Homeless in Arizona

Police left prison door ajar in Debra Milke case

In the last couple months DNA testing caused the 300th person framed for murder by the police to be released from death row.

The Phoenix Police also framed Ray Krone for murder. Ray Krone's claim to fame was that he was the 100th person released from death row when DNA testing proved he was framed for murder.

The 4 kids from Tucson, Mike McGraw, Leo Bruce, Mark Nunez and Dante Parker, where also framed by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office for the Wat Promkunaram Buddhist temple murders on August 10, 1991 by Sheriff Tom Agnos who was replaced by Sheriff Joe.

Johnathan Doody who was probably one of the "real" murders in the Promkunaram Buddhist temple even had his conviction thrown out because the cops coerced a confession out of him after he took the 5th.

Last but not least "The 9 Step Reid Method" is responsible for most of these false confessions.

When it because socially unacceptable for cops to beat people the sh*t out of people with rubber hoses to get confessions "The 9 Step Reid Method" became popular.

"The 9 Step Reid Method" pretty much replaced beating people with "real" rubber hoses to beating them with "psychological" rubber hoses.

"The 9 Step Reid Method" is very effective at getting confessions. So effective it routinely gets innocent people to confess to crimes they didn't commit.

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Police left prison door ajar

The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Mar 20, 2013 7:11 PM

Debra Milke can see daylight. After two decades on death row, she’s likely to get a new trial. For this, thank the police.

Milke was convicted of arranging the 1989 execution-style murder of her 3-year-old son. A jury convicted her, in part, on the strength of a verbal confession that now-retired Phoenix police Detective Armando Saldate said he had obtained from her.

The confession wasn’t taped. No one else witnessed it. That alone raises questions.

But the jury in 1989 wasn’t allowed to hear even more troubling facts: Saldate had a history of lying and obtaining the most unlikely confessions, including from a man drifting in and out of consciousness in a hospital room.

In four court cases, confessions or indictments were tossed because Saldate misled juries and judges. In another four cases, confessions were suppressed or convictions tossed because Saldate violated suspects’ constitutional rights.

And now, there is Milke, granted a new trial by a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel because the jury didn’t hear about Saldate’s record.

Saldate’s superiors knew his history. They recorded it in his personnel file. But it appears they did little to correct his behavior, to guard against further abuses, to protect justice. If they had, he would not have been in an interrogation room alone with Milke or any other suspect.

Police must police themselves as vigorously as they do all other citizens. When they fail in that duty, justice suffers.

Hitler joins gun debate, but history is in dispute

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Hitler joins gun debate, but history is in dispute

By Adam Geller Associated Press Sat Mar 23, 2013 8:26 AM

When the president of Ohio’s state school board posted her opposition to gun control, she used a powerful symbol to make her point: a picture of Adolf Hitler. When a well-known conservative commentator decried efforts to restrict guns, he argued that if only Jews in Poland had been better armed, many more would have survived the Holocaust.

In the months since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, some gun rights supporters have repeatedly compared U.S. gun control efforts to Nazi restrictions on firearms, arguing that limiting weapons ownership could leave Americans defenseless against homegrown tyrants.

But some experts say that argument distorts a complex and contrary history. In reality, scholars say, Hitler loosened the tight gun laws that governed Germany after World War I, even as he barred Jews from owning weapons and moved to confiscate them.

Advocates who cite Hitler in the current U.S. debate overlook that Jews in 1930s Germany were a very small population, owned few guns before the Nazis took control, and lived under a dictatorship commanding overwhelming public support and military might, historians say. While it doesn’t fit neatly into the modern-day gun debate, they say, the truth is that for all Hitler’s unquestionably evil acts, his firearms laws likely made no difference in Jews’ very tenuous odds of survival.

“Objectively, it might have made things worse” if the Jews who fought the Nazis in Poland’s 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising had more and better guns, said historian Steve Paulsson, an expert on the period whose Jewish family survived the city’s destruction.

But comparisons between a push by gun control advocates in the U.S. and Hitler have become so common — in online comments and letters to newspaper editors, at gun rights protests and in public forums — they’re often asserted as fact, rather than argument.

“Absolute certainties are a rare thing in this life, but one I think can be collectively agreed upon is the undeniable fact that the Holocaust would have never taken place had the Jewish citizenry of Hitler’s Germany had the right to bear arms and defended themselves with those arms,” former Major League Baseball pitcher John Rocker wrote in an online column in January.

After some gun advocates rallied at New York’s capitol in February carrying signs depicting Gov. Andrew Cuomo as Hitler, National Rifle Association President David Keene said the analogy was appropriate.

“Folks that are cognizant of the history, not just in Germany but elsewhere, look back to that history and say we can’t let that sort of thing happen here,” Keene, who was the lead speaker at the rally, told a radio interviewer March 1.

Those comparisons between gun control now and under Hitler joined numerous other statements, including the one by the Ohio school board president, Debe Terhar, on her personal Facebook page in January and by conservative commentator Andrew Napolitano, writing in The Washington Times.

The comparisons recently prompted the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, to call on critics of gun control to keep Hitler and the Nazis out of the debate.

The rhetoric “is such an absurdity and so offensive and just undermines any real understanding of what the Holocaust was about,” said Ken Jacobson, the ADL’s deputy national director. “If they do believe it, they’re making no serious examination of what the Nazi regime was about.”

But some gun rights advocates firmly disagree.

“People who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” said Charles Heller, executive director of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, which has long compared U.S. gun control to Nazi tactics. “I guess if you’re pro-Nazi, they are right. But if you’re pro-freedom, we call those people liars.”

Comparing gun control activism to Hitler is not new. In a 1994 book, “Guns, Crime and Freedom,” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre wrote that “In Germany, firearm registration helped lead to the Holocaust.”

But the history of civilian gun ownership under the Nazis, scholars say, is far more complicated than the rhetoric indicates.

After World War I, Germany signed a peace treaty requiring dismantling of much of its army and limiting weapons import and export. But many of the 1 million soldiers returning home joined armed militias, including a Nazi Party force that saw Communists as the leading threat.

“Technically, they (the militias) were illegal and the guns were illegal, but a lot of government officials didn’t care about right-wingers with guns taking on Communists,” said David Redles, co-author of “Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History,” a popular college text. By 1928, however, officials decided they had to get a handle on the militias and their weapons and passed a law requiring registration of all guns, said Redles, who teaches at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland.

Soon after Hitler was named chancellor in 1933, he used the arson of the Reichstag as an excuse to push through a decree allowing for the arrest of many Communists and the suspension of civil rights including protections from search and seizure. But as the Nazis increasingly targeted Jews and others they considered enemies, they moved in 1938 to loosen gun statutes for the loyal majority, said Bernard Harcourt, a University of Chicago professor of law and political science who has studied gun regulations under Hitler.

The 1938 law is best known for barring Jews from owning weapons, after which the Nazis confiscated guns from Jewish homes. But Harcourt points out that Hitler’s gun law otherwise completely deregulated acquisition of rifles, long guns and ammunition. It exempted many groups from requiring permits. The law lowered the age for legal gun ownership from 20 to 18. And it extended the validity of gun permits from one year to three years.

“To suggest that the targeting of Jews in any of the gun regulations or any of the other regulations is somehow tied to Nazis’ view of guns is entirely misleading,” Harcourt said, “because the Nazis believed in a greater deregulation of firearms. Firearms were viewed, for the good German, were something to which they had rights.”

With the 1938 law, Nazis seized guns from Jewish homes. But few Jews owned guns and they composed just 2 percent of the population in a country that strongly backed Hitler. By the time the law passed, Jews were so marginalized and spread among so many cities, there was no possibility of them putting up meaningful resistance, even with guns, said Robert Gellately, a professor of history at Florida State University and author of “Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany.” [Of course the Jews fighting a normal war against the Nazi's would have been impossible. But when minorities are oppressed, the never fight a normal war, but instead fight a guerrilla war and only choose to fight in battles they can win. That's what happened in the American Revolution when the Americans fought the British]

U.S. gun rights advocates disagree, pointing to the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising by about 700 armed Jews who were able to fend off a much larger force of German troops for days until retreating to tunnels or fleeing. The Nazis won out by systematically burning the ghetto to the ground, house by house.

“Once the Germans began adopting that strategy there really wasn’t very much that people armed with pistols, or even rifles and machine guns, could do,” said Paulsson, the historian and author of “Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw.” [Again I disagree, in these situations the Jews would have chosen to fight a guerilla war and only picked to fight battles which they could win.]

Paulsson said it is possible that if Polish Jews had limited their resistance, Nazi troops might not have destroyed the ghetto, allowing more to survive in hiding or escape. When armed Jews shot at mobs or troops at other times in 1930s and 1940s Poland, it incited more vicious counter-attacks, he said.

But to Heller, the gun rights activist, the Warsaw uprising is proof of power in firearms. Giving Jews more guns might not have averted the Holocaust, but it would have given them a fighting chance, enough that perhaps a third of them could have shot their way out of being marched to the concentration camps, he said.

“Could they have fought back? They did (in Warsaw). You know why they (the Nazis) destroyed the ghetto? Because they were afraid of getting shot,” he said. “Now, will it get to that in the U.S.? God, I hope not. Not if (U.S. Attorney General Eric) Holder doesn’t start sending people to kick doors down.”

But Paulsson, whose mother was freed from the Auschwitz concentration camp at the end of the war, dismisses that argument as twisting the facts.

“Ideologues always try to shoehorn history into their own categories and read into the past things that serve their own particular purposes,” he said.

Law-enforcement veterans join Arpaio recall

Law-enforcement veterans join Arpaio recall

By Michelle Ye Hee Lee The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Mar 28, 2013 12:14 AM

Several retired Valley law-enforcement officials have joined the recall effort against Sheriff Joe Arpaio, criticizing him for using what they consider scare tactics to raise money to fight the recall.

Respect Arizona is in the process of gathering signature petitions seeking to hold a recall election to oust Arpaio.

The group obtained a letter — signed by Arpaio and paid for by the Elect Sheriff Joe Arpaio campaign — that was e-mailed to conservative supporters urging financial donations to help fight the recall.

In the letter, Arpaio said the Valley’s public safety was at stake in the recall.

Without Arpaio, the letter said, those who would be in danger include single mothers whose children face “a rampant drug culture,” the hypothetical mother of a child killed by a drug dealer whom Arpaio is not able to keep in jail, and small-business owners whose livelihoods are threatened by illegal immigrants who have control over neighborhoods.

Respect Arizona released statements purported to have been provided by retired Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris and retired Phoenix Assistant Police Chief Bill Louis, accusing Arpaio of misleading supporters by taking sole credit for community safety. Former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Paul Charlton and former Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard were also quoted in the group’s statements.

“Arizona law enforcement will continue to fight crime and ensure public safety long after Mr. Arpaio leaves office,” Harris said in his statement.

Two other retired law-enforcement officials and former Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon echoed those sentiments in person. During a Wednesday news conference, they called Arpaio’s fundraising letter disingenuous.

“Elected officials come and go, and the state moves on,” Gordon said.

Arpaio’s camp defended the statements in his letter.

Chad Willems, manager for the Elect Sheriff Joe Arpaio campaign, said there “would most certainly be consequences negatively impacting law enforcement” if Arpaio were recalled: Fewer illegal immigrants would be apprehended or turned over for deportation, and citizens would be less safe because crimes associated with illegal immigration could increase.

“If it doesn’t matter who the elected official is, then why do they want to remove Arpaio from office? They want him out of office precisely because of the way he runs his office, specifically as it relates to enforcing illegal immigration laws,” Willems said in an e-mail to The Arizona Republic.

Willems took a swipe at Respect Arizona and its dwindling finances, which the group’s leaders recently confirmed. He blamed the group for misleading the public, the same accusation the group lodged against Arpaio.

“It is ironic that the Respect Arizona petitioners are criticizing the sheriff for seeking financial donations when he has been made to do so to defend himself against the very recall effort they started, an effort that is waning, if not entirely dead,” Willems said in a statement.

One local cop for every 270 people in Arizona???

So for about every 270 people in Arizona there is one city, county, or state cop or prison guard.

The Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board sets standards for training, recruitment and retention for more than 15,000 sworn peace officers and 9,000 correctional-service officers in the state.

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Phoenix police temporarily halt shooting practice, cite rising supply costs

By Cecilia Chan The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Wed Mar 27, 2013 10:26 PM

Phoenix police are temporarily halting discretionary shooting practice because of rising cost and limited supply of ammunition.

Officers will no longer get 100 rounds of .40-caliber and .45-caliber ammunition each month and shoot on their own at the academy’s range, said police spokesman Trent Crump. All other firearms training and certifications will remain.

The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, which represents 2,500 rank-and-file officers, said some officers struggle with shooting and need the extra practice and many go down to the range and take advantage of the monthly shooting.

“Any time you have a resource, a critical resource that is limited, reduced or taken away it does cause concern,” union Vice President Ken Crane said.

Crane said roughly 308 officers each month last year participated in the optional practice. Some officers participate because they enjoy shooting and others do it to keep up their required shooting skills, he said.

Every year officers must pass a firearms qualification, which includes earning a score of 84 percent with a duty handgun on an approved course.

Crane said some officers might have a hard time passing the certification and thus more might have to take department’s Skill Builder Program, which is mandated for officers who fail their firearms qualification.

“We want officers to maintain their level of efficiency when they are out on the street,” he said.

The department memo sent Monday cited budgetary issues, the increasing cost of ammunition, and the difficulty in getting ammunition in a timely basis for suspending the monthly practice. Crump said the ammunition cost was 20 percent higher.

Crump doesn’t know exactly when the department can resume the target shooting. He attributed the shortage on a back-order.

Crump said the department ordered a bulk shipment of practice rounds in May, which didn’t arrive in January as expected.

“It sounds like fall before we can expect it,” Crump said. “The firearms unit is trying to manage the ammunition we have to make sure we get through all the training, all the mandatory shooting required by AZ Post.”

The Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board sets standards for training, recruitment and retention for more than 15,000 sworn peace officers and 9,000 correctional-service officers in the state.

Crump was unable to say how much money the department spends on practice rounds but that last year it spent $850,000 for all ammunition.

Crump said 1 million to 2 million practice rounds are fired each year.

Practice ammunition is cheaper and of less quality than that used while on duty, Crump said.

“We are being more frugal with the rounds we have because of the shortage,” he said.

Are the DEA and FBI listening to your cell phone calls????

F*ck the 4th Amendment, I got a gun and a badge and can do anything I want!!!!

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Little-known surveillance tool raises concerns by judges, privacy activists

By Ellen Nakashima, Published: March 27

Federal investigators in Northern California routinely used a sophisticated surveillance system to scoop up data from cellphones and other wireless devices in an effort to track criminal suspects — but failed to detail the practice to judges authorizing the probes.

The practice was disclosed Wednesday in documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California — in a glimpse into a technology that federal agents rarely discuss publicly.

The investigations used a device known as a StingRay, which simulates a cellphone tower and enables agents to collect the serial numbers of individual cellphones and then locate them. Although law enforcement officials can employ StingRays and similar devices to locate suspects, privacy groups and some judges have raised concerns that the technology is so invasive — in some cases effectively penetrating the walls of homes — that its use should require a warrant.

The issues, judges and activists say, are twofold: whether federal agents are informing courts when seeking permission to monitor suspects, and whether they are providing enough evidence to justify the use of a tool that sweeps up data not only from a suspect’s wireless device but also from those of bystanders in the vicinity.

In Northern California, according to the newly disclosed documents, judges expressed concerns about the invasive nature of the technology.

“It has recently come to my attention that many agents are still using [StingRay] technology in the field although the [surveillance] application does not make that explicit,” Miranda Kane, then chief of the criminal division of the Northern California U.S. attorney’s office, said in a May 2011 e-mail obtained by the ACLU.

As a result of that, she wrote, “effective immediately, all . . . applications and proposed orders must be reviewed by your line supervisor before they are submitted to a magistrate judge.” [I suspect a "line supervisor" will rubber stamp the request with no questions asked, just like judges usually rubber stamp them with no questions asked]

The Justice Department has generally maintained that a warrant based on probable cause is not needed to use a “cell-site simulator” because the government is not employing them to intercept conversations, former officials said. But some judges around the country have disagreed and have insisted investigators first obtain a warrant.

“It’s unsettled territory,” said one U.S. law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the record. [Unsettled territory my *ss, the Fourth Amendment has been around since the 1700's]

In a statement, Christopher Allen, a spokesman for the FBI, said the bureau advises field offices to “work closely with the relevant U.S. Attorney’s Office to adhere to the legal requirements” of their respective districts.

One of the problems is there is “scant law” addressing the issue of cell-site simulators, said Brian L. Owsley, a federal magistrate judge in the Southern District of Texas, who in June wrote a rare public ruling on the issue. He denied an application to use a StingRay, in large part because he felt the investigating agent failed to explain the technology or how it would be used to gather the target’s cellphone number.

Moreover, the government did not explain what it would do with the numbers and other data “concerning seemingly innocent cell phone users” that were also picked up.

“Neither the special agent nor the assistant United States attorney appeared to understand the technology very well,” Owsley wrote. “At a minimum, they seemed to have some discomfort in trying to explain it.” [I suspect they didn't WANT to explain it and risk the judge not issuing their search warrant]

At a recent conference on cellphone tracking issues at Yale University, Owsley said he thought that “there are magistrate judges around the country that are getting these requests and not realizing what these requests are,” in some cases perhaps because the agents are not clear about their intent to use the technology. [Again, I suspect the agents intentionally don't explain the technology, because they don't want to risk a just refusing to rubber stamp the search warrant]

“By withholding information about this technology from courts in applications for electronic surveillance orders, the federal government is essentially seeking to write its own search warrants,” said Linda Lye, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California.

Judges “need the opportunity to require privacy safeguards, such as rules on how to handle the data of innocent people that may be captured by the devices as well,” she said.Lye will be arguing the issue on Thursday in a federal case in Arizona, in support of a defendant charged with tax fraud and identity theft. Daniel Rigmaiden, known as “the Hacker” to acquaintances and federal agents, was tracked in part with the use of a StingRay. He has alleged that investigators did not seek a court’s approval to use the technology.

“The main concern we have in Rigmaiden is the government was not being forthright with the magistrate when it was seeking to use this device,” said Lye, whose organization is one of several that have filed an amicus brief in the case.

The newly disclosed documents suggest that “Rigmaiden was not an isolated case,” she said.

The government said it obtained a warrant to track Rigmaiden, but the ACLU is arguing that the government did not present key information about the surveillance device to the magistrate, rendering the warrant invalid.

Chris Soghoian, the ACLU’s principal technologist, said cell-site simulators are being used by local, state and federal authorities.

“No matter how the StingRay is used — to identify, locate or intercept — they always send signals through the walls of homes,” which should trigger a warrant requirement, Soghoian said. “The signals always penetrate a space protected by the Fourth Amendment.”

FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers

I suspect if George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were alive today they would tell us that these FBI tyrants are far worse then King George and that it's people like them that they passed the Second Amendment for.

Can you imagine how people would complain if the FBI demanded the right to open and read our snail mail letters? Well this is far worse and I don't hear any public out cry against the FBI tyrants.

On the other hand I suspect the people in Nazi Germany were just as passive when Hitlers goons turned Nazi Germany into a police state.

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FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as “Top Priority” for 2013

By Ryan Gallagher

Posted Tuesday, March 26, 2013, at 4:58 PM

For now, law enforcement has trouble monitoring Gmail communications in real time

Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time. But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a “top priority” this year.

Last week, during a talk for the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C., FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann discussed some of the pressing surveillance and national security issues facing the bureau. He gave a few updates on the FBI’s efforts to address what it calls the “going dark” problem—how the rise in popularity of email and social networks has stifled its ability to monitor communications as they are being transmitted. It’s no secret that under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the feds can easily obtain archive copies of emails. When it comes to spying on emails or Gchat in real time, however, it’s a different story.

That’s because a 1994 surveillance law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act only allows the government to force Internet providers and phone companies to install surveillance equipment within their networks. But it doesn’t cover email, cloud services, or online chat providers like Skype. Weissmann said that the FBI wants the power to mandate real-time surveillance of everything from Dropbox and online games (“the chat feature in Scrabble”) to Gmail and Google Voice. “Those communications are being used for criminal conversations,” he said.

