Cambridge cops insist they were right to arrest black scholar Henry Gates for entering his own home

Photo: Henry Gates, Jr.

The situation was ludicrous from the get go: police responded to a call that two men might be breaking into a house through the front door, in broad daylight. The caller even cautioned them that the men might live in the house and might be dealing with a recalcitrant door. The police arrived to find a middle-aged man who walked with a cane, and arrested him after he provided proof that he was the owner of the house.

Then the police falsely blamed the caller for bringing race into the situation. In fact, the caller never said either man was black.

I think it's possible that the arresting officer couldn't stand being yelled at by a black man.

Certainly the police officer overreacted when an innocent man became angry and called him a racist. Crowley let his pride decide whether the targeted man would be punished for expressing anger at being questioned for entering his own home.

The police tried to shift some of the blame for their actions to the woman who made the call, saying that she brought up the issue of the men being black. In fact, a tape of her call reveals that she did not even say the men were black when she was asked if they were black. I apologize to Lucia Whalen for being one of the bloggers who blamed her in some way for the fiasco. She is blameless; she was merely assisting another woman who brought the situation to her attention.

Crowley's weakness was being too hot-headed to walk away when an innocent man became furious at having the cops question him for being in his own home.

Would Mr. Gates have been reported to police if he had been white? A black man trying to get a door open in an upscale suburb may have looked like a criminal to the elderly woman who asked Lucia Whalen to call 911.

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Henry Louis Gates case: Should yelling at a cop be a crime?
Disorderly conduct charge gives police a lot of power
Chicago Tribune
By David G. Savage
Washington Bureau
July 25, 2009

WASHINGTON -- For some defense lawyers, the arrest of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was less about racial profiling than about how people can be arrested simply for speaking angry words to a police officer.

The laws against "disorderly conduct" give the police wide power to arrest people who are said to be disturbing the peace or disrupting a neighborhood. In Massachusetts and elsewhere, the courts have said the "disorderly acts or language" must take place in public where others can be disturbed.

It is probably not a crime of disorderly conduct for a homeowner, standing in his kitchen, to speak abusively to a police officer.

According to his police report, Sgt. James Crowley said the professor was "yelling very loud" and "accusing me of being a racist."

Complaining that the "acoustics of the kitchen" made it difficult to communicate, the officer said he "told Gates that I would speak with him outside."

On the porch, the officer arrested Gates for being loud and abusive in the presence of several neighbors on the sidewalk. The charges were later dropped.

[Maura Larkins comment: What a sneaky, manipulative tactic.]

"You might think that in the United States, you have a right to state an opinion, even an offensive opinion. But prosecutors like to say you don't have a right to mouth off to the police," said Samuel Goldberg, a Boston criminal defense lawyer.

"Gates was saying, 'You are hassling me because I'm black.' I understand how that's offensive to a police officer," Goldberg said. "It's astounding to me to call it criminal."

Matt Cameron, a criminal defense lawyer in East Boston, said the state's law against "disorderly conduct" dates to the 1600s.

"It's a handy tool for the police because it is so broad and confusing," he said...





Mass. Cops Point to Favoritism in Harvard Prof Case
By MICHELE McPHEE
ABC News
July 22, 2009

Police officers from across Massachusetts are raising questions about favoritism over the handling of disorderly conduct charges that were lodged and promptly dropped against prominent Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. refutes the police account of his arrest.

The incident began when Cambridge Police Sgt. Joseph Crowley Crowley had responded to a call about someone apparently trying to break into Gates' Cambridge, Mass., home. Crowley said Gates called him a "racist cop" after he arrived at the house and asked the Harvard professor for identification.

Gates refused after saying: "No I will not." Gates then, according to Crowley, said he was being harassed because he is a "black man in America." As the confrontation escalated, Crowley was then joined by a Hispanic Cambridge police officer and a black sergeant, according to two high-ranking law enforcement officials who have been briefed on the case and Cambridge police reports.

Gates was arrested and booked on a disorderly conduct charge.

"The actions of the Cambridge Police Department, and in particular, Sergeant Joseph Crowley, were one-hundred-percent correct,'' said Hugh Cameron, president of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police. "He was responding to a report of two men breaking into a home. The police cannot just drive by the house and say, 'looks like everything is ok.'

...Jim Carnell, a union representative for the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, said cops are "furious at the way Crowley is being vilified."...

"If Professor Gates was poor, he'd be in a jail cell."

[Maura Larkins comment: If Professor Gates were white, he'd never have been arrested. Does the police union approve of keeping poor people in jail for entering their own homes? I doubt that the DA does. I simply do not believe that the DA would prosecute such a case unless cops have some sort of ongoing understanding with the DA. If I were this cop, I'd have apologized and left, and I sure wouldn't have arrested the homeowner whose homecoming I had interrupted.]

...there are questions about the way the case was handled. David Frank, former prosecutor and a writer for Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, said it was "unusual" for a case to be "nul-processed" [charges dropped] without a court appearance. Gates was slated to be arraigned on disorderly conduct charges on Aug. 26. He is now demanding an apology from Crowley instead.

[Maura Larkins comment: I don't believe David Frank. I believe that what is unusual here is that a man was arrested as a result of entering his own house. No arraignment should have been scheduled.]

"Legally, the prosecution made the right call. The issue, though, is that if Gates were an electrician from Everett and not a well-known professor from Harvard the reality is in that in all likelihood he would have to defend himself against the charges in a courtroom," Frank said.

[Maura Larkins comment: Does Frank think it is right for a citizen, any citizen, to have to defend himself in court for entering his own home?]

..."I think what went wrong personally is that you had two human beings that were reacting to a set of circumstances, and unfortunately at the time cooler heads did not prevail," said Downes...

Gates, who according to his lawyer had been trying to force open a jammed door, was inside the house when the Cambridge police officer got there.

Asked about allegations that Gates' arrest was racially fueled, Downes said, "Our position is very firmly that race did not play any factor at all in the arrest of Mr. Gates."

[Maura Larkins comment: The next paragraph seems to contradict Downes' conclusion.]

The officers were sent to the house after a 911 call placed by a Lucia Whalen Thursday afternoon. Whalen, who works at Harvard Magazine, had reported that two "black men with backpacks" shouldered their way into a home on a tony, upscale Cambridge block – one of the leafy neighborhoods that ring the college.

Though Gates eventually identified himself, he was arrested after he allegedly came out of the house and continued yelling at police, even after he was warned that he "was becoming disorderly," according to the police report.

Gates, the director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and former host of the PBS show "African American Lives," had just returned from a trip to China and found the front door of his home jammed, according to his Harvard colleague and attorney Charles Ogletree.

He entered the house through the back door, but then tried to get the front door open so he could bring his luggage in, which may have been when the woman who called 911 saw, Ogletree said.




















Photo: Sgt. James Crowley
Photo by Christopher Evans Boston Herald

Cop in Scholar Arrest Is Profiling Expert
Officer Slams Obama for Saying Police 'Acted Stupidly'
By BOB SALSBERG,AP

NATICK, Mass. (July 23, 2009) -- The white police sergeant accused of racial profiling after he arrested renowned black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his home was hand-picked by a black police commissioner to teach recruits about avoiding racial profiling.

Friends and fellow officers — black and white — say Sgt. James Crowley is a principled police officer and family man who is being unfairly described as racist.

[I don't think this police officer is being accused of being racist. He's accused of overreacting when an innocent suspect became angry and called him a racist. There's a difference. Crowley let his pride decide whether the targeted man would be punished for expressing anger at being questioned for entering his own home. I think the racial profiling was done by the woman who reported a black man breaking into a house. Crowley's weakness was being too hot-headed to walk away when an innocent man became furious at having the cops question him for being in his own home.]

Cambridge (Mass.) Police Sgt. James Crowley, seen speaking to reporters Wednesday, said he followed police procedure in arresting black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. at Gates' Cambridge home. "There will be no apology," he said. On Thursday, it emerged that Crowley is a police academy expert on understanding racial profiling.

Cambridge (Mass.) Police Sgt. James Crowley, seen speaking to reporters Wednesday, said he followed police procedure in arresting Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. outside Gates' Cambridge home. "There will be no apology," he said.

"If people are looking for a guy who's abusive or arrogant, they got the wrong guy," said Andy Meyer, of Natick, who has vacationed with Crowley, coached youth sports with him and is his teammate on a men's softball team. "This is not a racist, rogue cop. This is a fine, upstanding man. And if every cop in the world were like him, it would be a better place."

Gates accused the 11-year department veteran of being an unyielding, race-baiting authoritarian after Crowley arrested and charged him with disorderly conduct last week.

Crowley confronted Gates in his home after a woman passing by summoned police for a possible burglary. The sergeant said he arrested Gates after the scholar repeatedly accused him of racism and made derogatory remarks about his mother, allegations the professor challenges. Gates has labeled Crowley a "rogue cop," demanded an apology and said he may sue the police department.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama elevated the dispute, when he said Cambridge Police "acted stupidly" during the encounter.

Obama stepped back on Thursday, telling ABC News, "From what I can tell, the sergeant who was involved is an outstanding police officer, but my suspicion is probably that it would have been better if cooler heads had prevailed."...

Crowley's encounter with Gates was not his first with a high-profile black man, although on the prior occasion he was lauded for his response.

He was a campus cop at Brandeis University in suburban Waltham when was summoned to the school gymnasium in July 1993 after Boston Celtics player Reggie Lewis collapsed of an apparent heart attack. Crowley, also a trained emergency medical technician, not only pumped the local legend's chest, but put his mouth to Lewis' own and attempted to breathe life back into the fallen athlete...

[Maura Larkins comment: I think it's pathetic that this incident is being touted as proof that Sgt. Crowley is not a racist: he did his job even though it required helping a black man. His only other option was to stand there and do nothing while the man died. Few human beings would do nothing. This simply proves that Crowley has some basic human decency. I'm sure he's a nice guy, but he's too proud and vindictive.]






Skip Gates Speaks
The Root
By: Dayo Olopade
July 21, 2009

In an interview with The Root, Henry Louis Gates Jr. talks about his arrest and the outrage of racial profiling in America.
07/21/2009

Henry Louis Gates Jr.: I’m outraged. I can’t believe that an individual policeman on the Cambridge police force would treat any African-American male this way, and I am astonished that this happened to me; and more importantly I’m astonished that it could happen to any citizen of the United States, no matter what their race. And I’m deeply resolved to do and say the right things so that this cannot happen again.

Of course, it will happen again, but … I want to do what I can so that every police officer will think twice before engaging in this kind of behavior.

TR: Can you describe, in your own words, what went on in and outside of your home? When did you suspect you were the victim of racial profiling?

HLG: I just finished making my new documentary series for PBS called “Faces of America.” It was a glorious week in Shanghai and Ningbo and Beijing, and on my trip, I took my daughter along. After we finished working in Ningbo we went to Beijing and had three glorious days as tourists. It was great fun.

We flew back on a direct flight from Beijing to Newark. We arrived on Wednesday, and on Thursday I flew back to Cambridge. I was using my regular driver and my regular car service. And went to my home arriving at about 12:30 in the afternoon. My driver and I carried several bags up to the porch, and we fiddled with the door and it was jammed. I thought, well, maybe the door’s latched. So I walked back to the kitchen porch, unlocked the door and came into the house. And I unlatched the door, but it was still jammed.

