Archive for the ‘Law’ Category
Super quick legal note.
Friday, December 10th, 2021Brief memo from the legal beat.
Thursday, December 9th, 2021There’s a guy in Houston named Dennis Laviage. I have not heard of him previously, but he’s supposedly a well known scrap metal dealer “best known for buying Houston’s scraps with $2 bills”.
Mr. Laviage is engaged in a lawsuit against a former Houston Police sergeant, Jesse Fite. Mr. Laviage accuses Mr. Fite of withholding evidence from a judge, leading to a wrongful arrest.
In Texas, scrap metal buyers like Laviage are required to report purchases to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). The city of Houston also requires they send reports to a national database called Leads Online. This is, in part, so law enforcement can trace potential metal thieves who sell stolen scraps to unsuspecting buyers.
In 2015, C&D Scrap Metal was using a program called Scrap Dragon to fill out the proper forms and send them off to DPS and Leads Online. In the summer of that year, a glitch in Scrap Dragon withheld a handful of C&D’s reports from DPS, but all of the reports were still being filed with Leads Online. Once Laviage became aware, he notified police and insisted that he would file reports with DPS manually until the software issue was resolved.
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Still, Fite continued his pressing until March 2016, when he filed for criminal charges against Laviage. In an application for Laviage’s arrest warrant, Fite accused the scrap metal dealer of “intentionally and knowingly” failing to report those scrap metal purchases to DPS. In the application, nowhere did it state that Laviage contended he knew about the issue and was actively trying to correct it.
A judge found probable cause for Laviage’s arrest based on the application. Several Houston police officers arrested him at his now-shuttered Heights location soon after. In September 2018, a jury found Laviage not guilty of the misdemeanor charge, and the case was expunged from his record. In December that year, Laviage filed a lawsuit in Harris County against Fite for false arrest and malicious prosecution, which was eventually moved to the federal court in the Southern District of Texas.
What’s interesting about this case to me is: last week, a federal judge ruled that Mr. Fite cannot raise a “qualified immunity” defense in this case. In theory, “qualified immunity” states that law enforcement can’t be sued for doing things within the scope of their employment. (I Am Not a Lawyer, and I am oversimplifying here.) In practice, “qualified immunity” has been used to cover a wide range of questionable behaviors: Reason has run a lot of stories on qualified immunity abuses.
Generally, a rejection of a QI defense is rare, so this story is noteworthy on that basis alone. But it also gives me a chance to throw in something absolutely unnecessary, but I think semi-relevant to metal theft:
“I feel blessed to live in such times.”
Monday, December 6th, 2021That was a comment from a friend of mine when I sent this story around last month.
I didn’t blog it at the time because it was all rumors and I had no reliable or semi-reliable sourcing on it. But ESPN published an article over the weekend, so now it can be blogged.
Jeff Banks, who is an assistant coach at UT, and his girlfriend are being sued.
Why?
Their monkey allegedly bit a child.
According to the lawsuit, the child, identified as C.C., was trick-or-treating with two friends on Halloween and was invited to attend a haunted house. The lawsuit says that, after completing the haunted house, the child and his friends were taken to a monkey that Thomas kept in the backyard. According to the complaint, the child was told the monkey was trained to give high-fives.
“Instead of giving a high five, Danielle Thomas’s monkey aggressively bit down on C.C.’s hand and refused to let go,” says the lawsuit, a copy of which was obtained by ESPN on Saturday. “C.C. was forced to manually pry the monkey’s jaw open. There was so much blood that C.C. was unable to see the full extent of the injury.”
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The family claims that Ms. Thomas has not yet provided vaccination records for the monkey. It isn’t clear from the article if C.C. had to go through the whole series of rabies shots.
Interesting side note:
Memo from the legal beat.
Wednesday, November 24th, 2021I feel like I have to write about this story, since I don’t think it has received much attention, and it sits at the odd intersection of crime and publishing. I’m trying to step lightly here, because what happened to both of the people involved is horrible, and I hope they are able to find some measure of peace.
Anthony J. Broadwater was exonerated on Monday. He was convicted of rape and spent 16 years in prison, but his conviction was thrown out:
…a state judge, his defense lawyers and the Onondaga County district attorney agreed that the case against him had been woefully flawed.
What makes this story slightly more significant than many of these cases is: the victim was Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky, a non-fiction book about the attack.
Ms. Sebold identified Mr. Broadwater as her attacker, but it seems like there were problems, even at the time:
After evidence was collected from a rape kit, she described her assailant’s features to the police, but the resulting composite sketch didn’t resemble him, she wrote.
Mr. Broadwater was arrested five months later, after Ms. Sebold passed him on the street and contacted the police, saying she may have seen her attacker.
But she identified a different man as her attacker in a police lineup. In her memoir, she writes that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him looked alike and that moments after she made her choice, she felt she had picked the wrong man. She later identified Mr. Broadwater in court.
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In their motion to vacate the conviction, the defense lawyers J. David Hammond and Melissa K. Swartz wrote that the case had relied solely on Ms. Sebold’s identification of Mr. Broadwater in the courtroom and a now-discredited method of microscopic hair analysis.
They also argued that prosecutorial misconduct was a factor during the police lineup — that the prosecutor had falsely told Ms. Sebold that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him were friends who had purposely appeared in the lineup together to trick her — and that it had improperly influenced Ms. Sebold’s later testimony.
Kind of interestingly, this whole thing was triggered by a planned film version of the book:
Timothy Mucciante was working as executive producer of the adaptation of “Lucky,” but began to question the story that the movie was based on earlier this year, after he noticed discrepancies between the memoir and the script.
“I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together,” Mr. Mucciante said in an interview.
Mr. Mucciante said that he ended up leaving the production in June because of his skepticism about the case and how it was being portrayed.
He hired a PI, they gathered evidence, they approached a lawyer (and, coincidentally, Mr. Broadwater hired the same lawyer), one thing led to another which led to the motion to vacate the conviction, and Mr. Broadwater is no longer a sex offender.
Noted.
Friday, November 19th, 2021Obit watch: November 12, 2021.
Friday, November 12th, 2021Still on the road, but taking a few minutes to round up some obits from the past few days. Sorry if this seems compressed.
John Artis, historical and legal footnote. He was the other guy convicted with Hurricane Carter.
Jerry Douglas. He was most famous for “The Young and The Restless”, but he had a pretty extensive career. “Barnaby Jones”, “Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockleman, Private Eye”, “The Dead Don’t Die”…
…and he was a “Mannix” three-timer. Sadly, IMDB has messed up the site to where I can’t easily get a list of his episodes.
Obit watch: October 29, 2021.
Friday, October 29th, 2021Richard Hammer, author. He wrote two books on the My Lai massacre:
Mr. Hammer’s account of the My Lai slaughter in 1968, “One Morning in the War: The Tragedy of Son My” (1970), was frequently reviewed alongside one by Seymour M. Hersh, who had broken the story — “My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath.” (The village of Son My included the hamlet of My Lai.)
“Richard Hammer — knowing perhaps that Hersh had the jump on him — tried to put the incident in perspective and thereby ended up writing the better book,” the book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times.“He took the time,” he added, “to explain the gradual depersonalization of the Vietnamese in American soldiers’ eyes — to make us understand how even women and children begin to seem hated and dangerous.”
Mr. Hammer followed up that book with another centered on the massacre, “The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley,” which John Leonard of The Times numbered among “a handful of public-affairs books published in 1971 that people will be reading a generation from now.” William Styron, writing in The Times Book Review, called it “an honest, penetrating account of a crucially significant military trial.”