While it is true that CALEA can only be used to compel Internet and phone providers to build in surveillance capabilities into their networks, the feds do have some existing powers to request surveillance of other services. Authorities can use a “Title III” order under the “Wiretap Act” to ask email and online chat providers furnish the government with “technical assistance necessary to accomplish the interception.” However, the FBI claims this is not sufficient because mandating that providers help with “technical assistance” is not the same thing as forcing them to “effectuate” a wiretap. In 2011, then-FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni—Weissmann’s predecessor—stated that Title III orders did not provide the bureau with an "effective lever" to "encourage providers" to set up live surveillance quickly and efficiently. In other words, the FBI believes it doesn’t have enough power under current legislation to strong-arm companies into providing real-time wiretaps of communications.

Because Gmail is sent between a user’s computer and Google’s servers using SSL encryption, for instance, the FBI can’t intercept it as it is flowing across networks and relies on the company to provide it with access. Google spokesman Chris Gaither hinted that it is already possible for the company to set up live surveillance under some circumstances. “CALEA doesn't apply to Gmail but an order under the Wiretap Act may,” Gaither told me in an email. “At some point we may expand our transparency report to cover this topic in more depth, but until then I'm not able to provide additional information.”

Either way, the FBI is not happy with the current arrangement and is on a crusade for more surveillance authority. According to Weissmann, the bureau is working with “members of intelligence community” to craft a proposal for new Internet spy powers as “a top priority this year.” Citing security concerns, he declined to reveal any specifics. “It's a very hard thing to talk about publicly,” he said, though acknowledged that “it's something that there should be a public debate about.”

Case against Horne not over; judge sets hearing

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Case against Horne not over; judge sets hearing

By Lindsey Collom The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Mar 29, 2013 10:49 PM

An administrative-law judge who recommended that the campaign-finance case against Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne and one of his top aides be dismissed on technical grounds has agreed to hold a hearing on the merits of the case.

In an order issued Friday, state Office of Administrative Hearings Judge Tammy Eigenheer said she will hear arguments May 7, a date originally set for an evidentiary hearing. The motion was quickly followed by responses from attorneys for Horne and Kathleen Winn, a campaign supporter who became a Horne staffer, imploring the judge to let her original decision stand.

Eigenheer’s order and the responses came hours after Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery filed his response to Eigenheer’s March 19 recommendation to dismiss the matter because she believed the method used to prosecute Horne and Winn was inappropriate.

Eigenheer contends the secretary of state did not follow statutory protocol by referring the case to Montgomery for prosecution, rather than to the Attorney General’s Office.

Horne and Winn are accused of unlawfully coordinating an independent-expenditure committee during the 2010 election, when he was the Republican candidate for attorney general and she was chairwoman of Business Leaders for Arizona. Both have denied any wrongdoing.

Horne and Winn are fighting a civil compliance order Montgomery issued in October for the pair to revise their campaign-finance reports and refund about $400,000 in donations, or face three times that amount in penalties. Horne and Winn appealed to the Arizona Office of Administrative Hearings, an independent arbiter over decisions made by certain state agencies, boards and commissions.

According to Montgomery, a 14-month inquiry by the FBI and his office revealed that Horne collaborated with Winn’s committee to quickly raise more than $500,000 to run negative ads against his Democratic foe, Felecia Rotellini.

The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office found that there was reasonable cause to believe a campaign-finance violation had occurred, and it referred the case to Montgomery.

In his motion Friday, Montgomery stood by his argument that the attorney general was disqualified from reviewing or enforcing a case against himself, or referring it to an outside agency, the latter of which Eigenheer says Horne should have been given a chance to do.

Montgomery said he rejected Eigenheer’s dismissal recommendation and directed her to proceed with the May 7 hearing.

Winn’s attorney, Tim LaSota, said he was perplexed by Montgomery’s motion. “It’s like a runner being called out by the umpire and ordering the umpire to call him safe,” he said.

In his motion, La Sota suggested that if Montgomery wants Eigenheer to hear the case, he should first ask a Maricopa County Superior Court judge to determine whether he has jurisdiction to prosecute.

Horne’s attorney, Michael Kimerer, wrote in his motion that Montgomery “is illegally claiming to be both advocate and judge in this matter.”

AG Tom Horne hates gays????

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AG Horne threatens legal action over Bisbee civil union vote

By Lindsey Collom and Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Apr 2, 2013 3:59 PM

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne warned Bisbee on Tuesday that his office would take legal action against the city if council members approve an ordinance tonight allowing civil unions for gay couples.

The unions would be recognized only within the city limits and would grant rights given to a married couple, including property ownership, inheritance, guardianship and adoption.

Horne opposed the measure in a letter to city officials, saying Bisbee doesn’t have the authority to offer such unions and that “the impact goes beyond (city) boundaries.”

"The ordinance seeks to change seven separate State statutes within the boundaries of the city, dealing with issues such as community property, inheritance of property, and appointment of personal representatives," Horne said in a news release. "The only proper way to change a statute is through the Legislature, not through actions of the City Council attempting to change a State statute within its boundaries. I emphasize that I am not expressing any opinion on the policy of the ordinance. My job is to enforce the laws that exist and I am obligated to respond to complaints from state legislators."

Three Republican state lawmakers -- Sen. Gail Griffin, of Hereford, and Reps. David Gowan and David Stevens of Sierra Vista -- complained to his office, saying that consituents had contacted them, expressing concern that the proposed ordinance may be in violation of the state's constitution, Horne said.

On Monday, a powerful conservative advocacy group, the Center for Arizona Policy, sent city officials a similar letter and threatened to sue the city if it allows civil unions.

Bisbee Councilman Gene Conners, who proposed the measure, said he doesn’t believe the letter will deter the council. It supported the ordinance unanimously in its initial vote. “I think there are a couple of votes that might peel off,” he said. “But if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.”

Trying to bully Bisbee

Source

Posted on April 2, 2013 11:44 am by EJ Montini

Trying to bully Bisbee

Bisbee officials should have expected the drawbridge to be lowered around the moat at the state capitol and the mob let loose upon them with torches and pitchforks.

The Phoenix-based right wing Center for Arizona Policy and the Republican legislators who cower before it are hoping to bully the town of Bisbee into not passing an ordinance allowing for civil unions between same-sex couples.

The Center had its attorney send a letter to Bisbee’s lawyer reading in part, “…The Arizona Constitution and Arizona statutes recognize only the marriages of one man and one woman. The City of Bisbee’s attempt to do an end-run around those laws, by offering a marital-type relationship with the benefits and responsibilities of marriage, is in violation of this state requirement for charter cities.

“If the City of Bisbee enacts a law recognizing a quasi-marital relationship not provided for by Arizona law, it will likely find itself involved in expensive and time-consuming litigation, which it is likely to lose.”

Bisbee’s ordinance, which is expected to pass tonight, would provide same-sex couples with rights in terms of “property ownership, guardianship in cases of illness, and disposition of remains upon death” according to the city’s attorney.

Last week, Bisbee Councilman Ken Budge told me, “Our attorney looked at it pretty hard. We’re not dealing with marriage. We’ll leave that to the Supreme Court. But there is nothing in our law about civil unions. Granted, our ordinance will only apply here, but it will take care of our own citizens and it’s our way of making a statement. I refer to us a blue dot in a sea of red.”

Where the CAP goes, so go the Republican politicians who supposedly run our state, like Attorney General Tom Horne, who drafted his own letter to the town of fewer than 6,000 residents. His office doesn’t consider such action “threatening.” Oh, no. The big bad state going after tiny Bisbee.

Horne said in a statement that he was acting on behalf of legislators representing the Bisbee area, adding, “I emphasize that I am not expressing any opinion on the policy of the ordinance. My job is to enforce the laws that exist and I am obligated to respond to complaints from state legislators. If the ordinance is passed, the Office will initiate a special action in the Courts to enjoin it.”

Sure. No threat there. No guts, either.

Bisbee’s ordinance would only be valid within city limits. But what if it catches on? What if bigger and bigger towns enact similar ordinances? Then a place like Phoenix?

What if the rest of Arizona suddenly got the urge to leave the 17th Century and travel all the way to the 21st Century?

It’s going to happen. No amount of lobbying will be able to stop it.

Young people these days don’t cower before stodgy old political hacks or the stodgy old lobbyists who pull their strings. They believe gay couples should have the same rights as any other couple.

They don’t carry pitchforks or torches.

Although there’s probably an app for that on their smartphones.

Is Tom Horne using Bisbee to launch his re-election bid?

Is Tom Horne using Bisbee to launch his re-election bid?

Attorney General Tom Horne – perhaps sensing his best shot at re-election next year — has announced that he’ll sue the city of Bisbee for having the effrontery to break state laws.

So says the top law enforcement official in the state, a guy who stands accused of breaking the state laws.

Horne, at the urging of southeastern Arizona legislators and the conservative Center for Arizona Policy, has worked himself into a legal lather over the Bisbee City Council’s vote Tuesday to approve civil unions within city limits. Yesterday, he sent the city a letter threatening to sue.

“The ordinance seeks to change seven separate state statutes within the boundaries of the city, dealing with issues such as community property, inheritance of property, and appointment of personal representatives,” Horne said, in a press release. “The only proper way to change a statute is through the Legislature, not through actions of the City Council attempting to change a State statute within its boundaries. I emphasize that I am not expressing any opinion on the policy of the ordinance. My job is to enforce the laws that exist and I am obligated to respond to complaints from state legislators.”

Goodness. He is worked up. Instead of worrying so much about what one tiny Arizona town is doing, perhaps Horne and the state legislators who are so exercised should instead step up, act like leaders and seek a solution to this vexing problem of inequality so that we can move on in this state and in this country.

Instead of fighting Bisbee, how about following Bisbee?

How about calling for an end to state regulation of marriage? I’ve been married a long time and have always wondered what business it is of the government whom I chose to marry.

Government ought to be in the business of allowing a legal arrangement between two consenting adults who choose to tie their lives together — much as Bisbee has approved. A simple civil contract, setting out all the rights and responsibilities, would serve the purpose, allow for equality and take this issue of state- approved morality out of the equation.

OK, I can feel Cathi Herrod fainting, even as I type. But for those who want to enter the state of holy matrimony, shouldn’t that really be an issue between them, their church and their God?

Tom Horne on the Sanctity of Marriage

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne - What the Bisbee City Council is doing undermines the sanctity of marriage

Reporter - What about your affair?

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne - Please have my wife removed from the room.

Conn. governor signs sweeping new gun bill into law

And of course without their guns the people of Connecticut won't be able to do much about it.

Source

Conn. governor signs sweeping new gun bill into law

Tribune newspapers and wire reports

11:44 a.m. CDT, April 4, 2013

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy today signed a tough new gun law that, among several key provisions, restricts sales of the sort of high-capacity ammunition clips that a gunman used to massacre 26 people in minutes in a December attack on a school.

Lawmakers in the state's Democratic-controlled House approved the measure, which supporters described as one of the toughest such laws in the United States, early on Thursday morning. The Senate approved the measure hours earlier.

The House debate stretched past midnight, with opponents of the law arguing that it infringed on the rights to gun ownership protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and that efforts to prevent attacks such as the Newtown, Conn., school shooting should focus on providing better mental-health services.

Connecticut's law passed hours after Maryland's House of Delegates on Wednesday approved their own gun law, which also limits magazine size and requires that gun buyers be fingerprinted.

The Connecticut law also requires background checks for private gun sales, expands the number of guns covered by the state's assault-weapons ban and establishes a $15 million fund to help schools improve security infrastructure.

It bans specifically the sale of ammunition clips that hold 10 bullets or more and requires owners of such clips to register them by January 1, 2014. After that date, owning an unregistered high-capacity clip will become a felony offense.

The legislation was proposed after the Dec. 14 slayings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in which a gunman used clips that held 30 bullets to fire off 154 rounds in less than five minutes. "The content of this legislation speaks for itself as really the strongest gun control legislation in the country," House Speaker Brendan Sharkey, a 50-year-old Hamden Democrat, said in a statehouse interview. "The details of this package, when reviewed by other states, will be a terrific blueprint for how to do this in a comprehensive way."

Newtown school massacre

Passage came more than three months after gunman Adam Lanza, 20, stormed into the Newtown school and mowed down students and teachers, reviving debate over gun control. Connecticut joins New York and Colorado in tightening firearms limits in the wake of the tragedy. Maryland’s House of Delegates passed a similar measure yesterday.

In Washington, congressional action on the issue has been stymied by opposition from the National Rifle Association, the nation’s biggest gun-rights lobby. President Barack Obama went to Colorado yesterday to praise that state’s new restrictions, and plans to visit Connecticut next week to pressure Congress

"Colorado is proving a model of what's possible," Obama said in Denver. "It's now been just over 100 days since the murder of 20 innocent children and six brave educators in Newtown, Connecticut, an event that shocked this country."

Lanza carried 10 30-round magazines into Sandy Hook, court documents show. He reloaded six times and fired 154 bullets from his Bushmaster AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle in less than five minutes, according to the documents. The measure approved yesterday bans sales of the weapon and similar models.

Lanza's victims front and center in debate

This week, some parents of Lanza's victims handed out pictures of their children to lawmakers who met April 1 to review the limits proposed in an accord hammered out by legislative leaders. Family members sought an outright ban on possession of high-capacity magazines, rather than the registration requirement that’s part of the final measure.

During one of the most emotional moments of the six-hour Senate debate yesterday, John McKinney, the Republican leader who represents Newtown, explained why he pins a green ribbon and a guardian angel on his lapel.

"I try to put it on my jacket every day to remember those that we've lost because I stand here, I stand here as their voice," McKinney, 49, said. He then read the names of each of the Sandy Hook victims, his voice wavering a times. Six of the 14 Republicans in the chamber voted for the measure.

Before the voting began, activists on opposite sides of the issue sparred verbally in the Capitol’s hallways.

A poll released on Thursday found that 91 percent of U.S. voters support regulations requiring all gun buyers to undergo background checks. However, 48 percent of all respondents and 53 percent of those owning guns said those checks could lead to the government's confiscating legally owned weapons.

That Quinnipiac University poll of 1,711 registered voters was conducted from March 26 to April 1 and had a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.

Vote makes 'everyone in this room a criminal'

"I don’t want 30-round magazines that can wipe out our children," said Dan Garrett, 53, of Hamden, speaking to a group of men wearing Connecticut Citizens Defense League stickers. Greg Kozeman, 44, of New Britain said improving mental-health access is a better solution than tighter gun limits.

Earlier, gun-rights advocates filled statehouse lobbies.

"The vote on this bill will make everyone in this room a criminal," said Warren Stevens, 58, a Plantsville gun owner. He wouldn’t say what type of guns he owns or how many.

“It is no business of the state what I own,” he said. "Their authority does not extend into my house."

Connecticut, with a long history of weapons production, is still home to six gunmakers. The companies include Sturm Ruger & Co., Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing Co., Colt Defense LLC, Stag Arms, Charter Arms, O.F. Mossberg & Sons Inc., and Ammunition Storage Components LLC, which makes 30-round magazines. Some have threatened to leave if the new limits pass.

The industry employs about 7,300 people in the state and contributed $119 million in tax revenue in 2011, according to the Newtown-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group. Charter Arms calls the region “the cradle of the American firearms industry.”

Reuters and Bloomberg

Less Culpable, but With Longer Sentences

Source

Less Culpable, but With Longer Sentences

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

By FERNANDA SANTOS

Published: April 5, 2013

PHOENIX — Members of a white supremacy group descended on a home here 11 years ago to scare a man into paying back the $200 his roommate had accused him of stealing. The attack ended in the man’s death.

Jeremy Johnson. Mr. Johnson, Ms. Nelson and Mr. Gaines killed a man in Phoenix, but brokered plea deals and were able to avoid trials. They could all be out of prison by 2028.

Three of the four people who were eventually arrested brokered plea deals, avoiding a trial. The roommate, Jessica Nelson, 37, who instigated the beating, and a skinhead recruit named Jeremy Johnson, 30, who pummeled the man, Mark Mathes, with a baseball bat, could be out of prison in four years. Sean Gaines, who shot Mr. Mathes as he was thrown naked from a car onto a county road, is scheduled for release in 2028, at the age of 47.

Only one of the perpetrators, a young man who by all accounts was not directly involved in the killing, received the death penalty. Patrick Bearup, 36, who helped dispose of Mr. Mathes’s body and severed one of its fingers to retrieve a ring, was convicted of kidnapping and first-degree murder.

Such cases, in which a defendant with lesser culpability draws the harshest sentence, are not uncommon in Arizona, and elsewhere around the country. Of the six inmates executed in this state last year, four were equally or less culpable than co-defendants implicated in the same crimes, according to Dale A. Baich, the supervisor of the capital habeas unit in the federal public defender’s office, which handles appeals of capital cases in federal court. (Prison records show that three of those four co-defendants have been released.)

In many of the 32 other states that carry the death penalty, similar stories unfold as prosecutors, when deciding whom to charge, weigh the cost of mounting a capital trial, which can reach $1 million, against the likelihood of a conviction.

In 2011 in Ohio, Gov. John R. Kasich, using his clemency powers, commuted to life in prison the death sentence of a man convicted of killing two people. The governor, a Republican, said it was unclear if he had been the one to actually commit the murders. Another Ohio inmate, John Getsy, was executed in 2009 for killing the mother of his intended target in a murder-for-hire plot, despite a clemency recommendation by the state parole board, which said that other participants in the crime, including its architect, had not been sentenced to die. (The governor at the time, Ted Strickland, a Democrat, overruled the board.)

Mr. Bearup’s case was one of 135 pending capital cases in Maricopa County in 2006, more than the combined number of cases in the next three jurisdictions at the top of the list: Los Angeles County and Clark County, Nev., each with 36; and Harris County, Tex., with 17.

“In an ideal world, the prosecution would have ironclad proof against all the co-defendants to be able to pick the worst for the death penalty, but we have an inequitable system, a bargaining system,” said Richard Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, which tracks the number of executions across the country.

“If you give the prosecution some help,” Mr. Dieter said of defendants in such cases, “you’ll get something out of it.”

In 1972, the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to invalidate all death penalty laws in the country because they had been too arbitrarily applied. One of the concurring justices, Potter Stewart, wrote that the Constitution could not “permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and freakishly imposed.” States moved to rewrite their statutes, narrowing their definition of first-degree murder or the number of aggravating factors used to define a capital crime. The idea was to make sure the death penalty would be reserved for the worst of the worst.

In an interview, the Maricopa County attorney, Bill Montgomery, who was elected in 2010, said his prosecutors, who handle most death penalty cases in the state, abide by a guiding principle: “Is this a case where the death penalty would be a just punishment in light of how we’ve handled similar cases,” based on the “brutality of the particular case in question?”

It is not a “side-by-side” comparison, he said, but a decision based on whether the evidence can prove a capital crime and whether the death penalty is supported. (His office currently has 68 pending capital cases.)

Defense lawyers have long argued that the state’s statute leaves too much of the decision in prosecutors’ hands.

In a motion filed before the state’s Superior Court last month, Susan L. Corey and Garrett Simpson, public defenders in Maricopa County, which accounts for 63 percent of the inmates on Arizona’s death row, said the problem was that the law was too broad.

They pored over more than 200 first-degree murder cases from 2010 and 2011 to check if the aggravating factors — the state has 14, up from 6 in 1973 — separated the most egregious from the rest. What they found was that virtually every one could have been tried as a capital murder.

“The point I’m trying to make is, it can’t be random,” Ms. Corey said.

Sometimes, money determines whether a defendant’s life is on the line. Last year, Greg McPhillips, the deputy attorney in Mohave County, in northwestern Arizona, said in a motion that because of a “budgetary crisis,” the county could not afford to try more than one death penalty case at a time. He gave up on seeking the death penalty against a man facing charges of first-degree murder, child abuse and sexual assault in the 2010 death of his infant son, choosing instead to pursue a capital case against a man accused of killing a teenage girl and injuring her mother.

“Do people who commit equally heinous crimes get the same results? The answer is unquestionably no,” said Christopher Dupont, a lawyer in Phoenix who has served as a consultant in death penalty cases in several states, including California and Nevada. “It’s a total mystery who is going to face the death penalty and who is not.”

Mr. Bearup’s case was dogged by challenges from the start: an inexperienced lawyer, an implausible defense of not being there for the attack and a decision to represent himself at sentencing and offer no mitigating evidence which jurors could weigh against the death penalty.

Last summer, he filed a motion to waive all legal challenges to his sentence. Judge Warren J. Granville, who had presided over Mr. Bearup’s trial, ordered a doctor to assess his competency. The doctor’s diagnosis of bipolar disorder was challenged by the prosecutor. A hearing is scheduled for May 10.

