's been since the early 1990s. In Philadelphia, it's the worst it's ever been, reported NPR.

The city set its all-time record for homicides in 2021, with 562 deaths, and is maintaining that pace so far this year.

Driving that number is a more generalized increase in gunplay. Homicides aside, last year about 1,800 people were shot and wounded.

"My phone goes off all night long," says Lt. Dennis Rosenbaum, a 26-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department. "Triples, quadruples, quintuples — one after another."

Rosenbaum is a squad commander with a new citywide team of about 40 detectives focused specifically on nonfatal shootings.

"We're modeling a lot of our things on what homicide does," Rosenbaum says at the scene of what he judges to be a "run-by shooting" outside a Chinese takeout store in early March. The street has been closed and yellow evidence markers show the trail of spent bullet casings.

"Two detectives will go to the hospital, two detectives will process the scene," Rosenbaum says. He says it's more manpower than they used to dedicate to an incident with minor injuries. And he says the citywide approach also makes it easier to find connections between different shootings.

"Now we're all together. We all sit around in the same area, our desks are all near each other, they all talk — that's what makes a big difference," he says.

Connecting shootings — to head off the retaliatory violence — is a big reason for this new strategy.

"If we start to see a group of shootings, if we don't get a few people off the street, that will continue until somebody wins," says Philadelphia Police Department's chief of detectives Frank Vanore.

Generally, police departments solve — or "clear" — nonfatal shootings at a lower rate than homicides. In Philadelphia, for instance, Vanore says so far this year his detectives have solved about 51% of homicides, versus 25% of nonfatal shootings.

Duke University professor of public policy Philip Cook has studied how police allocate investigative resources, and he says this gap is not unusual.

"One thing that we found in Boston is that for every type of evidence, there was simply more of it being collected in the case of a homicide investigation," he says.

In theory, nonfatal shootings should be easier to solve, since the victim is alive and can provide evidence. But many victims don't speak up either out of a fear of retaliation by the shooter or a simple refusal to "snitch." Experts say the difficulty is compounded by the fact that detectives on nonfatal shootings generally carry more cases than their counterparts in homicide, and have less time to coax witnesses into cooperating.

The result, Cook says, is very different levels of response to crimes that start out the same — an attempt to kill someone.

"Whether the victim lives or dies in most shooting cases is a matter of luck," Cook says.

Most criminologists have come to agree that crime deterrence depends less on severity of punishment than it does on whether people have a sense that punishment will be "swift and certain." For this reason, they say you would expect shootings to increase in a city where there's a general impression than shooters are rarely identified and arrested.

That's an impression the Philadelphia Police Department hopes to reverse. So far, the news of the nonfatal shootings investigations team is just beginning to filter out to the most affected neighborhoods. In North Philadelphia, Reuben Jones, director of the community group "Frontline Dads," welcomes the new approach.

"I definitely think that makes sense," Jones says. "One thing we know the data shows almost half of those shootings are retaliation. So something like that, I can publicly applaud and say 'Good job, good start, let's do more of it and really hold people accountable.' "

But there are inevitable trade-offs. If a department uses more staffing to investigate nonfatal shootings, it means less effort for other kinds of crimes, such as robberies and burglaries.

"You're just moving the resources around," Lt. Rosenbaum says. But he thinks this is what he and his detective colleagues should be focused on, right now.

"We had to adjust, with 1,800 shootings," he says. "We had to make a change. Hey, if it doesn't work, we go back to the old model. But let's try it."

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Mangino appears on Court TV

Watch my interview on Court TV discussing the New Jersey criminal trial of former Olympian Michael Barisone. 

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St. Louis' drop in murders may not be what it seems

When the final numbers showed that St. Louis had reduced its murders last year while other big cities were hitting records, city officials said their success was due to smart use of crime data and effective anti-violence programs.

But over the past two years, St. Louis has quietly lowered its murder count in another way: classifying more than three dozen killings as what are termed justifiable homicides, sometimes in apparent violation of FBI guidelines for reporting crimes, a ProPublica/APM Reports investigation found. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. 

From 2010 through 2019, St. Louis police classified an average of six killings a year by private citizens as justifiable homicides, meaning incidents in which someone killed another person who was committing a serious criminal offense. Those cases were not counted in the city’s official murder tally.

In 2020, they counted at least 17 that way. In 2021, the number jumped to at least 22. Had just a handful of those justifiable homicides been classified as murders, St. Louis might have set its all-time murder record in 2020 and had its second highest annual total in 27 years in 2021 — changes that might have altered the conversation about the city’s success in reducing violent crime.

The news organizations found that over the two years, detectives sought murder charges in at least five cases labeled as justified. Prosecutors declined to file charges in four of them; in the fifth, prosecutors later charged a suspect with murder, but the case was still counted in police statistics as a justifiable homicide. FBI guidelines say police must count murders based on results from their investigation, regardless of a prosecutor’s action.

The news organizations’ examination of crime statistics doesn’t alter the overall picture of the city’s decline in murder last year — from what the department reported as 263 in 2020 to 198 last year, a drop of nearly 25%. But it adds important context to that picture, showing the city’s murder count is becoming less reliable as a measure of the number of lives that ended in violence.

In cities that have struggled to contain violent crime, as St. Louis has, the murder count is a rolling report card that is used to measure the success or failure of elected leaders and the police department.

The murder tally has long been the first item of business at the department’s Monday morning media briefing, which catalogs weekend violence. So far this year, the reduction in homicides has continued. But the rise in slayings classified as justifiable has not received much attention from the public.

When the murder count goes up, companies talk about leaving the city, residents consider moving away and local politicians debate new anti-crime measures. Officials in St. Louis even considered using surveillance aircraft to battle a reported rise in street violence. When the murder count goes down, officials cite it as an example of their sound leadership.

Two years ago, the issue of the city’s crime rate became especially urgent, with the metro area’s largest public company, the health care company Centene, getting involved. In November 2020, according to records, Jim Brown, a consultant to then-Mayor Lyda Krewson, suggested in an email to a consultant — who was working for Centene to evaluate the police department — that St. Louis could better manage the issue by combining its data with the much larger suburban St. Louis County.

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