Crime

The Arizona Republic reports: 2 fatally killed after fight near house party by Ofelia Madrid - Feb. 28, 2009 07:51 PM The Arizona Republic Two men are dead after an early morning shooting in south Phoenix, police said. Officers responded to a shooting near 36th Avenue and Broadway Road a little after midnight Friday, police said. Officers arrived to find numerous people fleeing and were directed to a 27-year-oldman who was dead in the alley from gunshot wounds, police said. ...

Radley Balko at Reason magazine exposes video that shows Michael West in the act of falsifying evidence used to frame someone for rape and murder, by using plaster casts of the accused’s teeth to make bite marks on a toddler’s corpse. This is one of three cases in which Michael West and Steven Hayne provided evidence in the form of bite marks on a body to link a murder victim to an accused rapist and murderer–and in the other two cases, the alleged killers were subsequently freed when exonerated by DNA evidence which linked the cases to the actual murderer, who confessed when they were released. West and Hayne belong in jail, as does the judge who claimed that the referenced video contained “no exculpatory evidence favorable to the defendant." Hayne performed over 80% of Mississippi’s autopsies for the last 20 years, and was permitted to complete a backlog of 600 autopsies even after he was terminated as the state’s coroner as a result of Balko’s exposure of other misconduct. This misconduct and the state’s failure to hold them accountable brings every criminal case they’ve ever touched into question. (Previously on Hayne.)

Mario Chavez was driving drunk when he hit another car, killing its driver, 20-year-old University of Maryland student Brian Gray. Gray’s mother was traveling behind him in another vehicle, and watched her son die. When police arrived at the scene, they did not bother to give Chavez a test for his blood alcohol level. Chavez lied to investigators about what he was doing prior to the crash, claiming he was sleeping even though his cell phone records show that he was talking on the phone. He didn’t lose his job and he has only received a speeding ticket. Brian Gray, however, had blood taken from his dead body to see if he had been drinking, but he had not. It seems the rules are different when the guilty party is a police officer. Mario Chavez is a Prince George’s County, Maryland police officer who was driving his patrol car at the time of the accident. For some reason the black box recording device for his police cruiser has not been checked for evidence due to “software problems.” A page of nurse’s notes about Chavez after his admission to Prince George’s Hospital after the crash has also disappeared. (Via The Agitator.) ...

When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City, he had a zero-tolerance policy on graffiti, litter, and broken windows, on the assumption that small crimes like vandalism create an environment conducive to more serious crimes. Now, a study in the Netherlands published in Science provides support for this theory. In an alley used to park bicycles, the experimenters set up two conditions, one in which the walls of the alley were freshly painted and one in which they were tagged with graffiti. Flyers advertising a bicycle shop were attached to the handlebars of all parked bicycles. In the graffiti condition, 69% of bicyclists dumped the flyer on the ground as litter; in the clean condition, 33% littered. They performed several other similar experiments, and in each case the test subjects were more likely to engage in anti-social acts such as littering, trespassing, and stealing in the condition of disorder as opposed to in the condition of order. (Via The Economist, where you can read more details of the experiments.) ...

Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon has sent a proposal to Congress to decriminalize possession of small amounts of heroin, methamphetamine, opium, and marijuana for personal use. This is similar to a proposal that actually passed Congress in 2006 which then-president Vicente Fox said he would sign, but then backed down from after pressure from the United States. The purpose is to free up police and court resources to go after the major drug gangs, which it would certainly do. ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed Jewel v. NSA to try another tactic in stopping unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping of U.S. residents. Their previous lawsuit against AT&T, Hepting v. AT&T, is still in federal court as the EFF argues with the government over whether the telecom immunity law passed by our spineless Congress is itself constitutional or applicable to the case. Jewel v. NSA names as defendants the National Security Agency, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and “other individuals who ordered or participated in warrantless domestic surveillance.”

Sarah Palin has apparently been using a personal email account for State of Alaska business (perhaps following Republican precedent on how to avoid subpoenas?), and it’s been compromised. Wikileaks has the documents. UPDATE (September 19, 2008): The screenshots used by the attacker showed that he used ctunnel as his web proxy, and contained enough information to identify his source IP in ctunnel’s logs. As pointed out by commenter Schtacky, it looks like they’ve identified the culprit, who used some Google research and Yahoo’s password recovery feature to change the password on the account to break in. This shows the problem with choosing “security questions” for password recovery that have answers which are easily publicly available. I hope that this kid’s actions don’t sabotage the corruption case against Palin that may have been supported by evidence in her Yahoo email, evidence that is now tainted by the fact that it was compromised (and subsequently deleted). ...

Radley Balko at The Agitator replies to Jennifer Rubin at Commentary about why the Washington Post’s coverage of Cindy McCain’s addiction to painkillers and commission of crimes to support it is newsworthy. Balko gives two reasons: John and Cindy McCain have touted her addiction an example in overcoming adversity. That presents quite the contrast to McCain’s legislative history as an ardent drug warrior. People accused of crimes similar to those Cindy McCain was accused of committing usually go to prison (even when they’re innocent). Her crimes haven’t been well-reported in the media. And they show how John McCain (who, by the way, is running for president) believes in one set of rules for the friends and family of powerful politicians, and a different set of rules for everyone else. While Cindy McCain’s addiction and theft from her children’s charity to support that addiction were lightly covered at the time, there has yet to be much coverage of it at all during this campaign. And one aspect of the case that’s been covered even less is John and Cindy McCain’s attempt to railroad Tom Gosinski, the guy who blew the whistle on Cindy McCain’s theft from her children’s charity. The Post story is one of the first to get his version of what happened. And Balko concludes: ...

Spammer Julian Jaynes now gets off as a result of a bad decision from the Virginia Supreme Court, reversing its own previous decision from six months ago. The court ruled that the Virginia anti-spam law’s prohibition of header falsification constitutes an unconstitutional infringement of the right to anonymous political and religious speech, suggesting that it would have been acceptable of it was limited to commercial speech. The court’s decision was predicated on the assumption that header falsification is a necessary requirement for anonymity, but this is a faulty assumption. All that is needed for anonymity is the omission of identity information that leads back to an individual, not the falsification of headers or identity information. That can be done with remailers, proxies, and anonymously-obtained email accounts, with no header falsification required. I previously made this argument in more detail in response to the arguments given by Jaynes’ attorney in the press. I also disagree with the court’s apparent assumption that commercial speech is deserving of less protection than religious or political speech. What makes spam a problem is its unsolicited bulk nature, not its specific content.

Long-time drug warrior politician Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) turns out to be a dirty politician. As Radley Balko of The Agitator puts it: …the chair of the House Committee that writes our tax laws didn’t know that he’d been given an interest-free loan for a luxury Caribbean Villa, didn’t know that he was getting taxable income off of rentals from said villa, and didn’t know that he had a duty to report and disclose and report the $75,000 in income from said rentals that apparently slipped his notice? Riiii-iiiight. This would be the same guy who didn’t know how he somehow was able to accumulate four rent-controlled apartments in New York City, and didn’t know about laws against using rent-controlled apartments for purposes other than a primary residence. ...