Archive for the ‘Law’ Category

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Dead lawyers don’t lie.

Friday, July 12th, 2013

Sergei L. Magnitsky was convicted yesterday of tax evasion by a Russian court. Mr. Magnitsky was a lawyer: his client, William F. Browder, was convicted as well.

This isn’t ordinarily the sort of thing I’d bring up, but there are a couple of interesting points:

  • Mr. Magnitsky was a prominent critic of the Russian government, and was arrested shortly after he accused officials of stealing $230 million in government funds.
  • Both Mr. Magnitsky and Mr. Browder were convicted in absentia. Mr. Browder is currently in London.
  • Mr. Magnitsky was convicted in absentia because he’s dead. He died four years ago in prison, after being refused medical care.

(Subject line hattip. My linking to this should not be taken as implying any endorsement of the content.)

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: July 5, 2013.

Friday, July 5th, 2013

Everton Wagstaffe and Reginald Connor are serving time for the kidnapping and murder of Jennifer Negron. Ms. Negron was 16 years old when she was murdered.

Both Mr. Wagstaffe and Mr. Connor have maintained their innocence and, after years of fighting, were able to arrange DNA testing of every piece of physical evidence that could be found; none of it implicated them, and the DNA in hair found on the victim’s body came from at least one other person.

The main witness against the two men was a crack addicted prostitute who was “forcibly detained by the authorities in a hotel until she testified”.

In the case of Mr. Wagstaffe and Mr. Connor, no records were kept of police interviews with other important witnesses; there was no physical evidence to support the informant’s claims; one witness, a police detective’s daughter, who could provide a seemingly credible alibi for Mr. Wagstaffe, was never interviewed by police, prosecutors or defense lawyers; the owner of a car supposedly used in the kidnapping said she told detectives that she had it with her at church through the night of Ms. Negron’s death. There is no record of any interview of her, either, even though the car was cited as important evidence.

Is this our old friend Louis Scarcella? Is the Brooklyn DA reinvestigating this case?

No. And no.

The investigation into the death of Ms. Negron was led by a detective from a different squad, Michael Race of the 75th Precinct. His work with another informant led to the conviction of at least three innocent people.
Of 750 murder investigations that he ran, Mr. Race has said, only one was “done the correct way, A to Z.”

One. Out of 750. And three wrongful convictions.

Aye aye mateys, oh, come on the Pirate Radio
Land of the free and home of the brave
FCC crawl in your grave!

(Explained.)

Directors of Meade Instruments Corp., which has helped foster the consumer market with its easy-to-use telescopes and binoculars since 1972, may be tipping their hand by Monday on whether to recommend selling the company, plow ahead alone or possibly seek bankruptcy protection.

This sucks. I’ve wanted a good telescope for much of my life, even though I find it hard to use one with glasses and I really am not able to stay up late in order to do observational astronomy. Still, I’m sad to see the market shrinking, even though the technology gets better and better.

Verizon has a great idea for Fire Island. As you might have guessed, the island got the crap beat out of it by Sandy, and the phone system was devastated.

Verizon, the only phone company in town, wants most of the island and its 500 homes to go all-wireless, ending for good its century-old copper wire phone network. That means phone lines buried underground or strung between poles and then stretched into homes will go out of service and be replaced by an experimental wireless service that sends calls between cell towers and home receivers.

Sounds great, right?

Without phone lines, consumers don’t have the option of DSL Internet. Gone are faxes. Heart monitors that connect over phone lines to hospitals don’t work over wireless, either. And small businesses can’t process credit cards or operate cash machines without buying entirely new payment systems, as Verizon notes in its New York public filing.

Not mentioned in the article: Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) over copper works when the power is out. Will Verizon’s wireless system? The cell towers may have battery backup or generators, but do the home receivers?

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Geek, Law, Radio | 2 Comments »

Random notes: July 4, 2013.

Thursday, July 4th, 2013

There’s an interesting article (tied to the Arizona tragedy) in today’s LAT, about the problems of investigating these incidents.

Some of them are probably obvious: these things generally happen in remote areas, and fire destroys a lot of evidence. But the main thrust of the LAT article is that a deep distrust has developed between firefighters and investigators since 2001. That year, four firefighters died in the Thirty Mile fire. The Forest Service did an investigation, and determined that there were a lot of issues with the way the fire was fought; from my reading, some of those issues were just bad luck and equipment failures, but there were also some procedural issues:

Standard safety procedures were violated. Risks were not appropriately assessed. Rest rules were disregarded.