Judge Granville, as the statute requires, had reviewed the legality of Mr. Bearup’s sentence, which he affirmed, though not before rebuking Andrew Thomas, the former county prosecutor, for pursuing a capital case against a man who “even under the state’s theory, did not cause the physical death” of Mr. Mathes. (Mr. Thomas was disbarred last year, over malicious criminal and civil charges brought against political opponents.) “Justice,” Judge Granville wrote, “was not done for Mr. Bearup.”

From death row, Mr. Bearup has been studying to become a pastor, a course he is set to finish as a motion challenging his conviction is due, in June. It is his last chance at challenging his conviction in the state courts.

Horne intenta anular ordenanza

Horne intenta anular ordenanza

Phoenix, Arizona

por Eduardo Bernal - Apr. 5, 2013 10:40 AM

La Voz

El procurador estatal Tom Horne anunció que intentará anular la nueva ordenanza municipal aprobada por la ciudad de Bisbee, Arizona, el pasado martes la cual permite que dos personas del mismo sexo puedan formar una unión civil.

La controversial medida fue aprobada en el cabildo de Bisbee con 5 votos a favor y 2 en contra, convirtiendo a esta pequeña ciudad en la primera del estado que otorga derechos a parejas del mismo sexo que a matrimonios tradicionales. Horne decidió tratar de anularla alegando que es inconstitucional.

La ordenanza fue aprobada con la motivación de eliminar prácticas discriminatorias hacia las comunidades LGBT para que estas personas puedan tener relaciones significativas y duraderas.

De acuerdo con la ordenanza, las parejas que deseen contraer matrimonio en el Condado Cochise, deberán pagar -como todos los demás-, los 76 dólares de cuota para emitir una licencia de matrimonio.

La disposición de esa municipalidad se limita a todas las dependencias de esa ciudad y no a entidades privadas, como hospitales.

Una vez más el Center for Arizona Policy, entidad que encabezó la batalla en contra una ordenanza antidiscriminatoria de la ciudad de Phoenix e iniciativas en la legislatura relacionadas con ese mismo tema, se encuentra batallando esta disposición alegando que atropella leyes estatales del matrimonio.

La oficina de Horne aseguró que someterá una demanda en las próximas semanas antes de que la ordenanza entre en efecto en 30 días.

Por su parte, el abogado de la ciudad de Bisbee mencionó que prevé que exista una demanda y está preparado para defender la ordenanza sin cobrarle un dólar a esa ciudad.

La demanda, según la oficina de Horne, estaría basada en una ley aprobada por el electorado en 2008, que prohíbe los matrimonios de personas del mismo sexo.

Bulletproof vests for elected officials???

Maybe that's why Republican Bob Thorpe said he wanted to provide Democratic and Republican members safety options.

Source

Arizona lawmaker cancels bulletproof vest demo

By Bob Christie Associated Press Mon Apr 8, 2013 1:38 PM

PHOENIX — An Arizona lawmaker invited a bulletproof vest retailer to do a demonstration at the state Capitol but canceled the event on Monday after a legislative lawyer advised him that making a sales pitch to lawmakers on state property was improper.

Freshman Republican Rep. Bob Thorpe called his idea a “rookie mistake” and said he instead plans to provide contact information for the retailer to fellow members of the Arizona House and Senate.

“In the future, before I set something like this up I’ll certainly go out and I’ll talk to some folks that have been around longer than me and just make sure that I’m not doing something that might look like it was inappropriate,” he said.

Thorpe said he wanted to provide Democratic and Republican members safety options in light of the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011 and the recent fatal shooting of a Texas prosecutor and his wife. He sent the email to all House and Senate members last Thursday inviting them to visit the Capitol basement on Wednesday to be fitted for a vest if they wanted to buy one.

“In the wake of Tucson shooting, I have been researching body armor in order to inform our members about the costs and options for those wishing to purchase a vest for their personal use, for example, at town halls, parades and other public events,” the email said.

Thorpe was criticized by Democratic state Rep. Ruben Gallego, a former Marine who served in the Iraq war

“We’re here to be in the public, and it’s not our job to be paranoid all the time thinking that someone is out to get us,” Gallego told abc15.com. “I think the best defense is actually to have a good, well-trained police force and some good gun laws.”

Thorpe said he’s not suggesting that lawmakers come to work armed, as some have done in recent years. He just said he believed fellow legislators might feel safer in some situations with body armor.

Thorpe said he understands that some might criticize the move, especially since the Legislature has rejected every effort to tighten gun laws in Arizona in recent years. But he said his view is that mental health issues are behind most violent events, like Giffords’ shooting.

“I support people owning guns and doing that lawfully, but we’ve got some wackos out there,” he said.

Thorpe said he’s supporting a stalled effort in the state Legislature to appropriate $250,000 to expand a program to train teachers, first-responders and others to recognize people having a mental health crisis and intervene. Giffords’ attacker, Jared Lee Loughner, suffered from mental illness.

While rejecting gun control measures, he said he’s open to more action on keeping the mentally ill from obtaining guns.

“I’m very interested in trying to pass some piece of legislation which would cause our government officials, whether its teachers or law enforcement, to keep track of people where’s there’s red flags being raised,” he said. “And that certainly didn’t happen with Loughner.”

Bulletproof vests for elected officials???

Arizona Legislature invited to … a body armor party?

In the wake of Newtown, the state of Connecticut on Thursday enacted what some are calling the strongest gun laws in the nation, including limits on the size of magazines, a ban on armor piercing bullets and universal background checks.

“Democrats and Republicans were able to come to an agreement on a strong, comprehensive bill,” Senate President Don Williams, a Democrat, said as the bill awaited a final vote. “That is a message that should resound in 49 other states, and in Washington, D.C., and the message is we can get it done here and they should get it done in their respective states and nationally in Congress.”

Meanwhile, in the state of Arizona, a legislator on Thursday offered a response to our own massacre.

“In the wake of Tucson shooting, I have been researching body armor in order to inform our members about the costs and options for those wishing to purchase a vest for their person use, for example, at town halls, parades and other public events,” Rep. Bob Thorpe wrote, in an e-mail to fellow legislators. “These vests have prices ranging from about $600-$800 and options that include their weight and comfort, bullet stopping ability and colors.”

You’ve heard of Tupperware parties? Thorpe, a Flagstaff Republican, has invited members of the Arizona Legislature to a body armor party. Next Wednesday, a representative of AZ Tactical will be on hand in basement of the Arizona House to extol the virtues of various vests and take orders.

“Mr. (Mike) Arthur is offering the same discounted prices to our members as he provides to members of law enforcement …,” Thorpe wrote.

“These vests are rated for a five year life but it is my opinion that legislators could wear them much longer because the five year life assumes almost daily law enforcement use. Prior to placing an order, you will be measured for the proper size vest.”

Next up: Uzi sales in the Senate. Which, by the way, earlier week strafed proposals to expand background checks, limit the size of magazines and bar those convicted of domestic violence from possessing guns.

The Senate also rejected a bid to require basic firearms-safety training in order to carry a concealed weapon.

Thus, the need, I suppose, for legislative body armor — to protect our leaders from the public.

If only there were a way to protect the public from our leaders…

Background checks on knife purchases????

And perhaps limit knife sales to knives with blades under 2 inches in length with dull blades. Society will be a safer place if people can only have dull butter knives, and only cops and government rulers are allowed to have sharp steak and other assault knives.

I'm just joking, but I wouldn't be surprised if some phoney baloney Arizona Libertarians I know try to say I actually believe that rubbish.

Source

Student charged in Texas college stabbing attack

Associated Press Wed Apr 10, 2013 7:54 AM

CYPRESS, Texas — A 20-year-old man from suburban Houston has been charged in a stabbing spree at a Texas community college that injured at least 14 people.

Sheriff’s officials say Dylan Quick is charged with three counts of aggravated assault in the Tuesday attack at Lone Star Community College in Cypress. The city is about 20 miles from Houston.

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office says in a statement that Quick used a “razor-type knife” to cut his victims, and pieces of the blade were found at the scene.

The sheriff’s office says Quick told investigators he’d had fantasies about stabbing people to death since he was in elementary school.

Investigators also say Quick indicated he’d been planning the attack for some time.

Rep. Bob Thorpe tries to protect his fellow crooks from us serfs???

The only good news about this article is that the crooks at the Arizona State Legislator seem to realize that they are crooks and need to protect themselves from the people they pretend to serve while they rob us blind.

Last if Rep. Bob Thorpe really is a "Tea Party" members who wants to protect us from the other government crooks, why is he trying to help protect his fellow crooks???

I suspect Rep. Bob Thorpe isn't really a "freedom fighter" and just ran on the "Tea Party" platform because it would help him get elected.

Source

Posted on April 9, 2013 3:30 pm by Laurie Roberts

Rep. Bob Thorpe looking for protection — and not just from bullets

In the wake of Sandy Hook, the state of Connecticut last Thursday enacted some of the strongest gun laws in the country, including limits on the size of magazines, a ban on armor piercing bullets and universal background checks.

Meanwhile, in the state of Arizona, a legislator on Thursday offered a response to our own massacre.

“In the wake of Tucson shooting, I have been researching body armor in order to inform our members about the costs and options for those wishing to purchase a vest for their personal use, for example, at town halls, parades and other public events,” Rep. Bob Thorpe, wrote, in an e-mail to fellow legislators. “These vests have prices ranging from about $600-$800, and options that include their weight and comfort, bullet stopping ability and colors.”

You’ve heard of Tupperware parties? Thorpe invited the Arizona Legislature to a body armor party. On Wednesday, a salesman from Arizona Tactical was supposed to be on hand in the House basement to offer discounts and take orders on the latest in tactical fashion.

Alas, legislative lawyers put the kibosh on Thorpe’s sale-a-thon. It’s seems you’re not supposed to use the state Capitol to sell bulletproof vests. Or anything else.

Now Thorpe is apparently steamed that his “internal” e-mail invite – the one sent out on his public e-mail account — wound up in the hands of the media.

“I’d love to know who leaked my email to the press, because I want to present them with a ‘Members Only’ jacket, as a reminder that some things, like my internal e-mail invitation, are intended for members only,” the Flagstaff Republican wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday.

Like his first e-mail, this one made it to my inbox within 15 minutes of his sending it.

Thorpe is a freshman legislator who made headlines earlier this year for his bill to require students to sign a loyalty oath before they could graduate from school — a bill he withdrew once somebody explained to him that it was blatantly unconstitutional. He’s a Tea Party guy who ran on a platform of protecting the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

Including, presumably, the law that says the Arizona Legislature is a public body – not the Augusta National Golf Club. And the one that says e-mail sent out on a government account is government business.

Or put another way: the public’s business.

Thorpe didn’t return my call to discuss public records and body armor and such. Pity, as I would have liked to ask him if that Members Only jacket would be outfitted in Kevlar.

In his Tuesday e-mail, Thorpe takes a shot at Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego — whom he suspects of “leaking” his e-mail – and notes that he arranged to have the body armor salesman come to the Capitol after a Democratic legislator told him she’d requested a police presence at a recent town hall meeting.

“She was concerned about her personal safety,” he wrote. “By the way, I sent out my e-mail invitation to all the House and Senate legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, because of my concern for the safety of all our members.”

Given his concern for safety, Thorpe might want to take up the cause for banning the sort of ammunition that would blast right through those bulletproof vests he’s hawking.

Sadly, his Senate colleagues rejected a ban on armor piercing bullets last week, along with a ban on high-capacity magazines and a call for universal background checks.

The irony wasn’t lost on Democrats.

“There are just so many other things that we should be working on and not just focused on our own personal safety but the personal safety of the public and for the children in our schools,” said Gallego, D-Phoenix.

“It’s is sad to see that we are almost at the 100th day of our session and yet we have not had a comprehensive discussion on gun violence for our constituents of Arizona,” Sen. Anna Tovar, D-Tolleson, told me.

For his part, Thorpe has provided his fellow legislators with the name and number for his body armor salesman. “His store is about a 10-minute drive from the Capitol and he’d like to try and arrange a time where perhaps 5 (or more) legislators can come in at a time for a joint briefing in one of their classrooms,” he wrote.

No doubt, Thorpe’s pal will have plenty of takers.

In addition to strafing other gun bills last week, the state Senate also rejected a bid to require basic firearms-safety training before you can carry around a concealed weapon.

Thus, the need, I suppose, for legislative body armor — to protect our leaders from the public.

Now, if only there was a way to protect the public from our leaders…

Constitutional Safeguards??? Don't make me laugh!!!!!

And of course as long as the mayor and city council of New York allows this illegal activity there ain't jack sh*t we can do to stop it.

Of course that is why the Founders gave us the Second Amendment. So when our government masters refuse to obey the law, the people have a means to force them to obey the law.

Of course in New York State the people's right to own guns has pretty much been flushed down the toilet by these same tyrants who allow the police to terrorize us.

And of course this isn't limited to New York State or New York City, it is happens all over the USA.

Source

An Assurance of Constitutional Safeguards

Faiza Patel

April 9, 2013

New York City has become safer over the last decade. Yet relations between the police and minority communities have become ever more strained.

Much of the tension stems from the N.Y.P.D.’s stop and frisk policy, which disproportionately targets black and Latino men. Muslim communities are troubled by the NYPD’s intelligence operation, which collects information about their daily lives that often seems to have no link to terrorism or crime.

Oversight of N.Y.P.D. activities like stop and frisk and the surveillance of Muslims shouldn't require decades of litigation.

An inspector-general could help the police ease these concerns and hew closer to constitutional requirements in their efforts to keep the city safe.

Crucial constitutional protections — like the requirement of equal treatment and the need for reasonable suspicion before searching someone — have been codified into specific rules for the N.Y.P.D. But we have little assurance that they are followed.

As part of the 2003 settlement of the first stop and frisk lawsuit, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly issued an order forbidding the N.Y.P.D. from relying on race, color, ethnicity or national origin as the determinative factor in undertaking action. Yet since these rules were adopted, the stop and frisk program has grown 450 percent, with nearly five million people — 81 percent of whom are minorities — stopped, questioned and searched.

These numbers have led many to ask whether the police are following the racial profiling ban. An inspector general would be ideally situated to audit the records of stop and frisk encounters for compliance.

Similarly, the N.Y.P.D.’s surveillance of Muslim communities has raised questions about police fidelity to the prohibition on religion-based targeting and to a 1985 consent decree that restrains their monitoring of First Amendment activities. Documents recently filed in this case show that the N.Y.P.D. has informants or undercover officers in at least 30 area mosques. Interested citizens cannot delve into police files to evaluate whether the widespread use of informants was justified or a reflection of biases. But an inspector general can do just that.

The lawyers challenging these practices know the difficulty of ensuring that police comply with rules and have asked for court-appointed police monitors to do so. We should not have to wait for decades of litigation to obtain oversight of N.Y.P.D. activities.

On these and other police operations, an inspector general would serve as front-end protection against illegality. Periodic reports from the inspector general would increase much-needed, impartial public information about police practices, helping elected officials perform their own oversight duties.

And, while an inspector general’s recommendations are not binding, the experience of the F.B.I. and the Los Angeles police, among others, shows that they can be highly influential in shaping lawful and effective law enforcement practices.

As the nation’s premier police department, the N.Y.P.D. should embrace the best practices developed by its peers and commit to working unreservedly with an inspector general to create an even better police force.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan is a liar who will say anything to get elected!!!

Source

Quan flubs crime stat, again

Post has been updated as of 5:50 p.m.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan has gained a reputation for citing crime statistics that don’t always add up or making statements to the press she later says were taken out of context.

It’s happened again.

In an interview with KCBS radio broadcast on Monday, Oakland’s mayor said the following:

For the last 2 months, violence in Oakland has been way down. It seems to come in these spurts. So like for six weeks there had been no murders east of High Street in East Oakland.

Problem is, there have been seven homicides east of High Street over the past six weeks, according to Shine in Peace, an online journalism project launching soon that’s tracking shootings and homicides in Oakland and noticed Quan’s statement.

“There’s no six-week period in 2013 where there were no homicides east of High Street,” said Susie Cagle, the project director.

Cagle said the homicides over the past six weeks included the following:

• Lionel Ray Fluker, 54, killed on April 4 near MacArthur Boulevard and Seminary Avenue.
• Qiunn Boyer, 34, died on April 4, two days after being shot near Keller Avenue and Hansom Drive.
• John Sunny Davis, 31, killed on Mar. 31 near 68th Avenue and Avenal Avenue.
• unidentified, killed on Mar. 31 near 70th Ave. and Hawley Street.
• unidentified, killed Mar. 31 on the 8900 block of International Boulevard.
• Noe Garcia, 28, killed on Mar. 2 near Apricot Street and Blenheim Street.
• Trisha Forde, 34, killed on Mar. 2 near Apricot Street and Blenheim Street.

Sean Maher, Quan’s spokesman, said the quote to KCBS was taken out of context in two important ways. Quan was only talking about gang-related homicides because she was discussing the effectiveness of Ceasefire, an anti-gang prevention program, Maher said.

Secondly, the mayor was talking about a specific period of time, Feb. 22 through Mar. 30. During that period, only the Mar. 2 double homicide killing Forde and Garcia occurred east of High Street in East Oakland — the target area of the gang-prevention efforts, Maher said. Police have said that homicide was not gang-related, he said.

Maher acknowledged that the period of time Quan referred to was only five weeks.

“Unfortunately, the KCBS report cuts their interview in a way that can be misleading,” said Maher. “Obviously, the mayor is aware of the recent spate of homicides that began on Easter Sunday.”

Cagle said her project’s data corroborates what Maher said. But she noted that there were five homicides east of High Street on Mar. 31 through Apr. 4. She said that hardly conveys success in reducing homicides.

“It seems like an odd thing to even be publicizing,” she said.

The IRS is monitoring your Facebook and Twitter accounts???

I discovered that the FBI, Homeland Security, TSA, DEA, BATF, Secret Service, or some other Federal agency is spying on me after I installed Google Analytics on my website.

Every day I get one or two hits from an IP address in the Washington, DC suburb of Shady Side, Maryland which I suspect is a headquarters for some Federal government site that spies on Americans.

I should say the city and the IP address changes over time, but it is pretty obvious that somebody in the Federal government is spying on me.

For those of you who wish to use Google Analytics to see if the government is spying on you it is free and this link will tell you how to install the software.

To get Google Analytics working on your web site all you have to do is create a free account with them and then put the following lines of code on each of your web pages.

Google will give you the following code, which you will have to cut and paste on to your web pages. The account number which has been replaced with "*************" will be replaced with your account number.

Last but not least you don't need to understand any of this computer mumbo jumbo to use Google Analytics.

Just cut and paste the code Google gives you and you will be on your way to seeing the government thugs that are spying on you.

Once you create the Google account you can visit the Google Analytics site and get reports on who is visiting your websites on an hour by hour basis.

I suspect if enough people start doing this Uncle Sam's goons will cut a deal with Google Analytics and order them not to tell you when Uncle Sam's goons visit your website.

BP murdered 16 year old Jose Rodriguez????

Source

New details in Mexico teenager's death by Border Patrol

By Bob Ortega The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Apr 11, 2013 12:18 AM

A new witness and new evidence seem to bolster the case that a Mexican teen shot to death by the Border Patrol in October in Nogales, Sonora, was walking down the street at the time he was killed — not, as the Border Patrol has maintained, throwing rocks over the fence at agents.

The new information also suggests that more than one agent may have opened fire on Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, 16. That information arrived as the family of the youth held a march on Wednesday in Nogales to protest what they called the FBI and Border Patrol’s “veil of silence” about the killing.

Both the bureau and the patrol have declined to comment on the boy’s death, citing an ongoing FBI investigation. They have declined to identify the agent or agents involved and have declined to release a surveillance video of the incident, shot by cameras mounted above the border fence.

Agents, along with Nogales, Ariz., police, were chasing two men they believed were fleeing back to Mexico after climbing over the fence to the U.S. side with drugs. The agents said rocks began flying over the fence at them as they tried to arrest the men climbing back over the fence.

The new witness, Isidro Alvarado, a private security guard, said on the night of Oct. 10, he was walking about 20 feet behind Elena Rodriguez down Calle Internacional, which runs parallel to the border fence, when two other youths suddenly ran past them. Then, he said, he heard gunshots from two separate places by the fence and saw Elena Rodriguez fall.

Alvarado said his brother, a Nogales police officer, persuaded him to come forward and speak to the Sonora Attorney General’s Office. Alvarado’s statements were first reported by Nogales radio station XENY. He also spoke at a news conference Wednesday in Nogales, Sonora.

