Scott Cobb will be paroled in August after 34 years in prison.
Archive for the ‘Law’ Category
Noted.
Thursday, July 27th, 2023Obit watch: July 24, 2023.
Monday, July 24th, 2023Richard Barancik has passed away at 98.
Mr. Barancik was the last surviving member of this group.
Mr. Barancik (pronounced ba-RAN-sick) was one of four members of what was formally called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in 2015 in Washington for their “heroic role in the preservation, protection, restitution of monuments, works of art and artifacts of cultural importance.”
On the day of the ceremony, Mr. Barancik told The Los Angeles Times: “The Americans cared about the cultural traditions of Europe. We did everything we could to salvage what the Nazis had done. It’s the best we could do.”
At first, the murder of Mr. Reynolds’s daughter, Kimber, seemed like just one more statistic. An 18-year-old college student home in Fresno on summer break, she was attacked one night in June 1992 by two men on motorcycles who tried to grab her purse.
When she resisted, one of the men, Joseph Michael Davis, shot her in the head, in front of dozens of witnesses. She was rushed to a hospital and died 26 hours later.
One of the murderers was killed in a shootout with police.
His efforts stalled out at first. Then Polly Klass was murdered.
Almost overnight, public outrage over Polly’s murder turned into support for Mr. Reynolds’s campaign. Calls came in to his Fresno headquarters in such volume that they overloaded the city’s 1-800 system. Within weeks, he had the signatures he needed.
The bill also found a new life in the Legislature, as state and national politicians, facing election in the fall of 1994, raced to appear tough on crime. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and her Republican opponent that year, Representative Michael Huffington, both endorsed the bill.
This time it sailed through both chambers of the Legislature, and Governor Wilson signed it into law in March. That fall, the accompanying ballot initiative passed with overwhelming support. In the years that followed, two dozen states, inspired by California, enacted their own three-strikes laws.
Tiny violin watch:
The law had, and continues to have, its detractors. Critics claimed it would overcrowd the prisons, drive up the cost of incarceration and clog the courts, as criminals facing life in prison would be less likely to reach a plea agreement.
It was also derided as unfair: Even a felony as minor as stealing a slice of pizza could result in a 25-year sentence, a situation that befell one man, Jerry Dewayne Williams. Though a judge later reduced Mr. Williams’s sentence, critics used his case as an example of the law’s unfairness.
More about Jerry DeWayne Williams.
Noted.
Wednesday, July 12th, 2023Obit watch: July 11, 2023.
Tuesday, July 11th, 2023Andrea Evans, soap star. IMDB.
Mikala Jones, surfer.
Jones had been staying at the Awera Resort with his family, when around 9:15 a.m., he likely impaled his left groin on his surfboard fin, suffering a 4-inch-long gash, according to the surfing website Surfline, citing official reports.
While the exact circumstances of Jones’ death remained unclear, those close to Jones wrote on social media that he died after slashing his femoral artery, leading to massive blood loss.
Remember: Stop The Bleed isn’t just for shootings.
Lawrence emailed obits for Manny Coto, producer, and Betta St. John, actress.
I don’t think this quite qualifies for the “Burning In Hell Watch”, but it does belong at the bottom: James W. Lewis, who was suspected, but never actually charged, in the Chicago Tylenol poisonings.
Mr. Lewis spent more than four decades under scrutiny in connection with the notorious unsolved poisonings, in which someone laced Extra-Strength Tylenol with deadly potassium cyanide, killing seven people in the Chicago area in September and October 1982.
Mr. Lewis was never charged in the murders, and he denied any involvement in them. But in October 1982, he sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of MacNeil Consumer Products, the manufacturer of Tylenol, saying he would “stop the killing” if he were paid $1 million. He was convicted of extortion in 1983 and spent 12 years in federal prison.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#107 in a series)
Wednesday, June 14th, 2023LA City Council member Curren Price was charged yesterday with:
There are a couple of things going on here.
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According to the complaint, Del Richardson & Associates received six checks from companies either incorporated or co-owned by affordable housing developers whom Price later voted to fund projects for or sell city property to.
In 2021, Price voted to slash the price of a property sold to GTM Holdings from nearly $1 million to $440,000 six months after a company incorporated by GTM Holdings wrote a check to his wife’s firm for about $51,000, court records show.
In 2019, according to the complaint, Price voted to fund a $4.6-million real estate project involving developer Thomas Safran & Associates after his wife’s firm received checks totaling about $35,000 from a company incorporated by Safran.
The second thing that’s going on involves health insurance, believe it or not.