My driver is a large black man. But from afar you and I would not have seen he was black. He has black hair and was dressed in a two-piece black suit, and I was dressed in a navy blue blazer with gray trousers and, you know, my shoes. And I love that the 911 report said that two big black men were trying to break in with backpacks on. Now that is the worst racial profiling I’ve ever heard of in my life. (Laughs.) I’m not exactly a big black man. I thought that was hilarious when I found that out, which was yesterday.

It looked like someone’s footprint was there. So it’s possible that the door had been jimmied, that someone had tried to get in while I was in China. But for whatever reason, the lock was damaged. My driver hit the door with his shoulder and the door popped open. But the lock was permanently disfigured. My home is owned by Harvard University, and so any kind of repair work that’s needed, Harvard will come and do it. I called this person, and she was, in fact, on the line while all of this was going on.

I’m saying ‘You need to send someone to fix my lock.’ All of a sudden, there was a policeman on my porch. And I thought, ‘This is strange.’ So I went over to the front porch still holding the phone, and I said ‘Officer, can I help you?’ And he said, ‘Would you step outside onto the porch.’ And the way he said it, I knew he wasn’t canvassing for the police benevolent association. All the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I realized that I was in danger. And I said to him no, out of instinct. I said, ‘No, I will not.’

My lawyers later told me that that was a good move and had I walked out onto the porch he could have arrested me for breaking and entering. He said ‘I’m here to investigate a 911 call for breaking and entering into this house.’ And I said ‘That’s ridiculous because this happens to be my house. And I’m a Harvard professor.’ He says ‘Can you prove that you’re a Harvard professor?’ I said yes, I turned and closed the front door to the kitchen where I’d left my wallet, and I got out my Harvard ID and my Massachusetts driver’s license which includes my address and I handed them to him. And he’s sitting there looking at them.

Now it’s clear that he had a narrative in his head: A black man was inside someone’s house, probably a white person’s house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me.

So he’s looking at my ID, he asked me another question, which I refused to answer. And I said I want your name and your badge number because I want to file a complaint because of the way he had treated me at the front door. He didn’t say, ‘Excuse me, sir, is there a disturbance here, is this your house?’—he demanded that I step out on the porch, and I don’t think he would have done that if I was a white person.

But at that point, I realized that I was in danger. And so I said to him that I want your name, and I want your badge number and I said it repeatedly.

TR: How did this escalate? What are the laws in Cambridge that govern this kind of interaction? Did you ever think you were in the wrong?

HLG: The police report says I was engaged in loud and tumultuous behavior. That’s a joke. Because I have a severe bronchial infection which I contracted in China and for which I was treated and have a doctor’s report from the Peninsula hotel in Beijing. So I couldn’t have yelled. I can’t yell even today, I’m not fully cured.

It escalated as follows: I kept saying to him, ‘What is your name, and what is your badge number?’ and he refused to respond. I asked him three times, and he refused to respond. And then I said, ‘You’re not responding because I’m a black man, and you’re a white officer.’ That’s what I said. He didn’t say anything. He turned his back to me and turned back to the porch. And I followed him. I kept saying, “I want your name, and I want your badge number.”

It looked like an ocean of police had gathered on my front porch. There were probably half a dozen police officers at this point. The mistake I made was I stepped onto the front porch and asked one of his colleagues for his name and badge number. And when I did, the same officer said, ‘Thank you for accommodating our request. You are under arrest.’ And he handcuffed me right there. It was outrageous. My hands were behind my back I said, ‘I’m handicapped. I walk with a cane. I can’t walk to the squad car like this.’ There was a huddle among the officers; there was a black man among them. They removed the cuffs from the back and put them around the front.

A crowd had gathered, and as they were handcuffing me and walking me out to the car, I said, ‘Is this how you treat a black man in America?’

TR: What was the jail experience like? Was it humiliating?

HLG: By the time I was processed at the Cambridge jail, I was booked, fingerprinted, given a mug shot and answered questions. Outrageous is the only word that I can use. The system attempts to humiliate you. They took my belt; they took my wallet, they took my keys, some change; they counted my money. And I knew that because they said, ‘We’re going to release you upon your own recognizance, and the fine is $40, and we know you can pay it because we went through your wallet.’

It’s meant to be terrifying and humiliating. And I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me. And I said I can’t wait to get out, I am eager to talk to my lawyer, and they said they had to book me first. Then I was told that Charles Ogletree was in the building, and that he was there with three other Harvard professors—my friends Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Larry Bobo and Marcelina Lee Morgan.

I was in jail for four hours. I told them that I was claustrophobic, that I couldn’t be in this cell. And a very nice police officer said here are some of your friends and I could talk to them one at a time in the interview room until the magistrate came and signed the form allowing me to leave. I was there just between 1:00 p.m. and 5:15 p.m., which is an interminable amount of time. I spent the rest of the time in another room, slightly bigger, and my friends just had to sit there and wait. And it was kind of like a Senate filibuster; we had to tell stories in the prison cell.

TR: How has this resonated within the academic community at Harvard? I know that Larry Bobo and Charles Ogletree, also black men, have expressed dismay. President Barack Obama has talked about how difficult it is to hail a cab, even as an elected official. Is there an irony to your notoriety and the incident?

HLG: There is such a level of outrage that’s been expressed to me. I’ve received thousands of e-mails and Facebook messages; the blogs are going crazy; my colleagues at Harvard are outraged. Allen Counter called me from the Nobel Institute in Stockholm to express his outrage. But really it’s not about me—it’s that anybody black can be treated this way, just arbitrarily arrested out of spite. And the man who arrested me did it out of spite, because he knew I was going to file a report because of his behavior.

He didn’t follow proper police procedure! You can’t just presume I’m guilty and arrest me. He’s supposed to ask me if I need help. He just presumed that I was guilty, and he presumed that I was guilty because I was black. There was no doubt about that.

TR: What do you make of the suspicious neighbor who called the police with an erroneous report of “two black men” trying to enter your apartment? Was this neighborhood watch gone wrong?

HLG: I don’t know this person, and I’m sure that she thought she was doing the right thing. If I was on Martha’s Vineyard like I am now and someone was trying to break into my house, I would hope that someone called the police and that they would respond. But I would hope that the police wouldn’t arrest the first black man that they saw—especially after that person gives them an ID—and not rely on some trumped-up charge, which is what this man was doing.






The good news about the Henry Louis Gates fiasco

America's most prominent black intellectual was arrested trying to get into his own house. So why am I glad?

By James Hannaham
Salon
July 22, 2009

...this event will probably make members of the Cambridge Police Department and other P.D.s think twice before they arrest another black man. Imagine the confusion it will cause the po-po -- "Uh-oh. Is this brother a professor, too? What does Cornel West look like?” Maybe some ordinary, untenured black men in the street will get some much-deserved benefit of the doubt now...





Are Police to be Feared?
By Bill Bradshaw, Mission Beach
Voice of San Diego
July 31, 2009

Did anyone else notice the similarities between the current flap involving the Cambridge police and a "distinguished Harvard professor" and the incident a few weeks ago involving a local political fund raiser? Both resulted in allegations of police overreaction and poor judgment in handling seemingly innocent situations, but let's back off and look at the two incidents.

Both started with trouble calls to the police by neighbors. In each case, the responding officer was met with indignation by the person contacted, and rapidly escalated into charges, in one case, of "racial profiling" and in the other, of "right-wing politics". The motives of the responding officer were impugned before the facts were clear. We even had the President, to his discredit, weigh in on the latest case.

There's a simpler, less sinister, explanation. One of the first things a police officer is taught is to take charge of a situation, and to require compliance with his or her instructions in order determine just what's going on. When the officer, knowing nothing of what to expect save for a brief summary from the dispatcher, encounters a "big shot", rattling on about his or her civil rights, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the officer asserts authority, and if an audience is present, bad things can happen.

Let's give the cops a break. Police officers aren't college professors or wealthy political activists, they're public servants trying to do a tough job, who deal daily with the worst of society. Next time you encounter a cop, how about a friendly greeting and cooperation, instead of a recitation of rights?

COMMENTS

I agree that society is best served when citizens are friendly and respectful to police. Police, like the rest of us, function better when receiving positive reinforcement. But I disagree that police are doing us a favor just by doing their jobs. We taxpayers pay them for their contributions. If Professor Gates should have thanked Officer Crowley for reporting to work, then Officer Crowley should likewise have thanked Gates for helping to pay his salary. I'm afraid the chances of such a conversation was pretty close to zero in the two cases mentioned since it appears that the manner in which Officer Crowley and Deputy Marshall Abbott approached the individuals they later arrested was not conducive to a friendly exchange. There are some police, however, who do deserve an extra thank you: the ones who keep their emotions out of their decisions.

Posted by Maura Larkins

What happened in San Diego and Cambridge are less about racial profiliing and right-wing conspiracies then they are about a gap between police and citizens. Does the average person know their rights when being stopped by police? I'm not sure they do. I know police officers have a tough job and can never be certain what they are walking into on a call, but they have a higher duty to de-escalate a tricky situation precisely because we give them guns and handcuffs. The officer in the Cambridge situation had no reason to arrest Gates no matter what a jerk he was being. It's not a crime to be rude to police. The San Diego case is a little trickier because of the crowd of people. But I make no apologies for second guessing police in these situations. It's the only way to deter abuse of authority.

Posted by Catherine



A light-hearted look at the situation:

JULY 31, 2009
Obama Pronounces Beer Summit "Thoughtful" Except Biden
Opensalon.com

WASHINGTON, D.C. Eager to put a major distraction behind him, President Obama today pronounced yesterday's "beer summit" with Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and a Cambridge, Mass. policeman a "thoughtful" exchange except for the contributions of Vice President Joseph Biden, who crashed the event.

"All right--honey roasted peanuts!"

"America will never be able to have an honest and candid conversation about race until the Vice President shuts up about the freakin' Philadelphia Phillies," Obama said with ill-concealed annoyance to a White House pool reporter as he returned to the Oval Office...

Did Lowell Bruce fit in with police culture? I'll bet he did.

Why was wife-killer Lowell Bruce hired by the San Diego Sheriff's department?

A Questionable Hire
By Lee Hazer, Clairemont
Voice of San Diego
July 14, 2009

Despite having the knowledge that Bruce failed the psychological test twice, and being rejected by at least eight other law enforcement agencies, he was still ultimately hired by the Sheriff's Department, and went on to fatally shoot his wife, the plaintiff's complaint said.

The lawsuit alleges the Sheriff's Department of "careless and reckless hiring policies or practices led to the issuing of a gun to Bruce, which then led to the death of Kristin."

But according to Judge Houston there is no direct link between the county's screening process for hiring purposes and the death of Kristin.

The plaintiffs did not demonstrate that the shooting was "a plainly obvious consequence of the hiring decision," a threshold that was established in 1997 by the U.S. Supreme Court, Houston said."

Um..... The Sheriff's Department handed Bruce the murder weapon.



Maura Larkins' response:

Like most workplaces, I suspect the sheriff's department looks for employees who will "fit in" with the predominant culture of the staff. Quite possibly our sheriff's department rules out people who are too smart. (A court has found this practice to be legal.) Or maybe the applicant displaced by Lowell Bruce didn't like to drink. (See below.) I suspect that the sheriff's department could benefit from hiring some "different" types of people. People with different attitudes might help change the department for the better.

Drinking to fit in at the police academy

"The results showed that recruits socialize and drink more with colleagues after entering the Academy than they did pre Academy. The way recruits drank also changed during training with a tendency towards heavier drinking sessions. Further results indicated that recruits did feel some pressure to drink to fit in and be one of the crowd." (Page 3 of Does the Police Academy Change Your Life?)

