Thursday, February 22nd, 2007,
by Fred (,
crime, Stafford
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Q: When is a missile not a missile?
A: When it’s actually a cup of soda from McDonalds.
Earlier yesterday, a weeping Hall, 25, thanked Judge Frank A. Hoss Jr. in Stafford Circuit Court after he reduced a jury’s recommended two-year sentence to the seven weeks she has spent in jail and ordered she serve probation.
Hall, a mother of three young children who lives at Camp Lejeune, N.C., was convicted in January of maliciously throwing a missile into an occupied vehicle. The jury’s recommended sentence was the minimum for the felony charge.
No one was injured in the July 2 incident on Interstate 95 in Stafford, in which Hall threw a cup of ice and soda at another car while in a traffic backup. Eliza Fowle, 28, was a passenger in that vehicle, driven by her boyfriend, Pete Ballin, 36.
The prosecutor, of course, was undeterred by arguments that Hall’s actions were relatively harmless.
Prosecutor George Elsasser argued for imposing the sentence, saying actions such as Hall’s pose a danger. He cited a Stafford case from 2000 in which three teenagers were killed when a teen tossed an egg at their car, leading to a chase.
“The alternative is a free-for-all out on the road,” Elsasser said.
No, the alternative is prosecutors who actually apply reason when deciding whether, and with what, to charge a criminal defendant. Does Elsasser really believe motorists are going to start chucking Dr. Pepper at each other just because they’ll only spend seven weeks in jail instead of two years? Maybe he’s just worried that someone will mess up his best suit.
In all seriousness, this case points out the problems with mandatory minimum sentences. If the judge hadn’t had the opportunity to reduce the sentence, you’d have someone in prison for two years for chucking a beverage.
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Tuesday, February 13th, 2007,
by Fred (,
apes, crime, Spotsylvania
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Oops. Remember that human foot found in a Spotsylvania County landfill? Actually, it was an ape’s. Begging the question, why did someone throw away an ape foot? And where’s the rest of the ape?
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Monday, April 17th, 2006,
by Fred (,
courts, crime, law, Missouri, sex offender registry
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Missouri legislators are considering a bill designed to limit a form of corporate welfare, tax increment financing, which allows developers to use the future property taxes, sales taxes and other taxes that their projects will generate. But critics of the bill say it doesn’t go far enough.
Since the law was passed in 1982, cities across the state have set up hundreds of TIF districts that have diverted hundreds of millions of dollars to developers. County governments, school districts, library boards and ambulance districts are among the entities that forgo revenue.After hours of debate over several days, the Senate decided to leave intact the vague definition of “blight” that has allowed the program to spread. Areas can be declared blighted based on factors such as defective street layout and obsolete platting.
But under the bill, vacant fields or farmland in the St. Louis region would no longer qualify. The region is defined as the city of St. Louis and St. Louis, St. Charles, Jefferson and Franklin counties.
Statewide, undeveloped or vacant land would be ineligible if the project consisted solely of homes or apartments. The idea is, schools can’t afford to lose property taxes from new subdivisions full of children who need educating.
TIF and its necessary partner, eminent domain, have created huge problems in St. Louis County. Local municipalities have created hundreds of TIF districts, exempting the regions from taxation. Meanwhile, a fragmented sales tax system has left many municipalities dependent upon economic development projects to fund local government, so the municipalities heavily recruit developers, which requires even more TIF districts and eminent domain abuse. It’s a vicious cycle that will only be circumvented if the government limits (or, better yet, eliminates) TIF.
This bill certainly doesn’t go far enough. Developers, as always, have the upper hand, claiming that the projects will go to Illinois or Kansas instead. But does anyone really believe that Home Depot would shun Missouri if TIF was not available? Should taxpayers really be subsidizing this development? No and no.
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Wednesday, April 12th, 2006,
by Fred (,
courts, crime, Duke, lacrosse
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The embattled Duke lacrosse team is rolling out the Kobe Bryant defense
By releasing embarrassing details about the stripper who claims she was raped at a party held by Duke University’s lacrosse team, the players’ attorneys are employing the same strategy used successfully to defend NBA star Kobe Bryant against rape charges: publicly attack the accuser’s credibility.”This is what the defense does, is try to smear the victim in the public and make it impossible to get a jury,” said Eagle County, Colo., District Attorney Mark Hurlbert, who charged Bryant.
No one has been charged in the Duke case, and defense attorneys said District Attorney Mike Nifong should drop the investigation after DNA test results revealed no connection to the stripper on Monday. But Nifong has said all along that he didn’t need a match to pursue the case against the players, and experts agree.
It’s too early in the process to draw any conclusions. The lack of DNA evidence proves next to nothing. It’s the CSI Effect again - we’re so conditioned by the TV police procedurals to expect DNA evidence that we consider lack of DNA evidence proof of innocence. But there is no DNA evidence in the vast majority of crimes, and most sexual assault cases are prosecuted the old fashioned way, with witness testimony and medical evidence from a rape kit.
So nothing that has come out to date proves these loutish youth are innocent. But neither does it prove they are guilty. But attorneys for the not-yet-defendants are pulling no punches, pointing out the victim’s 2002 misdemeanor charges stemming from an incident in which she stole the taxi of a man to whom she was giving a lap dance.
Given Nifong’s position, defense attorneys have stepped up efforts to portray the accuser as a liar whose story doesn’t add up.
Over the weekend, they told reporters that photos taken at the party show the woman was injured even before she arrived, and impaired, too. And while answering questions about their clients’ legal troubles — about a third of the current team has been charged in recent years with public urination, underage possession of alcohol and disorderly conduct — they have suggested that the woman’s own criminal past undermines her credibility.
I don’t buy the victim’s defenders’ arguments that if the perpetrators’ and victim’s races were reversed, the boys would already be in jail. But we sure do love us some athletes in America, and it’s certainly true that these frat boys are getting preferential treatment because they are jocks. Just like they got preferential treatment on their drunken, louytish behavior in the past. Just like Kobe Bryant was able to beat his accuser into submission because he had an army of supporters who backed him because he can shoot a jump shot.
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Wednesday, April 12th, 2006,
by Fred (,
crime, Illinois, Madison County
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Police: Man became burglar to nab impounded pooch
Police said that Thomas Carroll, 20, of Glen Carbon, broke into Madison County’s animal control facility and left with his pet Weimaraner, Titus.Police said Carroll could not come up with the $125 needed to retrieve the dog, which had been picked up as a stray. Now Carroll, of the 100 block of South Main Street, is charged with two felony counts of burglary and is being held in the Madison County Jail on $50,000 bail. He will need $5,000 to make bond.
I can’t decide which is worse. Is it that someone is so stupid that they would risk a sentence of 3-7 years in prison and a $25,000 fine to avoid paying the $125 fee to retrieve a stray dog? Or is it that the government charges you $125 to retrieve your stray dog? Apparently, it is better that this dog be put up for adoption (and put to sleep if adoption fails) than that the dog be returned to his owner without payment of the Madison County Dog Tax.
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Tuesday, April 11th, 2006,
by Fred (,
crime, Illinois, psychology
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Illinois Seeks to Commit Sex Offender
A Catholic priest who was scheduled for parole Tuesday after serving two years in prison for molesting boys will instead be sent to a state treatment center for sexually violent criminals, where he could be committed indefinitely.State officials petitioned the court to involuntarily commit the Rev. Frederick Lenczycki on the grounds that he likely would molest again.
A judge on Monday ordered the 61-year-old priest held at the state facility in Joliet until a hearing can be held to determine if he should remain there indefinitely.
The case is the first in which the state has attempted to hold a priest under Illinois’ Sexually Violent Persons Commitment Act, a 1998 law that allows for the involuntary commitment of convicted sex offenders to mental institutions until they are determined to no longer be threats to society, said DuPage County State’s Attorney Joseph Birkett.
These laws should give any freedom-lover pause. What Lenczycki did was horrible, but he did serve the sentence provided in the law for the crime for which he was convicted. Illinois could not constitutionally extend his prison sentence for another 20 years while he was behind bars, so why should they be able to imprison him indefinitely based on a claim that he “likely would molest again”? Studies have repeatedly shown that sex offenders actually have lower rates of recidivism than other offenders.
Even with the offenders who are pedophiles, treatment can help change behavior even if it does not change sexual attraction patterns. In a 1998 evaluation of 61 research studies on sexual offender recidivism (known as a meta-analysis), sexual offense recidivism was very low (13.4% of more than 23,000 offenders). The sexual offense recidivism of child molesters was slightly lower — 12.7% for 9,603 abusers. In another study, one in five of the extrafamilial child molesters recidivated. The Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice reports that 5.3% of sex offenders were rearrested for a sexual crime within three years of release. Another study found that child molesters with female victims had a 10 to 29% recidivism rate while child molesters with male victims ranged between 13 and 40%, but this study included non-sexual offenses in its data. Other criminals had higher rates of recidivism – for example, 38% of those convicted of a violent crime had another offense, as did one third of those with a property offense.
So if the rate of recidivism for other offenders is three times higher, why is it only sex offenders we seek to confine indefinitely? If prosecutors and legislators think pedophiles should be confined for life, then seek to amend the statute to provide life sentences. Don’t allow parole and then use a back-door, ripe-for-abuse civil commitment.
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Monday, April 3rd, 2006,
by Fred (,
Congress, crime, Cynthia McKinnon, politics
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Want to know why Congresswoman and professional crazy person Cynthia McKinney really hit that cop? Here’s why.
In 1996 and 1998, she complained that White House security officials did not give her the same treatment as other members of Congress, at one time mistaking her 23-year-old white aide for her. McKinney is black.”I am absolutely sick and tired of having to have my appearance at the White House validated by white people,” she said at the time.
Can’t let the White Man get you down. Now if only there was some way McKinney could identify herself and bypass those pesky security checks, some sort of identifying badge that would indicate that she is a member of Congress, thus obviating her need to be validated by white people. Something like this:
[Link via The Owner’s Manual, image from Collinson Enterprises]
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Monday, April 3rd, 2006,
by Fred (,
crime, drugs, methamphetamine, police
,
Score another one for the War on Cold Medicine, this time in Arizona
Under the new laws, all those medications must be kept behind the counter, available for purchase only after customers sign a special logbook. Every month, the logbook would be faxed to police.And, as Phoenix Police Sgt. Don Sherrard explains it, even though the pages now make a stack eight feet high, they didn’t just end up in the trash . . . or even in a file cabinet somewhere. The cops actually read them.
And that led them to Anthem.
As the officers pored over the logbook, Sherrard says, they kept noticing the same name, over and over, and the same Anthem address.
So they went out to investigate.
Now, it might be funny if Anthem, a cookie-cutter enclave northwest of the city, harbored a coven of tweakers, systematically “cooking” cold medicine into an illegal drug. It’s not hard to imagine cops busting the place, sending dozens of skinny soccer moms to jail.
But that isn’t what happened when the police officers made their trek up I-17.
Instead, they found a big family that had been racked by the flu.
The members of this family weren’t stocking up on pseudoephedrine. They were buying cold medicine.
“The way the log reads, the amount purchased can be deceiving,” Sherrard says. “All we see is that the mother’s name appeared four or five times — what it doesn’t tell you is that she’s buying Children’s Tylenol.”
(And if mom had wanted to make meth, five boxes of Children’s Tylenol was hardly going to do the trick.)
Needless to say, Sherrard says dryly, “we closed that case.”
Sherrard says he thinks the city restrictions were worth doing: “If we can stop just one meth lab, it’s worth it.”
This is just stupid. Does anyone really believe that the meth market is controlled by a bunch of people who buy cold medicine over the counter in pharmacies? No, of course not. Because most meth is made by drug cartels that get their precursor chemicals in bulk, such as the 100 million extra tons of pseudoephedrine that enter Mexico each year. Even the DEA recognizes this, notes Jacob Sullum:
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, some 80 percent of the illicit meth consumed in the United States comes from large-scale Mexican traffickers, who buy their pseudoephedrine in bulk rather than a couple of boxes at a time from CVS. Restricting retail access to pseudoephedrine may shift production from small local labs and toward the big-time meth makers who already account for most of the supply, but it’s unlikely to affect consumption noticeably.
Nor do you need pseudoephedrine to make methamphetamine. Other methods use precursors such as ephedrine, methylamine, phenylalanine and phenyl-2-propanone (which can be synthesized various ways). So even if the government somehow managed to cut off all access to pseudoephedrine — which making you line up at the pharmacy for cold medicine assuredly will not — the black market would adjust.
That family in Anthem, AZ? The Childrern’s Tylenol cold formulas contain 15 mg of pseudoephedrine per 5 ml dose. That wouldn’t have made much meth in a home lab. So you have a pointless law that will have almost no impact on the meth trade. The Arizona cops that raided a sick family looking for tweakers admit that the pharmacy logs haven’t produced a single legitimate lead. The only effect it does have is to make sick people suffer more and to force manufacturers to substitute inferior replacements for pseudoephedrine - tried the new NyQuil lately?
Worth it if they stop one meth lab? No it isn’t. You could stop all traffic fatalities by banning cars, too, but that wouldn’t be worth it either. It makes as much sense as Missouri requiring home sellers to disclose whether meth was ever produced on the premises:
In the event that any parcel of real property to be sold, exchanged or transferred is or was used as a site for methamphetamine production, the seller or transferor shall disclose in writing to the buyer or transferee the fact that methamphetamine was produced on the premises, provided that the seller or transferor had knowledge of such prior methamphetamine production. The seller or transferor shall disclose any prior knowledge of methamphetamine production, regardless of whether the persons involved in the production were convicted for such production.
[via SayUncle]
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Friday, March 24th, 2006,
by Fred (,
art, Australia, crime, graffiti, vandalism
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“Street artists” are up in arms in Melbourne over the city’s attempts to eradicate graffiti.
Young was commissioned by the city council to draw up a draft graffiti strategy last March in which she recommended tolerance zones be set up where street art and graffiti be allowed a small space within the city, where writers and artists would be at a lower risk of being arrested. “This was rejected by the city council, despite it generating lots of public support and despite evidence being presented that zero tolerance, for lots of reasons, wouldn’t work.”Instead, the council doubled its anti-graffiti budget. “The clean-up is an imposition of a supposedly mainstream, or dominant, cultural view,” says Young, “in denial of the diversity of cultural styles that actually exist within a city space.”
Imposition of a dominant cultural view? I don’t think so. How about attempt to clean up vandalism? Calling it “street art” doesn’t change the fact that the “artists” have defaced private property without the permission of the property owner, and that is (and should be) criminal.
The idea of “tolerance zones” actually makes some sense, if the affected property owners consent to allowing access to their property. But looking the other way while vandals destroy property is wrong, even in the name of “art”.
[via Boing Boing]
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Thursday, March 23rd, 2006,
by Fred (,
crime, humor, scientology, South Park
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Wow. Don’t ever piss of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Check out how they killed off Chef after Scientologist Isaac Hayes left the show in a huff:
“A lot of us don’t agree with the choices the Chef has made in the last few days,” one of the children eulogizes him at a funeral. “Some of us feel hurt and confused that he seemed to turn his back on us. But we can’t let the events of the past few weeks take away the memories of how Chef made us smile.”We shouldn’t be mad at Chef for leaving us,” the eulogy concludes. “We should be mad at that fruity little club for scrambling his brains.”
Sounds like a good tagline. Scientology: A Fruity Little Club That Scrambles Your Brains.
Except it’s not just a fruity little club. And it’s not harmless. Instead of scrambling your brains, Scientology kills you by depriving you of contact with humans or medical treatment in a bogus ritual. And makes you consent to said ritual and waive any claims against them before you can join their “religion”. Or insists that you forego psychiatric treatment for your schizophrenia in favor of vitamins from a chiropractor (because modern psychiatric medicine derives from an ancient space alien civilization’s plot to drug and enslave humanity, of course), until you stab your mother 77 times. The pedophiles of the adventurers club on South Park seem kind of harmless in comparison.
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