Archive for the ‘Law’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Random notes: September 21, 2012.

Friday, September 21st, 2012

Somewhere, deep within the Bronx, is a horse stable. Back in the old days (some twenty years ago) people went to the stable and rented horses for rides on a trail that runs past Pelham Parkway.

The stable has been condemned by the building department, and the owners of the property haven’t paid taxes since 2007. But just because the stable is condemned doesn’t mean there’s nothing left inside.

What remains? A horse, of course. A horse named Rusty that the residents are trying to “save”.

Rusty is a mystery to even those who want nothing more than to save it. The residents and animal activists at the rally did not know its age, whether it was male or female, or how it came to be living in the stable, which has no posted name but was once known as Bronxbuster.

Noted here for family reasons: Texas Tech men’s basketball coach Billy Gillispie resigned yesterday. Gillispie had coached the team for one year.

This doesn’t sound like a firing: Gillispie states he resigned for “health reasons”. However, the university was investigating “allegations of player mistreatment” (Mike Leach, call your office, please), and Gillispie’s performance last season was disappointing, to put it mildly.

(I apologize for linking to the Statesman, but the Lubbock newspaper’s site isn’t working for me this morning. Here’s the HouChron story, which is a little longer.)

(Edited to add: Slightly different story, also from the HouChron.)

(Edited to add 2: I couldn’t pull it up at work – I kept getting errors from a proxy, and I don’t think it was ours – but now that I’m home, here’s the Lubbock paper’s coverage.)

Randy Adams had a hearing before a panel of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System yesterday. Mr. Adams is appealing the decision by the system not to include his one year as police chief of Bell in calculating his pension. (Previously.) If Mr. Adams wins his appeal, he’ll get a pension of $510,000 a year, “making him the second-highest-paid public pensioner in California” according to the LAT.

So how did the hearing go?

He was asked if he was Bell’s former police chief.
“Yes,” he replied.
Did he send an email to a Bell city official saying, “I am looking forward to seeing you and taking all of Bell’s money?!”
“On the advice of counsel I am going to exercise my right to remain silent,” he replied.
For the next 14 minutes, the man who had been a lawman for nearly 40 years, a police chief in three cities, exercised his constitutional right against self-incrimination over and over, refusing to answer most questions.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’m not sure I understand California law. Does the Fifth Amendment apply in an administrative proceeding? Or is Mr. Adams taking the Fifth because he’s concerned that evidence presented in the administrative proceeding could be used against him in a criminal case? (Remember, Mr. Adams has not been charged with any crimes. Yet.)

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Horses, Law, Sports | 1 Comment »

Deja vu all over again.

Thursday, September 20th, 2012

Someone is allegedly paying Monica Lewinsky $12 million for her memoir, which allegedly contains “more salacious details about Lewinsky and Clinton, ostensible complaints by Clinton about his wife, Hillary, and Lewinsky’s love letters to Clinton, previously unpublished”.

Kato Kaelin says O.J. is guilty.

The clock on my computer says it is September 20, 2012, not 1994. If it is 1994, does that mean I have to give back my diploma? And my Intel-based MacBook?

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Some random stuff for the morning of September 20, 2012.

Thursday, September 20th, 2012

There hasn’t been much in the news the past couple of days, and I’ve been depressed and upset for various reasons that the readers of this blog won’t care about.

I don’t have a lot to say about the DOJ report on “Fast and Furious”. I haven’t had time to go through the report myself, and I’m expecting that a lot of people who are smarter than I am will have smarter things to say than I do, once they’ve had a chance to go through it.

The Astros have crossed the 100 loss barrier, and are still on track for 110 losses. Woot.

Today’s NYT has two articles I found kind of interesting. One is about problems with the United Network for Organ Sharing and kidney allocation:

…many experts agree that a significant number of discarded kidneys — perhaps even half, some believe — could be transplanted if the system for allocating them better matched the right organ to the right recipient in the right amount of time.

Story number two is about the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation in North Dakota:

The man who plays Santa Claus here is a registered child sex offender and a convicted rapist. One of the brothers of the tribal chairman raped a child, and a second brother sexually abused a 12-year-old girl. They are among a number of men convicted of sex crimes against children on this remote home of the Spirit Lake Sioux tribe, which has among the highest proportion of sex offenders in the country.