Luis Parra, a Nogales, Ariz., attorney representing the Elena Rodriguez family, said he recently interviewed Alvarado and then confirmed with an attorney from the Sonora Attorney General’s Office that the first call to Nogales police reporting the shooting, immediately after it happened, came from Alvarado’s cellphone.

“But what has made the family even more distraught,” he said, “are the indications that two agents were involved in the shooting and that he (Elena Rodriguez) had to have been lying on the ground when five bullets penetrated his back.”

In a forensic scene-analysis report, investigators for the Sonora Attorney General’s Office concluded that at least five shots into Elena Rodriguez’s back must have hit him while he was lying on the sidewalk. This jibes with findings in an autopsy, previously reported by The Arizona Republic, that all but one of the bullets that hit the boy entered from behind and most at an angle suggesting he was prone when hit.

In their forensic report, investigators also describe how they climbed the story-and-a-half-high bluff on which the border fence sits and looked through the fence as Border Patrol agents and Nogales, Ariz., police conducted their investigation on the U.S. side of the fence.

They describe an area next to the fence, cordoned off with police tape, where they counted 11 shell casings, and another taped-off area, about 28 feet away, where they could see three more casings. This seems to suggest, Parra said, that agents fired from two different spots along the fence.

A Sonora ballistics report, meanwhile, describes the nine bullets recovered by Mexican police — six from the boy’s body, and three from the street — as hollow-point, .40-caliber slugs fired from one or more polygonal-rifled guns.

Michael Haag, a forensic scientist and ballistics expert based in Albuquerque, reviewed the report. He said this is a relatively uncommon type of rifling, a type used in the Heckler & Koch P2000 handgun, among others.

That is the standard-issue Border Patrol sidearm, a spokesman confirmed.

The ballistics report said polygonal rifling, which leaves a much smoother barrel than conventional rifling, makes it harder to distinguish whether all the bullets were fired by the same gun or different guns.

“Because it leaves no good marks on the bullets, it’s very rare by forensic science to identify the bullets back to a specific gun,” Haag agreed. He added, “You can ID it sometimes, so it should be attempted.”

He also noted that each Border Patrol agent should have told the FBI whether he or she fired shots that night.

The Sonora ballistics report identified the bullets as Starfire hollow points, but Haag said the poor-quality photocopies of the bullets show cannelures — a ring that runs around the circumference of the bullet — that are not found on Starfire rounds but are consistent with the similar Federal Premium HST .40-caliber rounds.

Those are standard-issue ammunition for the H&K P2000 handgun, a Border Patrol spokesman confirmed.

The Department of Homeland Security expects shortly to complete a review of the Border Patrol’s use-of-force policy, which allows agents to fire at rock-throwers, Secretary Janet Napolitano said in an interview with The Republic last week.

There have been eight incidents in the past three years in which agents have shot and killed alleged rock-throwers, among 20 deaths caused by agents since the beginning of 2010. In all but three of those cases, the FBI investigations remain open and the Border Patrol and the DHS have declined to release any information, including the names of the agents involved.

Reach the reporter at bob.ortega@arizonarepublic.com

NRA - Worlds largest gun control organization???

Some people like to say that the NRA is the worlds largest gun control organization.

I think this editorial cartoon by Steve Benson on April 11, 2013 gives credibility to that.

In the cartoon NRA leader Wayne LaPierre is picture on TV saying

We think it is reasonable to provide instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone.

Who is that idiotic bobblehead.

It's you Wayne, don't you remember.

Testimony before House Judiciary Committee on Crime, 27, May 1999

Government rulers all talk, no action on public records.

Arizona's public records laws, or freedom of information act which is A.R.S 39 §121 requires government bureaucrats and elected officials to answer all requests for public records as quickly as possible. That's the good news.

The bad news is there is no criminal or civil penalties for government bureaucrats and elected officials who refuse to obey the law.

And you can't call the cops to enforce the public records law. The only way you can do that is for YOU to sue the bureaucrat who refused to honor your request for public records.

And the Arizona's public records law doesn't even guarantee that your expenses for suing will be covered. It says "The court MAY award attorney fees and other legal costs"

Source

San Jose fights disclosure of email, text message records

By John Woolfolk

jwoolfolk@mercurynews.com

Posted: 04/12/2013 06:21:01 AM PDT

SAN JOSE -- San Jose drew praise for its progressive approach to open government in the digital age by adopting a policy three years ago making elected officials' personal email and text messages about city business public records subject to disclosure.

But the City Council this week voted unanimously to appeal a judge's ruling last month that effectively applies that policy to the whole city workforce by declaring government employees' communications about public business subject to the California Public Records Act whether on official or private devices.

The case sets up a showdown that will be watched statewide and beyond over what open-government advocates say has become a gaping hole in public records law that was written in the typewriter era and didn't contemplate officials with Gmail, Facebook and iPhones. And they say, bring it on.

"I'm glad the city is appealing the ruling, since it is likely to be affirmed on appeal," said Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition in San Rafael. "That will force all California cities and counties to treat emails about government business as public records, regardless of the status or ownership of the email accounts or devices. What matters is the substance of the message -- is it about government business or is it purely personal? -- not the technology."

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, who ran as an open-government champion, had made the same argument in 2010 when he pushed a policy that would require disclosure of messages about city business sent or received by the mayor, council members and their staffs whether they were communicated on personal or city phones and networks. The City Council approved the policy unanimously in March 2010 on a trial basis and, citing no problems since, made it permanent in December.

Scheer said at the time the council adopted the policy that he knew of no other city that had gone so far in updating public records policy to account for modern technology. Most cities have fought efforts to force disclosure of officials' messages on private networks, citing both privacy concerns and practical questions of how a government could search for relevant documents and messages on phones and email networks it doesn't control.

Reed said that such disclosure rules covering private devices and networks can be justified and managed on a small scale involving a few dozen elected officials and their staffs. But he said the council appealed out of concern that applying those rules throughout a city organization of 5,500 full-time employees -- the practical effect of a decision that personal emails are subject to the California Public Records Act -- would be invasive and burdensome.

"It's about the scope of it," Reed said. "I think it's too broad. It sets up practical problems."

The case originated in June 2009 when activist Ted Smith requested voice mails, text messages, and emails sent or received by the mayor and council members related to a downtown redevelopment project in San Jose, whether on official or personal networks and devices. He sued in August that year when the city claimed it lacked authority to access any records on officials' private personal accounts.

Last month, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James P. Kleinberg ruled in Smith's favor, stating that under the city's interpretation of public records law, "a public agency could easily shield information from public disclosure simply by storing it on equipment it does not technically own."

"Regardless of where a record is retained, if it is drafted by a public official," Kleinberg wrote, it "constitutes a 'public record.' "

Scheer said that while the practical and privacy concerns cities have raised are legitimate, they can easily be overcome by requiring public officials to copy messages about public business to their official email where the city can search for and retrieve it.

In the city's petition with the Sixth District Court of Appeal, San Jose argues that the council disclosure policy for private email and phone networks is irrelevant to Smith's case because it was adopted 10 months after his records request and was not retroactive. The city added that "local policies simply do not affect the courts' interpretation of the Public Records Act," and that the council had chosen to limit its policy to affect about 30 city employees.

But San Jose also advanced arguments that seemingly conflict with the policy that the council adopted for itself.

"A council member is not a governmental entity," San Jose's appellate filing stated. "A council member is an individual public official with no authority to act alone on behalf of the city. Consequently, emails and documents found on a council member's personal computer or personal electronic device do not fall within the definition of a public record because any record personally and individually created by a council member is not a documentation of a transaction or activity of the city as a local agency."

Contact John Woolfolk at 408-975-9346. Follow him on Twitter at Twitter.com/johnwoolfolk1.

We need answers in Border Patrol murders???

But Linda Valdez is very naive expecting the cops to arrest and jail one of their own buddies for murder. It ain't going to happen.

I have posted 100's of articles on other police crimes and the police routinely do get away with murder and they rarely get more then a slap on the wrist, if that much for their crimes.

The crime I vividly remember happened around November, 2004 when a News 12 helicopter caught some Phoenix Police beating up a Mexican they arrested for hijacking a car. They had the evidence they needed to nail those crooked Phoenix cops on tape, but I believe Rick Romney who was then Maricopa County attorney decided not to press charges. See News 12 video tapes Phoenix Police beating and Assault by police claimed

Yes, the Mexican who hijacked the car was a criminal. But so were the Phoenix Police officers who beat him up for his crime.

And of course we have Sheriff Joe's goons who routinely murder innocent people in his tent city gulag. Yes, Maricopa County has paid millions in out of court settlements for those murders, but I don't think the police criminals that committed the murders have received anything more then a slap on the wrist and a stern warning not to do it again [well except to criminals who deserve it, like the people they murdered - and that's from Sheriff Joe, not me]

Source

Linda Valdez

Posted on April 11, 2013 10:13 am by Linda Valdez

We need answers in Border Patrol killing

The Border Patrol is a fast growing national police force whose power and secrecy should worry civil libertarians.

After six months, the public that funds this national police force doesn’t even know the identity of the agent or agents involved in killing a youth in Nogales, Mexico, with a barrage of bullets fired across the border.

It smacks of cover-up. [Smacks??? It IS a COVER-UP!!!]

Can you imagine the outrage if Mexican police had gunned down an American youth with equal gusto?

Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, 16, was shot numerous times — and as many as 11 bullets hit him from behind.

The Border Patrol alleges he was throwing rocks at them – an activity that the distance and angle of the border fence would have made more futile than threatening.

A witness has come forward, according to reporting by the Republic’s Bob Ortega, to say Elena Rodriguez was not throwing rocks.

Does anybody know for sure?

After six months, does anybody believe the FBI investigation hasn’t found some answers? If that’s the case, somebody send the FBI some coffee. They need to get moving.

Or are they – and Homeland Security — just hoping the whole thing blows over?

Protests yesterday at the border show that this is not going to go away. Nor should it.

The Border Patrol has extraordinary power, and there have been other deadly encounters where rocks were met with bullets.

According to Ortega:

“There have been eight incidents in the past three years in which agents have shot and killed alleged rock-throwers, among 20 deaths caused by agents since the beginning of 2010. In all but three of those cases, the FBI investigations remain open and the Border Patrol and the DHS have declined to release any information, including the names of the agents involved.”

We need answers. We need them now. [I agree with you Linda, but it ain't going to happen]

Those who paint dystopian scenarios about an out-of-control national government threatening civil liberties are often the same people who demand tougher border security. They ought to be careful what they ask for.

The Border Patrol needs to be accountable. Not secretive. [Again it ain't going to happen. This is why we need the Second Amendment. When the government becomes tyrannical and the police and elected officials are above the law the only way to fix things is with armed citizens physically ousting the government tyrants]

Phoenix officers to begin wearing video cameras

This makes as much sense as giving bank robbers a video camera and telling them they are on the honor system to turn on the video camera before they rob any banks.

Of course I suspect now and then a cop will forget to turn off his camera before beating up a person.

That happened in the case when the Fullerton, California police beat up and murdered Kelly Thomas. But normally cops are smart enough to turn off their cameras before they commit any crimes. Or "accidentally lose and destroy the cameras" if they do forget to turn them off when they commit a crime.

Source

Some Phoenix officers to begin wearing video cameras

By Cecilia Chan The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Fri Apr 12, 2013 4:43 PM

Police officers in the Maryvale Precinct of west Phoenix will begin wearing video cameras on Monday to record their interaction with the public.

Phoenix Police Department teamed with Arizona State University to purchase 50 on-officer cameras with a $500,000 federal grant to study the impact of the cameras on crime and accountability. The cameras will be worn for about a year.

“The whole purpose of the test is to really find out what type of impact it has on law enforcement,” police spokesman Tommy Thompson said. “Is there really a need for this kind of technology?”

The camera is about the size of a pager and will be clipped in the middle of an officer’s shirt area, Thompson said. The officer will turn the camera on when dealing with the public and download the footage onto a computer at the end of the shift. The footage can not be edited. [So the cop will decide when to turn the camera on and off. Obviously most criminals, especially police criminals are smart enough to turn off the cameras before committing crimes, such as beating up a suspect!!!!]

Arizona law requires that only one person be aware that they are being recorded, but officers will disclose they are recording an interaction if asked, officials said. [Yea, sure they will. Just like they will always turn on the cameras before they commit any crimes!!!]

The Maryvale Precinct was chosen because it has two squad areas. One squad will wear the cameras and the other, as a control group, will not, Thompson said.

The data obtained from the two groups will help determine if cameras enhance an officer’s ability to conduct domestic violence and other criminal investigations, he said.

Thompson said many times in a domestic violence situation, a victim will later change the story in court because of financial dependency on the abuser.

The data also will show if the cameras measurably impact how officers and citizens behave, he said.

The department first tested the cameras in 2011 for 90 days with 18 officers in the South Mountain and Cactus Park precincts. The three-month trial period resulted in 860 hours of video, where footage was used as court evidence in 62 cases, according to police.

The pilot program was spurred by the recommendation of a task force created after a March 2010 controversy over an officer's confrontation with Phoenix Councilman Michael Johnson at the scene of a fire.

Other police departments in Mesa, Surprise and Peoria are testing or implementing digital cameras that officers wear to record virtually everything an officer does during a shift.

Cops read everything you post online???

This Chicago teenager was busted for the victimless crime of posting a Craigslist ad selling his pet alligator.

I also posted articles before about Phoenix and Tempe cops who work full time posting internet ads posing as hot, horny, underage teenager girls looking for old men to have sex with.

On these web pages I get at least one visit everyday from a site in the Washington D.C. area (IP address 76.114.145.234 located in Shady Side, Maryland), which appears to be a Homeland Security office that is spying on me for my posts documenting crimes committed by the police.

The site that logs the visits was broken into several times, by I suspect police with the Homeland Security, or perhaps hackers hired by the Homeland Security and they modified the logging software.

Sadly only 30 years after 1984, America is beginning to look like the police state written in the novel 1984.

Source

Police: Galewood neighborhood man tries to sell alligator on Craigslist

By Rosemary Regina Sobol Tribune reporter

2:30 a.m. CDT, April 16, 2013

A Northwest Side man accused of trying to sell a baby alligator on Craigslist for $300 was arrested Monday evening, police said.

Juan A. DeJesus, 19, of the 1700 block of Meade Avenue, was charged Monday with one count of misdemeanor possession of wildlife, police said.

A state Department of Natural Resources police officer responded to an advertisement that was posted on Craigslist and went to DeJesus' home Monday afternoon under the pretenses he was going to purchase the alligator, police said.

The ad, which has since been pulled from Craigslist, stated:

"Baby gator for sale, id consider a trade for a leachie gecko. Sale price is 300 obo asap."

DeJesus came out of his home with the alligator and said he would like to have $300 for it, but the officer identified himself and told DeJesus of the violation, police said.

The alligator was seized as evidence and given to other IDNR agents and DeJesus was transported to the Grand Central District police station to be processed, police said.

DeJesus could not be reached immediately Tuesday morning. He is scheduled to appear in court at the Daley Center on May 31.

rsobol@tribune.com

Tempe prosecutor Kathy Matz arrested for domestic violence

Source

Tempe assistant prosecutor, boyfriend held in assaulting each other

By Cecilia Chan The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Fri Apr 12, 2013 10:08 PM

A Tempe assistant city prosecutor and her live-in boyfriend were arrested Wednesday on suspicion of assaulting each other, according to Tempe police.

Kathy Matz and Keith Walls were arrested late Wednesday night at the Tempe home they shared and transported to the city jail, according to a police report. Both had been drinking, police said.

Each posted a $500 bail Thursday, police spokesman Michael Pooley said.

Police arrived at the home at about 11:10 p.m. Wednesday after Matz called 911.

According to the report, Walls and Matz were on the bed, watching television when he asked Matz to move over. When he returned from the bathroom, she still had not moved and as he laid down in bed, she told him to get out and sleep on the couch, the report said.

Walls told police he refused and when he sat up in bed, Matz punched him in the back of his head.

They both got out of bed and Matz began shouting obscenities and swinging her closed fists at him, hitting him in the eye and kneeing him in the groin, he said.

Walls said he then threw water on Matz from a cup before he walked out of the room and proceeded to pack his clothes.

Matz told police that Walls was upset with her being on his side of the bed and he began to push her off the bed causing her to fall to the floor.

The report said Matz told police that Walls also threatened to shoot her with her gun that she kept under her side of the bed. She then pushed Walls away from her and he picked up a plastic cup of water and threw it at her, hitting her in the eye, the report said.

Police found no visible injuries on Matz when they arrived, but doctors found a bruise on the back of her head that she claimed was from hitting the headboard when she was being assaulted by Walls, according to the report. Doctors were unable to determine when she received the contusion and she never told officers on scene about the injury, police

Matz also complained that Walls gave her two bruises to her left wrist when he grabbed her. But police said they were unable to determine when she received the injuries and she did not tell officers on scene about the bruises.

Walls had a small bruise under his right eye, according to the report.

Matz will be placed on paid administrative leave while the matter is reviewed under the city’s Personnel Rules and Regulations, according to the city spokeswoman Nikki Ripley.

Her case will be transferred to a different jurisdiction in Maricopa County, she said.

Matz has worked for the city since 1998 in a number of roles, including city clerk and assistant to former Mayor Neil Giuliano, Ripley said. Her current salary is $115,045 and she is one of seven prosecutors on the city staff.

Both Walls and Matz told police they would not aid in the prosecution. Walls told police that he just wanted the relationship to be over.

Tempe prosecutor Kathy Matz arrested for assault

Source

Tempe assistant prosecutor, boyfriend held in assaulting each other

By Cecilia Chan The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Fri Apr 12, 2013 10:08 PM

A Tempe assistant city prosecutor and her live-in boyfriend were arrested Wednesday on suspicion of assaulting each other, according to Tempe police.

Kathy Matz and Keith Walls were arrested late Wednesday night at the Tempe home they shared and transported to the city jail, according to a police report. Both had been drinking, police said.

Each posted a $500 bail Thursday, police spokesman Michael Pooley said.

Police arrived at the home at about 11:10 p.m. Wednesday after Matz called 911.

According to the report, Walls and Matz were on the bed, watching television when he asked Matz to move over. When he returned from the bathroom, she still had not moved and as he laid down in bed, she told him to get out and sleep on the couch, the report said.

Walls told police he refused and when he sat up in bed, Matz punched him in the back of his head.

They both got out of bed and Matz began shouting obscenities and swinging her closed fists at him, hitting him in the eye and kneeing him in the groin, he said.

Walls said he then threw water on Matz from a cup before he walked out of the room and proceeded to pack his clothes.

Matz told police that Walls was upset with her being on his side of the bed and he began to push her off the bed causing her to fall to the floor.

The report said Matz told police that Walls also threatened to shoot her with her gun that she kept under her side of the bed. She then pushed Walls away from her and he picked up a plastic cup of water and threw it at her, hitting her in the eye, the report said.

Police found no visible injuries on Matz when they arrived, but doctors found a bruise on the back of her head that she claimed was from hitting the headboard when she was being assaulted by Walls, according to the report. Doctors were unable to determine when she received the contusion and she never told officers on scene about the injury, police

Matz also complained that Walls gave her two bruises to her left wrist when he grabbed her. But police said they were unable to determine when she received the injuries and she did not tell officers on scene about the bruises.

Walls had a small bruise under his right eye, according to the report.

Matz will be placed on paid administrative leave while the matter is reviewed under the city’s Personnel Rules and Regulations, according to the city spokeswoman Nikki Ripley.

Her case will be transferred to a different jurisdiction in Maricopa County, she said.

Matz has worked for the city since 1998 in a number of roles, including city clerk and assistant to former Mayor Neil Giuliano, Ripley said. Her current salary is $115,045 and she is one of seven prosecutors on the city staff.

Both Walls and Matz told police they would not aid in the prosecution. Walls told police that he just wanted the relationship to be over.

Only police officers can be trusted to handle guns properly!!!!

Retired cop drops gun, shoots self at Des Plaines school

By Jonathan Bullington Tribune reporters

8:18 p.m. CDT, April 16, 2013

A retired police officer accidentally shot himself when he dropped his gun inside a Des Plaines school while attending his grandson's Boy Scout troop meeting.

Police and school officials said the man was carrying his licensed, loaded gun inside a fanny pack Monday evening at Iroquois School, and that the gun went off and a bullet struck him in the leg after he dropped the pack.

The man, who school officials called a troop leader, was taken to Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge. Des Plaines police Chief William Kushner said the man is a retired Chicago police officer.

No one else was injured, and police did not file charges because no laws were broken, Kushner said.