Noted:
Price is the fourth current or former council member to face criminal charges in four years.
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This year, Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas was found guilty of conspiracy, bribery and fraud for extracting benefits for his son from USC while voting on issues that benefited the school.
Councilmembers Mitch Englander and Jose Huizar also pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges in recent years after an FBI investigation.
Obit watch: June 10, 2023.
Saturday, June 10th, 2023Mike Batayeh, actor and comedian. NYT (archived). Other credits include a show I do not acknowledge the existence of, “The Shield”, and “Life”.
Burning in Hell watch: Ted Kaczynski.
His terrorist strategy, and the ideas that he said undergirded it, enjoyed an afterlife few would have predicted in the 1990s.
The Norwegian news media reported that Anders Beivik, who killed dozens of people at government buildings and at a youth summer camp in 2011, lifted passages from Mr. Kaczynski’s manifesto in a manifesto of his own. More curious was the way a variety of law-abiding Americans developed an interest in the same line of thought.
In 2017, the deputy editor of the conservative publication First Things, Elliot Milco, credited Mr. Kaczynski with “astute (even prophetic) insights.” In 2021, during an interview with the businessman and politician Andrew Yang, Tucker Carlson cited Mr. Kaczynski’s thinking in detail without any prompting.
Online, young people with a variety of partisan allegiances, or none at all, have developed an intricate vocabulary of half-ironic Unabomber support. They proclaim themselves “anti-civ” or #tedpilled; they refer to “Uncle Ted.” Videos on TikTok of Unabomber-related songs, voice-overs and dances have acquired millions of views, according to a 2021 article in The Baffler.
Hugh Scrutton, Thomas Mosser, and Gilbert Murray were unavailable for comment.
Obit watch: June 9, 2023.
Friday, June 9th, 2023James G. Watt, former Secretary of the Interior and notorious Beach Boys hater.
As planning for the 1983 Independence Day celebration on the National Mall began, Mr. Watt said that pop-music groups retained in recent years had attracted “the wrong element” — presumably young people drinking and taking drugs. The Mall’s most prominent band had been the Beach Boys, popular since the 1960s.
Mr. Watt, a Pentecostal fundamentalist who did not smoke or drink alcohol, proposed the Las Vegas entertainer Wayne Newton, whose signature song was “Danke Schoen,” and military bands, saying they would better represent the patriotic, family-oriented themes he preferred.
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Carroll Cooley, historical and legal footnote, has passed away at 87.
Mr. Cooley was a detective with the Phoenix Police Department. In that capacity, he was the person who took Ernesto Miranda’s original confession.
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The Miranda case was by far the most significant of Detective Cooley’s law enforcement career. Mr. Miranda was convicted of rape and kidnapping by a Superior Court jury in June 1963; the conviction was upheld nearly two years later by the Arizona Supreme Court, which ruled that his confession was admissible despite his not having had a lawyer present.
In late 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review four cases, including Mr. Miranda’s, in which indigent men had confessed after being interrogated. The next year, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the Fifth Amendment required the police to advise suspects that they had the right to remain silent once they were in custody and to have an attorney present during interrogations. The rights, almost from the day of the decision, became known as the Miranda warning.
Mr. Miranda’s conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, but he was retried on rape and kidnapping charges and found guilty again in 1967. (The confession was not used in that trial.) He was paroled in 1972 and stabbed to death four years later in a barroom fight. After his death, it was reported that he had been trading on his legal celebrity by selling Miranda warning cards for $1.50 each.
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In 1976, he defended his actions in the Miranda case to The Republic, saying that Mr. Miranda’s confession had been written voluntarily and that Mr. Miranda knew his rights.
“He was not un-knowledgeable about his rights,” he said. “He was an ex-convict and served a year in prison” — for auto theft — “and had been through the routine before.”
Noreen Nash, actress. Other credits include the original “Dragnet” TV series, “77 Sunset Strip”, and ‘Yancy Derringer”.
Obit watch: June 6, 2023.
Tuesday, June 6th, 2023Astrud Gilberto, of “The Girl From Ipanema” fame.
Jim Hines. He set a world record by running the 100 meter dash in 9.95 seconds at the 1968 Olympics: that record stood for 15 years.
Roger Craig, noted split-fingered fastball pitcher.
Bobby Bolin, former pitcher for the Giants (also the Brewers and the Red Sox).
Bolin made his MLB debut in 1961 and was on the 1962 pennant-winning Giants, appearing in two games in the World Series against the Yankees, a series San Francisco would lose in seven games.
The sidearmer went a career-best 14-6 in 1965.
