Mangino discussed Pennsylvania co-ed's faked disappearance with Nancy Grace

Listen to my interview with Nancy Grace on Crime Stories about the Jeannette, Pennsylvania college student who faked her disappearance because she wasn't going to graduate.

To listen to the interview CLICK HERE

City of Philadelphia suing gun shops over straw purchases

Philadelphia is suing three local gun shops that city officials allege have knowingly sold firearms to “straw purchasers” who buy guns on behalf of people who are legally prohibited from doing so, such as juveniles or people with criminal records, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“These gun shop owners turn a blind eye to the consequences of their actions,” Mayor Jim Kenney said at a City  news conference. “They know exactly what they’re doing. … They are profiting off the mayhem that they help create.”

Kenney has long complained that the city’s hands are tied when it comes to combating the ongoing gun violence crisis due to Pennsylvania’s weak gun laws, which allow weapons to flow freely into the city, and to the state’s prohibition on municipalities enacting their own gun control measures.

At gun buyback programs, Philadelphians turns their firearms over to the city’s Police Department

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of attempts by the city to gain some leverage over the issue through the courts. It comes three weeks after Kenney announced a separate lawsuit aimed at manufacturers of “ghost guns,” untraceable and increasingly common weapons that can be purchased without background checks and assembled at home.

Little has come so far of the city’s various attempts at litigation over gun control. But Kenney said his administration will pursue every opportunity it has to reduce shootings and homicides.

As of Monday, Philadelphia police had recorded 240 homicides in 2023, a staggering sum that underscores the city is still mired in a persistent public safety crisis that began in 2020. This year’s total is 22% lower than at the same point in 2021, a year in which the city set a record with 562 homicides.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said Tuesday she is optimistic the numbers will continue going in the right direction.

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Mangino discusses developments in Hunter Biden plea deal on WMFJ-TV

Watch my interview with Lindsay McCoy on WFMJ-TV21 discussing the status of Hunter Biden's plea deal and Donald Trump's problems in Georgia.

To watch the interview CLICK HERE

America's obsession with life in prison

The Sentencing Project: 

Before America’s era of mass incarceration took hold in the early 1970s, the number of individuals in prison was less than 200,000. Today, it’s 1.4 million; and more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences – one out of every seven in prison. More people are sentenced to life in prison in America than there were people in prison serving any sentence in 1970.

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Israel passes law limiting the Supreme Court’s ability to overturn government decisions

The Israeli Parliament passed a law that limits the Supreme Court’s ability to overturn decisions made by government ministers, completing the first stage of a wider and deeply contentious effort to curb the influence of the judiciary.

The court is now barred from overruling the national government using the legal standard of “reasonableness,” a concept that judges previously used to block ministerial appointments and contest planning decisions, among other government measures.

The enactment of the law is the government’s first victory in a seven-month effort to reduce the court’s power. Previous plans that would have allowed Parliament to overrule the court’s decisions and give the government more sway over who gets to be a Supreme Court justice were suspended by the government in March, after an eruption of street protests, labor strikes and disquiet in the military.

Right-wing ministers and lawmakers took selfies in the parliamentary plenum rule to celebrate their victory. The vote was 64 in favor and zero against, after members of the opposition left the chamber, boycotting the vote they had no chance of winning.

The new law passed despite a similar level of opposition, as well as criticism from the Biden administration. Large parts of the country fear that the legislation undermines the quality of Israel’s democracy and will allow the government — the most ultranationalist and ultraconservative in Israeli history — to build a less pluralist society.

The government and its supporters say that the legislation will in fact improve democracy by giving elected lawmakers greater autonomy over unelected judges, allowing them to more easily carry out the policies that they were elected to enact. The court can still overrule the government using other legal measures.

This disagreement is part of a much wider and long-running social dispute about the nature and future of Israeli society. The ruling coalition and its base generally have a more religious and conservative vision, and see the court as an obstacle to that goal. The opposition tends to have a more secular and diverse vision, and consider the court as a standard-bearer for their cause.

Right-wing ministers and lawmakers took selfies in the parliamentary plenum rule to celebrate their victory. The vote was 64 in favor and zero against, after members of the opposition left the chamber, boycotting the vote they had no chance of winning.

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Renowned forensic scientist Henry Lee liable for fabricating evidence

Famed forensic scientist Henry Lee was found liable for fabricating evidence in a murder case that sent two Connecticut men to prison for decades for a crime they did not commit, a federal judge ruled Friday.

Ralph “Ricky” Birch and Shawn Henning were convicted in the Dec. 1, 1985, slaying of Everett Carr, based in part on testimony about what Lee said were bloodstains on a towel found in the 65-year-old’s home in New Milford, 55 miles (88.5 kilometers) southwest of Hartford.

A judge vacated the felony murder convictions in 2020, and the men filed a federal wrongful conviction lawsuit naming Lee, eight police investigators and the town of New Milford.

The ruling Friday sends the case against the police and the town to trial. In granting a motion for summary judgement against Lee, the only outstanding issue for a jury in his case will be the amount of damages.

Lee, the former head of the state’s forensic laboratory and now a professor emeritus at the University of New Haven’s Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Lee, 84, rocketed to fame after his testimony in the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial, in which he questioned the handling of blood evidence. He also served as a consultant in other high-profile investigations, including the 1996 slaying of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in Colorado; the 2004 murder trial of Scott Peterson, who was accused of killing his pregnant wife Laci; and the 2007 murder trial of record producer Phil Spector.

