Somewhat to my chagrin, I have not been following the Suge Knight murder trial closely.
In fairness, though, the case has been going on for 3 1/2 years:
One man, Terry Carter, died. The second man, Cle “Bone” Sloan, was badly injured but lived.
The whole thing became a circus more or less behind my back:
…
Where is this going? Knight pled out to manslaughter yesterday:
Remember, the deadly weapon in this case was a Ford F-150. When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have pickup trucks.
Back in the day, when Argosy was publishing Erle Stanley Gardner the creator of Perry Mason’s “The Court of Last Resort” column, they noticed a sizeable circulation uptick. (According to Wikipedia, the magazine was “never terribly successful”, but they did get a “significant boost in sales”.)
These days, the “large mass market publication brings attention to a wrongful conviction and gets the guy off” story is so common as to almost not be news anymore. Texas Monthly has done this several times that I know of, the legendary Gene Miller won two Pulitzer Prizes for his stories at the Miami Herald, and given enough time I could probably come up with more examples than Carter had liver pills.
But this is an unusual first, as far as I know: guy has his conviction vacated after spending 27 years in prison (“the bulk of it in the infamous Attica Correctional Facility”) because of the work of a lot of people: the Erie County district attorney’s wrongful convictions unit, the Georgetown University Prison Reform Project, his daughter (who raised money for his legal fees by selling his color drawings of golf courses online), and the mass media…
Said it before, I’ll say it again: we need a new “Court of Last Resort” as a regular feature in some large circulation publication. And we need more public intellectuals like Erle Stanley Gardner, too.
(Edit: forgot to include hattips: Popehat on the Twitters, and Lawrence.)
…are not opening for KISS on the “End of the Road World Tour”.
But there is an update:
An anesthesiology professor at a top Hong Kong university was convicted on Wednesday of murdering his wife and daughter with a yoga ball filled with carbon monoxide, in a case that drew intense local interest for its bizarre details and unusual family dynamics.
The jury voted unanimously for convicting the professor, Dr. Khaw Kim-sun, after almost seven hours of deliberation.
The judge sentenced Dr. Kim-sun to life in prison.
Back in February, I touched on problems with the Llano Police Department. I had not seen an update on this until yesterday, when Reason‘s “Hit and Run” blog, of all places, ran a story covering the latest developments.
Summarizing:
Chief Kevin Ratliff is now ex-Chief Kevin Ratliff. He was fired July 26th…after being convicted of two counts of official oppression and one count of tampering with a governmental record.
These were all class A misdemeanors. I can’t tell if conviction on these charges requires Ratliff to surrender his peace officer’s license. It doesn’t look like the other indicted officers have gone to trial yet. (Former officer Harden is set for trial in October.)
But wait, there’s more! There was another incident that resulted in another Llano officer and a sheriff’s deputy also being indicted on official oppression charges!
Basically, the two officers responded to a domestic dispute. The male party wouldn’t open the door to the responding officers: so first they tried to pick the lock, then they kicked the door in.
“You’re going to jail,” Roberts told Holley as he stood over him. The officers held Holley in the back of a patrol unit for nearly an hour, then later took the handcuffs off and let him go.
Holley was never charged with a crime.
And apparently, there’s body camera footage of this whole affair as well.
When asked if there was a climate of corruption at the police department, [City Manager Scott] Edmonson said, “Uh, no.”
When asked if Edmonson could be certain of that given the city’s done nothing to investigate that angle, Edmonson replied, “Can we be sure of anything?”
Existential philosophy in Llano. Who’d thunk it?
The sheriff’s deputy is currently suspended:
The sheriff disciplined Roberts the Monday after the incident and stripped him of his police powers and put Roberts on paid administrative leave when the indictment came down. Blackburn didn’t allow Roberts to sit at home to earn his pay, he put his deputy to work in the county jail until the criminal charges are resolved.
“I think for the citizens of the county, if he’s going to be on paid leave, he should be working for it,” Blackburn said.
The Llano PD officer resigned.
Shot:
Chaser: what story is this related to?
Hong Kong Professor Faces Murder Trial in ‘Yoga Ball Killing’
“Yoga Ball Killing”? Yes: Dr. Khaw Kim-sun is accused of murdering his wife and 16 year old daughter using yoga balls filled with carbon monoxide.
…
Dr. Khaw, who has pleaded not guilty, had told the police that Lily [the 16-year-old daughter – DB] might have tried to kill herself with the yoga ball. Last week, the prosecutor, Andrew Bruce, said in court that was a “lame excuse” and “simply untrue.”
Prosecutors say that when Dr. Khaw drove the yoga balls home in his Toyota, he had used a monitor that would sound an alarm if the gas reached dangerous levels. They said Ms. Lee, his mistress, was an assistant in the rabbit experiment.
Look, I understand bringing your work home with you. But when your work is a yoga ball filled with carbon monoxide? Leave that (stuff) in the lab.
Spicy bar snack, by way of Mike the Musicologist:
I saw Carbon Monoxide Yoga Balls open for Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test at Altamont in ’67.
David Rothenberg died on July 15th at the age of 42. His death was not widely reported until late last week.
He worked as a visual artist under the name “Dave Dave” in Las Vegas:
Mr. Rothenberg became a close friend of Michael Jackson, who encouraged him to pursue a career in art. Through brightly colored 1960s-style Pop Art paintings and drawings, he sought to promote positivity, he wrote on his website, particularly through a series called “Lifted.”
“There is a lot that happens in people’s lives, but that doesn’t define them as a human being, it makes them stronger,” Mr. Rothenberg told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2016.
Here’s the rest of the story:
He was 6 in 1983 when his father gave him a sleeping pill in a motel room in Buena Park, Calif., near Disneyland, and then doused his bed with kerosene and set it on fire. The attack left burns on more than 90 percent of David’s body. His father, who was said to be in a bitter custody fight with his wife, Marie, then fled.
“He was working at a restaurant in New York, and he had saved $10,000 for this trip to California,” Mr. Rothenberg told The Review-Journal. “On the trip, he was planning to kill me.”
I swear that I’ve written about his father, Charles, previously, but I can’t find that blog entry now. Charles Rothenberg spent seven years in prison for attempted murder before being paroled. He went on to commit other crimes: I recall them being mostly financial. He’s currently serving a 25 to life sentence in California under the three strikes law.
For the historical record: Kofi Annan.
The cause was advanced pancreatic cancer, her publicist, Gwendolyn Quinn, said.
Also among the dead: Morgana King, who was somewhat famous as a jazz singer. She was better known, however, as Mama Corleone in the “Godfather” movies.
Herbert Sperling died in early July at a federal prison hospital near Boston. He’d been in prison since 1973.
He also had a reputation for violence.
In 1977, he was indicted on charges of hiring three fellow inmates at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta to murder Mr. [Vincent C.] Papa, whom he suspected of turning police informant. Mr. Sperling was acquitted in the conspiracy, but two other defendants were convicted of fatally stabbing Mr. Papa in the back and chest at least eight times in a prison courtyard.
Mr. Papa had been convicted of choreographing the audacious theft by rogue police officers of tens of millions of dollars worth of drugs from the New York Police Department’s evidence room in Lower Manhattan in the early 1970s and replacing it with bags of flour and cornstarch. The crimes kick-started a consequential corruption investigation of the police.
Much of the heroin had been seized in 1962 in the Bronx from the car in which it had been shipped from the French port city Marseille. The successful investigation in the case inspired the Oscar-winning 1971 movie “The French Connection.”
Mr. Sperling was also suspected in the death of Louis J. Mileto, whom police identified as a courier for the Sperling heroin ring. Mr. Mileto’s frozen, headless and limbless torso was found in 1972 in the trunk of a gutted car in the Hudson Valley. He was identified by his teeth, which were found in his stomach. Investigators said he had swallowed them during a vicious beating.
There’s your telling detail, right there.
Personally, I kind of hope Rep. Collins turns out to be innocent, and it was a dingo who gave the stock tips.
DEFCON 26 and Black Hat 2018 start up later this week. Again, I’m not going, but I do feel like I’m inching closer to making a return. Full-timers from my group have been sent to Black Hat in the past, so who knows what’s going to happen next year?
What would I do if I was there? A quick skim of the Black Hat briefings schedule doesn’t show a whole lot that really jumps out at me. I’d probably just be hitting targets of opportunity, with a few exceptions:
What about DEFCON 26? After the jump…
I’m sure we all remember the Fyre Festival, now a synonym for “legendary fiasco”.
Loyal readers of my blog, and perhaps others, may remember that one of the principals, William McFarland, pled guilty to wire fraud charges related to the festival.
You’re probably not going to believe this. I have trouble believing it myself. On Thursday, Mr. McFarland pled guilty to even more charges.
Astonishing part one: this had nothing to do with the Fyre Festival. From the Justice Department’s press release:
Astonishing part two: notice the dates? Yes! He was running this scam while under indictment for the Fyre Festival scam!
Max sentence, whale sushi, yadda yadda. But I would expect running a second scam while you’re under indictment for the first one to be what they call an “aggravating factor”, and I’d expect Mr. McFarland’s sentence to be on the high end of those ranges.
Of course, I Am Not a Lawyer, so take that with some salt.
Tony Sparano, offensive line coach for the Vikings and former head coach of the Dolphins and Raiders. StarTribune.
This is kind of a half-obit, but I want to bring it up here so I can call out a couple of things. Tess Henry was an opiate addict. Beth Macy, a writer for the NYT, covered her struggle to get off opiates using “medication-assisted treatment”. Sadly, that struggle ended last December: someone beat her head in and threw her in a dumpster.
This jumped out at me:
…
So, on the one hand, we have the addict’s mother, who not only knows her better than just about anyone else, but who is also a nurse who has treated addicts. On the other hand, we have…a NYT reporter.
This, too:
The day of her funeral in January, Dan Polster, a federal judge in Cleveland, was presiding over a hearing in the continuing mass litigation case against opioid makers, distributors and retailers. “About 150 Americans are going to die today, just today, while we’re meeting,” Judge Polster said.
Last month, a lawyer representing some of the plaintiffs in that case called me to discuss a potential settlement. She wanted my ideas about how to treat the more than two million opioid-addicted Americans.
Settlement for what? We’ve decided we’re going to demonize the drug companies for making effective painkillers available, and make it harder for people with real, chronic, crippling pain to get the drugs those companies make – drugs that can improve their quality of life – because we’re so damn concerned with what other people put into their bodies.
I’m not exactly “pro-heroin”. But if Tess Henry had been able to spend $20 a day on a couple of shots – shots of known dosage and purity – would she have been able to work? Hold down a job? Take care of her child? Would she have been any different than the person who comes home at night and drinks some Scotch over ice?
Would Tess Henry be alive today, if we weren’t so insistent on the “demon opiates” line of thinking?
“the Drug Company That Addicted America”. I think we know where she’s coming from.
Jonathan Gold, restaurant critic for the LA Times and Pulitzer Prize winner. NYT.
This hit me kind of hard, and I’m not exactly sure why. I don’t live in LA, I barely even consider California to be part of the United States these days, and the LAT website has become so obnoxious I rarely read it. At most, I was an intermittent follower of Gold’s.
I know obituaries generally concentrate on the positive about the subject – I’ve seen very few that say, “Christ, what an a–hole” – but the tributes to him make him sound like an incredibly kind and funny guy who loved food, and even more loved telling people about food.
…
…
He preferred to praise chefs rather than pan them. If Gold wrote about you, he generally liked your food. Earnest and slightly awkward in person, he would voice displeasure with a gentle rebuke instead of the gleeful excoriating that other critics tend to dabble in.
“He wasn’t looking down his nose at the world, he was looking out from the table and trying to put restaurants, meals and cuisines in context. Empathy, understanding, commensality: That’s what he brought to the game,” Meehan said. “Jonathan didn’t write restaurant reviews, he wrote about who we are and how we feed each other. He wasn’t just a better writer than the rest of us, he cared more, too.”
Also, he was only 57: pancreatic cancer got him so fast most people didn’t even know he was sick, according to the obits. I’ve linked to them before, but The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research still gets four stars from Charity Navigator.
Also among the dead: Shinobu Hashimoto, screenwriter perhaps most famous for his work with Akira Kurosawa (including “Rashomon”, “Ikiru”, and “Seven Samurai”.
Madeleine Kamman, noted French chef and author.
Last, least, and burning in Hell: Barry Mills, leader of the Aryan Brotherhood.
Dumb de dumb dumb…
The stories I am about to link to are true. I haven’t changed any names, because none of these people are innocent.
Dumb: threatening a judge.
Dumber: threatening two judges.
Dumbest: threatening two judges, one of whom was already shot and wounded by another idiot three years ago.
“I have every right to hang your (expletive),” Holgate said in a message according to the affidavit. “You have every goddamn right to be afraid of me. I am the law and you shouldn’t have crossed me.”
In another message, Holgate threatened to kill one of the judges, according to the document.
“I have the right to (expletive) kill you. You understand that?” He said. “…But we will see if we can resolve it. I don’t think we can, I think we are just going to hang your (expletive).”
And by the way…
Meanwhile, over in Williamson County, the relatively new sheriff and prolific tweeter Robert Chody is in a micturition contest with one of the county commissioners, Dan Gattis.
Sheriff Chody has opinions about how county government is run, especially when it comes to sewage leaks, and does not hesitate to share them. This, in turn, seems to upset Judge Gattis:
This little spat wouldn’t be noteworthy to me, except for what happened next:
Yes, you read that correctly: the WillCo DA filed criminal charges against a county commissioner (who, by the way, is not running for re-election this year) because he shot his mouth off.
Personally, I think they’re all idiots: the sheriff’s office and the DA for filing charges over a political disagreement, and Judge Gattis for making empty threats. (“I’m going zero his budget out”. Yeah, Judge, you’re going to zero out the sheriff’s department budget. Call me when the pigs start flying.)
I’m sorry.
More seriously, there seems to be a long recent string of judges deciding that they can just disregard the Supreme Court and order newspapers to do whatever the judge wants. Just once before I die, I would love to see an editor or publisher say to one of those judges:
“Your order is illegal and unconstitutional, and we believe that you are fully aware of these facts. We will not obey your order. We will also not initiate violence. But if this court attempts to enforce its illegal order, we will treat that as the initiation of violence against our staff, and we will defend ourselves with whatever level of force is necessary to stop said violent acts.”
Edited to add 7/16: Ken White over at Popehat:
Kicking, screaming, biting Kansas councilwoman finally taken down with Taser, arrested, police say
It’s not quite “You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena!” but it’s close enough for government work.
Bonus points:
A few days later, on July 2, Fowler refused to cooperate with jail workers as they tried to complete the booking process.
When officers were forced to remove jewelry and personal items from her, Fowler bit one of them on the thumb hard enough to break the bone.
The original charges against her were failure to appear on a public drunkeness and interferring with law enforcement charge from last year. Now she’s managed to escalate that into at least two, probably three counts of battery on a law enforcement officer. Plus interference with a law enforcement officer times two. Plus the drunkenness charge.
I wouldn’t expect her at a council meeting in the near or far future.