The following season he set career-highs with 10 complete games and four shutouts despite a pedestrian 11-10 record.
Mike the Musicologist sent over an obit for Kaija Saariaho, composer. He says some of her late works are appealing: I am unfamiliar with them myself.
George Riddle, actor. Other credits include “Arthur” and “The Trial of Standing Bear”.
Burning in Hell watch: Robert Hanssen, notorious spy.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#106 in a series)
Tuesday, May 9th, 2023This story snuck up on me, which is why I haven’t covered it before today. It has nothing to do with the protagonist being a Republican: as I have said before, I am an equal opportunity observer of hyenas on fire.
Bryan Slaton (R-Royse City) resigned from the Texas House yesterday.
His resignation came one step ahead of his being expelled from the House, in what appears to be a massive bi-partisan consensus that he needed to go.
So what the heck happened? Former Rep. Slaton apparently plied one of his aides, a 19-year old woman, with rum and cokes until she was drunk. Then he had sex with her.
On Sunday, the Texas House Freedom Caucus, a group that includes some of the most socially conservative lawmakers in the chamber who are usually politically aligned with Slaton, also called for his resignation.
“The abhorrent behavior described in the report requires clear and strong action,” the caucus said in a statement. “He should resign. If he does not, we will vote to expel him Tuesday.”
Later that night, 36 members of the 62–member State Republican Executive Committee, party activists who help set the agenda for the party, also called for his resignation, calling his conduct “wrong and unacceptable.” They were joined by the party’s vice chair, Dana Myers, and secretary Vergel Cruz. Three more committee members who could not be reached Sunday night added their names to the call for resignation Monday morning.
More from KVUE, which does not appear to be a re-hashed Texas Tribune story (unlike Fox 7 and KXAN). Statesman coverage.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#105 in a series)
Friday, May 5th, 2023Kimberly M. Gardner, the head prosecutor (“Circuit Attorney”) in St. Louis, resigned yesterday.
The Attorney General of Missouri was (and still is) suing to force her removal from office..
It sounds like she was…not good. There were large numbers of resignations among her staff: “…leaving her with half the number of attorneys as when she took office”. (She was elected in 2017, and re-elected in 2020.)
There were also other issues:
…about a year into office, she indicted sitting Gov. Eric Greitens for taking a partially nude photo of a woman in a Central West End basement without her consent. But charges were eventually dropped, an investigator she hired pleaded guilty in federal court to concealing documents in the case, and Gardner herself was reprimanded by the Missouri Supreme Court and forced to pay a $750 fee in an ethics case over her office’s mishandling of evidence.
She continued to face public scrutiny over her “exclusion list” of St. Louis police officers, whose work she didn’t trust, and also for her decision to charge a Central West End couple with brandishing guns at racial justice protesters.
…
…
…
…on Thursday, city officials, attorneys and former staffers said Gardner had to leave.
Prominent St. Louis defense attorney Scott Rosenblum called her leadership untenable.
“This was overdue,” he said. “The office was running amok.”
Former assistant prosecutor Natalia Ogurkiewicz, who quit last month, blasted Gardner for taking “the easy way out.” She wanted to see what Bailey would uncover in trial.
“She asked for this fight and then she backed down so that the information would not get out, and the people in the city, the countless lives that she has ruined with all of this, they all deserve to have these answers,” she said.
(Hattip on this to Mike the Musicologist, who has been feeding me links to this story.)
Edited to add: while I generally prefer local news sources when I can get them, I think this NYT story is a good basic primer on the Gardner situation.
Also, I’m putting this here as a sub-story, since I don’t think Andrew Gillum counts as a tax-fattened hyena any longer:
A federal jury acquitted Andrew Gillum, the Democrat who lost the 2018 Florida governor’s race to Ron DeSantis, of lying to the F.B.I. on Thursday. But jurors failed to reach a verdict on charges related to whether Mr. Gillum and a close associate diverted campaign funds when Mr. Gillum was running for governor.
After more than four days of deliberation, the 12-member jury said it had reached agreement only on the charge that Mr. Gillum made false statements when the F.B.I. interviewed him in 2017. Judge Allen C. Winsor of the Federal District Court in Tallahassee declared a mistrial on one conspiracy charge and 17 fraud charges against Mr. Gillum and Sharon Lettman-Hicks.
He can still be tried again on the charges where the jury did not reach a verdict.
Obit watch: May 1, 2023.
Monday, May 1st, 2023Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author. (When Bad Things Happen to Good People and other books).
Detective Troy Patterson of the NYPD.
