I’m sure he would have gotten away with it, too, if only he had told her she was on “double secret probation“.
Archive for the ‘Law’ Category
That’s your problem, right there…
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021Obit watch: June 1, 2021.
Tuesday, June 1st, 2021Buddy Van Horn. He has 109 credits in IMDB for stunt work: many of those were as Clint Eastwood’s stunt double or as a stunt coordinator on Eastwood movies.
He also directed three Eastwood movies: “Any Which Way You Can”, “Pink Cadillac”, and “The Dead Pool”.
Romy Walthall. She was in “Face/Off”, the 1989 “The House Of Usher”, and “The Howling IV: The Original Nightmare”, and a fair number of 1980s and 1990s TV series.
By way of Lawrence: Foster Friess, “successful investor, Republican donor and onetime Wyoming governor candidate”.
Thomas Sullivan. He was a Federal prosecutor in Chicago, and Diogenes would likely have been glad to meet him.
As federal prosecutor, Mr. Sullivan embarked on an audacious plan to root out bribery and case-fixing in the Cook County Circuit Court system. It included installing listening devices in judges’ chambers and creating fabricated cases that would be tried before judges who were under investigation. The sting came to be known as Operation Greylord.
“If we used real cases,” he said in an interview on his law firm’s website in 2014, and the prosecutor or judge “takes a bribe and a guy is released from a minor crime and then goes out and commits a really horrible crime, I’m going to get blamed for it. So you can’t use real cases; you have to use fake cases.”
As part of the sting, F.B.I. agents who were lawyers established legal practices to gain access to judges.
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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 419
Monday, May 24th, 2021Military History Monday!
This is also the last entry in MilHisMon. Sort of. It’s complicated.
Somewhere in my collection of books on leadership, I have a thin little pamphlet that I picked up at the National Museum of the Pacific War: “Arleigh Burke on Leadership”.
Who was Arleigh Burke, other than being a guy who has a whole class of destroyers named after him?
“Saluting Admiral Arleigh Burke”, circa about 1961 (around the time he retired, after three terms as Chief of Naval Operations).
Bonus #1: This might be the last chance I get to do one of these. Plus: CanCon!
“Canadair CF-104 Starfighter”.
Bonus #2: And as long as I’m taking last chances…”Secrets of the F-14 Tomcat: Inflight Refueling” from Ward Carroll.
As a side note, which I learned from Mr. Carroll this past weekend, did not know previously, and don’t really have a good place to stick it: one of Donald Trump’s final pardons was granted to Randall “Duke” Cunningham.
Bonus #3: A documentary about “Operation Blowdown”.
“Operation Blowdown”? Yes: back in 1963, the Australian military decided to simulate a nuclear blast in a rain forest, just to see what conditions would be like afterwards. Because, you know, why the heck not?
A device containing was detonated to partially simulate a ten kiloton air burst in the Iron Range jungle. The explosives were sourced from obsolete artillery shells and placed in a tower 42 metres (138 ft) above ground level and 21 metres (69 ft) above the rainforest canopy. After the explosion, troops were moved through the area (which was now covered in up to a metre of leaf litter), to test their ability to transit across the debris. In addition, obsolete vehicles and equipment left near the centre of the explosion were destroyed.
Memo from the police beat.
Tuesday, May 18th, 2021There have been a few mildly interesting police stories in recent days. Here’s a round-up.
1. The police chief of the Manor ISD Police (yeah, the school district police, not the city police) has been “placed on administrative leave“.
The accusations against him seem to amount to two things: “falsifying timesheets”, and “improperly donating used cellphones to a local domestic violence shelter”.
The defense attorney representing Chief Shane Sexton and three other officers in the force, said credible evidence has been submitted to the district to show that all timesheets have been accurate.
Sexton’s attorney Brad Heilman said Verizon Wireless donated the cellphones to the department, came at no cost to the district and were no longer being used.
Manor is about 34 miles down the road from here, and has an estimated population (as of 2019) of about 13,000 people. Small town politics…but I’ll come back to that in a bit. (I also have some questions about why small school districts need their own police departments, but that gets into other issues: how big does a school district have to be to justify their own police force? Does not having a police force for a small school district divert resources from a small city police force? Is it just a question of which pocket the money comes out of? I haven’t though through all of this yet.)