When Birch and Henning were put on trial in 1989, jurors heard about an extremely bloody crime scene. Carr had been stabbed 27 times, had his throat cut and suffered seven blows to the head.

No forensic evidence existed linking Birch and Henning to the crime. No blood was found on their clothes or in their car. The crime scene included hairs and more than 40 fingerprints, but none matched the two men.

Prosecutors presented evidence from Lee — not yet famous — that it was possible for the assailants to avoid getting much blood on them.

Lee also testified that a towel, which later was suggested could have been touched by the killers while cleaning up, was found in a bathroom near the crime the scene with stains that he tested and were consistent with blood.

Tests done after the trial, when the men were appealing their convictions, showed the substance was not blood.

In his ruling Friday, which was first reported by The Hartford Courant, U.S. District Judge Victor Bolden ruled that Lee presented no evidence to back up his testimony.

“Other than stating that he performed the test, however, the record contains no evidence that any such test was performed,” the judge wrote. “In fact, as plaintiffs noted, Dr. Lee’s own experts concluded that there is no ‘written documentation or photographic’ evidence that Dr. Lee performed the TMB blood test. And there is evidence in this record that the tests actually conducted did not indicate the presence of blood.”

The judge also ruled that Lee failed to properly use an immunity defense that could have shielded him from damages and was no longer eligible to use that argument.

Elizabeth Benton, a spokesperson for Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, whose office defended Lee and the police detectives in the case, said it was reviewing the decision and evaluating the next steps.

Birch served more than 30 years of a 55-year sentence for felony murder before being released in 2019 after a judge ordered a new trial. Henning, who was 17 when the crime occurred, was granted probation in 2018.

After their convictions were vacated in 2020, Lee defended his conduct in the investigation.

“In my 57-year career, I have investigated over 8,000 cases and never, ever was accused of any wrongdoing or for testifying intentionally wrong,” Lee told a throng of reporters. “This is the first case that I have to defend myself.”

Lee’s work in several other cases has come under scrutiny, including in the murder case against Spector, in which he was accused of taking evidence from the crime scene.

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Inside the 'polygon' the Giglo Beach serial killer investigation

They called it the polygon.

Using phone records and a sophisticated system that maps the reach of cell towers, a team of investigators had drawn the irregular shape across a map of tree-lined streets in the Long Island suburb of Massapequa Park. By 2021, the investigators had been able to shrink the polygon so that it covered only several hundred homes, reported The New York Times.

In one of those homes, the investigators believed, lived a serial killer.

A decade before, 11 bodies had been found in the underbrush around Gilgo Beach, a remote stretch of sand five miles away on the South Shore. Four women had been bound with tape or belts or wrapped in shrouds of camouflage-patterned burlap, the sort that hunters use for blinds. They had worked as escorts and had gone missing after going to meet a client.

Each, shortly before she disappeared, had been in contact with a different disposable cellphone. Investigators eventually determined that during the workday, some of the phones had been in a small area of Midtown Manhattan near Penn Station, and at night they pinged in the polygon, mirroring the tidal movements of the 150,000 Long Island residents who head into Manhattan each day.

Last Friday, Suffolk County authorities announced that they had arrested a man who they believed had killed the four women: Rex Heuermann, a 59-year-old architect who had an office near Penn Station and lived on a quiet street right where they had expected to find him. He was charged with three of the murders, to which he has pleaded not guilty, and was named as the prime suspect in the fourth.

The arrest ended years of anguish for some of the victims’ families. But the investigation also raised an unsettling question: Could the authorities have solved the case years earlier?

The following account is drawn from a 32-page bail application and interviews with current and former investigators and Suffolk County’s top law enforcement officials.

The case had unfolded fitfully over more than a decade. But it took a new police commissioner and his task force just six weeks to uncover a crucial clue in the sprawling case file.

Working under Commissioner Rodney K. Harrison, the core group of about 10 investigators was drawn from his department, the sheriff’s office, F.B.I. and State Police and worked closely with District Attorney Ray Tierney of Suffolk County and his prosecutors.

They worked in a beige office, its walls covered with maps, photos and a giant timeline, scouring their suspect’s digital and daily life — email addresses, social media accounts, search history.

All the while, Mr. Heuermann was searching, too, asking Google the same question that so many of his neighbors had been asking each other for more than a decade: “why hasn’t the long island serial killer been caught?”

Picking up the trail of a serial killer is an exceptional challenge. The killer often has no personal connection to the victims. If the victims lived on society’s margins, months or years can go by before their disappearances are treated as serious matters — or even recognized as the work of a single murderer.

The realization that a serial killer was hunting on Long Island’s South Shore came in December 2010, when a Suffolk County police officer, John Mallia, and his canine partner, a German shepherd named Blue, were searching for a 24-year-old woman named Shannan Gilbert, who had gone missing in the area. 

Instead, over several days they found four other bodies near Gilgo Beach. They had been placed roughly 10 yards from Ocean Parkway, the main east-west thoroughfare that traverses a barrier island off the South Shore. After they discovered the bodies, investigators searched for evidence nearby with meticulous care — “sifting the sand like gold miners around each body,” one investigator recalled.

Ms. Gilbert’s corpse and other remains, including those that the authorities described as a man wearing women’s clothing and a toddler, would be found along the same roadway over the following year. The grisly discoveries riveted the region as the police speculated that the killings might be the work of more than one person.

But the first four bodies — all petite women in their 20s who had gone missing in the previous four years — seemed linked. Investigators surmised they had been killed by the same man, in part because of the way the bodies were wrapped and their proximity. And there was reason to believe that a witness might have gotten a look at the man.

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