One night in 1990, three punks tried to hold Officer Patterson up. The robbery went bad, and Officer Patterson was shot in the head. He’d been in a vegetative state for the past 33 years.
Patterson was promoted to detective in 2016.
The three suspects — Vincent Robbins, Tracey Clark and Darien Crawford — were later arrested in the unprovoked shooting.
Robbins, now 53, was convicted of assault and attempted-robbery charges and sentenced to a prison term of five to 15 years. He was released in 2000, state records show.
Clark, the alleged gunman in the shooting, also went to trial in the case. The outcome of the case is not immediately available, nor are any details of the charges against Crawford.
Tim Bachman, of Bachman-Turner Overdrive. You may recall that his brother, Robbie, passed in January.
Mike Shannon, former player and later broadcaster for the St. Louis Cardinals.
John Stobart, artist.
A product of Britain’s Royal Academy of Art, Mr. Stobart moved to the United States in 1970, when conceptual art, Op Art and minimalism were riding high in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.
Affable, unassuming and unfailingly candid, Mr. Stobart would have none of it. “I’ve never bought it, and the general public has never bought it either,” he said of abstract art in an interview with The Boston Globe in 1986. “That’s a lot of baloney, that stuff.”
Instead, he conjured the past as a master of richly detailed historical works brimming with schooners, brigs and sloops, their sails flapping under moody clouds, with shore lights twinkling in the distance.
Working out of studios in the Boston area, Martha’s Vineyard and several other locations, Mr. Stobart, who lived in Medfield, Mass., employed the same taste for exhaustive historical detail as Patrick O’Brian, the prolific Anglo-Irish author known for his bracing tales of naval heroics.
He left no detail to chance, traveling to the locations he painted, consulting old daguerreotypes of harbors and ships and going out to sea on various watercraft to learn the most arcane points about their engineering and behavior on the water.
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The obit reproduces some of Mr. Stobart’s paintings. I’m probably a sucker for representational art, but I like what I see there, and would be happy to have an original Stobart on my wall.
Obit watch: April 28, 2023.
Friday, April 28th, 2023As promised, NYT obit for Jerry Springer.
In 2008, some students objected when Mr. Springer was invited to give the commencement address at Northwestern.
“To the students who invited me — thank you,” he said. “I am honored. To the students who object to my presence — well, you’ve got a point. I, too, would’ve chosen someone else.”
Massad Ayoob has posted an obit for Bart Skelton on his blog. This is the only source I’ve found that I can link.
She was working in her husband’s general store on Aug. 24, 1955. She was white, married, and 21 years old. Her husband was a trucker who was working that day.
A group of black teenagers came to the store. Mrs. Bryant (at the time) claimed that one of the teenagers, a 14-year old boy, “made a sexually suggestive remark to her, grabbed her roughly by the waist and let loose a wolf whistle.”
That boy was Emmett Till.
He was killed four days later. Mr. Bryant and his half-brother were charged with the murder, but were acquitted.
Obit watch: April 26, 2023.
Wednesday, April 26th, 2023NYT obit for Ken Potts, U.S.S. Arizona survivor. I think this one is a little better than the NYPost one I linked a few days ago.
I feel like I’m not giving Mr. Potts as much attention as I should, but since I posted the longer obit the other day, I also feel like this is mostly supplemental.
I am seeing reports that Bart Skelton, gun writer and son of Skeeter Skelton, has passed away. I don’t have anything I can link to at this time, but I’ll update if I do find something.
Alton H. Maddox Jr. has passed.
Mr. Maddox, along with C. Vernon Mason and the Rev. Al Sharpton, were the pivotal figures in the Tawana Brawley kidnapping and rape hoax.
Ms. Brawley was a few weeks shy of her 16th birthday when, in late November 1987, she cast herself as a victim of rank depravity: She, an African American teenager, had been abducted, she said, and held for four days near her home in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., a Dutchess County town about 60 miles north of New York City. She said she was sexually assaulted by a half-dozen white men.
Indeed, she was found in appalling condition. She lay dazed in a trash bag with some of her hair chopped off, feces smeared on her and “KKK” and a racial epithet written in charcoal on her body. Her assailants, Ms. Brawley said, included law enforcement officials.
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Their insults were nonstop, their allegations outlandish. The Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia and the Irish Republican Army were somehow all involved, they said. They accused the state’s attorney general, Robert Abrams, who led a seven-month grand jury inquiry into the Brawley matter, of having masturbated over a photo of her.
Mr. Maddox, who was given to referring to whites as “crackers,” went on later to call New York “the Mississippi of the ’90s” and New York’s governor at the time, Mario M. Cuomo, “the George Wallace of the ’90s.”
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But in October 1988, the grand jury concluded in a 170-page report that Ms. Brawley had not come anywhere near the truth, dismissing her account as fiction. There was no evidence of sexual assault, it said; she had smeared herself with feces, written the racial slurs herself and faked being in a daze. Her motive was not made clear, but a boyfriend said later that she had wanted to avoid the wrath of her stepfather for having stayed out late.
For Mr. Maddox, the consequences were severe. In May 1990, after he refused to respond to charges of misconduct in the Brawley case, appellate judges in Brooklyn suspended his law license. He never bothered to seriously try getting it back. “The white man thought that after 13 years I’d be so much on my knees,” he said in 2003. “They don’t know me.”
There was also a price to pay in dollars. Steven Pagones, a Dutchess County prosecutor accused by the Brawley team of having assaulted her, won a defamation suit against Messrs. Sharpton, Maddox and Mason. Mr. Maddox was held personally liable for $97,000, a penalty that he paid with help from benefactors.
None of the three apologized for their roles in the hoax. Mr. Sharpton became a national figure with a television program. Mr. Mason, who was disbarred in 1995, became an ordained minister. And Mr. Maddox, who had moved to New York from Georgia in 1973, wrote columns for The Amsterdam News, offered radio commentary and for a while led a group called the United African Movement.
Obit watch: April 24, 2023.
Monday, April 24th, 2023I got a little behind while I was on vacation, so there’s a lot of catch-up here.
Ken Potts (USN – ret.) has passed away at the age of 102.
Mr. Potts was one of the two remaining survivors of the USS Arizona.
He was working as a crane operator shuttling supplies to the Arizona the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when the Pearl Harbor attack happened, according to a 2021 article by the Utah National Guard.
In a 2020 oral history interview with the American Veterans Center, Potts said a loudspeaker ordered sailors back to their ships so he got on a boat.
“When I got back to Pearl Harbor, the whole harbor was afire,” He said in the interview. “The oil had leaked out and caught on fire and was burning.”
Dozens of ships either sank, capsized, or were damaged in the bombing of the Hawaii naval base, which catapulted the U.S. into World War II.
Sailors were tossed or forced to jump into the oily muck below, and Potts and his fellow sailors pulled some to safety in their boat.
This is the oral history referenced above:
Bud Shuster (R – Pennsylvania).
During his 28 years in Congress, including three terms as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Mr. Shuster managed to divert a disproportionately large share of federal highway trust funds into pedestrian crossings, access roads, interchanges, buses, road widening and the Bud Shuster Highway, which links State College, Altoona and the Pennsylvania Turnpike in southern Pennsylvania.
By 1991, he had perfected the earmarking of federal funds to his district so successfully that when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, was asked which state had reaped the biggest slice of the highway trust-fund pie, he replied, “The state of Altoona.”
Richard Riordan, former mayor of Los Angeles.
Obit watch: April 19, 2023.
Wednesday, April 19th, 2023Tiger McKee, noted firearms trainer. American Handgunner.
I never had the pleasure of taking a course from Mr. McKee, but I did read his AH columns and The Book of Two Guns: The Martial Art of the 1911 Pistol and AR Carbine. (Amazon says I bought that in 2008. Wow.) And I think I knew that he was doing custom Smith and Wessons, but those were probably out of my price range.
This is a bad loss. And 61 seems a lot closer these days.
Carol Locatell, actress. Other credits include “M*A*S*H”, “The Pretender”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”…
…and “Mannix” (“Desert Run”, season 7, episode 6.)
Almost a month ago, I posted an obit Lawrence sent me for Gloria Dea. Yesterday, the paper of record ran their own obit.
IMDB. She’s credited as “Girl”.
During the Troubles (that is, the conflict in Northern Ireland), the British Army had a deep cover mole known as “Stakeknife”.
Mr. Scappaticci led that unit.
There are a lot of people who believe he was Stakeknife. He consistently denied it.
Mr. Scappaticci may well have taken some of his secrets to his grave, shielding government intelligence and military handlers from one of the central moral conundrums of the case: Did the British state collude in the killings in order to protect Stakeknife’s identity?
British officials have described Stakeknife as the “golden egg” and “the jewel in the crown” of their infiltration of the I.R.A. They have said that intelligence he delivered alerted them to myriad I.R.A. operations, saving hundreds of lives.
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There is an inquiry going on into Stakeknife. It’s been going on since 2016.
Wikipedia entry. Why am I reminded of Whitey Bulger?