What happened next is that one of the crew bosses was charged with manslaughter, based on that report. (The boss pled guilty to “making false statements” and served 90 days on work release.)

When federal investigators later showed up in California to look into the 2006 Esperanza fire, near Cabazon, firefighters refused to talk to investigators without union officials present, and some sought advice of lawyers.
Firefighters across the country began seeking legal counsel instead of participating in investigations into fatalities, according to congressional testimony in 2007 from Mark Rey, then an undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture who oversaw the Forest Service.
“Many of our firefighters do not want to speak freely,” he said at the time. They were also opting not to take supervisory jobs for fear of being held liable, he said.
Chockie is not surprised. “When I saw what followed after our report, I can understand why people might be much more hesitant or cautious now,” he said. “What they told us came back to them in unexpected ways.”

Safety procedures exist for reasons. And it is hard to say that people shouldn’t be held accountable. On the other hand, there’s also a very strong “do whatever it takes to fight the fire” attitude among firefighters, even if that means sometimes disregarding rest and safety rules. (And what are you going to do if it is rest time, there’s no relief, and the fire is still burning out of control? “Sorry, can’t fight that fire. On my coffee break.”) The other thing to realize is that wildfires are very volatile and chaotic situations; things can change literally in seconds. Is it fair or right to pass judgements in hindsight on the people who were there on the ground fighting the fire?

Obit watch: noted computer scientist and inventor of the mouse, Douglas Engelbart. LAT. NYT.

You, too, can have a Tony award. If you’re a “major investor” in a Tony-winning production. And you have $2,500.

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Law, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Christmas in June!

Friday, June 28th, 2013

The temperature here in Austin is projected to hit 106 today. We’re not even into July yet.

What better time than now to think about Christmas?

The former president of a troubled Austin non-profit, already in jail on drug charges, has been indicted for theft from the charity he helped run. Six months after being arrested during a traffic stop, Shon Washington has been indicted for theft from a nonprofit, a second degree felony, and false statement to obtain credit, a state jail felony.

(Previously. Previously.)

Posted in Christmas, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

I have no joke here. I just want to say…

Wednesday, June 26th, 2013

Police Spokesman Anthony Guglielmi has been abruptly transferred to a new job in the department’s Community Partnership Office, effective immediately, so the department can refocus its “message,” Batts said in a news conference at City Hall.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: June 26, 2013.

Wednesday, June 26th, 2013

Richard Matheson obits: NYT. Lawrence. LAT.

Please refrain from tasting the knob.

(Note that the musical in question, “Somewhere in Time” is based on the movie, which in turn was based on a novel, “Bid Time Return”, by Richard Matheson. I’m not linking to Amazon, but you should be able to find the novel easily: the cheaper editions are listed under “Somewhere in Time”, and the editions carrying the original title are pricy.)

You know what NYC needs? Strict pen control. And perhaps strict costume control, too.

Busking being serious business in Midtown, long-simmering tensions between the box man and one of his rivals erupted into violence on Friday night, when the box man was said to have stabbed a competing panhandler, Wayne Semancik, five times in the head and chest with a pen.

More:

…a photograph in The Daily News showed the police interviewing Alien and Predator as witnesses after the episode.

(Hotlinked: click on the photo to read the Daily News article.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Law, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Random notes: June 25, 2013.

Tuesday, June 25th, 2013

The NYT, LAT, and WP have not yet published obits for Richard Matheson. However, the A/V Club has a very nice tribute.

I feel kind of blocked when it comes to paying tribute to Mr. Matheson. The one thing I can say is: whenever I was trying to think of “who wrote this story?” – the box with the button, the family fleeing their home planet, the girl who falls into the fourth dimension – at least seven times out of every ten, the story I was trying to think of was written by Richard Matheson. It is impossible to overstate the depth of his influence on the genre.

In other news, I’m sure some of my readers remember the 2003 documentary Capturing the Friedmans about the child abuse convictions of Arnold and Jesse Friedman. Since the documentary was released, there’s been a lot of back and forth about the guilt or innocence of the Friedmans, leading up to an investigation by the Nassau County district attorney.

…it concluded, “By any impartial analysis, the reinvestigation process prompted by Jesse Friedman, his advocates and the Second Circuit, has only increased confidence in the integrity of Jesse Friedman’s guilty plea and adjudication as a sex offender.”

