Archive for Your Legal Rights
Compassion for the Whole Person – A Few Tips if You’re Going to Help the Poor
Posted by: | Comments300 Demonstrate Against LAPD After Fatal Shooting Of Laborer
Posted by: | CommentsAs Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck defended the fatal shooting of a day laborer, protesters and officers clashed last night near the site of the incident, the Los Angeles Times reports. About 300 demonstrators gathered at the police department’s Rampart Station. Some hurled eggs at police cars and others threw objects at the station windows, prompting officers in riot gear to push the throng along the street.
Officers fired non-lethal projectiles at protesters near the intersection where Manuel Jamines was fatally shot Sunday afternoon by an officer who said Jamines refused commands to drop a switchblade. Beck said the three bicycle patrol officers who confronted Jamines had about 40 seconds to act and did as good a job as could be done in such a quick-moving, emergency situation. “There was very, very little opportunity to do much more than what was done,” he said.
VA’s Surging Elderly Inmates Cost Nearly $30K Per Year To House
Posted by: | CommentsJust before lunch at Virginia’s Deerfield Correctional Center, says the Washington Post, 60 men in wheelchairs stream across the prison courtyard and into the mess hall, followed by a group of inmates hobbling on canes, leaving the blind and the senile to shuffle inside last. Not far from this daily migration — dubbed the “wheelchair brigade” by prison employees — are two rooms full of elderly inmates too weak to make it outside. Deerfield, near the North Carolina border, is where the state’s inmates are sent to grow old. Since the state abolished parole releases for the newly convicted in 1995, the number of elderly inmates in custody has soared. In 1990, there were 900 inmates over the age of 50. Now there are more than 5,000.
Deerfield, which once housed 400 inmates, has become a 1,000-bed facility with a long waiting list. “We’re left trying to be both a nursing home and a prison,” said Keith Davis, the warden. The state has built a 57-bed assisted living facility at Deerfield, with rows of hospital beds filling a room the size of a high school gymnasium. They’ve added a special meal for diabetics, and they’ve hired nurses to keep round-the-clock watch on the infirmary’s 16 inmates. It’s an expensive endeavor: It costs $28,800 annually to house an inmate at Deerfield, compared with the $19,000 it costs at most of the state’s medium-security prisons. Fewer than 5 percent of inmates charged before 1995 have won parole reprieves since former Gov. George Allen’s initiative passed, compared with 42 percent of eligible inmates who were granted parole in the years preceding the change in law.
U.S. Senate Panel To Examine Police Rape Investigations
Posted by: | CommentsConcerned that police departments nationwide fail to investigate rapes fully, a congressional committee will examine the issue next week at a hearing spurred partly by a Baltimore Sun examination of the systemic underreporting of sex crimes. The Senate Crime and Drugs subcommittee has asked representatives of the Office of Violence Against Women to appear in Washington to discuss the problem, says the Sun, as well as a Pennsylvania woman jailed by police who erroneously accused her of making a false rape report.
The Sun reported in July that Baltimore for years led the nation in the percentage of rape cases in which police concluded that the victim was lying, with more than 3 in 10 cases called “unfounded.” Other cities have seen disturbingly high percentages of uninvestigated or dropped race cases in years past, and a women’s advocate in Philadelphia pushed for the congressional hearing after the Sun’s investigation reignited concerns. The newspaper’s report “made me believe that all of the issues [in other cities] were not just idiosyncratic problems, but that there is likely a chronic and systemic failure in police departments,” said Carol Tracy, head of the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia. “I think it’s important to expose it, and to encourage the federal government, which has very little jurisdiction around this, to nevertheless exercise greater accountability on the data that it does receive.” Tracy’s group reviews rape reports marked as unfounded by Philadelphia police. The hearing was authorized by panel chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.)
Complaints Against Detroit Police Up 36% In 8 Years
Posted by: | CommentsCitizen complaints against the Detroit Police Department continue to rush in at more than 1,700 a year, showing that more needs to be done to clean up alleged misconduct, says the Detroit Free Press, quoting a report by the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners. The board said the complaints range from sexual harassment to excessive force. Twenty cases from 2009 were considered major offenses, resulting in the suspension of officers without pay.
The number of complaints has hovered around 1,700 annually since 2007, a 36 percent increase over 2002. The report faults the department for complying with only 39 percent of a 7-year-old federal consent decree aimed at rehabilitating an abusive department. Among the failures was a slow response to citizen complaints. The police board is urging the department to do a better job of recruiting police officers who “meet the moral and ethical requirements to be a Detroit Police officer.” The recommendations include conducting more in-depth background investigations of applicants, holding recruitment fairs to hire Detroit residents, and clearly showing the standards and expectations of a police officer.
“Unbelievable Malevolence” Cited In Boston Pizza Delivery Murder
Posted by: | CommentsThree people charged with killing a Boston pizza delivery man had a plan, a prosecutor said yesterday, and they carried it out with cold calculation. The three are accused of luring him to a vacant house, stabbed him repeatedly, and then taking what little he had, including the pizza. Two men and a woman, ages 17 to 20, were held in the killing of Richel Nova, 58.
The bloodstained pizza box was found under a car with three slices of pizza still inside. “Every new piece of evidence we uncover makes this crime more despicable,’’ Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said yesterday. “Taken together, they paint a picture of almost unbelievable malevolence.’’
Pittsburgh Police Officers Get A Technology Upgrade
Posted by: | CommentsToday, in the front seat of each Pittsburgh patrol car is a sturdy, wireless laptop that generates maps, streams information from 911 calls and, with the swipe of an officer’s “Smart Card,” provides access to criminal databases, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “We’re creating this technology in-house,” said Mayor Luke Ravenstahl. Sixty patrol cars now have tiny printers that produce waterproof citations and can read and extract information from scanned driver’s licenses.
Officers in one area are testing windshield-mounted video cameras that remotely upload footage when they drive within 300 feet of a station. A microphone on the officer’s lapel records conversations during traffic stops, providing proof of what happened if disputes arise. “Obviously, the film won’t lie,” Ravenstahl said. The new technologies reduce paperwork and allow officers to return to the station less frequently, said Deputy Chief Paul Donaldson. The wealth of information also keeps officers safer, said Sgt. Eric Kroll, who coordinates new technology training. “There’s no lost communication between 911 and the officer,” he said.
TN Gang Members Accused Of Faking Court-Ordered Local Service
Posted by: | CommentsTo a group of suspected gang members in East Nashville, community service was just another racket: If you had enough money, you could buy your way out of it, The Tennessean reports. Federal prosecutors say the gang faked court-ordered community service work with the help of a local nonprofit devoted to fighting gangs and violence. Members acted with impunity, because of a lack of oversight by probation agencies.
A wide-ranging gang racketeering case exposed an apparent lack of checks and balances, allowing a handful of criminals to buy their way out of performing community work and cheating the criminal justice system of an alternative form of punishment, education, and rehabilitation. Administrators say budget constraints make it impossible to check on whether everyone ordered to perform community service work actually does it. Judges have dealt with the problem for years, sometimes creating their own systems of accountability where government has not.
Prosecutors May Need Probable Cause For Cell Phone Locations
Posted by: | CommentsIn the first appellate ruling on a cutting-edge privacy issue, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit declared that cell phone location data may trigger Fourth Amendment concerns and that prosecutors demanding access to such records may be required at times to satisfy a probable cause standard, reports The Legal Intelligencer. The ruling is a setback for the Justice Department, which argued that judges are required under the Stored Communications Act to issue orders for access to such data whenever prosecutors show that it would be “material” and “relevant” to an ongoing investigation.
The appellate court largely adopted the position of a coalition of civil rights and privacy groups who argued that judges must be free to decide when to demand that prosecutors satisfy the probable cause standard. “Because the statute as presently written gives the magistrate judge the option to require a warrant showing probable cause, we are unwilling to remove that option although it is an option to be used sparingly,” said U.S. Circuit Judge Dolores Sloviter. The ruling was hailed as an important protection of privacy rights by professor Susan Freiwald of the University of San Francisco School of Law, an expert in the area of privacy and technology, one of two lawyers arguing against the government. Freiwald said the larger importance of the appellate court’s decision was the panel’s rejection of the Justice Department’s reading of the statute as well as the government’s arguments about the modern-day implications of two significant decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1970s.
After Fatal Crash, VA Won’t Allow U.S. Work Permit Cards As ID
Posted by: | CommentsVirginia is no longer allowing federal work permit cards to prove someone’s legal status when obtaining driver’s licenses or identification cards after a fatal crash involving a Benedictine nun and a Bolivian man, accused of drunk driving, who immigrated to the U.S. illegally, the Washington Post reports. The state motor vehicle department changed its policy to remove the federal government’s I-766 permit from the list of documents that can be used to demonstrate “proof of legal presence.” A spokeswoman called last month’s death of Sister Denise Mosier, 66, the “catalyst” for the change. Carlos Martinelly-Montano, 23, is accused of swerving into the path of a vehicle carrying Mosier and two other nuns on their way to a retreat.
Martinelly-Montano, who had entered the U.S. illegally at age 8 with his parents, had been awaiting a deportation hearing after convictions for drunken driving in 2007 and 2008. Immigrant advocacy groups decried the move as a political overreaction. “From a legal point of view, it’s just plain stupid,” said Crystal Williams of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. ”There are so many people who are here legally, and that’s the only documentation they are able to produce.”