The retired officer is licensed to carry the firearm, according to a letter to the school community from Iroquois Principal Michael Amadei.

"Of course, the district does not condone bringing firearms on school grounds," the letter states.

Kushner said he initially heard that the retired officer was in serious condition, but school officials said the man's injuries were "not as serious as anticipated."

Amadei's letter said the school "will continue to work with" police and Scouting officials "to clarify any questions that arise. ... Student safety is our number one priority."

Representatives of the Boy Scouts of America Northwest Suburban Council could not be reached for comment late Tuesday.

Tribune reporter Robert McCoppin contributed.

jbullington@tribune.com

LA shoots itself in foot with silly porn condom law!!!!

Porn filming declines sharply since L.A. condom law passed

By Kurt Streeter

April 17, 2013, 3:21 p.m.

Film permits issued for porn shoots in Los Angeles County have dropped to almost zero since a law was enacted requiring actors to use condoms during shoots.

So far this year, only two permits have been issued for pornographic filming, far off the pace for an industry that typically gets about 500 permits annually, according to Paul Audley, president of FilmLA, a nonprofit agency that oversees permitting throughout Los Angeles County. “It’s a steep drop,” Audley said, adding that “both of those applications came in January.”

Coupled with an apparent increase in filming in nearby Ventura County -- where one politician says some residents have complained about “seeing people naked” during film shoots -- the decrease has been seized on by porn industry insiders who have long claimed that efforts to regulate their industry would end up hurting Los Angeles’ pocketbook.

“We’re not surprised by this,” said Diane Duke, chief executive of the Free Speech Coalition, a film industry trade group. “Movie companies are beginning to look for other areas,” outside the San Fernando Valley, the longtime home base for most of the industry.

Duke said that Measure B, the ordinance passed by Los Angeles voters in November mandating condom use during film shoots, has created difficulties for the industry because most consumers want to see scenes without condoms. She added that many film companies are simply deferring production, waiting for the results of a lawsuit expected to be heard in U.S. District Court challenging the measure on free speech grounds. The new law also requires studios to apply to Los Angeles County for health permits.

Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which like many other public health groups has strongly advocated the restrictions, said that porn studios in Los Angeles simply need to accept the vote.

The industry’s prediction of a filming exodus that would create a deep economic hole was “heard by the voters in L.A. County, and 57 percent voted for Measure B.” Weinstein said. “We live in a democracy.”

Weinstein added that there was no evidence the industry has started filming elsewhere, nor was their evidence that nearby states such as Nevada were keen to allow X-rated filming.

But parts of Ventura County are already grappling with an increase in porn film permits since the Los Angeles law took effect, said Linda Parks, a Ventura County supervisor. Parks said residents of a neighborhood she represents near Thousand Oaks are upset because companies from Los Angeles have started shooting and “people are hearing moans and groans and seeing naked people.”

The supervisor said she is planning to introduce legislation modeled on Measure B -- and a similar law in Simi Valley -- in an effort to regulate porn filming in her county.

State Assemblyman Isadore Hall (D-Compton) has proposed an Assembly bill similar to Measure B that would cover all of California.

The decline in permits was first reported by the Daily News of Los Angeles.

Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema gets $333,000 in campaign contributions

OK, they are not bribes, they officially are campaign contributions, but for the man on the street it's hard to see the difference.

And of course people who give suitcases full of money to Congressmen, expect something in return for their cash.

U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema recently sponsored a $5 billion dollar corporate welfare program for corporations which make solar cells. I am sure she will say it wasn't a result of the campaign contributions she receive from the solar industry. But the rest of us have our questions.

Last but not least Kyrsten Sinema when she was a member of the Arizona State Legislator sponsored a bill which would have slapped a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana in an attempt to flush the will of the people down the toilet who voted for Prop 203 which legalized medical marijuana in Arizona.

Source

Sinema, Barber flex fundraising muscle

By Ronald J. Hansen and Rebekah L. Sanders The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Apr 17, 2013 3:51 PM

Though she is only a freshman on Capitol Hill, U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema has quickly established herself as one of the more prolific fundraisers in Congress.

Sinema, a Phoenix Democrat, collected $333,000 between January and March and ranked 55th among all incumbents in the House. Her haul wasn’t far behind the $345,000 raised by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Posting an impressive fundraising total in the beginning of an off-election year could help Sinema ward off potential challengers to her toss-up seat — or at least intimidate them. Two fellow Arizona Democrats, Reps. Ron Barber of southern Arizona and Ann Kirkpatrick of northern Arizona, were close behind in total fundraising, reflecting the importance of campaign cash for the three incumbents who took narrow victories last year.

Barber raised $297,000 and Kirkpatrick $314,000.

By contrast, Reps. Trent Franks of Glendale and Paul Gosar of Prescott, two Republicans holding among the safest conservative seats in the country, raised less than $100,000 combined. Both ranked near the bottom of fundraisers among incumbents, Federal Election Commission records show.

“The first quarter fundraising shows that Kirkpatrick, Barber and Sinema are taking their re-elections seriously,” said Nathan Gonzales, deputy editor of the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report, based in Washington, D.C. “If you raise a lot of money early, it does give challengers pause. But I don’t think at this early stage potential challengers look at a fundraising number and think, ‘It’s too big, and there’s not enough time to get there.’ ”

“By the time we get to next summer and fall,” Gonzales added, when the election cycle will be at its peak, “both sides will be dumping money in.”

Among potential challengers to Sinema, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Wendy Rogers, a Tempe Republican, raised $103,000 in the first quarter. Rogers’ total was among the highest in the country among non-incumbents. Sinema represents parts of Phoenix, Tempe, Mesa, Chandler, Paradise Valley and Scottsdale.

Rogers, who has begun sending e-mails touting her campaign bid, ran in the district last year, as did Vernon Parker and Martin Sepulveda. Parker, who won the Republican primary and lost to Sinema in November, raised $11,000. Sepulveda took in 70 cents.

Republicans in Barber’s district appear to be pinning their hopes on retired Air Force Col. Martha McSally. Barber barely scraped by her in November, but easily raised more cash than McSally in the first quarter. McSally reported $8,400 in contributions, half of which came from a Georgia-based GOP PAC.

Barber’s district includes part of Tucson and all of Cochise County near the U.S.-Mexico border.

In recent months, McSally has appeared on national news shows, sent out e-mails from her campaign account and visited political groups in the district, sending signals that she will run again, but she has declined to make it official.

“If we see a couple more quarters from McSally with that showing, there will be concern on the Republican side,” Gonzales said. But “for someone like McSally who just got off the campaign trail, I think there’s usually a natural pause before getting things ramped up again.”

Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat, raised $75,000; Rep. Ed Pastor, a Democrat, raised $90,000; Rep. Matt Salmon, a Republican, raised $94,000; and Rep. David Schweikert, a Republican, raised $172,000.

Senate filings were not yet available.

Most Glendale tax dollars go to the POLICE!!!!

That is followed by the fire department which gets 22 percent of the budget.

And all other departments combined share the remaining 37 percent of the budget.

They had a second graph that showed the number of Glendale police employees was 550, the number of fire department employees was 250. All the other city employees on the graph were 500. So the police and fire departments have more employees then all the other departments combined.

Those numbers are typical for other city budgets I have seen and the money spent on the cops is usually twice as much at the fire department, and that the police and fire departments budgets are always more then that of all the other city departments combined.

Which leads me to say that America cities are police states because most of the money is spent on the police.

The sad part is that most of the arrests the police make are for victimless drug war crimes. I have read that at the Federal level two thirds of the people in prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes. I am not sure what percent of people in state prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes, but I suspect it is also a huge number.

Glendale city finances could be nearing steep cliff

Glendale city finances could be nearing steep cliff

By Paul Giblin The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Apr 17, 2013 8:59 AM

The mostly new Glendale City Council is contending with a mostly old problem. The city’s financial position has been on a downward slope for years.

In an effort to offset declines in tax revenues, the state’s fifth-largest city has nearly chewed through its financial reserves while it has shed employees and cut services.

Yet, according to the city’s projections, its financial position is about to get far worse.

According to current forecasts, the city will have $3.4 million in reserve in the general fund at the end of fiscal 2014. Without serious restructuring, by 2015 the city would be $3.8 million in the red, and by 2018, the city would have a $20.3 million shortfall.

One option city bookkeepers recommend is to make $3.5 million in cuts for the fiscal year opening in July, followed by $10.8 million in reductions for 2015, and an additional $8.2 million in cuts in 2018.

The seven-member council, with its four new members, is trying to determine how to shape a budget that will keep enough police on patrol and parks in good repair.

But those goals seemed to border on unachievable during an opening series of budget workshops in recent weeks.

If all goes as scheduled, the council will offer a draft of the 2014 budget and a 10-year capital-improvement plan May 28, then authorize a final budget June 11.

Glendale’s financial experts project the city to finish the current fiscal year with an $11.4 million reserve in the general fund.

Ending with any savings, or a reserve, in 2014 requires $3.5 million in reduced spending that would be accomplished by eliminating vacant positions and related costs, Financial Services Executive Director Sherry Schurhammer told the council.

With those cuts and deeper ones recommended by staff, the city could build its reserve to nearly $20 million by fiscal 2018.

Without changes, the city’s financial position is set to become particularly grim in 2018, because that year marks the first year without revenue from a current, but temporary sales tax.

“What I want to make clear here — or hope I’m making clear — is that this ongoing structural operating deficit exists even if that sales tax does not sunset, because you’ve got this negative fund balance,” she said March 27.

The general fund is important because it’s the city’s largest operating fund and it supports the widest range of programs, she said.

The city’s financial position is headed downward because municipal spending patterns were based on prerecession tax collections, and spending was not reduced enough to keep pace as tax collections tapered off during the recession, Schurhammer said.

Most city departments have reduced spending by letting vacant positions remain unfilled in recent years, but those efforts aren’t enough to balance the books, she said.

The heads of most municipal departments told council members that staffing cuts already have cut into their programs.

Acting Police Chief Debby Black and Fire Chief Mark Burdick told council members that they have run out of ways to cover the staffing cuts by adjusting employees’ work schedules and assignments. Both departments need more employees, they said.

Likewise, the number of positions in the Community and Economic Development Department has fallen from 78.5 in 2009 to 39.8 this year, according to city records. Projections call for the department to lose three more positions next year.

Yet the city’s economic development officials are handling more business prospects than they have in years, Executive Director Brian Friedman said.

In addition to anticipated budget expenses across the city, council members are expected to consider an array of new expenses in coming weeks. Among them:

Payments to the potential new owners of the Phoenix Coyotes or a separate management firm to operate Jobing.com Arena. Next year’s budget assumes the city could pay an arena manager $6.5 million.

Funding air-traffic controllers at Glendale Municipal Airport beginning in June when the federal government discontinues the service.

Securing permanent parking and perhaps even building a parking garage around University of Phoenix Stadium.

Possible pay raises or cost-of-living adjustments for city employees, whose pay has been frozen for years.

Union contract prevents corrupt cops from being fired

Of course those same cops forget to say they are the ones that wrote up the contract.

If you are a criminal the best place for you to get a job is either as a police officer or an elected official. In both jobs you can usually get away with committing crimes that would send any of us normal serfs to prison for years.

Source

Chicago police officer escapes discipline despite inspector general's findings

Probe finds that contract prohibits reprimand

By Bill Ruthhart, Chicago Tribune reporter

8:58 p.m. CDT, April 17, 2013

The Chicago Police Department declined to discipline an officer who improperly used the job to generate business for a friend's firm, according to a quarterly report released Wednesday by the city's inspector general.

The Police Department agreed there was "substantial probability" that the officer acted improperly but said its contract with the union prevented it from taking action, according to the report.

Inspector General Joseph Ferguson said his investigators determined that while serving court summonses for building violations, the officer sought to drum up business for a friend whose company offered to resolve such violations.

The officer visited homes with "an official city summons in one hand" and a "friend's business card in the other," according to the report. The report did not identify the officer.

Ferguson's office, which also accused the officer of lying to investigators, recommended that the officer be fired.

The Police Department said its contract with the Fraternal Order of Police prevented it from disciplining the officer in a noncriminal case because any complaint — even one from the inspector general — must be filed by a "firsthand witness," according to the report. The city's Law Department agreed.

"The underlying issue here is that the city's Law Department and Police Department do not differentiate between an inspector general's investigation and a general complaint from a layperson," said Jonathan Davey, a spokesman for Ferguson.

Law Department spokesman Roderick Drew said the city recommended no action against the officer because Ferguson did not conduct his investigation properly and any discipline could have led to a union grievance or unfair labor practice complaint.

Drew said Ferguson's office should have presented the accusations to the officer in writing before investigators conducted a formal interview.

Davey declined to respond to the reasons given by Drew for not taking action against the officer.

The case is the latest example of the inspector general's reach being thwarted.

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled unanimously last month that Ferguson cannot independently go to court to enforce a subpoena for documents from Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration. Ferguson said he has asked the mayor to turn over documents despite the ruling but that Emanuel has not responded.

"The IG has the same power and capability that the state IG and federal IGs have," Emanuel said Wednesday. "I don't think they're not capable of doing their job, and I think he's a good IG. Therefore, I think he can do his job."

When asked whether he'd reappoint Ferguson when his term is up at the end of November, Emanuel demurred.

"I have plenty of time," he said. "I have a couple other appointments I'm going to be working on between now and then."

bruthhart@tribune.com

Twitter @BillRuthhart

Sheila Polk is a habitual liar on medical marijuana???

Source

Sheila Polk Was Wrong: 16 Medical-Pot Dispensaries Now Open in AZ and Not Being Shut Down by Feds

By Ray Stern Tue., Apr. 16 2013 at 9:05 AM

Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk said last July that the feds would shut down medical-pot dispensaries in Arizona as they opened. With 16 dispensaries now open and more on the way, she's been proved wrong.

Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk announced in dramatic fashion last July that federal authorities would shut down every medical-marijuana dispensary in Arizona "as it opens."

Polk made the bad prediction in a letter she penned and sent to the governor after getting several other county attorneys to sign it. We checked into her assertion and reported to you at the time that Polk's claim appeared to be nonsense and was, in fact, a major exaggeration of something she'd been told by a retired drug agent.

How wrong was Polk's info?

As of today, there are 16 retail shops legally selling medical marijuana under Arizona law.

That's five more than were opened in late March, when we wrote of how the dispensary industry was taking off, finally. The first, Arizona Organix of Glendale, opened in November.

Now, there are legal weed stores for Arizona's roughly 40,000 qualified patients in Glendale, Phoenix, Mesa, Eloy, Wickenburg, Quartzsite, Globe, and many other towns and cities.

An additional 29 other shops are nearing their final inspection process, records from the Arizona Department of Health Services show, meaning those places will likely be open in a matter of weeks.

Another 25 would-be shops have requested dispensary applications but have not yet asked for inspections by DHS, the April 12 records show.

The lottery held last year by DHS granted 99 businesses the right to apply to open a dispensary in pre-planned geographic areas around the state.

Would-be pot-shop operators who won one of those "CHAA" areas in the lottery must request an inspection for their stores by DHS by June 8. Those who fail to do this will not be able to open a dispensary in the foreseeable future, and those "CHAAs" will go dark -- for a while, anyway.

Meanwhile, many "unauthorized" dispensaries, a.k.a. cannabis clubs, seem to be operating without much interference from authorities. Members of the Regulated Dispensaries of Arizona Association, have been urging law enforcement agencies to shut down the clubs, which provide marijuana for patients but aren't overseen by the state DHS. Patients may decide the issue by choosing to shop only at state-authorized dispensaries -- especially if the authorized shops can price their product more competitively.

So, Polk was wrong. Which isn't surprising considering that she exaggerated the quality of her information.

Arizona U.S. Attorney John Leonardo did not shut these legal Arizona dispensaries down as soon as they opened. Apparently, he has no imminent plans to do so.

Whether the feds ultimately do shut down Arizona's burgeoning dispensary industry is still an open question.

For now, with 16 dispensaries and many more on the way, the industry is beginning to bloom.

Cop pulls gun on McDonal's customer for taking too long in line????

Source

Posted: 4:39 p.m. Wednesday, April 17, 2013

DeKalb cop arrested for alleged assault at McDonald’s

By Alexis Stevens

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A sergeant with the DeKalb County police department was arrested Wednesday morning following an alleged assault against a teenager at a McDonald’s, according to police.

Scott A. Biumi, 48, of Cumming, was charged with aggravated assault for the April 9 incident at the McDonald’s on Old Atlanta Road, the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office said.

Biumi was in the drive-through of the restaurant at 10:30 p.m. when he allegedly became upset with another customer, according to police.

“He exited his car, and following a verbal exchange with the customer, Biumi drew a gun and pointed it at the victim,” Deputy Courtney Spriggs with the Forsyth sheriff’s office said in an emailed statement.

Video footage from McDonald’s and released by the sheriff’s office shows a man, identified as Biumi, lunging into a pickup truck at the drive-through window. The alleged teenage victim, Ryan Mash, told Channel 2 Action News that Biumi got mad because it was taking too long to get his order.

“He grabbed me on my right shoulder and pinned me against my driver’s seat, and the next thing I know, I have a gun in my face,” Mash told Channel 2. “He goes, ‘Do you know who you’re messing with,’ and ‘You shouldn’t be holding up the line’ and all this and that.”

While investigating the incident, deputies determined Biumi was employed as a detective sergeant with DeKalb police, Spriggs said. At the time of the alleged incident, Biumi was driving a department-issued, unmarked Chevrolet and had a department gold star badge on his belt.

Biumi’s bond was set at $22,000 and he was in the process of bonding out of the Forsyth County jail Wednesday afternoon, Spriggs said. Biumi’s court date was set for May 23.

At an afternoon press conference, DeKalb County police Chief Cedric Alexander said he is awaiting the outcome of the Forsyth County investigation, but does not tolerate this type of behavior.

Source

Frustrated by delay, Georgia cop allegedly pulled gun in McDonald’s drive-thru line

By Michael Walsh / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Thursday, April 18, 2013, 3:17 PM

Food, folks and fun? More like gall, grouch and gun.

A young Georgia man was not "lovin' it" when a hold up in the drive-thru lane at McDonald's allegedly led to an armed holdup with an off-duty officer Tuesday night.

Student Ryan Mash, 18, was waiting for his order at the drive-thru window of a Forsyth County McDonald's when he was taken by surprise — and it was not a Happy Meal toy.

It was a gun allegedly brandished by Sgt. Scott Biumi, 48, a member of the DeKalb County Police Department for more than 20 years, authorities suspect.

Biumi apparently grew frustrated that the fast food experience was not faster, so he stepped out of his car and yelled, "Stop holding up the drive-thru line," according to Mash.

Mash claims Biumi thought his sincere apology was sarcastic. Then witnesses reported hearing Biumi scream, "You don't know who you are (messing) with!"

"And that's when he pulled the gun on me," Mash said, "and kept on yelling at me for about 30 more seconds. And then walked off."

A McDonald's security camera recorded the incident.

One of Mash's friends saw that the man had a police badge on his belt. The high school students also wrote down the man's license plate number.

Forsyth County Sheriff Duane Piper linked the license plate number to Biumi and the DeKalb County Police Department. The teenagers identified Biumi from a photo lineup, and he was arrested Wednesday, reported Atlanta station WXIA.

"It's a betrayal of a trust to the public," said Piper. "We're expected to handle ourselves correctly in high-stress situations, and it's very disappointing that an officer would snap like this. It's a break in judgment that can't be excused."

Biumi was booked at the Forsyth County jail and released the same day on a $22,000 bond.

"I'm just not going to stand for any behavior that goes outside that of the scope of the law," said DeKalb County Police Chief Cedric Alexander.

He is on administrative leave with pay from his job as the investigation proceeds. Mash, however, thinks Biumi should be stripped of his gun and badge permanently.

"He shouldn't be serving in our community," Mash said, "because you never know, he could get angry at somebody for speeding, and pull a gun on him."

Criminalizing Children at School

Basically the government schools have become a jobs program for teachers, administrators, and cops and are run for the sake of the teachers, administrators, cops and unions, not the parents and children.

Now the cops seems to want to use recent shootings to turn the schools into a bigger jobs program for police officers. And this article addresses some of that.

Source

Criminalizing Children at School

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: April 18, 2013 13 Comments

The National Rifle Association and President Obama responded to the Newtown, Conn., shootings by recommending that more police officers be placed in the nation’s schools. But a growing body of research suggests that, contrary to popular wisdom, a larger police presence in schools generally does little to improve safety. It can also create a repressive environment in which children are arrested or issued summonses for minor misdeeds — like cutting class or talking back — that once would have been dealt with by the principal.

Stationing police in schools, while common today, was virtually unknown during the 1970s. Things began to change with the surge of juvenile crime during the ’80s, followed by an overreaction among school officials. Then came the 1999 Columbine High School shooting outside Denver, which prompted a surge in financing for specially trained police. In the mid-1970s, police patrolled about 1 percent of schools. By 2008, the figure was 40 percent.

The belief that police officers automatically make schools safer was challenged in a 2011 study that compared federal crime data of schools that had police officers with schools that did not. It found that the presence of the officers did not drive down crime. The study — by Chongmin Na of The University of Houston, Clear Lake, and Denise Gottfredson of the University of Maryland — also found that with police in the buildings, routine disciplinary problems began to be treated as criminal justice problems, increasing the likelihood of arrests.

Children as young as 12 have been treated as criminals for shoving matches and even adolescent misconduct like cursing in school. This is worrisome because young people who spend time in adult jails are more likely to have problems with law enforcement later on. Moreover, federal data suggest a pattern of discrimination in the arrests, with black and Hispanic children more likely to be affected than their white peers.

In Texas, civil rights groups filed a federal complaint against the school district in the town of Bryan. The lawyers say African-American students are four times as likely as other students to be charged with misdemeanors, which can carry fines up to $500 and lead to jail time for disrupting class or using foul language.

The criminalization of misbehavior so alarmed the New York City Council that, in 2010, it passed the Student Safety Act, which requires detailed police reports on which students are arrested and why. (Data from the 2011-12 school year show that black students are being disproportionately arrested and suspended.)

Some critics now want to require greater transparency in the reporting process to make the police even more forthcoming. Elsewhere in the country, judges, lawmakers and children’s advocates have been working hard to dismantle what they have begun to call the school-to-prison pipeline.

Given the growing criticism, districts that have gotten along without police officers should think twice before deploying them in school buildings.

U.S. uses the Bible as “an excuse for invading other countries.”

While I think it is wrong to murder innocent people like the people that planted the bombs in the Boston Marathon, I think that Tamerlan Tsarnaev quote is correct.

If the American government would stop terrorizing people in other countries these terrorist acts would stop overnight.

Also from this quote it sounds like the American police force have a double standard of justice. They seem to think it's OK to flush our Constitutional rights down the toilet to help them catch alleged criminals.

U.S. officials said a special interrogation team for high-value suspects would question him without reading him his Miranda rights

Source

Final shootout, then Boston bombing suspect caught

Associated Press Sat Apr 20, 2013 7:26 AM

WATERTOWN, Mass. — For just a few minutes, it seemed as if the dragnet that had shut down a metropolitan area of millions while legions of police went house to house looking for the suspected Boston Marathon bomber had failed.

Weary officials lifted a daylong order that had kept residents in their homes, saying it was fruitless to keep an entire city locked down. Then one man emerged from his home and noticed blood on the pleasure boat parked in his backyard. He lifted the tarp and found the wounded 19-year-old college student known the world over as Suspect No. 2.

Soon after that, the 24-hour drama that paralyzed a city and transfixed a nation was over.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s capture touched off raucous celebrations in and around Boston, with chants of “USA, USA” as residents flooded the streets in relief and jubilation after four tense days since twin explosions ripped through the marathon’s crowd at the finish line, killing three people and wounding more than 180.

Will cops torture Boston Marathon bombing suspect to get answers???

President Barack Obama said there are many unanswered questions about the Boston bombings, including whether the two men had help from others. He urged people not to rush judgment about their motivations.

Dzhokhar and his brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were identified by authorities and relatives as ethnic Chechens from southern Russia who had been in the U.S. for about a decade and were believed to be living in Cambridge, just outside Boston. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died early in the day of gunshot wounds and a possible blast injury. He was run over by his younger brother in a car as he lay wounded, according to investigators.

During a long night of violence Thursday and into Friday, the brothers killed an MIT police officer, severely wounded another lawman during a gun battle and hurled explosives at police in a desperate getaway attempt, authorities said.

Late Friday, less than an hour after authorities lifted the lockdown, they tracked down the younger man holed up in the boat, weakened by a gunshot wound after fleeing on foot from the overnight shootout with police that left 200 spent rounds behind.

The resident who spotted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in his boat in his Watertown yard called police, who tried to persuade the suspect to get out of the boat, said Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis.

“He was not communicative,” Davis said.

Instead, he said, there was an exchange of gunfire — the final volley of one of the biggest manhunts in American history.

The violent endgame unfolded just a day after the FBI released surveillance-camera images of two young men suspected of planting the pressure-cooker explosives at the marathon’s finish line, an attack that put the nation on edge for the week.

Watertown residents who had been told Friday morning to stay inside behind locked doors poured out of their homes and lined the streets to cheer police vehicles as they rolled away from the scene.

Celebratory bells rang from a church tower. Teenagers waved American flags. Drivers honked. Every time an emergency vehicle went by, people cheered loudly.

“They finally caught the jerk,” said nurse Cindy Boyle. “It was scary. It was tense.”

Police said three other people were taken into custody for questioning at an off-campus housing complex at the University of the Massachusetts at Dartmouth where the younger man may have lived.

“Tonight, our family applauds the entire law enforcement community for a job well done, and trust that our justice system will now do its job,” said the family of 8-year-old Martin Richard, who died in the bombing.

Queries cascaded in after authorities released the surveillance-camera photos — the FBI website was overwhelmed with 300,000 hits per minute — but what role those played in the overnight clash was unclear. State police spokesman Dave Procopio said police realized they were dealing with the bombing suspects based on what the two men told a carjacking victim during their night of crime.

The search by thousands of law enforcement officers all but shut down the Boston area for much of the day. Officials halted all mass transit, including Amtrak trains to New York, advised businesses not to open and warned close to 1 million people in the city and some of its suburbs to unlock their doors only for uniformed police.

Around midday, the suspects’ uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., pleaded on television: “Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness.”

Until the younger man’s capture, it was looking like a grim day for police. As night fell, they announced that they were scaling back the hunt and lifting the stay-indoors order across the region because they had come up empty-handed.

But then the break came and within a couple of hours, the search was over. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured about a mile from the site of the shootout that killed his brother.

A neighbor described how heavily armed police stormed by her window not long after the lockdown was lifted — the rapid gunfire left her huddled on the bathroom floor on top of her young son.

“I was just waiting for bullets to just start flying everywhere,” Deanna Finn said.

When at last the gunfire died away and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken from the neighborhood in an ambulance, an officer gave Finn a cheery thumbs-up.

“To see the look on his face, he was very, very happy, so that made me very, very happy,” she said.

Authorities said the man dubbed Suspect No. 1 — the one in sunglasses and a dark baseball cap in the surveillance-camera pictures — was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, while Suspect No. 2, the one in a white baseball cap worn backward, was his younger brother.

Chechnya, where the brothers grew up, has been the scene of two wars between Russian forces and separatists since 1994, in which tens of thousands were killed in heavy Russian bombing. That spawned an Islamic insurgency that has carried out deadly bombings in Russia and the region, although not in the West.

U.S. uses the Bible as “an excuse for invading other countries.”

Also, the FBI interviewed the older brother at the request of a foreign government in 2011, and nothing derogatory was found, according to a federal law enforcement official who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official did not identify the foreign country or say why it made the request.

Exactly how the long night of crime began was unclear. But police said the brothers carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston, then released him unharmed at a gas station.

They also shot to death a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, 26-year-old Sean Collier, while he was responding to a report of a disturbance, investigators said.

The search for the Mercedes led to a chase that ended in Watertown, where authorities said the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged gunfire with police. A transit police officer, 33-year-old Richard Donohue, was shot and critically wounded, authorities said.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ran over his already wounded brother as he fled, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation. At some point, he abandoned his car and ran away on foot.

The brothers had built an arsenal of pipe bombs, grenades and improvised explosive devices and used some of the weapons in trying to make their getaway, said Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Watertown resident Kayla Dipaolo said she was woken up overnight by gunfire and a large explosion that sounded “like it was right next to my head … and shook the whole house.”

“It was very scary,” she said. “There are two bullet holes in the side of my house, and by the front door there is another.”

Tamerlan Tsarnaev had studied accounting as a part-time student at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston for three semesters from 2006 to 2008, the school said. He was married with a young daughter.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was registered as a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Students said he was on campus this week after the Boston Marathon bombing. The campus closed down Friday along with colleges around the Boston area.

The men’s father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said in a telephone interview with the AP from the Russian city of Makhachkala that his younger son, Dzhokhar, is “a true angel.” He said his son was studying medicine.

“He is such an intelligent boy,” the father said. “We expected him to come on holidays here.”

A man who said he knew Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Krystle Campbell, the 29-year-old restaurant manager killed in Monday’s bombing, said he was glad Dzhokhar had survived.

“I didn’t want to lose more than one friend,” Marvin Salazar said.

“Why Jahar?” he asked, using Tsarnaev’s nickname. “I want to know answers. That’s the most important thing. And I think I speak for almost all America. Why the Boston Marathon? Why this year? Why Jahar?”

Two years ago, the city of Cambridge awarded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev a $2,500 scholarship. At the time, he was a senior at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, a highly regarded public school whose alumni include Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and NBA Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing.

Tsarni, the men’s uncle, said the brothers traveled here together from Russia. He called his nephews “losers” and said they had struggled to settle in the U.S. and ended up “thereby just hating everyone.”

———

Sullivan and Associated Press writers Stephen Braun, Jack Gillum and Pete Yost reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Mike Hill, Katie Zezima, Pat Eaton-Robb and Steve LeBlanc in Boston, Rodrique Ngowi in Watertown, Mass. and Jeff Donn in Cambridge, Mass., contributed to this report.

DUI and "drug war" laws are a jobs program for cops????

When you’re paying officers $50-$60 an hour in overtime to make arrests and appear in court, the cash will be gone in a flash.

Source

Richardson: When will Arizona, cities get serious about alcohol-related crime?

Posted: Thursday, April 18, 2013 9:27 am

Guest Commentary by Bill Richardson

It was no surprise a 20-year-old man was arrested over the weekend for stabbing another man at the Country Thunder music festival in Pinal County. News reports tell of an argument escalating into violence. I’d bet excessive and criminal alcohol consumption played a part in this crime.

Country Thunder is well known for its wild parties, exhibitionism, drunkenness and violence. In 2011 an Arizona Department of Public Safety officer and Pinal County sheriff’s deputy were attacked by a drunken crowd resulting in serious injuries to both officers.

We constantly hear about violent outcomes to citizens encountering drunks and DUI drivers, but police officers contact drunks regularly and get hurt and killed. I can recall four officers, three from Tempe and one from Gilbert, in Tempe being seriously injured and killed. Two were shot — one beaten and another run over after their assailants spent the night drinking to excess at local watering holes and boozefests. Officers from Mesa, DPS, Chandler, Phoenix and other agencies have also fallen victim to criminal alcohol abusers in their communities.

[Oddly ex-cop Bill Richardson just plain forgot to mention DPS police officer Steven Svestka who was arrested, while he was drunk as a skunk at the Country Thunder concert who was busted in a woman's restroom.]

Gov. Jan Brewer’s Office for Highway Safety recently awarded an $80,000 grant to Tempe to the city get a handle on its illegal alcohol activities and related crime. Officials said the money would be used for “DUI enforcement downtown and on streets citywide, including to impact Large Party Liquor Enforcement, enhance existing Covert Underage Buyer Program in partnership with the Arizona Department of Liquor License, Control and Investigations, and limit the purchase of alcohol with fraudulent ID in liquor establishments.”

An amount like $80,000 will no doubt help pay the extra overtime in Tempe’s efforts, but what happens when the money is gone? When you’re paying officers $50-$60 an hour in overtime to make arrests and appear in court, the cash will be gone in a flash. [Sounds like a jobs program for overpaid and under worked cops. If we are going to pay them $50 or $60 an hour we should at least make them hunt down real criminals, not victimless liquor crime]

Will there be thousands for Scottsdale to help them with their booze related problems? What about Pinal County’s annual problems at Country Thunder? Will there be money for DPS and surrounding cities to deal with the problems that are pushed out of Tempe and onto the highways and into other cities? I doubt with Arizona’s budget and federal sequestration there’ll be many more handouts.

What’s going to be done long-term?

Does the Legislature need to make the criminal law violations relating to the liquor law enforcement more police friendly versus liquor industry friendly? Should it be easier for officers to make arrests for serving an intoxicated patron or allowing drunks on the premises? Should using a fake ID card to get alcohol be a more serious crime? What about a “sin tax” on alcoholic beverages and liquor licenses to pay for police to enforce liquor laws, grants for assistance, education and treatment of those with alcohol problems? [Sorry there already are hefty federal and state taxes on liquor which pretty much are sin taxes]

Should Arizona return liquor law enforcement to DPS and remove it from the state liquor board that’s run by a political appointee? Currently there are only 10 liquor board officers enforcing laws at 11,000 establishments. Should law enforcement “data mine” DUI arrest reports to look for bars that chronically produce drunk drivers? Police officers collect data on where arrested drivers were drinking but the information mostly sits in files and could be used as part of an intelligence led policing effort to prevent crime and target trouble spots. Bars have long been havens for money laundering, drugs, stolen property and the sex trade and with little or no liquor law enforcement these kinds of crimes have only flourished. Should liquor law enforcement be a higher priority for law enforcement?

There’s no question the criminal use of alcohol in Arizona has contributed to crime. [And no doubt that the "war on liquor", like the "war on drugs" is mostly a jobs program for cops and has nothing to do with public safety]

The question is, does Arizona and its cities really want to get serious about confronting alcohol related crime and the misery it causes?

Retired Mesa master police officer Bill Richardson lives in the East Valley and can be reached at bill.richardson@cox.net.

Sens. Graham, McCain say Tsarnaev should be sent to Guantanamo

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

H. L. Mencken

Source

Sens. Graham, McCain say Tsarnaev should be sent to Guantanamo

By Richard A. Serrano

April 20, 2013, 10:33 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), said Saturday in a joint statement that alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be denied a defense attorney and declared an “enemy combatant.”

They added in a statement on Graham's Facebook page, "It is clear the events we have seen over the past few days in Boston were an attempt to kill American citizens and terrorize a major American city.”

The two Republican conservatives have demanded that terror suspects not be Mirandized or tried in federal courts and instead be shipped to the detainee prison on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But the Supreme Court has never said that a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil, like Tsarnaev, could be treated as an enemy combatant.

“The accused perpetrators of these acts were not common criminals attempting to profit from a criminal enterprise, but terrorists trying to injure, maim, and kill innocent Americans,” the senators said. “We need to know about any possible future attacks which could take additional American lives. The least of our worries is a criminal trial which will likely be held years from now.

"Under the Law of War we can hold this suspect as a potential enemy combatant not entitled to Miranda warnings or the appointment of counsel. Our goal at this critical juncture should be to gather intelligence and protect our nation from further attacks."

In a separate tweet, Graham added, “The last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights telling him to 'remain silent.'"

Tsarnaev was arrested Friday night in Watertown, Mass. He was being held at a local hospital, and a Justice Department official said he likely would be charged later Saturday. Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney in Boston, invoked a “public safety exemption in cases of national security and potential charges involving acts of terrorism” as a reason not to immediately read him his Miranda rights against self-incrimination.

In 2011, a Justice Department memo expanded the use of the public safety exception in domestic terrorism cases, so that it can be invoked in exceptional circumstances even when there is not an imminent safety threat. The changes were made after a controversy over the handling of the suspect in the Christmas Day 2009 airline bomb attempt, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was questioned by FBI agents for less than an hour before being read his rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, said in a statement that “every criminal defendant” is entitled to Miranda rights, noting that Tsarnaev became a naturalized American citizen.

“The public safety exception should be read narrowly. It applies only when there is a continued threat to public safety and is not an open-ended exception to the Miranda rule,” the ACLU said. “Every criminal defendant has a right to be brought before a judge and to have access to counsel. We must not waver from our tried and true justice system, even in the most difficult of times. Denial of rights is un-American and will only make it harder to obtain fair convictions."

F*ck his Constitutional rights, he is a criminal!!!

Sadly the Bill of Rights is supposed to protect us from those very government tyrants who want to flush his 5th Amendment rights down the toilet.

Of course if you ask me I would tell Mr Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev to take the 5th and not say a word to the cops. It's his Constitutional right!

Source

Debate Over Delaying of Miranda Warning

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: April 20, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s announcement that it planned to question the Boston Marathon bombing suspect for a period without first reading him the Miranda warning of his right to remain silent and have a lawyer present has revived a constitutionally charged debate over the handling of terrorism cases in the criminal justice system.

The suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, a naturalized American citizen, remained hospitalized on Saturday for treatment of injuries sustained when he was captured by the police on Friday night, and it was not clear whether he had been questioned yet. But the administration’s effort to stretch a gap in the Miranda rule for questioning about immediate threats to public safety in this and other terrorism cases has alarmed advocates of individual rights.

Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it would be acceptable for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ask Mr. Tsarnaev about “imminent” threats, like whether other bombs are hidden around Boston. But he said that once the F.B.I. gets into broader questioning, it must not “cut corners.”

“The public safety exception to Miranda should be a narrow and limited one, and it would be wholly inappropriate and unconstitutional to use it to create the case against the suspect,” Mr. Romero said. “The public safety exception would be meaningless if interrogations are given an open-ended time horizon.”

At the other end of the spectrum, some conservatives have called for treating terrorism-related cases — even those arising on American soil or involving citizens — as a military matter, holding a suspect indefinitely as an “enemy combatant” without a criminal defendants’ rights. Two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, called for holding Mr. Tsarnaev under the laws of war, interrogating him without any Miranda warning or defense lawyer.

“Our goal at this critical juncture should be to gather intelligence and protect our nation from further attacks,” they said. “We remain under threat from radical Islam and we hope the Obama administration will seriously consider the enemy combatant option.”

The Miranda warning comes from a 1966 case in which the Supreme Court held that, to protect against involuntary self-incrimination, if prosecutors want to use statements at a trial that a defendant made in custody, the police must first have advised him of his rights. The court later created an exception, allowing prosecutors to use statements made before any warning in response to questions about immediate threats to public safety, like where a gun is hidden.

The question applying those rules in terrorism cases arose after a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009. After landing in Michigan, he was given painkillers for burns and confessed to a nurse. He also spoke freely to F.B.I. agents for 50 minutes before going into surgery.

After he awoke, the F.B.I. read Mr. Abdulmutallab the Miranda warning, and he stopped cooperating for several weeks.

Republicans portrayed the Obama administration’s handling of the case in the criminal justice system as endangering national security, setting the template for a recurring debate.

In late January 2010, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s family and lawyer persuaded him to start talking again, and he provided a wealth of further information about Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. Later, during pretrial hearings, his lawyers asked a federal judge, Nancy G. Edmunds, to suppress the early statements.

But Judge Edmunds ruled that the statement to the nurse had been voluntary and lucid despite the painkillers, and that the 50-minute questioning was a “fully justified” use of the public safety exception. She declined to suppress the statements, and Mr. Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.

By then, the Justice Department had sent the F.B.I. a policy memo urging agents, when questioning “operational terrorists,” to use a broad interpretation of the public safety exception. The memo asserted that giving the “magnitude and complexity” of terrorism cases, a lengthier delay is permissible, unlike ordinary criminal cases.

“Depending on the facts, such interrogation might include, for example, questions about possible impending or coordinated terrorist attacks; the location, nature and threat posed by weapons that might post an imminent danger to the public; and the identities, locations and activities or intentions of accomplices who may be plotting additional imminent attacks,” it said.

Judge Edmunds’s ruling was seen by the administration as confirmation that its new policy was constitutional — and that it was neither necessary nor appropriate to put domestic cases in military hands.

Stephen Vladeck, an American University law professor, said the middle ground sought by the administration has put both the civil libertarian and national security conservative factions in a bind.

“This is the paradox of progressive national security law, which is how do you at once advocate for the ability of the civilian courts without accepting that some of that includes compromises that are problematic from a civil liberties perspective?” he said. “The paradox is just as true for the right, because they are ardent supporters of things like the public-safety exception, but its existence actually undermines the case for military commissions.”

F*ck his Constitutional rights, he is a criminal!!!

Sadly the Bill of Rights is supposed to protect us from those very government tyrants who want to flush his 5th Amendment rights down the toilet.

Of course if you ask me I would tell Mr Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev to take the 5th and not say a word to the cops. It's his Constitutional right!