More, and I apologize for the length of this quote:

The report centered on four points raised in the film and by the appeals court: that the case may have been tainted by repeated police interviews that pushed children toward confessions; that children may have been hypnotized to recover memories not based on fact; that the case was distorted by a “moral panic” that created false accusations and a predisposition toward conviction; and that Jesse Friedman’s guilty plea may have been unlawfully coerced by the police, prosecutors and a hostile judge.

The review rejected them all. It said that though some interviews late in the case may have been flawed, the rapid pace and early flow of accusations from children in the classes indicated that the allegations arose from spontaneous accounts, not from investigators pushing children toward accusations. It said the first child interviewed reported improper behavior, 12 children leveled accusations of illegal sexual behavior at Arnold Friedman in the investigation’s first two weeks and, five weeks into the investigation, 13 boys described criminal behavior by Jesse Friedman.

It said, that despite one student’s account in “Capturing the Friedmans” of making allegations after being hypnotized, any use of group therapy or hypnosis came after all the indictments were filed. It disputed the one account of hypnosis in the film.

Additionally, the report points out that Jessie Friedman had “competent legal representation, weighed his options intelligently and pleaded guilty after determining it was ‘the optimal strategy’ in light of the available choices.”

Mr. Friedman’s lawyer, Ron Kuby, and the film’s director, Andrew Jarecki, reacted with disappointment and anger, saying the report was a biased whitewash by the office that originally botched the case.

About that: the investigation was overseen by a “four-member independent advisory panel” that included Barry Scheck of Innocence Project fame.

The report was prefaced by a four-page statement by the panel. It said its job was about process more than findings. It did not reinvestigate the case itself, and it was not given access to key documents like grand jury records and interview reports.

Still, it commended the investigation, and said that if the evidence had pointed toward exoneration, “we have no doubt the Review Team was prepared to recommend without reservation that Friedman’s conviction be overturned.”

The statement, signed by all four members, said it was not the role of the panel to make an ultimate judgment about Jesse Friedman’s guilt, but added: “We do have an obligation to express a view as to whether we believe the conclusions expressed in the Review Team’s report are reasonable and supported by the evidence it cites. We think they are.”

Posted in Books, Clippings, Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Another Ranger.

Thursday, June 20th, 2013

This is the “front” side of the Armstrong family monument in Oakwood Cemetery.

armstrong1

This is the John B. Armstrong side:

armstrong2

Who was John B. Armstrong, other than a Texas Ranger? A serious badass, most famous for capturing John Wesley Hardin. Armstrong had been shot in the leg previously (according to his entry in the Handbook of Texas Online, it was a self-inflicted wound), and was using a cane:

When the train carrying Hardin came into the station, Armstrong entered the front of the coach. Switching his cane to his left hand, he drew his Colt .45 with his right and confronted Hardin and four members of his gang. One of the men drew and shot at Armstrong who returned the fire killing the man. Hardin’s gun had hung up on his suspenders allowing the Ranger time to hit Hardin over the head, knocking him unconscious. He unarmed the other three men.

(Some accounts say the bullet fired by Hardin’s man went through Armstrong’s favorite hat, seriously pissing him off, and that Armstrong’s blow knocked Hardin unconscious for two hours. These accounts are not well sourced, so I would take them with a grain of salt.)

Armstrong was also involved in the capture of Sam Bass, which is probably worthy of another post and some more photos next time I’m out near Round Rock.

Armstrong’s Texas Ranger Hall of Fame page. Armstrong on the “Badass of the Week” site (a little overwrought, but entertaining). Handbook of Texas online.

Posted in Cops, History, Law, Photography, Texas Rangers | Comments Closed

Another Ranger.

Wednesday, June 19th, 2013

haley

Oakwood Cemetery, Austin, Texas.

Information about George Wesley Haley is hard to find online. If I dig up anything else, I’ll do an updated post.

Edited to add: here’s a second photo that I think I like just a bit better. Both of these were taken with the Nikon and 18-55 lens, but the second one used aperture priority instead of the auto setting.

haley2

Posted in Cops, Law, Photography, Texas Rangers | Comments Closed

Random notes: June 18, 2013.

Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

I was all set to snark on this NYT headline:

For Its Latest Beer, a Craft Brewer Chooses an Unlikely Pairing: Archaeology

After all, craft brewers going back and doing beer anthropology isn’t exactly a new thing.

However, the paper of record gets a pass from me, because the brewer in question is Great Lakes Brewing Company, a personal favorite of mine.

