First one to call the cops wins.
Siwatu-Salama Ra was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and committing a felony while in possession of a firearm. Her conviction was just overturned by the Michigan Court of Appeals.
Archive for the ‘Law’ Category
What did I say? What did I just say?
Wednesday, August 21st, 2019While we’re talking about defensive gun use…
Wednesday, August 21st, 2019Andrew Branca did a good post on Monday (that I missed) over at Legal Insurrection about the Michael Drejka case: the trial has started.
You might know the Drejka case better as the “handicapped parking space shooting”. Trying to summarize as objectively as I can: Mr. Drejka confronted Markeis McGlockton’s girlfriend about being parked illegally in a handicapped parking space. Mr. McGlockton intervened and shoved Mr. Drejka to the ground: Mr. Drejka, apparently believing he was in a vulnerable position and subject to further attack by Mr. McGlockton, shot and killed him.
Mr. Drejka was not initially charged: the local sheriff stated that he believed this was a legitimate case of self-defense. A month after the shooting, Mr. Drejka was charged with manslaughter.
Bonus: CNN debunking.
Hard lessons learned.
Tuesday, August 20th, 2019There’s an article in today’s NYT about Anwar Ghazali. Mr. Ghazali was convicted of second degree murder a few days ago.
What did he do? He shot a 17-year-old who shoplifted some beer from the convenience store Mr. Ghazali was clerking at.
You should apply the usual NYT gun related story discount to this article, but I think there are some illustrative lessons to be learned here.
So the guy was running off, he wasn’t a fleeing armed felon who could endanger others, and Mr. Ghazali was (by this account) out of danger. Why did he grab a gun and pursue? I’m not a lawyer, much less a Tennessee one, but I’m pretty sure grabbing a gun and pursuing a person who is in flight, and poses no immediate threat to you or others, takes you outside of “castle doctrine” and into “the DAs likely going to charge you – that is, if you don’t get shot by the cops while you’re running down the street waving a gun” territory.
The store clerk grabbed a handgun and chased him, firing off a few shots into the dark night, on March 29, the authorities said.
“I think I shot him,” the clerk, Anwar Ghazali, 29, told a customer when he returned to the store, according to a police affidavit and the Shelby County District Attorney’s office.
“I think I shot him.” So he was spraying shots into “the dark night”?
Always be sure of your target and what is beyond it. What if he had hit an innocent person in a house or apartment nearby?
But he did hit somebody.
And:
If he had called the police, there’s a pretty good chance they would have found Mr. Harris, stopped the bleed, gotten medics out there, Mr. Harris would be alive today, and Mr. Ghazali wouldn’t have been charged with murder. (Admittedly, I haven’t seen the autopsy report, which is why I qualify that with “pretty good chance”.)
Also on point: in a defensive gun use, even if you just display the gun without actually using it, first one to call 911 wins. Massad Ayoob’s writings contain more than one story of someone who legitimately displayed a weapon to deter a threat, and found themselves on the wrong end of a police investigation and legal bills. If I remember correctly (I don’t have the book here at work) Chris Bird’s Thank God I Had a Gun contains a story like this that ended “well”: in that the defensive gun user avoided prison time, but still racked up legal fees and other consequences.
So that’s my takeaways: don’t shoot people who aren’t an imminent threat to life, don’t shoot blindly into the dark, and call the police. Did I miss any salutary points? Feel free to mention my many shortcomings in comments below.
Obit watch: August 20, 2019.
Tuesday, August 20th, 2019Quel fromage!
Tuesday, August 13th, 2019I don’t think this qualifies for flaming hyenas status. Yet.
…
…sources confirmed that the investigation involves an alleged “quid pro quo” between donors to six-term Sheriff Laurie Smith’s election efforts and people who have obtained concealed-carry weapons permits from her office, which has been relatively stingy about issuing the privilege compared to neighboring counties.
The sources also said that the probe, while publicly surfacing over the past few days, had been in the works far longer and that it is focused on some of Smith’s trusted advisers in the agency.
…
…at least four recipients of the 13 permits either issued or renewed last year donated at least $1,000 to Smith’s re-election efforts, including to her formal campaign or to the independent Santa Clara County Public Safety Alliance that supported her.