Source

Debate Over Delaying of Miranda Warning

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: April 20, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s announcement that it planned to question the Boston Marathon bombing suspect for a period without first reading him the Miranda warning of his right to remain silent and have a lawyer present has revived a constitutionally charged debate over the handling of terrorism cases in the criminal justice system.

The suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, a naturalized American citizen, remained hospitalized on Saturday for treatment of injuries sustained when he was captured by the police on Friday night, and it was not clear whether he had been questioned yet. But the administration’s effort to stretch a gap in the Miranda rule for questioning about immediate threats to public safety in this and other terrorism cases has alarmed advocates of individual rights.

Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it would be acceptable for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ask Mr. Tsarnaev about “imminent” threats, like whether other bombs are hidden around Boston. But he said that once the F.B.I. gets into broader questioning, it must not “cut corners.”

“The public safety exception to Miranda should be a narrow and limited one, and it would be wholly inappropriate and unconstitutional to use it to create the case against the suspect,” Mr. Romero said. “The public safety exception would be meaningless if interrogations are given an open-ended time horizon.”

At the other end of the spectrum, some conservatives have called for treating terrorism-related cases — even those arising on American soil or involving citizens — as a military matter, holding a suspect indefinitely as an “enemy combatant” without a criminal defendants’ rights. Two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, called for holding Mr. Tsarnaev under the laws of war, interrogating him without any Miranda warning or defense lawyer.

“Our goal at this critical juncture should be to gather intelligence and protect our nation from further attacks,” they said. “We remain under threat from radical Islam and we hope the Obama administration will seriously consider the enemy combatant option.”

The Miranda warning comes from a 1966 case in which the Supreme Court held that, to protect against involuntary self-incrimination, if prosecutors want to use statements at a trial that a defendant made in custody, the police must first have advised him of his rights. The court later created an exception, allowing prosecutors to use statements made before any warning in response to questions about immediate threats to public safety, like where a gun is hidden.

The question applying those rules in terrorism cases arose after a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009. After landing in Michigan, he was given painkillers for burns and confessed to a nurse. He also spoke freely to F.B.I. agents for 50 minutes before going into surgery.

After he awoke, the F.B.I. read Mr. Abdulmutallab the Miranda warning, and he stopped cooperating for several weeks.

Republicans portrayed the Obama administration’s handling of the case in the criminal justice system as endangering national security, setting the template for a recurring debate.

In late January 2010, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s family and lawyer persuaded him to start talking again, and he provided a wealth of further information about Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. Later, during pretrial hearings, his lawyers asked a federal judge, Nancy G. Edmunds, to suppress the early statements.

But Judge Edmunds ruled that the statement to the nurse had been voluntary and lucid despite the painkillers, and that the 50-minute questioning was a “fully justified” use of the public safety exception. She declined to suppress the statements, and Mr. Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.

By then, the Justice Department had sent the F.B.I. a policy memo urging agents, when questioning “operational terrorists,” to use a broad interpretation of the public safety exception. The memo asserted that giving the “magnitude and complexity” of terrorism cases, a lengthier delay is permissible, unlike ordinary criminal cases.

“Depending on the facts, such interrogation might include, for example, questions about possible impending or coordinated terrorist attacks; the location, nature and threat posed by weapons that might post an imminent danger to the public; and the identities, locations and activities or intentions of accomplices who may be plotting additional imminent attacks,” it said.

Judge Edmunds’s ruling was seen by the administration as confirmation that its new policy was constitutional — and that it was neither necessary nor appropriate to put domestic cases in military hands.

Stephen Vladeck, an American University law professor, said the middle ground sought by the administration has put both the civil libertarian and national security conservative factions in a bind.

“This is the paradox of progressive national security law, which is how do you at once advocate for the ability of the civilian courts without accepting that some of that includes compromises that are problematic from a civil liberties perspective?” he said. “The paradox is just as true for the right, because they are ardent supporters of things like the public-safety exception, but its existence actually undermines the case for military commissions.”

Judge: Phoenix officers must do union work off the clock

And of course in this case the Phoenix City Council has been bribed by the Phoenix Police has has been giving them millions of dollars in government pork in exchange for their votes.

Source

Judge: Phoenix officers must do union work off the clock

By Cecilia Chan The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Tue Apr 23, 2013 10:55 PM

Phoenix officers must immediately stop working for the police union at taxpayers’ expense, a judge has ruled.

Judge Katherine Cooper of Maricopa County Superior Court on Tuesday granted the Goldwater Institute’s request for a preliminary injunction against part of the two-year labor contract ending June 2014 between the city and the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association.

The labor contract allows six city-funded officers to do union business full time, including representing officers on grievance and disciplinary matters; advocating for members’ interests, such as better pay and benefits; and providing training. The union represents more than 2,500 rank-and-file officers.

Goldwater, a conservative think tank, sued the city and the union, arguing that the practice violated the state Constitution’s Gift Clause. The Gift Clause requires that public entities receive substantial benefit from any public money they spend. A ruling on the lawsuit has yet to be made.

This is the second injunction Cooper has granted Goldwater, which challenged the practice of “release time” in June.

PLEA Vice President Ken Crane declined to comment.

The union and Phoenix officials have maintained that the city benefits because PLEA officers use release time to represent employees during administrative investigations, serve on Police Department task forces and committees, and facilitate communication between city management and employees.

Phoenix will comply with the judge’s decision, city spokeswoman Toni Maccarone said.

Effective immediately, the PLEA officers will begin a short-term assignment at the Police Department training academy, Maccarone said. The officers will then be assigned regular police duties by Monday, she said.

Goldwater lead attorney Clint Bolick said some of the union’s activities, including lobbying, should not be done on city time.

“The streets of Phoenix will be safer now that union officials must go back to the important police work for which they were hired,” Bolick said in a statement.

In Cooper’s 11-page decision, she found that “release time does not advance a public purpose.”

“It diverts resources away from the mission of the Phoenix Police Department, which is the safety of the community,” and instead applies those resources to the interests of a single group of city employees, she wrote.

Cooper said the union’s activities are solely to advance the interests of its members.

Release time costs the city $852,000 a year, or $1.7 million for the entire two-year contract, according to Cooper. She said union work can be paid for by membership fees, with each officer paying $322 a year, instead of by taxpayers.

Phoenix Councilman Sal DiCiccio hailed the decision as a win for taxpayers.

“This is fantastic news for the hardworking taxpayers in Phoenix,” DiCiccio said. “This is big news, huge news.”

DiCiccio said the practice is widespread, with local and state governments paying their employees wages and benefits while they conduct union business.

“They can do stuff for the union but not while on the government payroll,” DiCiccio said.

Bolick said that if the group succeeds in its lawsuit, it will stop the practice “in all state and local labor contracts.”

Medical marijuana will create 1,500 jobs in Arizona

I think two thirds of the people in Federal prison are there for victimless drug war crimes. I am not sure of the percent in Arizona prison for victimless drug war crimes, but the number is huge.

Source

Study: Medical marijuana will create 1,500 jobs in Arizona

Posted: Wednesday, April 24, 2013 1:35 pm

By Julia Shumway, Cronkite News

When Arizona voters approved the use of medical marijuana in 2010, Steve Cottrell saw a way to combine his laboratory background and his interest in the plant he’d been studying since his 11-year-old son died of cancer more than a decade before.

Cottrell is now the owner of AZ Med Testing, a medical marijuana testing laboratory in Tempe. Dispensaries pay Cottrell and his business partner, Brenda Perkins, to test marijuana samples for mold and pesticides.

“We’re making money, but we definitely have our challenges,” he said. “But now that dispensaries are open, it’s moving forward.”

According to a study sponsored by the Regulated Dispensaries of Arizona Association, the two jobs at AZ Med Testing are among estimated 1,500 that will be created by Arizona’s medical marijuana industry.

Tim Hogan, an Arizona State University research associate who authored the study, used information from Oregon’s established medical marijuana industry to estimate the size of Arizona’s market

“It’s a pretty simple industry,” he said. “There’s not too much nuance. The main driving mechanism is how many patients.”

Hogan found that the industry had the potential to create not only 1,500 direct jobs for marijuana growers and dispensary employees but up to 5,000 indirect jobs at places like grocery stores.

Arizona has approximately 38,000 medical marijuana cardholders and is allowed 126 dispensaries, a percentage of the state’s operating pharmacies. Only a handful are open now.

Hogan said his study models only the straight economic impact of the industry instead of offering a more extensive cost-benefit analysis. The industry is small but should contribute to Arizona’s economy, he said.

“Given the size of the industry, it seems it will generate substantial income and tax revenue,” Hogan said.

In Colorado, which legalized the use of medical marijuana in 2000, dispensaries brought in nearly $200 million in sales and paid about $5.5 million in state sales tax in 2012, according to that state’s Department of Revenue.

Beth Wilson, an economics professor at California’s Humboldt State University and a faculty member in the school’s new Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research, said much more study on medical marijuana is needed.

She said it’s possible that more states legalizing the drug for medical or recreational use could lead to marijuana mega-farms run by tobacco companies instead of small businesses.

“No one can know for sure what the impact is,” Wilson said.

Michelle LeBas worked as an office administrator at a car dealership before becoming a dispensing agent at Bisbee’s Green Farmacy Natural Relief Clinic. She verifies that patients have valid medical marijuana cards and then teaches them about different strains of the plant.

LeBas said the dispensary, which has three employees and an on-site doctor, faced some scrutiny when it opened in late March.

“People just thought it was an excuse for stoners to do it,” she said. “But we’ve overcome that and we have people coming in here that genuinely need it. We’ve given them a completely new form of care.”

Green Farmacy Natural Relief Clinic serves about 100 patients and has provided 25 with new medical marijuana cards.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery has sought to block the state’s medical marijuana law since it went into effect. He said any study that discusses medical marijuana’s possible economic benefits is inherently flawed because the state loses more in criminal prosecution.

“It’s crock,” Montgomery said. “None of those studies that purport to show an economic impact take into account the criminal impact.”

It’s important to remember that all marijuana is illegal at the federal level, said Carolyn Short, chairwoman of Keep AZ Drug Free, a committee that formed in opposition to the 2010 ballot proposition that legalized medical marijuana.

She said economic models like the study commissioned by the Regulated Dispensaries of Arizona Association have to be done in a bubble because every part of the medical marijuana business violates federal law.

“Every single time a dispensary sells a joint or an ounce, they’re doing something illegal,” Short said.

At AZ Med Testing, Cottrell said the possibility of federal prosecution or a raid by the Drug Enforcement Administration hangs over his head each day. However, he said he remains focused on doing his job well.

“Sure, they could come down and knock our door down and arrest us for this plant material,” Cottrell said. “But there’s far more dangerous non-law-abiding people who are doing a lot worse than testing plants for pesticides, and we have to believe the DEA is going after them.”

Disbarred Maricopa County Attorney Thomas to run for governor

Of course I wouldn't like him any better then Hitler, Bush, Mecham or Brewer. But Steve Benson would have 4 years of editorial cartoonist fun making fun of the moron in the Republic editorial cartoons

Source

Disbarred former Maricopa County Attorney Thomas to run for governor

By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Apr 25, 2013 6:14 PM

Disbarred former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas has announced he will run for governor in 2014.

In an e-mail to members of the media, the Republican said he file paperwork today with the Secretary of State’s Office.

“I’ll be focusing on the need to protect public safety, ensure border security and fight corruption, among other issues,” Thomas said in the e-mail. “Voters will be urged to watch the video of my State Bar hearing and see for themselves how honest prosecutors are railroaded for fighting corruption in this state.”

Thomas served as county attorney from 2005 until he resigned in 2010 to unsuccessfully run for Arizona attorney general. He was stripped of his law license last year after a court panel found he acted unethically.

Thomas was once a conservative Republican icon, making his name pushing immigration control at the state and county levels. His political downfall came after he was accused of using his prosecutorial powers while in office for political purposes.

A disciplinary panel convened by the Arizona Supreme Court found clear and convincing evidence of ethical misconduct that merited disbarment.

Among the most serious findings were that he and his former prosecutors pressed unwarranted criminal charges, obtained indictments, filed a federal racketeering lawsuit and initiated investigations against his political enemies and those of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio from 2006 to 2010. Targets included judges, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and other county officials.

Thomas did not respond to an e-mail from The Arizona Republic seeking additional comment about his decision to run for governor.

Thomas joins a growing list of candidates.

Democrat and former Arizona Board of Regents Chairman Fred DuVal, Republican and former Tempe Mayor Hugh Hallman and Americans Elect party candidate John Mealer have already formally filed to run. Republicans Sen. Al Melvin and Secretary of State Ken Bennett have formed exploratory committees, and numerous others have indicated an interest.

What about Fifth Amendment rights?

Letter: What about Fifth Amendment rights?

Posted: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:16 pm

Letter to the Editor

Every time I am stopped by the police I tell them I am taking the Fifth and refusing to answer their questions.

I even refuse to tell them my name.

I am not a criminal, but I figure that since the founders died to get me those rights I should use them or lose them.

The next things that usually happens is the cops tell me I don’t have any Fifth Amendment rights in “this case.” I am confused on that because Miranda v Arizona says “If the individual indicates ... he wishes to remain silent, the interrogation must cease”

And of course things then get worse. The cops usually illegally search my wallet, and all my pockets looking for my ID, drugs and guns. I don’t carry an ID, and I don’t use drugs or carry a gun so they never find anything.

Yes, I know Terry v. Ohio allows the cops to give you a pat down search of your outer garments looking for weapons, but a search of my pockets and wallet is clearly illegal per the 4th Amendment and Terry v. Ohio.

Then, I am usually handcuffed and falsely arrested while the police make all kinds of threats on what is going to happen if I don’t answer their questions. After an hour or two the cops release me and tell me I am a jerk for thinking I have “Constitutional rights”.

With that in mind, I can understand where the cops are going in attempting to force Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, to answer their questions without reading him his Miranda rights.

Our Constitutional rights were not created to protect criminals. They were created to protect the innocent from government tyrants, like the police that have a number of times falsely arrested me, illegally questioned me and illegally searched me. I guess I should be glad, because I have not been beaten up, yet, for thinking I have Constitutional rights.

Mike Ross

Tempe

MCSO Commander Bob Rampy under hacking inquiry

Ex-MCSO commander under hacking inquiry

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Apr 25, 2013 10:59 PM

A former Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office commander whom the office suspects of hacking into its computer system is the subject of an ongoing federal investigation spurred by the security breach.

Federal investigators earlier this month served a search warrant on the home of former Cmdr. Bob Rampy, who federal court documents say is suspected of committing “fraud and related activity in connection with computers.”

Investigators searched Rampy’s home April 9 and recovered at least one hard drive, several computers, notebooks, e-mails and other computer-related materials, according to court documents.

Rampy, 56, retired last September from the Sheriff’s Office, where he commanded the technology bureau.

Rampy’s attorney and federal officials declined to comment on the investigation.

The federal search warrant contains few details about why FBI agents sought authorization in early April from U.S. District Judge Lawrence Anderson to serve the warrant. It includes only a single reference to a violation of U.S. criminal code for fraud, and prosecutors sealed a probable-cause statement in which they would typically describe the crime they believe was committed.

The warrant authorized investigators to seize records related to accessing the Sheriff’s Office’s secure network, information on the office’s digital network architecture, records on three specific devices that control access to computerized media and at least one Toughbook laptop computer of the type frequently assigned to sheriff’s deputies.

The Sheriff’s Office first noticed something amiss with its computer systems in January and asked the Department of Public Safety, which regulates access to criminal-justice databases, if something was wrong on the state’s end, said Lisa Allen, a spokeswoman for Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Allen said DPS assumed the problems were coming from the Sheriff’s Office.

“We clearly recognized then that there might have been some sort of security breach and that it was coming from outside the systems,” Allen said. “Looking at the type of breach it was, it obviously required some significant expertise to breach that system.” At that point, the Sheriff’s Office contacted the FBI, Allen said.

The Sheriff’s Office is conducting a criminal investigation of Rampy, Allen said. That investigation has not produced information that leads detectives to believe there are other employees involved in the breach, Allen said.

Rampy figured in some of the disputes between the Sheriff’s Office and other county agencies during the past five years. Some of those disputes led to allegations that Rampy used his expertise to violate the privacy of the office’s enemies.

In 2010, when the Sheriff’s Office and other agencies were embroiled in a dispute over who should have access to and control of a sensitive criminal-justice database, attorneys representing county administrators wrote a letter asking the Sheriff’s Office if Rampy was conducting surveillance on county officials.

“It has been brought to our attention that Commander Rampy has been observed on numerous occasions parked across from the Chambers Building watching (county Office of Enterprise Technology) employees from his unmarked SUV with radio and satellite equipment on the roof,” the letter stated.

Rampy claimed the letter, and its release to the media, was part of an orchestrated campaign among county administrators to smear him. He filed a notice of claim against the county in February 2011, calling the letter “the first salvo in a series of unwarranted, public attacks on Commander Rampy’s impeccable personal and professional reputation.”

He offered to settle the dispute for $750,000. The county never responded to the claim, and Rampy never filed suit.

Another dispute with Rampy arose in June 2011, involving allegations that his wife illegally accessed a criminal-justice database. The accusations were contained in a three-page handwritten complaint sent to Maricopa County supervisors and the FBI.

At the time, Rampy said the accusations took him by surprise. “Actually, using my wife as a mechanism like that doesn’t make any sense at all. When asked where I work, she doesn’t even say that I work for the Sheriff’s Office because some of the cases I work on are life-threatening,” Rampy said in a June 2011 interview. “It’s really bothering me. My laptop is secure; there’s nobody else that can get on it. I carry it with me.”

Rampy retired from the Sheriff’s Office last fall to work in the private sector, Allen said.

Federal officials announced in late August that they had closed a four-year investigation into allegations that Arpaio’s office engaged in civil-rights violations, misuse of public money and perjury. An assistant U.S. attorney said prosecution was declined because of a lack of evidence or an insurmountable burden of proof. Arpaio said at the time the investigation’s closure absolved him and members of his office of the accusations.

Yavapai County deputies had lied in probe

Report: Yavapai County deputies had lied in probe

By Dennis Wagner The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Apr 25, 2013 10:49 PM

Two Yavapai County deputies who belonged to a motorcycle club known as the Iron Brotherhood lied to Prescott police about a December bar fight on Whiskey Row and criminally hindered the investigation, according to an internal report released Thursday by the Sheriff’s Office.

Three sheriff’s employees — Capt. Marc Schmidt, Sgt. William Suttle and Deputy Mark Boan — were subjects of the probe, which concluded that Schmidt and Suttle were “deceitful” on the night of the altercation, and all three deputies showed more loyalty to the biker club than to their sworn duty as peace officers.

At least 16 members of the Iron Brotherhood, a law-enforcement club, were partying at saloons on Dec. 22 when a fight broke out at Moctezuma’s Bar. Justin Stafford, 23, was hospitalized with a possible broken nose after allegedly being struck several times by club member Eric “Guido” Amado, whose police agency was not listed.

In a news release, Sheriff Scott Mascher apologized to county residents “for any trust we may have lost as a result of this event. I know the badge has been tarnished and we will work relentlessly to regain the community’s full trust and confidence.”

None of the Yavapai County deputies involved could be reached for comment. Schmidt and Suttle resigned while the internal probe was under way; Boan faces discipline for alleged conduct unbecoming of an officer. A criminal investigation by the Arizona Department of Public Safety was to be released today.

Cmdr. Rex Gilliland, who conducted the internal review, compared the 26-member Iron Brotherhood with outlaw organizations such as the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, noting that it is an all-male outfit that uses similar membership “patches” — a skull with blue eyes and an iron cross. Iron Brotherhood vests display the number 92, using the ninth and second letters in the alphabet to indicate the club initials, IB. Hells Angels display the number 81 for HA.

A website for the Iron Brotherhood says it was founded in 2006 as a national fraternity for biker officers who do not associate with “1 percenters,” a nickname for outlaw motorcycle clubs.

Gilliland wrote that Suttle, a police supervisor for more than two decades, is the club’s vice president and goes by a nickname, “Mongo.” On the night of the fisticuffs, he said, Suttle attempted to influence local officers by telling them that Prescott’s deputy police chief, Andy Reinhardt — also an Iron Brotherhood member — had been present. Evidence later revealed that Reinhardt had left his companions and gone to another bar before the brouhaha. He has since resigned from the biker club.

The altercation began when Stafford accosted another lawman in the Iron Brotherhood, Prescott Valley Police Chief Billy “Tarzan” Fessler, reportedly grabbing at his “colors,” or vest. Fessler, the club’s Whiskey Row chapter president, quit the biker fraternity in December and resigned from the Police Department last month, according to the Daily Courier of Prescott.