"When asked what were some of pressures to drink in the Academy, 20% of recruits said peer pressure, 10% said to be one of the boys..."(Page 7 of Does the Police Academy Change Your Life?)



http://www.defendingthetruth.com/affirmative-action-race-issues/17917-judge-rules-police-can-bar-high-i-q-scores.html
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/4503/1/4503b.pdf
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/4503/1/4503b.pdf

Court says Police can refuse to hire applicants with high IQ scores

Judge Rules That Police Can Bar High I.Q. Scores
METRO NEWS BRIEFS: CONNECTICUT; Judge Rules That Police Can Bar High I.Q. Scores

A Federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by a man who was barred from the New London police force because he scored too high on an intelligence test.

In a ruling made public on Tuesday, Judge Peter C. Dorsey of the United States District Court in New Haven agreed that the plaintiff, Robert Jordan, was denied an opportunity to interview for a police job because of his high test scores. But he said that that did not mean Mr. Jordan was a victim of discrimination.
Judge Dorsey ruled that Mr. Jordan was not denied equal protection because the city of New London applied the same standard to everyone: anyone who scored too high was rejected.

Mr. Jordan, 48, who has a bachelor's degree in literature and is an officer with the State Department of Corrections, said he was considering an appeal. ''I was eliminated on the basis of my intellectual makeup,'' he said. ''It's the same as discrimination on the basis of gender or religion or race.'



http://www.defendingthetruth.com/affirmative-action-race-issues/17917-judge-rules-police-can-bar-high-i-q-scores.html

Google street scene solves Dutch crime

Dutch muggers caught on Google street view camera
June 19, 2009
Reuters

Dutch twin brothers who mugged a teenager in the northern town of Groningen were arrested after being caught on camera by a car gathering images for Google's online photo map service, police said.

The pair stole the 14-year-old boy's mobile phone and 165 euros ($230) in cash last September.

"The picture was taken just a moment before the crime," a police spokesman said.

In March, the victim recognized himself and the two robbers while surfing Google Maps, which has a "Street View" feature allowing users to see images of buildings. The images are usually taken by a camera mounted on a car.

After an investigation by the police, one of the 24-year-old twins confessed to robbing the boy. ($1=.7183 Euro) (Reporting by Harro ten Wolde)

Cops made up false accusations about brothers selling cocaine in Queens: who's in jail now?

Brothers Prove Cops Wrong With Video
By TOM HAYS and COLLEEN LONG
AP
June 13, 2009

When undercover detectives busted Jose and Maximo Colon last year for selling cocaine at a seedy club in Queens, there was a glaring problem: The brothers hadn't done anything wrong.

But proclaiming innocence wasn't going to be good enough. The Dominican immigrants needed proof.

The Story: Undercover police arrested two brothers for dealing cocaine at a New York night club. The officers claimed Maximo Colon, left, and his brother Jose sold two bags of cocaine to them. - The Truth: The brothers proved their innocence -- and laid the groundwork for a multimillion dollar lawsuit -- with a video from the club's security cameras.

"I sat in the jail and thought ... how could I prove this? What could I do?" Jose, 24, recalled in Spanish during a recent interview.

As he glanced around a holding cell, the answer came to him: Security cameras. Since then, a vindicating video from the club's cameras has spared the brothers a possible prison term, resulted in two officers' arrest and become the basis for a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.

The officers, who are due back in court June 26, have pleaded not guilty, and New York Police Department officials have downplayed their case.
But the drug corruption case isn't alone.

On May 13, another NYPD officer was arrested for plotting to invade a Manhattan apartment where he hoped to steal $900,000 in drug money. In another pending case, prosecutors in Brooklyn say officers were caught in a 2007 sting using seized drugs to reward a snitch for information. And in the Bronx, prosecutors have charged a detective with lying about a drug bust captured on a surveillance tape that contradicts her story.

Elsewhere, Philadelphia prosecutors dismissed more than a dozen drug and gun charges against a man last month when a narcotics officer was accused of making up information on search warrants...

LAPD detective charged 23 years after being named a suspect in slaying

Nels Rasmussen says he told LAPD detectives in 1986 that a jealous ex-girlfriend had broken into his daughter's condo and told her 'If I can't have John, nobody can,' in the days before her slaying.


Detective stalked slaying victim, father says
By Andrew Blankstein and Joel Rubin
June 10, 2009

Nels Rasmussen says he vividly remembers the calls from his daughter 23 years ago when she confided her fears that a jealous LAPD officer was out to harm her. She told him the young female officer had shown up in uniform at the hospital where she worked and issued a chilling warning about her husband, "If I can't have John, nobody can."

He remembers the call when his daughter told him that she had found the officer, again in uniform, standing in the Van Nuys condo she shared with her new husband, John Ruetten. Then there was the call, days before she was beaten and shot to death in 1986, when Sherri Rasmussen said she believed the officer had been following her on city streets.

All of this, Nels Rasmussen says, he told Los Angeles Police Department detectives in the days, months and years after his daughter's slaying. His information was ignored by police until this year when cold-case detectives reopened the homicide investigation. Last week his suspicions were validated when Det. Stephanie Lazarus was arrested and charged with capital murder. Police say Lazarus, who had dated Ruetten, killed Sherri Rasmussen in a crime of passion.

On Tuesday, as Lazarus made her first court appearance, Nels Rasmussen and his wife held a news conference, calling on the LAPD to investigate their belief that detectives overlooked glaring leads that pointed to Lazarus...





LA Police Detective Charged With Murder
By RAQUEL MARIA DILLON
AP


LOS ANGELES (June 8, 2009) - A veteran detective was charged with murder Monday in the slaying of her ex-boyfriend's wife in 1986 — a crime that went unsolved for more than two decades as she rose through the Los Angeles Police Department ranks.

Detective Stephanie Lazarus, 49, could be sentenced to death if convicted of breaking into the victim's condominium on Feb. 24, 1986, and repeatedly biting, beating and shooting the woman.

Police in Los Angeles charged a veteran detective in the 1986 murder of her ex-boyfriend's wife Monday. Stephanie Lazarus, here in court Tuesday, could face the death penalty if convicted of repeatedly biting, beating and shooting the woman. Lazarus was identified as a suspect through a recent DNA match of saliva taken from bite marks on the victim's body.

Lazarus, who joined the force in 1983, was identified as a suspect through a recent DNA match of saliva taken from bite marks on Sherri Rasmussen's body, said Deputy Chief Charlie Beck.

Lazarus' husband, Scott Young, who works as a detective in the San Fernando Valley, knew nothing about the slaying, Beck said.

"None of us blames him. I don't know if he's been interviewed yet, but he will be, as will a lot of people," he said.

Lazarus was not a suspect at the time of Rasmussen's death because detectives believed that two robbers who had attacked another woman in the victim's Van Nuys neighborhood were to blame.

The case file mentioned Lazarus because she had once dated the victim's husband, John Ruetten, but investigators did not pursue her as a suspect until DNA tests recently showed the attacker was a woman...

Police allegedly stand by as man is beaten to death in Northern Ireland

From The Times
May 26, 2009
Catholic man Kevin McDaid beaten to death 'by UDA gang'
David Sharrock, Ireland Correspondent

A Catholic community worker was beaten to death by men shouting that they were members of the Ulster Defence Association, his widow said today.

Evelyn McDaid, a Protestant who suffered serious head injuries when she tried to save her husband Kevin,spoke as police questioned nine men over the killing.

“UDA, they called themselves the UDA. I went across to help him and they beat me while they beat him,” she said.

“My neighbour had to step in to save me and she was pregnant and they beat her too and she shouted ‘I’m pregnant’ and they didn’t care.”


She added: “It was all to do with religion, and I’m not even a Catholic. I am a Protestant, it’s a mixed marriage, but they just seem to hate us so much.”

Mr McDaid, 49, was killed in Coleraine, Co Londonderry, on Sunday evening. Another man, Damien Fleming, 46, is in intensive care and his case is being treated by police as attempted murder.

Both men were targeted by separate gangs of up to 40 men who entered a mainly Catholic housing estate afterGlasgow Rangers won the Scottish Premier League.

Mrs McDaid appealed for the Catholic community not to respond to the attacks.

“He wouldn’t want retaliation for it,” she said.

“He wouldn’t want my sons to get hurt, he wouldn’t want this. He was trying to keep the peace, he didn’t want all this, the nonsense that’s been going on here for years and years. He wanted peace.”

Mr McDaid, a former plasterer, had three sons and a foster son. His widow said that the family’s life had been shattered.

“My life’s over,” she said. “A big part of me is missing now. He was my soulmate and now that’s finished. I have to try to go on for the wee foster boy and my other three sons. I have to try and go on but I’ve lost a very big part of me and I can never replace that, never ever.”

Celtic scarves have been tied on railings and flowers left close to the scene of the savage attack.

Ryan McDaid, one of the dead man’s sons, claimed that police stood by and did nothing during the attack. “The police sat and watched as Dad died, they never moved,” he said.

“There were four police officers in a car and they sat and watched from Pates Lane. They never moved, never came, never helped.

“Before I rang the police on my mobile I was shouting at them [the police in the waiting patrol car]. They didn’t want to know, they were 100 yards away. They saw the whole thing and did nothing.

“He died in my arms, dad was staggering up the road, he had gone out to help Damien. Damien was getting beaten and I rang the police on my mobile. Four or five times I rang 999. They said they were coming.

“When dad staggered up and he fell I was trying to bring him around again and I rang the ambulance on my mobile as he was in my arms. Police arrived in a van and ran up and gave Dad CPR but it was too little too late.”

Mr McDaid said that the family would be taking the matter to the Police Ombudsman’s Office.

A police spokesman said that all the circumstances surrounding Mr McDaid’s death were being thoroughly investigated.

San Diego's justice system has a problem: a cop who hid evidence tapes for eight years

DA Reviews Cases After Taped Cop Interviews Found
May 19, 2009
Channel 8 San Diego and Associated Press

OCEANSIDE, Calif. (AP) - San Diego County prosecutors are trying to determine how many criminal cases could be affected by the discovery of a stash of taped suspect interviews going back as far as 2001.

Public Defender Steve Carroll said Tuesday that Oceanside Officer Damon Smith taped interviews for eight years but never turned them in as evidence.

Defense attorneys were unaware of the tapes' existence until they were notified earlier this month by the district attorney's office.

The tapes came to light in April when Smith was testifying in a domestic violence case.

Carroll says Smith's motive is unclear...

The discovery was originally reported by the North County Times.

Arizona police versus free speech

Arizona v. Pataky
Citizen Media Legal Project
Posted April 9th, 2009 by David Ardia

Threat Type: Criminal Date: 03/09/2009
Legal Claims: Harassment; Theft

Party Issuing Legal Threat:
State of Arizona, Maricopa County

Party Receiving Legal Threat:
Jeff Pataky


Description
In March 2009, Phoenix police raided the home of Jeff Pataky, a blogger who runs Bad Phoenix Cops, a blog that has been highly critical of the Phoenix Police Department. According to The Arizona Republic, Pataky's home was raided by ten Phoenix police officers who handcuffed his girlfriend for three hours while they conducted the raid. "We have heard internally from our police sources that they purposefully did this to stop me," Pataky told the Republic. "They took my cable modem and wireless router. Anyone worth their salt knows nothing is stored in the cable modem."

The search warrant lists petty theft and computer tampering with the intent to harass as potential crimes. Pataky, who was away on a business trip when the raid occurred, says he has yet to see an affidavit that explains why they had probable cause to conduct the raid.

The search warrant provides little insight into what police believe Pataky has done. It does, however, mention repeatedly that police were to search for personal correspondence between Pataky and "Dave Barnes." According to The Arizona Republic, Barnes is a former Phoenix homicide detective who went public in 2007 with claims of mismanaged evidence at the city's crime lab. In May 2009, Barnes' home also was raided by police due to his alleged "involvement in what some officers perceived to be a connection to a blog critical of the police leaders," the Republic reported at the time.

Carlos Miller, who runs the Photography is Not a Crime Blog, is reporting that Pataky recently filed a lawsuit over the raid, which netted three computers, routers, modems, hard drives, memory cards and everything necessary to continue blogging. Pataky told Miller that he has not let the raid stop him from blogging, however, "They thought they were going to scare us into a corner but they just made us stronger."

Innocent man jailed for 11 years forgives his accuser

Jennifer Thompson is a truly moral person who is bravely accepting responsibility for identifying the wrong man in a police lineup.


Mark Hansen, Forensic Science: Scoping out eyewitness Ids, 87 A.B.A.J. 39, April, 2001.

Nobody understands better than Jennifer Thompson how unreliable eyewitness evidence can be. Except maybe for Ronald Cotton.

Thompson is a North Carolina rape victim whose eyewitness identification of a suspect put the wrong man in prison for life. Twice.

Cotton is the innocent man who spent 11 years of his life in prison because of Thompson's mistake. And he might still be behind bars today if he hadn't been watching the O.J. Simpson trial on television in prison in 1995 and heard about a test for DNA.

Thompson, now the 38-year-old mother of triplets, was a 22-year-old college student in 1984 when someone broke into her apartment, put a knife to her throat and raped her.

Several days later, she went to the police station and picked Cotton's photo out of a lineup. She also picked him out of a physical lineup and identified him as her assailant at his 1985 trial.

"I was absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt certain he was the man who raped me when I got on that witness stand and testified against him," Thompson recalls now. "And nobody was going to tell me any different."

Two years later, though, Cotton won a new trial where there was testimony about another man, a fellow inmate who had reportedly told other prisoners he had committed the rape for which Cotton had been convicted.

But the man denied it on the witness stand. And Thompson testified that she had never seen the other man before in her life.

Nine years later, Cotton was watching the Simpson trial unfold on TV when he heard about a miraculous new test that could prove his innocence. So he asked to be tested.

And when the results came back, Thompson got the shock of her life. Cotton was innocent. It was his fellow inmate, the man she swore she had never seen before, who had raped her.

"I felt like my whole world had been turned upside down, like I had betrayed everybody, including myself," Thompson says.

But experts say they aren't surprised by her story. Mistaken eyewitness identification is the No. 1 cause of wrongful convictions, they say.

Cotton isn't angry. In fact, he and Thompson have since become friends. "You can't forget, but you can forgive," he says.

But he also counts his blessings every day. And thanks God for DNA. "If it weren't for that, I wouldn't be where I am today," he says.

Did police belief in discredited lie detector test cause them to let Chandra Levy's killer go free?

Arrest Near in Killing of Chandra Levy, Authorities Say
New York Times
By IAN URBINA
February 21, 2009

Police officials here are close to making an arrest in the killing of Chandra Levy, the former federal government intern whose disappearance in 2001 ended Gary A. Condit’s Congressional career after his relationship with her was revealed, several law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation said on Saturday.

Law enforcement officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because charges had not been filed, identified the suspect as Ingmar Guandique, 27, a Salvadoran immigrant who has previously denied any involvement in Ms. Levy’s disappearance and killing.

Ms. Levy’s killing is one of Washington’s most sensational unsolved crimes and has brought intense pressure on the Police Department. Ms. Levy disappeared on May 1, 2001, and more than a year passed before her body was found in Rock Creek Park in Washington.

Mr. Guandique pleaded guilty to assault in September 2001 in two cases involving attacks on women in the park in May and July 2001. He is now serving a 10-year sentence at a federal prison in Adelanto, Calif., and is eligible for parole in 2011.

The police recently submitted new evidence to the United States attorney’s office after an inmate serving time with Mr. Guandique contacted them, law enforcement officials said. The inmate said Mr. Guandique told him he had killed Ms. Levy, the sources said.

In the initial investigation, Mr. Guandique told the police that he had seen Ms. Levy in the park, but that he had not harmed her. The police called Mr. Guandique a “person of interest,” but said he had passed a polygraph test...

Innocent man died in prison; real rapist is "sorry"

Justice Finally Served
Harry Cabluck, AP
Feb. 7, 2009

A man who died in prison while serving time for a rape he didn't commit was cleared Friday by a judge who called the state's first posthumous DNA exoneration "the saddest case" he'd ever seen.

Calling it "the saddest case" he'd ever seen, a judge exonerates Timothy Cole, who was convicted of rape in 1985. DNA evidence helped clear Cole -- and pointed to Jerry Wayne Johnson instead. Here, Johnson walks into a Texas courtroom on Friday, past a portrait of Cole. This was the first case in Texas history where DNA cleared someone who had died in prison.

Cole was convicted of raping a Texas Tech University student in Lubbock in 1985 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He died in 1999 at age 39 from asthma complications.

DNA tests in 2008 connected the crime to Jerry Wayne Johnson, who is serving life in prison for separate rapes. Johnson testified in court Friday that he was the rapist in Cole's case and asked the victim and Cole's family to forgive him.

"I'm responsible for all this. I'm truly sorry for my pathetic behavior and selfishness. I hope and pray you will forgive me," Johnson said.

The Innocence Project of Texas said Cole's case was the first posthumous DNA exoneration in state history...

Cole and his relatives for years claimed he was innocent, but no one believed them until evidence from the original rape kit was tested for DNA. Cole had refused to plead guilty before trial in exchange for probation, and while in prison, he refused to admit to the crime when it could have earned him release on parole.

The Innocence Project pressed for a hearing to start the process of clearing Cole's name. Cole's family now wants Gov. Rick Perry to issue a formal pardon.

Former Cop Suspected in Shootings Dies

Former Cop Suspected in Shootings Dies
By DANNY ROBBINS, AP
Dec. 23, 2008

...A former Utah state trooper suspected in a series of roadway shootings earlier this week died on Christmas Eve, a hospital official said. Dallas police said they believe Brian Smith, above, killed at least one of the victims in a series of apparent random rush-hour shootings near Dallas. Smith shot and injured himself after a standoff with police.

The 37-year-old had been in critical condition on life support from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Police say he shot himself in the head after a brief standoff early Tuesday, more than six hours after the roadway shooting spree ended...

Dallas police Lt. Craig Miller said authorities were working to confirm that Smith was the gunman in separate shooting deaths minutes apart Monday on a Garland street and a Dallas interstate.

Earlier Wednesday, police shut down the freeway to re-examine the scene of one of several of the shootings.

Officials said both police departments were waiting for ballistics tests to come back for possible matches of bullet casings...

Warrants for Smith's arrest had been issued in the Fort Worth suburb of Southlake, where authorities have obtained evidence linking him to two robberies in the past eight days. Both incidents involved thefts in which purses were stolen from women in vehicles parked at businesses near where Smith lived.

Police have tied Smith to the incidents through witness identification and video of him using a credit card belonging to one of the victims, Southlake police spokesman Mike Bedrich said.

Smith moved to Keller with his wife and children last spring, just months after his conduct came under scrutiny from the Utah Highway Patrol. His peace officer certification was revoked after he went on a drinking binge and threatened to kill himself.

In Utah, where Smith's problems as a trooper are just now coming to light, he's remembered as a good father who never lost his temper and coached youth soccer and basketball.

"This is a shock for everyone who knows Brian," said Michael Peterson, Smith's former bishop in the Mormon church. "Obviously, he was struggling with some things. But the Brian Smith that everyone around here knows would never have done any of these things."

In this case, independent thinking worked better than blind obedience

21 December 2008
Deaths from Mumbai 'police error'
By Adam Mynott
BBC News, Mumbai

...A prominent Mumbai gynaecologist, Dr Prashant Mangeshikar, was trapped in the Taj Mahal hotel along with hundreds of other guests as gunmen stormed into the building, firing indiscriminately.

Terrified, he and others barricaded themselves into a room and waited.

Eventually, in the early hours of the morning, police officers made it through to where they were hiding and told people it was safe to leave the hotel because the gunmen were cornered on another floor.

Some went ahead but Dr Mangeshikar held back.

"I was a little suspicious that the police were actually sending these guys down a different route where the terrorists were supposed to be," he said.

"I refused to move away and the people who ran ahead of me, about 20 or 30 of them, all of them died."

A dress designer from the city says her aunt was shot dead and her cousin seriously wounded because they followed police instructions to try to leave.

The designer, Shilpa, described the police conduct as disgraceful.

They had no right, she said, to risk people's lives...

Anthony Pellicano gets 15 years for using illegal snooping to help clients gain advantage in court

Pellicano Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison
New York Times
By BROOKS BARNES
December 15, 2008

LOS ANGELES — Anthony Pellicano, a private investigator whose client list once included many Hollywood stars, was sentenced on Monday to 15 years in prison for his role in an illegal wiretapping enterprise.

The sentence, from Judge Dale S. Fischer of Federal District Court, was in line with what prosecutors had recommended. Mr. Pellicano, 64, already in custody, was found guilty in two different trials earlier this year on 78 charges, including wiretapping, racketeering and wire fraud. He and his two co-defendants were also ordered to pay a fine of $2 million...

The investigation of Mr. Pellicano began when an entertainment journalist, Anita M. Busch, was threatened in June 2002 by an associate of the private investigator after she wrote damaging articles about Michael S. Ovitz, once a prominent talent agent.

The investigation into the threat, which uncovered Mr. Pellicano’s wiretapping, seized Hollywood’s imagination with courtroom testimony revealing stars like Chris Rock as the beneficiaries of Mr. Pellicano’s illicit trade and other stars like Sylvester Stallone the victims. Ultimately, however, few industry players were charged.

Mr. Pellicano still must contend with a number of civil lawsuits that were delayed during the criminal proceedings. Those cases largely involve victims of wiretapping seeking damages for incidents in which private conversations were recorded.

Ms. Busch spoke at the sentencing, bitterly outlining the suffering that she said Mr. Pellicano caused her. “I no longer had my career, my peace of mind,” she said...

Wiretapper Anthony Pellicano gets 15 years

Update: Mr. Pellicano received a 15-year sentence.


Private eye faces sentencing in wiretapping case
Victims tell judge Pellicano's actions affected their lives
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 15, 2008

LOS ANGELES – Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano isn't the only person imprisoned as a result of his wiretaps of the rich and famous. His victims say they have never been able to free themselves from the emotional and financial fallout caused by his crimes.

A former reporter says she has nightmares about being hunted and raped. A mother copes with her daughter being mocked by other kids and their parents. An actress who once appeared in a popular television series says she has found little work since.

They are among the victims who submitted letters to the federal judge who is scheduled to sentence Pellicano today. The former private investigator is in custody after being convicted of a total of 78 counts, including wiretapping, racketeering and wire fraud, in two separate trials this year.

Federal prosecutors have recommended in court documents that Pellicano, 64, serve nearly 16 years in prison for running a criminal enterprise and becoming a “high-priced thief who fraudulently obtained prominence through the harm that he wantonly inflicted on others.”

Their letters give a glimpse into the anger, disgust and hardship his victims say they have endured since Pellicano combed through their lives.