And:

Federal agencies, however, have sought to minimize the extent of the problem, including disciplining employees who have spoken publicly about sexual abuse and questioning the competence of others, according to federal and tribal officials.

And the mayor of Central Falls, Rhode Island, resigned yesterday. He’s also agreed to plead guilty on federal charges that “he took illegal gratuities from a friend and political supporter who received lucrative work from the city boarding up abandoned buildings”.

Some homes were boarded up even though people were still living there. Others were re-boarded by Bouthillette at Moreau’s direction, even though the owners had already had their own contractors board the building.

“Some homes were boarded up even though people were still living there.” In completely unrelated news: gee, I really miss Buddy Cianci.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law, Loser, Rhode Island, Sports | Comments Closed

I’m not snickering. I’m experiencing schadenfreude.

Wednesday, September 19th, 2012

I would have sworn I had written about the Virginia Samuelson murder case last year, but I can’t find it. Maybe I sent it to Weer’d Beard for the “Gun Death” files instead.

Short version: Shaun Samuelson got into an argument with his mother, Virginia, and hit her several times. EMS was called, and while Mrs. Samuelson was on a stretcher, being loaded into the ambulance, Mr. Samuelson drove his pickup into the group (including Mrs. Samuelson, the EMTs, and an APD officer) killing her. (APD and the EMTs apparently ducked out of the way and avoided serious injury.)

The jury in Mr. Samuelson’s trial took 30 minutes to return a “guilty” verdict on capital murder charges.

Mr. Samuelson will serve a life sentence, as the prosecution did not seek the death penalty.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Schadenfreude | Comments Closed

TMQ watch: September 18, 2012.

Tuesday, September 18th, 2012

The time has come for TMQ to go after…well, not exactly a gnat, maybe an amoeba…with a sledgehammer.

Actually, we were thinking of something different, but we’ll take that one and run with it after the jump…

(more…)

Posted in Cops, Law, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch, TV | Comments Closed

Hillsborough.

Thursday, September 13th, 2012

This was covered some on FARK yesterday, but I kind of feel like it is important enough to mention here.

On April 15, 1989, at the Hillsborough Stadium (located in Sheffield), 96 people were crushed to death. The initial inquiry on the deaths basically blamed the fans for what happened; that was a controversial verdict.

The British government agreed to a new inquiry in December of 2009. The results of that inquiry were issued yesterday.

Prime Minister David Cameron formally apologized on Wednesday to the victims’ families, saying their “appalling deaths” were compounded by an attempt by the police, investigators and the news media to depict the victims as hooligans and to blame them for the disaster.

More:

Quoting from the new report, Mr. Cameron said: “The Liverpool fans were not the cause of the disaster. The panel has quite simply found no evidence in support of allegations of exceptional levels of drunkenness, ticketlessness or violence among Liverpool fans, no evidence that fans had conspired to arrive late at the stadium, and no evidence that they stole from the dead and dying.”

And further:

The report also concluded that 116 witness statements presented by the police to previous inquiries had been amended by the police “to remove or alter comments unfavorable to the police,” and that police officers conducted computer checks on those who had died in an attempt “to impugn the reputations of the deceased.” In addition, the report said the coroner measured blood-alcohol levels in all who died, including children, only to discover — a fact withheld from previous inquiries — that the levels of alcohol consumption were “unremarkable and not exceptional for a social or leisure occasion.”

Additionally, the report suggests that at least some of the people who died may have lived, if they had been given prompt medical treatment:

The report said autopsy findings showed there were 41 victims who did not have the traumatic asphyxia that caused most of the deaths, and Dr. Bill Kirkup, a physician on the panel, said they might have survived if they been taken swiftly to a hospital.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, History, Law, Safety, Sports | Comments Closed

Good taste: you can’t afford it.

Thursday, September 13th, 2012

Ramiro Pozos Gonzalez, a “founding member” of the La Resistencia drug gang, has been captured.

Ordinarily, I don’t note the capture of every cartel member that comes down the pike. But the HouChron article includes a charming photograph of Mr. Gonzalez’s gold-plated “AK-47”, which was also captured with him.

I can sort of, vaguely, understand plating the gun. But the magazines? That’s just a waste of money. Magazines are disposable items. You should be prepared to trash them if they don’t feed; gold-plating them just makes the decision that much more difficult.

(Previously.)

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law | 2 Comments »

Random notes: September 12, 2012.

Wednesday, September 12th, 2012

Amy Bishop took a plea. She’s going away forever. Good.

Speaking of plea deals, one of the suspects in the Austin nightclub case has also pled out to charges of selling and distributing cocaine. He’ll do 46 months in prison, and three years of “supervised release”. The cases against the other suspects are proceeding, but it looks like at least one of them is on the run.

Obit watch: Dr. Thomas Szasz, noted critic of psychiatry.

This is interesting to me on a personal level: there’s a shopping center at the corner of North Lamar and 38th Street that has what is easily one of the Top Ten worst parking lots in Austin. The tenants in that center have been told that they need to move out: apparently, someone plans to demolish that center for new development.

The other thing that makes this interesting to me (besides the loss of the horrible parking lot) is that one of the anchor tenants is Precision Camera, a regular stop for me on Saturday and (as far as I know) the only real camera store in Austin. Even better, they’re moving to a location at Burnet and Anderson, almost within walking distance of my apartment.

[Jerry] Sullivan [owner of Precision] has twice expanded his Precision Camera store, but he said there’s still not enough room. The new location will be larger — about 20,000 square feet compared with the current 13,000 square feet — and will feature more products and services. There will also be more parking for customers, he said.
“The sales floor over there will be two — almost two and a half — times bigger,” he said. “We need the space. Right now, we’re crammed in here sideways.”

Preach it, brother! I’m excited about this move, in case you couldn’t tell.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

The Indian of the group.

Tuesday, September 11th, 2012

The Colorado Supreme Court has upheld lower court decisions, and has refused to reinstate Ward Churchill as a professor at the University of Colorado.

“The Colorado State Supreme Court spends 55 pages saying the regents are above the law,” said David A. Lane, Mr. Churchill’s lawyer. “Regents at universities all over the country should feel emboldened to feel free to violate the First Amendment any time they want, as long as there is some sham due process that is given before they do it.”

Bitter much?

More from the Denver Post. Churchill background here.

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

“I like to do it like the Boss Tweed way.”

Monday, September 10th, 2012

I’m sure it comes as no great shock to anybody that California isn’t the only place in the country where corruption runs rampant.

The mayor of Trenton, New Jersey, Tony Mack, has been arrested on charges of “conspiring to obstruct, delay and affect interstate commerce by extortion under color of official right”.

Also arrested were the mayor’s brother, Ralphiel, and Joseph Giorgianni, described as a “sandwich shop owner” and “convicted sex offender”.

U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said at a news conference Monday that the city-owned land for the garage was assessed at $271,000. He said Mack and Giorgianni agreed to accept $100,000 for the land for the city coffers — as long as the purported developers paid a bribe of $100,000 to be split between the two alleged conspirators.

It appears that Giorgianni was the bagman for the mayor, and that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. The “Boss Tweed” line above is a direct quote from Giorgianni. Other great quotes:

Giorgianni complained at one point that Mack, 46, could not take bribes because he was being watched so closely, the documents said. “It’s sickening,” he told one of the informants, according to the court papers.

More:

He was also caught on tape telling one of the informants: “One thing about the Mack administration — when I say that, it’s me and Mack — we’re not greedy. We’re corruptible. We want anybody to make a buck,” and “I’m there to buffer the thing where, you know, take the weight … going to jail’s my business. It ain’t his.”

“We’re not greedy. We’re corruptible.” That’s got to be a quote of the year right there.

One piece of evidence they offer is that Giorgianni referred to money by code — calling it “Uncle Remus” — when he spoke with Mack, and that Mack seemed to know what he was saying.

And by way of the awesome Jay G., we learn that the not greedy, but corruptible, Mayor Mack was also a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. So he’s for gun control, but apparently had no problem with Giorgianni, who…

…went to prison in the 1980s on charges of carnally abusing and debauching the morals of a 14-year-old girl in the back of his shop.
The case gained notoriety because of weight-related health problems that got Giorgianni, a steakhouse owner who once claimed to tip the scale at over 500 pounds, released and led a prosecutor to charge he “ate his way out of jail.”

(Giorgianni and some other folks (not including the mayor and his brother) are also charged with selling oxycodone, and Giorgianni is also being charged with “weapon possession by a convicted felon”, speaking of illegal guns.)

(I’m linking to the WP rather than the Trenton papers, because I looked at the two Trenton newspaper sites that came up in Google, and their coverage wasn’t good.)

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law | Comments Closed

This is for Andrew.

Sunday, September 9th, 2012

An article from this week’s NYT Magazine:

How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

Unfortunately, the article isn’t about couches with knife-like edges on the underside, but rather about the alleged dangers of flame retardant chemicals used in couch foam.

Since 1975, an obscure California agency called the Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation has mandated that the foam inside upholstered furniture be able to withstand exposure to a small flame, like a candle or cigarette lighter, for 12 seconds without igniting. Because foam is highly flammable, the bureau’s regulation, Technical Bulletin 117, can be met only by adding large quantities of chemical flame retardants — usually about 5 to 10 percent of the weight of the foam — at the point of manufacture. The state’s size makes it impractical for furniture makers to keep separate inventories for different markets, so about 80 percent of the home furniture and most of the upholstered office furniture sold in the United States complies with California’s regulation.

The big problems are:

  • These chemicals apparently don’t stay bound to the foam, but migrate into the environment.
  • These chemicals allegedly have negative side effects on human health.
  • And these fire retardants may not be doing a damn bit of good in any case.

In Babrauskas’s view, TB 117 is ineffective in preventing fires. The problem, he argues, is that the standard is based on applying a small flame to a bare piece of foam — a situation unlikely to happen in real life. “If you take a cigarette lighter and put it on a chair,” he says, “there’s no naked foam visible on that chair unless you live in a horrendous pigsty where people have torn apart their furniture.” In real life, before the flame gets to the foam, it has to ignite the fabric. Once the fabric catches fire, it becomes a sheet of flame that can easily overwhelm the fire-suppression properties of treated foam. In tests, TB 117 compliant chairs catch fire just as easily as ones that aren’t compliant — and they burn just as hot. “This is not speculation,” he says. “There were two series of tests that prove what I’m saying is correct.”

One question sort of implied, but not explicitly asked, by this article: many of these standards, like TB 117, were implemented at a time when far more people smoked, and smoke detectors were far less common. The idea was to keep Grandpa’s cigarette from setting the couch on fire if he dozed off in front of the TV set. Now that smoking has decreased dramatically, and smoke detectors are everywhere, do these standards continue to make sense? And shouldn’t this be a consumer choice? If you have kids, buy a couch with all natural fabric and stuffing. If you smoke and drink in front of the TV set and frequently doze off, get a couch that you couldn’t set on fire with a blowtorch and napalm.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law, Safety | Comments Closed

Banana republicans watch: September 8, 2012.

Saturday, September 8th, 2012

Friday’s LAT had an interesting article about the tensions between LAPD beat officers and the homeless in downtown LA. Specifically, the homeless beer vendors:

One by one, his customers approached, handing over $1.50 for cans of Colt 45, Steel Reserve or Heineken that he kept hidden in a blue cooler beneath a shopping cart. Government checks had arrived a few days before. Business on skid row was good — as it has been all year.

Yeah, yeah, illegal, yeah, yeah, alcohol drives crime on skid row, yeah yeah. But I have to admit that my first reaction was “Damn, I wish Austin’s homeless were that entrepreneurial.” Seriously, it’d be kind of nice to be able to walk down the street and pick up a cold bottle of something to sip on for $2.50 or so. (This being Austin, you couldn’t get away with selling that Colt 45 or Steel Reserve crap on the streets. You’d have to go with the local craft brews; Shiner Bock in bottles, maybe some Fat Tire. Leave the malt liquor to the gas stations.)

Come to think of it, you don’t even have to limit yourself to beer, and all the problems associated with that. There are times when, if that guy on the street corner wasn’t panhandling for cash, but had a cooler full of ice and cold sodas and bottled water, damn sure I’d give him at least $2 bucks for a cold drink when it is 103 degrees out there. I know someone who tried this experiment a while back, but I’ll let him report in comments if he wishes.

(And before you jump on my case: I know the problem is more complex than I’m making it sound, and selling bottled water and sodas on street corners isn’t a surefire way to get folks from homelessness to prosperity. But providing a useful good and/or service to a willing customer beats begging for bucks in my mind.)

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Banana republicans watch: September 7, 2012.

Friday, September 7th, 2012

Hey, remember Maywood? The city that couldn’t get insurance, and had to disband the police department and much of the municipal government, in large part because the cops were out of control? That Maywood?

Well, cops are going to be cops, right? And if they aren’t cops in Maywood, they’ve got to end up somewhere, right?

Guess where they ended up.

If you said “I bet they ended up with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department”, you get to drink from the firehose.

Should being employed by Maywood be a bar to signing on with LACSD? Given the level of misconduct and corruption in that department, I think a case can be made that yes, former Maywood officers should not be employed in law enforcement anywhere. But let us set aside the generalities for the moment and focus on specifics. Some of the former Maywood officers hired by LACSD included:

There were apparently four “questionable” applicants from Maywood hired (the article does not mention why number four was considered questionable) out of an unknown number of applicants from Maywood. As a reminder:

At least a third of the then-37 member force had left other police jobs under a cloud or had brushes with the law while working for Maywood.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Quick banana republicans update.

Thursday, September 6th, 2012

The bankrupt city of San Bernardino has voted to cut 100 city jobs.

Of the 100 eliminated jobs, 41 are non-sworn positions in the Police Department. The rest are positions in other departments ranging from managers to janitors. The cutbacks also could lead to the closure of three or four library branches.

The city is not cutting fire department positions. (It is interesting that the original reports stated that 20 positions were proposed to be eliminated, nine people would be demoted, and nobody would be laid off. I wonder why, if this was the plan, there were threats of “rotating, temporary closures of fire stations”.)

(Thanks to Lawrence for the backlink yesterday.)

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Banana republicans watch: September 5, 2012.

Wednesday, September 5th, 2012

We previously mentioned the lawsuit by former police chief Randy Adams against the city of Bell over unpaid severance.

The other shoe has dropped: the city is suing Adams and wants all the money he was paid, plus “a portion of the $20 million the city estimates it lost as a result of a corruption scandal that led to the arrests of eight former civic leaders.”

The suit also asks that Adams be forced to pay the city’s costs to settle a whistle-blower lawsuit brought by Bell police Sgt. James Corcoran. Corcoran went to Adams with allegations of voter fraud, unlawful vehicle seizures, illegal selling of building permits and two instances of sexual harassment involving Rizzo. According to the lawsuit, Adams became upset when Corcoran told him he had taken the information to the FBI.

Corcoran was demoted, placed on “administrative leave”, and Adams “started an investigation for insubordination”.

After he was told he would be fired, according to the suit, Corcoran retired and sued the city. He recently settled for $400,000 and won back his job on the police force.

Meanwhile, the bankrupt city of San Bernardino is considering…cutting the city’s budget. No, really. (Edited to add: Or maybe not.)

I noticed this article yesterday, but didn’t have time to read it: Lawrence also sent me a link. Basically, police unions in California are behaving like bullies towards people who criticize them.

At a press conference held by [Costa Mesa Councilman Jim] Righeimer to spotlight the behavior of unions associated with Lackie, Dammeier & McGill, Councilman Fred Smith of Buena Park, who has also taken a tough stance on unions, said a uniformed officer approached waitresses and demanded to know why their restaurant had a Smith for Council sign in the window, as their squad cars blocked the restaurant parking lot entrance. Elected officials shared examples of threatening statements and text messages by police union operatives. [Costa Mesa] Councilman [Gary] Monahan has in the past said police have staked out his bar and pulled over patrons as they leave to harm his business.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »