When is a wrongful conviction not a miscarriage of justice?

Victor Nealon was wrongly jailed for 17 years, but he is not being compensated

Victor Nealon has been denied compensation. The Dubliner left Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire in the days before Christmas last year with less than £50 (€63) in his pocket, having spent 17 years in jail for a wrongful conviction for attempted rape.

His life spiralled into a nightmare after a 22-year-old woman was attacked in Redditch, south of Birmingham, on her way home from the Rackets nightclub in August 1996, after celebrating her birthday.

"She was very drunk. About half an hour before she left she noticed that a man, who was about 20 feet away, was staring fixedly at her with what she interpreted as sexual interest," Lord Justice Fulford said in a court of appeal ruling. "She particularly noted his intense gaze and a lump that was like a scratch on his forehead. He was notably older than most of the other men at the nightclub."

Blanked out

In the early hours, the woman and a female friend left to walk home, before she was seized from behind as they walked under a bridge. She blanked out, but subsequently regained consciousness.

She punched and kicked her assailant, who then ran away.

Distressed, she was taken to her home. Within 90 minutes, police had taken her clothes for forensic analysis.

Both women were vague about identifying the attacker. The victim’s friend said she had had "just a few seconds" to look at the man’s face, and the light under the bridge was poor.

"She was sure, however, that it was the same person who had been staring at [the victim] in Rackets, and she said he was wearing the same black trousers and black paisley panelled shirt.

"She described him as stocky and about the same height as [the victim when] wearing heels," said Lord Justice Fulford, adding that she said he had been "clean-shaven with strange, very small lips and an evil-looking face".

Forehead lump

Preparing an artist’s drawing, the victim’s friend said the attacker’s forehead lump had been on the left side of his face, though later in court she said it was on the right.

Detectives spoke to other people who had been in the nightclub.

Three recalled a man who wore a distinctive patterned shirt. The doorman remembered admitting him, but believed his accent was Scottish.

Differences existed among testimonies, as is typical with such attempts at recall, but all agreed on the existence of the forehead lump – a disfigurement, rather than anything temporary caused by a blow.

Nealon, then a 36-year-old postman, does not have such a disfigurement, but he did have acne – something that appeared sufficient to West Mercia police to justify placing him in an ID parade.

There, he was identified as having been in the nightclub by three witnesses – though not by the victim, who did not inspect the parade, nor by her friend, who had provided details for a drawing of the assailant.

The Dubliner said he had been at home that night, watching videos. However, detectives’ suspicions were heightened when he gave the wrong film titles when asked to name them.

Given a life tariff, with a minimum recommendation of seven years, Nealon was repeatedly refused parole because he refused to admit to the crime. He faced similar rebuffs from the criminal cases review commission.

DNA evidence

Nealon tried again. In July 2012, the commission finally referred his case to the court of appeal, saying fresh DNA evidence had emerged – even though it was far from fresh.

A "real possibility" existed, said the commission, which was set up after a string of wrongful Irish convictions in the 1970s, that judges would find his conviction to have been unsafe.

Unsafe it was, but 17 years in jail does not merit compensation, it seems. British justice secretary Chris Grayling has now ruled that Nealon has "not suffered a miscarriage of justice" as defined by law.

The decision is "a nonsense", says Nealon’s solicitor, Mark Newby. "His conviction was quashed on the basis that someone else was responsible, so why should he not be entitled to compensation?"

Seventeen years on, Nealon, who was repeatedly segregated for refusing to co-operate with the authorities, lives in temporary accommodation in Birmingham, struggling even to begin to rebuild his life.

Original report here

　

　

　

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The Central Park Five

While the problem of false confessions among young, low-IQ juveniles may be a real one, the "Central Park Five" case is a bad example, because there’s no real evidence, as we’ve repeatedly shown here on VDARE.com, that they were any less guilty than they said they were. Ann Coulter said

Of more than three dozen hoodlums brought in for questioning, only 10 were charged with any crimes, and only five of those were charged with raping the jogger. All those charged with the jogger`s rape gave detailed, corroborated, videotaped confessions, after full Miranda warnings, four of the five in the presence of an adult relative.

Recall that none of them—including the police—could have known whether the jogger would emerge from her coma and be able to identify her attackers. (She emerged, but blocked all memory of the attack.) All five confessed to assisting the attack on the jogger, but none to raping her themselves. That`s enough for a rape conviction….

Melody Jackson, whose brother was friends with defendant Kharey Wise, testified—reluctantly—that she talked to Wise by phone when he was at Rikers Island and that he told her that he didn`t rape the jogger, he "only held her legs down while Kevin (Richardson) f–ked her." She originally volunteered this information to the police thinking it would be helpful to Wise.Ann Coulter: What You Won`t Read In The Papers About The `Central Park Five`

The "exoneration" were based on a guy who’s in jail for life claiming he did it all by himself, a thing that appears to have been physically impossible, and the fact that he was the only guy whose DNA was found. Sometimes DNA isn’t found because the rapist failed to achieve penetration and/or intromission.

Robert K. Tanenbaum , quoted by Nicholas Stix

Det. [Thomas] McKenna’s memo book entry of statements made to him by the defendant Yusef Salaam:

"Hit her with pipe/she went down and hit her again/. . . Kevin [Richardson] f—-d her. . . To me it was something to do.

"It was fun."

Kevin Richardson is on one of the "false confessions" referred to by Lauren Kirchner above, he’s one of the people who sued New York City for convicting them after they confessed.

Original report here

　

　

　

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"Welfare" thugs defeated: Judge orders Connecticut girl to be returned to family

In the end they couldn't even defend their own actions

Justina Pelletier is coming home.

A Massachusetts judge ordered the 16-year-old Connecticut girl, who was taken from her family by child welfare advocates more than a year ago, to be returned to her mother and father effective Wednesday. The ruling caps a long-running medical custody dispute that began when two highly-respected Boston hospitals clashed over the girl's diagnosis. The case sparked national outrage, and led Lou and Linda Pelletier, of West Hartford, Conn., to wage a bitter legal battle.

"To hear the news is overwhelming," Lou Pelletier told FoxNews.com moments after learning of the ruling. "Now we can certainly begin the healing process."

The case began when the girl's parents disagreed with a psychiatric diagnosis given by Boston Children's Hospital and said they wanted their daughter returned to her original physician at Tufts Medical Center, who had previously treated Justina for mitochondrial disease, a group of rare genetic disorders affecting cellular energy production. The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families moved in, claiming Justina was the victim of "medical child abuse."

Mat Staver, of the Liberty Counsel, which battled the Bay State bureaucracy on behalf of the Pelletiers, said the ruling handed down by Massachusetts juvenile court Judge Joseph Johnston was well-deserved.

"We are thrilled that Justina will finally be returning home," Staver said in a statement. "The family looks forward to putting this 16-month nightmare behind them. Justina and her family now begins the process of healing both physically, emotionally, and spiritually."

In May, Justina was moved from Massachusetts to a facility in Thompson, Conn., allowing her parents to visit with their daughter, but doing little to dampen their determination to win her back for good. In a 45-second, videotaped plea, first posted on a Facebook support page last week, Justina is seen sitting in a chair and pleading plaintively with Johnston.

"All I really want is to be with my family and friends," the girl says, her voice faltering at times. "You can do it. You're the one that's judging this. Please let me go home."

The judge granted the girl's wish, after the Massachusetts DCF filed a motion agreeing that the teenager should be returned to her family. Alec Loftus, a spokesman for Massachusetts Health and Human Services Secretary John Polanowicz, confirmed to FoxNews.com last week that the agency was no longer planning to fight the case.

The emotional toll on Justina and her family is one that cannot be measured, Staver said. She has missed out on two years of education, Staver said, and went from becoming a competitive figure skater to being confined in a wheelchair.

Lou Pelletier said he knows his daughter will need time and love from her family to overcome her ordeal.

"She’s coming home tomorrow," he said. "I think she will want to get adjusted.

"Think of it like a prisoner of war who has been held captive for 16 months," he continued. "There will be an adjustment period."

Original report here

　

　

　

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New York, the injustice capital of America

Wrongful convictions have been at the center of public discourse lately. Every few weeks, there's a headline about a new exoneration, some poor guy locked up for 20 years for a crime it turned out he did not commit. In 2013, 87 people were exonerated across America, the most in any year on record.

In New York City, and even nationally, Kings County is at the forefront this wave of overturned convictions. Brooklyn, after all, has had the highest-profile faces at every layer: David Ranta, the innocent man who spent 23 years in prison after being found guilty of killing a rabbi; Louis Scarcella, the detective accused of fabricating confessions and coaching witnesses; Michael Vecchione, the prosecutor accused of hiding evidence of a defendant's innocence; Charles Hynes, the politically minded D.A. who seemed to turn a blind eye to the misconduct that led to the as-yet-undetermined number of false convictions; and current Brooklyn D.A. Ken Thompson, who unseated Hynes by vowing to clean up the office and whose staff is reviewing nearly 100 questionable convictions, including 56 involving Scarcella.

It's enough to make an intelligent, well-read New Yorker think that Brooklyn is the city's wrongful conviction capital. But that New Yorker would be wrong. In fact, it is the Bronx that holds that dubious title.

From January 1989 through December 2013, Brooklyn and the Bronx each had 29 exonerations, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Nationally, the two counties tied for fourth place for highest total. Manhattan was sixth, with 26. Cook County, Illinois, a populous and sprawling area that includes Chicago, had the most by far, with 95.

The Bronx, of course, contains a million fewer residents than Brooklyn.

Per capita, Bronx County had the highest rate of exonerations in the state, and ranked fifth nationwide, while Brooklyn did not crack the top ten. Cook County ranked seventh, and Manhattan ranked eighth.

A slightly different data set, looking at convictions between 1985 to 2007, offers some additional details. From that period, 32 people were exonerated in the Bronx; 29 of them were convicted between 1985 and 1999. Fourteen of those 29 spent at least a decade in prison.

Of those 32, 12 involved a mistaken witness identification. Only one of the exonerations involved DNA evidence.

The data also show the extent to which exonerations, and, therefore, wrongful convictions by extension, are disproportionately spread across the city. While the Bronx and Brooklyn each had more than 30 exonerations stemming from convictions between '85 and '07, Manhattan had 24, Queens had 18, and Staten Island had one.

When the boroughs combine forces, though, they help push New York state to the top of the rankings. New York led the country in exoneration between 1989 and 2013, with 152, 16 more than the next closest state.

Original report here

　

　

　

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Changing pot laws prompt child-endangerment review

A Colorado man loses custody of his children after getting a medical marijuana card. The daughter of a Michigan couple growing legal medicinal pot is taken by child-protection authorities after an ex-husband says their plants endangered kids.

And police officers in New Jersey visit a home after a 9-year-old mentions his mother's hemp advocacy at school.

While the cases were eventually decided in favor of the parents, the incidents underscore a growing dilemma: While a pot plant in the basement may not bring criminal charges in many states, the same plant can become a piece of evidence in child custody or abuse cases.

"The legal standard is always the best interest of the children, and you can imagine how subjective that can get," said Jess Cochrane, who helped found Boston-based Family Law & Cannabis Alliance after finding child-abuse laws have been slow to catch up with pot policy.

No data exist to show how often pot use comes up in custody disputes, or how often child-welfare workers intervene in homes where marijuana is used.

But in dozens of interviews with lawyers and officials who work in this area, along with activists who counsel parents on marijuana and child endangerment, the consensus is clear: Pot's growing acceptance is complicating the task of determining when kids are in danger.

A failed proposal in the Colorado Legislature this year showed the dilemma.

Colorado considers adult marijuana use legal, but pot is still treated like heroin and other Schedule I substances as they are under federal law. As a result, when it comes to defining a drug-endangered child, pot can't legally be in a home where children reside.

Two Democratic lawmakers tried to update the law by saying that marijuana must also be shown to be a harm or risk to children to constitute abuse.

But the effort led to angry opposition from both sides — pot-using parents who feared the law could still be used to take their children, and marijuana-legalization opponents who argued that pot remains illegal under federal law and that its very presence in a home threatens kids.

After hours of emotional testimony, lawmakers abandoned the effort as too complicated. Among the teary-eyed moms at the hearing was Moriah Barnhart, who moved to the Denver area from Tampa, Florida, in search of a cannabis-based treatment for a daughter with brain cancer.

"We moved here across the country so we wouldn't be criminals. But all it takes is one neighbor not approving of what we're doing, one police officer who doesn't understand, and the law says I'm a child abuser," Barnhart said.

Supporters vow to try again to give law enforcement some definitions about when the presence of drugs could harm children, even if the kids don't use it.

"There are people who are very reckless with what they're doing, leaving marijuana brownies on the coffee table or doing hash oil extraction that might blow the place up. Too often with law enforcement, they're just looking at the legality of the behavior and not how it is affecting the children," said Jim Gerhardt of the Colorado Drug Investigators Association, which supported the bill.

Colorado courts are wading into the question of when adult pot use endangers kids. The state Court of Appeals in 2010 sided with a marijuana-using dad who lost visitation rights though he never used the drug around his daughter.

The court reversed a county court's decision that the father couldn't have unsupervised visitation until passing a drug test, saying that a parent's marijuana use when away from his or her children doesn't suggest any risk of child harm.

But child-endangerment standards remain murky in Colorado, with wide disparities in how local child-protection officers and law enforcement approach pot, said Rob Corry, a Denver lawyer who successfully argued the father's custody appeal.

Corry, who helped Colorado's 2012 campaign to legalize recreational marijuana, said the main thrust of the effort was to treat pot like alcohol.

"Think of brewing beer. You've got a constitutional right to do it. There's nothing wrong with it. Marijuana should be just as simple — you just keep it on a high shelf, right next to your vodka. But in practice, this is not how law enforcement treats marijuana," he said.

In the absence of legal guidelines, a growing network of blogs counsel parents in how to deal with police or child-protection agencies concerned about parental marijuana use, including one, Ladybud, run by legal-pot activist Diane Fornbacher.

She said she moved to Colorado this year after child-protection workers visited her family in New Jersey after a teacher alerted officials when her son mentioned hemp — pot's non-hallucinogenic cousin — at school.

"They said, 'We're just here to help.' Emotionally, my brain was like, 'My kids! My kids!' My mama bear instinct kicked in," she said.

The need for better standards about when marijuana endangers kids is growing by the day, said Maria Green, a Lansing, Michigan, mother who lost custody of her infant daughter for three months last year.

Green grows pot to treat her husband's epilepsy, and though Michigan's medical marijuana law states parents shall not be denied custody or visitation with a child for following the statute, a legal dispute with her ex-husband led to her daughter being placed with a grandparent until it was resolved.

The ex-husband who brought the complaint declined an interview until talking with his lawyer.

"I never in a million years thought that they were going to take my daughter," Green said. "I know that there's a place for child protection, but I would love to see it used to protect kids from being actually hurt."

Original report here

　

　

　

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Woman Dies in Jail Because She Failed to Pay a Fine—For Her Child's Truancy From School

Some monstrous policy out of Pennsylvania, from Associated Press via the Pottstown Mercury News, a land where there is no such thing as debtors prison for the poor unless that debt is to the government, that institution that only monsters question because after all it's there to help the poor:

Hundreds of parents, some impoverished and overwhelmed, have been jailed in Pennsylvania for failing to pay court fines that arise from truancy hearings after their children skip school, creating what some call a "debtor's prison" for people like Eileen DiNino.

DiNino, 55, of Reading, was found dead in a jail cell Saturday morning, hours after she surrendered to serve a 48-hour sentence.

She had racked up $2,000 in fines, fees and court costs since 1999 as the Reading School District tried to keep her children in class, most recently at a vocational high school.

Died alone in prison. Over truancy.

More than 1,600 people have been jailed in Berks County alone — where Reading is the county seat—over truancy fines since 2000, more than two-thirds of them women, the newspaper reported....

Language barriers can also be an issue for letters and phone calls between the parents and school, given that the vast majority of the city and school population is Hispanic, Guida said.

...the fines handed down by judges were typically small, perhaps $20. The debt adds up, he said, over court costs and fees. In one case alone involving DiNino, her bill included a laundry list of routine fees: $8 for a "judicial computer project"; $60 for Berks constables; $40 for "summary costs" for several court offices; and $10 for postage.

As I wrote about back in January in "Petty Law Enforcement vs. the Poor" and again last month, focusing specifically on the whole "multiplying court fees" matter that helped Ms. DiNino die in a cell, some of the pettiest fines when it comes to traffic and the like can really end up screwing up citizens lives in ways far more serious than the initial offense. (Not to mention the stickier question of the ethical status of an entity that makes sure it gets its pound of flesh from any debtor by literally locking them up as punishment for not paying off.)

It's not a topic that political scientists and sociologists have gathered a lot of data on, as near as I've been able to tell, but let's add this set of anecdotes from Pennsylvania to "the state will behave with monstrous lack of mercy to the least well-off among us."

Original report here

　

　

　

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Police compared to a foreign military

With especial note to the "war on drugs"

I have previously compared domestic police forces to domestic military, but it would seem the illustration is not complete. So today I’ll make the comparison to a foreign military.

The Foreign Military

Right now, Al Qaeda "insurgents" are marching towards Baghdad. Let’s imagine that they succeed in taking the Iraqi capital, and establish an Islamic State in Iraq. In retaliation for the US invasion of Iraq, they team up with the Iranian & North Korean governments to attack America, with weapons and funding from Russia. We will refer to this invading force as the Axis Powers.

While American war propaganda has, to date, been completely blown out of proportion, we can say with a good deal of certainty that these are bad dudes. To make matters worse, they’re absolutely convinced that they are doing a good thing. After all, the Iraqi’s were actually attacked by the US Government, who killed over a million of their people, and attempted to install a puppet government to rule over them for generations to come. The Iranians and the North Koreans, they are told every day about the very real threat to their countries that the United States poses. They aren’t just fighting for a pay check, they are fighting for their lives.

The Axis Powers reach our shores, and drop leaflets assuring the population they are only here to deal with the threat our government poses. They say they have no interest in harming American citizens, but we’ve heard the stories of soldiers raping women, killing children, and ransacking houses.

The Axis Powers are easy to identify visually. They have uniforms, flags, and by the way, they are driving tanks and armored personnel carriers. Kinda hard to miss.

They have fully automatic weapons, rocket launchers, and grenades. Thanks to the US government, we can safely assume the Axis Powers have superior firepower over any group of average Americans. To make matters worse, they have radios and can call in for reinforcements, and air strikes. Fighting them is extremely dangerous, the likelihood of victory is very low.

The Police

The police have none of the excuses the Axis Powers have for their initiations of force. We pose no threat to their safety, we didn’t invade their country, we didn’t kill a million of their people. They signed up for the job to get paid, and to hold a certain status in society. They could quit their jobs at any moment, and seek out productive employment, with pretty much no negative consequences whatsoever. All they would have to give up is their status in society as police. They may actually make more money working in the private sector, if they have any marketable skills whatsoever.

They sit in their cars, drinking coffee, hiding in wait on the sides of highways, hoping someone will disobey the orders of their political masters. When someone does, they will pull their car out of hiding, turn on their lights to signal the victim to pull their car over, and if the victim does not comply, he will use whatever level of force is necessary to stop them, up to and including ramming their car, or shooting them in the face.

They have actually declared war on us. They call it a "war on drugs" but of course, drugs don’t fight wars, people do. If you have plants they do not approve of, they will conspire secretly to break into your house with guns drawn. If they even think you might put up the slightest bit of resistance, an entire team of armed thugs will empty their guns into you. They will throw grenades at babies.

The police aren’t dealing with a threat to themselves, they have pledged their lives to be a threat to you.

The police are as easily identifiable as the Axis Powers. They wear uniforms, they have marked cars, they have armored personnel carriers. They get on television and announce their intentions. The entire community not only knows who they are and what they do, most of them are actually pretty happy about it. That is, until it happens to them.

Like the Axis Powers, the police have us outnumbered and outgunned. They have automatic weapons, armored vehicles, and radios to call in for reinforcements. If we attempt to arm ourselves anywhere near comparable to the weaponry they possess, they will break into our homes, confiscate our weapons, and murder anyone who resists them. Fighting them is very dangerous, the likelihood of success is very low.

I would submit that the Axis Powers actually have a more legitimate claim to use of force than the police do. They are responding to an actual threat that is made possible by the tax payers and voters of this country. That said, we’re all held hostage by this government. Anarchists do not consent to this extortion, and so we can and should defend ourselves against this foreign invasion.

The police have no more authority to use violence against us than the Axis Powers do. They are only doing this because they gain positive benefit from it, they have plenty of other options, and they are not responding to a threat to their safety. The police are actively participating in the aforementioned hostage crisis, making us vulnerable to the retaliations of the Axis Powers.

If we are to accept the words of Cop Block and Will Grigg, then we can only respond to the Axis Powers after they have actually used violence against us personally. The fact that they are a foreign military with no legitimate authority to harm us, does not mean we can preemptively use violence to stop their advancement. Being able to identify them as enemy soldiers is not enough, because only individuals can be held responsible for the aggressions they commit directly against the person defending themselves.

One of two things is true. Either you can kill police, just for being police. Or, you cannot kill soldiers of the Axis Powers until they break into your home and kidnap/murder/rape your family.

If that’s your definition of the "non-aggression principle" then you just don’t understand use of force. Use of force is justified in dealing with a threat, and whatever level of force is necessary to repel that threat is justified. If the Axis Powers invaded tomorrow, myself and others would be making improvised explosive devices to deal with them. We would ambush them, fight dirty, and commit every otherwise repulsive act of violence to stop their advancement. Not just anarchists either. People who voted for Barack Obama would be doing the same thing. Jeb Bush supporters, would be doing the same thing. Everybody would recognize the foreign threat, and many Americans would respond to it with deadly force.

If you’re actually committed to the non aggression principle, then police are subject to the exact same rules of engagement as a foreign military. In fact, they are even less worthy of mercy.

Original report here

　

　

　

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Treated like a hardened drug dealer: As he is finally cleared, anger of RAF hero, 83, arrested for giving wife painkillers in her care home

A grandfather arrested and banned from seeing his wife after he gave her a painkiller patch at her care home said last night he had been treated like ‘a hardened drug dealer’.

Walter Crompton, 83, had attached the prescription patch to her arm after she told him that she had been left in severe discomfort by arthritis.

But staff at Allendale Care Home, in Blackley, Manchester, where the dementia sufferer has been living, contacted police because the patch contained morphine.

Four days later Mr Crompton – who had been his wife Eileen’s only carer for 15 years before she became seriously ill and went into the home – was arrested on suspicion of ‘administering a noxious substance’.

He was even locked up for seven hours in a police cell.

But only after a two-month police probe has he finally been cleared of wrongdoing.

Yesterday the RAF veteran – who has lost weight and struggled to sleep since his arrest – said: ‘This whole sorry business has been hanging over me for months and I think the way it has been dealt with is absolutely disgusting.

‘I’ve had a hell of a time and been treated as if I was like some kind of hardened drug dealer. ‘I’ve never committed a crime in my 83 years and for this to happen is mind-boggling.

‘For the police to say I’ve tried to harm my wife is unbelievable. ‘She had complained of arthritis in her arm and I said I had a pain patch in my pocket so I put it on her arm.

‘I used to look after her 24 hours a day so I know what she can and can’t have.’

He said: ‘I have never been in a cell before. I’ve only seen stuff like that on TV. ‘I never had anything to eat from morning to night when I was in the cell.’

Mr Crompton was asked to give fingerprints and a DNA sample and his house was searched, before he was interviewed by officers at midnight.

He was eventually released and taken home at 1am but as part of his bail conditions he was barred from contacting his wife of 60 years.

The retired British Aerospace aircraft engineer later had his bail conditions relaxed slightly so that he could see his wife – but only if accompanied by a social worker, who was not always available.

He added: ‘I’ve been missing my wife greatly because before of all this. ‘I used to be allowed see her every day but after my arrest I was told not to contact her at all. ‘I was allowed to visit her later but only under supervision with someone watching over us.

‘Two or three days per week I had no one to go to the care home with me so I was restrained from seeing my wife. It was terrible. Then on Monday when I went to the police station they told me there was no case to answer.

‘They said all accusations had been dropped. Why couldn’t that have happened after two weeks? It’s been an absolutely horrendous three months.’

Instead, officers from the Greater Manchester Police Public Protection Investigation Unit started an investigation and a ‘multi-agency strategy meeting’ was held.

Detective Superintendent Joanne Rawlinson said: ‘This was a potentially serious incident in which a vulnerable elderly woman with significant health issues could have come to serious harm and, as such, people would expect the police to always conduct a thorough investigation.

‘An integral part of the inquiry was to safeguard the potential victim and, while the investigation was ongoing, bail conditions were necessary to ensure this happened.

‘After twice interviewing the 83-year-old man, we presented a file of evidence to the CPS and they ruled there is insufficient evidence to proceed to a charge.’

A spokesman for Allendale Care Home said: ‘We strictly follow the guidelines with regard to patient care and protection to ensure they receive the highest standard of care.’

Original report here

　

　

　

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Chicago Cops Caught Brutalizing Woman, Says "You’ll Be Dead, Your Family Will Be Dead"

A woman has filed suit against the city of Chicago as well as the Chicago Police Department after she was thrown to the ground and assaulted by officers during a raid of her salon. The disturbing incident was captured on the salon’s surveillance video.

Police conducted a raid at the Copper Tan and Spa owned by Jianqing "Jessica" Klyzek last July after an undercover officer had alleged that he’d been offered sex for money at the establishment. According to the lawsuit, the first officers to arrive were not in uniform and Klyzek initially thought she was being robbed.

Klyzek screamed that she had done nothing wrong and pulled away from the officers attempting to detain her. The raid became violent, as the video shows Klyzek being swiftly grabbed by an officer and dragged down to the ground. The video also shows an officer hitting her on the head while she was kneeling, handcuffed, on the ground.

In addition to physical force, one of the officers- named as Officer Gerald Di Pasquale in the lawsuit- became enraged, yelling that she wasn’t a real American:

You’re not f*****g American! I’ll put you in a UPS box and send you back to wherever the fu** you came from!

Klyzek is an immigrant from China and has been a United States citizen since 2011. After she insisted she was an American citizen, Di Pasquale’s tirade continued:

"No, you’re not a citizen! No, you’re not! No, you’re not! You’re here on our borrowed time. So mind your f*****g business before I shut this whole f*****g place down. And I’ll take this place and then whoever owns it will f*****g kill you because they don’t care about you, OK? I’ll take this building. You’ll be dead and your family will be dead."

Klyzek had initially been the one charged with aggravated battery following this incident. Those charges were dismissed by a judge, although according to the Chicago Tribune the police sought a felony indictment of Klyzek. The lawsuit claims that in the surveillance video, the officers had realized they were being filmed and tried to find the recording. The lawsuit also alleges that the officers falsified police reports about what had really happened at the salon.

"I can’t see how they have any business wearing the uniform," said Torreya Hamilton, Klyzek’s attorney, at a press conference.

According to the Tribune, two of the officers named in Klyzek’s lawsuit have already been investigated for assaulting an illegal immigrant during a sting in 2008.

"The alleged conduct and comments are reprehensible and completely intolerable in our police department. We have codes of conduct that apply to officers and if the allegations are proven accurate, appropriate action will be taken," said Chicago Police spokesman Adam Collins in a statement.

Original report here

　

　

　

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OK: Former inmate sues Tulsa over wrongful conviction

An Oklahoma man whose robbery conviction was vacated after he served 16 years in prison has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Tulsa, claiming that officials used fabricated evidence that led to his conviction.

Sedrick Courtney argued in his lawsuit filed Monday that city officials used manufactured evidence to convict him of robbery and burglary — then obstructed his efforts at exoneration. Courtney was released from prison on parole in 2011 and his conviction was later vacated.

"Sedrick is looking forward to proving that his wrongful conviction was not an unfortunate accident but was caused by police misconduct," said Emma Freudenberger, a New York City-based attorney who is representing Courtney.

Courtney had been sentenced to 60 years in prison for a 1996 robbery at a Tulsa apartment, where two masked intruders robbed a woman. At trial, prosecutors showed forensic tests that they said linked Courtney to hairs recovered from a ski mask believed to have been used in the crime. In 2011, subsequent DNA testing excluded Courtney as a possible source of the hairs, court filings said.

In September 2012, after Courtney was released on parole, Tulsa County District Judge William Kellough cleared Courtney of criminal wrongdoing and found that he shown his "actual innocence" in the case.

The suit does not seek a specific amount of money in damages. Courtney has already received $175,000 from the state — the maximum allowed under state law for a wrongful imprisonment tort claim.

Original report here

　

　

　

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Armed British police hunting suspected gun dealer storm ill old lady's home -- smashing down front door and leaving her hospitalised for shock

Armed police hunting a firearms suspect stormed the home of an injured 66-year-old woman, frightening her so much she needed hospital treatment for shock.

Frail pensioner Hermine Lynch, 66, was lying in bed recovering from two broken vertebrae when the police burst into her home.

She was so frightened of the raid, conducted under the cover of darkness at her Birmingham home, that she had to go to hospital to be treated for shock.

Hermine Lynch's family say there were three doors damaged in the home, which police left in 'a right state'

The police search was also misplaced, with their target - wanted man Antoine Peak - not located at either of the two addresses raided that evening.

Her family has now hit out at the police raid, saying she could have been killed.

Her brother, FA Cup winner Dave Bennett, said he was making an official complaint to West Midlands Police. 'They messed up and we had to pick up the pieces. Hermine is in a bad way. She could have died - what would have been said then? 'I am not going to allow this to be swept under the carpet.'

Three doors were said to have been damaged in the raid, conducted in the early hours of May 13.

Her son Jeremy, 28, said: 'Officers with guns stormed into my mother’s home - and we’re not talking little pistols, we’re talking great big guns.

'They had a warrant. They left the door in a right state. The only courteous thing they did was to ring Midland Heart to put a makeshift board on the door.

'Until that night, she hadn’t been out of the house for two months. Her heartbeat wouldn’t go down because she was so worked up. 'We didn’t leave City Hospital until 8am.'

Superintendent Darren Miles, Head of Operations for West Midlands Police, said police had visited two 'interlinked' addresses, where recent information had placed the wanted man.

He said it was 'essential' to enter both premises to ensure a safe arrest. 'The armed officers quickly and safely established that he was not at the addresses and ensured that the lady at the house had the appropriate medical treatment for shock.

'As I am sure the public will appreciate, we have to act safely but quickly when seeking to arrest someone who we believe has access to a firearm.'

Original report here

　

　

　

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Wrongful, 17-year conviction ends for ‘framed’ Brooklyn man

Another black mark against detective Scarcella

Scarcella

A Brooklyn man who was locked away 17 years for a crime he didn’t commit got his first taste of freedom Tuesday and said he was "framed" by a former NYPD detective whose investigative tactics have been called under review.

"I contacted the [DA’s] office and told them I was innocent and that Detective [Louis] Scarcella had framed me and I needed help," Roger Logan, 53, said outside a Brooklyn courtroom Tuesday.

Logan was serving a 25 years-to-life sentence for the 1997 murder of Sherwin Gibbons in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

But an investigation by the Brooklyn DA’s Conviction Review Unit found that the witness who testified against Logan was actually in police custody the day she claimed to have seen Logan kill Gibbons.

"The witness could not have made those observations because she was incarcerated," Brooklyn prosecutor Mark Hale said in court. "Mr. Logan’s lawyer did not and could not have known this."

Brooklyn Supreme Court judge Matthew D’Emic granted the DA Ken Thompson’s motion to toss the conviction. "OK sir, you’re free to go," a court officer told Logan.

He and his family celebrated outside court on the sunny spring day. "I believed my brother was innocent all this time," said sister Connie Logan, 56.

"I want to get out of these clothes," said Logan, gesturing down at his khakis and white button-down shirt. "This is not my style at all."

The Conviction Review Unit began an investigation into some 50 Scarcella-involved cases after David Ranta, who spent 23 years behind bars in the killing a rabbi, had his conviction tossed in March 2013 amid allegations of misconduct by the since retired detective.

The DA’s office stands by 11 of the Scarcella cases it has reviewed, Thompson said Tuesday. Logan was the seventh wrongful conviction Thompson has vacated since he took office in January.

Three half-brothers were cleared for a 1985 murder after prosecutors said a crack-addicted witness Scarcella often used was unreliable. The other three were unrelated to the detective.

Scarcella did not immediately return a call for comment. He has previously told The Post he never did anything wrong in his murder investigations.

"I never framed anyone in my life. You have to be a low devil to frame someone. I sleep well at night," Scarcella has said.

Original report here

　

　

　

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Dad goes to jail for 4-year-old daughter’s drawing

It was a kindergarten class piece of art that Jessie Sansone probably won’t want to hang on the refrigerator anytime soon.

After Jesse Sansone’s 4-year-old daughter drew a picture of a gun, cops handcuffed the clueless father and dragged him off to jail. It was there that the dad was stripped of his clothes and searched by the authorities. Sansone was never charged with a crime.

Sansone wasn’t expecting to be greeted by police when he went to pick up his three children from school last week. Faculty there had become concerned, however, after the man’s 4-year-old daughter drew an image last Wednesday that they thought warranted investigation. It was a picture of a man holding a gun, and when teachers asked the girl to explain it, she said it was a depiction of her father.

"He uses it to shoot bad guys and monsters," teachers say the girl explained.

The father says he doesn’t own a gun. Nor does he kill monsters.

"I’m picking up my kids and then, next thing you know, I’m locked up," Sansone, 26, tells The Record out of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

"I was in shock. This is completely insane. My daughter drew a gun on a piece of paper at school," he says.

After seeing the image in question, the school’s staff became shocked as well. So much so, in fact, that they rang up child welfare officials and local law enforcement and arranged for them to meet the girl’s father at the end of the school day. By that evening, Sansone had been handcuffed, whisked away to jail and forced to remove his clothes so he could be subjected to a strip search.

Authorities took all three of Sansone’s children and dragged them to Family and Children’s Services to be interviewed. His wife, Stephanie Squires, tells The Record that authorities never explained themselves.

"He had absolutely no idea what this was even about. I just kept telling them. ‘You’re making a mistake,’ " she says.

Despite her pleas, the ordeal went on for hours. Sansone says he was scared and was told he would be charged with possession of a firearm. The problem was, he says, that he doesn’t own a gun. After being held for hours, Sansone was eventually freed from jail and was asked to authorize a search of his home. Though he didn’t have to comply, he says he did so anyway.

Authorities did not recover any weapons in their search (or monsters). His wife says they knew they wouldn’t. The police, she says, acted on an assumption and nothing else.

"The way everything happened was completely unnecessary, especially since we know the school very well. I don’t understand how they came to that conclusion from a four-year-old’s drawing," she says.

The girl’s father was pretty surprised the school acted that way, as well. Only last year, he says, the principal offered him a job as a counselor there. Sansone is a licensed personal support worker that educates children in classrooms across the region. The principal, Steve Zack, tells The Record that it was the welfare agency’s decision to involve the authorities.

"Police chose to arrest Jessie here. Nobody wants something like this to happen at any time, especially not at school. But that’s out of my hands," Zack explains.

Sansone and his family are left wondering why the investigation carried out as far as it did, however. When The Record followed up on the story days later, Waterloo Regional Police Inspector Kevin Thaler told them, "We had every concern, based on this information that children were in danger." The information is now being called into question after Thaler adds that investigators never saw the drawing. Neither has Sansone or the school’s superintendent.

Police add that the strip-search was necessary since it was a firearms-related incident.

Original report here

　

　

　

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Just Shoot: The Mindset Responsible for Turning Search Warrants into Death Warrants, and SWAT Teams into Death Squads

How many children, old people, and law-abiding citizens have to be injured, terrorized or killed before we call a halt to the growing rash of police violence that is wracking the country? How many family pets have to be gunned down in cold blood by marauding SWAT teams before we declare such tactics off limits? And how many communities have to be transformed into military outposts, complete with heavily armed police, military tanks, and "safety" checkpoints before we draw that line in the sand that says "not in our town"?

The latest incident comes out of Atlanta, Georgia, where a SWAT team, attempting to execute a no-knock drug warrant in the middle of the night, launched a flash bang grenade into the targeted home, only to have it land in a crib where a 19-month-old baby lay sleeping. The grenade exploded in the baby’s face, burning his face, lacerating his chest, and leaving him paralyzed. He is currently in the hospital in a medically induced coma.

Where too was the outrage when a Minnesota SWAT team raided the wrong house in the middle of the night, handcuffed the three young children, held the mother on the floor at gunpoint, shot the family dog, and then "forced the handcuffed children to sit next to the carcass of their dead pet and bloody pet for more than an hour" while they searched the home?

If this were the first instance of police overkill, if it were even the fifth, there might be hope of reforming our system of law enforcement. But what happened to these families, whose lives will never be the same, has become par for the course in a society that glorifies violence, turns a blind eye to government wrongdoing, and sanctions any act by law enforcement, no matter how misguided or wrong. Indeed, as I detail in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, this state-sponsored violence is a necessary ingredient in any totalitarian regime to ensure a compliant, cowed and fearful populace.

The problem with these incidents, as one reporter rightly concluded, is "not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone."

This battlefield mindset has so corrupted our law enforcement agencies that the most routine tasks, such as serving a search warrant—intended to uncover evidence of a suspected crime—becomes a death warrant for the alleged "suspect," his family members and his pets once a SWAT team, trained to kill, is involved.

Unfortunately, SWAT teams are no longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations. Owing to the militarization of the nation’s police forces, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day.

Yet the tension inherent in most civilian-police encounter these days can’t be blamed exclusively on law enforcement’s growing reliance on SWAT teams. It goes far deeper, to a transformation in the way police view themselves and their line of duty. Specifically, what we’re dealing with today is a skewed shoot-to-kill mindset in which police, trained to view themselves as warriors or soldiers in a war, whether against drugs, or terror, or crime, must "get" the bad guys—i.e., anyone who is a potential target—before the bad guys get them. The result is a spike in the number of incidents in which police shoot first, and ask questions later.

Who could forget what happened to 13-year-old Andy Lopez? The teenager was shot seven times and killed after two sheriff’s deputies, a mere 20 feet away, saw him carrying a toy BB gun in public.

Then there was the time two Cleveland police officers mistook the sounds of a backfiring car for gunfire and immediately began pursuing the car and its two occupants. Within 20 minutes, more than 60 police cars, some unmarked, and 115 officers had joined the pursuit, which ended in a middle school parking lot with more than 140 bullets fired by police in less than 30 seconds. The "suspects"—dead from countless bullet wounds—were unarmed.

Just as troubling as this "shoot first, ask questions later" mindset is what investigative journalist Katie Rucke uncovered about how police are being trained to use force without hesitation and report their shootings in such a way as to legally justify a shot. Rucke reports the findings of one concerned citizen, "Jack," who went undercover in order to attend 24 hours of law enforcement training classes organized by the private, for-profit law enforcement training organization Calibre Press.

"Jack says it was troubling to witness hundreds of SWAT team officers and supervisors who seemed unfazed by being instructed to not hesitate when it comes to using excessive, and even deadly, force," writes Rucke. "‘From my personal experience, these trainers consistently promote more aggression and criticize hesitation to use force,’ Jack said. ‘They argue that the risk of making a mistake is worth it to absolutely minimize risk to the officer. And they teach officers how to use the law to minimize legal repercussions in almost any scenario. All this is, of course, done behind the scenes, with no oversight from police administrators, much less the public.’"

If ever there were a time to de-militarize and de-weaponize police forces, it’s now, starting at the local level, with local governments and citizens reining in local police. The same goes for scaling back on the mindset adopted by cops that they are the law and should be revered, feared and obeyed.

Police have been insulated from accusations of wrongdoing for too long and allowed to operate in an environment in which whatever a cop says, goes. Meanwhile, the epidemic of police violence continues to escalate while fear of the police increases and the police state, with all its surveillance gear and military weaponry, expands around us.

Original report here

　

　

　

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CA: Court rules no "blanket right" to hide names of cops who shoot people

California police departments do not have a blanket right to conceal the names of officers involved in shootings, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

In a 6-1 decision, the Supreme Court rejected the arguments of the Long Beach police union, concluding there is a presumption that the public has a right to know the identities of officers involved in shooting incidents. While the justices indicated there may be circumstances that would permit keeping the information secret, particularly if an officer's safety might be jeopardized, departments do not have a sweeping right to withhold the officers' identities in the aftermath of shootings.

"We reject that blanket rule," Justice Joyce Kennard, who retired this spring with the case pending, wrote for the majority.

Justice Ming Chin was the lone dissent, siding with the Long Beach police union, which was joined by some other law enforcement groups in the case. Chin argued that the information is exempt from public records laws because it threatens police rights to privacy.

The decision is unlikely to have much immediate impact on police departments in the Bay Area, which typically release the names of officers involved in shootings, although in some instances after a period time has lapsed. San Jose police, for example, do release the names, and the city did not take a position in the state Supreme Court case.

The case stems from a challenge by the Los Angeles Times, joined by other media organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union, which in 2010 sought the names of Long Beach officers involved in the fatal shooting of an unarmed man. The Times also made a request under the state Public Records Act for the names of any Long Beach officers involved in shootings over a five-year period.

The Long Beach police officers' association balked at the request, moving to block the disclosures in the courts. Both a trial judge and a state appeals court rejected the union's arguments, prompting the appeal to the state Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court made it clear there might be situations where police departments can make a strong showing that the reasons for keeping the identities of the officers under wraps outweigh the public's right to know the names. But the court found Long Beach did not meet that standard.

"Understandable are the general safety concerns of officers who fear retaliation from angry members of the community after an officer-involved shooting, especially when the shooting results in the death of an unarmed person," the court wrote. "But the Legislature ... has not gone so far as to protect the names of all officers involved in such shootings."

The decision is likely to be used in cases where other departments refuse to release the names, including one involving Juan Ruelas, a Sunnyvale man shot and killed by six officers in a September 2013 incident. The officers were from various police agencies, and the departments have refused to disclose their names, citing the fact it would jeopardize their undercover assignments.

Ruelas' family has retained Oakland attorney John Burris, who frequently brings civil rights cases against Bay Area police departments. Burris said Thursday he will use the Supreme Court ruling to argue for release of the names in Ruelas' case and other shooting incidents.

"This decision removes a huge barrier that police departments have hid behind to prevent the disclosures of police officers' names," he said.

　

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Silly mundane — "civil rights" are for killer cops

The United States Constitution, as Seattle police officers pretend to understand it, extends to police an unqualified right to the discretionary use of aggressive force, and prohibits "second-guessing" by those who are not members of the State’s coercive caste.

Inhibiting the exercise of that entitlement, the officers claim in a lawsuit filed against the U.S. Justice Department and the City of Seattle, would be a "violation of the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution."

In 2012, after a Justice Department investigation concluded that Seattle police officers routinely use unnecessary force, the City of Seattle implemented a new use-of-force policy and agreed to the creation of an independent police monitor. The current lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of more than 100 Seattle cops, complains that those trivial and inadequate restrictions created "vaguely defined, newly protected classes of suspects" and violate the officers’ supposed "right not to be required to take unnecessary risks."

An "unnecessary" risk, on this construction, would occur any time a police officer is required to use "significantly less force than is being threatened against them by suspects … [who] appear to be or are engaged in threatening and dangerous conduct." (Emphasis added.) Police are trained to believe that they put their lives at risk in every encounter with a citizen, and to regard any gesture of non-compliance as an immediate and impermissible risk to that most sacred of all considerations, "officer safety."

At present, in most of the country a police officer who brutalizes or kills somebody without moral justification can take refuge in the "totality of circumstances" test. In practice, this is nothing less than an unalloyed entitlement to kill first, and devise a suitable rationale after the fact.

Seattle’s new use-of-force guidelines, the police lawsuit objects, require officers – who, as a class, are selected on the basis of limited intellectual agility – "to engage in mental gymnastics wholly unreasonable in the light of the dangerous and evolving circumstances we face every day. This creates unnecessary and, therefore, unconstitutional risks to Plaintiffs’ safety."

Just as unconscionable, from the cops’ perspective, is the fact that their violent actions would be subject to what they call "the very second-guessing prohibited by the Constitution" – that is, their actions would be scrutinized by people who are not part of their privileged class. This distant possibility of accountability "places unconstitutional risks and burdens on the Plaintiffs’ lives and livelihood," pouts the civil complaint.

Those unacceptable risks can be avoided, of course, if police officers unwilling to deal with the modest dangers associated with that vocation would pursue other employment. The vexatious and complicated conditions imposed by official "use-of-force" guidelines would be unnecessary if police officers were subject to the same non-aggression standard that applies to everybody else. But extracting aggressive violence from law enforcement would be as futile as attempting to dehydrate water.

The use-of-force approach preferred by the Seattle police plaintiffs was displayed in the August 30, 2010 murder of John T. Williams on a street corner by Officer Ian Birk.

Williams, a partially deaf, 50-year-old alcoholic woodcarver who suffered from psychological problems, was shot four times by Birk within a few seconds of the encounter.

Birk claimed that he had been "threatened" by Williams, who was carrying two small, closed knives at the time of the incident. The autopsy, however, documented that Williams wasn’t facing Birk when he was shot: The officer approached him from behind and to the right, and Williams was shot in the right side of his body from an estimated distance of about ten feet. In addition to being partially deaf, Williams was wearing headphones at the time he was killed.

The victim’s non-cooperation, which was interpreted by Birk as hostility, most likely meant that he never heard the demand to drop his carving knife. Since the knives were legal under Seattle’s municipal code, Birk’s demand was not a "lawful order" in any sense.

In his testimony, Birk mentioned that he and other police are taught the "21-foot rule," which dictates that a knife-wielding subject should be considered a lethal threat within the prescribed distance. Williams was carrying two small knives, but he wasn’t "wielding" them. Rather than moving aggressively toward Birk, Williams was walking away from the officer: Birk said under oath that "I motioned for him to come over and talk to me. He walked away."

During the January 2011 inquest into the shooting, Birk stated that he gunned down John T. Williams on a Seattle street corner because he didn’t like the way the 50-year-old chronic alcoholic looked at him.

"He had a very stern, very serious, very confrontational look on his face," Birk testified during the inquest. "His brow was furrowed…. His jaws were set."

Birk’s description of Williams as displaying a countenance like that of the legendary Celtic warrior Cu Chulain (whose "eyes were dark, his expression sullen") wasn’t confirmed by any of the several non-police eyewitnesses.

Although Birk and his defenders invoked the"reasonable officer" standard to justify the killing, no reasonable person would have considered Williams a threat to Birk. We know this because there were several reasonable people who witnessed the incident, none of whom perceived the pathetic man to pose a risk to anybody. This is because none of them had ben indoctrinated to perceive even a momentary lack of cooperation by a Mundane as a "pre-attack indicator," or marinated in the conceit that officer safety always and everywhere trumps every other moral or practical consideration.

"Why did you shoot him? He wasn’t doing anything!" exclaimed one woman after Birk killed Williams.

It took just seconds for Birk to escalate an incidental encounter to the point of homicide. His reflexive reaction was to kill someone who was demonstrably harmless – and the programmed response of the first fellow officer on the scene was to commend Birk for doing so. Officer William Collins, who arrived in response to Birk’s "shots fired" report, told him, seconds after the killing, that he had done a "good job." All that Collins knew at the time was that a fellow member of the punitive caste had just killed a Mundane — and that’s all he needed to know. No "second-guessing" would be necessary, or allowed. During the January shooting inquest, Seattle police brutality lawyer Tim Ford asked Collins if a closed knife constitutes a threat to "officer safety." A closed knife is "a major threat," Collins insisted, "just as big as an open knife…. It’s extremely dangerous, and you have to treat the person with utmost caution…. [I]f you don’t drop it, you may be shot" — even if it is closed at the time, the officer maintained.

"We don’t get paid enough to be hurt," simpered Collins on the witness stand.Detective Jeff Mudd, who also testified at the inquest, also applauded Birk’s decision: "We’re trained to shoot people who pose a threat to us."

The alleged "threat" posed by Williams consisted of a dirty look the decrepit old alcoholic had supposedly given a young, healthy, but lethally craven police officer.

Birk resigned after the Seattle PD’s firearms review board ruled that the killing of Williams was "unjustified and out of policy." Police Chief John Diaz referred to Birk’s actions as unjustified and "egregious." Therefore it was an act of criminal homicide, correct? Not according to King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, who declined to file charges. Significantly, the Obama-Holder Justice Department, which devised the new use-of-force standard that is supposedly suffocating the bold and valiant officers of the Seattle Police Department, also refused to file civil rights charges against Birk.

Seattle-area tax victims were forced to pay a $1.5 million settlement to the family of John T. Williams. The only "punishment" Birk received for the unlawful killing was his compelled resignation from the police force. According to the plaintiffs in the Seattle police lawsuit – who, remarkably, are not being supported by the local police union – this was an atrocious violation of Birk’s civil rights.

Most people believe that the purpose of the Bill of Rights is to protect citizens against abuses of their rights by government officials. The incurably self-preoccupied people behind the Seattle police lawsuit apparently believe that the Bill of Rights exists to emancipate law enforcement officers from restrictions on the use of lethal force, and immunize them against legal, civil, and professional accountability when they kill people without legal justification.

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Why Did Baby-Burning Drug Warriors Think There Were No Children in the Home They Attacked?

Last week Habersham County, Georgia, Sheriff Joey Terrell, explaining how a SWAT team critically injured 19-month-old Bounkham Phonesavanh by tossing a flash-bang grenade into the toddler's playpen during a 3 a.m. drug raid on Wednesday, said members of the team, which consisted of his deputies and local police officers from Cornelia, never would have used such a "distraction device" if they had realized children were living in the home they were attacking. "If there's children involved in a house, we do not use any kind of distraction devices in those houses," Terrell told AccessNorthGa.com. "We just don't take the chance on it....According to the confidential informant, there were no children. When they made the buy, they didn't see any children or any evidence of children there, so we proceeded with our standard operation."

But according to a lawyer hired by Bounkham's parents, Boun Khan and Alecia Phonesavanh, even the most rudimentary surveillance would have revealed the presence of children in the house near Cornelia, which belongs to the couple's relatives. The Phonesavanhs moved there with Bounkham and his three older sisters after their home in Wisconsin burned down. "They had been in this home for about two months," the lawyer, Mawuli Mel Davis, told WSB-TV, the ABC station in Atlanta. "This is a stay-at-home dad who was out in front of the home, playing with the children on a daily basis. Any surveillance that was done would have revealed there was a father with four children who played in that driveway."

Habersham County Sheriff's OfficeHabersham County Sheriff's OfficeBy Terrell's own account, the SWAT team was relying on the report of a confidential informant who briefly visited the home on Tuesday night, just a few hours before the raid, and bought methamphetamine from Wanis Thonetheva, the Phonesavanhs' nephew. "There was no clothes, no toys, nothing to indicate that there was children present in the home," Cornelia Police Chief Rick Darby claimed. "If there had been, then we'd have done something different." But Alecia Phonesavanh says anyone visiting the home should have noticed signs of children. "They say there were no toys," she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "There is plenty of stuff. Their shoes were laying all over."

Bounkham, who was severely burned when the flash-bang grenade exploded in his face, is undergoing surgery today for the second time. His parents told the Journal-Constitution that doctors say he has a 50 percent chance of surviving. The Phonesavanhs, who have no health insurance, are collecting contributions to cover Bounkham's medical expenses.

Despite an avowed policy of not using flash-bang grenades when children are present, it seems that neither Terrell's office nor the Cornelia Police Department did anything to investigate that possibility aside from asking the informant, who according to Terrell did not even enter the home. Beyond the lack of due diligence on that point, there is the question of whether tossing an exploding, potentially incendiary device into a home that may be full of innocent people in the middle of the night is A-OK as long as you are reasonably sure all those people are 18 or older. And beyond that question, of course, is the issue of whether violence is ever a morally acceptable response to peaceful, consensual transactions between adults.

Terrell continues to blame those transactions for the horrible injuries police inflicted on a sleeping baby. "The information we had from our confidential informant was there was no children in the home," he told WXIA, the NBC station in Atlanta. "We always ask; that determines how we enter the house and the things we do.... Did we go by our training, did we go by the intelligence? Given the same set of circumstances, with the same information dealing with a subject who has known gun charges on him, who is selling meth, they would go through the same procedures...Nothing would change....Had no way of knowing the child was in the house. The little baby [who] was in there didn't deserve this. These drug dealers don't care."

Terrell, by contrast, cares so much about the psychoactive substances his neighbors consume that he is willing to endanger the lives of innocent bystanders in his vain attempt to stop people from getting high. If Terrell cared a little less, Bounkham would be home with his parents instead of clinging to life in a hospital.

Update: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that doctors who wanted to repair the chest wound Bounkham suffered during the raid have delayed the surgery planned for today because of the boy's "worsening health." The family's lawyer says "his fevers have been spiking" and "he is not out of the woods yet."

Update II: At a prayer vigil for Bounkham today, Marcus Coleman of the National Action Network said "the children [and] the father, on a daily basis, play out in the front yard at this residence." He added that in front of the door through which police entered was a minivan with four child seats and pictures of the children on the dashboard. "The sheriff gave a message saying that the one to blame for this incident is the individual that was selling narcotics," Coleman said. "What we come to tell him today is that the one to blame is you and your police department."

Original report here

　

　

　

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British police 'fess up

Days of bullying and getting ‘bladdered’ on expenses are over, says the new chairman of Police Federation as he pledges to rebuild public trust

The new chairman of the Police Federation has pledged to end the scandals that have plagued the nation’s forces.

Inspector Steve White was elected just over a week ago as chairman of the organisation, which represents 125,000 rank-and-file policemen and women.

In his first interview since securing the post, Mr White told The Guardian that his priorities were unifying the federation, and ‘rebuild[ing] the level of trust the police has with the public’.

‘We have been in a fairly dire place for 18 months ... we were quite close to being irrelevant,’ he said.

The police’s reputation has been damaged in recent times by allegations of bullying, officials getting ‘bladdered’ on expenses and scandals such as Plebgate, when police claimed that then Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell swore at them when they refused to open the gates of Downing Street for him.

Insp White demanded that the government stop attacking police and the federation which was lambasted by Theresa May, the Home Secretary, at its conference the week before last.

Mrs May announced that she was scrapping all Police Federation funding because the organisation sits on 'vast reserves' of cash worth tens of millions of pounds. She also demanded that the organisation reformed itself 'from top to bottom'.

Insp White said that the federation was going to reform itself anyway and ‘didn't need the Home Secretary to come and give us a beating’.

Original report here

　

　

　

(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today. Now hosted on Wordpress. If you cannot access it, go to the MIRROR SITE, where posts appear as well as on the primary site. I have reposted the archives (past posts) for Wicked Thoughts HERE or HERE or here

　

Australia: David Eastman inquiry recommends murder conviction be quashed

A police frame-up

The Eastman inquiry has recommended David Eastman’s conviction for the infamous 1989 assassination of ACT police chief Colin Stanley Winchester be quashed.

The extraordinary finding could have the convicted murderer freed after almost 19 years behind bars, should it be followed by the ACT Supreme Court.

If Eastman walks, it will be despite the inquiry's judge saying he is "fairly certain" the former Treasury official killed Mr Winchester.

The inquiry's report finally arrived late on Friday afternoon, after six months, thousands of pages of documents, a conveyor belt of now ageing witnesses, and countless hours of public hearings.

Its recommendations are jaw-dropping.

They could potentially clear Eastman of shooting Mr Winchester, then an Assistant Federal Police Commissioner, twice at close range outside his neighbour's Canberra home late one summer night in 1989.

Inquiry head Acting Justice Brian Martin used the 447-page report to ultimately recommend Eastman’s conviction be quashed, saying a retrial would now neither be feasible nor fair.

Despite the recommendations, Acting Justice Martin said he still thought Eastman was likely to be guilty of the murder.

"While I am fairly certain the applicant is guilty of the murder of the deceased, a nagging doubt remains," the judge wrote. "Regardless of my view of the case and the applicant’s guilt, the substantial miscarriage of justice suffered by the applicant should not be allowed to stand uncorrected."

The enormity of his findings may take time to be fully realised.

The cold-blooded killing of Mr Winchester shocked the nation, sparking a lengthy manhunt, and leaving an indelible mark on the minds of Canberrans.

Mr Winchester is the highest ranking police officer ever to be assassinated, and the AFP famously described his death as the "end of innocence" in Australia.

Eastman, a disgruntled public servant trying to avoid an assault charge, quickly became a suspect in the killing and was arrested and taken to trial in 1995, following a lengthy investigation.

The ACT Government, police and prosecutors have remained tight-lipped about the inquiry’s findings so far, saying the matter is before the Supreme Court, which will decide on the next course of action.

Acting Justice Martin said a "substantial miscarriage of justice" had occurred, pointing chiefly to the unreliable gunshot residue analysis used to link Eastman to the scene.

"As a consequence of the substantial miscarriage of justice, the applicant has been in custody for almost 19 years," Acting Justice Martin wrote.

Eastman, the judge said, was denied a fair chance of acquittal, and did not receive a fair trial.

He said his guilt had been decided on "deeply flawed" forensic evidence, in a trial where Eastman had been denied procedural fairness because of incomplete disclosure by the prosecution of all relevant material to the accused’s defence team.

The work of the case’s key forensic expert, Robert Collins Barnes, was significantly undermined during the inquiry; its credibility and reliability repeatedly savaged.

Barnes, now struggling in a battle with cancer, conceded some of his evidence had been misleading, and the inquiry heard he destroyed crucial exhibits, and failed to write reports for his most important results.

Counsel assisting the inquiry, Liesl Chapman, SC, described his mixing up of results from the crime scene and Eastman’s car by saying: "For a forensic scientist, it doesn't get any worse than that."

The supposedly independent expert was also covertly recorded professing himself to be a "police witness", and resisting efforts to have his work reviewed.

"If we don't put a brake on these turkeys ... I mean, we don't want these bastards putting that sort of stuff in writing," Mr Barnes told detectives in 1994.

Barnes was subject to an internal disciplinary investigation in Victoria at the time, and his work was later audited following concerns stemming from his evidence in a separate case.

The Eastman inquiry’s report lies with the ACT Supreme Court, where a full bench will decide on a way forward. The court can only use Acting Justice Martin’s report to aid them in their decision.

ACT Attorney General Simon Corbell said the report was "comprehensive and considered", but it would be up to the court what orders were made.

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Jon White, also declined to comment on the report, saying his office needed time to work through the detail.

The AFP also remained tight-lipped, saying it would be inappropriate to comment while the report was before the ACT Supreme Court.

Lawyers for the AFP lost a last-hour attempt to delay publication of the report on Friday afternoon.

Original report here

　

　

　

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