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Additionally, he was a two-time winner of the Edgar award for “best fact crime” for books unrelated to My-Lai: The CBS Murders: A True Account of Greed and Violence in New York’s Diamond District and The Vatican Connection: The True Story of a Billion-Dollar Conspiracy Between the Catholic Church and the Mafia (affiliate links).
Viktor Bryukhanov, the guy who took the rap for Chernobyl.
It really was a different country, wasn’t it?
Sonny Osborne, of the Osborne Brothers.
Best known for their 1967 hit “Rocky Top,” the Osborne Brothers pioneered a style of three-part harmony singing in which Bobby Osborne sang tenor melodies pitched above the trio’s other two voices, instead of between them, as was the custom in bluegrass. Sonny Osborne sang the baritone harmonies, with various second tenors over the years adding a third layer of harmony to round out the bright, lyrical blend that became the group’s calling card.
The Osbornes broke further with bluegrass convention by augmenting Mr. Osborne’s driving yet richly melodic banjo playing — and his brother’s jazz-inspired mandolin work — with string sections, drums and pedal steel guitar. They were also the first bluegrass group to record with twin banjos and, more alarming to bluegrass purists, to add electric pickups to their instruments, abandoning the longstanding practice of huddling around a single microphone.
This is in the NYT article, and I’ve posted this before, but fark that: I’m in the mood right now for some insurrectionist music.
Eleonore von Trapp Campbell, of the von Trapp family.
Mrs. Campbell’s father, Capt. Georg von Trapp, and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp, had the seven children who were the basis for the singing family. Maria Kutschera married the captain after Agathe von Trapp died.
Georg and Maria von Trapp had three children, who were not depicted in the movie; Mrs. Campbell was the second. Early on, she sang soprano as a member of the Trapp Family Singers, who performed in Europe before World War II and, after fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, continued to do so in the United States and internationally.
Martha Henry. She was 83.
For the last role of her long career, Martha Henry, one of Canada’s finest stage actors, played the character in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” known simply as A. Mr. Albee’s character description reads in part, “a very old woman; thin, autocratic, proud, as together as the ravages of time will allow.”
As Ms. Henry took to the stage at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in August to begin the play’s two-month run, the cancer she had been dealing with for more than a year was well along. She used a walker in the first shows. In September she performed the role from a wheelchair, soldiering on in the demanding part through the final performance, on Oct. 9.
David DePatie, co-creator (with Friz Freleng) of “The Pink Panther”.
George Butler, documentary filmmaker. Among his credits: “Pumping Iron”, aka “the movie that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star”.
In an interview with The Daily News of New York in 1977, when he was early in his run on “Quincy” (he eventually appeared in the vast majority of the show’s 148 episodes), Mr. Bisoglio gave himself a nickname of sorts that was a reference to his “Quincy” role but could well have applied to much of a career in which he specialized in making a memorable impression in a brief amount of time.
“Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant. It’s only one minute or two, at the most. So I’m the one- or two-minute man.”
Obit watch: October 26, 2021.
Tuesday, October 26th, 2021Francis Wayne Alexander. Mr. Alexander is believed to have died sometime between 1976 and 1977, but his death was not announced until Monday.
Mr. Alexander moved to Chicago from New York with his wife in 1975, officials said. The couple divorced months later, and Mr. Alexander remained in Chicago.
He lived on Winona Street on the North Side of Chicago, in a neighborhood where Mr. Gacy was known to have targeted other victims, including William Bundy, a 19-year-old construction worker.
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The Sheriff’s Department was aided by a nonprofit organization, the DNA Doe Project, whose all-volunteer staff tries to match unidentified remains with genetic profiles that had been uploaded to an open-source genealogy database.
Using DNA from one of Victim No. 5’s molars, the DNA Doe Project found connections to Mr. Alexander’s family. Detective Moran followed up with research, interviews and further DNA testing before confirming that he had found the identity of the victim.
The confirmed identification of Mr. Alexander leaves five remaining unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office is actively working to identify those as well.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#76 in a series)
Wednesday, October 20th, 2021Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R-Nebraska) was indicted yesterday.
Specifically, he’s charged with the ever popular lying to the Feds.
The indictment stems from a separate federal investigation into Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese Nigerian billionaire who was accused of conspiring to make illegal campaign contributions to American politicians in exchange for access to them.
Foreign citizens are prohibited by federal law from contributing to U.S. election campaigns. Mr. Chagoury admitted this year to providing approximately $180,000 to four candidates from June 2012 to March 2016. He said he had used others, including Toufic Joseph Baaklini, a Washington lobbyist, to mask his donations.
Mr. Fortenberry, who has served in Congress for 15 years, was one of those politicians. He is not disputing the fact that the donations, ultimately from Mr. Chagoury, were illegal.
“Five and a half years ago, a person from overseas illegally moved money to my campaign,” Mr. Fortenberry said in his video. “I didn’t know anything about this.”
But the government is saying he’s lying about not knowing the donations were illegal.
The government said in court filings that in spring 2018, one of Mr. Fortenberry’s fund-raisers told the congressman that he had funneled $30,000 from Mr. Baaklini to the 2016 re-election event, but that the money “probably did come from Gilbert Chagoury.”
The fund-raiser, referred to as Individual H in the indictment, was cooperating with law enforcement when he spoke with Mr. Fortenberry, according to the indictment.
Despite the fact that the donations were most likely illegal, Mr. Fortenberry did not take appropriate action, such as filing an amended report with the Federal Election Commission or returning the contributions, the indictment said. It was not until after the Justice Department contacted him in July 2019 that Mr. Fortenberrry returned the contributions, according to the document.
In his initial interview with the F.B.I. in 2019, Mr. Fortenberry said that the people who had contributed during his fund-raising event in 2016 were all publicly disclosed, and that he was unaware of any contributions made by foreign citizens, according to the indictment.
Noted:
They tried to make me go to rehab…
Thursday, October 14th, 2021…and then when I got out, they arrested me for swindling the sons of my dead housekeeper out of the settlement they got when she fell and died on my front steps.
Okay, that was not one of the more successful Amy Winehouse songs. The scansion could probably use a little work.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#75 in a series)
Thursday, October 14th, 2021Giggle. Snort. Both Mike the Musicologist and Lawrence sent this to me.
Also charged: Marilyn Louise Flynn, “who at the time was dean of USC’s School of Social Work”.
In a 20-count indictment, he and Flynn face charges of conspiracy, bribery and mail and wire fraud.
But what exactly did they do?
Allegedly, the senior Ridley-Thomas funneled about $100,000 to USC.
The Times reported that USC alerted federal prosecutors to the unusual arrangement after an internal investigation. It also described the intense budget pressure Flynn was under at the time of the alleged scheme with Mark Ridley-Thomas in large part because of her embrace of online degree programs.
Under her tenure as dean, USC’s social work program became the largest in the world, growing from an enrollment of 900 in 2010 to 3,500 in 2016.
That growth, however, was achieved largely through a partnership with a digital learning startup that received more than half of the tuition that students paid for a master’s degree through the school’s online program. The profit-sharing required Flynn to aggressively raise money and seek government contracts to increase revenue.
To fill the online ranks, the school began admitting less qualified students, who sometimes struggled to do the work and who ultimately drove down the rankings of the once-prestigious program. In 2019, USC was forced to lay off social work professors and staff members.
More fun: Ridley-Thomas is the third council member to be indicted in the past two years.
The council has been mired in corruption scandals. Former L.A. Councilman Jose Huizar is awaiting trial on racketeering, bribery, money laundering and other charges. Prosecutors allege he headed up a criminal enterprise involving multiple real estate developers looking to build projects in his downtown district when he was on the council. Huizar and a former deputy mayor who was indicted with him have pleaded not guilty and are seeking to have many of the charges dismissed.
In a related case, former Councilman Mitchell Englander is serving a 14-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to lying to federal authorities about cash and other gifts that he received in casinos in Las Vegas and near Palm Springs.
And even more fun: USC has other issues.
And the cherry on top:
Noteworthy.
Thursday, October 14th, 2021I have my own set of issues with the New York City Police Department, and I don’t even live in NYC.
But I think this story is worth calling out.
In January of 1993, Katrina Brownlee was shot 10 times by her abusive boyfriend.
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She survived, but lost the child she was carrying.
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In 2001 she entered the police academy. What followed was a 20-year career of promotions to busy, dangerous areas of policing, from the streets of Brooklyn to undercover work in narcotics and prostitution stings. She ended up on the elite executive protection detail, as a bodyguard to the mayor of New York.
The entire time, through all those postings, Ms. Brownlee did her best to keep her shooting a secret. She feared what her fellow officers or her bosses would make of her traumatic injuries and her motivations for joining their ranks.
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After more than five years of being undercover, she was transferred to a quieter post in a community affairs office in police headquarters, and, now a police officer in plain sight, she saw an opportunity.
In 2012, she founded a program with the office called A Rose Is Still a Rose, which was eventually renamed and designated a nonprofit, Young Ladies of Our Future. The organization “aims to inspire, educate, mentor, and empower at-risk young ladies,” according to its website. At offices in Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn, young women would gather for weekly workshops — “from etiquette to bullying to gun violence to nutrition,” she said.
Briefly noted.
Wednesday, October 13th, 2021The NYT has a good summary of the Murdaugh case(s), for those like me who have had trouble keeping up.
Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#AH of a series)
Tuesday, October 12th, 2021He’s gone, gone.
Well, technically, not quite yet:
Miami City Manager Art Noriega moved to fire embattled Police Chief Art Acevedo Monday night, ending weeks of speculation following two circus-like public hearings where city commissioners slammed the chief for everything from a tone-deaf statement about “Cuban Mafia” running the department to a tight jumpsuit he wore years ago during a fundraiser in another city.
Technically, the manager suspended Acevedo pending termination — forcing an almost-sure-to-lose hearing before a five-member commission with three vocal critics who appear likely to support his ouster after his tumultuous six months in charge.
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In just six months, Acevedo angered city leaders with a string of decisions and comments. Noriega, Acevedo’s boss and who was ultimately responsible for his hire, was left with little choice but to force the chief out.
Since early April Acevedo has taken control of internal affairs, publicly disparaged the legal community for early prisoner releases and short sentences and fired the highest ranking police couple in the department for not properly reporting an accident in which two tires were blown out of a city-issued vehicle. He also demoted four majors, including the second-highest ranking Black female officer in the department.
Acevedo also “accidentally” posed for a picture with one of the local leaders of the white national movement Proud Boys.
Some of the complaints seem quite petty, like the one about the tight white jumpsuit. But others…
His relationship with the city’s five commissioners — who direct Noriega — only worsened. Three weeks ago he penned a memo to Noriega and Mayor Francis Suarez accusing Commissioners Joe Carollo, Diaz de la Portilla and Manolo Reyes of interfering with police investigations. The chief also said he had informed federal investigators and compared the trio’s actions to Communist Cuba.
Like Acevedo, two of the city’s three Cuban-American commissioners fled Cuba as children and the families of all three have suffered since Castro’s takeover 60 years ago. Infuriated, commissioners called for a pair of public hearings in which they excoriated the chief without rebuttal.
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Noted:
Good news, everyone!
Wednesday, October 6th, 2021The Zodiac Killer has been identified!
Again.
For about the 16th time, based just on my rough count of Wikipedia entries. (Even if you throw out the Manson Family and Ted Kaczynski as not serious candidates, that still leaves what, 14? 15 if you count Ted Cruz?)
Oh, yeah: the Riverside Police Department says these people are full of you-know-what.