Archive for the ‘Law’ Category

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Back on the train, hey, back on the chain gang….

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

And we have a couple of stories from the municipal beat.

Story #1: The last ballots cast in June’s election in the notoriously corrupt California town of Vernon have been counted…and Reno Bellamy has been declared the winner. Bellamy’s opponent, Luz Martinez, was endorsed by the Vernon Chamber of Commerce. Of course, the Chamber “has vowed to pursue further legal action”.

Story #2: A while back, the town of Moberly, Missouri, agreed to guarantee $39 million in bonds through 2025. The bonds were intended to help a Chinese company, Mamtek International, build a plant to manufacture sucralose in Moberly.

Guess what happened next? If you said, “I bet the project fell apart”, take two gold stars and advance to the next blue square.

The hook here is that Moberly is refusing to make payments on the bonds, basically claiming that they were “misled” by Mamtek. (Mamtek claimed they already had an operating sucralose plant in China; it turns out that plant never opened, and that Missouri state development officials were aware of this before the bonds were sold, but nobody told Moberly officials.)

In a related NYT story:

Surprised local taxpayers from Stockton, Calif., to Scranton, Pa., are finding themselves obligated for parking garages, hockey arenas and other enterprises that can no longer pay their debts.

This is particularly interesting:

Residents of Pennsylvania’s capital, Harrisburg, recently learned from a forensic audit that their city’s fiscal woes could be traced to a guarantee issued in 1998, for the bonds of a trash incinerator project. Every few years after that, the authority running the project issued more bonds, and the city guaranteed those as well.
The audit showed that the authority had been selling new bonds for the cash to pay its older bonds — saving unwitting residents from having to honor their guarantees for a time, but blowing up their debt from the incinerator to an impossible $310 million. That’s more than three times what residents owe on the city’s own bonds.

If you or I did this, they’d call it a Ponzi scheme, and we’d be going to Federal pound you in the ass prison.

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

EarthQuest update.

Sunday, June 24th, 2012

Remember EarthQuest, the dinosaur/ecology theme park proposed for Montgomery County?

I’m promoting this from a comment left on my “Contact the proprietor” page. The original can be found here.

Awesome blog about Earthquest. Here is an update:
The Earthquest Institute is now defunct and its CEO (as Don Allen Holbrook LLC) is suing John and Jane Does who have dared to comment about this project and his involvement in it. He is also suing the Tribune, Cynthia Calvert, The Houston Press, Craig Malisow, The Pahrump Valley Times and me (Soapboxmom).
Earthquest Adventures will be remembered for this frivolous, harassment suit filed by Holbrook in an effort to stifle public debate about this matter of public concern. Holbrook apparently thinks the taxpayers should have no say in how their tax dollars are spent.
Please also watch for updates on the Earthquest Facebook page.

I was not aware that Holbrook was suing folks. If so, this is a revolting development. Since I’ve been on vacation the past couple of days, I haven’t had a chance to follow-up with soapboxmom on this, so I don’t know if she and other folks involved have legal representation yet. I assume the Houston Press has lawyers on retainer, but I’m not sure about the other folks named.

(soapboxmom, I would like to follow up with you on that. Please feel free to email me at one of the addresses on the contact page.)

Posted in Clippings, Earthquest, Law, Politics | 5 Comments »

Random notes: June 18, 2012.

Monday, June 18th, 2012

I don’t have anything to say about Rodney King.

I do, however, have a Bell update: Robert “Ratso” Rizzo and Angela Spaccia lost five years of pension credit. CALPERS, the people who regulate state pensions, ruled that the five years of credit Rizzo and Spaccia had purchased was bought using city funds. This is a) not legal, and 2) CALPERS “found no evidence that the Bell City Council had approved making payments”.

According to the LAT, Ratso’s pension has been cut from $650,000 a year to $50,000 a year. Spaccia went from $250,000 to $34,000. Neither of these figures include money both could have received from “Bell’s supplementary retirement program”.

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

Pine Ridge.

Friday, June 15th, 2012

I was eight years old in 1973.

I have vague memories of hearing about the Wounded Knee standoff on the network news, but not much more than that.

What does this have to do with the price of beer in Whiteclay?

Glad you asked.

…the Oglala Sioux tribe has demanded that the federal government reopen dozens of cases it says the F.B.I. may have mishandled decades ago.

The NYT cites several odd deaths: a man found with “stab wounds to his face and neck” was ruled to have committed suicide. A woman who was found with a stab wound in her burnt home was ruled to have died of “carbon monoxide poisoning, acute alcoholism ‘and other factors'”. Another man was killed with a hatchet, but the killer was never prosecuted “because of impairment caused by a mental condition”.

The F.B.I. however, has not disclosed the nature of the suspect’s impairment, why the suspect’s ability to stand trial was not left for a court to decide or whether the suspect was a threat to kill again.

Here’s another good one:

Ms. Aquash’s decomposing body was discovered in a field in 1976. A coroner ruled her death had been caused by exposure to the cold. But after Ms. Aquash’s family demanded a second autopsy, she was found to have been shot behind the left ear. It was not until 28 years later, in 2004, that the first of two men was convicted in her death.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: special paging Dr. Johnson edition

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Dave Boswell won 20 games to help take the Minnesota Twins to an American League division championship in 1969. He pitched in a World Series when he was only 20. But for many he is most remembered as a combatant on the list of Billy Martin’s greatest fights.

NYT obit for Henry Hill.

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

Annals of Law (part 6 of a series).

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

Cast your mind back, way back, to those halcyon days of June, 2011. Remember those times?

Disco was the rage. People were discovering that you could get food out of trailers. And in Liberty County, police were digging up someone’s house based on the claims of a self-proclaimed “psychic” that there were 30 or more bodies buried on the property.

Really. I’m not making this stuff up.

Why this flashback to the era of Herman Cain and Casey Anthony?

The couple who owns the property is suing the psychic, the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office, and various media outlets.

As we often say at WCD, “Quel fromage!”

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 13, 2012.

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

Henry Hill has passed away. In a hospital. Of what I guess could be called “natural causes”.

(You know, I still have not seen “Goodfellas”, though I do have it and want to sit down and watch it soon. I have read Wiseguy, and I think it is a heck of a book.)

Also worth noting: Ann Rutherford, Scarlett O’Hara’s sister.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Movies, Obits | 1 Comment »

Say it ain’t so, José.

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Long and fascinating article in the NYT. Apparently, the Zeta cartel has been laundering drug profits by purchasing quarter horses in the United States.

The affidavit said the Zetas funneled about $1 million a month into buying quarter horses in the United States. The authorities were tipped off to Tremor’s activities in January 2010, when the Zetas paid more than $1 million in a single day for two broodmares, the affidavit said.

Way to keep a low freaking profile there, guys.

Edited to add: More from the Statesman.

Posted in Clippings, Horses, Law | Comments Closed

Meanwhile, back at Alcatraz…

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the great Alcatraz escape.

Clarence and John Anglin and their friend Frank Lee Morris broke out of the prison and escaped into San Francisco Bay on a raft they made out of raincoats. They were never recaptured, and there is considerable debate to this day about whether they died during the escape or managed to elude capture. (All three would be over 80 today.) More background here.

Anyway, the LAT has coverage tied to a 50th anniversary gathering of various folks involved in the case, including the Anglins’ sisters, federal marshals who are still looking for the trio, and Jolene Babyak, who has written extensively about Alcatraz (one of her books is devoted to the escape).

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Azaria.

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

I previously noted the fourth coroner’s inquest into the Azaria Chamberlain case.

The verdict is in: the coroner has ruled that Azaria was killed by a dingo.

NYT coverage. The Australian (may ask for a login, not sure). BBC. And by way of the BBC, the inquest findings from the coroner’s website.

Pull quotes:

“We live in a beautiful country but it is dangerous and we’d ask all Australians to be aware of this and take appropriate precautions.”

 

In February, the Mr Tipple told the inquest there were 239 recorded instances of dingoes attacking people in Queensland from 1990 to 2011, with many of those attacks occurring on Fraser Island.

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: June 11, 2012.

Monday, June 11th, 2012

Two stories by way of Lawrence:

This odd one about a scientist who works for the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas trying to stop approval of a $20 million dollar grant to Rice University and M.D. Anderson. Lawrence sent it to me and asked if I could make heads or tails out of it; I think I can, but it seems to me to be one of those HouChron stories that’s like a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

I’m not sure if this has been on FARK yet, but since Lawrence sent it to me, I’m linking to it anyway as part of the “Art, damn it! Art!” watch: a 200-foot-long knitted rabbit on the side of an Italian mountain.

The NYT has a story I find kind of odd about the NYPD Accident Investigations Squad.  Basically, the AIS investigates traffic accidents: “But they do so only in cases of death or when a victim is deemed likely to die.”
The problem, according to the NYT, is that AIS sometimes doesn’t investigate accidents where the victim is not immediately dead; if the person dies days later, evidence may be “lost”.

I have two problems with this, both related to the incident the NYT cites:

  1. “That delay, Mr. Stevens said, meant that most of the evidence from the crash — skid marks and surveillance video, witness accounts, and alcohol in the driver’s bloodstream — had been lost.” How was it lost? The way I read that sentence, the AIS started to collect the data, then stopped because the victim was still alive (she died three days later). Did they throw away what they had already collected? That seems like an…odd choice, to say the least.
  2. Reinforcing point 1 is the fact that the NYT is able to report that the driver in the accident had a 0.07 BAC. So at least some evidence was preserved. “Felony charges were considered…” What felony charges? 0.07 is below the legal limit, as far as I know. And “those charges were dropped because the police testing equipment had not been properly calibrated”. Uh-huh. That’s certainly interesting, and I wish the NYT had gone into more detail on the calibration issue.

Edited to add: It occurs to me that some folks might be as confused as I was by the NYT references to the Highway Patrol and the NYPD. The state of New York does have a state police agency, the New York State Police (whose website is currently broken, it seems). There is also a group within the NYPD called the Highway Patrol “primarily responsible for patrolling and maintaining traffic safety on limited-access highways within New York City.” So it isn’t a statewide police agency in the Broderick Crawford sense, but a confusingly named NYPD division. Got it.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Cops, Geek, Law | 1 Comment »

Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

The same thing we’re going to do every night for the next eight and a half years, Pinky: hard time in Federal prison.

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Random: June 7, 2012.

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

Kwame Brown, chairman of the Washington DC City Council, resigned his position yesterday.

Earlier in the day, prosecutors filed a three-page charging document in the District’s federal court accusing Brown (D) of falsifying records in applications to obtain a home loan and to buy a $50,000 powerboat. Brown inflated his income by “tens of thousands of dollars” in the two-year scheme that started in August 2005, federal prosecutors wrote.

Innocent until proven guilty, yadda yadda, but according to the WP‘s reporting, Brown and the prosecution have already made a plea deal.

Ray Bradbury obits: WP. LAT. NYT. NYT appreciation by Michiko Kakutani. Lawrence. A/V Club. Scalzi.

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

Recall.

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

Sorry, folks. I’m getting a slow start today; I had a doctor’s appointment this morning. (Nothing serious, just the 7,500 mile oil and filter change/lube/check the fluid levels.)

How about that successful recall election yesterday? No, not that one. It seems that the good people of Fullerton, California, voted overwhelmingly to throw out three city council members. What makes this interesting is that the recall started as a reaction to the council’s perceived indifference to the beating death of Kelly Thomas.  (Warning: that last link contains a graphic and disturbing image.)

This is the first time I can recall that voter anger over police misconduct has become that much of a hot button issue. Let us hope it is not the last time.

I will probably wait until tomorrow to post a roundup of Bradbury obits.

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

Important safety tip. (#12 in a series)

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

This one’s a quickie: if you’re going to steal a car, you probably shouldn’t steal an art car.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Law, Safety | 2 Comments »

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