Homeless in Arizona

Cannabis no alivia el dolor, pero lo hace más tolerable

Cannabis no alivia el dolor, pero lo hace más tolerable

Realizaron un seguimiento de 12 personas a las que se les administró una pastilla de 15 mg de THC.

El cannabis no sirve para aliviar el dolor pero sí lo hace más tolerable para algunas personas, según indica un estudio de la universidad inglesa de Oxford difundido en el Reino Unido.

Los autores del estudio, que publica en su último número la revista Pain, descubrieron, mediante un experimento en el que utilizaron escáneres cerebrales, que la sustancia psicoactiva del cannabis reducía la actividad en partes del cerebro asociadas a la parte emocional del dolor.

En cambio, esos cambios no se registraron en la parte del cerebro asociada directamente a la sensación de dolor, que es la que se activa con otro tipo de fármacos.

Los expertos señalan que el cannabis puede hace más tolerable el dolor, aunque no en todos los casos, ya que algunas personas no son sensibles a sus efectos o estos no les benefician.

El equipo de investigadores del centro de resonancias magnéticas del cerebro de la universidad de Oxford, dirigido por Michael Lee, basó sus conclusiones en un pequeño experimento con 12 personas sanas.

A estas personas se les hizo un seguimiento de la actividad cerebral después de administrarles una pastilla de 15 mg de THC, la sustancia psicoativa del cannabis que causa la sensación de subidón, y de provocarles dolor untándoles en la pierna una crema con el componente que da el picor a las guindillas.

También se les hizo ese seguimiento administrándoles un placebo en lugar de las sustancias anteriores.

En general, los investigadores observaron que, con el THC, los voluntarios valoraban que el dolor -con la misma intensidad- era más tolerable.

Además, notaron que se activaba la región del cerebro que determina "la reacción emocional al dolor", y no la que codifica "la sensación" de dolor, señala el doctor Lee.

También detectaron ciertos cambios en la actividad cerebral de las personas a quienes el cannabis hizo más efecto, lo que indica que en el futuro se podría llegar a predecir qué personas pueden beneficiarse más de su consumo, apunta el experto.

De todas formas, Lee subraya en el artículo que, para corroborar estas conclusiones, haría falta un estudio más amplio con personas con dolor crónico y por un plazo más largo de tiempo.

Arizona checkpoint yields drugs in chicken buckets

Source

Arizona checkpoint yields drugs in chicken buckets

Associated Press Sat Feb 23, 2013 8:40 AM

TUCSON — Authorities say two women aboard a commercial shuttle van have been arrested after Border Patrol agents found methamphetamine hidden in two buckets of chicken.

Border Patrol says the agents discovered the drugs Thursday during a stop at an Interstate 19 checkpoint near Nogales.

Authorities say the drugs weighed about six pounds and were valued at more than $58,000.

The suspects have been held pending federal prosecution, and the methamphetamine has been turned over to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The identities of the suspects were not immediately released.

Uncle Sam goes hunting for local government crooks

Robert Robb gives the nitty gritty details!!!

Yes, Ben Arredondo, Sheriff Joe, and Tom Horne are all probably big time crooks that belong in prison. But by both the Federal and Arizona Constitutions I think the job of arresting and jailing these government crooks belongs to the local cops, not Uncle Sam.

Source

Robert Robb | azcentral opinions

Reach Robert Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8472.

Posted on February 22, 2013 2:13 pm by Robert Robb

Feds go hunting for local officials

The federal Department of Justice makes investigating and prosecuting public corruption, including by state and local officials, a major priority.

And the focus is not just on major corruption with national implications or involving federal programs. Acting principally through local branches of the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office, DOJ views any corruption by any state or local official, regardless of how small or distant from federal operations, as its business.

The justification is that corruption, regardless of how small, robs the public of the honest administration of their government, and local law enforcement is frequently conflicted, complaisant or complicit.

There is a superficial sensibility to this justification. But there are substantial problems with the role DOJ has arrogated both in theory and in practice, as illustrated by the recent raft of such cases in the Phoenix metro area.

In the first place, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that can be even remotely argued to assign the task of policing the integrity of state and local officials to the executive branch of the federal government. Such a role would have been anathema to the framers. In fact, it’s fair to say that if policing the integrity of state and local officials had been an enumerated executive branch responsibility, the Constitution would never have been ratified.

So, how has DOJ managed to assume this extra-constitutional role? Congress has enacted some highly elastic statutes that permit DOJ to turn practically any malfeasance by state and local officials into federal crimes. The most elastic are the federal crimes of bribery, mail fraud and wire fraud.

Bribery involving a state or local official working for an entity that takes at least $10,000 from the federal government can become a federal crime. Since the federal government doles out over $600 billion a year to state and local governments, basically there are no state or local officials not subject to a federal bribery charge, irrespective of how profoundly local the venality.

If any element of the misdeed involved sending something through the mail, it can be mail fraud. Through the Internet, it’s wire fraud.

When federal judge Fred Martone gave former Tempe City Councilman Ben Arredondo a relatively light sentence, it was generally assumed that he did so in part because he thought that the federal government had wasted resources in pursuing such a small-potatoes case. And, indeed, Martone said words to that effect in open court.

But perhaps Martone was also influenced by how much the federal government had stretched these elastic statutes. Although Arredondo was initially charged with an independent count of bribery, that accusation was folded into one of the two counts of mail fraud to which he actually pled. One involved receiving sports tickets through the mail. The other was for sending a letter to ASU saying none of the recipients of the scholarship fund he sponsored were relatives.

The conclusion of the Arredondo case is highly unsatisfying. Was he on the take, explicitly selling his official services to special interests outside the sting operation conducted by the federal government? If so, he got off much too lightly. Or was he just a political hustler, maneuvering aggressively in the gray areas but stopping short of an illegal quid pro quo, despite his plea agreement? If so, he was wrongly subjected to the heavy hand of the federal government, which ultimately threatened to criminally prosecute his wife.

The pursuit of Attorney General Tom Horne also yields disturbing questions. After an intense investigation by the FBI, Horne has been charged by Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery with the civil state offense of illegally coordinating with an independent campaign conducted on his behalf.

So, why was it the FBI that launched the investigation, if it involved the violation of a civil state statute? Initially, the FBI thought the elastic mail and wire fraud statutes could apply, but apparently that was too much of a stretch for the local U.S. Attorney’s Office.

If Horne did violate state law about coordination with an independent campaign, the offense took place in a very few days toward the end of the 2012 campaign, and involved just a handful of people. Yet the FBI, in a sprawling investigation, developed an extraordinary interest in the interpersonal relationships between people in Horne’s Attorney General’s Office. Although the details are pretty salacious, they have no obvious connection to a campaign finance law violation that is alleged to have occurred before Horne was ever elected to the office.

A staffer to former state House Speaker Jim Weiers, John Mills, has been charged with federal wire fraud for taking money from Weiers’ campaign account for personal uses, and then returning it. His attorney is asking that the case be dismissed because the federal government is stretching the wire fraud statutes too far.

The Mills case best illustrates the practical problem with the role the federal government has arrogated. Arizona has very robust state statutes against bribery, fraud and embezzlement. If the facts against Mills are as alleged, he could be prosecuted under some of them without any question that they were being stretched beyond reason.

So why, if state statutes are so much more apropos, are the feds pursuing an iffy wire fraud case rather than turn it over to state or local prosecutors? Impossible to say for sure. But the feds do seem to like to mount their own trophies.

Now there have been several local public corruption cases in which the federal role was unarguably appropriate. Some of the illegal Fiesta Bowl campaign contributions went to candidates for federal office. Former state legislator Richard Miranda embezzled from a federal non-profit and engaged in federal tax evasion in the process.

And the federal government, or at least the U.S. Attorney’s Office, has shown some restraint. Federal charges weren’t filed against Horne. After investigating Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for criminal civil rights violations, which is something the federal government is uniquely empowered to do, the U.S. Attorney’s Office made a rare public announcement that charges wouldn’t be filed.

Arizona is not being picked on, as some allege. The raft of local public corruption investigations isn’t because Arizona passed SB 1070 or because Gov. Jan Brewer wagged her finger at President Obama.

The investigatory targets in Arizona are a bipartisan lot. And similar small-potatoes federal investigations and charges are occurring all over the country. The feds recently busted some traffic court judges in Philadelphia for fixing tickets for friends and relatives.

The Department of Justice just sees policing the integrity of state and local officials as its job. But is justice truly being served by turning what are really state crimes into federal offenses?

Give this plant its due: legalize hemp

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Give this plant its due: legalize hemp

February 25, 2013

As states of a more liberal bent battle the federal government over the legalization of medical and even recreational marijuana, another cannabis battle has reemerged in the farm states. But if pot smoking raises troubling moral and safety questions, industrial hemp does not.

Activists have been struggling to legalize hemp for decades in the U.S., but only recently has the issue seemingly caught fire in Congress. Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell signed on to legislation that had for years been championed by Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the former GOP presidential contender, and has now been taken up by his son Rand, the Republican senator from Kentucky. It would remove hemp from the federal government's list of Schedule 1 controlled substances and make it legal to cultivate the plant.

What's so hep about hemp? Supporters tout it as a wonder fiber with dozens of potential uses that would find a lucrative market in the U.S. But while that may be an exaggeration — hemp is unlikely to become anything more than a specialty crop for a few hundred growers supplying goods to high-end food markets and low-end textile producers — there's no denying that it's a highly useful weed. The global market for hemp consists of some 25,000 products, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, including fabric, paper, rope, auto parts and home furnishings. Hemp seed, meanwhile, is an alternative protein source used in a variety of food and beverages, and can be pressed to make body oils, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.

Despite all this, it is illegal to grow hemp anywhere in the U.S. without permission from the Drug Enforcement Administration. There are currently no active federal licenses, so all hemp products produced here are made from imported material.

Based on its classification under the Controlled Substances Act, one might suspect that hemp provides a cheap high for pot fiends, but one would have to smoke an absurd amount of rope to catch a hemp buzz. The plant seems to have been deemed guilty by association with marijuana because both come from the same species, Cannabis sativa. But just as some mushrooms are magical while others are only good in a salad, not all varieties of cannabis are the same. The intoxicating chemical in marijuana, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), is heavily concentrated in the marijuana plant: anywhere from 10% to 30%. The THC content of hemp, by contrast, is less than 1%, and in the varieties legally cultivated in the European Union and Canada must be less than 0.3%.

Historically, hemp was an important crop in the U.S. before it was caught up in an anti-marijuana crusade in the 1930s. When the Controlled Substances Act was approved in 1970, it took the definition of marijuana from the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which considered all varieties of Cannabis sativa to be dangerous and narcotic. Despite court challenges, the DEA continues to insist that any plant containing THC, no matter how little, must be tightly controlled.

Legalization opponents, including the California Narcotics Officers Assn., argue that legalizing hemp would complicate the enforcement of laws against cultivating marijuana because the plants are almost indistinguishable from each other; marijuana growers, in other words, could easily conceal their plants in hemp fields. The association opposed a 2011 state bill to create pilot programs for hemp cultivation, which was approved by the Legislature but vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown because hemp production violates federal law.

Of course, few sensible growers of marijuana would raise their plants in a hemp field. The two varieties would cross-pollinate, severely lowering the pot's THC content and rendering it all but useless medicinally or as a recreational drug.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether marijuana should be legalized. But the dangers of growing industrial hemp are next to nonexistent. To date, nine states have approved its cultivation, but none has any active fields because of a refusal by the DEA to grant growing permits.

Enough. Hemp is a rare issue that Republicans and Democrats, and members of Congress from both rural and urban states, ought to be able to agree on. Legalize it.

Sen. Rich Crandall wants to create a jobs program for cops???

The law doesn't apply in Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, Prescott or any other Arizona cities and only applies to rural areas.

The law would continue to create a jobs program for cops in schools, because only cops would be allowed to carry guns.

Source

Arizona bill to arm teachers returns to Senate for public hearing

By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Feb 25, 2013 10:17 PM

Efforts to arm teachers in schools and to “sweep” public-campaign finance revenue to hire more school-resource officers were among 15 Senate bills granted special permission on Monday to move forward with public hearings.

Although Friday was the deadline for bills to get hearings, Republican leadership usually gives some bills an extra week, and the Senate Appropriations Committee will today hear the Senate bills granted an extension.

Senate Bill 1325, introduced by Sen. Rich Crandall, R-Mesa, would allow school governing boards to authorize a teacher or administrator to carry a concealed gun on campus if the school has fewer than 600 students, is more than 30 minutes and 20 miles away from the closest law-enforcement facility, and does not have its own school-resource officer.

A proposed amendment would allow any school governing board to allow a retired law-enforcement officer who is an employee of the school to carry a gun on school grounds.

Crandall’s bill was thought to be dead. A similar bill pushed by Attorney General Tom Horne that would have allowed school districts to arm any teacher or administrator went nowhere.

But Crandall said late last week that he worked with Senate leadership on the amendment and convinced them to give the bill a hearing.

Senate Concurrent Resolution 1017, also introduced by Crandall, would ask voters to allow the state to use excess Clean Elections money to help schools pay for resource officers, counselors and behavioral-health services.

The program’s sources of revenue include a surcharge on civil penalties and criminal fines, $5 donations collected by candidates, and taxpayer donations. Currently, Clean Elections money not used to fund participating candidates goes into the state’s general fund.

Arizona Education Association President Andrew Morrill said his organization opposes SB 1325.

“I think Sen. Crandall is trying to be about as reasonable as anybody down there and I know he’s trying to look at some of the unique rural needs,” he said. “But we have drawn a pretty firm line to say there is no substitute for the school-resource officer program.”

He said he’d rather see lawmakers focus on helping schools make their campuses safer, whether that’s by hiring school-resource officers or better securing a school’s perimeter with fencing.

But Morrill said there may be a compromise in allowing retired law-enforcement officers to help schools with safety, especially if they were required to go through the school-resource officer training.

“That’s one of the few suggestions I’ve heard down at the Legislature that could actually work and would have the effect of increasing school safety,” he said.

He said the AEA supports increasing funding for the school-resource officer program but hasn’t researched SCR 1017 enough to know if it may be a viable solution.

Arizonans for Gun Safety President Hildy Saizow, whose group worked with the Obama administration earlier this year on its gun reform proposals, said she has concerns about both bills.

“We don’t agree at all that teachers or administrators or any civilians in the school should be carrying weapons,” she said, saying she even has concerns if the bill does limit who can carry weapons. “There are just too many variables that can lead to a bad outcome.”

She said the organization supports creating a safe environment in schools and supports school-resource officers, but said it does not believe that boosting funds for the schools addresses the issue of gun violence.

“If you look at the 900 gun deaths that took place (in Arizona) last year, not one of them occurred on school grounds,” she said.

She said it would be more helpful if the Legislature would toughen background-check requirements for gun buyers or take weapons away from individuals with mental illnesses.

The Citizens Clean Elections Commission is not opposed to Crandall’s bill to use excess funds to help schools.

Executive Director Todd Lang said Crandall has introduced an amendment that would remedy an administrative problem the Clean Elections bill would have caused. “So in that case ... we’re fine with it,” he said.

Other bills to be heard today would give more adopted children access to behavioral-health services, give the Legislature more oversight over Arizona Department of Transportation highway construction projects and establish a performance-based funding program for schools.

Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee will hear seven bills granted extensions in that chamber. They include efforts to expand mental-health services funding.

Utah liquor bill aims to take down ‘Zion curtains’

Utah liquor bill aims to take down ‘Zion curtains’

Associated Press Tue Feb 26, 2013 9:39 PM

SALT LAKE CITY — Wine spritzers are a favorite at Rovali’s near Salt Lake City. Behind the bar, in full view of patrons, waiters siphon soda and syrup into glasses of ice — then they duck behind a fake olive tree and a barricade to add the chardonnay.

Utah’s famously strict liquor laws forbid the restaurant from pouring alcohol in front of customers. The ban is based on the idea that the state should shield the mixing of cocktails and pouring of drinks from children. “Zion curtains” went up around the state as part of a compromise after lawmakers lifted a mandate in 2010 requiring bars to operate as members-only social clubs.

But this year, the curtains may be coming down.

Utah lawmakers are considering whether to repeal the requirement, a move that would ease restrictions and encourage new business. Right now, the requirement applies to restaurants that are less than 3 years old.

Doing away with the curtain would mark yet another small step by the state to relax its liquor laws.

Lawmakers have introduced a handful of pending bills this year that would ease Utah liquor regulations, including a measure allowing customers to order a drink before they order food and another to make more liquor licenses available to restaurants.

They are scheduled to discuss whether to do away with the curtains Wednesday; the measure has not yet been voted on by either chamber.

The so-called Zion curtains have a long history in the state. The nickname nods to Utah’s legacy as home to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The barriers first went up decades ago in the social clubs that existed before bars were legalized in 2009, unmistakable glass walls separating customers from bartenders.

Those who oppose today’s Zion curtains say the law forces restaurant owners to waste money and space on configurations to keep bartenders out of sight of patrons using barriers or strategically positioned service bars. Curtain opponents also say the law hinders tourism by annoying outsiders and reinforcing their perception of Utah as staunchly sober.

Rovali’s, an Italian restaurant in Ogden, opened in 2010. When waiters there explain the state’s befuddling liquor laws to out-of-towners, Montanez said, “You see the eye roll.”

“That kind of stifles guests,” he said. “They’re a little rankled by these weird laws.”

Some lawmakers warn that removing the mandate could encourage underage drinking and influence customers to drink too much.

The majority of Utah legislators and residents belong to the Mormon church, which teaches its members to abstain from alcohol.

“Alcohol is a drug,” said Sen. John Valentine, R-Orem, who opposes the law. “It has social costs. We have DUIs. We have underage drinkers. We have problems that are caused by drinking.”

Valentine said he would consider supporting the proposal if the state promised trade-offs such as bulking up police presence around restaurants and nearby roads, or a measure keeping children from entering restaurants serving liquor.

For restaurant owners moving into existing spaces, the law presents a nightmare, said Rep. Ryan Wilcox, R-Ogden. Restaurants sometimes have to cut into floor space, he said, where more tables should be.

“It really just hampers the new guys, the little guys,” Wilcox said. “A lot of these guys, too, they’re not large operators. They’ve got one shop: ‘This is my restaurant. My lifelong dream. I’ve invested everything into this.’”

At Rovali’s, Montanez plays sommelier for guests who order wine service, setting off a presentation that underscores the patchwork nature of current laws. Montanez opens the wine at the table and invites guests to sniff the cork. If they purchase the bottle, he can pour and serve the bottle. If they order by the glass, however, he must slip away to pour the drink behind a partition.

“Everything we do is show,” Montanez said, likening the visible pouring of drinks to a dessert cart.

The display of pastries and sweets bolsters dessert sales at the restaurant by about 15 percent, he said. And Montanez estimates that taking the curtain down would boost wine sales by a similar margin.

“You can’t get creative, that’s for sure,” he said of the partition. “You have to stick with the rules.”

Melva Sine, president of the Utah Restaurant Association, said the curtain mandate confuses diners and raises eyebrows. Utah should impose one set of rules for all restaurants, regardless of their start date, Sine said.

“It lessens consumer confidence: What’s the reason that you’re doing this in the back room?” she said.

Sine rejects the notion that the visible flow of liquor would tempt youngsters to drink.

“We have got to stop feeling like everyone who drinks alcohol is doing something wrong,” she said. “We all want people to go out and enjoy themselves and be responsible.”

———

Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.

Supremes to flush 4th and 5th Amendments for DNA testing???

I think they were right on that, but sadly the courts didn't buy it.

I suspect this forced DNA testing is also unconstitutional, but sadly I suspect the courts will approve it.

If "solving crimes" was the most important function of government, the Founders probably would not have created a "Bill of Rights" to protect us from government abuse.

Source

Supreme Court appears conflicted over DNA sampling

Associated Press Tue Feb 26, 2013 3:04 PM

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday struggled with what one of the justices called its most important criminal procedure case in decades, whether to let police take DNA without a warrant from those arrested in hopes of using it to solve old cases.

Justices seemed conflicted over whether police have a right to take genetic information from people who have only been arrested without getting a judge’s approval first, or if the government’s interest in solving cold cases trumped the immediate privacy rights of those under police suspicion of other crimes. [Notice they didn't say a word about the government claiming to be a "public servant" here. When they say the "government's interest" here, it sounds like they consider the "government's interest" more important then the people the government pretends to serve!!!]

One justice seemed to make clear what he thought. “I think this is perhaps the most important criminal procedure case that this court has heard in decades,” said Justice Samuel Alito, a former prosecutor.

“This is what is at stake: Lots of murders, lots of rapes that can be solved using this new technology that involves a very minimal intrusion on personal privacy,” Alito said later. “Why isn’t this the fingerprinting of the 21st century? What is the difference? If it was permissible, and it’s been assumed to be so for decades, that it is permissible to fingerprint anybody who’s booked, why is it not permissible to take a DNA sample from anybody who is arrested?”

But Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan questioned how far the government can go if they decide that the police have an interest in people’s DNA to help solve cases, with Roberts noting that it wouldn’t take much for police to add DNA swabs to traffic stops. “Police officers who give Breathalyzer tests, they can also take a Q-tip or whatever and get a DNA sample, right?” Roberts said.

“It could be any arrestee, no matter how minor the offense,” Kagan said. “It could be just any old person in the street. Why don’t we do this for everybody who comes in for a driver’s license because it’s very effective?”

Getting DNA swabs from criminals is common. All 50 states and the federal government take cheek swabs from convicted criminals to check against federal and state databanks, with the court’s blessing. But now 28 states and the federal government now also take samples from people who have been arrested for various crimes, long before their guilt or innocence has been proven.

According to court documents, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System or CODIS — a coordinated system of federal, state and local databases of DNA profiles — contains more than 10 million criminal profiles and 1.1 million profiles of those arrested.

In the case before the court, a 53-year-old woman was raped and robbed but no one was arrested. Almost six years later, Alonzo King was arrested and charged with felony second-degree assault. Taking advantage of a Maryland law that allowed warrantless DNA tests following some felony arrests, police took a cheek swab of King’s DNA, which matched a sample from the 2003 Salisbury rape. King was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison.

King eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of misdemeanor assault from his arrest, a crime for which Maryland cannot take warrantless DNA samples. The state courts said it violated King’s rights for the state to take his DNA based on an arrest alone.

The state Court of Appeals said King had “a sufficiently weighty and reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless, suspicionless searches.”

The Supreme Court is reviewing that decision. The justices will make a decision later this year.

King’s lawyer, Kannon K. Shanmugam, told the justices there’s “legitimate expectation of privacy” in the contents of an individual’s DNA. “An individual’s DNA contains far more information and far more personal information than an individual’s fingerprints,” Shanmugam said.

But prosecutors argued that those arrested have less expectations of privacy than people not in police custody. An arrested individual “by virtue of being in that class of individuals whose conduct has led the police to arrest him on, based on probable cause, surrenders a substantial amount of liberty and privacy,” said Maryland Chief Deputy Attorney General Katherine Winfree. [People are routinely arrested without the required "probable cause" or "reasonable suspicion"! Does the prosecutor think the police have some God given right to illegally take a DNA sample from these people after illegally arresting them???]

In addition to solving cold cases, prosecutors argued that DNA testing is needed to help identify the person in custody, just like fingerprinting — when police make ink impressions of suspects’ fingers and compare them quickly to others kept by authorities and found at crime scenes. [If you ask me the Fifth Amendment allows people to refuse to identify themselves to the police. Of course the case Hiibel v Nevada, partially flushed that right down the toilet, when the Supreme Court said that people who are detained by the police with "reasonable suspicion" are required to verbally tell the police their name, if their state has a law requiring it.]

With arrested individuals, the government has a compelling interest in “knowing who that person is, which includes knowing what the person has done. And DNA does that in a far more powerful way than fingerprints have done,” Justice Department lawyer Michael R. Dreeben said.

If that comparison can be made, “I think that you would have a quite good case,” Kagan said.

But Winfree said it currently takes 11-17 days to get results from a DNA swab, making it useless for instant identification. Winfree argued that technology will soon go into use give the police the ability to get results back from DNA swabs within minutes, instead of the days it takes now. But “can I base a decision today on what you say is going to happen in two years?” Roberts said.

“You can’t demonstrate that the purpose is immediate identification of the people coming into custody. You just can’t demonstrate that now,” Justice Antonin Scalia said to Winfree. “Maybe you can in two years. The purpose now is the purpose you began your presentation with, to catch the bad guys, which is a good thing. But you know, the Fourth Amendment sometimes stands in the way.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, usually a swing vote on the court, compared the DNA swab to police patting a person down after an arrest, something they don’t need a warrant to do. “Does the justice system have an interest in knowing whether the person committed other crimes?” he asked Shanmugam several times. [I suspect they are referring to "Terry v Ohio" which allows the cops to search a person for weapons by patting them down. I think "Terry v Ohio" also flushed part of the 4th Amendment down the toilet!!!]

“They have that interest, but if they want to investigate other crimes, they have to do what they would have to do as to an ordinary citizen. They have to have a warrant or some level of individualized suspicion,” Shanmugam said.

Here is a comment from a list server on this article

Also, for all their reliance on fingerprint evidence, they've know almost from it's introduction that it is extremely easy to fake. R. Austin Freeman's book "The Red Thumb Mark" gave a detailed description on how to do it in 1907. How long before someone figures out how to fake DNA evidence?

The fact that Un-Constitutionally obtained evidence is allowed should be of grave concern to us all. It has been sold to the courts, and the public as being highly reliable, and effective, neither of which is true.

Mike B.

Beer drinkers accuse Anheuser-Busch of watering down brews

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Beer drinkers accuse Anheuser-Busch of watering down brews

By Stuart Pfeifer Los Angeles Times

6:20 a.m. CST, February 27, 2013

Beer drinkers in three U.S. states filed lawsuits accusing brewing giant Anheuser-Busch of watering down and mislabeling Budweiser, Michelob and other brands to cut costs.

The lawsuits, filed in the last week in California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, said the brewing giant cheated consumers by listing a higher alcohol content than the beers actually contained.

Ten Anheuser-Busch products were named in the lawsuits: Budweiser, Michelob, Michelob Ultra, Bud Ice, Bud Light Platinum, Hurricane High Gravity Lager, King Cobra, Busch Ice, Natural Ice and Bud Light Lime.

Former employees at the company’s 13 breweries -- including some in high-level positions -- are cooperating with the plaintiffs, said San Rafael, Calif., lawyer Josh Boxer, the lead attorney in the case.

“Our information comes from former employees at Anheuser-Busch, who have informed us that as a matter of corporate practice, all of their products [mentioned in the lawsuit] are watered down,” Boxer said, according to the Associated Press. “It's a simple cost-saving measure, and it's very significant.”

The excess water is added just before bottling and cuts the stated alcohol content by 3% to 8%, he said.

Anheuser-Busch InBev called the claims “groundless” and said its beers fully comply with labeling laws.

“Our beers are in full compliance with all alcohol labeling laws. We proudly adhere to the highest standards in brewing our beers, which have made them the best-selling in the U.S. and the world,” Peter Kraemer, vice president of brewing and supply, said in a statement.

Anheuser-Busch, based in St. Louis, Mo., merged with InBev in 2008 to form the world's largest alcohol producer, headquartered in Belgium. In 2011, the company produced 22 billion gallons of alcoholic beverages, 3 billion of them in the U.S., and reported $22 billion in profits, the lawsuit said.

According to the lawsuit, the company has sophisticated equipment that measures the alcohol content throughout the brewing process and is accurate to within one-hundredth of a percent. But after the merger, the company increasingly chose to dilute its popular brands of beer, the lawsuit alleged.

“Following the merger, AB vigorously accelerated the deceptive practices ... sacrificing the quality products once produced by Anheuser-Busch in order to reduce costs,” said the lead lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court in San Francisco.

Boxer told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the plaintiffs did not independently test the alcohol content in the beers. That was a significant omission, said Eric Shepard, executive editor of Beer Marketer's Insights.

"Right now, I'm skeptical," Shepard told the Post-Dispatch. "Brewers and other large companies are often the targets of class-action lawsuits, and A-B wouldn't have had its vice president of brewing Peter Kraemer come out with their statement if they weren't confident in their standing."

Californians' support for legalizing pot at record level

Marijuana poll: Californians' support for legalizing pot at record level

By Steven Harmon

Bay Area News Group

Posted: 02/27/2013 06:00:00 AM PST

SACRAMENTO -- Californians support legalizing pot in greater numbers than ever -- and they want the federal government to cool it with the crackdowns on medical marijuana dispensaries.

In a Field Poll released Wednesday, California voters, by a margin of 54 percent to 43 percent, supported allowing legal sales of marijuana, as long as restrictions are in place on age, driving under the influence of the drug and licensing those who sell it. That represents the highest level of support since the Field Poll began asking the question 44 years ago, when most California believed pot was the gateway drug to more hurtful substances.

Only 13 percent of California adults supported legalizing marijuana in 1969.

"Now, we're getting to the point where baby boomers have lived with this stuff for most of their lives," said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll.

Two-thirds of 834 registered voters said they opposed the Obama administration's raids on medical marijuana outlets, in which nearly 200 dispensaries -- most in California -- were targeted in President Barack Obama's first term. Local governments have taken cues from the administration: Two hundred cities and counties have banned medical marijuana dispensaries.

The state Supreme Court is poised to issue a ruling on whether local governments can shut down dispensaries.

Nearly three-fourths -- 72 percent -- of Californians back the state's existing medical marijuana law, approved by voters in 1996. And a strong majority -- 58 percent -- would support allowing medical marijuana dispensaries in their own community.

"Certainly, it's a rebuke of the Obama administration's tactics," said Kris Hermes, a spokesman for Oakland-based Americans for Safe Access, a medical marijuana advocacy group. "It should indicate that the Justice Department's tactics are unacceptable and should be reconsidered."

Obama once criticized President George W. Bush for his aggressive approach to shutting down medical marijuana dispensaries. But Obama is on pace to exceed Bush's record of medical marijuana busts.

Though voters support medical marijuana, just over two years ago they rejected a ballot measure to legalize pot, Proposition 19, by a 53 to 47 percent margin. Legalization had only narrow support -- 50 to 46 percent -- in a Field Poll four months before that election, and the measure's chances for success were derailed by what political analysts called a lackluster campaign and a vague regulatory plan.

Well-run campaigns and more detailed regulatory plans led to pot legalization last November in Colorado and Washington state.

A coalition of Proposition 19 supporters met in December to discuss potential future California ballot measures. They've said that they're targeting the 2016 presidential election ballot, though they haven't ruled out putting it on the ballot in 2014.

A younger and more tolerant electorate is changing the political landscape. Among voters between the ages of 18 and 29, legalization has a 58-39 edge; among 30- to 39-year-olds, it has a 61-38 percent advantage. Voters 65 or older are the least likely to support legalization, with only 43 percent in favor and 52 percent against.

Independent voters most strongly support legalization, at 59 percent, closely followed by Democrats, at 58 percent.

Only 42 percent of Republicans favor legalization. And Latinos are just as against it, with only 41 percent in favor. But Latinos between the ages of 18 and 39 support it, 53 to 47 percent. Only 30 percent of Latinos 40 and older support legalization.

Voters living in the Bay Area are most likely to support legalizing pot, with 66 percent in favor. Voters along the coast south of Los Angeles County are the least likely, at 47 percent.

The poll, taken Feb. 5 to 17, has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Contact Steven Harmon at 916-441-2101. Follow him at Twitter.com/ssharmon. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.

Cop accused of padding DUI busts to obtain federal grant pleads not guilty

Veit’s false reports meant the Des Plaines police department “fraudulently obtained” $132,893 in federal grants

Source

Cop accused of padding DUI arrests pleads not guilty

By Jonathan Bullington Tribune reporter

3:01 p.m. CST, February 27, 2013

The former Des Plaines police commander accused of padding DUI arrest records to obtain federal grant money pleaded not guilty in federal court today, authorities said.

Timothy Veit, 55, of Mount Prospect, appeared before Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan for an arraignment hearing, and was released on his own recognizance, said U.S. Attorney spokesman Randall Samborn.

Veit is expected to appear in court again on June 4 for a status hearing, Samborn said. Neither Veit nor his attorney were immediately available for comment.

Last week, federal authorities accused Veit of “knowingly and intentionally” inflating the number of DUI arrests made under a federally funded grant designed to curb drunk driving and seat belt violations.

Prosecutors said the grant required submitting the number of DUI arrests made and the blood-alcohol content of the person arrested. Authorities said the department was then reimbursed for officer overtime pay, mileage and equipment.

From 2009 to 2012, Veit allegedly falsely inflated DUI arrest numbers by 122, and provided fake blood-alcohol content levels for those “fictitious” arrests, authorities said.

Authorities claim that Veit’s false reports meant the department “fraudulently obtained” $132,893 in federal grant money from Sustained Traffic Enforcement Program grants funded by the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Veit served as the department’s project director for the STEP program, authorities said, and his duties included certifying that the department complied with a grant requirement showing that an average of one DUI arrest is made for every 10 hours of overtime officers worked in STEP enforcement campaigns.

He retired last year after 31 years with Des Plaines police, according to authorities.

Documents previously released to the Tribune show that Veit was paid $25,603 in overtime in 2011, $11,530 in 2010 and $3,042 in 2009. It is not clear how much, if any, of that overtime pay came from STEP grant money. Samborn would not comment on whether more Des Plaines police officers could face charges stemming from the investigation.

Authorities charged Veit with one felony count of making false statements, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Earlier this month, Des Plaines police Chief William Kushner confirmed that 13 police officers face possible suspensions stemming from the city’s internal investigation into mismanagement of the grant program.

jbullington@tribune.com

Do Fingerprints Lie?

Annals of Crime

Do Fingerprints Lie?

The gold standard of forensic evidence is now being challenged.

by Michael Specter May 27, 2002

Late one afternoon in the spring of 1998, a police detective named Shirley McKie stood by the sea on the southern coast of Scotland and thought about ending her life. A promising young officer, the thirty-five-year-old McKie had become an outcast among her colleagues in the tiny hamlet of Strathclyde. A year earlier, she had been assigned to a murder case in which an old woman was stabbed through the right eye with a pair of sewing scissors. Within hours of the killing, a team of forensic specialists had begun working their way through the victim’s house. Along with blood, hair, and fibres, the detectives found some unexpected evidence: one of the prints lifted from the room where the murder took place apparently matched the left thumb of Detective McKie.

Crime scenes are often contaminated by fingerprints belonging to police officers, and investigators quickly learn to eliminate them from the pool of suspects. But McKie said that she had never entered the house. Four experts from the Scottish Criminal Record Office—the agency that stores and identifies fingerprints for Scotland’s police—insisted, however, that the print was hers. Though McKie held to her story, even her father doubted her. “I love my daughter very much,’’ Iain McKie, who served as a police officer in Scotland for more than thirty years, told me earlier this year. “But when they said the print was Shirley’s I have to admit I assumed the worst. My entire career I had heard that fingerprints never lie.”

Nobody actually suspected McKie of murder, and in fact the victim’s handyman, David Asbury, was charged with the crime. The sole physical evidence against him consisted of two fingerprints—one of his, lifted from an unopened Christmas gift inside the house, and one of the victim’s, found on a biscuit tin in Asbury’s home. The last thing prosecutors needed was for their own witness to raise questions in court about the quality of the evidence. Yet McKie did just that—repeating under oath that she had never entered the house. Asbury was convicted anyway, but Scottish prosecutors were enraged by McKie’s testimony. As far as they were concerned, McKie had not only lied; she had challenged one of the evidentiary pillars of the entire legal system. Despite their victory in the murder trial, they charged McKie with perjury.

Desperate, she went to the public library and searched the Internet for somebody who might help her. Among the names she came upon was that of Allan Bayle, a senior forensic official at New Scotland Yard and perhaps the United Kingdom’s foremost fingerprint expert. (It was Bayle’s expertise and supporting evidence that helped convict one of the principal Libyan suspects in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland.) He agreed to review the prints, and what he saw astonished him. “It was obvious the fingerprint was not Shirley’s,’’ Bayle told me recently. “It wasn’t even a close call. She was identified on the left thumb, but that’s not the hand the print was from. It’s the right forefinger. But how can you admit you are wrong about Shirley’s print without opening yourself to doubt about the murder suspect, too?” Bayle posted a comment on Onin.com, a Web site trafficked regularly by the world’s fingerprint community. “I have looked at the McKie case,’’ he wrote. “The mark is not identical. I have shown this mark to many experts in the UK and they have come to the same conclusions.”

Bayle’s assertion caused a furor. He was threatened with disciplinary action, shunned by his colleagues, and, after a quarter century with the Metropolitan Police, driven from his job. But in the end McKie was acquitted, and Bayle’s statement helped challenge a system that had, until then, simply been taken for granted. For more than a century, the fingerprint has been regarded as an unassailable symbol of truth, particularly in the courtroom. When a trained expert tells a judge and jury that prints found at a crime scene match those of the accused, his testimony often decides the case. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s basic text on the subject is entitled “The Science of Fingerprints,’’ and a science is what F.B.I. officials believe fingerprinting to be; their Web site states that “fingerprints offer an infallible means of personal identification.’’ The Bureau maintains a database that includes the fingerprints of more than forty-three million Americans; it can be searched from precinct houses and properly equipped police cruisers across the country. Fingerprints are regularly used to resolve disputes, prevent forgery, and certify the remains of the dead; they have helped send countless people to prison. Until this year, fingerprint evidence had never successfully been challenged in any American courtroom.

Then, on January 7th, U.S. District Court Judge Louis H. Pollak—a former dean of the law schools at Yale and at the University of Pennsylvania—issued a ruling that limited the use of fingerprint evidence in a drug-related murder case now under way in Philadelphia. He decided that there were not enough data showing that methods used by fingerprint analysts would pass the tests of scientific rigor required by the Supreme Court, and noted the “alarmingly high” error rates on periodic proficiency exams. Although Judge Pollak later decided to permit F.B.I. fingerprint experts to testify in this particular case, students of forensic science felt his skepticism was justified. “We have seen forensic disciplines which focus on bite marks, hair analysis, and handwriting increasingly questioned in the courts,” Robert Epstein, who had argued for the exclusion of fingerprint testimony in the case, told me. “But we have accepted fingerprinting uncritically for a hundred years.’’

Epstein, an assistant federal public defender in Philadelphia, was responsible for the first major court challenge to the discipline, in 1999, in U.S. v. Byron Mitchell. In that case, Epstein showed that standards for examiners vary widely, and that errors on proficiency tests—which are given irregularly and in a variety of forms—are far from rare. The critical evidence consisted of two fingerprint marks lifted from a car used in a robbery. To prepare for the trial, F.B.I. officials had sent the prints to agencies in all fifty states; roughly twenty per cent failed to identify them correctly. “After all this time, we still have no idea how well fingerprinting really works,’’ Epstein said. “The F.B.I. calls it a science. By what definition is it a science? Where are the data? Where are the studies? We know that fingerprint examiners are not always right. But are they usually right or are they sometimes right? That, I am afraid, we don’t know. Are there a few people in prison who shouldn’t be? Are there many? Nobody has ever bothered to try and find out. Look closely at the great discipline of fingerprinting. It’s not only not a science—it should not even be admitted as evidence in an American court of law.”

Fingerprints have been a source of fascination for thousands of years. They were used as seals on legal contracts in ancient Babylonia, and have been found embossed on six-thousand-year-old Chinese earthenware and pressed onto walls in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Hundreds of years ago, the outline of a hand with etchings representing the ridge patterns on fingertips was scratched into slate rock beside Kejimkujik Lake, in Nova Scotia.

For most of human history, using fingerprints to establish a person’s identity was unnecessary. Until the nineteenth century, people rarely left the villages in which they were born, and it was possible to live for years without setting eyes on a stranger. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, cities throughout Europe and America filled with migrants whose names and backgrounds could not be easily verified by employers or landlords. As the sociologist Simon Cole made clear in “Suspect Identities,” a recent history of fingerprinting, felons quickly learned to lie about their names, and the soaring rate of urban crime forced police to search for a more exacting way to determine and keep track of identities. The first such system was devised in 1883 by a Parisian police clerk named Alphonse Bertillon. His method, called anthropometry, relied on an elaborate set of anatomical measurements—such as head size, length of the left middle finger, face height—and features like scars and hair and eye color to distinguish one person from another. Anthropometry proved useful, but fingerprinting, which was then coming into use in Britain, held more promise. By the eighteen-sixties, Sir William J. Herschel, a British civil servant in India, had begun to keep records of fingerprints and use them to resolve common contract disputes and petty frauds.

Fingerprinting did not become indispensable, however, until 1869, when Britain stopped exiling criminals to Australia, and Parliament passed the Habitual Criminals Act. This law required judges to take past offenses into account when determining the severity of a sentence. But in order to include prior offenses in an evaluation one would need to know whether the convict had a previous record, and many criminals simply used a different alias each time they were arrested. The discovery that no two people had exactly the same pattern of ridge characteristics on their fingertips seemed to offer a solution. In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds published the first comments, in the scientific journal Nature, on the use of fingerprints to solve crimes. Soon afterward, Charles Darwin’s misanthropic cousin, Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist and the founder of eugenics, designed a system of numbering the ridges on the tips of fingers—now known as Galton points—which is still in use throughout the world. (Ultimately, though, he saw fingerprints as a way to classify people by race.)

Nobody is sure exactly how Mark Twain learned about fingerprints, but his novel “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” published in 1894, planted them in the American imagination. The main character in the book, a lawyer, earned the nickname Pudd’nhead in part because he spent so much time collecting “finger-marks”—which was regarded as proof of his foolishness until he astounded his fellow-citizens by using the marks to solve a murder. If you were to walk into a courtroom today and listen to the testimony of a typical forensic expert, you might hear a recitation much like Pudd’nhead Wilson’s: Every human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain physical marks which do not change their character, and by which he can always be identified—and that without shade of doubt or question. These marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak, and this autograph cannot be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and the mutations of time. . . . This signature is each man’s very own. There is no duplicate of it among the swarming populations of the globe!

Some things have changed since Pudd’nhead Wilson, of course. A few weeks ago, I visited the headquarters of the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems, the F.B.I.’s billion-dollar data center, just outside Clarksburg, West Virginia—a citadel of the American forensic community. After driving past a series of shacks and double-wides and Bob Evans restaurants, you come upon a forest with a vast, futuristic complex looming above the trees. (I.A.F.I.S. moved from more crowded quarters in the Hoover Building in 1995, thanks to the influence of the state’s senior senator, Robert C. Byrd.)

Clarksburg is home to the world’s largest collection of fingerprints; on an average day, forty thousand are fed into the system. The I.A.F.I.S. computers, which can process three thousand searches a second, sort through the database in a variety of ways. For example, they compare complete sets of fingerprints in the files with new arrivals—as when a suspect is held in custody and the police send his “ten-prints” to I.A.F.I.S. The computer hunts for shared characteristics, and then attempts to match the prints to a record on file. “We identify about eight thousand fugitives per month here,’’ Billy P. Martin, the acting chief of the Identification and Investigative Services Section, told me. Martin said that eleven per cent of job applicants whose fingerprints are entered into the system—they could be day-care workers, casino staff, federal employees—turn out to have criminal records; as many as sixty per cent of the matches are repeat offenders.

The center looks like a NASA control room, with dozens of people monitoring the encrypted network of fingerprint machines sending in data from police stations throughout the country. The main computer floor is the size of two football fields and contains sixty-two purple-and-gray “jukeboxes,” each filled with two hundred compact disks containing fingerprints. (There are three thousand sets on each CD.) When someone is arrested, his prints are initially searched against a state’s computer files. If the search finds nothing, the information is forwarded to the federal database in Clarksburg. To make a match, the I.A.F.I.S. computer analyzes the many points on the ridges of every fingerprint it receives, starting with the thumb and working toward the pinkie; only when the data produce prints that match (or several prints that seem similar) is the original print forwarded to an analyst for comparison.

”We used to go to a file cabinet, pull out paper cards. If it was all loops—which is the most common type of print—you could spend an hour,’’ Martin said. “Now a computer algorithm does it in seconds. The system searches the electronic image against the database and pulls up the image onto the screen. The accuracy rate on first run is 99.97 per cent.’’ Still, this would mean that the I.A.F.I.S. computers make three hundred mistakes in every million searches. That is where trained examiners come in. The patterns on fingertips are more like topographical maps or handwriting than, say, bar codes. They can be so similar that even the most sophisticated computer program can’t tell them apart; it takes a trained human eye to detect the subtle differences.

I sat with one of the examiners in a dim, nearly silent room lined with what seemed like an endless series of cubicles. At each station, someone was staring at a monitor with two huge fingerprints on it. No two people—not even identical twins—have ever been shown to share fingerprints. The friction ridges that cover the skin on your hands and feet are formed by the seventeenth week in the womb; at birth they have become so deep that nothing can alter them, not even surgery. Look at your fingertips: the patterns resemble finely detailed maps of the bypasses and exit ramps on modern roads. Experts use the nomenclature of the highway to describe them: there are spurs, bifurcations, and crossovers. Some people have fingertips that are dominated by “loops,” others by “tented arches” or small circles that examiners call “lakes,” or smaller ones still, called “dots.” Collectively, these details are referred to as minutiae—an average human fingerprint may contain as many as a hundred and fifty minutia points. To identify fingerprints, an expert must compare these points individually, until enough of them correspond that he or she feels confident of a match.

When fingerprints are properly recorded (inked, then rolled, finger by finger, onto a flat surface, or scanned into a machine that captures and stores each finger as a digital image), identification works almost flawlessly. The trouble is that investigators in the field rarely see the pristine prints that can be quickly analyzed by a computer; most of the prints introduced at criminal trials are fragments known as “latent prints.” Crime scenes are messy, and the average fingerprint taken from them represents only a fraction of a full fingertip—about twenty per cent. They are frequently distorted and hard to read, having been lifted from a grainy table or a bloodstained floor. “It is one thing to say that fingerprints are unique and quite another to suggest that a partial latent print, often covered in blood or taken from an obscure surface, is unique, identical, or easy to identify,’’ Barry Scheck told me. In the past decade, Scheck, who directs the Innocence Project, has used DNA evidence to exonerate more than a hundred prisoners, some of them on death row. “We have always been told that fingerprint evidence is the gold standard of forensic science. If you have a print, you have your man. But it is not an objective decision. It is inexact, partial, and open to all sorts of critics.’’

Police use several methods to discover latent fingerprints. First, they shine a flashlight or a laser along the clean, solid surfaces on which a print may have been left by the perspiration and oil on a fingertip. When a print is discovered, detectives use a brush and powder to mark it, much as they did in the nineteenth century; the powder clings to the perspiration. (The method works best on smooth surfaces, like glass.) The print is then photographed and lifted with tape.

The technology for retrieving partial and obscure fingerprints keeps improving. On a recent episode of the television program “C.S.I.,” you might have seen detectives using a technique called superglue fuming to reveal the outline of a face on a plastic bag—an unconventional use of a common practice. In order to find difficult prints on an irregular surface, such as the human body, crime-scene investigators blow fumes of superglue over it. As the fumes adhere to the surface, the ridges of any fingerprint left there turn white and come clearly into view. Another common method involves ninhydrin, which works like invisible ink: when you douse paper with it, the chemical brings out any sweat that may have been left by fingertips. Ninhydrin is particularly useful with old prints or those covered in blood.

F.B.I. fingerprint examiners have a variety of computer tools—a sort of specialized version of Photoshop—to help them compare rolled prints with those in their system. In front of me, an I.A.F.I.S. examiner stared at his computer screen as a training instructor, Charles W. Jones, Jr., explained the process. “He is looking for ridges that form dots,’’ Jones said. “Bifurcations. Usually they look for six or seven of those.’’ The examiners work around the clock, in three shifts, and are required to evaluate at least thirty prints an hour. They know nothing about the people attached to the fingers on their screens; the prints could be those of a rapist, a serial killer, Osama bin Laden, a woman applying for a job in the Secret Service, or a bus driver from Queens. (“Yesterday I did fifty-one for a couple hours in a row,’’ an examiner told me proudly.)

At the bottom of the screen there are three buttons—”Ident,” “Unable,” and “Non-Ident”—and the examiner must click on one of them. If he identifies a finger, the print goes to a second analyst. If the two examiners independently reach the same conclusion, the fingerprint is considered to have been identified. If not, it gets forwarded to an analyst with more experience. “We have a pretty good fail-safe system,’’ Jones said. “Computers help immensely. But in the end they can’t pull the trigger. That’s our job.’’

Only a human being can make critical decisions about identity, and yet the talent, training, and experience of examiners vary widely. “The current identification system . . . is only as genuine as the knowledge, experience, and ability of the specialist carrying out the comparison,’’ David R. Ashbaugh, a staff sergeant with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, writes, in “Quantitative-Qualitative Friction Ridge Analysis,” which is considered the Bible of the field. And although fingerprint analysis has been in use for decades, there has never been any consensus about professional standards. How many distinct characteristics are necessary to prove that a latent fingerprint comes from a specific person? The answer is different in New York, California, and London. In certain states, and in many countries, fingerprint examiners must show that prints share a set number of Galton points before they can say they have made an identification. Australia and France require at least twelve matching Galton points; in Italy, the number is sixteen. In America, standards vary, even within a state. The F.B.I. doesn’t require a minimum number of points; all such regulations were dropped fifty years ago, because, according to Stephen B. Meagher, the chief of the Bureau’s latent-print unit, the F.B.I. believes that making an identification using Galton points alone can cause errors.

Meagher says that fingerprint analysis is an objective science; Robert Epstein, the Philadelphia attorney who has led the fight against presenting fingerprint evidence in court, says it is not a science at all. Neither is exactly right. Examining the many contours of a human finger is not as objective as measuring someone’s temperature or weight, or developing a new vaccine. But it’s not guesswork, either. It involves, inevitably, human judgment, and most people agree that when it is done well it is highly accurate. The difficulty is in determining whether it has been done well. Scientific methodology is based on generating hypotheses and testing them to see if they make sense; in laboratories throughout the world, researchers spend at least as much time trying to disprove a theory as they do trying to prove it. Eventually, those ideas that don’t prove false are accepted. But fingerprinting was developed by the police, not by scientists, and it has never been subjected to rigorous analysis—you cannot go to Harvard, Berkeley, or Oxford and talk to the scholar working on fingerprint research. Yet by the early twentieth century fingerprinting had become so widely accepted in American courts that further research no longer seemed necessary, and none of any significance has been completed.

David L. Faigman, who teaches at the Hastings College of the Law and is an editor of the annually revised forensic text “Modern Scientific Evidence,’’ has spent most of his career campaigning to increase the scientific literacy of judges and juries. Faigman likens the acceptance of fingerprint evidence to the way leeches were once assumed to be of great medical value. “Leeches were used for centuries,’’ he told me. “It was especially common for the treatment of pneumonia and it was considered an effective therapy. It wasn’t till late in the nineteenth century that they did the clinical tests to show that leeches did not help for pneumonia, and they may have actually hurt. Fingerprinting is like that in at least one crucial way: it is something we assume works but something we have never properly tested. Until we test our beliefs, we can’t say for sure if we have leeches or we have aspirin”—an effective remedy that was used before it was understood. “One of the things that science teaches us is that you can’t know the answers until you ask the questions.’’

The discussion of fingerprinting is only the most visible element in a much larger debate about how forensic science fits into the legal system. For years, any sophisticated attorney was certain to call upon expert witnesses—doctors, psychiatrists, Bruno Magli shoe salesmen—to assert whatever might help his case. And studies have shown that juries are in fact susceptible to the influence of such experts. Until recently, though, there were no guidelines for qualification; nearly anybody could be called an expert, which meant that, unlike other witnesses, the expert could present his “opinion” almost as if it were fact. Experts have been asked to testify about the rate at which a tire would skid, and the distance blood would splatter when a certain calibre bullet smashed into a skull. They have lectured scores of juries on the likelihood that a medicine could cause a particular side effect; they have interpreted polygraphs and handwriting, and have pronounced on whether a bite mark was made by one set of teeth to the exclusion of all others.

Although forensic evidence has proved particularly powerful with juries, it is particularly weak as a science. By the nineteen-eighties, the kind of evidence that was routinely admitted into court without any statistical grounding or rationale had earned a name: “junk science.” And junk science had become ubiquitous. With the problem growing out of control, in 1993 the Supreme Court took up a lawsuit called Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. The case involved a child who suffered from serious birth defects. His lawyers claimed that the defects were caused by Bendectin, a drug that was for many years routinely prescribed for morning sickness, which his mother took while she was pregnant. The company argued that no valid evidence existed to support the claim. The Court’s decision set a new standard for scientific evidence in America: for the first time, it held that it was not permissible for expert witnesses to testify to what was “generally accepted” to be true in their field. Judges had to act as “gatekeepers,” the Court said; if an expert lacked reliability he was no longer allowed in the courtroom. The ruling, and others that expanded upon it, laid down clear guidelines for the federal bench, requiring judges to consider a series of questions: Could a technique be tested or proved false? Was there a known or potential error rate? (DNA identification has provided the model, because experts have gathered enough statistical evidence to estimate the odds—which are astronomical—that one person’s DNA could be traced to another.) The Court also instructed judges to consider whether a particular theory had ever been subjected to the academic rigor of peer review or publication.

The Daubert ruling forced federal judges to become more sophisticated about science, which has not been easy for them. “Daubert changed everything,” Michael J. Saks, a law professor at Arizona State University, who has written widely on the subject, told me. “And it is pretty clear when you look at those criteria that fingerprinting simply doesn’t satisfy any of them.’’ Since the Daubert ruling, federal courts have judged handwriting evidence and hair identification to be unscientific. The use of polygraph data has also been curtailed. Questions have been raised about ballistics—say, whether a bullet can be traced back to a particular gun. Somehow, though, until Judge Pollak came along, challenges to fingerprinting continued to be regarded as heresy.

Relying largely on testimony presented by Robert Epstein in U.S. v. Byron Mitchell, the first post-Daubert case involving fingerprint testimony, Judge Pollak ruled in January that an expert could say whether he thought fingerprints belonged to the people accused of the crime, but he could not say that the fingerprints he had examined were, beyond doubt, those of the defendant.

Pollak is one of the federal judiciary’s most respected judges. Federal prosecutors were so concerned that any ruling he issued would carry a significance even greater than its legal weight that they asked the Judge to reconsider his precedent-shattering decision. Pollak agreed.

Late in February, Pollak held a hearing on the reliability of fingerprint evidence. For three days, several of the world’s most prominent experts discussed their field in his courtroom. The F.B.I.’s Stephen B. Meagher testified that no Bureau analyst had ever misidentified a person in court, and that the Bureau’s annual proficiency test was among the reasons that the Judge should be confident about admitting expert testimony. Allan Bayle, the British forensic specialist, flew in from London at the request of the defense. He had a different view. He told Pollak that the F.B.I.’s proficiency test was so easy it could be passed with no more than six weeks of training. “If I gave my experts [at Scotland Yard] these tests, they would fall about laughing,” he told Pollak in court. Later, in conversation with me, he expanded on those comments. “The F.B.I. are conning themselves and they are conning everybody else,’’ he said. “They don’t even use real scene-of-crime marks for the fingerprint tests.” He pointed out that the fingerprints used in the exams were so different from each other that almost anybody could tell them apart. “Let’s say I asked you to look at a zebra, a giraffe, an elephant, and a lion. Then I asked you to find the zebra. How hard would that be? What the Bureau should be doing is comparing five zebras and selecting among them.” Bayle and other critics stopped short of calling fingerprint evidence junk science, but they noted that there are few data showing how often latent prints are properly identified.

By February 27th, the final day of the hearing, the fissures in an old and accepted discipline had become visible, and Judge Pollak promised to issue a final ruling within a couple of weeks. A few days after Pollak’s hearing ended, I flew to Cardiff to attend the annual meeting of the Fingerprint Society. It was raining in Wales, and the members of the society were deeply unsettled because their profession was under assault. Each year, the society gathers for a few days to listen to lectures and to talk about developments in the field. The society has always been a club—the type where you might expect to stumble upon Sherlock Holmes or G. K. Chesterton. The bar at the Thistle Hotel, where the conference was held, was filled with police officers from Sussex, Aberdeen, and most places in between. The conference was well attended by representatives of the United States Secret Service and the F.B.I. There were also a few stray academics interested in the latest obscure technology, such as magnetic nanoflake powders, which are able to capture fingerprints without disturbing whatever traces of DNA may be present. (With conventional methods, an investigator has to choose: either swab a mark to harvest the DNA or lift it to find the print.)

By the time I arrived, the society was preoccupied by two issues: the Pollak hearings and the lingering ill will from the McKie case, in Scotland. One of those in attendance was Meagher, the lead F.B.I. witness in Judge Pollak’s courtroom. I introduced myself, and told him that I understood he couldn’t discuss the Philadelphia case while it was under review, but asked if we could talk about the field in general. “No,’’ he said, without a moment’s hesitation.Iain McKie had also come to Cardiff that weekend, as had Allan Bayle. McKie, a tall, reedy man with a great nimbus of curly white hair, presented a lecture on the ethics of fingerprinting. He remained livid about the fact that a fingerprint had destroyed his daughter’s career; although she had been acquitted of perjury, she felt unwelcome on the police force after having been strip-searched and jailed by her colleagues, and had resigned soon after her trial. She never returned to work. Today, she spends much of her time trying to force Scottish authorities to admit that what they did to her was wrong. “I believe a person made a mistake, and instead of admitting it they were prepared to send me to jail,’’ Shirley McKie said after she was acquitted of perjury. “It ruined my life, and now I am trying to pick up the pieces.”

The Scottish Criminal Record Office has never acknowledged the error, nor has the Fingerprint Society issued any statement about the incident. (David Asbury, the man convicted of the murder, was released in August of 2000, pending an appeal. As expected, the judge in the case questioned the validity of the fingerprint evidence that had led to his conviction.) In Cardiff, McKie told the Fingerprint Society that the system they represented was “incestuous, secretive, and arrogant. It has been opened to unprecedented analysis and it’s sadly lacking. It pains me to say that, because I was a police officer for thirty years. You are indicted on the basis of a fingerprint. You are not innocent till proven guilty; if the police have a print, you are assumed to be guilty. We need to start a new culture. The view that the police and fingerprint evidence are always right, the rest of the world be damned, has to end.’’

Afterward, the corridors and conference rooms were buzzing; it was as if somebody had challenged the fundamentals of grammar at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. But McKie was far from the only speaker at the conference to raise questions about the field. Christophe Champod, who works for a British organization called the Forensic Science Service, has long attempted to apply rigorous statistical methods to fingerprinting. Champod spoke in an understated and academic manner, but what he had to say was even more forceful than McKie’s presentation. He told the audience that they had only themselves to blame for the state of the field, that for years they had resisted any attempts to carry out large trials, which would then permit examiners to provide some guidance to juries about the value of their analysis, as is the case with DNA. “What we are trying to do in this field is reduce, reduce, reduce the population so that there is only a single individual that can possess a set of fingerprints. . . . But we can never examine the fingerprints of the entire universe. So, based on your experience, you make an inference: the probability that there is another person in the universe that could have a good match for the mark is very small. In the end, it’s like a leap of faith. It’s a very small leap, but it is a leap nonetheless.”