2. Lorenzo Hernandez used to be a deputy with the Williamson County sheriff’s department. He also appeared on “Live TV”, back when they were in WillCo and “Live PD” was a thing.
And now he’s been charged with “assault and official oppression”.
In the arrest affidavit, a Williamson County detective wrote that the woman Hernandez is accused of assaulting “did not pose a threat.”
“Defendant Hernandez escalates the event through an intentional, unreasonable use of force against [the victim] by placing his hand on her throat directly below her chin,” the affidavit said, adding that Hernandez then squeezed her throat and pushed her back into the apartment wall.
“The intentional use of force by Defendant Hernandez by placing his hand on the throat of [the victim] is unlawful, as no exception provides Defendant Hernandez the justification for the use of said force.”
3. This one is in my own backyard, but I’ve avoided writing about it. The story broke late Friday afternoon, and I’ve been trying to get a little more clarity about what’s happening.
The Lakeway police chief, Todd Radford, resigned on Friday. His resignation was not voluntary.
There is a lot of speculation on NextDoor about what’s going on. Most of it I find unreliable. The theory that I do find compelling is: this is related to a move by the council to eliminate contracts for all city employees and convert them to at-will status. This is something I can get behind for most city employees, but not for the police chief and police officers. I think law enforcement people should be on a contract basis – one which allows termination for clearly defined reasons. I don’t think a cop who murders or rapes someone should keep their job, but I don’t want them being fired because they didn’t fix a ticket for the mayor’s brother-in-law.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 409
Friday, May 14th, 2021Today, a handful of random.
“Skallagrim” discusses “End Him Rightly”, a fighting technique from the Gladiatoria.
Bonus #1: Here’s another video from the good folks at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC): “Integrity in the Workplace”. Or, things you shouldn’t do as a Federal employee.
Bonus #2: A little something for FotB RoadRich again. Guy picks up a 1973 Piper Cherokee Cruiser for $9,000 (it needs an overhaul and the owner couldn’t afford it) and does a restoration and rebuild.
Besides putting this up as RoadRich bait, I’m posting this because that’s a really nice looking airplane. I could see myself flying something like that.
Bonus #3: And speaking of the Cherokee, “50th Anniversary of the Piper Cherokee” from the good folks at Piper.
Obit watch: May 10, 2021.
Monday, May 10th, 2021Frank McRae, actor. He was in “License to Kill” and “Last Action Hero”, and did a few TV guest shots (“Quincy”, “Rockford Files”, etc.)
Pete du Pont, former Deleware governor and presidential candidate.
Obit watch: May 9, 2021.
Sunday, May 9th, 2021Tawny Kitaen, 80s figure.
She once described working with Paula Abdul, who was a choreographer at the time, on the set of one video.
As Ms. Kitaen recalled, Ms. Abdul asked her what she could do, and Ms. Kitaen showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to the director, Marty Callner, and said, “She’s got this and doesn’t need me.” And then, Ms. Kitaen said, she left.
“That was the greatest compliment,” she said. “So I got on the cars and Marty would say, ‘Action,’ and I’d do whatever I felt like doing.”
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Ed Ward, music critic. He wrote for “Crawdaddy” and “Rolling Stone”:
Mr. Ward’s review of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” (1969) in Rolling Stone demonstrated his tough side: He called “Sun King” the album’s “biggest bomb” and its second side “a disaster.”
“They’ve been shucking us a lot lately and it’s a shame because they don’t have to,” he wrote. “Surely they have enough talent and intelligence to do better than this. Or do they?”
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Mr. Ward was fired from Rolling Stone after a few months (he didn’t get along with Jann Wenner, the publisher), then became the West Coast correspondent for the rock magazine Creem, a post he held for most of the 1970s. He left in 1979 to write about the thriving music scene in Austin as a music critic at The American-Statesman.
“Ed brought a reputation to Austin as an unflinching critic — Rolling Stone had a lot of clout — and he was not diplomatic in his writing,” said his friend and fellow writer Joe Nick Patoski, who described Mr. Ward as cantankerous and difficult. “Early on, there was a reaction to some of the things he wrote and it started a ‘Dump Ed Ward’ movement that had bumper stickers and T shirts.”
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Ernest Angley, televangelist. Or, as I liked to call him, “the man who took over Rex Humbard’s soup kitchen“.
These last two by way of Lawrence: George Jung, cocaine smuggler.
Japanese composer Shunsuke Kikuchi. Among his credits: “Dragon Ball”, “Dragon Ball Z”, and several “Gamera” films.
Well!
Friday, May 7th, 2021Previous coverage of Corrine Brown.
More:
But the court’s majority found on Thursday that the judge who had presided over Ms. Brown’s case in U.S. District Court in Jacksonville had violated her constitutional right to a unanimous jury verdict when he removed a juror and replaced him with an alternate during the panel’s deliberations.
Shortly after deliberations had begun, the juror told the other members of the jury he had received divine guidance, prompting another juror to bring his comments to the attention of Judge Timothy Corrigan.
In a majority opinion, the appeals court wrote that Judge Corrigan had not had cause to dismiss the unidentified juror, known as Juror No. 13, whom he had questioned about the role of his faith in deliberations.
“We ask whether Juror No. 13’s religious statements amounted to proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he could not render a verdict based solely on the evidence and the law, thereby disqualifying him, despite substantial evidence that he was fulfilling the duty he had sworn to render,” the court’s majority wrote. “They did not.”
The decision was 7-4.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 400
Wednesday, May 5th, 2021This popped up in my feed, and you know I had to post it here: “TRS-80 Color Computer: Radio Shack’s $399 Micro from 1980!”
It me. Mine had 4K of memory: not 4 GB, or 4 MB, but 4,096 8-bit bytes of memory, and used cassette tape for storage.
Bonus #1: I’m marginal about using this one, but it calls back to an earlier blog entry: “The Norco Shootout, 40 Years Later”.
Not officially part of the content here, but: the “Behind the Badge” channel posted the Norco documentary in one (54 minute) chunk. I linked to that in my previous Norco post, but that version divides the video up into three chunks.
Bonus #2: Here’s something we hope you really like (especially you, RoadRich): a video on “Use of Force” from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC).
Bonus #3: This is short, but I thought it was worth putting up here. Simon Sinek on “The Most Toxic Person In The Workplace”.
Quick update from the legal beat.
Friday, April 30th, 2021Five people have been arrested on charges related to the shooting of Lady Gaga’s dog walker.
Three of them were actually involved in the robbery, according to police:
The other two are charged as accessories after the fact. One of them is the woman who returned the dogs.
The fark?!
Wednesday, April 28th, 2021Greg Newman, the elected DA for Henderson, Polk and Transylvania counties in North Carolina, has been removed from office.
…Newman engaged in “willful misconduct in office” and “conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice which brings the office into disrepute,” under N.C. General Statute 7A-66.
The decision was made nearly two weeks after a three-day removal hearing April 12-14 in Henderson County Superior Court.
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The term “willful misconduct in office” has been defined as “the improper or wrongful use of the power of his office by a judge acting intentionally, or with gross unconcern for his conduct, and generally in bad faith,” Ervin wrote in his 30-page order.
“Conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice,” is defined as “conduct which a judge undertakes in good faith but which nevertheless would appear to an objective observer to be not only unjudicial conduct but conduct prejudicial to public esteem for the judicial office,” Ervin wrote in his order, citing multiple instances presented in the hearing with which he agreed.
The process was started by a group of victims who felt ex-DA Newman wasn’t taking child rape and murder cases seriously:
Peggy McDowell filed the G.S. 7A-66 affidavit without a lawyer, but she was supported by more than a dozen families who said they were seeking justice on their own because Newman had been acting out of self-interest rather than in the best interest of the public.
One was her daughter, Joanne McDowell, a former UNC law student, who now lives in Canada. Joanne McDowell claimed she had to flee the country to protect her child from sexual abuse by his father and four years later was charged by Newman with felony child abduction, which she calls a “vindictive charge.”
“Newman’s expulsion proves that endemic corruption plagues North Carolina’s legal system,” McDowell said. “For years, Newman’s victims begged for relief from the N.C. Attorney General, N.C. State Bar, and N.C. Court of Appeals, but these institutions repeatedly protected the wrong people. Now that ongoing harm has been established, N.C. must assist Newman’s victims and investigate systemic corruption.”
Valerie Owenby, now 22 and living out of state, also supported the removal petition and was a witness at the hearing. She claims she had been raped from ages 5-12 by a Hendersonville neighbor, James Sapp, but Newman pleaded down the felony to a misdemeanor in 2015 without notifying her or her parents and without letting her face the accused in court.
Newman is the third DA to be removed from office in North Carolina. (The other two were Jerry Spivey in 1995, and Tracy Cline in 2012. Mike Nifong was disbarred in 2007, and then resigned, so he technically doesn’t count here.)
(Hattip to President Dawg.)
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 388
Friday, April 23rd, 2021Two for today. Our first one is lower quality because it is vintage, but fits in with an ongoing theme.
This is a training film from the San Diego Police Department, made sometime in the late 1940s according to the notes.
To make up for the low quality of the previous video, here’s a much higher quality bit of history, also totally unrelated to the po-lice.
“Oil Men: Tales From the South Texas Oil Patch”.
Yeah, it is about an hour long, which is why I waited to post this until closer to the weekend.
Obit watch: April 15, 2021.
Thursday, April 15th, 2021Frank Jacobs, one of the old time “Mad” magazine guys.
…
When you’re a Red
You’re a Red all the way
From your first Party purge
To your last power play!
When you’re a Red,
You’ve got agents galore;
You give prizes for peace
While they stir up a war.
John Naisbitt, Megatrends guy.
Finally, Burt Pugach died on Christmas Eve last year, though his death was not widely reported until now.
I wrote a little about this case when his wife died, but that was a long time ago. In brief: Mr. Pugach was married, and carrying on an affair with Linda Riss. She found out he was married and broke it off. He wasn’t having any of that and continued to pursue her.
Finally, he hired thugs – he claims to “beat her up”. The thugs threw lye in her face and left her blind. Mr. Pugach was disbarred, his wife divorced him, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, released after 14 years…
…and after being released, he married Linda Riss, and they stayed married until her death in 2013.
Mr. Pugach left a legacy of recriminations and legal challenges over changes in his will that left a majority of his $18 million in assets to his caregiver. The latest version of the will disinherited several friends and reduced a planned bequest to the foundation for the visually impaired that he had established to honor his wife, Linda Riss Pugach, who died in 2013.
His assets have been frozen while the challenges are adjudicated, said Peter S. Thomas, a lawyer for the foundation, and Peter Gordon, who had drafted earlier versions of Mr. Pugach’s will. Those earlier versions had provided about $10 million for the foundation and roughly $5 million for Shamin Frawley, the 52-year-old caregiver with whom Mr. Pugach (pronounced POO-gash) had been living in Flushing since last year.
Obit watch: April 14, 2021.
Wednesday, April 14th, 2021Ray Lambert, another Amercian badass, has passed away at 100.
A native of Alabama, Staff Sgt. Lambert was leading a unit of medics with the Second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the Army’s First Division. He had taken part in the invasions of North Africa and Sicily and had already earned three Purple Hearts and two Silver Stars before his war came to an end on the morning of June 6, 1944, on Omaha Beach.
He was in the first wave of Allied forces as they crossed the English Channel and stormed German defenses strung along the coast of northern France, beginning the long offensive that would culminate in Germany’s defeat. His brother Bill, also a medic, was with him.
In heavy surf, Ray Lambert was helping a wounded soldier when a landing craft’s ramp dropped on him, pushing him to the bottom. The water was deep as the medics scrambled off the craft.
“When we went under the water, they had barbed wire and you had to try to get through that,” Mr. Lambert said in an interview in 2019 with the American Homefront Project, a public radio effort, “and there were mines tied to that. So we had a lot of guys get tangled up. A lot of the underwater mines went off and killed some guys.”
But he made his way to the beach to tend to the wounded, amid withering fire from German bunkers above.
At one point he scanned the beach for something behind which he could safely treat the wounded. He spotted a lump of leftover German concrete, about eight feet wide and four feet high.
“It was my salvation,” he said. (A plaque installed in 2018 recognizes the concrete as “Ray’s Rock.”)
“Again and again, Ray ran back into the water,” President Trump told a crowd gathered for the ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery, on a bluff overlooking the beach. “He dragged out one man after another. He was shot through the arm. His leg was ripped open by shrapnel. His back was broken. He nearly drowned.”
As Mr. Trump spoke, Mr. Lambert sat behind him wearing a purple “D-Day Survivor” cap. At the end of his speech, the president turned to him and said, “Ray, the free world salutes you.”
Only seven of the 31 soldiers on Mr. Lambert’s landing craft survived. He and his brother, who was also badly wounded, were hospitalized in England.
Mary Ellen Moylan, early and influential ballet dancer who worked with George Balanchine. Noted here because this is one of those odd ones: she actually died almost a year ago, but her passing went unnoticed until recently.
Lee Aaker. This is a sad one. He was a child actor: he played “Rusty” on “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin”, and appeared in “Hondo” and “The Atomic City”, among other credits. His last one in IMDB was an episode of “The Lucy Show” in 1963, when he was 20.
Aaker had suffered a stroke and died April 1 near Mesa, Arizona, Paul Petersen, the former Donna Reed Show star who serves as an advocate for former child actors, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Aaker had battled drug and alcohol abuse during this life and was alone with one “surviving relative that could not help him,” Petersen said, adding that Aaker’s death certificate lists him as an “indigent decedent.”
For Petersen, it marked another sad end to the life of a Hollywood child actor. “You are around just to please everyone,” he said, “and when there’s nothing left, they are done with you.”
Lawrence sent over an obit from ZeroHedge, and the NYT now has it as breaking news: Bernie Madoff is burning in Hell.
Bad boys, bad boys…
Tuesday, April 13th, 2021I’ve written a lot previously about the LA County Sheriff’s Department (motto: “dumber than a bag of hair“). But not in a while: I haven’t been following the LAT as much, as it is basically unreadable unless you pay for it.
This came across Hacker News, however, and is a Justice Department press release, so I can cover it here.
Marc Antrim, who used to be a LACSD deputy, was sentenced to 84 months in federal prison on Monday.
Why? He conspired to rob a marijuana warehouse.
I love “conspiracy to deprive rights under color of law” and “deprivation of rights under color of law”. Those are two of my favorite charges in the Federal system.
More details:
During the early morning hours of October 29, 2018, Antrim and his co-conspirators dressed as armed LASD deputies and approached the warehouse in an LASD Ford Explorer. Upon arrival, Antrim flashed his LASD badge and a fake search warrant to the security guards to gain entry to the warehouse. To perpetuate the ruse that they were legitimate law enforcement officers, Antrim and two fake deputies sported LASD clothing, wore duty belts, and carried firearms. One fake deputy also visibly carried a long gun to further intimidate the guards into submission.
At the beginning of the two-hour robbery, Antrim and his co-conspirators detained the three warehouse security guards in the cage of the LASD Ford Explorer. Soon after the guards were detained, a fourth man arrived at the warehouse in a large rental truck, and all four men began loading marijuana into the truck.
When Los Angeles Police Department officers legitimately responded to a call for service at the warehouse during the robbery, Antrim falsely told the LAPD officers that he was an LASD narcotics deputy conducting a legitimate search. To facilitate the sham, Antrim handed his phone to one of the LAPD officers so that the police officer could speak to someone on the phone claiming to be Antrim’s LASD sergeant. The individual on the phone was not Antrim’s sergeant, and Antrim did not have a legitimate search warrant for the warehouse.
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Six other people have been convicted and sentenced, including the ever-popular “disgruntled warehouse employee” who is serving 14 years. Former deputy Antrim testified at his trial, which is one reason why he only got seven years.
The big question in my mind: when is the movie coming out, and who’s going to play former deputy Antrim?