Former Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch says she no longer is a journalist and has nightmares about being hunted because of the harassment she faced from Pellicano. Busch found a dead fish with a rose in its mouth on her car, along with a sign reading “stop,” in June 2002 after she wrote a series of unflattering articles about one-time superagent Michael Ovitz, a Pellicano client.

Lisa Bonder Kerkorian, the former wife of billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, said her privacy has been destroyed. Prosecutors said Pellicano and Kerkorian's attorney, Terry Christensen, bugged her phone conversations to disprove her claims that the MGM mogul was the father of her young daughter. DNA tests later showed movie producer Steve Bing was the biological father.

Christensen was convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wiretapping and sentenced to three years in prison.

Bonder Kerkorian said her daughter “has faced cruel comments, sly whispers and been openly ridiculed by students and parents at her school.”

Linda Doucett, who was a regular on “The Larry Sanders Show,” also chimed in, saying in her letter she has been unable to work as an actress and support herself and her son since taking part in a lawsuit filed by her former boyfriend, comedian Garry Shandling, against his former talent manager Brad Grey, now the head of the Paramount studio. Pellicano worked for Grey on the suit.

In late 2003, she said she received a call threatening her son's safety from someone she presumed to be Pellicano. Prosecutors never proved Pellicano or someone at his direction was the caller.

[But cops would never snoop illegally for private reasons, would they? They would. For four years Santa Barbara Sheriff Commander Sam Gross has been protecting deputy Michael Carlson for very similar activities to those of Anthony Pellicano.]

Police Chief indicted in boy's machine gun death

Police Chief Indicted for Boy's Uzi Death
By STEPHANIE REITZ, AP
Associated Press
SPRINGFIELD, Mass.
Dec. 4, 2008

Three men, including a small-town police chief, were indicted Thursday on involuntary manslaughter counts in the gun-fair death of an 8-year-old who accidentally shot himself in the head with an Uzi that a prosecutor said he never should have been allowed to handle.

The club where the fair was held also was charged. The fair had promised shooters would have certified instructors in an advertisement, but District Attorney William Bennett said the child, Christopher Bizilj, was supervised by an uncertified 15-year-old boy.

As his father watched, 8-year-old Christopher Bizilj died after accidentally shooting himself with an Uzi gun at a Massachusetts gun fair in October. A police chief and the men who brought the gun to the demonstration were indicted for involuntary manslaughter and other charges on Thursday.

Christopher, of Ashford, Conn., lost control of the 9mm micro submachine gun as it recoiled while he was firing at a pumpkin Oct. 26 at the Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo at the Westfield Sportsman's Club in western Massachusetts.
Pelham Police Chief Edward Fleury was charged because he owns the sponsor of the gun fair, COP Firearms & Training...

Bennett said prosecutors know of at least four children, including Christopher, who fired automatic weapons at the fair. He added that Fleury had wrongly assured Guiffre and Spano that it was legal for children to use the Uzi under Massachusetts law...

"It's all legal & fun — No permits or licenses required!!!!" reads the ad, posted on the club's Web site...

The ad also said children under 16 would be admitted free, and both adults and children were offered free .22-caliber pistol and rifle shooting.

Christopher's father was 10 feet behind him and reaching for his camera when the child fired the weapon.

Bennett said Charles Bizilj (pronounced bah-SEAL') had selected the compact weapon for his 4-foot-3, 66-pound son to fire after he was assured it was safe. He had thought the Uzi's small size made it safer, but the opposite was true, the prosecutor said.

"Although it might appear a heavier or longer weapon would be more dangerous, the small size of the weapon together with the rapid rate of fire made it more likely that an 8-year-old would lose control and the muzzle of the weapon would come close to his face, which is what happened here," he said.

The father was not charged because he was a layman and based his decision on information from others who should have known it was too dangerous, Bennett said. The 15-year-old boy who was supervising Christopher with the Uzi also will not be charged, he added...

Time to end dangerous and costly practice of regular police overtime

Here's the Voice of San Diego discussion of a fatigued San Diego police officer who accidentally killed his canine partner.

Deputy who killed wife finally gets his plea deal: 15 years

By Ray Huard
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
September 11, 2008

SAN DIEGO COURTS – A former sheriff's deputy who shot and killed his wife during a fight in their Alpine home with their 4-year-old son in the room was sentenced to 15 years in prison yesterday...

Lowell Bruce was given the maximum sentence allowed by law after pleading guilty in August 2007 to voluntary manslaughter for the December 2006 death of Kristin Maxwell-Bruce, San Diego Superior Court Judge Michael D. Wellington said.

It took more than a year and three judges to finally impose the sentence.

Bruce, a deputy since 1998, initially was charged with murder. But in July 2007 prosecutors and defense lawyers proposed a deal under which he would plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter and get a 15-year prison sentence.

El Cajon Superior Court Judge Herbert J. Exarhos rejected the deal, saying it raised questions about whether Bruce was getting special treatment because of his job in law enforcement.

A second judge, Allan J. Preckel, later agreed to it but then changed his mind, saying he wanted the discretion to sentence Bruce to a longer or shorter term. In June, Preckel was removed from the case for what an Orange County judge said was an appearance of bias against Bruce, and the case was assigned to Wellington.

Tom Condit and Chandra Levy: mirror images in Egypt?

Could the following story happen in America? It could, but it hasn't.


By HADEEL AL-SHALCHI
AP
Sept. 2, 2008
CAIRO, Egypt
An Egyptian lawmaker and business tycoon was arrested Tuesday in the death of a Lebanese pop singer, Egypt's chief prosecutor said, accusing the man of paying a former police officer $2 million to kill her.

Hisham Talaat, a lawmaker from the ruling party of President Hosni Mubarak, is accused of ordering the death of 30-year-old Suzanne Tamim, who was found decapitated in her Dubai apartment in July, chief prosecutor Abdel-Maguid Mahmoud told The Associated Press...

Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife Trinity Tomsic were victims of a mistaken police raid last week

My guess is that the police chief belonged to a different political party than Mayor Calvo. My opinion is, of course, influenced by watching San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis and her henchman Patrick O'Toole conduct political prosecutions for the past couple of years.

Police chief expresses regret over drug raid
By Gus G. Sentementes
Baltimore Sun
August 9, 2008

Prince George's County police Chief Melvin C. High said yesterday that a suburban Washington mayor and his wife were "innocent victims of drug traffickers" and expressed regret for the loss of the couple's dogs during a raid on his home last week.

Meanwhile, the FBI has opened an investigation into the actions of the county police officers who burst into the house of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo and shot the dogs. Calvo and his mother-in-law were handcuffed after the officers mistakenly suspected he was involved in shipping marijuana to his home.

Special Agent Richard Wolf, a spokesman for the FBI's Baltimore field office, said the agency has opened a civil rights investigation upon the request of Calvo...

The innocent bystander turned out to be the perpetrator

Bruce Ivins was able to shift suspicions to Steven Hatfill.


In Anthrax Case, Hindsight Shifts View of Ivins Actions to Aid Probe Appear Now As Cover-Up
By ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON and SIOBHAN GORMAN
August 9, 2008

Bruce Ivins...took an overdose of painkillers and died in an apparent suicide last week. The FBI said the government scientist was close to being charged in 2001's deadly anthrax attacks.

One night in autumn 2001, as the U.S. reeled from the worst act of bioterrorism in its history, Bruce Ivins was alone in his cluttered Fort Detrick, Md., office, scrubbing phones, walls and furniture.

For colleagues, this was proof of the anthrax scientist's attention to safety. From a distance of seven years, it might be evidence of his guilt.

Like the detective in Agatha Christie's play "Mousetrap" who turned out to be the murderer, Dr. Ivins played a haunting dual role in the anthrax mystery, federal law-enforcement agents say. He was part of the team that examined the poisoned letters. Investigators say he implicated other scientists and submitted incomplete samples to throw them off-track...

20-year-old kills self after police say, "Are you a coward?"

video
Oceanside police accused of negligence after man's suicide

Personality of a killer: church-going, jolly family man

How can you tell who will become a killer?

The answer is surprising in the case of the man suspected of sending anthrax powder in the US mail in 2001.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/us/02scientist.html?em#
New York Times
By SARAH ABRUZZESE and ERIC LIPTON
August 2, 2008
FREDERICK, Md. — Bruce E. Ivins arrived last month for a group counseling session at a psychiatric center here in his hometown with a startling announcement: Facing the prospect of murder charges, he had bought a bulletproof vest and a gun as he contemplated killing his co-workers at the nearby Army research laboratory...

To some of his longtime colleagues and neighbors, it was a startling and inexplicable turn of events for a churchgoing, family-oriented germ researcher known for his jolly disposition — the guy who did a juggling act at community events and composed satiric ballads he played on guitar or piano to departing co-workers.

“He did not seem to have any particular grudges or idiosyncrasies,” said Kenneth W. Hedlund, a retired physician who once worked alongside Dr. Ivins at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick. “He was the last person you would have suspected to be involved in something like this.”

Hatfill was innocent; suspected anthrax killer Ivins kills himself

Anthrax Suspect Commits Suicide
By MATT APUZZO and LARA JAKES JORDAN, AP

Federal prosecutors investigating the 2001 anthrax attacks were planning to indict and seek the death penalty against a top Army microbiologist in connection with anthrax mailings that killed five people...

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins...killed himself this week.

...prosecutors were closing in on Ivins, 62. They were planning an indictment that would have sought the death penalty for the attacks, which killed five people, crippled the postal system and traumatized a nation still reeling from the Sept. 11 attacks.

Authorities were investigating whether Ivins released the anthrax as a way to test his vaccine, officials said.

...Russell Byrne, a colleague who worked in the bacteriology division of the Fort Detrick research facility ...said Ivins was forcefully removed from his job by local police recently because of fears that he had become a danger to himself or others. The investigation led to Ivins being hospitalized for depression earlier this month, Byrne said.

...The Los Angeles Times, which first reported that Ivins was under suspicion, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.
...
In late June, the government exonerated a colleague of Ivins', Steven Hatfill...

Los Angeles tried to create scapegoats in the Ramparts scandal

HARPER v. CITY OF LOS ANGELES

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

No. 06-55519
D.C. No. CV-03-00959-CJC
Filed July 14, 2008
Before: Jerome Farris and Richard A. Paez, Circuit Judges,
and Frederic Block,* District Judge.
Opinion by Judge Paez

COUNSEL
Edward J. Horowitz, Office of Edward J. Horowitz, Pacific
Palisades, California; Dale B. Goldfarb, Harrington, Foxx,
Dubrow & Canter, Los Angeles, California, for the
defendants-appellants.
Jeffrey Isaac Ehrlich, The Ehrlich Law Firm, Claremont, California;
Joseph Y. Avrahamy, Law Offices of Joseph Y.
Avrahamy, Encino, California; Etan Z. Lorant, Law Offices
of Etan Z. Lorant, Encino, California, for the plaintiffsappellees.

OPINION
PAEZ, Circuit Judge:

This case arises from the Los Angeles Police Department’s
(“LAPD”) investigation and prosecution of three former
police officers, Paul Harper, Brian Liddy, and Edward Ortiz.
These officers were implicated in wrongdoing by former
LAPD officer Rafael Perez in an event that came to be known
as the “Rampart Scandal”—an event that, based on Perez’s
own unlawful conduct and his allegations of corruption at the
Rampart Division, launched an internal investigation that ultimately
implicated scores of police officers, overturned dozens
of convictions, and generated intense media scrutiny. The
criminal charges against these officers resulted in acquittals.
Harper, Liddy, and Ortiz (the “Officers”) subsequently
brought suit against a number of actors, including Perez, the
district attorneys, the City of Los Angeles, and former Chief
of Police Bernard Parks for violations of their constitutional
civil rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, contending among other
claims that the defendants had conducted an improper and
negligent investigation, and that they had been arrested without
probable cause for falsifying a police report and conspiring
to file such a report.

The Officers’ claims against the County of Los Angles,
District Attorney Gil Garcetti, Rafael Perez, and Deputy District
Attorneys Laesecke and Ingalls were dismissed on Federal
Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) motions or motions for
summary judgment, and the case proceeded to trial against the
City of Los Angeles and Chief Parks (“the City”). After an
eleven-day trial, the jury returned a special verdict in favor of
the Officers, finding that the Officers’ constitutional rights
were violated by the City and by Chief Parks in his official
capacity.1 The jury awarded each officer compensatory damages
in the amount of $5,000,001. The City thereupon filed a
number of post-judgment motions, including a renewed
motion under Rule 50(b) for judgment as a matter of law. The
district court denied the motions, and the City appealed. We
affirm. “[W]e do not lightly cast aside the solemnity of the
jury’s verdict.” Graves v. City of Coeur D’Alene, 339 F.3d
828, 844 (9th Cir. 2003). Both the jury’s verdict and the jury’s
damages award are supported by substantial evidence. We
also affirm the district court’s challenged evidentiary rulings.
Because we affirm both the verdict and the district court’s
determination on the post-judgment motions, we also affirm
the district court’s award for attorney’s fees under 42 U.S.C.
§ 1988.2

Cops get hysterical, falsely claim cookies laced with drugs

An innocent 18-year-old spent a night in jail because police got the idea that the cookies he delivered were laced with drugs, then claimed that they had evidence to prove their hunch. It turned out that the deliveries were part of a court-ordered community service program.

Here is a story that was published BEFORE tests proved the cookies were clean.

July 10, 2008
By DAN X. McGRAW
The Dallas Morning News
dmcgraw@dallasnews.com

Police officers in Blue Mound didn't think much of the cookies dropped off at their station Monday night – until they got a whiff of them.

Overpowering the chocolate chips was the pungent smell of marijuana, police said. [Note: this turned out to be a figment of the police officers' imaginations.]

"It reeked of it," said Lt. Thomas Cain, a Blue Mound police spokesman. "It wasn't hard to tell. Anyone that's been around marijuana before would have known."

Christian Phillips Christian Phillips, 18, of Watauga was arrested Tuesday after authorities said he tried to deliver a batch of cookies that later tested positive for LSD to the nearby Lake Worth police station...

The cookies, which tested positive for marijuana [note: this report was later proved false], were not eaten by anyone in Blue Mound, he said...

Police arrested Mr. Phillips around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday when he attempted to drop off cookies in Lake Worth, officers said...

Did false accusations in anthrax case lead to failure to find perpetrator?

One of the problems with false accusations is that they tend to stop investigations from going in the right direction.
Washington Post
June 28, 2008

Doctor Who Was Target in U.S. Anthrax Probe, Wins Multimillion Dollar Settlement

The physician and bio-researcher who the U.S. Justice department identified as a "person of interest" in the bizarre series of anthrax incidents that killed 5 people beginning in 2001 has settled his lawsuit against the government.

TheNew York Timesreports that Dr. Steven Hatfill will receive almost $3 million in cash and an additional $150,000 annually for the next 20 years to settle a lawsuit he filed in 2003, charging the FBI and U.S. Justice Department with leaking information to the news media in order to link him to the mailing of letters that contained anthrax spores.

Hatfill has consistently denied having anything to do with the anthrax incidents, in which five people died after inhaling the spore particles and another 17 were hospitalized, in 2001 and 2002.


U.S. Justice Department officials have never explained why Hatfill was such a prominent figure in the investigation, and a government statement said only that the government admitted no liability but decided settlement was "in the best interest of the United States," the newspaper reported.

Border Patrol Corruption Increasing

What's the point in building a fence when our own agents allow illegal entry at the main gate?

Why didn't Biloxi jail fire violent guard Ryan Teale?

Why didn't Biloxi jail fire violent guard Ryan Teale? Because prison guards were taught to cover up wrongdoing.

CNN.com
Anderson Cooper

Justice system in New Orleans: What's wrong with this system?

Anderson Cooper reports on CNN regarding the soaring murder rate in New Orleans:

"Witnesses are either missing or unwilling to cooperate. Last year, nearly half the murder suspects walked free because by law, prosecutors have just 60 days to make their case before a judge. Time is simply running out.

(on camera) What's actively being done at this point to try and repair the justice system so the killing will stop?

NAGIN: Everything. Everything is being done, from more resources, more dollars, more manpower, more police officers. We've got the federal government involved.

KAYE: why then is the number of homicides going up instead of down? Who should be held accountable? Everyone is pointing fingers.

Police blame the district attorney for not prosecuting cases quickly enough. The district attorney blames police for holding onto case files and letting witnesses slip away. And the mayor, he accuses the district attorney of encouraging lawlessness and dropping charges against dangerous criminals.

(voice-over) Like this guy, Michael Anderson, who says he's innocent. District attorney Eddie Jordan just last week dropped five counts of first degree murder against him for the deaths of five teenagers. Jordan's office claimed it couldn't find a key witness. So how did police manage to the next day?

(on camera) Certainly a lot of people are pointing fingers at your office. Who do you think is at fault here?

EDDIE JORDAN, ORLEANS PARISH DISTRICT ATTORNEY: Well, let me say, first of all, that I am not going to take the blame for all the sins of the criminal justice system. Certainly, we have our shortcomings. But we're working on our shortcomings.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0707/27/acd.01.html

When the justice system befriends child molesters

CNN.com
Anderson Cooper

"...You're paying for the criminal justice system. We all are. And you're counting on it to keep you safe and uphold the principles you believe in. The truth is, though, it doesn't always work that way.

Money is wasted. Bad guys go free. Decent people get hurt, and government sometimes gets away with it.

This hour is about holding people accountable.

Tonight, we will look at how a man accused of raping a child could go free, perhaps never to be tried again, because the prosecution could not find him a qualified interpreter. It only took us a few hours on the phone to find one.

And it gets worse. He might not have even needed an interpreter at all. And the evidence of that was plain to see.

We begin tonight with a story that seemed utterly surreal to us when we first learned about it, an accused molester going free because the court couldn't find him a qualified interpreter.

And, the more we investigated, the stranger it got. And the more you hear tonight, the madder you will likely get. How could an accused molester go free?

...GARY TUCHMAN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This is the man at the center of a legal storm, because of a bizarre technicality that is hard to believe, Mahamu Kanneh, charged with the horrifying crimes of raping and repeatedly molesting a 7-year-old girl and molesting a 1-and-a-half-year-old girl, both relatives of his.

But now the charges against the Liberian immigrant have disappeared.

JOHN MCCARTHY, MONTGOMERY COUNTY PROSECUTOR: We believe that that decision to dismiss these charges was improper.

TUCHMAN: Why were such serious charges dismissed? Because a court clerk was unable to find an interpreter fluent in the rare language known as Vai who could stay through the entire trial. A court-ordered psychiatrist told the judge an interpreter was necessary.

MCCARTHY: The bottom line is that any delays caused by an attempt to find an appropriate and qualified interpreter is not attributable to the prosecution and legally was the responsibility of the courts and should not serve as the basis for dismissing the charges against the defendant.

TUCHMAN: But Judge Katherine Savage disagreed, saying on the bench, "This is one of the most difficult decisions I have had to make in a long time." She cleared the charges because she says the long delay violated Kanneh's constitutional right to a speedy trial.

"Keeping Them Honest," we investigated what went wrong. An estimated 100,000 people in the world speak the West African tribal language of Vai.

The court office in Rockville, Maryland, says it worked hard to find someone anywhere in the country who could be with the suspect during the trial. Over two-and-a-half years, it couldn't successfully do so...

TUCHMAN (on camera): This story strikes high on the outrage meter. But what may be more outrageous involves the question over whether Kanneh needed an interpreter to begin with, because CNN has learned that Kanneh graduated from this Maryland high school back in 2005, one of the best high schools in the state, where, most certainly, you need to know more than Vai to get by.

(voice-over): At Magruder High School, a student is not allowed to get a diploma without passing four years of English. A source in the school says Kanneh did not even find it necessary to take the English-as-a-second-language course that is offered. And there's more.

JEREMY BROWN, NEIGHBOR OF MAHAMU KANNEH: It's right there, number seven.

TUCHMAN: Jeremy Brown currently lives next door to Kanneh.

(on camera): And how long have you lived here?

BROWN: About a year.

TUCHMAN (voice-over): We wanted to talk to Kanneh about his case and his language skills, but nobody was home in apartment seven. So, we asked his neighbor this.

(on camera): Does he speak English?

BROWN: Yes.

...TUCHMAN: So, on a scale of one to 10 of English proficiency, what would you say he had?

BROWN: Probably a seven or eight.

TUCHMAN (voice-over): No one, from the judge, to the court clerk, to Kanneh's public defender, would speak to us about the case, because prosecutors have filed an appeal. An appellate court would have the authority to make the charges reappear. But, if the appeal fails, Mahamu Kanneh will not ever go to trial on these charges...


http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0707/27/acd.01.html

Jury finds Steve Castaneda not guilty; Patrick O'Toole promises to go after Cheryl Cox, Patrick Judd, Pamela Smith...

After the jury came back with a "not guilty" verdicts yesterday in the case of Chula Vista city councilman Steve Castaneda, Prosecutor Patrick O'Toole announced that
"the obligation to tell the truth under oath is one that we're going to fight for."

At last! I filed a complaint long ago about subornation of perjury by Chula Vista Elementary School District board members. It sounds like the D.A. is finally going to do something about it.

The D.A. clearly got sidetracked from this goal when it engaged in the bizarre prosecution of a Steve Castaneda, who was accused of hiding his "intent" to buy a condo while testifying during a grand jury investigation that found no wrongdoing.

Prosecutor Patrick O'Toole said, "It was a case from our end that we thought had to be brought..." It would seem that O'Toole felt obliged to go after the political opponents of the wife of O'Toole's boss, County Supervisor Greg Cox. The problem was that Cheryl Cox herself was actually guilty of perjury crimes, while Steve Castaneda was not.

I've been waiting for a long time to hear someone in Bonnie Dumanis' office say "the obligation to tell the truth under oath is one that we're going to fight for."

I'm pleased to hear that O'Toole is finally going to do something about Chula Vista Elementary School District trustees and administrators who obstructed justice and committed or suborned perjury. The District Attorney received my complaint in 2005.

Here is the story from Fox News:


Councilman Found Not Guilty of Perjury in Condo Charges
Last Update: 4/23/2008

A Chula Vista city councilman accused of lying to the county grand jury regarding his personal interest in an apartment complex that was being converted into condominiums was acquitted Wednesday of six of 10 perjury counts.

Prosecutors will decide later whether to retry Steve Castaneda on the remaining four counts on which jurors deadlocked.

"I'm very happy that I'm vindicated. I'm very happy about the fact that I can now go on with my life," Castaneda told reporters outside the courtroom.

Defense attorney Marc Carlos said jurors gave it their best shot -- deliberating for five days after a two-week trial -- before coming to a decision.

"They've had hundreds of exhibits and thousands of pages of grand jury testimony, and that's as good as they can do and there's nothing there," Carlos told reporters. "I think (District Attorney) Bonnie Dumanis should do the right thing and step up and dismiss the remaining counts. They've spent a lot of money on this case and it's gone nowhere."

Prosecutor Patrick O'Toole said: "It was a difficult case. Everybody knew that going in. It was a case from our end that we thought had to be brought -- that the obligation to tell the truth under oath is one that we're going to fight for."


http://www.fox6.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=3866874d-c8bd-43b4-a142-5eaa4837d9c4

More than 1 in 100 U.S. adults are in prison

Herald Tribune International

By Adam Liptak
February 29, 2008
Click here for original article.
For the first time in the nation's history, more than one in 100 American adults are behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million, after three decades of growth that has seen the prison population nearly triple. Another 723,000 people are in local jails.

The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 adult Hispanic men is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 adult black men is, too, as is one in nine black men ages 20 to 34.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that one in 355 white women ages 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one in 100 black women...

"We aren't really getting the return in public safety from this level of incarceration," said Susan Urahn, the center's managing director.

But Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former federal judge, said the Pew report considered only half of the cost-benefit equation and overlooked the "very tangible benefits: lower crime rates."

In the past 20 years, according the Federal Bureau of Investigation, rates of violent crimes fell by 25 percent, to 464 per 100,000 people in 2007 from 612.5 in 1987.

"While we certainly want to be smart about who we put into prisons," Professor Cassell said, "it would be a mistake to think that we can release any significant number of prisoners without increasing crime rates. One out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense."

The United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. China is second, with 1.5 million people behind bars. The gap is even wider in percentage terms.

Germany imprisons 93 out of every 100,000 people, according to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London. The comparable number for the United States is roughly eight times that, or 750 out of 100,000...

"We tend to be a country in which incarceration is an easy response to crime," she said. "Being tough on crime is an easy position to take, particularly if you have the money. And we did have the money in the '80s and '90s."

Now, with fewer resources available, the report said, "prison costs are blowing a hole in state budgets."

..."Getting tough on crime has gotten tough on taxpayers," said Adam Gelb, the director of the public safety performance project at the Pew center. "They don't want to spend $23,000 on a prison cell for a minor violation any more than they want a bridge to nowhere."

The cost of medical care is growing by 10 percent annually, the report said, and will accelerate as the prison population ages.

About one in nine state government employees works in corrections, and some states are finding it hard to fill those jobs. California spent more than $500 million on overtime alone in 2006...

Also see this analysis by Adam Liptak.

Are Oakland police aiding the murderer of Chauncey Bailey?

Police arranged jail conversation, but didn't record it. They admit officer is a friend of Yusuf Bey IV.

The Murder Of Chauncey Bailey
Was A Newspaper Editor Murdered To Keep A Story Out Of Print?

60 Minutes(CBS)
Feb. 24, 2008

Shot-gunned to death in the course of reporting a story, police say newspaper editor Chauncey Bailey was probably killed to keep that story out of print.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper reports.

(CBS) This story begins with a journalist murdered this past summer in Oakland, Calif., presumably because of a story he was working on.

His name was Chauncey Bailey, and just this past week he was honored posthumously with the George Polk Award - one of journalism’s most prestigious honors - for the story that may have cost him his life.

The story Bailey was working on was about, of all things, a bakery. But not any ordinary bakery: it’s called "Your Black Muslim Bakery," and as CNN's Anderson Cooper reports, it was once a multi-million-dollar business as well as a major religious and political power in Oakland.

But the bakery's leaders were known for using tactics right out of "The Godfather." Bailey was investigating some of those tactics, which made some bakery leaders angry.

And angering the bakery was risky business, as Oakland police knew all too well.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Rumors about them killing people or, forcing them to do stuff that they didn't want to do, was rampant throughout the community," Assistant Chief Howard Jordan remembers. "People were scared to talk. People were scared to call the police."

Jordan has been an Oakland cop for 19 years. He says Your Black Muslim Bakery was on police radar for a long time.

It looks harmless enough on the outside, but at its height, the bakery employed about 200 people, many of them ex-convicts, who converted to Islam. And some of them didn't seem to spend too much time in the kitchen.

Your Black Muslim Bakery opened its doors in Oakland more than 30 years ago, selling bean pies and fish sandwiches. It was started by a man who called himself Yusuf Bey, a black Muslim who preached a philosophy of self-reliance and self-esteem.

Over the years, the bakery provided jobs and hope to hundreds of African-Americans in Oakland's inner city. But the positive outward image of the bakery never told the whole story. Inside the building, there were some very sinister things going on.

"It doesn't seem like many folks at the bakery were baking too many pies. It seemed to have just become a criminal enterprise," Cooper remarks.

"That's a fairly accurate statement," Jordan agrees. "It went from a business that was conducting legitimate business to a business interested in doing fraud, real estate fraud, assaults, robberies, vandalism, to promote a criminal cause versus a religious cause."

But in 2002, bakery founder Yusuf Bey was arrested on 27 counts of abusing and raping 12 and 13-year-old girls taken in by the bakery. He was accused of fathering children by them, and of stealing their welfare payments.

According to many reports, Bey fathered more than 40 children by different women at the bakery. As the Bey family, and its business, grew, they opened a dozen stores and owned a security company, a dry cleaner, a school, and properties in the area. In the process, the bakery became something of a law unto itself.

"A lot of Oakland cops told me that they left certain neighborhoods to the Bey family," says reporter Chris Thompson.

"Let them take care of business however they wanted?" Cooper asks.

"Yeah," Thompson says.

Thompson revealed the bakery's secrets in the East Bay Express, a weekly paper. He exposed a trail of "violence, brutality and fraud that stretches back almost a decade." Members of the bakery were furious.

After the stories were published in the paper, Thompson says somebody smashed out all their windows.

Asked if he personally received threats, Thompson tells Cooper, "Somebody would call up and say 'Mr. Thompson, we just want you to know that your days are numbered. Your time is up. You screwed up for the last time.' The creepiest thing was when they started following me home."

That's when Thompson decided to get out of town for a few months. While he was gone, the bakery's charismatic leader, Yusuf Bey, died. His funeral was attended by a thousand mourners, from all parts of Oakland.

After Yusuf Bey Sr.'s death, Howard Jordan says there was a power struggle within the organization. "There was a power struggle between the younger and the older Bey family members," he explains.

This was not your typical boardroom power struggle. Two of Bey's successors were murdered, and a third was wounded in an ambush. The last man standing was Yusuf Bey IV, the 19-year-old son of founder Yusuf Bey, and one of five sons he named after himself.

That's where reporter Chauncey Bailey picked up the story. Bailey was a veteran of Oakland newspapers and television, who worked for a weekly African-American newspaper called The Oakland Post.

In July, Bailey was tipped off to serious financial problems inside the bakery by a man named Saleem Bey.

"The story you told Chauncey Bailey, did that lead to his murder?" Cooper asks Saleem Bey.

"I believe that it led directly to his murder," he replies.

Saleem Bey is not one of Yusuf Bey Sr.'s biological children. He's one of the dozens of people Bey "spiritually adopted" who took the family name. Saleem Bey was a leader of the bakery, until he was forced out in that power struggle.

"I told Chauncey Bailey that the bakery was about to be shut down in an illegal bankruptcy," Saleem Bey explains. "This was the culmination of three years of the bakery being embezzled, and fraud and forgery, and different things that led to it being this way."

"You asked Chauncey Bailey to keep your name out of it. Why?" Cooper asks.

"I knew that it would be inflammatory, and that the people who would take it that way were dangerous," Saleem Bey explains.

Over the years, the bakery had earned a reputation for intimidation.

One incident, which they called a "show of force," was taped by San Francisco's CBS station KPIX-TV. Members of the bakery could be seen outside an Oakland tow-yard, demanding that a car be released. This was a smaller version of the close-order military drills that up to 50 bakery members would put on to intimidate the community.

Another "show of force" was caught by a security camera. Yusuf Bey IV and some of his followers were charged with trashing a neighborhood liquor store. Bey, who has pleaded not guilty, said the action was taken because alcohol was against Islamic law.

After taking over the bakery, Yusuf Bey IV went on a crime spree; he was arrested in three Oakland-area counties on five different felony charges.

"We saw a huge criminal enterprise starting to develop with the change in leadership when Yusuf Bey took over," Jordan says.

At the time reporter Chauncey Bailey was killed, Yusuf Bey IV was free on bail on all charges.

Asked if he thought Chauncey Bailey understood the risk, Saleem Bey says, "I believe that he thought it was more of a risk to myself than to himself. I don't believe that he really felt that he was in danger."

The danger was very real. While working on the bakery story, Chauncey Bailey was ambushed as he walked to his office at the Post. Witnesses told police a young black man wearing a ski-mask, pointed a shotgun at Bailey, and calmly fired three times at point-blank range. The shooter got into a white van idling nearby and sped off.

A day later, more than 200 heavily armed police raided the bakery to arrest Yusuf Bey IV and others on kidnapping and torture charges that had nothing to do with the Bailey murder.

And they arrested another man, Devaughndre Broussard, for killing Bailey. Broussard was a 20-year-old janitor at the bakery, who had converted to Islam after serving time for assault in San Francisco.

When 60 Minutes met him in county jail, Broussard told Cooper what he first told police: he didn't do it.

"I never heard about Chauncey Bailey. I never met him. I never seen him. The first time I heard about Mr. Chauncey Bailey was that night I got arrested," Broussard says.

While under arrest, Broussard continued his denials. And that's when police took an unorthodox step: they put Broussard in an interrogation room alone with his boss and spiritual leader, Yusuf Bey IV.

"He was saying like, 'You gotta help us out. You gotta take this fall.' He was saying like 'As your commanding officer, you gotta follow my orders,'" Broussard claims.

To convince him to take the fall, Broussard says Yusuf Bey IV played on his Moslem beliefs. "He was telling me how I was being tested by God," he says.

"He said that God was testing you?" Cooper asks.

"Yes, he did," Broussard says. "He was saying that, 'You gotta prove your loyalty' and what not."

"By saying you killed Chauncey Bailey, that was proving yourself to God?" Cooper asks.

"He were saying that most times, people don't realize when they being tested by God. 'I’m helping you out. I'm telling you that you being tested by God,'" Broussard says.

"But, I mean, this is a guy you trusted," Cooper remarks.

"Like they say, the people you love is the one that's going to hurt you the fastest," Broussard says.

Immediately after that conversation, Broussard confessed, telling police he was a "good soldier" who killed reporter Chauncey Bailey to protect the bakery. Did Broussard change his story because of what Yusuf Bey IV said to him? Police don't know, because they didn't listen in to that conversation or even record it.

"Mr. Broussard is saying that Yusuf Bey the IV told him, you know, 'Be a good soldier, take the fall.' Do you buy that?" Cooper asks Howard Jordan.

"No. I don't know what was said, but I don't I don't think that it's really relevant as far as what was said in that room," Jordan says.

"You don't think what was said in that room really matters?" Cooper asks.

"No, and it doesn't matter to us in terms of the end-product," Jordan says.

"But shouldn't someone have tape recorded that, or at least listened in on what they were saying?" Cooper asks.

"In a perfect world, yes, that, that should have taken place, but it didn’t," Jordan replies.

The lead investigator in the case, Sgt. Derwin Longmire, was the officer who decided to put Broussard and Bey IV together. But, in another strange twist, it turns out that Sgt. Longmire had been close to Yusuf Bey IV and the bakery for years.

Broussard realized just how close when he heard them talking at the police station.