Half an hour had been allotted for questions, but there was only silence. Afterward, one of the organizers explained it to me: “He was using the terms of religion to describe our science. That’s just not fair.” Allan Bayle invited me to visit him in London after the meeting. Bayle is six feet five with sandy hair and flecks of gray in his blue eyes. He had recently married and he lives with his wife, child, and mother-in-law just steps from the M1 motorway entrance in Hendon, on the northern edge of the city. We sat in his conservatory on a cloudy day while his five-month-old boy slept in a stroller beside us.

Bayle was frustrated. For the past five years, he had worked mostly as a lecturer on fingerprints for the Metropolitan Police. “I taught advanced forensic scene examination, and I loved it. Once I said I would give evidence in the McKie case, though, I was no longer allowed to go to meetings. But that is not why I left. They did nothing about this mistake in identity. When you know something is wrong, how can you stay silent?” He told me he was particularly upset that Shirley McKie’s career as a police officer had ended for no reason. Bayle’s life, too, has changed. He now works as an independent consultant. Although he has been portrayed as a critic of fingerprint analysis, he is critical only of the notion that it should never be questioned. “It’s a valuable craft,” he said. “But is it a science like physics or biology? Well, of course not. All I have been saying is, let’s admit we make errors and do what we can to limit them. It is such a subjective job. The F.B.I. want to say they are not subjective. Well, look at what David Ashbaugh—certainly among the most noted of all fingerprint analysts—said when he testified in the Mitchell case.” Ashbaugh had clearly stated that fingerprint identification was “subjective,” adding that the examiner’s talents are his “personal knowledge, ability, and experience.”

Bayle took out a large portfolio containing dozens of fingerprints, as well as gruesome pictures of crime scenes. “Look at the mess,’’ he said. He showed me a series of photographs: jagged fingerprints—black smudges, really—recovered from the scenes of several murders he had investigated. “With all that information, you then come to your conclusions. You have to somehow match that to this clean image’’—he handed me a picture of a perfect print, taken at a police booking—”and say, finally, it’s one man’s print. You have got to look at everything, not just points. The Bureau has not had a missed ident in all their years of working, and I applaud that. But they are not testing their experts’ ability. And that is dangerous.’’

The following week, Stephen Meagher agreed to speak with me at the F.B.I. headquarters, on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Meagher is perhaps the best known and most forceful advocate for the view that fingerprint evidence is scientifically valid and that it ought to be welcome in courts.

”But is it really a science?” I asked as soon as we settled down to talk in his office. Meagher said that he didn’t think of science as a term that could be easily defined or tailored to fit all disciplines in the same way. “There is academic science, legal science, and forensic science,’’ he told me. “They are different. You can be an expert in the field and give testimony without having an academic level of scientific knowledge. . . . It is not achievable to take pure science and move it into a legal arena.’’ This seemed surprising, since Meagher had often argued that, when performed correctly, fingerprint analysis is an “objective’’ science. In 1999, when he was asked in court whether, based on the unique properties of fingerprints, he had an opinion of the error rate associated with his work, he said, “As applied to the scientific methodology, it’s zero.” (Scientists don’t talk this way; it is an axiom among biomedical researchers that nothing in biology is true a hundred per cent of the time.)

Later, when I asked David Faigman, the Hastings law professor, whether it made sense to divide science into legal, academic, and forensic subgroups, he laughed.

”Of course it makes no sense,’’ he said. “Mr. Meagher operates on a sixteenth-century notion—a Francis Bacon idea—of what science is all about. To me, the analogue for law is meteorology. It deals with physics and chemistry—the most basic sciences. Yet it has to make predictions and empirical statements regarding complex reality. That is because so many factors determine the weather that it’s really a probabilistic science. And I think fingerprinting is the same.”

”Most fields of normal science could pull from the shelf dozens or hundreds, if not thousands, of studies testing their various hypotheses and contentions, which had been conducted over the past decades or century, and hand them to the court,’’ Michael Saks wrote in “Modern Scientific Evidence.” For fingerprinting there was nothing. In 1999, the F.B.I. conducted its study in preparation for the Byron Mitchell trial. The study asked examiners to match the two actual latent prints taken from the car in the Mitchell case with the known set of fingerprints of the man on trial. Both sets of prints were sent to the crime laboratories of fifty-three law-enforcement agencies. Of the thirty-five agencies that examined them and responded, most concluded that the latent prints matched the known prints of the accused; eight said that no match could be made for one of the latent prints, and six said that no match could be made for the other print. The F.B.I., realizing it had a problem, sent annotated enlargements of all the prints to those examiners who had said the fingerprints couldn’t be matched. In these photographs, the points of similarity on the fingertips were clearly marked. This time, every lab adopted the F.B.I.’s conclusions.

When I asked Meagher about the study, he told me that the test was supposed to demonstrate the uniqueness of the prints; it was not meant to be a test of competency. He claimed opponents have used the data unfairly. At the same time, he conceded that it would not matter how clean a fingerprint was if the person examining it hadn’t been trained properly. “Our system is a huge statistical-probability model, but it doesn’t make identifications, because it doesn’t have all the information that is needed,” he said. “It’s a job for human beings.” On March 13th, Judge Pollak vacated his earlier order. He issued a new opinion, in which he stated that the defense had succeeded in raising “real questions about the adequacy of the proficiency tests taken annually by certified F.B.I. fingerprint examiners.” Yet he was persuaded by the F.B.I.’s record of accuracy, and wrote that “whatever may be the case for other law-enforcement agencies” the Bureau’s standards seemed good enough to permit F.B.I. experts to testify in his courtroom. “In short,’’ he concluded, “I have changed my mind.’’ It was, naturally, a blow to the opposition—though Pollak was careful to rule only on the case before him and only with regard to the F.B.I.

I met with the Judge shortly after he issued his decision. Having arrived early for our meeting, I watched as he led the jury-selection process in the case in which Meagher will now be permitted to testify. Like most courtrooms, it was decorated with an American flag, but it was filled with art as well: prints by Matisse, Cézanne, and Eakins and drawings by Victor Hugo lined the walls.

During the lunch break, we sat in his ramshackle office. The stuffing was falling out of both of our chairs. Pollak, a lively man in his late seventies, declined to talk specifically about the case, but was happy to consider the broader issues it raised. “The most important question here, of course, is, Am I the right person to be a gatekeeper?’’ he said. “I, who know little of science. . . . As society comes to rely more fully on technology, the question will become acute.’’ Pollak said that he found it worrisome that the Supreme Court ruling in the Daubert case meant that he could rule one way on an issue like fingerprints and another federal judge in a different jurisdiction could do the opposite, and neither ruling would be reversed (the Court will hear appeals only on procedure, not on the law). He was frank about how poorly prepared most judges are for making decisions based on scientific issues.

”I want to tell you that shortly after I got into this line of work there was no more unqualified district judge”—for making such decisions—”in the United States,’’ Judge Pollak said of himself. He told me that in the early nineteen-eighties he had met a former chief executive of DuPont at a reception. “He asked me how it can be that people like me are entrusted to make such major scientific decisions. He wasn’t questioning my good faith. But by virtue of my job I have been asked to make decisions that are out of the range of any competence that I have.” Pollak conceded that the DuPont chairman had a point. I asked if he felt scientifically competent to rule on the current case in Philadelphia. He laughed but didn’t answer. “I knew when I decided the thing there was going to be some surprise,’’ he said, referring to his initial opinion. “Honestly, I don’t think I had anticipated the degree to which people would be startled. . . . Other lawyers in fingerprint situations are now almost duty bound to raise these questions and challenges again. How could they in good faith act in any other way? This decision is certainly not the end. I think we can be certain of that.’’

Drugs are dangerous and will kill you???

No, the laws against drugs are dangerous and will kill you!!!!

No, the laws against drugs are dangerous and will kill you!!!!

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China airs drug traffickers' moments before execution

By Barbara Demick

March 1, 2013, 3:09 a.m.

BEIJING -- It was reality television in the extreme.

Chinese state television Friday broadcast nearly one hour of live images of the last moments of four foreign drug traffickers about to be executed for the 2011 killing of 13 Chinese fishermen on the Mekong River. Although the cameras pulled away before the final lethal injection, the unprecedented pre-execution coverage unleashed a storm of criticism and debate about the death penalty.

Psychologists decried the live coverage as distressing to children, while lawyers complained that it violated a clause in the criminal code against parading the condemned before execution.

"This carnival on CCTV was a violation not only of ethics, but of the criminal code regulations that the death penalty not be carried out in public," wrote human rights lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan on a microblog. Many on the microblogs, however, applauded the execution of the four drug traffickers.

China executes about 4,000 people each year, more than all other countries in the world combined, although the numbers and the crimes carrying the death penalty are gradually being reduced.

"I don’t know of any other country, not Iran, Afghanistan or North Korea, that has nationally broadcast in this way the last moments of an executed prisoner," said Nicholas Bequelin, Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch. "It is a step backward at a time we thought China was making progress with the death penalty."

In the past, public executions were common in China, but nowadays, there is usually no more than a brief news report and video of the condemned before an execution.

Although many Chinese were shocked by the live coverage, they applauded the death sentences as just retribution for a particularly violent crime. The 13 Chinese fishermen were ambushed, then shot to death while tied up with rope, their bodies dumped in the river.

The outraged Chinese government considered a drone attack to kill the drug traffickers, but in the end launched an international manhunt that resulted in their capture and extradition from Laos.

The kingpin executed was Naw Kham, 44, a Burmese national who allegedly commanded a militia of 100 men in the Gold Triangle region. Two others executed Friday were from Laos and one was Thai.

The live coverage showed the men being taken from their prison cells in southwestern Yunnan Province with their hands trussed behind their backs with ropes. A doctor in a white coat prepared the lethal injections.

The television commentator went on at some length about how well the men had been treated in prison.

"From the appearance of these criminals, you can clearly tell our prison has carried out humanitarian spirit, these criminals clearly look healthier, whiter, with better skin complexion than when they were arrested," the commentator said.

At one point, the television broadcast cut away to show a gala-style award ceremony complete with patriotic music and small children carrying bouquets for the investigators who had worked on capturing the drug traffickers.

Chinese television also broadcast a chilling interview with Naw Kham taped earlier this week in which he said, "I am afraid of death. I want to live. I don't want to die. I have children. I am afraid."

The Yunnan Province Public Security Bureau sent out a message at 2:55 p.m. Friday that Naw Kham and his accomplices were dead.

Pocket dialing calls police to Oregon drug deal

For that matter if you are ever involved in any victimless crimes, never, never program your phone to dial 911.

Hell, I don't use illegal drugs, non am I involved in any other victimless crimes, but I would never, never call 911 for any reason.

I have not desire to be jerked around by *sshole cops who would love to illegally search me and illegally question me in an attempt to prove I did something wrong.

And of course the fact that recently the 300th person has been released from death row because DNA tests proved the police framed him for murder means the police routinely make mistakes and frame innocent people for crimes they didn't commit.

You don't want to be a victim of these corrupt cops who will commit a crime to send an innocent person to prison in order to improve their arrest record and get a raise!!!!

Remember the police are almost never your friend, and the police are almost always your enemy!!!

Source

Pocket dialing calls police to Oregon drug deal

Associated Press Fri Mar 1, 2013 8:25 AM

MOLALLA, Ore. — Police in the Oregon town of Molalla say a dispatcher received a cellphone call and overheard a drug deal taking place.

A phone in the woman’s pocket inadvertently dialed 911 early Tuesday and dispatchers heard a conversation with a man about drugs.

KGW reports (http://bit.ly/13tEKpX) police tracked the GPS signal to a car in an alley about a block away. An officer who arrived at the scene could be heard over the phone by dispatchers.

The officer found methamphetamine and arrested a 25-year-old man on multiple drug charges. The 25-year-old woman was cited for possessing marijuana — and hung up her phone.

———

Information from: KGW-TV, http://www.kgw.com

Source

Suspect ‘butt dials’ 911 during drug deal near police

Posted on February 28, 2013 at 5:30 PM

PORTLAND -- A man was arrested on felony drug charges after inadvertently dialing 911 just before a drug deal Monday, Molalla police said.

An emergency dispatcher got the call just after midnight and heard what she thought was a drug deal, said officer Aaron Christopherson. The dispatcher tracked the phone’s GPS signal and it led officers to an alley about a block away from the police department.

Two people sitting a car nearby denied having a working cell phone, but the officer spoke loudly and the dispatcher confirmed she could hear him.

“This, I will say, is a first, and got a chuckle around the department,” Christopherson said. “They don't make it that easy for us, usually.”

The officer found the cell phone and some methamphetamine, Christopherson said. The suspect, 25-year old Raleigh Reynolds, was jailed on multiple drug charges. The woman in the car with him was cited.

_____

KGW Reporter Kyle Iboshi contributed to this report.

Marijuana-friendly Colorado debates blood-level limits.

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Too high to drive? Marijuana-friendly Colorado debates blood-level limits.

By Brady Dennis and T.W. Farnam, Published: March 1

DENVER — When is someone too stoned to drive?

The answer, it turns out, has been anything but simple in Colorado, which last fall became one of the first states in the country to legalize marijuana.

Prosecutors and some lawmakers have long pushed for laws that would set a strict blood-level limit for THC, the key ingredient in cannabis. A driver over the limit would be deemed guilty of driving under the influence, just as with alcohol.

Such legislation has failed several times in recent years in the face of fierce opposition from marijuana advocates and defense lawyers, who claim a one-size-fits-all standard doesn’t work for marijuana because it affects the body differently than alcohol. [And of course many experts on alcohol abuse will also tell you that the current .08 legal limit for liquor isn't a one-size solution that works for everybody. And freedom fighter will tell you the .08 legal limit is more about raising DUI revenue then protecting public safety!!]

On both sides, passions run high.

“I haven’t had a car accident since I was 18, and I’ve had marijuana in my system for most of that time,” said Paul Saurini, 39, one of numerous weed activists, or “wactivists,” who spoke out against setting a firm blood-level limit during a public hearing in the state capital this week.

“We have to create some standards to protect public safety. Not doing so, in my opinion, is reckless public policy,” said John Jackson, the police chief in nearby Greenwood Village. “Any time you legalize things like this, you’ll have more of it on the roadway. If we had vending machines with Oxycontin, there’d be more people on Oxycontin driving on the roadways. And that’s not safe.” [That's BS. In Japan they have vending machine all over the county where you can shove in 100 yen and get a beer, or shove in a couple hundred yen in and get a bottle of saki or whiskey. And despite there being a legal age of something like 20 to drink the machines are not abused by children or adults]

Since the passage of Amendment 64 in November, Colorado has been wrestling with the many questions of how to regulate the new marijuana reality, from how to tax it and monitor its growth to where people can buy it, sell it, smoke it and advertise it.

But drugged driving looms as one of the most critical and controversial issues. The outcome of Colorado’s struggle to shape marijuana-related DUI laws could have far-reaching implications, as a growing number of states approve marijuana for medical use and others consider legalizing the drug altogether.

State Sen. Steve King, a Republican who supports a THC limit, insists that driving high is no different than driving drunk. “You’re a threat and a hazard,” he said. “The consensus should be to err on the side of safety for the traveling public.” [Well if that is true maybe we should make cars illegal. After all straight people in cars cause thousands of deaths every year when they get into accidents.]

Michael Elliott and other marijuana advocates argue that marijuana affects different people differently, and that setting a THC limit would free prosecutors from having to prove their cases and could lead to wrongful DUI convictions.

“When it comes to criminal law, we err on the side of protecting the freedom of our citizens and holding the criminal justice system to the highest standards of proof,” said Elliott, a lawyer and executive director of the Colorado-based Medical Marijuana Industry Group.

Though research and opinions vary widely, studies have shown that smoking marijuana tends to affect spatial perceptions. Drivers might swerve or follow other cars too closely, as well as lose their concentration and suffer from slowed reaction times. Such findings have led some researchers to conclude that driving high doubles the chances for an accident, and that smoking pot and drinking before driving is a particularly dangerous mix.

Every state bars driving under the influence. But convictions in drugged-driving cases generally rely on police officers’ observations rather than blood tests. The White House in a drug policy paper last year called on states to adopt blood-limit laws in an effort to reduce drugged-driving incidents by 10 percent by 2015. [That is unlikely in Arizona because it conflicts with Prop 203, and the legislator would have to override Prop 203 with a two thirds or three fourths majority vote.]

But different states have taken different approaches.

In Ohio and Nevada, where medical marijuana is legal, the limit for driving is two nanograms per milliliter of blood. In Washington state, that limit is five nanograms. A dozen other states, including Illinois, Iowa and Arizona, have zero-tolerance policies for driving under the influence of marijuana and various controlled substances. [In Arizona if you don't have a medical marijuana prescription that is true. But in Arizona if you have a medical marijuana prescription there is NO legal limit to the amount of THC in your body, so for the cops to arrested a person for driving stoned they have to prove it with something other then a drug test]

In Colorado, both sides agree that people shouldn’t drive impaired; the fight is over what should be used as proof of impairment.

Marijuana advocates argue that, unlike with alcohol, traces of the drug remain in the bloodstream long after an individual has smoked pot, and that a THC test can mistakenly suggest a person is high, especially in a regular smoker who has built up tolerance to the drug. But officials who favor a blood-level limit say tests exist that can pinpoint “active” THC in the bloodstream in the hours immediately after marijuana usage. [For a person who has smoked marijuana for several times over several days THC can be detected in for body for around a month or so, despite the fact the person is only stoned for a few hours after smoking the drug]

People on both sides cite the work of Dutch researcher Jan Ramaekers, who found that marijuana users generally are impaired at a level of five nanograms, but that many cannabis users do develop higher tolerances.

Ramaekers, in an interview, said he supports the five-nanogram limit, noting that lawmakers have long set a legal limit for alcohol in the name of public safety, even though people have different tolerances and impairment varies by person. [That is 100 percent BS. When DUI or DWI was invented the level was .15 at which most people are very drunk. However over the years the Feds have bribed the state governments with money to reduce the legal limit to .08 which many people will say is not drunk. For a petite woman who weighs 100 pounds, they will blow .08 after having 1 beer. The bottom line is that NOW, the DUI laws are more about raising revenue then protecting public safety!]

“Who should the law serve: the individual or the population?” he asked.

Still, some in Colorado are concerned about drawing a bright line between impaired and unimpaired when it comes to marijuana. The state Senate’s majority leader, Democrat Morgan Carroll, said research suggests that impairment can occur with anywhere from two to 20 nanograms per milliliter of blood. “My number one problem is that you could convict someone at five nanograms who wasn’t actually impaired,” she said.

Lawmakers are working on a compromise to break the long-standing impasse. A bill backed by King and other legislators would set five nanograms as the legal limit, but a test indicating that level would not automatically result in a DUI conviction. Instead, people accused of driving under the influence would be able to argue in court that they weren’t impaired. [So you are assumed to be guilty and have to prove your innocence!!! Welcome to the American police state!!!] The measure is working its way through the statehouse and appears likely to pass.

Carroll is still not fond of the five-nanogram limit but says she and others might be swayed by the provision that would allow defendants to make their case in court. “It gives the accused the opportunity to come in and offer proof,” she said.

At Tuesday’s hearing, a string of law enforcement officials and a state toxicologist testified in favor of the legislation. Ed Wood, whose son was killed in a car accident caused by a drugged driver, said he supported the bill but wants an even tougher standard. “We believe Colorado deserves better,” he said.

But Saurini and other wactivists voiced their opposition, with some arguing that marijuana often induces paranoia and causes people to drive abnormally slowly, as opposed to alcohol, which can provide the “liquid courage” to drive irresponsibly.

King, the lawmaker who has long pushed for a legal limit, grows agitated at the suggestion by some marijuana advocates that they drive as well or even better high. It’s a reason, he said, to put a limit in place as soon as possible.

“I heard that [argument] 25 years ago with alcohol,” he said. “If you want to smoke marijuana, smoke marijuana. But smoke and walk, smoke and get a ride, smoke and take a cab. Don’t smoke and drive — that’s the point we’re trying to make.”

Dennis reported from Washington.

Kyrsten Sinema campaigns for more military spending???

Kyrsten Sinema campaigns for more government pork and higher taxes???

Sinema used her five minutes to criticize the massive budget cuts as bad for Arizona.

Oddly Kyrsten Sinema whom I know from the anti-war movement and whom I suspect pretends to be an anti-war person sided with her pretend enemy John McCain and seems to support more military pork!!

“I stand with the dean of our state’s delegation, Sen. John McCain, when I say this sequester will be devastating, let’s roll up our sleeves together and get the job done.”

Arizona's Congress members return after budget cuts hit

By Rebekah L. Sanders The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Mar 2, 2013 1:16 AM

WASHINGTON - Arizona’s Congress members were packing their bags and boarding planes out of the capital this week as the deadline to avoid across-the-board federal budget cuts neared with no resolution in sight.

As negotiations continued between President Barack Obama and leaders of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, the state’s nine House members were headed home, unlikely to be needed for a vote anytime soon.

Republican Rep. David Schweikert, of Fountain Hills, who supported the sequestration cuts as a way to balance the nation’s budget, was going from one cliff to another. Schweikert planned to spend the weekend with his wife and staffers hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Others lamented the House’s recess.

“I love to go home, but I’d much rather be here working on this problem with Congress members on both sides of the aisle,” Rep. Ron Barber, a Democrat, said hours before flying to Tucson. “I voted against all those adjournments because we should be here dealing with this issue.”

The Arizona Republic spent the week in Washington with members of the state’s delegation. The Arizonans were busy meeting with constituents, speaking on the House floor and voting on a controversial bill to extend funding for programs to address domestic violence.

Northern Arizona’s Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick was sitting down with members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe and Navajo Nation to talk about education funding, as well as members of the Grand Canyon National Park Foundation, who updated her on efforts to preserve the Arizona treasure.

Barber spent time with an award-winning Girl Scout who started an anti-bullying campaign, while Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican based in Prescott, was meeting with military veterans.

Arizona’s one freshman representative, Kyrsten Sinema, delivered her first floor speech. Though she performed the symbolically powerful act before a nearly empty chamber, her words would be broadcast on C-SPAN and shared with constituents. Sinema used her five minutes to criticize the massive budget cuts as bad for Arizona.

“I stand with the dean of our state’s delegation, Sen. John McCain, when I say this sequester will be devastating,” she said. “Let’s roll up our sleeves together and get the job done.”

Political polar opposites, Rep. Trent Franks and Rep. Raul Grijalva, found themselves on differing sides of the debate, as usual.

Grijalva, a Democrat and co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, was championing an alternative budget-cutting plan that, among other things, would shutter the costly F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program in favor of building F-18s.

Franks, a Republican whose district includes Luke Air Force Base, whose survival depends on the F-35, called the proposal a threat to national security. He said it showed a lack of understanding of the military’s technological needs.

Mesa Republican Rep. Matt Salmon, meanwhile, was calling for entitlement reform and chairing his first Western Hemisphere subcommittee hearing, a position he hopes to turn into generating greater trade between the U.S. and Latin America.

The state’s longest-serving member, Rep. Ed Pastor, was asked to think about his legacy, as he appears to be under consideration to join the Obama administration.

The Phoenix Democrat said he was torn over the possibility of becoming Transportation secretary, a job which he acknowledges the White House is vetting plenty of candidates for.

“Do I really want to leave? It’s one of those things you think about. I’m not unhappy with the job. I’m still enjoying representing Arizona,” Pastor said. “Just to be considered is good.”

He said the prospect of securing federal funding to extend the Valley’s light rail for now is stalled due to the ongoing budget problems.

“We’re dealing with a crisis every 30 days,” Pastor said.

As if on cue, the first effects of the budget cuts were felt even before sequestration hit Friday at midnight.

The Republic’s flight was delayed, though the weather was fine, the United Airways pilot said.

In Arizona you can get busted for DUI when you are sober!!!!

Maricopa County Attorney Attorney Bill Montgomery prosecutes sober people for DUI??

In this article Maricopa County Attorney Attorney Bill Montgomery seems to think it is OK to prosecute and jail stone cold sober people for the crime of DUI or DWI.

Source

Not high but still DUI

What if you could get a DUI in Arizona for having had a few drinks two weeks ago?

Crazy, right?

Except it’s happening. Not with alcohol, but with marijuana.

Arizona drivers are going to jail, paying big fines and losing their licenses after having gotten DUI citations when blood tests prove they were not high.

“It makes no sense,” said attorney Michael Alarid III, who is representing a man charged under current law. “But this is how prosecutors and the courts are interpreting the law. And the legislature doesn’t appear to want to change it. So we’re hoping we can get the issue before the state Supreme Court.”

How could a person who is not high get busted for DUI?

It happens when science meets politics.

Blood tests now can detect two important chemical compounds in marijuana. One of them makes a person high and lasts for hours. The other is inactive but can linger in a person’s system for up to a month.

In Arizona, state law says if you have either of these compounds in your blood you are guilty of a DUI. [i.e. any detectable amount makes you legally guilty of DUI, (except for medical marijuana patients, because Prop 203 excludes them)]

“As things stand a person from Arizona could go on a snowboarding trip to Colorado or Washington State, where marijuana is legal for recreational use,” Alarid said. “And then a month later he could be driving in Arizona, get stopped and be convicted of DUI.”

Not long ago, the state Court of Appeals upheld Arizona’s law, which says if any “metabolite” of a drug like marijuana is found in a person’s blood he is guilty of DUI. There are about a dozen states with the same standard.

Alarid got a lower court to dismiss the original charges against his client after it was shown that the marijuana chemicals found in his client’s blood were inactive. The appeals court overturned it.

In it’s ruling on the case (Arizona v. Shilgevorkyan) the Appeals Court said, “We determined that the legislative ban extends to all substances, whether capable of causing impairment or not.”

Apparently, there is no statute in Arizona outlawing impaired logic.

(And yes, I’m aware that my continued employment proves it.)

The case is being prosecuted by the Maricopa County Attorney’s office. I asked County Attorney Bill Montgomery if he believed it was appropriate to convict people for DUI when the only marijuana metabolite in their blood did not cause impairment.

He responded, “The Court of Appeals decision is unremarkable in light of consistent case law on the issue of proscribing driving with a prohibited drug or its metabolite in a driver’s system.”

Since that didn’t answer my question I tried again, asking if Montgomery would favor amending state law to differentiate between metabolites that cause impairment and those that do not.

He responded, “No. We do not want to create an incentive to ‘game’ how long it takes for any given metabolite to leave a driver’s system. Nice try, Ed.”

It isn’t a game. It’s chemistry.

Some states at least try to acknowledge the science. In Washington, for example, a person is considered impaired if a blood test shows 5.0 nanograms of marijuana’s active ingredient. That level has been compared to a .08 limit for alcohol.

“An alcohol DUI in Arizona gets your license suspended for 90 days,” Alarid said. “After 30 days you can drive to work and school. On the other hand, a drug-related DUI, like marijuana, gets you the same fines and jail time but revokes your license for a year. That means a person who wasn’t impaired could be punished more harshly than someone who was.”

Alarid is hoping the Arizona Supreme Court will take his case.

“In addition to the fairness issue, this doesn’t seem right in a state where citizens passed a medical marijuana law,” Alarid said. “It really puts an unfair burden on those patients.”

The risk of getting busted for a DUI charge when they are not impaired might cause some medical marijuana patients not to use the drug, no matter how much it helps them.

Or course, it’s probably just a coincidence that the politicians who could revise the DUI statute hate the medical marijuana law. As does the county attorney.

Coincidence. Yeah, that must be it.

More police tracking license plates

1984 is here!!! It just took a few extra years to get here.

For those of you who were born after 1984, or who don't know about the book 1984, it is a fictional story about how the world turned into a police state in the year 1984 and the government spied on everybody 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Source

More police tracking license plates

Associated Press Sun Mar 3, 2013 1:07 AM

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Little Rock may not be a likely terrorism target or a gang crime hotspot, but the Arkansas capital has decided to follow the example of high-security cities by expanding electronic surveillance of its streets.

A police car with a device that photographs license plates moves through the city and scans the traffic on the streets, relaying the data it collects to a computer for sifting. Police say the surveillance helps identify stolen cars and drivers with outstanding arrest warrants.

It also allows authorities to monitor where average citizens might be at any particular time. That bothers some residents, as well as groups that oppose public intrusions into individual privacy. The groups are becoming more alarmed about license plate tracking as a growing number of police departments acquire the technology.

Though authorities in Washington, D.C., London and Chicago conduct extensive electronic surveillance of public areas to detect security threats or deter gang crime, “Today, increasingly, even towns without stoplights have license plate readers,” said Catherine Crump, a New York-based staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. Collecting data

In Little Rock, even some city officials wonder about keeping data on drivers’ movements.

“It bothered me particularly if someone wasn’t guilty of a crime or didn’t have any active warrants or hadn’t committed a crime,” city director Ken Richardson said.

However, Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas said the law enforcement benefits outweigh any concerns about possible abuse of the information, which, as a public record, is legally available for anyone to see. He said the department may get more of the devices.

“Should that potential of misuse therefore eliminate the capacity of law enforcement to collect data which has a legitimate purpose for the safety of our officers or the appropriateness of enforcement actions? I don’t think so,” he said.

Privacy issues?

Many Little Rock residents still haven’t heard about the surveillance. Angel Weston, 45, said she’s glad to hear that police are looking for stolen cars and people with warrants but wondered about keeping logs of citizens’ movements.

“I don’t feel like they should keep the data for six or 12 months,” Weston said.

Lawmakers in several states, including Minnesota and Utah, have suggested setting a time limit for their departments, but Little Rock has no policy yet. The department now has a growing archive of license plate photos, along with time stamps and the locations, showing where motorists were at certain times.

Privacy advocates worry about the potential uses for such outside law enforcement, from snooping by stalkers and private investigators to businesses that sell personal data. How it works

Little Rock’s license plate reader is mounted in Officer Grant Humphries’ patrol car. He said it’s led to dozens of arrests and the recovery of a number of stolen vehicles and vehicles and license plates, although the exact number isn’t known.

As Humphries drives around town, a laptop processes the license plate numbers being photographed and emits a sound and flashes red when it finds a match.

Congress - It's secret, you can't sue us!!!!

Congress uses secrecy to flush the Constitution down the toilet???

First the government used the "Interstate Commerce" clause of the Constitution to justify them doing anything under the sun.

Now the government is using the "it's secret" card to claim citizens can't sue the government for unconstitutional acts.

Sadly the Supreme Court is buying that line of BS, just like the Supreme Court bought the BS line of using the "Interstate Commerce" clause to justify the government doing anything under the sun.

Source

Supreme Court rules out secret surveillance lawsuits

By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau

February 26, 2013, 6:50 p.m.

WASHINGTON — No one can sue the government over secret surveillance because, since it's secret, no one can prove his or her calls were intercepted, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, throwing out a constitutional challenge to the government's monitoring of international calls and emails.

The 5-4 decision is the latest of many that have shielded the government's anti-terrorism programs from court challenge, and a striking example of what civil libertarians call the Catch-22 rule that blocks challengers from collecting the evidence they need to proceed.

Over the last decade, the justices or lower court judges have repeatedly killed or quietly ended lawsuits that sought to expose or contest anti-terrorism programs, including secret wiretapping, roundups or arrests of immigrants from the Mideast and drone strikes that kill American citizens abroad.

The court's conservative majority believes that matters of national security and the fight against terrorism are properly decided by the president and Congress, not through lawsuits. They have erected procedural barriers to block such suits. The only exception has been lawsuits brought on behalf of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, which have won new appeal rights for inmates.

The intense wiretapping of international electronic traffic began shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. President George W. Bush was determined to detect secret terrorist plots, if possible, and ordered the National Security Agency to intercept calls and messages coming into and out of the country. Bush chose to bypass a special court created to oversee "foreign intelligence surveillance."

When Bush's order was revealed, civil libertarians called the mass surveillance unconstitutional. But Congress, with the support of Democrats and Republicans, approved even broader electronic surveillance in 2008. By law, the targets of that surveillance must be outside the United States, but lawmakers acknowledged that calls and messages of some Americans would be inadvertently intercepted.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other groups began a new challenge, suing on behalf of lawyers, journalists and human rights advocates. They argued the expanded surveillance was unconstitutional because it would chill free speech and permit illegal searches of "purely domestic communications."

They won a preliminary victory when the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said they had standing to sue. Because the plaintiffs had clients and contacts abroad, they had a "reasonable fear" their calls would be intercepted, the appeals court said.

The Obama administration appealed last year, and the Supreme Court tossed out the suit Tuesday in the case of Clapper vs. Amnesty International.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the lawsuit was based on speculation, not evidence of how the program worked. The plaintiffs "have no actual knowledge of the government's targeted practices. Instead, [they] merely speculate and make assumptions," he said. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas joined his opinion.

Alito cited the Supreme Court's strict rules on standing, which hold that a case cannot go forward unless a complaining party can show he or she has suffered an "actual or imminent" injury. Alito said that this approach prevented judges from "usurping the powers of the political branches" of government.

In dissent, the court's four liberal justices said the lawsuit should have gone forward because the plaintiffs had to alter their work practices to avoid having their confidential calls overheard. "In my view, this harm is not 'speculative,'" Justice Stephen G. Breyer said.

The PEN American Center, which represents writers, called it a "Kafkaesque holding.... The U.S. government is running a secret program that monitors people. In order to challenge the legality of the program, the court's majority says you have to show that you're being monitored. You can't show this, of course, because the program is secret," said Peter Godwin, the group's president.

Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the decision disturbing. It "insulates the statute from meaningful judicial review and leaves Americans' privacy rights to the mercy of the political branches."

But a lawyer for six former U.S. attorneys general applauded the decision. It "sends a clear message that politically motivated litigation over national security is untenable," said Megan L. Brown, a Washington attorney who represented them. The courts should not "second-guess" the president and Congress on "sensitive national issues," she said.

david.savage@latimes.com

Legislative critters tell you how to label medical marijuana

Source

Arizona law would squeeze regulations on food, drinks with medical marijuana

Posted: Sunday, March 3, 2013 2:44 pm

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

State lawmakers voted Thursday to put new limits on the packaging of food and drinks containing medical marijuana.

SB 1440 would make it illegal to sell or advertise products that are packaged in any way that suggests that it is anything other than for medicinal use.

Rep. Kimberly Yee, R-Phoenix, said she saw evidence that sodas with medical marijuana were being put into bottles that looked suspiciously like other over-the-counter brands. And she said some items were being sold that looked a lot like brand-name chocolate bars.

The legislation, given preliminary Senate approval on a voice vote, spells out that any labeling can be only black text on a white background.

Thursday's action came over the objections of the Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Attorney Anjali Abraham said her organization has no problem with strict labeling requirements. But she said the language making it illegal to "state, suggest or imply'' that the product is for anything other than medical use is too vague, leaving dispensary owners unclear of what will cause them to lose their licenses.

A final vote will send the measure to the House.

Santa Muerte patron saint of dope dealers???

I am surprised that they didn't mention Jesus Malverde or San Jesus Malverde in this article. He is the patron saint of dope dealers and drug runners in Mexico.

Of course I am an atheist and to me this is nothing but superstitious rubbish.

Source

Underworld saint becoming more popular in U.S.

Associated Press Mon Mar 4, 2013 2:51 PM

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A follower in New Orleans built a public shrine in her honor. An actor in Albuquerque credits her with helping him land a role on the TV show “Breaking Bad.” She turns up routinely along the U.S.-Mexico border at safe houses, and is sighted on dashboards of cars used to smuggle methamphetamine through the southwest desert.

Popular in Mexico, and sometimes linked to the illicit drug trade, the skeleton saint known as La Santa Muerte in recent years has found a robust and diverse following north of the border: immigrant small business owners, artists, gay activists and the poor, among others — many of them non-Latinos and not all involved with organized religion.

Clad in a black nun’s robe and holding a scythe in one hand, Santa Muerte appeals to people seeking all manner of otherworldly help: from fending off wrongdoing and carrying out vengeance to stopping lovers from cheating and landing better jobs. And others seek her protection for their drug shipments and to ward off law enforcement.

“Her growth in the United States has been extraordinary,” said Andrew Chesnut, author of “Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint” and the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Because you can ask her for anything, she has mass appeal and is now gaining a diverse group of followers throughout the country. She’s the ultimate multi-tasker.”

Exact numbers of her followers are impossible to determine, but they are clearly growing, Chesnut said.

The saint is especially popular among Mexican-American Catholics, rivaling that of St. Jude and La Virgen de Guadalupe as a favorite for miracle requests, even as the Catholic Church in Mexico denounces Santa Muerte as satanic, experts say.

Her image has been used on prayers cards citing vengeance and protection, which are sometimes found at scenes of massacred bodies and on shipments of drugs.

U.S. Marshal Robert Almonte in West Texas said he has testified about La Santa Muerte in at least five drug trafficking cases where her image aided prosecutors with convictions. Last year, Almonte testified that a Santa Muerte statue prayer card, found with a kilogram of methamphetamine in a couple’s car in New Mexico, were “tools of the trade” for drug traffickers to protect them from law enforcement. The testimony was used to help convict the couple of drug trafficking.

Almonte has visited shrines throughout Mexico, and given workshops to law enforcement agencies on the cult of the saint.

“Criminals pray to La Santa Muerte to protect them from law enforcement,” Almonte said. “But there are good people who pray to her who aren’t involved in any criminal activity so we have to be careful.”

Devotees say La Santa Muerte has helped them find love, find better jobs and launch careers.

Gregory Beasley Jr., 35, believes he landed acting roles on “Breaking Bad” and the 2008 movie “Linewatch” after a traditional Mexican-American healer introduced him to La Santa Muerte.

“All my success … I owe to her,” he said. “She cleansed me and showed me the way.”

Some devotees pray to the saint by building altars and offering votive candles, fruits, tequila, cigarettes — even lines of cocaine in some cases — in exchange for wishes, Chesnut said. A red La Santa Muerte, her best-selling image, helps in matters of love. Gold ones aid with employment and white ones give protection. Meanwhile, a black Santa Muerte can provide vengeance.

“She’s my queen,” said Arely Vazquez Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant and transgender woman who oversees a large altar inside her Queens, New York apartment. Against one wall of her bedroom altar is a tall, sitting Santa Muerte statue in a black dress surrounded by offerings of tequila.

Gonzalez, who sports a tattoo of La Santa Muerte on her back, holds an annual event in August in the saint’s honor, with mariachis and a feast.

“All I have to do I ask for her guidance and she provides me with what I need,” she said.

The origins of La Santa Muerte are unclear. Some followers say she is an incarnation of an Aztec goddess of death who ruled the underworld. Some scholars say she originated in medieval Spain through the image of La Parca, a female Grim Reaper, who was used by friars for the later evangelization of indigenous populations in the Americas.

For decades, though, La Santa Muerte remained an underground figure in isolated regions of Mexico and served largely as an unofficial Catholic saint that women called upon to help with cheating spouses, Chesnut said.

It wasn’t until 2001 when a devotee unveiled a public La Santa Muerte shrine in Mexico City that followers in greater numbers began to display their devotion for helping them with relationships and loved ones in prison. Economic uncertainty and a violent drug war against cartels that has claimed an estimated 40,000 lives also are credited for La Santa Muerte’s growth.

Oscar Hagelsieb, assistant special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations in El Paso, said agents have found that most members of the Gulf and Zeta Cartels mainly pray to Santa Muerte while those from the Sinaloa and Sonora Cartels honor folk saint Jesus Malverde.

“Altars are very intricate. We have found some with food and others with blood from animals,” Hagelsieb said.

The association with cartels and denunciations by some priests has resulted in some non-devotees destroying makeshift roadside altars. Recently, assailants smashed a life-size statue of La Santa Muerte in a South Texas cemetery. Police in Pasadena, California, recently found human bones at a home with a Santa Muerte altar outside. The owners say they bought the bones online.

But the vast majority of devotees aren’t crooks.

Kiko Torres, owner of the Masks y Mas art store in Albuquerque, said sales of La Santa Muerte statues, incense, and oils have skyrocketed in recent months.

“Most people who buy the stuff are regular people who just recently found out about her,” he said. “Some probably have no idea about her connection to that other world.”

One such devotee is Steven Bragg, 36, who said he was introduced to La Santa Muerte in 2009 and began praying to her for a variety of different reasons, including a plea for a life companion. Recently, the New Orleans man built a public chapel to her and holds rosary services that attract around a dozen people.

He also just formed a nonprofit to support the “New Orleans Chapel of the Santisima Muerte,” the official name of his public altar.

“It’s something I decided to do after all that La Santa Muerte has provided,” Bragg said. “She has never failed me.”

Firefighter charged in fatal crash was on prescription medicine

Source

Prosecutors: Firefighter charged in fatal crash was on prescription medicine

By Jason Meisner Tribune reporter

3:29 p.m. CST, March 4, 2013

An Orland Fire Protection District firefighter was speeding and swerving in and out of traffic when he rear-ended a vehicle near southwest suburban Tinley Park Friday, causing a chain-reaction crash that killed a 25-year-old woman, prosecutors said today in court.

Patrick Bruce, 45, who is on leave from his job because of a back injury, told police he had taken prescription medication before the crash, prosecutors said. He was charged with reckless homicide and ticketed with numerous traffic offenses, including failure to reduce speed, improper lane usage and failure to signal a turn.

Bruce, of the 5500 block of Christopher Drive in Oak Forest, appeared in court in a white hospital gown with bruises and scratches visible on his face. Judge Israel Desierto set bond at $250,000.

Prosecutors said Bruce was driving a Lincoln Navigator east on 167th Street on Friday afternoon when he accelerated to 60 mph in a 35-mph zone and began weaving between lanes. As he approached the intersection with Lockwood Avenue, Bruce suddenly swerved to the right and rear-ended a Hummer SUV, then crossed into oncoming traffic and struck another vehicle head-on, prosecutors said.

The driver of that vehicle, Anasis Knox, 25, of Downers Grove, died a short time after the crash. The driver of the Hummer suffered a concussion and fractured vertebrae, while Bruce suffered minor injuries, according to police and prosecutors.

Prosecutors said Bruce admitted to taking prescription pain medication before the crash. The results of alcohol tests were still pending this afternoon.

In a statement Sunday, Orland Fire Protection Chief Ken Brucki said Bruce has been on leave due to an injury for the last eight months and was in his personal vehicle at the time of the crash.

"Our condolences go out to the family of the victim," Brucki said in the statement.

Bruce's attorney, Stephen Eberhardt, said in court that Bruce had suffered a shoulder injury while on duty. He said Bruce has two children, ages 4 and 2, and no criminal background.

jmeisner@tribune.com

U. of C. puts 2 on leave, says cop posed as protester

Currently just about all our emails are read by police spies and these web pages are read by the Homeland Security folks on a daily basis, so I think it is pretty accurate that America has turned into the police state defined in the novel "1984"

Source

U. of C. puts 2 on leave, says cop posed as protester

By Kim Geiger Tribune reporter

6:15 a.m. CST, March 5, 2013

The University of Chicago Police Department said Monday it had placed two employees on administrative leave and launched an investigation after university officials acknowledged that an officer posed as a protester during a demonstration over U. of C. hospital trauma care last month.

The U. of C. officer's undercover activity was reported by the student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, which published photos Friday that appear to show the officer holding a protest sign and sending texts.

In a statement over the weekend, university President Robert Zimmer and Provost Thomas Rosenbaum said the officer's actions were "totally antithetical" to the university's values. In addition to the internal police investigation, Zimmer and Rosenbaum will appoint an "external independent reviewer" to look into the matter.

In recent years, activists have demanded wider access to trauma care on the South Side. The University of Chicago Medical Center is a trauma center for patients up to age 16, and the Feb. 23 protest sought to pressure U. of C. to accept trauma victims up to age 21.

Those who attended the protest, which included a news conference outside the medical center and a march, said the undercover officer looked out of place.

"She kind of looked like a police officer to me," said protester Alex Goldenberg.

An unidentified person gave Maroon reporter Madhu Srikantha photos of the officer participating in the protest and others showing her typing text messages.

"In crowd w(ith) sign," one message said. "All is well."

Srikantha said she showed the woman's photo to campus police officers, and they identified her as a colleague. The reporter said the woman later "admitted to being there and to being working." The Tribune could not reach the officer for comment.

University officials had no knowledge of an undercover operation, said spokesman Jeremy Manier. University police Chief Marlon Lynch said his agency had not approved it.

Olivia Woollam, a protester who was a liaison with police, said she was alarmed by the undercover action. Organizers met with police beforehand and had received approval of the route for their march, Woollam said.

"Especially given the level of communication that was undertaken the day before the protest, it seems extremely peculiar to me and a definite setback," Woollam said.

The groups protesting were Southside Together Organizing for Power, an affiliated youth group Fearless Leading by the Youth and the student group Students for Health Equity.

kgeiger@tribune.com

Twitter @kimgeiger

Researchers report sharp rise in ‘patriot’ groups

And I suspect the cops, like the ones that are paid to read this web page ever day also love it to because after all it gives them a lame excuse to hire more cops to oppress the people with under the guise of protecting us from these "patriot" groups.

As H. L. Mencken said:

"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."

Researchers report sharp rise in ‘patriot’ groups

Associated Press Tue Mar 5, 2013 12:51 PM

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — President Barack Obama’s administration and the gun control debate after the Connecticut school shooting have led to surging numbers of anti-government “patriot” groups, according to a civil rights group that tracks extremist groups.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported the rising numbers on Tuesday in its annual report on extremist groups.

The number of anti-government patriot groups, one category tracked by the center, rose dramatically over the past four years, from 149 groups in 2008 to 1,360 today, researchers reported. That was up about 7 percent from the 1,274 active in 2011.

The election and re-election of the nation’s first black president and the rugged economy have fueled their growth, said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the SPLC.

“The anger, angst, frustration, fear surrounding the economy have very much poured fuel on this fire,” Potok said.

On gun control, the debate following the Newtown, Conn., mass murder of schoolchildren has led to “a kind of white-hot rage unleashed on both the radical right and also within more mainstream political circles,” he said.

In the week following the Dec. 14 school shooting, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it conducted more background checks for firearms sales and permits to carry than it has in any other one-week period since 1998.

In a letter today to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the SPLC warned of the potential for domestic terrorism and urged the creation of a task force to assess whether there are enough federal resources devoted to the threat.

“As in the period before the Oklahoma City bombing, we now are seeing ominous threats from those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns,” wrote SPLC President Richard Cohen, a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group.

The SPLC found there were 1,360 Patriot groups in 2012 - an 813 percent rise since 2008, the year before Obama took office. The groups include 321 militias. These numbers far exceed the movement’s peak in the 1990s, when militias were inflamed by the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 assault rifle ban.

Some critics believe the SPLC is too broad in labeling hate and extremist groups, to the point of including legitimate political organizations that oppose illegal immigration, gun control, gay rights and other issues.

The center’s researchers say they use a variety of methods to track anti-government groups and compile their list from field reports, patriot publications, law enforcement sources and news reports. Potok said only active groups are included.

“We are not just looking at one man and a computer,” he said.

The report states: “Generally, Patriot groups define themselves as opposed to the ‘New World Order,’ engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing, or advocate or adhere to extreme anti-government doctrines.”

The FBI defines military extremists as anti-government groups often organized into paramilitary groups that follow a military-style rank hierarchy and typically engage in wilderness, survival, or other paramilitary training, according to a September 2011 FBI report on domestic terrorism.

Pot dispensary robbed, suspects barricade themselves in SF building

Source

Police: Suspects rob marijuana dispensary then barricade themselves in San Francisco building

Bay City News Service

Posted: 03/06/2013 06:34:03 AM PST

A group of suspects that police said robbed a medical marijuana dispensary have barricaded themselves inside a building in San Francisco's Bayview District early this morning, according to San Francisco police.

Police have two suspects in custody in connection with the robbery. The additional suspects barricaded themselves into a building near Jennings Street and Wallace Avenue at around 3:50 a.m.

The additional suspects were still inside the building at 5 a.m., police said.

White, male police officers discriminated against???

I guess this means that Black, Mexican, Latino and woman who work for the Phoenix PD are no longer being discriminated against???

And of course the Blacks, Mexicans, Latinos and women who work for the Phoenix PD have become so powerful that White, male cops are being discriminated against???

Just joking, but I bet that is how the police union feels.

Of course the real question here isn't why are White, male Phoenix police officers being discriminated against, but why the hell is Phoenix wasting our tax dollars sending Phoenix police officers to Washington D.C. to police the presidential inauguration????

I suspect this is just a 100 percent free paid vacation paid for by the tax payers of Phoenix for all these Phoenix cops that went to Washington D.C. for this pork trip.

Source

Letter of concern placed in 2 police supervisors’ files

By Cecilia Chan The Arizona Republic-12 News

Breaking News Team Wed Mar 6, 2013 9:11 AM

Phoenix administrators have determined that two high-ranking police supervisors discriminated against White officers when they chose women and minorities to work the presidential inauguration.

City leaders placed a “letter of concern” in the supervisors’ personnel files, but the union that represents 2,500 rank-and-file officers say the discipline measure falls short.

Five White officers logged a complaint in October with the city Equal Opportunity Department, saying the selection process using race and gender unfairly excluded them.

The department investigation concluded that Assistant Chief Tracy Montgomery and Cmdr. Geary Brase violated the city’s administrative regulation that prohibits discrimination based on factors including race, color, religion, gender and age.

“Using race, national origin and gender for the selection process was not appropriate,” the investigative report states.

Police spokesman Sgt. Trent Crump said neither Montgomery nor Brase will comment.

EOD director Lionel Lyons and Assistant City Manager Ed Zuercher, point out that because the Police Department re-selected the team based on seniority prior to the inauguration, no harm was done to the White officers.

Four women and five minority men made up the original group from the patrol division's Neighborhood Enforcement Team. Three White men were picked as alternates. The new team included one woman, six White men and a Hispanic man.

Four of the five officers who filed the grievance made the trip to the nation’s capital in January for a four-day security detail, which included traffic control. One officer lacked the seniority to qualify for the assignment.

“I’m very disappointed in the outcome,” Joe Clure, president of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, said of the discipline. “It’s a complete failure, not holding folks accountable to policy.”

Clure had asked the city for an independent investigation, which was not done.

Clure said although four of the complaining officers served on the inaugural detail, it doesn’t excuse the fact that they “were discriminated against and suffered indignation by having to file a grievance.”

Clure said the city also should have investigated Chief Daniel Garcia because he requested the inaugural detail reflect diversity.

In a memo, Lyons said Garcia’s directive was not discriminatory because diversity is one of the city’s core values. He also said Montgomery and Brase could have used “legitimate non-discriminatory methods” to accomplish Garcia’s goal.

Zuercher, who oversees the Police Department, credited Garcia with scrapping “the flawed selection method” and directing staff to re-select the team.

“As a result, the selection was in conformance with city policy and no officers' rights were harmed in the assignment to the inaugural detail,” Zuercher said Thursday. “Additionally, the chief consulted with the assistant chief and the commander and removed them from the detail assignment.”

Taking all that into account, Zuercher said he issued the letter of concern. He said he also consulted with the city’s human-resources director on the appropriate level of discipline.

“A letter of concern is within city policy,” Zuercher said. “It is a record of supervisory counseling. It puts in writing the discussion with an employee that an action has happened that should be corrected.”

Zuercher said the letter stays in an employee's file for one year. Garcia, who acknowledged that he could have better monitored the selection process, also received a letter of concern.

The five officers who filed the complaint can pursue the issue with the Arizona Attorney General’s Office and and U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Clure said he was unsure of the officers’ intentions. Attempts to reach the officers for comment were not successful.

Clure said the supervisors should have gone before the Police Department’s Disciplinary Review Board, composed of citizens, peer employees and police commanders who review cases of serious misconduct.

Clure points to the Police Department’s disciplinary policy that stipulates that supervisors found in violation of equal-employment opportunity regulations face suspension without pay.

However, Crump said the process was handled by the EOD and city management, not the Police Department.

Crump also said the investigative report was sent to the Professional Standards Bureau, the department’s internal affairs unit that reviews and investigates officers’ conduct.

“It was sent to them for review,” Crump said. “There is no action being taken on their part.”

Clure said the city “wants to play it off as nothing happened and that no harm had occurred.”

“I disagree,” Clure said. “There was reputational harm to the department and the city” and the officers felt humiliated.

Clure said he plans to press the issue with the mayor and City Council.

He said if city leaders fail to do anything, it will send a wrong message to rank-and-file officers, that there are two standards, one for them and one for upper management.

A total of 40 Phoenix police officers went to Washington, including those from the chief's office, the Gang Enforcement Unit, the Major Offender Unit and the Downtown Operations Unit.

Secret Police in Phoenix????

Phoenix Police to encrypt radio transmissions making them secret

Of course the cops will use any lame excuse to justify their actions, and that excuse is always that it making it safer for the children or some other lame excuse along those lines.

I suspect the reals reason for this is to make the police less accountable for their actions and prevent the public from knowing bad things the police do.

As the cops say when they question us, we must have something to hide if we exercise our constitutional rights take the 5th Amendment and refuse to answer police questions.

So I suspect the police have something to hide from the public if they want to make their radio transmissions secret.

Source

Phoenix to shield police radio traffic

Officials: Rise in listeners jeopardizing crime scenes

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Mar 7, 2013 11:25 PM

When Mike Ormandy was growing up in Indiana in the 1970s, it was not uncommon for the adults to gather at a home on a weekend evening to play cards and have a few drinks with an odd soundtrack in the background: police-scanner traffic.

The sounds of static and police-radio transmissions infected Ormandy with the scanner bug, and he brought it with him to Arizona, where he invested in high-powered antennas and radios to capture the sounds of emergency responders communicating in the field.

The proliferation of websites and smartphone applications that stream police-radio traffic to hundreds of thousands of users, and a handful of recent instances in which scanner listeners have beaten police to crime scenes, are threatening what Ormandy and others view as a hobby — one that is as much about public safety as it is about infotainment.

“It’s kind of nice for safety reasons to know when there’s something major going on. ... I think it keeps officers honest, and I really think the public listening allows them to have a respect for the kind of danger these guys face every day,” Ormandy said.

“Police want you to share what you see and not get involved. That’s where the smartphone users get it wrong. From what I’ve found, the biggest culprit is people listening on smartphones and hearing something big going on and running out to the scene.”

Phoenix police last month decided to encrypt emergency police-radio traffic related to crimes in progress, a move that will reduce by about 18 percent the agency’s scanner traffic audible to the public, said Sgt. Trent Crump, a department spokesman.

The decision for Phoenix to encrypt more dispatch calls and conversations between officers comes after recent incidents:

About an hour after a Jan. 30 office shooting in central Phoenix, police broadcast over their radios the address of a possible suspect’s home.

The information was picked up by media outlets and others monitoring scanners, and some posted the address on social-media sites. Media crews and others arrived at the home before police tactical teams could get there, Crump said, setting up to wait for the shooter, Arthur Harmon.

Police believe media coverage of his home may have caused Harmon to flee as he was on his way there, spurring a manhunt that ended the following morning when he was discovered dead in a Mesa parking lot. However, evidence found in Harmon’s rental car, including cash, hygiene products and clothes, could indicate that he had intended to go on the run after his carefully planned murders.

On Feb. 8, police responded to a home-invasion call in west Phoenix where the suspects turned out to be juveniles, including a 16-year-old boy who was fatally shot by the homeowner. Police broadcast information about the suspects, including the school they attended, over their radios, prompting some media members to go to the school and attempt to interview students and staff even before investigators had arrived, Crump said.

On Feb. 11, police broadcast information about tactical positions and response plans as they closed in on a man suspected of robbing more than a dozen pharmacies and grocery stores, potentially jeopardizing their ability to capture the “Calligraphy Bandit,” Crump said. Tomas Garcia-Mancinas was arrested without incident. That day, police administrators made the decision to move more calls to encrypted channels, Crump said.

The California manhunt for fugitive ex-police officer Christopher Dorner brought the issue into sharp focus nationally on Feb. 12, after police were reportedly heard on radios discussing plans to burn the cabin Dorner was hiding in. A California sheriff later denied that the fire was intentionally set and said police used pyrotechnic tear gas called “burners” in an attempt to flush Dorner from the cabin.

“I think a lot of police agencies looked at that in horror realizing that this website Radio Reference had their agency on a worldwide Internet feed,” Ormandy said. “The natural response is to go ahead and encrypt it and keep it all secret.”

Crump said the Phoenix police decision was simply about safety for officers and the public.

“There are several large agencies across the nation that have gone completely encrypted, and more agencies are going in this direction because of the low cost and the ease for suspects to (otherwise) have this access,” he said.

The digital system that opened up a host of new radio channels for Phoenix police and fire agencies and allowed for easy encryption was part of a $120 million upgrade in 2004.

Other Valley cities acquired similar systems at the same time, and many took advantage of the new technology to begin securing calls on crimes in progress, conversations between detectives and tactical calls on private frequencies.

It was a sign of things to come.

“Back when they had the old system and you could put an antenna up and hear basically everything that happened — detectives doing surveillance, car-to-car stuff — I’m sure they longed for the day when they had more security,” Ormandy said.

Phoenix initially followed the lead of other agencies and encrypted those same calls at the time, Crump said, but it opened up some calls shortly after. Still, a lot has changed in the past nine years, he said.

“A scanner used to sit on a desktop and have an antenna on the roof. Now, everyone is on the move with us with their smartphone,” Crump said. “Those that we’re fighting against have the same access.”

Lindsay Blanton, founder and president of a company that broadcasts police-radio traffic over the Internet, wrote on his website that police arguments about emerging technology interfering with their work have been around for decades.

“In the ’90s, when an agency did go encrypted and members of the media and public complained, the standard response from the agencies was, ‘Hey, any criminal can go down to Radio Shack and purchase a scanner to listen to all our comms,’” Blanton wrote. “Now, that argument has just shifted to ‘Anyone with a smartphone can.’”

But as emerging technology threatens to close one door that allowed public access to what police are doing on a day-to-day basis, it will likely open others, though the access won’t be as instant as scanners.

Police departments in Phoenix, Mesa, Surprise and Peoria are among the agencies testing or implementing digital cameras that officers wear to record virtually everything an officer does during a shift.

And police-scanner traffic will still be available several weeks or months after most incidents through Arizona’s Public Records Law.

“Everything techwise has gotten more and more efficient for the user. But by the same token, we can’t have it jeopardizing our work,” Crump said. “This doesn’t eliminate transparency. You can still ask for any radio tape you want.”

Politicians making it harder for us to recall them?

Politicians passing a retroactive law making it harder to recall Sheriff Joe Arpaio?

But when you look at how our government masters actually operate, it looks more like they consider themselves royal rulers who have a God given right to micromanage our lives and steal our money.

In this article it sounds like these royal rulers are attempt to change the recall process making it more difficult for us serfs to recall them.

This law also seems to be an attempt by our royal rulers to prevent us from recalling Sheriff Joe, or to help Sheriff Joe get reelected if he is recalled.

Source

Arizona recall bill could aid targeted politicians

By Mary Jo Pitzl The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Mar 8, 2013 12:44 AM

Arizona’s recall elections would take on a partisan cast that could help the targeted politician survive under a bill approved by the state House of Representatives on Thursday.

According to its critics, House Bill 2282 also could cut a break to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is the target of an ongoing recall drive. A last-minute amendment would make the changes retroactive to Jan.1, which would cover the period within which the Arpaio recall was launched.

The bill would carve out a primary and general election from the recall process, which currently consists of a single election in which all candidates compete and all voters cast ballots.

Most political observers believe the two-step process would help the recalled official, since a primary election could clear out the challenger most likely to appeal to voters from all parties. For example, former Senate President Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, lost in a 2011 recall election to a more moderate Republican who had Republican and Democratic support. It was widely believed a Democrat could not defeat him, given the political makeup of his legislative district.

Republican lawmakers argued the bill simply makes recall elections mirror the same process by which other candidate elections are conducted.

Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, who added the retroactive clause, said the failure last fall of the single-primary ballot measure only reinforces the argument for the bill. Proposition 121 would have scrapped partisan primaries and made all candidates compete in the same election, regardless of party. Voters rejected it by a ratio of 2 to 1.

“This is just an extension of that mandate,” Kavanagh said.

But Democrats argued the framers of Arizona’s Constitution carefully considered the issue and decided a single recall election was needed.

That’s because in a recall election, voters are deliberating whether to retain a given politician, and not doing a rerun of a candidate vs. candidate competition, said Rep. Andrew Sherwood, D-Tempe.

“It is sufficiently difficult to recall an official,” he said, noting only one lawmaker — former Senate President Pearce — has been recalled in the state’s 101 years. There’s no need to change the process, he said.

Besides, the bill doesn’t address what would happen if the recalled official loses in a primary, Sherwood said. Would that person’s name advance to the general election ballot, so all voters could decide? If so, isn’t that what the recall system does already? he asked.

Rep. Steve Smith, R-Maricopa, introduced the bill this year after seeing it fail to become law last year. In 2012, the bill passed both the House and Senate, but foundered in a conference committee, where lawmakers tried to reconcile differences in their respective versions of the bill.

This year’s version passed the House on a 36-23 party-line vote, with Republicans in support and Democrats opposed. It now moves to the Senate for consideration.

Reach the reporter at 602-444-8963.

Federal court limits border searches of computers, other devices

Federal court limits border searches of computers, other devices

Posted: Friday, March 8, 2013 7:01 pm

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

Setting bold new standards for digital searches, a federal appeals court ruled Friday that customs agents need "reasonable suspicion'' a crime has occurred before delving into the hidden files on someone's computer.

"A person's digital life ought not be hijacked simply by crossing a border, wrote Judge Margaret McKeown for the majority of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. And she said it's appropriate to have a different standard for computer files than other items.

"When packing traditional luggage, one is accustomed to deciding what papers to take and what to leave behind,'' she wrote.

"When carrying a laptop, tablet or other device, however, removing files unnecessary to an impending trip is an impractical solution given the volume and often intermingled nature of the files,'' McKeown continued. And McKeown pointed out that, given the nature of digital files, simply "deleting'' them from the computer does not make them disappear, as they can remain on the hard drive -- and, as is the case here, be found with a forensic examination of that drive.

Friday's ruling also offers new protection in the era of "cloud computing,'' where files are not held within a computer but on a remote server, presents different issues. That makes the computer the access point to that data, with McKeown comparing it to a key to a safe deposit box.

"Notably, although the virtual 'safe deposit box' does not itself cross the border, it may appear as a seamless part of the digital device when presented at the border,'' she wrote. "With access to the cloud through forensic examination, a traveler's cache is just a click away from the government.''

McKeown acknowledged that travelers have a "diminished expectation of privacy'' at the border. And she said international travelers expect their property will be searched.

"What they do not expect is that, absent some particularized suspicion, agents will mine every last piece of data on their devices or deprive them of their most personal property for days (or perhaps weeks or even months, depending on how long the search takes),'' she wrote. "Such a thorough and detailed search of the most intimate details of one's life is a substantial intrusion upon personal privacy and dignity.''

But the ruling, which establishes the legal standards that now apply in Arizona and eight other the Western states within the 9th Circuit, provides no help to Howard Cotterman, whose case the judges were reviewing.

They concluded that Border Patrol agents did in this case have reasonable suspicion to examine his hard drive. And that allows Cotterman, who has been locked up since 2009 -- he had initially fled the country -- to be prosecuted in federal court on charges of child pornography.

His attorney, William Kirchner, said he was studying the ruling on Friday but said he likely will seek review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Friday's ruling drew fire from Judge Consuelo Callahan who filed a dissent.

"The majority's new limits on the government's border search authority will make it much harder for border agents to do their jobs,'' she wrote. duh!!! That's the whole purpose of the 4th Amendment!!!!!]

Callahan said it is "common knowledge'' that agents at security checkpoints do more thorough searches not only of those who arouse suspicion but also on a random basis.

"Otherwise, a person who appears entirely innocent will have nothing to fear and will not be deterred from carrying something that should not be brought into the country,'' the judge wrote. "A checkpoint limited to searches that can be justified by articulable grounds for 'reasonable suspicion' is bound to be less effective.''

And Callahan said the ruling means "criminals now know they can hide their child pornography or terrorist connections in the recesses of their electronic devices'' knowing that border agents, faced with this new standard, will avoid conducting searches.

The case involves Howard and Maureen Cotterman who entered the country at Lukeville in 2007.

Following protocol, customs officials checked their names in a national database. There, they found that Cotterman had been convicted in California in 1992 of seven counts related to child molestation. Based on that, they sent the couple to a secondary inspection area.

A search of the vehicle revealed two laptops and three digital cameras. While the inspecting officer found no child pornography, he noted that several files were password protected.

The officers said they refused Cotterman's help fearing he could destroy any files. Instead, they took the laptops to Tucson.

Eventually, a specialist found what he said were 75 images of child pornography on the computer. Cotterman eventually fled to Australia but was indicted, after which he was extradited back to the United States.

U.S. District Court Judge Raner Collins ruled that the images could not be used at trial. He said agents did not have a "reasonably particularized suspicion" of anything improper to conduct an extended search.

McKeown, however, said there was enough in this case to give agents cause to do the forensic search. That included not only his criminal background but also his frequent travels, coming from a country known for sex tourism as well as the password-protected files.

But she cautioned that last factor, by itself, is not enough, calling it "commonplace for business travelers, casual computer users, students and others to password protect their files.'' And she specifically said that protecting the entire computer with a password, versus individual files, cannot be a factor in determining whether there is reasonable suspicion to search.

"Using a password on a device is a basic means of ensuring that the device cannot be accessed by another in the event it is lost or stolen,'' McKeown wrote.

Deadly Drugs: What You Need to Know About Bath Salts and Spice

Source

Mesa workshop offers parents information on ‘deadly drugs’

Posted: Thursday, March 7, 2013 9:49 am

Tribune

Mesa Unified School District’s Parent University will offer a workshop on current drug patterns later this month.

“Deadly Drugs: What You Need to Know About Bath Salts and Spice” is free, but advance registration is required. Parents can bring their teens and preteens to the event.

Register at mpsaz.org/parentu using class code 11302. It will be held 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. March 26 at Fremont Junior High auditorium, 1001 N. Power Road, Mesa. Community Bridges will present the event.

For more information, call Jan Umhay, Parent University specialist, (480) 308-7309.

Dope smugglers are targets on Obamas drone murder list???

The Drone Question Obama Hasn’t Answered

By RYAN GOODMAN

Published: March 8, 2013

THE Senate confirmed John O. Brennan as director of the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday after a nearly 13-hour filibuster by the libertarian senator Rand Paul, who before the vote received a somewhat odd letter from the attorney general.

“It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: ‘Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?’ ” the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., wrote to Mr. Paul. “The answer to that question is no.”

The senator, whose filibuster had become a social-media sensation, elating Tea Party members, human-rights groups and pacifists alike, said he was “quite happy with the answer.” But Mr. Holder’s letter raises more questions than it answers — and, indeed, more important and more serious questions than the senator posed.

What, exactly, does the Obama administration mean by “engaged in combat”? The extraordinary secrecy of this White House makes the answer difficult to know. We have some clues, and they are troubling.

If you put together the pieces of publicly available information, it seems that the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has acted with an overly broad definition of what it means to be engaged in combat. Back in 2004, the Pentagon released a list of the types of people it was holding at Guantánamo Bay as “enemy combatants” — a list that included people who were “involved in terrorist financing.”

One could argue that that definition applied solely to prolonged detention, not to targeting for a drone strike. But who’s to say if the administration believes in such a distinction?

American generals in Afghanistan said the laws of war “have been interpreted to allow” American forces to include “drug traffickers with proven links to the insurgency on a kill list,” according to a report released in 2009 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then led by John Kerry, now the secretary of state.

The report went on to say that there were about 50 major traffickers “who contribute funds to the insurgency on the target list.” The Pentagon later said that it was “important to clarify that we are targeting terrorists with links to the drug trade, rather than targeting drug traffickers with links to terrorism.”

That statement, however, was not very clarifying, and did not seem to appease NATO allies who raised serious legal concerns about the American targeting program. The explanation soon gave way to more clues, and this time it was not simply a question of who had been placed on a list.

In a 2010 Fox News interview, under pressure to explain whether the Obama administration was any closer to capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, Mr. Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said that “we have gotten closer because we have been able to kill a number of their trainers, their operational people, their financiers.” That revelation — killing financiers — appears not to have been noticed very widely.

As I have written, sweeping financiers into the group of people who can be killed in armed conflict stretches the laws of war beyond recognition. But this is not the only stretch the Obama administration seems to have made. The administration still hasn’t disavowed its stance, disclosed last May in a New York Times article, that military-age males killed in a strike zone are counted as combatants absent explicit posthumous evidence proving otherwise.

Mr. Holder’s one-word answer — “no” — is not a step toward the greater transparency that President Obama pledged when he came into office, but has not delivered, in the realm of national security.

By declining to specify what it means to be “engaged in combat,” the letter does not foreclose the possible scenario — however hypothetical — of a military drone strike, against a United States citizen, on American soil. It also raises anew questions about the standards the administration has used in deciding to use drone strikes to kill Americans suspected of terrorist involvement overseas — notably Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

Is there any reason to believe that military drones will soon be hovering over Manhattan, aiming to kill Americans believed to be involved in terrorist financing? No.

But is it well past time for the United States government to specify, precisely, its views on whom it thinks it can kill in the struggle against Al Qaeda and other terrorist forces? The answer is yes.

The Obama administration’s continued refusal to do so should alarm any American concerned about the constitutional right of our citizens — no matter what evil they may or may not be engaged in — to due process under the law. For those Americans, Mr. Holder’s seemingly simple but maddeningly vague letter offers no reassurance.

Ryan Goodman is a professor of law and co-chairman of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University.

Richard Nixon wished for total handgun ban

Of course the reason the Founder created the Second Amendment was to protect us from tyrants like Nixon, Bush and Obama.

Source

Richard Nixon wished for total handgun ban

Associated Press Sat Mar 9, 2013 11:24 AM

WASHINGTON — Few presidents in modern times have been as interested in gun control as Richard Nixon, of all people. He proposed ridding the market of Saturday night specials, contemplated banning handguns altogether and refused to pander to gun owners by feigning interest in their weapons.

Several previously unreported Oval Office recordings and White House memos from the Nixon years show a conservative president who at times appeared willing to take on the National Rifle Association, a powerful gun lobby then as now, even as his aides worried about the political ramifications.

“I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house,” Nixon said in a taped conversation with aides. “The kids usually kill themselves with it and so forth.” He asked why “can’t we go after handguns, period?”

Nixon went on: “I know the rifle association will be against it, the gun makers will be against it.” But “people should not have handguns.” He laced his comments with obscenities, as was typical.

Nixon made his remarks in the Oval Office on May 16, 1972, the day after a would-be assassin shot and paralyzed segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace. As president, Nixon never publicly called for a ban on all handguns. Instead, he urged Congress to pass more modest legislation banning Saturday night specials, which were cheaply made, easily concealed and often used by criminals.

Not all of the president’s men appeared to share his passion on the issue. The recordings and memos show that Nixon administration officials saw gun control as a political loser.

Nixon, a Republican, did say publicly that if Congress passed a ban on Saturday night specials, he would sign it. But in a sign of how potent the NRA was even 40 years ago, this narrow piece of legislation never made it to his desk, and there is no sign that he ever sent a draft bill to Capitol Hill.

Today, President Barack Obama faces similar hurdles in trying to ban assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines. Gun control advocates say no one needs such powerful weapons to kill an intruder or take down an animal. In Nixon’s time, the argument of such advocates was that Saturday night specials were too poorly made to be relied on for self-defense or hunting.

“Let me ask you,” Nixon said to Attorney General John Mitchell in June 1971, “there is only one thing you are checking on, that’s the manufacture of those $20 guns? We should probably stop that.” Saturday night specials sold for $10 to $30 at the time. Mitchell responded that banning those guns would be “pretty difficult, actually,” because of the gun lobby.

“No hunters are going to use $20 guns,” Nixon countered.

“No, but the gun lobby’s against any incursion into the elimination of firearms,” said Mitchell.

The term Saturday night special originated in Detroit, where police observed the frequency with which the guns were used to commit weekend mayhem. Lynyrd Skynyrd memorialized the weapon in its 1975 song, “Saturday Night Special,” in which the Southern rock band sang: “Ain’t good for nothin’/But put a man six feet in a hole.”

Nixon’s private comments were not always supportive of gun control, particularly measures that would go beyond handguns. For example, in a taped conversation just a few days after saying that people shouldn’t have handguns, the president asked rhetorically, “What do they want to do, just disarm the populace? Disarm the good folks and leave the arms in the hands of criminals?”

But most of his comments on the tapes, available at the websites of the National Archives and of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, were in favor of stronger gun control.

At a June 29, 1972, news conference, about six weeks after Wallace’s shooting, Nixon said he’d sign legislation banning Saturday night specials. Later that year, the Senate did pass such a bill, but the House never acted on the legislation.

The bill’s sponsor, Indiana Democrat Birch Bayh, said in a recent interview that the NRA helped prevent his bill from getting through Congress. The Nixon administration supported an unsuccessful Republican alternative Senate bill on Saturday night specials that had a definition the NRA preferred.

The shooting of another politician put gun control back on the radar the following year. On Jan. 30, 1973, two robbers shot Sen. John Stennis, D-Miss., and surgeons initially thought he would die. Stennis survived and lived until 1995.

The day of the shooting, Nixon told White House special counsel Charles Colson, “At least I hope that Saturday night special legislation, at least we’re supporting that, you know. We’re not for gun control generally, but we are for that. God damn it that ought to be passed. Or was it passed?”

When Colson told him it hadn’t, Nixon instructed his counsel, “We better damn well be for it now, huh?”

At a news conference the next day, the president repeated his call to ban Saturday night specials. He also volunteered a comment that few national politicians would make today: “Let me say, personally, I have never hunted in my life. I have no interest in guns and so forth.”

By March 1973, aide John Ehrlichman was telling Nixon that gun control was a “loser issue for us.”

“You’ve got a highly mobilized lobby,” he told the president. “I think what we have to do is carve out a little piece of it, and Saturday night specials, of course, has been our tactic.”

Other White House officials also argued against doing much, including Tom C. Korologos, a White House deputy assistant for legislative affairs who later was an outside lobbyist for the NRA and ambassador to Belgium under President George W. Bush.

“The thing that worries me is that the president’s hard-core support comes from the gun-folk and obviously we need support these days,” Korologos wrote in an Aug. 31, 1973 memo, referring to the Watergate scandal that would undo Nixon’s presidency.

“Lurking in the background is the president’s personal statement: ‘I’m a liberal on gun control,’” Korologos said. Nixon might have made this statement privately; there is no record of him saying it publicly.

Korologos’ conclusion: “I vote for a ‘talk’ meeting and then ‘tough it out’ by doing nothing and hope nobody gets shot in the next three years.”

The effort to ban Saturday night specials receded in recent decades as the focus of gun control advocates shifted to rein in more powerful weapons.

Nixon’s focus soon shifted, too.

In June 1972, a little over a month after his chat about banning handguns, Nixon had a recorded conversation that showed him trying to get the FBI to stop investigating the break-in at Democratic offices at the Watergate office building by burglars tied to his re-election committee.

Few remember the tapes about handguns. History forever remembers the tape that gave Nixon’s Watergate pursuers their “smoking gun.”

———

Follow Fred Frommer on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ffrommer

Google says the FBI is spying on some of you

Google says the FBI is spying on some of you

By Chris Gayomali | The Week

For millions of Americans, Google is the fabric that weaves the various threads of our digital lives together: Gmail, Gchat, Google Voice, search queries, YouTube, Maps, Chrome — you name it. So it shouldn't really come as a surprise that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has repeatedly tapped the tech company for otherwise-private information concerning a small percentage of Google's users.

But let's put it more plainly: The FBI has been spying on some of you.

In a new Transparency Report announced in an official blog post, Google has released previously unseen information about the number of National Security Letters (NSLs) it has received from the FBI in the past couple of years. According to Wired, these letters "allow the government to get detailed information on Americans' finances and communications without oversight from a judge." Needless to say, the FBI sends NSLs out all the time — hundreds of thousands of them, in fact — to internet service providers, banks, credit companies, and other businesses. Unsurprisingly, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have accused the FBI of abusing the letters' power post-9/11.

Until recently, it's been unlawful for a company to disclose when it has received an NSL. Now, thanks to a new deal with the Obama administration, Google is able to publish a broad range of instances in which it has received such FBI requests.

The table below provides a range of how many National Security Letters (NSLs) we've received and a range of how many of the uers/accounts were specified each year since 2009. For more information about NSLs, please refer to our FAQ. These ranges are not included in the total sum of user data requests that we report biannually

As you can see, Google says it receives between 0 and 999 NSLs from the government each year. In 2009, those letters contained requests asking for information concerning between 1,000 and 1,999 users/accounts. In 2010, the FBI was slightly busier — 2,000 to 2,999 different users/accounts were requested. Then in 2011 and 2012, that range dipped back down.

The search giant doesn't comply with every NSL it receives, and claims to carefully vet each request. "We review it carefully and only provide information within the scope and authority of the request," writes Google. "We may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases." Google also says that the standard practice is to notify users when an NSL has been received concerning them, although the FBI has the power to nullify the disclosure if it may result in "a danger to the national security of the United States, interference with a criminal, counterterrorism, or counterintelligence investigation, interference with diplomatic relations, or danger to the life or physical safety of any person."

You can read Google's Transparency Report for yourself here.

And it's worth remembering: The FBI and other government agencies can still access your email without a warrant as long as the information been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more (per a convoluted and terribly antiquated 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act). A new email and phone tracking bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday seeks to make it harder for authorities to snoop around without a judge's order.

AG Holder - Obama OK to murder Americans with drones!!!!!

Source

Holder letter ignites new debate on drones

By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau

March 6, 2013, 7:07 p.m.

WASHINGTON — Can the president legally order a drone strike to kill an American on U.S. soil?

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. wrote this week in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that he could envision "an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate" to use such lethal force.

Those words touched off a heated debate Wednesday in the Senate over when and where the president can order the killing of U.S. citizens designated as "enemy combatants."

President Obama and his aides have said that targeted killings of Americans must be governed by some due process. But they have resisted public disclosure of their rules. Until this week, the administration had refused to allow even members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to read most of the legal opinions that justified the one known drone killing of an American, the attack on Anwar Awlaki in 2011 in Yemen.

The debate burst into public view on Capitol Hill. On the Senate floor, Paul filibustered the nomination of John Brennan to be the new director of the CIA, imploring colleagues to join him in criticizing Obama for refusing to rule out the use of lethal force against terrorism suspects in this country. Brennan has been a chief architect and defender of the administration's drone program.

"Are we so complacent with our rights that we would allow a president to say he might kill Americans?" Paul asked. "No one person, no one politician should be allowed … to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual. It goes against everything we fundamentally believe in our country."

Paul showed no sign of giving up, holding the floor for more than eight hours and continuing to talk into the night. He demanded a public promise from the White House to never target drones against Americans in the United States. Paul said that he was not objecting to the use of lethal force to repel an attack, but that the administration was claiming a far broader power.

"Do we want martial law in this country?" Paul asked, mocking the claim that the entire world could be considered a battlefield in the war against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. "The hell this is a battlefield! This is our country."

"If there was an ounce of courage in this body, I would be joined by others in telling the president that no president has the authority to kill Americans without trial," Paul declared to a near-empty chamber. As the afternoon wore on, his words appeared to have had an effect, as several Republican colleagues and Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon joined the filibuster, delaying a final vote on Brennan's nomination at least until Thursday.

Simultaneously, Holder was testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where senators tried to pin him down about the limits of the power the government was claiming.

In his letter, Holder had said he hoped "no president will ever have to confront" the need to order the killing of an American on U.S. soil.

But, he added, "it is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States." He mentioned the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, as a possible example.

That explanation did not satisfy several members of the committee. The letter "raises many questions for citizens on when the government can kill them," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) demanded to know what in the Constitution gives the president or anyone else the power to kill an American terrorist suspect "sitting quietly in a cafe in the U.S." who at that time is not posing an immediate threat.

After initially saying only that killing a suspect in that sort of circumstance would not be "appropriate," Holder eventually told Cruz that such an attack would not be constitutional. He also said that he expected Obama to speak more publicly about the issue soon. "I think there is a greater need for transparency —a greater need for appropriately sharing information — and we are struggling with how to do that, but it is something that the president feels strongly about," he said.

Although Republicans asked most of the questions, the issue did not break down cleanly on partisan lines.

Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) applauded the administration's drones policy. "In every war we've had, unfortunately, American citizens have sided with the enemy. They've been few in number, but that does happen," he said.

A battery of Patriot missiles now guards the U.S. Capitol against attack, he noted. "Let's go back in time," he said. "What would we all give to have those Patriot missile batteries available" on Sept. 11?

Using them to blow up one of the airliners aimed at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon "would have meant that we would have lost a planeload of American citizens, but we'd save thousands more. That's the world in which we live in," Graham said.

"I want to stand by you and the president to make sure that we don't criminalize the war and that the commander in chief continues to have the authority to protect us all," he told Holder. "And I've got a lot of my colleagues who are well-meaning, but there is only one commander in chief in our Constitution."

Holder, appearing uncomfortable before the committee, repeatedly told its members that his letter merely dealt with the unlikely possibility of an extreme event. He emphasized that there was no plan to broaden the administration's drone program to aim at targets inside the U.S.

"It's hard for me to imagine a situation where that would occur," he said.

Finding and isolating terrorists abroad is much harder than in the U.S., often making capturing a suspect impractical, he said. In the U.S. many law enforcement tools exist that allow officials to capture suspects without killing them.

"Thus the use of drones is entirely, entirely hypothetical" for this country, he said.

Holder added, "The government has no intention to carry out any drone strikes in the United States."

richard.serrano@latimes.com

Michael A. Memoli of the Washington Bureau contributed to this report.

House panel approves police destruction of seized medical marijuana

Source

House panel approves police destruction of seized medical marijuana

Posted: Saturday, March 9, 2013 11:58 am

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services | 7 comments

Rejecting the pleas of the state's former top federal prosecutor, a House panel voted Thursday to let police destroy marijuana they have seized even if it turns out the person had a right to possess it.

Melvin McDonald, who was the U.S. Attorney for Arizona in the early 1980s, told members of the Judiciary Committee that SB 1441 is an improper end-run around the 2010 voter approval of the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act. And he called the fear by police that they will be subject to prosecution under federal law if they give back the drugs "utter nonsense.''

McDonald admitted he is more than an idle bystander.

He told lawmakers of the seizures suffered by his stepson, Bennett Black, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a 1997 accident and eventually had to have part of his brain removed. McDonald said both the seizures and the pills designed to control them made Bennett sick and nauseous.

It was only when his wife, Cindy, began to get marijuana for their son -- illegally until the law was passed -- that he was actually able to eat and reverse the weight loss from 180 pounds to 118 pounds.

Committee members approved the measure anyway on a 5-3 party-line vote. Its fate, however, , remains uncertain.

Two of the Republicans who supported the legislation said they did so to give the full House a chance to weigh in. But they expressed concern with anything they believe undermines the 2010 law.

Rep. Ethan Orr of Tucson said he fears that the legislation could be used to effectively shut down an entire medical marijuana clinic by seizing the drugs, leaving its patients without their drugs while the clinic owners sought out a new supply.

And Rep. Doris Goodale of Kingman explained how she used to be against anyone using marijuana.

"I have come to realize through personal family situations that yes, there is an applicable use of medical marijuana,'' she said. Goodale also said she does not want to undermine the will of the public which created the program.

Those soft Republican votes are only part of the problem faced by the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys Advisory Council which already has pushed the measure through the Senate.

Because the law was adopted by voters, it can be amended only with a three-fourths vote of each chamber. That means proponents have to convince 45 of the 60 House members to go along.

And Anjali Abraham with the American Civil Liberties Union said even that may not work.

She pointed out the Arizona Constitution allows legislators to tinker with voter-approved measures only when the "further the purpose'' of the original law. Abraham said allowing police to keep marijuana taken from patients does not do that.

The legislation is designed to overturn a ruling last year by the state Court of Appeals.

In that case, Valerie Okun, a California medical marijuana patient, was stopped by Border Patrol just inside Arizona. The agents took her marijuana and referred the case to the Yuma County Attorney's Office for prosecution.

The case was dropped after Okun eventually produced her California medical marijuana card. Arizona law, which allows those with a doctor's recommendation and a state-issued card to obtain up to 2 1/2 ounces of marijuana every two weeks, provides similar recognition to patients from other states.

But when Okun demanded her marijuana back, the Yuma County Sheriff's Office refused, saying deputies would be violating federal laws which continue to make possession of marijuana a crime.

The appellate judges, however, said there is no danger of federal prosecution, at least in part because the deputies would be obeying a lawful court order.

That case is now on appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court. But Kim MacEachern, lobbyist for the prosecutors, said lawmakers should make clear that marijuana, once seized, cannot be returned.

McDonald told lawmakers any concern about federal prosecution is "utter nonsense.''

"The Department of Justice has more issues on their plate than to worry about a deputy sheriff turning back to a lady marijuana that should have never been seized in the first place,'' he said. And he said the legislation lacks merit.

"It is nothing more than prosecutors trying to yet create another exception to allow them to do what the voters of the state of Arizona said you can't do,'' McDonald said. He said those who have medical marijuana need it to live.

"My boy does not eat without first taking the marijuana,'' he said.

MacEachern said the legislation still leaves patients with the option of filing a claim against the agency for the value of the drugs taken.

She also said the prosecutors' desire to destroy the drugs is not unprecedented. MacEachern said that's what happens with prescription drugs when police take it from individuals who cannot immediately prove they are entitled to possess them.

Senator Kimberly Yee wants to repeal Arizona's medical-marijuana laws

Arizona Senator Kimberly Yee aims to tighten medical-marijuana laws

I suspect if you asked the Founders why they created the Second Amendment they would say to allow the people to protect themselves from tyrants like Sen. Kimberly Yee.

Of course the Founders are not here so we can't ask them.

On the other hand Sen. Kimberly Yee's desire to flush Arizona's medical marijuana law which is Prop 203 down the toilet is almost certainly unconstitutional and a slap in the face of the people that voted for it.

Source

Arizona senator aims to tighten medical-marijuana laws

By Lindsey Collom The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Mar 9, 2013 10:00 PM

Sen. Kimberly Yee has become the go-to legislator for bills involving Arizona’s medical-marijuana law.

The Phoenix Republican is the primary sponsor of three measures this session that would tighten what members in the law-enforcement community have identified as loopholes in the 2010 voter-mandated law as well as pave the way for university researchers to study the effects of medical marijuana.

Her bills give direction to law enforcement on what to do with medical marijuana that is seized during a criminal investigation (destroy it) and would require manufacturers to put warning labels on edible medical-marijuana products — ice cream and candy, items attractive to children — similar to those on cigarettes.

We recently spoke with Yee about her work involving the medical-marijuana act. Here’s an edited excerpt:

Question: All of your bills to modify the medical-pot law have passed through the Senate and are advancing in the House, unlike a repeal measure that went nowhere. Does that say something about legislators’ acceptance of the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act?

Answer: A small majority of voters passed this medical-marijuana act in 2010, so clearly it was the will of the voters to proceed with medical marijuana in this state. I believe it is the legislators’ role at this point to close any loopholes that they see in the measure, and so that’s what we’re doing here. It’s certainly not in the same path as (the) one person who sponsored the bill in repealing the act altogether.

Q: Some critics say medical marijuana is the first step toward lawful recreational use. Is that where Arizona is headed?

A: I know there are some states that are moving towards recreational use of marijuana. I don’t believe that’s something this state should (do). The voters in Arizona voted for this medical- marijuana act because it was medically based, and that’s what these bills are about, keeping it medically based. I’m finding by talking to a number of individuals in Arizona they didn’t realize some of the other elements contained in the act. For instance, allowing any person of any age, even babies and children, to have medical-marijuana use. If they had known that, they may not have voted on it.

Q: In addressing medical marijuana, are you finding resistance among your own party?

A: In committee today I did — a Higher Education Committee in the House where at least one Republican gave indication that he was not supporting any bill that had the word marijuana in (it). I thought that was surprising because, clearly, these bills have the words contained in the act. Just because a person sponsors a medical-marijuana bill does not mean that you’re advancing medical marijuana in this state. In fact, if this legislator had actually read the bill, he would see that medical marijuana is actually being advanced in a way that voters intended.

Q: You got a little defensive.

A: Yes, I think he was indicating in his statements that if you have a bill that contains the word marijuana, you would be considered a liberal. And I found that to be shortsighted because legislators should actually open the bills, read them and look at the policy within that bill. And if this particular member had done that, they would see this bill is about medical research, very tight scientific studies that are approved not only by our federal government, but our state universities in a very specified and secure setting. And I wouldn’t have been the sponsor of this bill otherwise, without all of those restrictions on the bill and ensuring that we do look at medical research in this area. And I think what’s important about this that is we may find, after our research is conducted at our universities, that we’ll be able to better understand both the positive and negative effects of medical marijuana. But we really can’t proceed blindly and continue forward in a public-policy setting without this very important information.

Q: Are you a medical-marijuana cardholder?

A: No, I’m not a cardholder. I carry a lot of bills. These are just four of them. These are health and public safety related, and education obviously. So the bills I sponsor run the gamut, and I think that’s a good broad scope. We need to carefully select the bills we sponsor and that’s what I do.

Q: Anything else?

A: I think it’s important for voters to know that as we have these types of statewide ballot initiatives, to really read them and get a full extent of what they’re about. As we’ve seen in the medical- marijuana act, there were a number of loopholes that weren’t ready for prime time. As a result, the Legislature, in the third year after the measure passed, has had to look to see how we can better implement this medical-marijuana law in Arizona. And also for voters to understand what was in this medical-marijuana act that has caused some concern. For instance, I think it would be important to let readers know the medical-marijuana act allowed for infants and young children to have access to medical marijuana. I don’t think voters realized there was no age restriction. Regardless, the voters in Arizona passed this as a slight majority, and that’s where we are today.

Dr. Patterson - It's time to legalize marijuana!!!

Source

Patterson: GOP should lead movement on marijuana

East Valley resident Tom Patterson (pattersontomc@cox.net) is a retired physician and former state senator.

Posted: Monday, March 11, 2013 10:15 am

Guest Commentary by Tom Patterson

Republicans should get out front for once and lead the movement to legalize marijuana. It makes sense any way you look at it.

“Medical marijuana” has turned out to be the farce that many of us suspected. Patients with glaucoma, AIDS and cancer were shamelessly paraded as the poster children for the initiative, yet they make up less than 10 percent of the patients at the marijuana dispensaries. The bulk of the clientele is 18- to 30-year-old males with “pain” and “mood disorder” problems that can’t be proved or disproved.

One naturopath alone has written thousands of prescriptions. High school students are ending up with a lot of the pot. The feds won’t promise not to prosecute and when state legislators discuss doing something about this mess, the howl of “defying the will of the people” starts up.

So what could be a better time to take a different tack and do what a growing number of Americans want anyway: legalize, regulate and tax it. Policymakers seem still influenced by “Reefer Madness”, the movie that ludicrously exaggerated claims of marijuana’s supposed tendencies to turn users into crazed maniacs.

In fact, marijuana is safer and has fewer bad consequences than alcohol. Alcohol claims an estimated 76,000 lives per year while marijuana advocates claim that pot has “never killed anyone”.

I doubt that’s strictly true, but in my emergency physician days, dealing with alcohol problems – auto accidents, domestic abuse, end-stage liver disease – was part of the daily grind. Hard drugs also commonly caused sickness and death but marijuana just never came up.

Every substance on earth can cause harm if abused or taken in excess. But, unlike alcohol, marijuana doesn’t stimulate aggressive behavior or cause “mean drunks”. And while chronic, heavy use may induce apathy, medically speaking there is no such thing as marijuana addiction or fatal overdoses. When we try to scare teens by claiming that marijuana is worse than it is, we look foolish and untrustworthy.

Many understandably worry about the effect of legalization on teenagers. But our current drug laws don’t work now to protect teens, who report that pot is easier to get than beer. In fact, drinking and cigarette smoking have dropped by 10 percent among high school seniors over the last five years, while pot smoking has risen by 23 percent. More teenagers smoke pot here than the Netherlands, where it is legal for adults.

Others worry about marijuana being a “gateway drug” to the hard stuff. But there’s no medical reason why pot should lead to hard drugs. In fact, it’s likely that if marijuana were purchased from a pharmacy rather than an illegal drug seller, the probability of being graduated to addictive drugs would be reduced.

More importantly, marijuana is a freedom issue. In a free society (that’s still us, isn’t it?), we have a natural right to do what we want with their own bodies. We don’t have to prove to government that is healthy or safe. In fact, it’s government that has the heavy burden of proof to show that our behavior is harmful to others to justify criminalizing it. That’s mighty hard to do.

But here’s the clincher. Even for those who believe on balance that there is some to benefit of criminalizing marijuana, we can’t afford it. At a time when government is flat broke, the War on Pot is estimated to cost $42 billion annually in direct expenses of enforcement, adjudication and incarceration. That doesn’t even include the massive human costs to the 700,000 arrested each year for marijuana offenses, much less the horrible toll of financially supporting the murderous drug cartels who control marijuana distribution.

We could end all this and use the money instead to reduce public debt or lower taxes while controlling marijuana use and abuse. It wouldn’t have to work perfectly to be far better than what we have today.

Republicans can get on the right side of a freedom and finance issue that is massively popular with the youth demographic. What are they waiting for?

East Valley resident Tom Patterson (pattersontomc@cox.net) is a retired physician and former state senator.

Judge strikes down NYC rule on sugary-drinks size

Source

Judge strikes down NYC rule on sugary-drinks size

Associated Press Mon Mar 11, 2013 12:50 PM

NEW YORK — A judge struck down New York City’s groundbreaking limit on the size of sugar-laden drinks Monday shortly before it was set to take effect, agreeing with the beverage industry and other opponents that the rule is arbitrary in applying to only some sweet beverages and some places that sell them. .

“The loopholes in this rule effectively defeat the stated purpose of this rule,” Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Milton Tingling wrote.

Further, the Board of Health went beyond its authority in approving the size limit, he said. The restriction was supposed to start Tuesday.

“The portion cap rule, if upheld, would create an administrative Leviathan and violate the separation of powers doctrine,” by straying into territory that should belong to the elected City Council, not the board appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Tingling wrote.

That, he wrote, “has the potential to be more troubling than sweetened beverages.

The city Board of Health approved the measure in September. Championed by Bloomberg, it follows on other efforts his administration has made to improve New Yorkers’ eating habits, from compelling chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus to barring artificial trans fats in restaurant food to prodding food manufacturers to use less salt.

The city has said that while restaurant inspectors would start enforcing the soda size rule in March, they wouldn’t seek fines — $200 for a violation — until June.

Soda makers, restaurateurs, movie theater owners and other business groups sued, asking a judge to declare the measure invalid. In February, they asked Tingling to bar the city from enforcing the regulation while the suit played out.

City officials have called the size limit a pioneering move for public health. They point to the city’s rising obesity rate — about 24 percent of adults, up from 18 percent in 2002 — and to studies tying sugary drinks to weight gain. Care for obesity-related illnesses costs government health programs about $2.8 billion a year in New York City alone, according to city Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley.

The supersize-drink crackdown will “have significant public health effects, and the sooner that happens, the better,” city lawyer Mark W. Muschenheim said in court in February.

Critics said the measure is too limited to make a meaningful impact on New Yorkers’ waistlines. But they said it would take a bite out of business for the eateries that have to comply, while other establishments still will get sell sugary drinks in 2-liter bottles and supersize cups.

Beverage makers had expected to spend about $600,000 changing bottles and labels, movie theater owners feared losing soda sales that account for 20 percent of their profits, and delis and restaurants would have had to change inventory, reprint menus and make other adjustments, according to court papers.

“These are costs which these businesses are not going to be compensated for,” and the money will be wasted if the court ultimately nixes the law, James E. Brandt, a lawyer for the American Beverage Association and other opponents, told the judge in February.

Critics also said the restriction should have gone before the elected City Council instead of the Bloomberg-appointed health board. The city says the panel of doctors and other health professionals had both the authority and expertise to make the decision.

Gabrielle Giffords' husband, Mark Kelly buys AR-15

More of the old "Do as I say, not as I do" from our government masters???

Our royal government rulers and bureaucrats like former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and astronaut Mark Kelly seem to think it's OK for them to have guns, but want to prevent the rest of us serfs from having guns.

Sorry guys, but I am sure the reason the Founders created the Second Amendment was to allow us serfs to protect ourselves from royal government rulers.

Source

Giffords' husband buys assault weapon to make point

By Catalina Camia USA Today Mon Mar 11, 2013 1:54 PM

Retired astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, recently purchased an assault weapon to make a point about the ease of background checks for gun owners.

Kelly posted on his Facebook page on Friday that he bought an AR-15, one of the 157 military-style weapons that would be banned under a bill pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The panel is set to consider three gun bills Tuesday, including the proposed assault weapons ban authored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

"Even to buy an assault weapon, the background check only takes a few minutes," Kelly said. "Scary to think of people buying guns like these without a background check at a gun show or the Internet. We really need to close the gun show and private seller loophole."

Kelly, who is also a retired Navy captain, and Giffords are both gun owners who have been outspoken about the need for new gun-control measures. Americans for Responsible Solutions, their super PAC, has been running ads featuring Giffords that tout the proposed assault weapons ban and universal background checks.

Kelly said on his Facebook page that he plans to give the AR-15 to the Tucson Police Department when he receives the weapon.

Giffords was shot in the head January 2011 in a Tucson rampage that left six people dead. President Obama and others have been pushing for new gun legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., in December that left 20 students and six of their educators dead.

'Truth serum' may be used to assess Holmes' sanity

Like lie detector tests I suspect getting a doped up person to talk MIGHT uncover some truths, but I also suspect that like a lie detector test the results are pretty unreliable.

Source

'Truth serum' may be used to assess Holmes' sanity, court says

By Dan Elliott and P. Solomon Banda, The Associated Press

Posted: 03/12/2013 09:29:49 AM PDT

DENVER -- The defendant in the deadly Colorado theater shooting could be given "truth serum" under a court order issued Monday to help determine whether he is insane if he pleads not guilty by reason of insanity.

Suspect James Holmes could be required to submit to a "narcoanalytic interview" as part of an evaluation to determine if he was legally insane at the time of the July 20 shootings, Arpahoe County District Judge William Sylvester said.

A narcoanalylitic interview is a decades-old process in which patients are given drugs to lower their inhibition. Academic studies have shown that the technique has involved the use of sodium amytal and pentothal, sometimes called truth serum.

The prospect of such interviews that may ensue under such a plea alarmed defense attorneys, who filed documents opposing the technique.

Holmes, 25, is scheduled to enter a plea Tuesday to multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. He is charged with killing 12 people and injuring 70 at a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" in the Denver suburb of Aurora.

If Holmes pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, he would be examined by doctors at the state mental hospital.

In an advisory that Holmes would have to sign if he enters an insanity plea, Sylvester didn't specify what type of drugs would be used but said the examination could include "medically appropriate" ones.

Sylvester said Holmes also could be given a polygraph examination as part of the evaluation.

After reading a draft of the advisory, Holmes' lawyers objected, saying a narcoanalytic interview and a polygraph would violate their client's rights.

In the final version of the advisory, Sylvester said he had incorporated some suggestions from the defense and the prosecution, but he did not address the defense objections to a narcoanalytic interview and polygraph.

Karen Steinhauser, a former prosecutor who is a law professor at the University of Denver and a defense attorney, said she could not find any case law about use of the narcoanalytic interview.

"It comes up so rarely," she said, adding she knows nothing about it.

She noted the technique is clearly allowed by Colorado law.

------

Associated Press writer Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this report

Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist - Freedom fighter or criminal???

Last survivor of plot to kill Hitler dies at 90

By David Rising Associated Press Tue Mar 12, 2013 12:48 PM

BERLIN — As a 22-year-old German army lieutenant, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist volunteered to wear a suicide vest to a meeting with Adolf Hitler and to blow himself up along with the Nazi dictator.

The assassination didn’t come to pass, but von Kleist went on to play a key role in the most famous attempt on Hitler later that same year, and was the last surviving member of the group of German officers who tried and failed to kill the Fuehrer on July 20, 1944.

Von Kleist died Friday at age 90 at his home in Munich, his wife Gundula von Kleist told The Associated Press.

Von Kleist was born July 10, 1922, on his family estate Schmenzin in Pommerania in an area of northeastern Germany that is today Poland.

The von Kleist family was a long line of Prussian landowners, who had served the state for centuries in high-ranking military and administrative positions.

Von Kleist’s father, Ewald von Kleist, was an early opponent of Hitler even before he came to power, and was arrested many times after the Nazi dictator took control in 1933. The elder von Kleist famously traveled to England in 1938, the year before World War II broke out, to try and determine whether other Western nations would support a coup attempt against Hitler, but failed to get the British government to change its policy of appeasement.

Despite his family’s opposition to the Nazis, younger von Kleist joined the German army in 1940, and was wounded in 1943 in fighting on the Eastern Front.

During his convalescence, he was approached in January 1944 by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, another officer from an aristocratic family, and presented with a plan to kill Hitler. Von Kleist had been chosen as the officer to model a new uniform for Hitler, and von Stauffenberg proposed that he wear a suicide vest underneath, and detonate it when he stood next to the dictator.

Years later von Kleist remembered explaining the suicide plot to his father, who paused only briefly before telling his 22-year-old son: “Yes, you have to do this.”

“Fathers love their sons and mine certainly did, and I had been quite sure he would say no,” von Kleist recalled. “But, as always, I had underestimated him.”

The suicide attack plan never came to fruition.

Months later, however, von Kleist was approached again by von Stauffenberg to take part in what would become known as the July 20 plot — for the day in 1944 that the assassination was attempted — which was brought to the big screen in 2008 in “Valkyrie,” starring Tom Cruise as von Stauffenberg.

Von Kleist was supposed to play a key role as the person who was to carry a briefcase packed with explosives to a meeting with Hitler. In a change of plans, however, von Stauffenberg decided to plant the bomb himself.

Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was meeting with his aides and military advisers at his East Prussian headquarters. Hitler escaped the full force of the blast when someone moved the briefcase next to a table leg, deflecting much of the explosive force.

Von Kleist remained in Berlin, charged with overseeing the arrest of officers and officials loyal to Hitler in the city.

But when news spread that Hitler had survived, the plot crumbled and von Stauffenberg, von Kleist’s father, and scores of others were arrested and executed in an orgy of revenge killings. Some were hanged by the neck with piano wire. Von Stauffenberg was shot by firing squad.

Von Kleist himself was arrested, questioned at length by the Gestapo, and sent to a concentration camp, but then inexplicably let go and returned to combat duty.

Following the war, von Kleist founded the Ewald von Kleist publishing house, and became involved in public education on security issues and trans-Atlantic relations. In 1952 he founded the independent defense affairs association known as the Society for Military Studies, and the European Military Studies magazine in 1954.

In 1963 he founded what would become the annual Munich Security Conference — a forum that still today brings together the world’s top diplomats and defense officials, in an informal setting for talks on global security policy, and has long been considered the preeminent conference on NATO issues.

Von Kleist served as the conference’s moderator until 1998, before handing it over to Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s longtime foreign policy adviser Horst Teltschik, who has also since stepped down.

For his efforts leading the Munich Security Conference, von Kleist was awarded the U.S. Department of Defense’s Medal for Distinguished Public Service in 1991, its highest award for a civilian.

His other decorations include Germany’s Federal Order of Merit and France’s Officier de la Legion d’Honneur.

His wife said funeral services would be private.

“My husband didn’t want anything big,” she said.

How do you spell hypocrite - Gun grabber Mark Kelly

Source

Mark Kelly’s purchase of rifle draws criticism

Associated Press Tue Mar 12, 2013 4:50 PM

The husband of former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords generated nearly 4,000 comments on Facebook from people on both sides of the gun debate after he posted a photo of himself buying a military-style rifle — a purchase he made to demonstrate how easy it is to obtain the kind of firearms he’s lobbying Congress to ban.

A background check took only a matter of minutes to complete, Mark Kelly said in the Facebook post, adding that it’s scary to think people can buy similar guns without background checks at gun shows or on the Internet.

It didn’t take long for gun-rights supporters to accuse Kelly of being a hypocrite for buying an AR-15-style rifle and a 45.-caliber handgun. Many of the Facebook comments focused on his motivations and the rules for purchasing such guns.

Kelly and Giffords started a gun control advocacy group, Americans for Responsible Solutions, amid the wave of recent mass shootings. They have been touring the country in recent months in support of expanded background checks for gun purchases.

Kelly bought the guns at a Tucson shop the day before he appeared with his wife at the supermarket where she was wounded during a shooting rampage that left six dead and 12 others injured two years ago.

The public event last week was the first time the survivors had come together since the January 2011 shooting.

Giffords resigned from Congress last year as she continues to recover from her injuries.

The AR-15 is among 157 military-style weapons that would be banned under a bill pending before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Kelly, a former astronaut, said he intends to eventually hand in the rifle to Tucson police.

Doug MacKinlay is the owner of Diamondback Police Supply, the shop where Kelly bought the guns. He said Kelly bought the rifle on March 5 but couldn’t immediately take possession of it because the shop had bought it from a customer. As a result, the store is required by a Tucson ordinance to hold the gun for 20 days to give the city enough time to make sure the weapon wasn’t used in a crime, MacKinlay said.

MacKinlay said Kelly never revealed to the store’s staff why he was buying the guns and added that it would be wrong to refuse to sell a gun to someone because of their personal views.

“He is a U.S. citizen, an Arizona citizen and expressing his Second Amendment right to purchase and own a firearm,” MacKinlay said.

Todd Rathner, a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association’s affiliate in Arizona and a national NRA board member, questioned the point that Kelly was trying to make in buying the guns, saying a model citizen such as Kelly should be able to buy a gun relatively quickly. He also noted that such a purchase could have been a good investment as the value of those types of weapon soars amid heightened demand from gun owners.

“If you believe him, it’s a cheap publicity stunt,” Rathner said. “If you don’t, then he was speculating on the value of the rifle because he knew the prices would be inflated.”

The advocacy group started by Giffords and Kelly had no immediate comment Tuesday on Kelly’s gun buys.

But the group released a statement from Kelly on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s approval Tuesday of a proposal to expand federal firearms background checks to nearly all gun purchases. Kelly said the 10-8 vote was a huge step in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and mentally ill people. Kelly’s statement didn’t address the controversy over his own gun buys.

Kelly, a former astronaut who plans to keep the handgun, told CNN on Monday that it was important for him to have firsthand information on the ease of buying guns such as the AR-15 and that he looks forward to buying a firearm at a gun show in the future. Kelly and Giffords have long been supporters of gun rights and owned handguns themselves.

No separation of Church and State in Utah - Zion curtain stays up!!!

Utah lawmakers keep ‘Zion curtains’ in place

Associated Press Tue Mar 12, 2013 4:30 PM

SALT LAKE CITY — A measure that would have scaled back one of Utah’s offbeat liquor laws died in the state Legislature on Tuesday.

Lawmakers killed a proposal that would remove barriers in Utah restaurants that shield patrons from seeing servers mix and pour drinks. The Senate replaced the repeal with other minor liquor regulations in a preliminary vote of 24-2.

Republican Sen. John Valentine, of Orem, said the move to keep the barricades stemmed from lawmakers’ fear that taking them down would foster a bigger culture of drinking in Utah.

“We have restaurants. And we have bars,” Valentine said, emphasizing a clear distinction between the two. “And we do not want to foster the culture of alcohol in those restaurants.”

The barriers, known as “Zion curtains,” went up around the state in 2010. They materialized as part of a compromise after lawmakers lifted a requirement for bars to operate as members-only social clubs.

The curtains go back decades in the state’s history, and the nickname nods to Utah’s legacy as home to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The majority of Utah legislators and residents belong to the Mormon church, which teaches its members to abstain from alcohol.

A former incarnate of the barriers went up in the late 1960s in social clubs serving alcohol, and stood until the state legalized bars in 2009. Those former barriers took the form of glass walls separating customers from bartenders.

Opponents of today’s Zion curtains say the law forces restaurant owners to waste money and space on configurations to keep bartenders out of sight. Some construct wall-like barriers, and others put up strategically positioned service bars. Curtain opponents also say the law hinders tourism by annoying outsiders and reinforcing their perception of Utah as staunchly sober.

Rep. Ryan Wilcox, a Republican from Ogden, is one of those critics. He sponsored the bill to take down the barricades, saying the barrier rule treats new restaurant owners unfairly. The patchwork nature of Utah’s liquor laws, Wilcox contends, makes them difficult for the state to enforce.

Lawmakers replaced the measure to take down the barriers with a measure that includes a smaller step to ease up on liquor restrictions. The new bill would free up some of the state’s limited liquor licenses, which it restricts based on a population quotas, by creating a master liquor license for chain restaurants. It would allow them to hold one permit for multiple restaurants, rather than gobble up a license for each site.

The Senate is set to cast a final vote on the bill before it adjourns Thursday. After that, the governor would have to approve for it to become law.

No ethics for Phoenix City Council members???

Experts: Phoenix ethics rules for elected leaders lag

By Dustin Gardiner The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Mar 13, 2013 11:02 PM

Phoenix’s ethics rules for its elected leaders significantly lag the best practices of large U.S. cities, a task force of legal experts has found.

That’s the conclusion reached by a group of prominent attorneys and judges who spent four months reviewing the city’s ethics policies, also determining that Phoenix employees are often held to a “higher standard” than City Council members.

Topping the group’s list of concerns is Phoenix’s lack of a legal mechanism to investigate or sanction council members who potentially violate its conflict-of-interest or gift policies.

On Wednesday, former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, who led the task force, gave the critique to a subcommittee of City Council members. He said that “most levels of government,” including the state, already have processes to sanction elected officials through a vote of their peers.

“The area of greatest weakness is with the elected officials,” Romley said of the city’s ethics safeguards. “We were quite surprised that there was nothing in place (to enforce rules) on elected officials.”

Phoenix’s Ethics Review Task Force, which Mayor Greg Stanton created last fall, has released 27 recommendations to improve overall policies for elected officials, board members, employees and volunteers.

Perhaps the most controversial measure calls for the creation of an independent ethics commission to oversee investigations of potential violations by elected officials. Residents would have to approve the move through a ballot measure because it requires an amendment to the City Charter.

Task-force members said other shortcomings they found were inconsistencies between the city’s rules for elected officials and general employees, who can be fired or disciplined for violations.

For example, state laws restrict council members from participating in deals in which a relative’s involvement could present a conflict of interest. But employees are restricted from directly doing business with anyone with whom their relationship “may create the appearance of a conflict.”

Council members so far haven’t been overtly enthusiastic about the task force’s recommendations. Wednesday’s subcommittee praised the group’s work but wanted more time to mull the issue before deciding whether to advance it to the full council for a vote.

“I know that from experience it sounds simple, but it’s not,” Councilwoman Thelda Williams said. “Ethics is kind of a personal perception for me and most people, I truly believe.”

Councilmen Daniel Valenzuela said he supports the aim of the task force but wants to ensure there’s no ambiguity in defining “unprofessional conduct” of elected officials, which could be investigated by the ethics panel. He said he does not want it to become an “overused tool” for tarnishing city leaders.

Romley said the task force hopes the council will approve the recommendations and convene another group to flesh out guidelines for elected officials.

“The City Council has the opportunity to walk the walk,” said Ernest Calderon, a task- force member and longtime Phoenix attorney. “I believe that the citizens of Phoenix don’t want a good council. They want a great council.”

Meanwhile, Stanton told The Arizona Republic that he will not take a stance on the specific recommendations until the subcommittee acts, though he supports the overall message.

Although the lack of a way to investigate council ethics violations was the task force’s main concern, it seeks other changes. Other key recommendations:

Require elected officials and board members to report within 48 hours gifts, including food, that exceed $50. Gifts that create an appearance of undue influence or conflict of interest would be banned entirely.

Create a uniform gift policy that applies to elected officials and employees, banning gifts that create an appearance of undue influence and gifts of entertainment, such as tickets to sporting or cultural events.

Establish ethics policies for the use of social media by elected officials and employees. These policies would likely vary for the two groups.

Conduct a city review and update of ethics policies at least every four years. The city’s policies haven’t been updated since 2005.

VA suppresses and manipulates health data???

Researcher alleges VA covered up adverse consequences to toxic exposures

Now if the US. Veterans Administration is going to do this don't you think that other government agencies like the DEA and FDA are also going to do it???

Source

Researcher alleges VA covered up adverse consequences to toxic exposures

Posted by Steve Vogel on March 13, 2013 at 3:04 pm

A senior epidemiologist for the Department of Veterans Affairs who resigned in December told a congressional committee Wednesday that the agency has covered up data showing adverse consequences for veterans who were exposed to toxic materials from burn pits and other environmental hazards in Iraq, Afghanistan and the first Gulf War.

Steven S. Coughlin testified that he resigned from the VA’s Office of Public Health in December “because of serious ethical concerns” about the agency’s conduct, which he said included not releasing study results that point to a connection between environmental exposures and illnesses.

“On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible,” Coughlin said in his testimony to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs’ oversight and Investigations subcommittee.

Coughlin said during his work studying the relationship between exposure to burn pits and asthma and bronchitis among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, his supervisor told him not to look at data regarding hospitalizations and doctors’ visits.

“When I advised him I did not want to continue as a co-investigator under these circumstances, he threatened me,” Coughlin said.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki has directed the Office of Research Oversight to review the allegations, according to the VA.

“Research on the health of Gulf War Veterans has been and continues to be a priority for VA,” the agency said in a statement. “The Department depends on this research to inform our decisions and guide our efforts in caring for Gulf War Veterans. All allegations of malfeasance are taken seriously and are investigated fully.”

During the hearing, several speakers said the VA has been slow to clearly acknowledge research that has validated Gulf War illnesses as a serious medical condition.

“There are many examples large and small of the VA minimizing Gulf War illness,” said Lea Steele, a professor of biomedical studies and director of the Veterans Health Research Program at Baylor University.

Victoria Davey, chief officer for the VA’s Office of Public Health and Environmental Hazards, told the subcommittee that the department takes the ailment seriously.

“We do not believe it is psychological,” she said.

VA doctor: Health data suppressed, manipulated

VA doctor: Health data suppressed, manipulated

By Patricia Kime - Staff writer

Posted : Wednesday Mar 13, 2013 21:25:01 EDT

The Veterans Affairs Department has suppressed and manipulated data that would support claims from Iraq, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf veterans that they’ve contracted illnesses from environmental pollution while serving in theatre, a high-level whistleblower told a House Veterans Affairs panel on Wednesday.

Dr. Steven Coughlin, an epidemiologist formerly with the VA’s Office of Public Health, told the House Veterans Oversight Committee that when results of research he conducted didn’t gel with unwritten department policies on the health consequences of oil-well fires, burn pits, pesticides, nerve agents and other pollutants, the information disappeared.

“This applies to data regarding adverse health consequences of environmental exposures, such as burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and toxic exposures in the Gulf War. On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible,” Coughlin said.

Coughlin worked on two large population studies for VA, including a Gulf War study and the National Health Study of a New Generation before he resigned in protest last December over the handling of his work, he said.

Coughlin’s laundry list of charges against the Office of Public Health also included the loss of data from a congressionally-mandated study on Gulf War family members and the failure of VA to reach out to 2,000 participants of the New Generation survey who, in the course of the survey, said they’d experienced suicidal thoughts in the weeks preceding the survey.

“Some of those veterans are now homeless or deceased,” he charged.

Coughlin was not alone in testifying that VA is failing to serve Gulf War veterans and their successors.

Similar to the government’s long battle against acknowledging the health consequences of Vietnam veterans’ exposure to Agent Orange, VA still “ignores the science of research” into Gulf War Illness that it is a serious medical condition with neurological and physical components, said Lea Steele, a professor of biomedicine at Baylor University.

She said VA’s survey of 30,000 Gulf War veterans included scores of questions on psychological stress, substance abuse and alternative medicine but none on basic symptoms of the illness, which include memory and processing difficulties, pain, fatigue and digestive disorders.

“This pattern of chronic symptoms has been well documented. … We also know that Gulf War Illness is not a stress-induced or psychiatric disorder,” Steele said.

About a third of the nearly 700,000 U.S. troops who deployed to Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1991 suffer from an array of symptoms of unknown origin. Once referred to as Gulf War Syndrome, it now commonly is known as Gulf War Illness, although the Institute of Medicine and Veterans Affairs call it Chronic Multisymptom Illness.

Coughlin told the panel that the VA’s obfuscation of data includes information on troops who deployed in the past decade. He said he was asked to include additional information when compiling tables to downplay the prevalence of respiratory illnesses like asthma and chronic bronchitis in those who served near open air burn pits.

“I urge you to initiate legislation to cure the epidemic of serious ethical problems in the VA’s Office of Public Health,” Coughlin told the congressional oversight committee.

VA officials did not respond directly to the explosive allegations. Victoria Davey, chief officer for public health at the Veterans Health Administration testified that the department has a 22-year history of treating Gulf War veterans and is committed to serving those with Gulf War Illness.

“Veterans with CMI, like all veterans enrolled in VA care, receive personalized, proactive patient-centered care,” she said.

She added that VA’s three War-Related Illness and Injury Study Centers provide specialized care tailored specifically to individual patients. More than 130,000 Gulf War veterans have received health exams under the department’s Gulf War registry program, Davey said.

Rep. Michael Coffman, R-Colo., subcommittee chair and retired a Marine who served in the Gulf War, promised further investigation.

“I find the conduct of the Veterans Administration embarrassing on this issue in terms of their treatment. If there were any Gulf War veterans in senior positions at VA, I don’t’ think we’d be here today,” he said.

Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War veteran who serves in an advisory capacity with the congressionally directed Gulf War Illness Research Medical Program, said new laws are needed to force VA to release findings, improve research and ensure that affected veterans receive the benefits and treatment they rate.

“Help right these ongoing wrongs, including comprehensive legislation and criminal sanctions for such behavior,” Hardie, who suffers from ongoing ailments related to service, said.