That includes match.com founder and Santa Clara County Valley Water District board member Gary Kremen, a Los Altos resident who donated $5,000 to the safety alliance group last fall, during Smith’s re-election bid for a sixth term.
Bagatelle (#13)
Saturday, August 10th, 2019Every now and then, I see a story in one of the papers and think to myself, “Dick Wolf’s going to get an episode of ‘Law and Order: Kinky Sex Crimes’ out of this one.”
Today is the first time I’ve ever thought “Dick Wolf’s going to get an entire season of ‘L&O:KSC’ out of this story.”
Quote of the day.
Friday, July 26th, 2019I finished Simon Baatz’s The Girl on the Velvet Swing: Sex, Murder, and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century a couple of days ago. I thought For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago was an excellent historical look at that case, and Girl is every bit as good: I commend it to your attention.
My only complaint is: I wish Girl had come out in 2015, not 2018. It would have made my life slightly easier. (Okay, I also kind of wish that Baatz would have given us at least a mini-review of “The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing“, like Simon Winchester did for “Krakatoa, East of Java” in his book.)
Anyway, there are two paragraphs in Girl that I found particularly interesting. (I think my use of these as a quote falls under the “fair use” category).
Anthony Comstock applauded such initiatives but continued to urge his acolytes to take independent action to combat such social evils as prostitution and pornography. Nothing in this regard was more infuriating to the Society for the Suppression of Vice than the complicity of newspaper proprietors in promoting prostitution, and no one was more culpable than James Gordon Bennett Jr., the owner and publisher of the New York Herald. Hundreds of paid notices, offering various services, appeared in the Herald every day; these advertisements never explicitly mentioned sex, but their meaning was nevertheless obvious. Such notices promoted prostitution, Comstock asserted, yet Bennett had always denied any responsibility, claiming that it was impossible for the Herald to distinguish between advertisements that offered companionship and those that offered sex.
But the campaign for moral purity would not be denied, and on July 7 [1906 – DB], Charles Wahle, a magistrate in the Seventh District Police Court, issued a summons against the New York Herald for printing obscene and lewd matter. Charles Grubb, a pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church, had initiated the complaint, but it was equally a triumph for Comstock and the Society for the Suppression of Vice.
Does this remind you of anything in particular?
(Historical side note: Baatz doesn’t reveal what gun Thaw used, but he does get a little closer to that end: it is described as a blue steel revolver. It also sounds like it might have been a top-break, since Thaw is repeatedly referred to as having “broken” the revolver after shooting White and held it above his head by the barrel. But I apply a press discount to almost all media coverage of firearms, even from the turn of the century.
There’s no discussion of the caliber or maker in the Baatz book. We know from the trial transcripts that it was introduced into evidence and identified by the man who took it from Thaw, but the trial transcripts I’ve been able to find online do not include that part of the testimony.)
Obit watch: July 26, 2019.
Friday, July 26th, 2019P. Rajagopal, prominent Indian restaurateur.
He founded Saravana Bhavan, a chain of vegetarian restaurants based on Southern Indian cooking:
The restaurant focused on South Indian cuisine, serving freshly cooked dosas, a type of crispy golden rice and lentil crepe. As his chain expanded, the dish would earn him the nickname the “dosa king” in the media. He also sold snacks like idlis, soft round steamed rice cakes, and vadas, a kind of lentil doughnut, serving them with freshly cooked chutneys.
As his tasty, inexpensive food gained a following, his restaurant eventually turned a profit, enabling him to open branches. In 2000, with about 20 locations in India, Saravana Bhavan ventured overseas, opening in neighborhoods where the Indian diaspora had a strong presence. The chain expanded first into Dubai, then to cities like New York, London and Sydney, Australia. Though it operates under a franchise model, its chefs continue to come from Chennai.
But, as you might have guessed, there’s more to the story. Mr. Rajagopal was also a convicted murderer and was trying desperately to stay out of prison when he died.
Apparently, he desperately wanted to marry the daughter of one of his assistant managers: she wanted nothing to do with him and took up with another guy. (Mr. Rajagopal is described in the obit as a “strict disciplinarian”, so I imagine that must have make the work relationship awkward.) Anyway, Mr. Rajagopal did not take kindly to being rejected…
At first, Mr. Rajagopal was convicted of “culpable homicide” in 2004 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. However, he didn’t serve any time, for medical reasons.
If you’re confused about how a court can “upgrade a conviction to murder”, well, I am, too. But I freely admit to being unfamiliar with the Indian legal system.
He was 71 when he died.
It’s Baltimore, gentlemen.
Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019The gods will not save you from being mugged. Even if you are a police.
(Hattip: Dean Bradley on the Twitters.)
Obit watch: July 22, 2019.
Monday, July 22nd, 2019Paul Krassner, Yippee.
…
Mr. Krassner was writing freelance pieces for Mad magazine in 1958 when he realized that there was no equivalent satirical publication for adults; Mad, he could see, was largely targeted at teenagers. So he started The Realist out of the Mad offices, and it began regular monthly publication. By 1967 its circulation had peaked at 100,000.
“I had no role models and no competition, just an open field mined with taboos waiting to be exploded,” Mr. Krassner wrote in his autobiography.
The magazine’s most famous cartoon was one, drawn in 1967 by the Mad artist Wally Wood, of an orgy featuring Snow White, Donald Duck and a bevy of Disney characters enjoying a variety of sexual positions. (Mickey Mouse is shown shooting heroin.) Later, digitally colored by a former Disney artist, it became a hot-selling poster that supplied Mr. Krassner with modest royalties into old age.
Robert M. Morgenthau, former Manhattan DA and federal prosecutor.
Noted:
Mr. Morgenthau had been in the Naval Reserve in college, and after graduation he went on active duty as an ensign. He passed his physical exam by concealing the near-deafness in his right ear from a boyhood mastoid infection. An officer aboard three destroyers and a minesweeper during World War II, he survived enemy attacks and won decorations for bravery under fire.
His destroyer, the U.S.S. Lansdale, was attacked by Nazi torpedo bombers in the Mediterranean off Algiers on April 20, 1944. Cut by explosions, the ship went down with a heavy loss of life. Lieutenant Morgenthau, the executive officer, saved several shipmates, leapt into the water and swam for three hours in the darkness until he and others were picked up by an American warship. In 1945 his ship, the U.S.S. Harry F. Bauer, was hit by a Japanese kamikaze plane off Iwo Jima, but its 550-pound bomb did not explode.
Obit watch: July 17, 2019.
Wednesday, July 17th, 2019For the historical record, one of the most unambiguously incorrect statements ever made by a Supreme Court justice (sitting or former):
Edited to add: Reason 1. Reason 2.
Charles Levin. Apparently he was most famous for playing a mohel on an episode of “Seinfeld”, but he knocked around TV quite a bit before that. Never did a “Mannix”, but he did some other cop shows, was a regular on “Alice”, and was also in “This Is Spinal Tap”.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#57 in a series)
Monday, July 8th, 2019There’s an interesting article in today’s NYT about Jenna Garland, the former press secretary for Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed.
Ms. Garland is currently under indictment. She’s charged with two misdemeanors. But, unlike the usual run of tax-fattened hyenas, the charges against Ms. Garland involve…
…violations of the Georgia open records law.
…
There are two interesting things about this.
1. Criminal charges against public officials for open records act violations are “extremely uncommon”, as the paper of record describes it.
Open-records or “sunshine” laws in a number of other states include no criminal sanctions for noncompliance, although a number of them call for civil penalties or the payment of attorneys’ fees and court costs if a news organization or a member of the public successfully sues a government agency for documents.
In Colorado, lawmakers removed criminal penalties for violating the state’s open-records law two years ago because almost no one was ever charged.
And something that’s feeding into this: even though Kasim Reed left office last year, his administration is still under federal investigation.
It kind of sounds like the charges against Ms. Garland are more fallout from the ongoing investigation of Mr. Reed. I’d be tempted to suggest that they’re trying to flip her: but that seems unlikely with misdemeanor charges.
Scott R. Grubman, an Atlanta-based lawyer experienced in white-collar crime matters who is not involved in the Garland case, read Ms. Garland’s text messages the same way. He said he thought the government’s case against her was “flimsy” and an overreaction, given that civil penalties could be levied instead.
In Georgia, both state agencies and local governments “regularly engage in delay tactics” in response to open-records requests, Mr. Grubman said in an email. “By bringing a criminal prosecution against Ms. Garland without having ever criminally prosecuted any other violation in the past, the A.G.’s office appears to be unfairly targeting Ms. Garland and opening up a can of worms that will be difficult to close.”
I actually kind of agree with Mr. Grubman’s position, at least in part. This does seem like selective prosecution. But: I only agree with him in part because I think more public officials should face criminal charges for open records act violations. The heck with “civil penalties”, which are probably going to be paid by the taxpayers anyway: let’s hold these people personally responsible for violating the law. And if that means some of them wind up in jail…fiat justitia ruat caelum.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#56 in a series)
Sunday, June 30th, 2019“This defendant is a walking crime-spree,” Michael Wheat, a special federal prosecutor, told the judge in court, saying she holds sway with police and has tampered with grand jury witnesses in the past.
Wow. “A walking crime-spree.” That’s pretty harsh. Who is the defendant?
Katherine Kealoha. She was a prosecutor in the Honolulu DA’s office. She is also married to the former Honolulu chief of police.
And both of them were convicted of consipracy and obstruction of justice on Friday. Also convicted: two officers with the Honolulu PD.
This whole case is kind of bat guano insane, and Hawaii is not my usual beat. So I didn’t find out about this story until yesterday, and completely missed any run-up to it. This particular set of convictions were the result of the Kealoha’s staging the theft of a mailbox. No, really. A mailbox.
The five defendants were accused of conspiring to frame Gerard Puana, Katherine Kealoha’s estranged uncle, for the alleged theft of the Kealohas’ Kahala mailbox in 2013 and then lying to federal authorities to cover their scheme.
Prosecutors said the Kealohas were trying to smear Puana and Katherine Kealoha’s grandmother Florence Puana because they were catching on to the fact that the Kealohas had used the proceeds from a reverse mortgage on Florence Puana’s home to bankroll a lavish lifestyle.
(Noted: one of those five, former HPD Major Gordon Shiraishi, was acquitted on all charges.)
So that’s a little more understandable, I guess? They tried to frame the uncle (who they didn’t get along with anyway) to keep the money faucet flowing.
I know real estate in Hawaii isn’t cheap, but how much did they get out of this reverse mortgage?
Prosecutors said Katherine Kealoha burned through $135,000 of Florence Puana’s money in six months.
By the way…
And the insanity doesn’t end there.
More (I apologize for the length, but this does give a fairly detailed account):
During the trial, prosecutors portrayed Katherine Kealoha as the ringleader of the conspiracy. She invented an alias, Alison Lee Wong, to forge documents, and tried to have her grandmother declared incompetent to silence her, prosecutors told the jury.
Jurors watched a deposition from Puana’s mother, Florence Puana, who was unable to testify in court because of her failing health.
Gerard Puana testified that Katherine Kealoha came to them with an idea about taking out a reverse mortgage on her grandmother’s home to help buy a condo her uncle wanted. Kealoha said she would consolidate her debts — which prosecutors described as massive — and promised her uncle and grandmother that she would pay off the loan.
Wheat noted that Kealoha tampered with potential witnesses, including sending letters trying to convince them Alison Lee Wong is a real person.
“Well, it’s pretty clear who Alison Lee Wong is,” Seabright said. “It’s Katherine Kealoha.”
Kealoha had an innocent man incarcerated and tried to silence her grandmother “after engaging in an outright theft of their money,” Seabright said.
“To be clear, it was her own grandmother she did this to,” he said.
She also got her firefighter boyfriend to lie about their affair to a grand jury and convinced the man whose childhood trust she controlled that his mother would go to jail if he didn’t lie and say Kealoha gave him his money, Seabright said.
And a little sting at the end:
Obit watch: June 10, 2019.
Monday, June 10th, 2019Nicky Barnes, the other (after Frank Lucas) legendary NYC heroin dealer of the late 1960s and 1970s.
I would use the “bad week for dope dealers” joke, but Mr. Barnes actually died in 2012: his death was not reported until late last week.
Mr. Barnes estimated that he had earned at least $5 million selling heroin in the several years before his 1977 conviction — income he had augmented by investing in travel agencies, gas stations, a chain of automated carwashes and housing projects in Cleveland and Pontiac, Mich. He also marketed something called a flake-burger, made from remnants of butchered beef.
By the time he audaciously agreed to be photographed for the cover of The Times Magazine and an article inside, he had a record of 13 arrests as an adult and no convictions.
Unfortunately, being profiled in the Times Magazine and called “Mister Untouchable” caused a certain amount of tsuris on the part of Jimmy Carter, who ordered the Justice Department to go all out after Mr. Barnes. In 1977, he was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
While he was imprisoned, though, his wife and former business parters took over his herion empire and began running it into the ground. Mr. Barnes ended up agreeing to testify against all of them, and was released from prison because of his cooperation in 1998.
After his release, Mr. Barnes entered the Witness Protection Program.
Because he was in witness protection, his death was not reported at the time. Apparently, it only came to light now because various people got to wondering what had happened to Mr. Barnes after Mr. Lucas died: Mr. Barnes’s daughters and anonymous sources confirmed his death.
David Bergland, 1984 Libertarian Party presidential candidate.
Obit watch: June 3, 2019.
Monday, June 3rd, 2019Leah Chase, New Orleans restaurateur.
I haven’t managed to eat at Dooky Chase yet, though I have heard of it (probably by way of Calvin Trillin). As much as I prefer to link to local obits, I like the way the NYT puts it:
…
Mrs. Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, always adhering to a code shaped in large part by her Catholic beliefs. She held up Gen. George S. Patton of World War II fame as a hero and was a fan of baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.
“I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve, but he doesn’t want us to strike out,” she said in a New York Times interview. “I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength, and you don’t cry about it, and you go on.”
…
I love this, too:
During that period, Mrs. Chase started catering the openings of fledgling artists so they could offer hospitality to people who had come to admire – and, perhaps, buy – their creations. She helped them pay their bills, and she hung their works in the restaurant.
This love of art, born when she studied art in high school, led to service on the boards of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Arts Council of New Orleans. Mrs. Chase also sat on the boards of the Louisiana Children’s Museum, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
…
Mrs. Chase regularly provided food for nonprofit organizations’ fundraisers and refused to submit bills, said Morial, the widow of one New Orleans mayor and the mother of another.
“She provided food for the Amistad Research Center and would not take money. That was her contribution,” said Morial, an Amistad board member. “We’d tell her this was a fundraiser. She said, ‘I know, and you need all the money you can raise.’”
My feelings about baseball are well known, but I thought this was an interesting obituary: Marc Okkonen.
Mr. Okkonen, a commercial artist and baseball aficionado with an appreciation for vintage apparel, spotted flaws in the purported uniforms of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs and wondered why they were not precise replicas of the originals from 1939, when the movie takes place. Given how thoroughly documented baseball’s history is, he thought, accurate details would not have been too difficult to uncover.
But, to Mr. Okkonen’s surprise, he could find no single volume containing images of historic uniforms, so he set out to fill that void. He spent the next five years poring through books, microfilms and archives, including those at the Library of Congress and the Baseball Hall of Fame, to find images of every home and road uniform worn by all major league teams, starting in 1900.
And then he wrote that book: Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century: The Official Major League Baseball Guide. This is the kind of obsessive historical study that I find admirable, in the same way that (for example) some people document the minute details of Smith and Wesson history…
(Eight days and a wake-up in country, and then I’m off to the S&WCA symposium.)
Roky Erickson, noted psychedelic musician with the 13th Floor Elevators. I wish I had more to say about this, but I pretty much missed the psychedelic era. Also, the treatment of Roky Erickson (and Daniel Johnston) locally seemed, to me, to be kind of “let’s point and laugh at the weirdo”. Not everyone was that way: I’m sure there were some people who were motivated by compassion and love of the music, but I felt like that was an undercurrent running through the scene. Perhaps some of my musician readers will have more to say on the subject.
(Edited to add 6/4: NYT obit for Mr. Erickson.)
Last and least: infamous heroin dealer Frank Lucas, whose life was adapted into “American Gangster”.