Here's his account of what went on: "They was getting along like they really knew each other. The detective, he was saying like, 'We can't let Yusuf Bey the IV go down. He doing good in the community. He helping out black people,'" Broussard claims.

"The police said that to you?" Cooper asks.

"Police officer said that to me," Broussard says.

Chief Jordan does confirm that police knew all about Sgt Longmire's long-time relationship with Bey IV and other bakery leaders. "I don't have any problems with Sgt. Longmire's relationship with members of the bakery. I trust his integrity. I trust his credibility," Jordan says.

"It's certainly something, though, that's gonna be brought up during the trial, the fact that the lead investigator on the case turns out to be friends with Yusuf Bey the IV. It’s unusual, to say the least," Cooper says.

"It's unusual, but not unethical," Jordan says.

Today, Broussard insists he's not guilty and claims he knows who the real killer is.

Asked if he knows who did it, Broussard tells Cooper, "I'm gonna give all that info up when I go to trial."

Yusuf Bey IV, who is in jail on multiple unrelated felony charges, declined 60 Minutes' request for an interview. But he has denied any part in the Bailey murder.

"If anyone had a reason to be concerned about Chauncey Bailey writing something negative about the bakery, they would seem to be the guy who was leading the bakery," Cooper remarks.

"Correct," Jordan agrees. "That is a motive that, you know, we need to explore."

Police say the case is still open. But more than six months after Chauncey Bailey’s murder, Broussard remains the only one charged in the crime.

"Does it make sense that a low-level employee at this bakery, Devaughndre Broussard, would come up with this plan and execute it all by himself?" Cooper asks.

"It doesn't seem right. It seems highly unusual. But I don't know this young man. I don't know what he believes in," Jordan says.

"So it's possible he was following orders from somebody else?" Cooper asks.

"Oh, that's very possible. Yes," Jordan replies.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/22/60minutes/main3861939.shtml

Man killed wife, then demanded law and order

LAPD make arrest in notorious '80s death

By THOMAS WATKINS
Associated Press
Feb. 23, 2008


LOS ANGELES - A Japanese businessman has been arrested on suspicion of murder more than a quarter-century after an infamous downtown shooting that left his wife dead and caused an international furor, police said.


Kazuyoshi Miura, 60, had already been convicted in Japan in 1994 of the murder of his wife, Kazumi Miura, but that verdict was overturned by the country's high courts 10 years ago.

Miura was arrested Friday while visiting Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth territory in the Pacific, after cold-case detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department worked with authorities there and in Guam, police said in a statement.

"A murder suspect who has been eluding (the) dragnet has been finally captured," the LAPD said. "Miura's extradition is pending."

Officer April Harding, a department spokeswoman, said no other details were available.

Miura's attorney, Junichiro Hironaka, told Japan's Fuji TV late Saturday that the arrest "astonished" him.

"My understanding was that the case was already closed both in Japan and the U.S., especially after their joint investigation," Hironaka said. "It's quite a surprise."

Miura and his wife were visiting Los Angeles on Nov. 18, 1981, when they were shot in a parking lot. Miura was hit in the right leg, while his 28-year-old wife was shot in the head.

His wife remained in a coma and was taken in an Air Force hospital jet to Japan, where she eventually died. Miura blamed street robbers on the attack and railed from his hospital bed against what he called a violent city.

The incident reinforced Japanese stereotypes of violence in the U.S. at a time when Los Angeles was preparing for the 1984 Olympics and was particularly sensitive about its overseas image. The LAPD vowed to find the killers.

Daryl Gates, who was police chief at the time of the killing, said Saturday that Miura was a key suspect even then.

"I remember the case well. I think he killed his wife," said Gates, who had not heard about Miura's arrest before he spoke Saturday afternoon. "We had Japanese police come over; they believed he was guilty, we believed he was guilty, but we couldn't prove it."

Miura, a clothing importer who traveled regularly to the U.S., had said he would write then-President Reagan and then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. and urge them to make the city safer.

"Many young Japanese will be coming to the U.S. with their dreams in their hearts," Miura said at the time, according to the Los Angeles Times. "I strongly hope this accident will never occur again."

In 1984, however, Miura's image as a grieving husband was tarnished by a series of news articles in Japan.

Miura reportedly collected about $1.4 million at today's exchange rate on life insurance policies he had taken out on his wife. In addition, an actress who claimed to be Miura's lover told a newspaper that Miura had hired her to kill his wife in their hotel room on a trip to L.A. three months before the shootings.

Miura was arrested in Japan in 1985 on suspicion of assaulting his wife with intent to kill her for insurance money in the hotel incident. He was convicted of attempted murder and while serving a six-year sentence was charged under Japanese law in 1988 with his wife's murder.

Miura was convicted of that charge in 1994 and sentenced to life in prison. Four years later, however, a Japanese high court overturned the sentence, throwing out a lower court's determination that Miura conspired with a friend in Los Angeles to kill his wife.

Kenji Yazawa, a Japanese consul in Saipan, said his office was informed of Miura's detention Friday but is waiting for permission from local authorities before meeting with him.

"It's been two days since he was detained, and we believe he has been given an explanation of his situation by now," Yazawa said. "I think we should probably discuss his situation now and what may come next."

Yazawa said Miura is believed to have visited Saipan previously and that he was "puzzled" by the unexpected development.

A duty official at Japan's National Police Agency said there was no notice from U.S. authorities before the arrest and that the news surprised him. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of internal policy.

News of Miura's arrest made front-page headlines in Japan.

"Why now?" asked the Mainichi newspaper.

Hideo Arai, president of Alpha Japan Promotion, an entertainment management company Miura is associated with, wrote on his blog that the arrest was "outrageous" because of the previous acquittal.

"Japan's Foreign Ministry should lodge a strong protest," Arai wrote.

After his acquittal in 2003, Miura often spoke publicly about false accusation and hounding media coverage.

He has been arrested at least twice since 2003, most recently on suspicion of stealing health supplements at a drugstore near Tokyo last year. Miura denied the charges and is free on bail. His trial is pending.

___

Associated Press Writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080224/ap_on_re_us/businessman_s_wife

Deputy abused disabled man

Associated Press
Feb. 16, 20008
TAMPA, Fla. - A Florida sheriff's deputy who was videotaped dumping a paralyzed man out of his wheelchair onto a jailhouse floor has turned herself in.

Jail records show Charlette Marshall-Jones was booked into the Orient Road Jail early this morning.

It is the same jail where Marshall-Jones worked. She is accused of tipping 32-year-old Brian Sterner out of his wheelchair and searching him on the floor. He had been brought in on a charge of fleeing and attempting to elude a police officer after a traffic violation.

The Hillsborough County deputy has been charged with one count of felony abuse of a disabled person. She was released after posting $3,500 bail. An attorney for Marshall-Jones listed in jail records did not immediately return a phone message.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23197160/

Guards punished other guards who threatened to report them.

Ex-Florida prison boss: Drunken orgies tainted system

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (CNN)

Softball, drunken orgies and a prison system run like the mafia. That's what Florida's former prison secretary says he inherited when he took over one of the nation's largest prison systems two years ago.

McDonough revealed a startling list of alleged abuses and crimes going on inside Florida's prisons:

• Top prison officials admitting to kickbacks;
• Guards importing and selling steroids in an effort to give them an edge on the softball field;
• Taxpayer funds to pay for booze and women;
• Guards who punished other guards who threatened to report them.

"Corruption had gone to an extreme," McDonough said, saying it all began at the top. "They seemed to be drunk half the time and had orgies the other half, when they weren't taking money and beating each other up." Watch a corrupted prison system »

McDonough described a bizarre prison culture among those that ran the system -- one that he says seemed obsessed with inter-department softball games and the orgies after games.

"I cannot explain how big an obsession softball had become," he said. "People were promoted on the spot after a softball game at the drunken party to high positions in the department because they were able to hit a softball out of the park a couple times."

A Brooklyn, New York, native, McDonough says he witnessed the way the mafia worked in his youth and it provided him a keen insight into how his prison predecessor, James Crosby, operated.

"It reminded me of the petty mafia I saw on the streets of Brooklyn when I was growing up in the late 1950s, early 1960s -- petty, small-minded, thugish, violent, dangerous, outside the law, and completely intolerable for a society such as ours in the United States of America," he said...

And getting rid of this "cancer" is exactly what McDonough says he did. McDonough fired 90 top prison officials -- wardens, supervisors, colonels and majors -- claiming they were corrupt or, at the very least, not to be trusted. He demoted 280 others...

Among those arrested were seven officers accused of beating inmates, including five accused of forcing a prisoner to drink toilet water. All have pleaded not guilty.

Tina Hayes...said employees who didn't attend softball games or play on the teams were "isolated" and "pushed aside."

McDonough says the majority of the prison system's 28,000 employees were honest, hard-working people who weren't corrupt at all. But he says many of the top prison officials weren't and he believes he has weeded out "an organized vein of corruption."

"They were like frat boys out of control."

Family men steal drugs--sounds like the mafia

Judge says "if the men were one-tenth as concerned about the children living in the poor neighborhoods they patrolled as their own children, they never would have resold the drugs."

http://www.suntimes.com/news/727182,CST-NWS-cop05.article

Judge astounded by good cops, bad cops
'SCHIZOPHRENIC'
January 5, 2008
BY STEVE WARMBIR

A federal judge Friday had sentenced a crooked Chicago cop to nearly 10 years in prison, and the hearing was over, but the judge wasn't finished.

In an unusual move, U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Guzman commented on what he saw over the last two days after he sentenced a parade of rogue officers who robbed drug dealers for cash and cocaine.

What he saw was "almost schizophrenic," Guzman said. The cops were good family men, according to court testimony. Pastors sang their praises. They gave back to the community. One was a Desert Storm veteran. Another made more than 1,000 arrests. And they were part of a ring that sold stolen drugs to return them to the street.

The judge said he had never seen anything like it. "Good guy on one side," Guzman said. "Bad guy on the other side." Guzman sentenced former Chicago Police Officer Corey Flagg to 9½ years in prison, a significant break because of his extensive cooperation against his former fellow officers.

Three of them were sentenced Thursday, with prison terms ranging from 19 years to 40 years.

Guzman appeared exasperated at times as he sentenced the former cops, noting that if the men were one-tenth as concerned about the children living in the poor neighborhoods they patrolled as their own children, they never would have resold the drugs.

Flagg, 37, was the right-hand man of the dirty cop running the drug ring, Broderick Jones. But Flagg was also the first officer charged in the case to cooperate and for that he got a break...

Mentally unstable law enforcement officers should be steered to other employment

San Diego Union Tribune
Letters, January 2, 2008

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/op-ed/letters/20080102-9999-lz1e2letters.html

Screen officers better, and make the pay better

Regarding “Lenient sentence is sought for deputy” (Our Region, Dec. 27):

Am I the only one who found it disturbing that a sheriff's deputy who was responsible for enforcing the laws and the safety of the citizens of our county now claims he was not able to handle stressful situations because of an abusive upbringing? I wonder if he provided the Sheriff's Department with this information on his job application?

I don't want a person who has trouble handling stress armed and in a position of authority. I have great respect for our law enforcement officers and the great job they do to protect us. I have long been of the opinion that these officers should be paid more than they currently receive to assure we get the best available.

At the same time we need to screen them on a regular basis to determine if they are being negatively affected by the stress and trauma of their jobs. Let's face it, how many people would want a job that starts at less than $50,000 a year knowing at any time you could have to face someone who is shooting at you with live ammunition? Better salaries, better officers.

ROBERT RICHARDSON
Pacific Beach