Gilliland concluded that Suttle and Schmidt untruthfully denied knowing the names of fellow club members and gave other false or misleading statements. “It is this investigator’s opinion and belief that Suttle’s allegiance and loyalties are first to the club and not to his position as a law enforcement officer,” he wrote. “I believe Suttle was reluctant and in fact misled and lied to Prescott police.”

No bribery charges for Mesa justice of the peace Markel K. Chiles

According to this article, Mesa judge Markel K. Chiles who is accused of shoplifting at Walmart offered Mesa Police officers Rich Rivera and Steve York a $1,000 bribe to make the charges go away won't face any bribery charges.

If that is true, I wonder how many bribes Mesa Judge Markel K. Chiles has taken to make cases go away in his East Mesa Justice Court???

Source

No bribery charges for Mesa justice of the peace

By Jim Walsh The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Apr 25, 2013 10:19 PM

An east Mesa justice of the peace told two Mesa police officers that he would pay $1,000 to make a shoplifting case disappear, but will not face bribery charges.

Chiles made the comment to Officer Rich Rivera and Officer Steve York during a meeting in his chambers at East Mesa Justice Court, according to a Mesa police report released Wednesday.

Police cited Chiles on a misdemeanor for a $40 speaker he allegedly took from a Walmart and will not pursue a bribery charge, said Mesa police spokesman Steve Berry.

“We were aware of the comment. It was not perceived as an attempted bribe,” he said.

Berry said police consider the statement an off-hand comment and that Chiles made no overt attempt to hand over money to the officers.

The report, released after The Arizona Republic and 12 News filed a public records request, said that a Walmart undercover security officer noticed that Chiles was wearing his badge from the court on his belt during the March 28 incident. Police accuse Chiles of removing the iBoost speaker from a package, hiding it under a jacket and leaving the store without paying for it.

The officers went to Chiles’ court on April 3 and told him that the undercover security officer watched as the judge paid $157 for nine videos, but walked out of the store without paying for the speaker, then loaded the speaker into a canvas bag before driving away on his motorcycle, according to the report.

“I really don’t know what an iBoost speaker is,” Chiles first told police.

When officers explained that it is a small external speaker that can be hooked up to an iPhone, iPad or a laptop to play music, Chiles said he planned to use it for his iPad, according to the police video.

“I really thought I had bought it. It was a speaker,” Chiles said.

Rivera asked Chiles to return to his house, find the stolen speaker and return it to police.

Rivera told Chiles that Walmart knew of his position at the court and “they are not looking to make a big deal out of it,” according to the video. “They just want to get their speaker back.”

Chiles asked the police if he could pay for the speaker, but the officers told him that was not an option. They also said he could not buy another speaker as a replacement, that they needed the original speaker back.

But later that day, Chiles told police he couldn’t find the speaker at home. He went to Walmart, bought another speaker and attempted to hand it over to police.

The officers would not accept the speaker Chiles purchased and cited him on suspicion of shoplifting.

“I am dumbfounded. I’m embarrassed. I am so very sorry,” Chiles said on the videotaped recording. “I’ll give you $1,000 if we could make this go away.”

Later, he said he would have no motive for such a petty theft.

“I don’t know, I have no idea,” he said when asked why he stole the speaker. “I don’t know why I would take it. I have plenty of money. I own three houses free and clear.”

He said he had spent $1,000 buying rifles at Walmart recently.

The speaker theft occurred between 4:40 a.m and 6:30 a.m. March 23.

Chiles worked at the court on April 3 and on the morning of April 4, but agreed to take a voluntary leave of absence during the lunch hour that day at the suggestion of C. Steven McMurry, the presiding judge of Maricopa County Justice Courts.

The courts handle misdemeanor cases, which can include shoplifting. He is scheduled to appear a pretrial conference before Judge Victor Ortiz on May 13.

Brian Strong, Chiles’ attorney, did not return a call from a reporter seeking comment.

On Tuesday, Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Rebecca White Berch ordered Chiles reassigned to other duties pending the outcome of his case. He earns $101,500 a year.

Sheryl Rabin, a Justice Courts spokeswoman, said the justice courts have no authority to withhold Chiles’ salary while the case is pending.

Judge Don Calender has been appointed as judge pro tem for the East Mesa Justice Court until the state Commission on Judicial Conduct decides what discipline Chiles will face.

Chiles has been reprimanded and censured in the past by the commission for violations of judicial conduct. He has served as the East Mesa Justice of the Peace since 2006.

Andrew Thomas for governor

Source

Posted on April 25, 2013 4:46 pm by EJ Montini

Andrew Thomas for governor (curse for Arizona, blessing for the media)

Along with a number of my brothers and sisters in the news business I received this precious gift of an e-mail this afternoon from disbarred former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas:

“Dear Members of the Media:

“I will be filing my paperwork at the Secretary of State’s Office tomorrow at 3 p.m. to run for Governor of Arizona. I will be making a few remarks and answering a few questions for media organizations that attend. Joining me for the filing will be some key supporters.

“I am confident public surveys will show upon my filing that I am a leading candidate for Governor.

“I’ll be focusing on the need to protect public safety, ensure border security, and fight corruption, among other issues.

“Voters will be urged to watch the video of my State Bar hearing and see for themselves how honest prosecutors are railroaded for fighting corruption in this state.

“Andrew Thomas

“Former County Attorney”

Dear Mr. Thomas,

Thank you.

Maricopa County to settles Andrew Thomas Sheriff Joe lawsuit

County to settle another lawsuit over Thomas-Arpaio corruption probes

By Michael Kiefer and Michelle Ye Hee Lee The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Apr 26, 2013 10:26 PM

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors reached settlement Friday in the next to the last of the lawsuits filed in the wake of the 2008-09 battles among former County Attorney and current gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Thomas and Sheriff Joe Arpaio with county officials, judges and citizens associated with them.

Conley Wolfswinkel, a longtime Valley land developer, and two of his sons will receive $1.4 million to compensate for search warrants served on the developers’ offices by sheriff’s deputies looking for evidence of fraud. Wolfswinkel was a friend and business associate of former County Supervisor Don Stapley. Stapley, incidentally, is the remaining claimant against the county who has not yet settled.

“The board voted to settle this case to avoid incurring additional attorneys’ fees including the possible imposition of plaintiff’s attorneys’ fees at trial,” said county spokeswoman Cari Gerchick. “The cost to the county of defending this case is significant because there are seven different defendants who each required separate attorneys.”

Wolfswinkel’s is the ninth settlement stemming from the so-called corruption investigations carried out by Thomas’ and Arpaio’s offices. The county has now paid $4,190,110 in settlements for the lawsuits, according to Gerchick. Another settlement offer — $975,000 — approved for Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox has not been paid and is being disputed in court. Those totals do not include millions of dollars more in attorneys’ fees for the plaintiffs and costs to defend the county against the lawsuits.

“Conley and the family felt obligated to try to right this wrong,” said Lawrence Wright, one of the Wolfswinkels’ attorneys. “They felt the need to take a stand against the reign of terror that was being conducted by Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Andrew Thomas.”

Thomas still contends that he was only doing his job, rooting out corruption. He filed criminal charges against Stapley, Wilcox and Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe, and filed a civil racketeering lawsuit in federal court against those same defendants and others. Many of the allegations had to do with the construction of the Superior Court’s south tower, which is now in service.

Thomas and one of his deputies were disbarred because of those actions; another deputy was sanctioned. Former sheriff’s Chief Deputy David Hendershott, who helped mastermind the corruption investigations, was fired.

Thomas announced Thursday that he will run for governor of Arizona.

Stapley was indicted twice. At the time that search warrants were served on the Wolfswinkels, Stapley faced 118 criminal counts related to properties and real-estate deals that prosecutors said he did not include in his annual financial-disclosure forms. Some of those deals related to business associations with Wolfswinkel, who was convicted of felony check-kiting in the 1990s and was a figure in the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s.

According to a search-warrant affidavit from 2009, investigators were looking for evidence of fraud and bribery involving Wolfswinkel. Investigators also believed Stapley voted on “land-related issues” regarding property in which he had business interests.

All of the criminal charges and the racketeering suit were dismissed.

Miranda rights silenced Boston bombing suspect

Miranda rights silenced Boston bombing suspect

By Richard A. Serrano, Ken Dilanian and Brian Bennett

April 25, 2013, 7:09 p.m.

WASHINGTON — Federal agents had to end what they termed "an urgent public safety interview" with Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev when a judge came to his hospital room, officials said Thursday, a disclosure that has renewed the debate over how the government should handle terrorism suspects.

Tsarnaev has not answered any questions since he was given a lawyer and told he has the right to remain silent by Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler on Monday, officials said.

Until that point, Tsarnaev had been responding to the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, including admitting his role in the bombing, authorities said. A senior congressional aide said Tsarnaev had asked several times for a lawyer, but that request was ignored since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule. The exemption allows defendants to be questioned about imminent threats, such as whether other plots are in the works or other plotters are on the loose.

After being briefed on the sequence of events, lawmakers from both parties questioned Thursday why the Justice Department didn't seek to delay the judge's appearance on the grounds that the public safety interview was continuing. Legal experts said that once documents charging Tsarnaev with using a weapon of mass destruction were signed Sunday night, criminal rules of procedure require that he be brought before a judge "without unnecessary delay," which usually means the next business day.

Lawmakers were told Tsarnaev had been questioned for 16 hours over two days. Injured in the throat, he was answering mostly in writing.

"For those of us who think the public safety exemption properly applies here, there are legitimate questions about why he was [brought before a judge] when he was," said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), a former federal prosecutor who serves on the House Intelligence Committee.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the committee, wrote Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. asking for a full investigation of the matter, complaining that the court session "cut off a lawful, ongoing FBI interview to collect public safety information."

Justice Department officials Thursday did not address the question of why they signed documents charging Tsarnaev on Sunday night, knowing that could start the clock ticking toward an appearance by a magistrate. Once that was done, they said, they had no legal way to stop the hearing from going forward.

A congressional official said interrogators left the hospital room about an hour before the judge arrived, after they were told she was coming.

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said, "The prosecutors and FBI agents in Boston were advised of the scheduled initial appearance in advance." One Justice Department official put it another way: "You don't tell a federal judge to put off a hearing."

Eugene Fidell, a professor at Yale School of Law, said it was past time for Tsarnaev to have been read his rights, because the Constitution requires it.

"The notion that the public safety exemption was going to allow them all the time in the world is preposterous," he said.

In other developments in the case Thursday:

A source familiar with the inquiry said that the FBI two years ago linked the phone number of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the second bombing suspect and Dzhokhar's older brother, to two people who were investigated for possible terrorist ties. But the matter was not pursued because the cases were closed for lack of evidence.

The source, speaking confidentially because the case is still underway, added that the brothers' mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, told an associate at the time that Tamerlan was "going over to the dark side" — another sign that he was becoming radicalized.

Meanwhile, New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told federal interrogators while he was still talking that he and his brother Tamerlan had planned to drive to New York to set off another series of explosions in Manhattan's Times Square. They had another pressure-cooker bomb like the ones used in Boston and five smaller pipe bombs in the car when they were stopped by police in Watertown, Mass., Kelly said.

Kelly said the younger suspect described how he and his brother had carjacked a motorist in a Mercedes three days after the bombing and then "decided spontaneously on Times Square as a target. They would drive to Times Square that same night."

But the police commissioner said the plan "fell apart" when they stopped for gas and the Mercedes owner fled and called police. A shootout ensued. Tamerlan was killed shortly after midnight; Dzhokhar was arrested Friday night.

Kelly also said Dzhokhar was caught by surveillance cameras in Times Square on April 18, 2012, and again in New York in November. But, he added, "we don't know if those visits were related" to plans to attack the city.

Law enforcement officials also revealed that the FBI in Boston was looking into whether two Kazakh men tried to remove items from Dzhokhar's dorm room at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth after his name surfaced as a bombing suspect.

Dias Kadyrbayev, 19, and Azamat Tazhayakov, 20, were arrested in New Bedford, Mass., on Saturday on administrative immigration violations, and investigators believe they were social friends with Dzhokhar.

The two men had entered the U.S. from Kazakhstan on academic visas to attend the school, but the visas had since terminated, an official said. They are being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Suffolk County House of Correction at South Bay in Boston but have not been charged with a crime.

Investigators at this point do not believe the men were accomplices, an official said. An evidence team Thursday searched several city dumps hunting for sales receipts, discarded bomb parts or other clues.

richard.serrano@latimes.com

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

brian.bennett@latimes.com

David G. Savage and Lisa Mascaro in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

Recorded interrogations should be the norm

Recorded interrogations should be the norm

By Laura H. Nirider My Turn Mon Apr 22, 2013 8:03 AM

President Ronald Reagan once famously said: “Trust, but verify.”

That phrase — originally uttered about the Soviet Union’s nuclear program — has since become a rallying cry for those concerned about government transparency here at home.

But in Arizona, transparency only extends so far. In fact, one of the most crucial, potentially life-changing interactions that a person can have with the government is often cloaked in secrecy. I’m talking about police interrogations.

In Arizona, police aren’t required to electronically record interrogations. Instead, a person can be subjected to government questioning behind closed doors for hours on end — all without any objective record of what happened.

This state of affairs lies at the heart of a federal appellate court’s recent decision to overturn the capital conviction of Phoenix resident Debra Milke, who was convicted in 1990 of soliciting the murder of her 4-year-old son.

Milke’s conviction was overturned because the only evidence against her was a detective’s claim that she had confessed to him at the police station during an unrecorded interrogation. Milke, on the other hand, denied ever confessing. In short, the only evidence against her was the detective’s say-so.

But that detective, it turned out, had said a lot of things in the past that weren’t so. He had a long history of misconduct, including repeatedly lying under oath in order to secure convictions. He even accepted sexual favors from a female motorist in exchange for leniency and then lied about it. In tossing out Milke’s conviction and death sentence, the court’s chief judge said of the detective’s testimony: “No civilized system of justice should have to depend on such flimsy evidence.”

In this case, our system relied on trust alone — and a potentially innocent woman paid a horrific price.

Let’s learn from Milke’s case. The Arizona Legislature should trust, but verify: It should require police to electronically record all interrogations from start to finish. Nineteen other states already have such a requirement, ranging from New Mexico to Ohio to North Carolina.

Even setting aside the possibility of police misconduct, there are plenty of other reasons for police to record interrogations. For one, it protects police from baseless claims of misconduct. One Mesa police officer who voluntarily records his interrogations has found that “the act of recording automatically brings with it the air of disclosure and avoids accusations of impropriety during the interview.”

And there are practical benefits, too.

A Gilbert police officer who records his interrogations has explained that it helps him question suspects more effectively: “In addition to the detective not having the distractions of note-taking, the absence of notes frequently makes the subject more at ease and does not alert him/her to key phrases, which may be of special interest at a later time.”

Even while some Arizona officers are already recording their interrogations, many others are not.

Indeed, the detective who questioned Milke was ordered by his superiors to record her interrogation — but he refused. So let’s change the law to require all police to get out the video cameras — or even their smartphones.

It’s not hard, and it’s not expensive, especially when weighed against the financial and moral costs of a case like Milke’s.

Most of us trust the police, and most of the time we’re right to do so. But we also need to verify what happens during police interrogations. That’s our duty to each other as citizens. And in this case, it very well might be the duty that we owe to Debra Milke.

Laura H. Nirider is co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago.

New hearing set for Horne, aide

New hearing set for Horne, aide

By Lindsey Collom The Republic | azcentral.com

Tue Apr 30, 2013 10:04 PM

A Maricopa County Superior Court judge will hear arguments Wednesday over separate petitions for special action filed by Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne and an aide that seek to derail a campaign-finance case against them and prevent County Attorney Bill Montgomery from taking any further action.

The hearing before Civil Presiding Judge John Rea comes less than a week before Horne and supporter-turned-employee Kathleen Winn are scheduled to defend themselves before an administrative law judge.

Horne and Winn are accused of unlawfully coordinating campaign spending during the 2010 election, when he was the Republican candidate for attorney general and she was chairwoman of Business Leaders for Arizona, an independent-expenditure committee.

Montgomery issued a civil order last October for Horne and Winn to revise their campaign-finance reports and refund about $400,000 in donations to bring them into compliance, or face three times that amount in penalties.

The pair, who continue to deny any wrongdoing, appealed the compliance order to the Arizona Office of Administrative Hearings, an independent arbiter over decisions made by certain state agencies, boards and commissions.

Chief among Horne and Winn’s complaints was the process used to take civil enforcement action against them.

Because the case involved a statewide office, they argued, Secretary of State Ken Bennett was required by law to refer the matter to the Attorney General’s Office, not to the Maricopa County attorney.

Administrative Law Judge Tammy Eigenheer was initially persuaded by Horne and Winn’s arguments and recommended the case for dismissal, which Montgomery later rejected.

Eigenheer reaffirmed last week that an evidentiary hearing will begin May 7.

In seeking relief in Superior Court, attorneys for Horne and Winn said Montgomery’s rejection was incorrect in part because the county attorney “has no jurisdiction to enforce civil campaign-finance laws with respect to campaigns for statewide office” and “Montgomery has been a dramatic and avid advocate to the press and the public in this case, and this disqualifies him for acting as a judge in the same case.”

In his response, Montgomery countered that Horne’s conflict of interest is “so severe that his quest to appoint his own prosecutor is ‘shocking to the universal sense of justice.’ ”

Montgomery said that if Rea were to prevent Eigenheer from hearing the case, it would “cause irreparable injury to the public trust vested with elected officials in enforcing the law.”

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Maricopa County attorney gathered compelling evidence of egregious campaign-finance violations during a yearlong investigation, which has been reported by the press,” he wrote. “In light of the plaintiffs’ vehement and very public denials of any wrongdoing, the public has a right to have the evidence heard.”

Judge at crossroads in case against Horne

Judge at crossroads in case against Horne

By Lindsey Collom The Republic | azcentral.com Wed May 1, 2013 10:11 PM

A Maricopa County Superior Court judge is weighing practicality vs. technicality in deciding whether to restart the clock on a campaign-finance case against Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne and supporter-turned-staffer Kathleen Winn.

Presiding Civil Judge John Rea said he will issue a decision today in response to separate petitions for special action filed by Horne and Winn that seek to stop an administrative law judge from hearing the case against them next week and prevent County Attorney Bill Montgomery from acting further.

In a hearing Wednesday, Rea indicated he was considering whether to send the case back to the Secretary of State’s Office on a legal technicality to begin the process all over, or to order it to proceed so as not to delay it any further.

Horne and Winn are accused of unlawfully coordinating campaign spending during the 2010 election, when he was the Republican candidate for attorney general and she was chairwoman of Business Leaders for Arizona, an independent-expenditure committee.

According to Montgomery, a 14-month inquiry by the FBI and his office revealed that Horne collaborated with Winn’s committee to quickly raise more than $500,000 to run negative ads against his Democratic foe, Felecia Rotellini.

The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office found that there was reasonable cause to believe a campaign-finance violation had occurred, and it referred the case to Montgomery for enforcement.

Montgomery issued a civil order last October for Horne and Winn to revise their campaign-finance reports and refund about $400,000 in donations to bring them into compliance, or face three times that amount in penalties.

The pair, who continue to deny any wrongdoing, appealed the compliance order to the Arizona Office of Administrative Hearings, an independent arbiter over decisions made by certain state agencies, boards and commissions. The matter is scheduled for an evidentiary hearing May 7, and Horne and Winn petitioned Rea to stop that from happening.

“Ms. Winn always was, and never stopped being, a member of the Horne for Attorney General campaign committee,” Maricopa County Civil Attorney Michael McVey told the court Wednesday. “And if we’re given the opportunity to proceed to a hearing next Tuesday, we will demonstrate that.”

Rea said he believes Secretary of State Ken Bennett did not follow the enforcement procedure outlined in statute, which dictates that Bennett’s office must send campaign-finance allegations involving statewide officeholders to the attorney general, meaning to Horne himself. Should a direct conflict arise, the attorney general can refer the case to a prosecutor of his choosing.

But Rea said that restarting the process would only delay the issue, not change the outcome: Bennett’s reasonable-cause finding still stands, and Horne would have to send the matter to another prosecutor.

Michael Kimerer, Horne’s attorney, responded by calling it a due-process issue. “We’re protecting a system here. We’re protecting a statutory scheme,” Kimerer said, adding that an independent prosecutor would likely review the “weak evidence” against his client and conclude no wrongdoing occurred.

More articles on Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne

More articles on Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne.