Archive for the ‘Law’ Category

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Cop watch: June 28, 2012.

Thursday, June 28th, 2012

I have not been able to give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut about the whole Drake/Chris Brown/Tony Parker kerfluffle. (If you are unaware of this, consider yourself lucky.) But there’s an interesting aspect to the story in today’s NYT.

W.i.P (the club where the fight broke out) and Greenhouse (another club) share both the building and a liquor license. Greenhouse has what the NYT characterizes as “a history of violence and other problems”. So…

…Faced with the prospect of being shut down, the owners signed an agreement with the Police Department in March 2011 that required them to scan the ID of everyone who passed through the club’s doors. The data was to be kept for at least 30 days, and provided to the police upon request.

Yep, that’s right. You go into a club, the club captures your ID, keeps it on file for 30 days, and gives it to the cops if they ask for it.

Gabriel Taussig, who heads the city Law Department’s administrative law division, said in a written response that starting in 2007, many nightclubs in the city had entered into agreements with the Police Department to scan the identification cards of patrons.

I’ve written previously about the Patricia Cook case (the woman who was shot by a cop in Culpepper, VA: the cop is now charged with murder). Reason has an interesting article about how the community used Facebook to draw attention to the case: the Facebook campaign led to increased press coverage and the discovery of a new witness. One thing that leaps out at me:

Local residents flooded the comment boards of the Star-Exponent*. Under the guise of anonymity, they defended “Pat” Cook, and called for an investigation into the Culpeper Police Department. “Two weeks after the shooting, [the publication] stopped that,” Jennings says of the message boards. “It deleted all the existing comments and all the existing discussion on that.” The paper relaunched with Facebook commenting, requiring people to identify themselves. At that point, the message boards for the small-town paper went silent. “I think people were afraid to speak up,” Jennings says, adding, “there are a couple of bullies in town.”

“Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” indeed.

And do you remember Deputy James Mee of the LA County Sheriff’s Department? You might: he arrested Mel Gibson. Apparently, Mee later sued the department, claiming his superiors had tried to pressure him into removing Gibson’s anti-Semetic remarks from his report. Deputy Mee settled the suit for $50,000….

…and now the department is planning to fire him.

[Richard A.] Shinee [Mee’s lawyer] said the department is trying to fire Mee over a June 17, 2011, pursuit of a drunk driver who slammed into a gas station, causing a fire. Mee received a letter dated June 7 notifying him the department intended to fire him, Shinee said.
“Although they allege that he violated the pursuit policy, the letter is unclear and vague as to how that occurred,” Shinee said.

Mee’s lawyer claims that the department is also peeved because Mee testifed for one of his colleagues at a disciplinary hearing. The gentlemen in question was accused of drunk driving, Mee testifed as an expert on DWI, and…

The commission cited Mee’s testimony in its decision to clear the discipline case, finding that there was no credible evidence that the deputy involved had been drunk.

I don’t know what to make of this. My reading of the LAT account is that the LACSO is looking to get rid of a meddlesome deputy, but I concede that account is pretty one-sided. It would be interesting to see LACSO’s side of the story, but they probably can’t discuss it.

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

Random notes: June 27, 2012.

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

Obit watch: Nora Ephron.

Oh, gee: “business leaders” are threatening to move their firms out of the notoriously corrupt city of Vernon, claiming the cost of business has become too high. Vernon has raised taxes and electricity rates, due to “the recession and a series of ill-fated investments that have cost the city millions”.

Among other bright ideas:

In other news, Stockton, California plans to file for municipal bankruptcy.

Edited to add: “It’s in our DNA to take the bitterness of lemons and make sweet lemonade,” [Rev. Dwight Williams of the New Bethel Baptist Church] said.

Hmmm.

  1. The ability to make lemonade is genetically inherited, rather than learned? This might explain why my lemonade isn’t very good. (Then again, it could be that I make mine with bottled lemon juice. Yeah, I know, but I mostly make lemonade so I can mix it with iced tea and make Arnold Palmers; why use fresh lemon juice for that?)
  2. Lemonade isn’t sweet until you add something like sugar to it. What does Rev. Williams propose to add to the lemonade of bankruptcy?

More details on the Jovita’s heroin bust from the Statesman.

One of the great barbecue related stories of the past quarter century was the Kreuz Market feud. In brief, when the family patriarch died, he left the Kreuz Market building to his daughter; he’d previously sold the business itself to two of his sons. This led to a family fight, and ultimately Kreuz Market moved into a new building on the highway, while the old building became Smitty’s.

What’s news? Well, the owner of Kreuz and the pitmaster at Smitty’s, along with another family member, are opening a new barbecue place: Schmidt Family Barbecue in Bee Cave. I am morally certain we will be going out there for an SDC, as soon as they’ve had time to shake out.

Posted in Beef, Books, California Über Alles, Clippings, Food, Law, Obits | 2 Comments »

Gratuitous and unnecessary photography (part 1 of 2?)

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

I’ve uploaded some photos I took during our tour of the Old Idaho Penitentiary to Flicker. You can find them here.

Posted in Law, Photography, Travel | Comments Closed

Smack!

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

Lawrence and I (and others) have often joked that certain establishments, given the amount of traffic they seem to get, stay in business only as fronts for either organized crime or the CIA. (Those of you who want to argue that there is no difference between those two can do so in the comments.)

I just discovered (by way of the TM Daily Post) a possible example of that theory:

Federal authorities are seeking to seize the well-known South Austin restaurant and music venue Jovita’s under a federal indictment that charges 15 people, including three members of the family that owns the South First Street business, with heroin distribution.

Actually, I do believe Jovita’s was an exception to the CIA front rule; it certainly seemed busy whenever I drove past.

And the combination of this raid and the Sixth Street raid in such close proximity makes me go “Hmmmmmmmm”, especially since there appears to be a Texas Syndicate connection to both.

(Apologies for posting this a little late. The story broke while I was in Boise, and I wasn’t checking the Statesman or other papers every day. This did remarkable things for my blood pressure, but was bad for blogging.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, Law | Comments Closed

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 »

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