Enlisting the help of archaeologists at the University of Chicago, the company has been trying for more than year to replicate a 5,000-year-old Sumerian beer using only clay vessels and a wooden spoon.

Sam Kellner believed his son had been sexually abused by a Hasidic cantor. Mr. Kellner lobbied the Brooklyn DA to prosecute the cantor. As a result, he was shunned by his synagogue and other members of the Hasidic community.

In April 2011, after the district attorney’s office gained a conviction against that cantor, Baruch Lebovits, the prosecutors turned around and obtained an indictment of Mr. Kellner. They said, based on a secret tape and the grand jury testimony of a prominent Satmar supporter of Mr. Lebovits, that he had tried to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mr. Lebovits.

The conviction of Mr. Lebovits was reversed:

Even today, Alan M. Dershowitz, one of Mr. Lebovits’s lawyers, portrays Mr. Kellner and other prominent whistle-blowers as extortionists. “We see Kellner as a leader of a major extortion ring,” he said in an interview. “He is not a do-gooder.”

On the other hand:

Two weeks ago, I talked with the three-member rabbinical court — known as a Beit Din — in Monsey. These rabbis rarely grant interviews, but spoke now of their moral obligation. Their community for too long has resisted coming to grips with sexual abuse.

They view Mr. Kellner as a brave pioneer. He did not seek out witnesses at random; rather their court, with the help of local leaders in Williamsburg, gave him the name of a victim.

“Lebovits is known to have a long history” of sexual abuse, Rabbi Chaim Flohr said. But Mr. Lebovits has powerful supporters, and people are fearful, he added.

The NYT spin on this is that Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn DA, gets a lot of political support from the Hasidic community, and is therefore very deferential to their wishes. But if he is so deferential, why did his office bring the case in the first place? It seems like he could easily have ducked the prosecution by claiming the evidence was insufficient or some other issue. The NYT‘s timeline is a little fuzzy, but I’m picking up at least an implication that Hynes’s office had the tape in their possession at the time of the Lebovits trial.

(Also, if you go back to the NYT article on the reversal of the Lebovits conviction, the extortion plot is mentioned in passing by Dershowitz. But the actual reason given by the appeals court for overturning the conviction is not the alleged extortion plot, but a failure by the prosecution to turn over evidence to the defense in a timely fashion.)

Posted in Clippings, History, Law, Mixology | 1 Comment »

Random notes: June 17, 2013.

Monday, June 17th, 2013

NYT obit for the late Harold J. Cromer, also known as “Stumpy”, “half of the vaudevillian duo Stump and Stumpy”.

Recently, a bunch of gas stations in my area rebranded their associated convenience stores/markets as 7-11 franchises. I kind of liked this, as it is nice to be able to stop off and get gas and a Slurpee when it is 101 degrees outside. (Many of the stand-alone 7-11 stores in my area have closed over the past few years.)

But they just can’t stay out of trouble, can they?

Federal authorities seized 14 7-Eleven stores on Long Island and in Virginia early Monday, arresting nine owners and managers and charging them with harboring and hiring illegal immigrants and paying them using sham Social Security numbers, people briefed on the case said.

More:

The store remained closed through the early morning, with law enforcement agents turning away customers who ordinarily stop in for coffee. A worker for the Town of Islip said he had seen similar law enforcement activity at several other nearby 7-Elevens.

I wonder what the cops were drinking, and where they were getting it from. I also wonder if anyone is keeping track of the doughnut inventory at the seized stores.

Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (another book I enthusiastically recommend) has an interesting piece in Wired about why ethylene glycol is such a swell poison. (Pure ethylene glycol is colorless, odorless, and sweet tasting. I hope that I never tick off someone to the point that they’re willing to poison me, because if they put ethylene glycol in my iced tea, I wouldn’t be able to tell.)

(Blum’s piece is tied to the M.D. Anderson poisoning scandal, which I thought about mentioning last week. But there really wasn’t a lot I could say about it; as Blum notes, ethylene glycol isn’t a particularly exotic poison, and the incident itself seems to be your basic boring lover’s spat.)

(Edited to add: Oh, so that’s where I found the Blum piece! Thanks, Tam! And I wasn’t aware Blum was writing regularly for Wired: I’d read some of her articles in Slate, but none since I gave up on Slate as a site publishing outlandish and ridiculous crap in an attempt to get page views.)

Posted in Clippings, Geek, History, Law, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

One Ranger.

Monday, June 17th, 2013

hamer_1

Grave of Frank Hamer, Austin Memorial Park Cemetery, Austin, Texas.

For those of you unfamiliar with the late Mr. Hamer, obviously he was a Texas Ranger, and perhaps one of the most famous of the Rangers. Among other things, Mr. Hamer led the posse that took down Bonnie and Clyde.

American Rifleman profile of Mr. Hamer. Jeff Guinn’s Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, which I have previously recommended, also has considerable background on Hamer. Hamer’s Wikipedia entry.

Here’s a second picture that I actually like a little better than the first. It was taken with a different camera (the first one was taken with my Nikon D40X and the 18-55 kit lens). Note that I haven’t done anything to these two photos except crop them: I haven’t manipulated exposure, contrast, or anything else.

hamer_2

Posted in Books, Cops, Law, Photography, Texas Rangers | Comments Closed

Random notes: June 15, 2013.

Saturday, June 15th, 2013

NYT headline:

Minnesota Man, 94, Is Investigated for Nazi Ties

I think, with Father’s Day approaching, this is an important safety tip for everyone. A tie may be a good gift for Dad, if he has to wear ties and if you put some thought into it. However, I’d recommend staying away from ties with Nazi iconography, just as a general rule.

When two student journalists from Paw Prints, the newspaper of West Islip High School, set out to investigate school security, they thought they might do some good, maybe win the award for story of the year in the Long Island Press high school journalism contest. Instead, the article was quashed, and they wound up with a grown-up lesson in the consequences of testing nerves in a post-Newtown-massacre world.

Randal Schwartz, call your office please.

(That was perhaps my only disappointment at YAPC. As I noted, I did get to shake Larry Wall’s hand, but I never saw Randal Schwartz; I’m not even sure if he was there.)

There’s a protest singer singing a protest song.

Another NYT headline:

A Precarious Olympic Bid for Istanbul

Not Constantinople?

(Technically, I suppose that’s nobody’s business but the Turks. And, I guess, the IOC.)

Posted in Clippings, Law, Music, Nazis, Perl, Programming Languages, Safety | 2 Comments »

Annals of law (#7 in a series).

Friday, June 14th, 2013

It is a well known fact (at least among those interested in copyright, those obsessed with trivia, and those who wonder why restaurants make up their own birthday songs) that “Happy Birthday to You” is under copyright until 2030 in the United States (and 2016 in the EU).

But there is a significant dispute over whether this copyright is valid. Jennifer Nelson, a filmmaker working on a documentary about the song, has filed a lawsuit seeking to have the song declared to be in the public domain.

The rich history of the song’s evolution and the conclusion that it might be in the public domain closely tracks the findings of Robert Brauneis, a professor at the George Washington University Law School and the author of a 68-page article titled “Copyright and the World’s Most Popular Song.”
In the study, Professor Brauneis said that “it is doubtful that ‘Happy Birthday to You,’ the famous offspring of ‘Good Morning to All,’ is really still under copyright.

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: June 13, 2013.

Thursday, June 13th, 2013

Gun control works! How can a bunch of people with rifles and handguns defeat a heavily armed military? Just ask Syria!

Across northern Syria, rebel workshops like these are part of a clandestine network of primitive arms-making plants, a signature element of a militarily lopsided war.
Their products — machine-gun mounts, hand grenades, rockets, mortar shells, roadside bombs and the locally brewed explosives that are packed inside — help form the arsenal of a guerrilla force that has suffered serious setbacks this year in its effort to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

More on our pal Louis Scarcella, the former NYPD detective whose cases are being reinvestigated: gee, there’s awfully similar language in many of the confessions he obtained.

In at least four more murder cases, suspects questioned by Mr. Scarcella began their confessions with either “you got it right” or “I was there.”

NYT obit for Iain Banks.

Noted without comment:

“Ann,” Holland Taylor’s solo show about the former Texas governor Ann Richards, will close on June 30 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, two months before its scheduled closing date of Sept. 1, the show’s producers announced on Wednesday. Directed by Benjamin Endsley Klein, “Ann” opened on Broadway in March to mostly positive reviews and was extended once. But weekly grosses never surpassed $400,000, and in recent weeks it has never played to more than 50 percent of its capacity at the Beaumont.

Since Lawrence and I have both touched on this story, I thought I’d link to the followup: the “psychic” who claimed there was a mass grave in Liberty County has been ordered to pay $6.8 million in damages to the property owners. If I understand the HouChron correctly, this was a default judgment, as the psychic didn’t appear in court. (Insert your favorite psychic joke here.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Cops, Guns, Law, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

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