Researcher says officials covered up vets' health data

Researcher says officials covered up vets' health data

Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY5:52p.m. EDT March 13, 2013

WASHINGTON — Department of Veterans Affairs officials purposely manipulate or hide data that would support the claims of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to prevent paying costly benefits, a former VA researcher told a House subcommittee Wednesday.

"If the studies produce results that do not support the office of public health's unwritten policy, they do not release them," said Steven Coughlin, a former epidemiologist in the VA's public health department.

"This applies to data regarding adverse health consequences of environmental exposures, such as burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and toxic exposures in the Gulf War," Coughlin said. "On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible."

Coughlin testified before the House Committee on Veterans Affairs that VA routinely minimizes research that would bolster the claims of veterans suffering from the series of symptoms associated with Gulf War illness, as well as health issues linked to exposure to large burn pits and dust in Iraq.

Victoria Davey, chief officer of VA's office of public health and environmental hazards, told the committee that veterans receive personalized, proactive care. She did not directly address critics' accusations, and instead talked about the VA's care for veterans and the "cutting-edge" research it has conducted.

Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., and a Marine who served during 1991 war, called VA's handling of Gulf War illness "embarrassing." He asked VA why they changed Congress's charge to ask the IOM to do research on treatments, to which she said VA let the experts decide what should be looked at. He also asked why VA had spent money meant for Gulf War vets on other programs, but Davey said she was not prepared to respond to that question.

"If you had anyone on your panel who was a Gulf war vet, I don't think we'd be here today," Coffman said.

Lea Steele, a researcher at the Veterans Health Research Program at Baylor University, backed Coughlin's claims, saying, "In some sectors within VA, there appears to be backward movement."

Steele also charged that VA has used money meant for Gulf War illness to fund other programs. For example, $1 million went to a Lou Gehrig's disease post-mortem brain bank. The majority of samples are not from Gulf War vets, she said.

VA spent $120 million on Gulf War illness, but just five programs focused on treatments, and two of those were for psychiatric care.

"Studies consistently show Gulf War illness is not due to war trauma," she said. She told the committee that VA has not managed an effective program.

Coughlin's allegations echo previous cases in which the VA was slow to respond to health problems in veterans, ranging from exposure to the chemical defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, to Gulf War illness, to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2010, Coughlin participated in a study of recent veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan that linked exposure to burn pits to greater incidences of asthma or bronchitis. His request to see their medical records was denied, Coughlin said, and the results of the study were never published.

"I was very concerned they were withholding data or misleading people," he told USA TODAY. "I don't want to speculate about why."

Coughlin said a 2012 panel of outside experts hired to help the Institute of Medicine study neurological connections to Gulf War illness was stacked in favor of those who believed the disease is psychological.

"There was no one to present the opposing side — that it's neurological," Coughlin said. "Science is self-correcting, but if people don't publish data that doesn't support an opposing hypothesis, then it's a huge problem."

The IOM research included veterans from the past 20 years, rather than just Gulf War veterans, and "lumped" their symptoms together, according to Steele. Bernard Rosof, head of the IOM committee, said they found no one cause to what they called "chronic multisymptom illness," and that there was no one treatment for all of those veterans.

Steele agreed that VA excluded data from the research, and that it was "akin to medical malpractice."

It's doubly important because today's veterans are coming back with the same symptoms as the Gulf War veterans did, he said.

"Anything that supports the position that Gulf War illness is a neurological condition is unlikely to ever be published," Coughlin said.

Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War veteran and appointed member of the Congressionally Directed Gulf War Illness Research Medical Program, said Coughlin's testimony confirms what veterans have been saying for years.

"There are staff within VA who are working against Gulf War veterans," Hardie said. "It puts focus on the specifics and details on the generalities that were already clear."

Hardie said he knows and respects VA Chief of Staff John Gingrich, and he feels, based on Coughlin's testimony, that Gingrich was lied to by his staff. Those people should be "punished with criminal sanctions," he said.

"I hope there's a shake-up at VA," said Hardie, who has been completely disabled by Gulf War illness. "I hope the leadership takes this seriously."

Coughlin will also testify that after a study determined that more than 2,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans said they had considered suicide during the previous two weeks, no VA official had reached out to them.

"Some of them are now deceased or homeless," Coughlin said. "No one reached out to them to see how they could help them."

Coughlin said he complained about the veterans' treatment to his supervisor, who did nothing. He then took the matter to the VA's inspector general, who decided not to pursue the case.

After the 1991 Gulf War, a series of research reports raised concerns that the veterans' children were more likely to be born with defects, and that veterans' spouses were also becoming ill. Congress mandated that the VA maintain a registry of Gulf War veterans' family members. The data has never been released, and Coughlin said he has "been advised that these results have been permanently lost."

He said his supervisors told VA's chief of staff that restructuring a survey for Gulf War veterans so it did not focus on psychosomatic issues would cost more than $1 million and delay the study for a year — neither of which was true.

Coughlin said he was told to retract his claims and admit that he had made a mistake.

He refused, adding that he kept a document trail of e-mails and reports to support his claims. "I thought, 'I don't want to work for these people,' so I left."

Coughlin, who was a senior cancer epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the director of the public health ethics program at Tulane University, said continuing to work for the VA was "against my conscience."

Whistleblower: VA Hiding Veteran Health Data

Whistleblower: VA Hiding Veteran Health Data

Mar 14, 2013

Military.com

by Bryant Jordan

A former epidemiologist for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs told lawmakers on Wednesday that the agency’s Office of Public Health buries or obscures research findings on veterans exposed to environmental toxins and hazards going as far back as the Persian Gulf War.

Steven Coughlin, who had worked more than four years for the VA before quitting over “serious ethical concerns” in December, said in testimony that leadership in the agency’s public health office did not want to find or reveal evidence that Gulf War illness and other sicknesses were linked to troops’ military experience.

"On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible,” he told the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Coughlin said his former office never released findings of a $10 million study that produced data on 60,000 Iraq and Afghan war vets – of which up to 30 percent were Gulf War vets – that revealed exposures to pesticides, oil well fires and more.

He said the results of a congressionally mandated study on Gulf War veterans and their family members also was never released, and claims he was advised that “these results have been permanently lost.”

“Anything that supports the position that Gulf War illness is a neurological condition is unlikely to ever be published,” he said. One of Couglin’s former supervisors, Dr. Aaron Schneiderman, threatened retaliation against him after he balked at the idea of deliberately leaving out certain relevant data in a research project, Coughlin said.

Victoria Davey, chief of the VA’s public health and environmental hazards office, told lawmakers that the office follows strict guidelines in analyzing and publishing its work. However, but she never directly addressed Coughlin’s allegations.

In a statement released after the hearing on Wednesday, the VA said VA Secretary Erik Shinseki has ordered the VA’s Office of Research Oversight to review Coughlin’s claims, including the alleged threat.

Any retaliation against VA employees is against the law and is not tolerated, the statement said.

“The Department of Veterans Affairs has a decade’s long history of conducting world-class research studies that meet accepted and rigorous scientific standards,” the statement read. “All allegations of malfeasance are taken seriously and are investigated fully.

Coughlin said Schneiderman told him not to look at data regarding hospitalizations and doctors’ visits while he was working on research into the health effects of burn pits on troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have reported serious respiratory problems that they believe are connected to inhaling smoke from the massive trash burn pits found in combat zones.

Coughlin told the House panel that when he said he did not want to continue in the project under those conditions, Schneiderman threatened him.

As with Vietnam veterans before them, large numbers of Gulf War veterans became ill in the years following the 1991 war. Those Gulf War veterans were told their problems were psychological.

The VA has said it does recognize there are health issues associated with Gulf War service, and notes that Shinseki formed a task force to conduct a comprehensive review of VA programs to help improve care and services for Gulf War vets.

The VA says in 2010 it recognized nine diseases linked to experience in the Gulf War.

According to Lea Steele, an epidemiologist with the Institute of Biomedical Studies at Baylor University, the VA still has serious problems in its approach – and funding – of Gulf War research.

She told Congress on Wednesday that scientific advances over the past 10 years have provided important insights into Gulf War illness. Steele has been studying Gulf War illness since 1998.

“After so many years of waiting, there is finally some hope for Gulf War veterans,” she said. “Hope that they will have answers that are long overdue and hope that treatments will be found that can meaningfully improve their health and their lives.”

“What is not acceptable is federal research that is poorly informed, based on notions developed in the early years after the Gulf War rather than on the scientific evidence now available,” she said.

VA has reportedly spent $120 million over the past decade on Gulf War illness research, but some of that money never went to Gulf War research, Steele said.

In one instance, $10 million was earmarked for something called a “Gulf War Biorepository Trust” that had nothing to do with Gulf War veterans. It was, instead, used to fund a brain bank for veterans who had ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

As of 2010, only one of the 60 brains in the brain bank had come from a Gulf War veteran, Steele said. The others were those of older veterans.

VA Covered Up Data on Mental Health

Whistleblower: Veterans Affairs Covered Up Data on Mental Health, Gulf War Syndrome

Mar 13, 2013 1:09 PM EDT

A former Veterans Affairs researcher turned whistleblower tells Congress the department repeatedly withheld data on Gulf War syndrome and neglected suicidal vets. Jamie Reno reports.

The Department of Veterans Affairs routinely disseminated false information about the health of America’s veterans, withheld research showing a link between nerve gas and Gulf War syndrome, rushed studies out the door without taking recommended fixes by an independent board, and failed to offer crucial care to veterans who came forward as suicidal.

These are the allegations of Steven Coughlin, an epidemiologist who worked at the VA’s Office of Public Health until he resigned last year, citing “serious ethical issues.” On Wednesday Coughlin will testify at a congressional hearing on the health of Gulf War veterans.

“What I saw [at VA] was both embarrassing and astonishing. I couldn’t stay any longer,” says Coughlin, who left the VA in December, just four and a half years into the job.

Coughlin was previously associate professor of epidemiology and director of the program in public-health ethics at Tulane University and is a former chair of the writing group that prepared the ethics guidelines for the American College of Epidemiology.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Coughlin said that whenever he spoke out about any alleged unethical activity, his bosses “intimidated and admonished” him. He says they first tried to silence him after he spoke out about a major health study of 60,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Coughlin believed that the nearly 2,000 subjects who self-identified as suicidal should have been checked up on afterward by mental-health clinicians. Instead, he says, the researchers interviewed them and moved on.

Coughlin says his supervisors also frequently “obscured the facts” about the impact of toxic exposures on troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the causes of Gulf War illness.

“Many of those veterans are now homeless or deceased,” he says. “It’s very unfortunate. My supervisors did all they could to block my efforts.”

After getting nowhere with his superiors, Coughlin says, he contacted the chairman of the VA’s Institutional Review Board and the VA inspector-general to request that the study be put on hold until his supervisors could identify clinicians to call back suicidal veterans.

“That’s when all hell broke loose,” he says. “My supervisors tried to remove me from the study, and I received a written admonition. It was shocking. All I was trying to do was help ensure the safety of the veterans participating in our study.”

Coughlin says he was unsuccessful in getting OPH to address the problem in the study of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, but he managed to incorporate clinician callbacks in a separate Gulf War survey, and he says those calls “saved lives.”

The VA declined to comment specifically for this story, but in a statement released Wednesday, it said the department has a "decades long history of conducting world-class research studies that meet accepted and rigorous scientific standards." The statement, which noted that "all allegations of malfeasance are taken seriously and are investigated fully," also said that the Obama Administration in 2010 recognized nine new diseases as associated with Gulf War Illness.

"VA agrees with Gulf War veterans that there are health issues associated with service in the Gulf War," the statement read. "That is why Secretary (Eric) Shinseki formed a Task Force to conduct a comprehensive review of VA's programs to help improve the care and services we provide to Gulf War Veterans. We will continue to learn and examine ways to improve treatment, process claims, and better care for these veterans.”

Coughlin says his supervisors also frequently “obscured the facts” about the impact of toxic exposures on troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the causes of Gulf War illness, which afflicted as many as 250,000 veterans, according to the Institute of Medicine.

While the cause of Gulf War illness has been debated for years, a number of peer-reviewed scientific studies have concluded that it is a neurological condition caused by exposure to nerve gas, pesticides, and other toxic elements.

However, says Coughlin, “the people I worked for refuse to release any information to the public that reaches that conclusion. They insist on holding on to the outdated theory that Gulf War illness is psychosomatic.”

He says there is VA data on adverse health consequences of toxic exposures in the Gulf War that “the public has never seen, and I’m sure will never see.”

He says his supervisors paid the Institute of Medicine $1 million to review the latest literature on Gulf War illness, but the first five outside experts they invited to the IOM committee all reported that it was psychiatric and not neurological. “This understandably outraged Gulf War advocates,” Coughlin says. “It was so obviously biased.”

Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War veteran and advocate who will also be testifying at the congressional hearing, tells The Daily Beast that Coughlin’s story “only confirms what Gulf War veterans have believed all along: this cabal of federal bureaucrats and contractors who continue to obfuscate, manipulate, and lie remain a serious obstacle to ill Gulf War veterans’ legitimate quest for treatments and justice.”

Coughlin says the OPH’s 2009–10 National Health Study of a New Generation of U.S. Veterans, which targeted 60,000 post-9/11 veterans, cost $10 million, plus the salaries of those who worked on it. He says 20 percent to 30 percent of these veterans were also Gulf War veterans, and the study produced data regarding their exposures to pesticides, oil-well fires, and pyridostigmine-bromide pills.

OPH never released any data from the study, or even the fact that it exists, Coughlin says. The VA’s official position on pyridostigmine-bromide pills, which the Department of Defense says Gulf War veterans took as protection against nerve gas, did not cause Gulf War illness. But a 2008 study by Beatrice Golomb at the University of California, San Diego, “thoroughly, conclusively shows that this class of chemicals actually are a cause of illness in Gulf War veterans.”

Coughlin also says the OHP released a major survey on Gulf War veterans without fixing it as recommended by the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, which was mandated by Congress in 2002. Coughlin says his supervisors told the VA that implementing the fixes would cost the government $1 million and delay the study for a year or longer.

“None of this was true. It would not have cost nearly that much to restart the study,” Coughlin says. “But as a result of the false statements made by my supervisors, the chief of staff ordered the survey to proceed without the changes.”

Coughlin says he’ll ask Congress to initiate legislation to cure the “epidemic” of ethical problems at the OPH and urge the committee to direct the VA to identify procedures to ensure that veterans who participate in large-scale epidemiologic studies receive appropriate follow-up care to prevent possible suicides.

“The VA is the nation’s largest health-care provider, and these large studies cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and are so important to veterans’ health,” says Coughlin, who is currently looking for another job. “My only motivation for coming forward is to help veterans. That’s the only reason I paid for my own flight to come to Washington. I think the attention from the House committee and the media will lead to positive changes. It will hopefully help veterans.”

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Jamie Reno, an award-winning correspondent for Newsweek for 17 years, has also written for The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, People, Men’s Journal, ESPN, Los Angeles Times, TV Guide, MSNBC, Newsmax, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Today. Reno, who’s won more than 85 writing awards, was the lead reporter on a Newsweek series on the 9/11 terrorist attacks that earned him and his colleagues the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the highest award in magazine journalism. Reno, who’s also an acclaimed author, singer-songwriter, and 15-year cancer survivor, lives in San Diego with his wife, Gabriela, and their daughter, Mandy.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Bill Montgomery wants to run all the Mexicans out of Arizona???

Is county attorney unfair to undocumented? (Would you care if he was?)

Last week the local Hispanic Bar Association sent a scathing 12-page letter to Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery that began with this bold, aggressive and completely inaccurate proclamation: “The community will no longer tolerate the unequal treatment of undocumented Latino workers that are arrested, detained and prosecuted in Maricopa County.”

It’s a nice thought.

But from what I have seen over the past 30 years, our otherwise lovely community has absolutely NO problem with the unequal treatment of undocumented Latino workers. If anything, a majority of those living in the county where Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been elected six times don’t believe undocumented Latino workers have any rights.

They do, of course.

And the attorneys from the Hispanic Bar Association, called Los Abogados, want to make sure they are protected. Not just for the workers, but for all of us.

“The law is for everyone,” said the group’s president, Gaetano “Guy” Testini.

The lawyers’ group says the county attorney unfairly prosecutes undocumented immigrants by making “plea offers that guarantee a non-citizen’s deportation from the United States and denies them their day in Immigration Court.”

They do so, the group believes, by charging undocumented immigrants with Class 4 felonies tied to forgery and identity theft statutes. They point out that defendants often are charged with multiple counts with presumptive sentences of 2½ years per count. This practically forces a defendant to accept a plea.

“Therefore,” the letter to Montgomery says, “as you are well award, plea agreements for one count of forgery amount to automatic deportation… “

Again, most people in Maricopa County, and in Arizona, would have no problem with this.

A politically ambitious guy like Montgomery understands that reality.

Still, the Hispanic lawyers are hoping to make their case.

“We think this is important,” Testini told me. “And we’re in a position to approach things a little differently than other groups with civil rights concerns. We speak about the legal aspects. We don’t believe this situation is fair.”

Why not?

One comparative example they cite is underage drinkers.

In their letter, the lawyers say, “Legally speaking, persons who provide fake identification for any unlawful purpose, including underage adults attempting to buy alcohol or enter a bar, have committed fraud.”

Since it is often a fraud charge facing undocumented immigrants they add, “Consider the harsh and unequal punishment that is being applies to different classes of individuals for the same underlying conduct.”

Testini added, “We don’t believe for a minute that an underage kid trying to by a drink should be charged with a felony. But we don’t believe that a lot of undocumented workers should be charged with felonies, either.”

The lawyers also question why employers are not being prosecuted.

And they say in their letter that Montgomery’s policy “exceeds its authority as a state law enforcement agency.”

Testini said that the county attorney has sent him an e-mail promising to address the group’s concerns. Montgomery’s spokesman told me the same thing, saying, “The County Attorney is in communication with Los Abogados on the issues raised in their letter. Nothing to share with media on this at the present time.”

Testini added, “To his (Montgomery’s) credit, he has an open door to us and allows us to speak with him about these issues. Andrew Thomas (the previous county attorney) wasn’t that way. But the problem is this: Is the open door just a rotating door where you go round and round but nothing changes? We’re hoping that he’ll really look at our concerns and do something.”

I wouldn’t count on it.

Testini admits that fairness is a tough sell when speaking about undocumented immigrants.

“Even with the kids who would be part of the Dream Act you don’t see a lot of support,” he said. “That’s just a shame. So it is even tougher with undocumented workers. But this is about the law, which is supposed to be applied equally to everyone.”

That’s true.

But we all know where we live.

In their letter, the lawyers suggest that Montgomery’s policy is political and meant to “cater to the overwhelming anti-immigrant sentiment in Arizona.”

Really? Ya think?

Alameda County Supervisor Nadia Lockyer - a meth freak???

Source

California Treasurer Bill Lockyer calls off divorce from Nadia Lockyer, who's done with meth rehab

By Josh Richman

jrichman@bayareanewsgroup.com

Posted: 03/14/2013 08:56:24 AM PDT

California state Treasurer Bill Lockyer's differences with his estranged wife, former Alameda County Supervisor Nadia Lockyer, might not be so irreconcilable after all.

Tom Dresslar, Bill Lockyer's spokesman, said the 71-year-old mainstay of state Democratic politics this week withdrew divorce papers he had filed last July against his 41-year-old wife, whose methamphetamine addiction and extramarital affair ended her political career and could have stained his.

"He and Nadia have agreed to try and work things out, to try and reconcile," Dresslar said. "He's proud of the progress she has made in her treatment, and they are both looking forward and not backward."

Nadia Lockyer recently finished a 180-day residential drug treatment program she had entered after her Aug. 28 arrest in Orange County. Police were tipped that she had drugs in the home where she was staying with her 9-year-old son, Diego. Officers found a tube of aluminum foil with a burned end, and when they met Lockyer later that day she showed signs of being under the influence of drugs.

She was charged with felony methamphetamine possession and three misdemeanors: being under the influence of a controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia, and child abuse and endangerment.

She's scheduled for a court appearance Thursday morning in Santa Ana; her attorney, Allan Stokke, last week said that she's "doing just fine" and that the judge has been happy with her progress.

Nadia Lockyer early last year claimed Stephen Chikhani of San Jose had attacked her in a Newark hotel room, but the state Justice Department investigated and eventually declined to charge him with any crime. As details emerged about Lockyer's lengthy affair with Chikhani and their drug use, she resigned her Alameda County supervisorial seat last April.

Bill Lockyer had filed for divorce in July in Alameda County Superior Court, citing "irreconcilable differences" and seeking joint physical and legal custody of their son. After Nadia Lockyer's August arrest, a judge ruled she could see their son, but only under her estranged husband's supervision. The boy has been living with his father in Hayward.

"All the decisions that Bill makes with regards to his marriage are made with Diego's best interests in mind," Dresslar said.

Bill Lockyer — who served for 25 years in the Legislature, two terms as state attorney general and now is in his second term as state treasurer — is a formidable fundraiser who transferred $1.5 million from his own campaign coffers to his wife's, letting her swamp rivals for a Board of Supervisors seat in a blizzard of direct mail and advertising in 2010.

It was Nadia Lockyer during that supervisorial campaign that Nadia Lockyer met Chikhani at a chemical-dependency program and began her relationship with him, she said in an exclusive interview with the Bay Area News Group last April. She was dealing with chronic pain and wasn't an addict then, she said.

Bill Lockyer has formed a campaign committee to run for state controller in 2014. He has more than $2.2 million banked.

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton is a gun grabber???

Source

Phoenix Mayor Stanton outlines aggressive plan to fight gun violence

By Dustin Gardiner and Amy B Wang The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Mar 1, 2013 4:42 PM

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton on Thursday outlined an aggressive plan to combat violence in the city, vowing to stage what he called the largest gun buyback in Arizona history and double the number of police officers in schools citywide.

The mayor’s comments during his second State of the City speech stoked the debate over firearm safety a month after a string of deadly shootings killed four people and thrust Phoenix into the national news.

“Recently, we have felt pain and grief too often and too deeply,” Stanton said, naming several shooting victims, including a lawyer and businessman. “Violence has no place in our city.”

Police Chief Daniel V. Garcia said Phoenix will destroy the guns, an approach often criticized by gun-rights groups. A state law that took effect in August is designed to prohibit Arizona police agencies from destroying weapons they confiscate, but Garcia said the law does not apply to voluntary gun buybacks.

Jennifer Longdon, a gun-violence survivor who is paralyzed from a spinal cord injury, was sitting in the audience for Stanton’s speech. She wrote on Facebook that she began to sob “like a baby” when he made the announcement.

“Every gun we take off the streets is one gun that won’t rob a son like mine of his healthy, able-bodied mother,” wrote Longdon, who uses a wheelchair. “I wonder how different my life would be if I had been attacked by knives or bats or fists. (Guns) do damage that no other tool or weapon can ever hope to inflict.”

Stanton noted the politics surrounding such a hotly contested issue — his speech instantaneously sparked protests from gun-rights advocates on social media. He said the buyback effort would make the city safer without curtailing the Second Amendment rights of responsible gun owners.

“Why risk the controversy?” Stanton asked. “Because I respect Chief Garcia, who told me, ‘Every unwanted gun we take off the street is one less gun out there to harm our officers or hurt our residents.’”

Gun violence and school safety were just a piece of Stanton’s speech, which focused on Phoenix’s need to develop a modern, diverse economy that can weather the ups and downs of the real-estate market. He spoke about other familiar hurdles: building a vibrant downtown, larger transit system and skilled workforce.

But the emphasis on gun violence was the mayor’s boldest new policy initiative debuted for the year ahead. It will likely continue to draw jeers from some right-leaning leaders who view buybacks as an ineffective tool for reducing violence.

“These criminals are really going to be running down there to turn in their guns for a Safeway card,” joked Charles Heller, spokesman for the Arizona Citizens Defense League, a non-profit that advocates for gun rights. “What the city of Phoenix is doing is interfering in the market.”

The buyback program, a partnership between Phoenix police and the non-profit Arizonans for Gun Safety, allows residents to drop off unwanted weapons with no questions asked. The effort is being funded with $100,000 from an anonymous donor, Stanton said.

Police officers will host the buybacks every Saturday during May, except Memorial Day weekend. The city will return stolen guns to their owners, and the police will keep those they suspect were used in a crime for investigation.

The program will compensate gun owners for their weapons, but officials have not yet determined the form and amount of payment. With past buybacks in Phoenix, Garcia said owners typically received about $100 per firearm.

Stanton also announced a new school-safety program that seeks to double the number of police officers in public, private and charter schools across the city.

“Education can only succeed if kids feels safe at school,” Stanton said, adding that he and Garcia had met with Phoenix-area superintendents and other education leaders earlier in the week. “We heard them loud and clear. The risk of school violence is one we cannot take.”

Under the program, each Phoenix police precinct commander would meet with superintendents in their district at least twice a year. The plan also proposes that districts hire off-duty police officers to patrol their schools as “school safety officers,” less expensive alternatives to traditional school-resource officers.

“We don’t need Steven Seagal to keep our kids safe,” said Stanton, a jab at Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who recently announced that the action star would help train his volunteer posse to patrol schools.

According to the city, school-safety officers would cost less than half of what traditional resource officers would — about $42,000 per year to staff a high school and $35,000 a year to staff a middle or elementary school. These costs would include coverage for seven hours a day, five days a week. That sounds like an outright LIE!!!!! Most Phoenix area police officers start at about $50,000 a year, which is about $25/hr, before benefits. And of course many cops make $100,000 or more a year, before you add in the benefits.]

Like traditional school-resource officers, school-safety officers would be responsible for monitoring student activity, training staff on safety mandates and enforcing criminal laws on campus. [Do we really need a FULL TIME cop on every high school and elementary school campus who is making between $50,000 and $100,000 a year before benefits to enforce the law??? I doubt it. Even if we do need one we could certainly get by with a rent-a-cop that is being paid $10 an hour, instead of a full time Phoenix police officer who is being paid between $25 and $75 an hour]

“This is no-nonsense community policing — boots on the ground ... We need real cops doing real police work,” Stanton said. [And real police work is NOT handcuffing 10 year olds for chewing bubble gum or talking in class. Real police work is hunting down dangerous criminals, something these Phoenix police officers who are working at their cushy school resource officer job won't be doing]

US citing security to censor more public records

US citing security to censor more public records, analysis finds

Published March 11, 2013

Associated Press

The U.S. government, led by the Pentagon and CIA, censored in the name of national security files that the public requested last year under the Freedom of Information Act more often than at any time since President Barack Obama took office, according to a new analysis by The Associated Press.

Overall, the Obama administration last year answered its highest number of requests so far for copies of government documents, emails, photographs and more, and it slightly reduced its backlog of requests from previous years. But it more often cited legal provisions allowing the government to keep records or parts of its records secret, especially a rule intended to protect national security.

The AP's analysis showed the government released all or portions of the information that citizens, journalists, businesses and others sought at about the same rate as the previous three years. It turned over all or parts of the records in about 65 percent of requests. It fully rejected more than one-third of requests, a slight increase over 2011, including cases when it couldn't find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was determined to be improper.

The government's responsiveness under the FOIA is widely viewed as a barometer of the federal offices' transparency. Under the law, citizens and foreigners can compel the government to turn over copies of federal records for zero or little cost. Anyone who seeks information through the law is generally supposed to get it unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose business secrets or confidential decision-making in certain areas.

The AP's review comes at the start of the second term for Obama, who promised during his first week in office that the nation's signature open-records law would be "administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails." The review examined figures from the largest federal departments and agencies. Sunday was the start of Sunshine Week, when news organizations promote open government and freedom of information.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement that during the past year, the government "processed more requests, decreased the backlog, improved average processing times and disclosed more information pro-actively." Schultz said the improvements "represent the efforts of agencies across the government to meet the president's commitment to openness. While there is more work to be done, this past year demonstrates that agencies are responding to the president's call for greater transparency."

In a year of intense public interest over deadly U.S. drones, the raid that killed Usama bin Laden, terror threats and more, the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times — a jump over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in Obama's first year in office. The secretive CIA last year became even more secretive: Nearly 60 percent of 3,586 requests for files were withheld or censored for that reason last year, compared with 49 percent a year earlier.

Other federal agencies that invoked the national security exception included the Pentagon, Director of National Intelligence, NASA, Office of Management and Budget, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Communications Commission and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice, State, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.

U.S. courts are loath to overrule the administration whenever it cites national security. A federal judge, Colleen McMahon of New York, in January ruled against The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union to see records about the government's legal justification for drone attacks and other methods it has used to kill terrorism suspects overseas, including American citizens. She cited an "Alice in Wonderland" predicament in which she was expected to determine what information should be revealed but unable to challenge the government's secrecy claim. Part of her ruling was sealed and made available only to the government's lawyers.

"I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules — a veritable Catch-22," the judge wrote. "I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret."

The AP could not determine whether the administration was abusing the national security exemption or whether the public was asking for more documents about sensitive subjects. Nearly half the Pentagon's 2,390 denials last year under that clause came from the National Security Agency, which monitors Internet traffic and phone calls worldwide.

"FOIA is an imperfect law, and I don't think that's changed over the last four years since Obama took office," said Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney for its national security project. "We've seen a meteoric rise in the number of claims to protect secret law, the government's interpretations of laws or its understanding of its own authority. In some ways, the Obama administration is actually even more aggressive on secrecy than the Bush administration."

The Obama administration also more frequently invoked the law's "deliberative process" exception to withhold records describing decision-making behind the scenes. Obama had directed agencies to use it less often, but the number of such cases had surged after his first year in office to more than 71,000. After back-to-back years when figures steadily declined, the government cited that reason 66,353 times last year to keep records or parts of records secret.

Even as the Obama administration continued increasing its efforts answering FOIA requests, people submitted more than 590,000 requests for information in fiscal 2012 — an increase of less than 1 percent over the previous year. Including leftover requests from previous years, the government responded to more requests than ever in 2012 — more than 603,000 — a 5 percent increase for the second consecutive year.

The Homeland Security Department, which includes offices that deal with immigration files, received more than twice as many requests for records — 190,589 new requests last year — as any other agency, and it answered significantly more requests than it did in 2011. Other agencies, including the State Department, National Transportation Safety Board and Nuclear Regulatory Commission performed worse last year. The State Department, for example, answered only 57 percent of its requests, down from 75 percent a year earlier.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services drove a dramatic increase in the number of times DHS censored immigration records under exceptions to police files containing personal information and law enforcement techniques. The agency invoked those exemptions more than 136,000 times in 2012, compared with more than 75,000 a year earlier. Even though USCIS is not a law-enforcement agency, officials used the exceptions specifically reserved for law enforcement.

The AP's analysis also found that the government generally took longer to answer requests. Some agencies, such as the Health and Human Services Department, took less time than the previous year to turn over files. But at the State Department, for example, even urgent requests submitted under a fast-track system covering breaking news or events when a person's life was at stake took an average two years to wait for files.

Journalists and others who need information quickly to report breaking news, for example, fared worse last year. The rate at which the government granted so-called expedited processing, which moves an urgent request to the front of the line for a speedy answer, fell from 24 percent in 2011 to 17 percent last year. The CIA denied every such request last year.

Under increased budget pressure across the government, agencies more often insisted that people pay search and copying fees. It waived costs in 59 percent of requests, generally when the amount was negligible or the release of the information is in the public interest, a decline from 64 percent of cases a year earlier. At the Treasury Department, which faced questions about its role in auto bailouts and stimulus programs during Obama's first term, only one in five requests were processed at no charge. A year earlier, it granted more than 75 percent of fee waivers. The CIA denied every request last year to waive fees.

The 33 agencies that AP examined were: Agency for International Development, CIA, Agriculture Department, Commerce Department, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Defense Department, Education Department, Energy Department, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Interior Department, Justice Department, Labor Department, State Department, Transportation Department, Treasury Department, Department of Veterans Affairs, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Election Commission, Federal Trade Commission, NASA, National Science Foundation, National Transportation Safety Board, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Office of Management and Budget, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Securities and Exchange Commission, Small Business Administration, the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Postal Service.

Four agencies that were included in AP's previous analysis of FOIA performance did not publicly release their 2012 reports. They included the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Personnel Management.

White House censors more public records, citing security concerns

Mar 11, 2013, 1:15pm EDT Updated: Mar 11, 2013, 1:30pm EDT

White House censors more public records, citing security concerns

Staff Washington Business Journal

The Obama administration is citing security concerns more often as a reason to keep the public in the dark, according to a new analysis by The Associated Press, Federal News Radio reports.

The Pentagon, intelligence community, NASA, Office of Management and Budget and several other agencies invoked the national security exemption last year in rejecting Freedom of Information Act requests.

The government is answering more open-records requests overall, having released two-thirds of the documents requested by the public last year. The other third included cases where agencies couldn't find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was improper.

Media blackout: Obama censors more documents, citing national security

Media blackout: Obama censors more documents, citing national security

By Susan Crabtree

The Washington Times

Monday, March 11, 2013

Amid intense public interest over drones, the Osama bin Laden raid and other terrorism-related news, the U.S. government cited national security as its reason for refusing to release documents requested by the public last year more often than in any year since President Obama took office, according to a study released Monday.

The Associated Press reviewed and analyzed the Obama administration’s level of responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests, giving the administration credit for answering its highest number of requests for copies of government files and slightly reducing the backlog of requests from previous years.

But the survey also faulted government agencies, led by the Pentagon and the CIA, for increasing the number of times they invoked legal reasons to keep records secret or redact them.

According to the AP analysis, the U.S. government last year turned over all or parts of the records requested in roughly 65 percent of requests, while rejecting more than one-third of requests, a slight increase over 2011. Over the last fiscal year, the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times — an increase over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in 2010.

Not surprisingly, the CIA was the most secretive agency. It denied 60 percent of 3,586 requests for information, compared to 49 percent a year earlier.

The stepped-up secrecy flies in the face of Mr. Obama’s pledge during his first week in office to run the “most transparent government in history.” He promised at the time that the nation’s open-records law would be “administered with a clear presumption — in the face of doubt, openness prevails.”

Watchdogs organizations and others who regularly make FOIA requests offered some praise for the Obama administration’s progress on open-government issues, but they say government agencies still have an abysmal record when it comes to responding to public requests for information.

Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive at George Washington University said Mr. Obama has declassified such items as the national intelligence budget, the so-called “torture memos” and information about the Justice Department’s warrantless wiretapping program. But the openness on big issues has not filtered down to the agencies dealing with FOIA requests.

“We have just not seen the agencies respond to the Obama and [Attorney General] Eric Holder presumption of disclosure. … You see a real hangover of regular bureaucratic behavior,” he said.

Others point to a growing trend among government agencies to refuse to waive the costs of responding to request, even for those applicants whose eligibility for a public-interest fee waiver seems clear.

The Obama administration “has been responsible for a growing trend in which agencies issue baseless denials of public-interest fee waiver requests,” said Julie Murray, an attorney at the watchdog group Public Citizen.

Melanie Ann Pustay, who heads the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy, on Monday defended the administration’s record on transparency.

Even though agencies received more requests than in previous years, Ms. Pustay said, government officials “rose to the challenge” and processed more requests than ever before. The government as a whole processed more than 665,000 request in fiscal year 2012, which is 34,000 more than they processed in fiscal year 2011 and 65,000 more than they processed two years ago.

As a result, the government reduced its backlog of pending requests by 14 percent over the last fiscal year and 45 percent since Mr. Obama took office, she said.

Detective Saldate gets confessions from unconscious people on hospital gurneys???

Source

Convictions of woman on Ariz. death row overturned

By Michael Kiefer The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Mar 14, 2013 10:39 PM

Debra Milke was a celebrated villain of 1989, a woman accused and convicted of dressing up her 4-year-old son to see Santa Claus and, instead, sending him off to be shot execution-style in a desert wash.

She is one of three women on Arizona’s death row.

But on Thursday, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out her death sentence and murder conviction because the trial court refused to let her introduce evidence that might have discredited her supposed confession.

The Phoenix police detective who claimed Milke confessed to him had a history of lying to grand juries and extracting confessions even from unconscious suspects on hospital gurneys, according to the court opinion. There were no witnesses to the confession, and it was not recorded. Milke denied she ever confessed.

The 9th Circuit asked the U.S. District Court to send the case to the Arizona court system for a new trial and ordered that the detective’s personnel files be made available for Milke’s defense.

Assistant Arizona Attorney General Jeffrey Zick said his office will likely ask a larger panel of 9th Circuit judges to rehear the appeal before taking it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Milke was tried and convicted in Maricopa County Superior Court, but a spokesman for the County Attorney’s Office said it would defer to the Arizona attorney general pending the appeal.

According to Milke’s attorney, Lori Voepel, Milke’s response when she heard of the opinion was, “Are you kidding?”

Milke, 49, was charged with first-degree murder, accused of conspiring with two acquaintances to kill her son Christopher in 1989.

According to court records and media accounts, Milke found the child to be an inconvenience and asked James Styers, her roommate, to kill him. She dressed the child in his favorite clothes and cowboy boots and told him that he was going to Metrocenter mall to see Santa Claus, court records said.

Another man, Roger Scott, drove Christopher and Styers to a pizzeria, and then to the desert near 99th Avenue and Happy Valley Road, where Styers shot the boy three times in the back of the head, according to court records.

Milke, Styers and Scott were each sentenced to death — and all three cases have languished in the federal court system. Styers’ conviction and sentence are pending before the appellate court. Scott lost his case in the 9th Circuit and is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, but he is near the end of his appeals.

At issue in Milke’s case is the confession supposedly obtained by now-retired Phoenix police Detective Armando Saldate. According to the 9th Circuit opinion, Saldate claimed Scott implicated Milke in the murder. Saldate then arrested Milke, and after a one-on-one interrogation that was not recorded, Saldate claimed he had extracted a confession. Milke always denied having confessed. Neither Scott nor Styers testified against Milke.

During her trial, Milke’s attorneys tried to subpoena Saldate’s personnel record, but the subpoena was quashed by the court. [So much for your right to a fair trial]

What the personnel record would have shown was that Saldate had a history of misconduct that could have been used to call into question his credibility.

According to the 9th Circuit ruling, he had falsified information to a grand jury, extracted confessions from people drifting in and out of consciousness in hospital rooms and continued to interrogate suspects even after they invoked their Miranda rights to an attorney. [That is a rather routine violation by the police of our Constitutional rights. Every time I am stop by the police I take the 5th and refuse to answer police questions. And every time the police respond by telling me I don't have any 5th Amendment rights. The police are corrupt to the core!!!!]

Once, he stopped a female motorist for a faulty taillight and then “took liberties” with her, letting her go without a citation after she promised to meet him later for sex. She didn’t show up for the arranged date and, instead, reported Saldate.

Saldate could not immediately be reached for comment.

The case was tried by now-retired Deputy County Attorney Noel Levy, the prosecutor who sent alleged “Snaggletooth Killer” Ray Krone to death row. Krone was exonerated after 10 years in prison. [Ray Krone was the 100th person in which DNA testing proved he was framed by the Phoenix Police for murder. Ray Krone did not take the 5th and talked to the Phoenix Police in an attempt to prove his innocence. I talked to Krone about this when he spoke at the ASU College of Law and Ray Krone told me the police twisted his words around claiming he was guilty. Ray told me he would never talk to the police again in an attemp to prove his innocence because the police are corrupt. He will always take the 5th now.]

In the 9th Circuit opinion handed down Thursday, written by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, the court ruled that Milke’s confession to Saldate was illegally extracted.

The court did not throw out the confession altogether but ordered that the potentially exculpatory material in Saldate’s file be provided so that the jury can weigh it against the supposed confession.

Federal bills take aim at federal marijuana ban

I suspect Kyrsten Sinema has sold out to the military, industrial complex. Well except at least until election time when she runs around asking for votes.

Vote for me, I am a freedom fighter who supports woman, atheists, hard working Latino immigrants and other little people.

Yea, sure Kyrsten.

You sound a lot Obama when he told us to vote for him instead of John McCain. Of course Obama pretty much has turned out to be a carbon copy clone of George W. Bush and John McCain.

And while we are talking about Kyrsten Sinema, you should remember that when she was a member of the Arizona Legislator she sponsored a bill which would have slapped an outrageous 300 percent tax on medical marijuana in Arizona. I suspect that was an attempt to make medical marijuana illegal in Arizona by taxing the krap out of it.

Source

Bills take aim at federal marijuana ban

By Raju Chebium Gannett Washington Bureau Thu Mar 14, 2013 12:20 PM

WASHINGTON -- A few House members have begun a broad effort to overturn a 43-year-old federal ban on marijuana and say they’re prepared to keep up the pressure even if it takes years.

About 10 lawmakers, mostly liberal Democrats, are writing bills that will serve as legislative guideposts for the future if the GOP-controlled House, as expected, ignores their proposals during this Congress.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., said it’s time to end the federal ban because 18 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana and many other states are exploring that option in response to growing public pressure.

“Maybe next year, maybe next Congress, but this is going to change. And the federal government will get out of the way,” he said. “I’m very patient. I’ve been working on this one way or another for 40 years and I think the likelihood of something happening in the next four or five years is greater than ever.”

Peter Bensinger, a former head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, urged lawmakers to keep the ban despite the pressure to legalize pot.

Advocacy groups, which have spent a lot of money over the years to push legalization, gloss over the negative effects of marijuana though studies show people do get hooked and smoking pot impairs judgment and could cause cancer like cigarettes, he said.

“Legalizing it is going to cost lives, money, addiction, dependency,” Bensinger warned in an interview Wednesday.

A number of lawmakers share that view, which is why previous congressional attempts to decriminalize marijuana went nowhere.

Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., acknowledged that getting any marijuana bill through a bitterly divided Congress -- which is consumed by debates over spending, gun regulations and other matters -- won’t be easy.

“It will take more states moving in the direction Washington and Colorado have before there’s a sufficient pressure on (Congress) to change the law,” he said. “It’s harder to get the attention of members of Congress from states where the legal status has not been changed because it’s simply not a relevant issue for their constituents.”

In February, Polis and Blumenauer introduced bills that begin to chip away at federal marijuana policy, which makes it illegal to grow, use, possess or distribute pot.

Polis’ measure seeks to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act. Blumenauer’s bill would allow the government to tax marijuana like tobacco and alcohol. If both bills become law, states would decide whether to legalize marijuana, not Uncle Sam, and state lawmakers would have Washington’s blessing to impose taxes on pot.

More proposals are expected in the coming months. For instance, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., is writing a bill to create a commission to study whether marijuana has medicinal value.

Though legalization advocates argue pot has proven benefits like relieving chronic pain and is not addictive, the federal government cites other studies showing pot has no medical benefits and acts as a “gateway,” leading users to try even more dangerous drugs like cocaine and heroin.

According to a 2011 federal survey, about 18 million people over the age of 12 have used marijuana at some point in their lives, making pot the country’s most-popular illegal drug under federal law. That means 7 percent of the nation’s 12-and-over population has used pot at some point.

So far, the legalization push in the House has very little bipartisan support.

The 10 lawmakers co-sponsoring Polis’ bill include California Democrat Barbara Lee, who represents San Francisco, New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler, whose district includes Manhattan, and one Republican, Californian Dana Rohrabacher, a tea party libertarian from conservative Orange County.

Blumenauer’s bill has six co-sponsors, including Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., and Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, but no Republicans.

Senators haven’t filed legislation to overturn the federal ban.

California became the first state to allow the use of pot for medical purposes in 1996.

Seventeen other states -- Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Michigan and Vermont -- and the District of Columbia now have medical marijuana laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Almost all of these states have set up patient registries to keep track of medical marijuana users. Eleven states also allow marijuana dispensaries.

In November, voters in Colorado and Washington took the unprecedented step of legalizing recreational use as well.

Nowhere in the world is it legal to grow and distribute pot, but that will be legal in those two states once authorities work out the regulatory details, according to Beau Kilmer, co-director of the Rand Drug Policy Research Center in Santa Monica, Calif.

Recreational-use ballot measures are considered likely in California and Oregon in the next few years, though Californians rejected similar language in 2010 and Oregonians said no in 2012.

According to the Marijuana Policy Project, lawmakers filed medical marijuana bills in 17 states this year: West Virginia, Texas, South Dakota, Oklahoma, North Carolina, New York, New Hampshire, Missouri, Mississippi, Minnesota, Maryland, Kentucky, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, Florida and Alabama.

Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said if the federal ban is overturned in this Congress, liberal states are likely to adopt legalization laws within a decade.

“Anywhere the salt water touches the West Coast, there will be legalization. All of New England will move in this direction reasonably quickly,” St. Pierre said.

Legalization will take years to become reality in conservative America, just as it took states like Oklahoma a long time to allow alcohol sales after Prohibition was repealed in 1933, St. Pierre said.

Unless the federal ban is lifted, all current and future state laws will violate the Controlled Substances Act, a 1970 U.S. statute that classifies marijuana as a dangerous, addictive drug with no medicinal value.

The broad push in the House comes as the Obama administration continues to grapple with how to respond to the state pot laws. Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce the administration’s plan soon.

In 2009, the Obama administration told federal prosecutors they don’t have to go after pot distributors who are complying with their state’s medical marijuana laws. In December, President Barack Obama said going after pot smokers in Washington and Colorado is a low-priority item.

Pressure is coming from those who favor the ban as well.

Bensinger, who works with anti-drug groups, said Holder should sue Washington and Colorado under the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which puts federal law above state law. Earlier this month, the International Narcotics Control Board, a United Nations agency, urged action saying state pot laws violate international treaties the U.S. has signed.

Overturning the ban is a tough job, Bensinger said.

“You’d have to undo the federal law, you’d have to have the Congress be willing to pay no attention to the supremacy clause, and you’d have to break an international treaty,” he said. “This is uphill sledding.”

The military's Chicken Littles want you to think the sky is falling

Source

Think Again: The Pentagon

The military's Chicken Littles want you to think the sky is falling. Don't believe them: America has never been safer.

BY THOMAS P.M. BARNETT | MARCH/APRIL 2013

"The Pentagon Is Always Fighting the Last War."

Just the opposite. The Pentagon, as former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates derisively pointed out, has a bad case of "next-war-itis." With Iraq now ancient history and Afghanistan winding down, all four of the major U.S. military services today prefer to imagine distant, future, high-tech shoot-'em-ups against China (er, well-equipped adversaries) over dealing with the world as we find it, which is still full of those nasty little wars. As Marine Corps general and outgoing Central Command boss James Mattis once told me, "I find it intellectually embarrassing that people want to hug the Chinese [and exclaim], 'Oh, thank God we have another peer competitor at last! Now we can go back to building the weapons that we always wanted to build.'"

Some of these efforts can verge on the ridiculous. I recently sat through an Air Force briefing during which super-empowered individuals were portrayed as thiiiiiis close to being able to wipe out humanity with a genetic weapon or to kill off -- get this -- more than half the U.S. population through electromagnetic-pulse attacks that send us collectively back to subsistence farming (think of the TV drama Revolution). Another scenario posited a "one-machine" future when, naturally, the "beast" starts thinking for itself and can turn on humanity (here, take your pick of Terminator's Skynet or the Matrix trilogy). That's the beautiful thing about Armageddon-like future wars: They could happen tomorrow, or they could never happen. The only thing we know for sure is that we're totally unprepared!

If you thought all these plotlines portray a Pentagon in search of the right justifying villain, then you'd be right. But remember, amid all this institutional angst, what's really being fought over are slices of a $530 billion budgetary pie that many experts think should be shrunk by one-fifth over the rest of this decade.

The first services to be infected were "Big War Blue" -- the Navy and Air Force -- as both felt slighted in the post-9/11 long war against radical terrorist networks, seeing in its unfolding an existential threat: a long-term emphasis on "Small Wars Green" involving mainly the Army, the Marine Corps, and special operators like SEAL Team 6. Now, however, even the Army and the Marine Corps are beginning to catch the fever. So while the Navy and Air Force have been fighting harder for longer because they've gotten the short end of the stick for the last decade, the Army and Marine Corps are now running hard from the long war too, looking to make sure they don't get discarded like Iraq and Afghanistan.

After years of acting like it was on top of everything, the U.S. military is back in Chicken Little mode and, man, is that sky ever fallin'. According to Andrew Krepinevich, a longtime advisor to the Pentagon, America either stands up militarily to the Chinese now or risks a "latter-day Chinese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of Influence." How does the Pentagon find those dollars? Krepinevich is blunt: "The big bill payer here is the ground forces."

All those gripes aside, next-war-itis is a good thing. After all, no American interests are served by having the U.S. military be the last to wake up to a genuine national security threat. And because these crystal-ball exercises are far more art than science, a certain number of bad bets will be placed. But those cost a great deal less than wars the military is ill-prepared to fight -- which is why the Pentagon is always fighting the wars yet to come, and the wars that will never be.

"The U.S. Military Still Needs to Be Able to Wage Two Wars at Once."

Not anymore. Or at least not for the foreseeable future. The two-wars concept, on some level, echoes World War II's European and Pacific theaters. During the Cold War, it became a matter of keeping the Soviets boxed in on both ends, lest the dominoes fall (as the United States feared in Southeast Asia). When the Reds went away, the Pentagon started calling them "major regional contingencies," but everyone soon realized that was just a bureaucratic euphemism for North Korea and Iraq (then later Iran) -- not exactly your daddy's world war.

So why has this Cold War artifact lasted so long inside the Pentagon? It created a force-sizing principle -- America needs X many troops/ships/aircraft/etc. -- that could be presented to Congress to justify a defense budget "floor" once the all-mighty Soviets were no more. Until the 9/11 attacks, it was just a theory. Now, after the United States just spent the better part of a decade waging two modest-sized wars and saw how they burned out the force, neither Congress nor the American people is in the mood to entertain the fantasy of simultaneously toppling Iran's mullahs in the Persian Gulf and duking it out with the Chinese in East Asia. So consider this one dead and buried until the United States reaches some semblance of fiscal order.

America's "pivot" from Southwest Asia (so long, Iraq and Afghanistan!) to East Asia (hello, China!) represents more than just Barack Obama's strategic rationale for tying off his predecessor's military adventures. In concluding two land wars that enlarged his two armies -- the Army and the Marine Corps -- the president can reduce their superexpensive manpower (keeping just one soldier in Afghanistan costs roughly $1 million a year) even as he shifts U.S. military and diplomatic efforts toward the Pacific.

All that "supplemental" spending on the Army and the far smaller Marine Corps to fund Iraq and Afghanistan depressed the Navy and Air Force shares of the procurement budget throughout the 2000s. For example, the Air Force's share of the defense budget across the 1990s averaged 31 to 32 percent. Now it stands just above 27 percent. Meanwhile, the Army picked up almost 2 percentage points that it's now sure to lose. For the services, the "pivot" has a wholly different meaning.

Plus, slotting in still-reddish Beijing for the old Red Menace is a stone that kills two birds: A Democratic administration avoids the "weak-on-defense" charge (see, we're standing up to those dastardly Chinese!) while sidestepping any serious military responsibility for what remains of, or is still to come from, the so-called Arab Spring (Syria, anyone?).

Obama's new secretaries of state and defense -- both Vietnam War veterans turned anti-war senators -- could not send a clearer signal in this regard: America doesn't do land wars (read: quagmires) anymore. Instead, the country returns to what scholars call "offshore balancing" and occasionally striking from a safe distance. "And how many troops/ships/aircraft/etc. does that take?" asks Congress. "Ah," says the Pentagon, "have we briefed you recently on Chinese military developments?"

Of course, the Pentagon will never admit exactly what is going on. No, that would be perceived as giving a green light to Antagonist B if America ever tussled with Antagonist A. Check out the recent tap dance by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, over the White House's 2013 budget submission:

There's been much made -- and I'm sure will be made -- about whether this strategy moves away from a force structure explicitly designed to fight and win two wars simultaneously. Fundamentally, our strategy has always been about our ability to respond to global contingencies wherever and whenever they occur. This won't change.… We can and will always be able to do more than one thing at a time. More importantly, wherever we are confronted and in whatever sequence, we will win.

Got that Beijing/Tehran/Pyongyang?

"The U.S. Navy Is Too Small."

Not necessarily. Yes, the U.S. Navy has dwindled greatly from the Reagan-era dream of a "600-ship navy," but its slow slide to today's approximately 290 "battle-force ships" is no cause for alarm -- even with all that talk about the future of American power being in the South China Sea. To paraphrase Obama's election-debate comeback, "This ain't your grandfather's 1917 navy." The combined agility, firepower, and operational reach of today's seaborne force dwarf anything America enjoyed in the last century. Military expert John Pike notes that current U.S. aircraft carriers are 10 times more powerful than they were just two decades ago, thanks to precision munitions.

So, yeah, when you can deliver that much force that accurately -- and from such incredible distances -- the notion of steaming into some rogue regime's inner harbor to teach it some manners is excruciatingly quaint. And if Beijing wants to stockpile budget-draining capital ships -- even aircraft carriers -- then Mao bless 'em, because the U.S. Navy is already evolving past last century's paradigm toward this century's version of the many, the cheap(er), and the unmanned.

The Navy's latest vision of war, concocted with the help of D.C. think tanks and the Air Force, is the Air-Sea Battle concept. It says, in so many words, that the Navy won't let China's military prevent it from accessing some future East Asian crisis or war. So when China starts fielding its first aircraft carrier (a Soviet retread built in the 1980s) and its superscary carrier-killing missiles, the U.S. Navy starts testing its first carrier-capable unmanned combat aircraft (what else to call it when it sports an F-16's engine?). And if China forces the Navy into a standoff posture, then guess what? America comes up with a technological breakthrough that turns every carrier-launched strike force into another Doolittle raid -- as in, No pilots? No return? No problem. We'll become the kamikazes, only there won't be any "we" inside our "suicide" drones.

As for the Navy's pitch in recent years about needing to police the "global commons," let's be honest and say that bad-actor behavior on the high seas doesn't amount to much. Heck, put two former special-ops snipers fore and aft of a cargo ship, and that's all the security you need to handle your average Somali pirate crew -- as in, bang, bang, you're dead.

So have no fears about the Navy. It'll remain "big" enough.

"So the Wars of the Future Will Be Unmanned."

I didn't say that. Yes, deep inside the Pentagon, some 50-pound brains are dreaming up the Terminator-style wars of tomorrowland (typically waged against the Chinese hoards … of robots and unmanned vehicles). And yes, drones increasingly rule the skies. But seriously, think about that for a minute. What exactly do such forces fight over -- decisively -- in this rock 'em, sock 'em manner? Other than just blowing up each other's high-tech toys? If, at the end of the day, there's something truly valuable to contest, a country's manned forces still need to occupy and control it; otherwise, nothing is achieved. Wake me up when drones can set up local government elections in Afghanistan or reconfigure Mali's judicial system.

So, yes, drones are spectacular for finding and targeting bad actors (and other drones, eventually), but if your robot war requires a no man's land to unfold (say, the tribal regions of Pakistan), then all you can "control" in this manner are no man's lands -- or patches of ocean. If you really want to get your hands on what lies below (hydrocarbons, minerals, arable land), you still have to send in some bodies -- eventually. That's why they call it blood and treasure.

That's not to say all these new aerial drones don't strike fear into the hearts of America's enemies, not to mention the U.S. Air Force. I mean, you couldn't even squeeze a pilot in many of the newest drones, some of which are so slight they can be launched with a flick of the wrist. And with the Army now proposing a 5-pound bullet of a drone (the Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System) to shoot individual enemy soldiers from half a dozen miles away, the youngest of the four services correctly spots an existential threat amid all those toggling joysticks. Indeed, four years ago, the Air Force published a report that suggested the service could eventually get rid of two-thirds (or more) of its 13,250 pilots. No wonder the Air Force is talking so much about its indispensable role combating the hazards of space and cyberwar these days.

"America Doesn't Need the Marines Anymore."

Hold on there, soldier! The Marines go into survival mode just about every other decade, all the way back to when they lost their jobs as snipers lodged in the masts of ships after the Civil War. Troop numbers were decimated after World War I, and the Marine Corps was almost swallowed whole by the Army after World War II. Then came the post-Vietnam funk and the relegation to a mere amphibious feint in the Army's lightning-fast liberation of Kuwait in 1991's Operation Desert Storm. So no, the Marines' latest bout of angst is nothing new. Sure, there wasn't really any difference between how the United States deployed Marine Corps and Army units in Iraq and Afghanistan, the clearest evidence being their frequent relief of one another. And with the special-ops community stealing a good chunk of the Marines' thunder recently, it's only natural to wonder whether America's most iconic service has reached its own Zero Dark Something.

Still, it's never going to happen.

First of all, no other service can match the Marine Corps' outsized reputation (hell, mystique) or its connections on Capitol Hill. Americans simply expect that there will always be a Marine Corps. Logic doesn't enter into it.

Plus, an essential division of labor has settled in since 9/11: While the special operators handle the low end of the spectrum (killing bad guys discretely) and the Army stands ready for the Big One, the Marine Corps, which alone among the services is back up to its Cold War fighting strength (of 200,000), exists to respond to everything in between -- at the drop of a helmet. That's why it was the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit that swooped into Japan after the big 2011 earthquake and tsunami, not the 1st Armored Division. So, no, forget about furloughing America's global emergency-response force, because -- unlike in Armageddon -- bad things happen to good people(s) all the time.

If the Marine Corps is reaching for a new combat image, it's best captured in the emerging Navy concept of the Single Naval Battle -- a ship or two, a few good men, and something to fight over on the water, like an oil rig. Yes, that sounds like it's ripped from today's headlines (e.g., China and Japan's ongoing tussle over islets in the East China Sea), but toss in a future ice-free Arctic Ocean, where one-fifth of the world's known hydrocarbon reserves lie largely unexploited, and who knows? A British firm just announced that it's launching Britain's first private navy in two centuries to fight those nasty Somali pirates, so maybe the Marines' new survival strategy makes sense, even if -- again -- the overall market likely remains small.

"The U.S. Army Is Far Too Big."

Bingo. Today's Army declares that it exists to win land wars in a decisive fashion. The key word is "decisive": While Army generals don't advertise it anymore, that means occupying the defeated power and overseeing its stabilization and reconstruction for a significant period of time. But let's get real: Does anyone really think the American people will tolerate another Iraq or Afghanistan?

Compared with the past, today's wars are waged decidedly faster and thus are dramatically shorter. (Yes, by that I mean America should stop calling its subsequent military occupations and counterinsurgency campaigns "wars.") They're also far less lethal thanks to smarter bombs and better emergency care. Point being: America doesn't need today's Army if the next Iraq war is a Vietnam syndrome away from happening. The U.S. government is simply too broke.

At roughly 560,000 men and women, the Army is bigger than it has been since 1994, when it was still crashing from its Reagan-era Cold War heights of 780,000. Later in the 1990s, the Army bottomed out at 480,000, and there's no reason it can't go back to that level, given that none of the fabulously high-tech wars being dreamed up by Pentagon planners calls for multiyear occupations of distant California-size countries.

The Army's just-issued "Capstone Concept" -- its vision of how it sees the wars of the future and the Army's role in them -- tried its best to be coy on this subject. But come on: When the first serious scenario mentioned is the "implosion" of the North Korean regime, then, buddy, that is one bare cupboard. After the steep cuts of the 1970s and 1990s (and before that the demobilizations following World War I and World War II), the Army should be used to this budgetary sine wave by now. The republic will survive.

"Cyberwar Is the Next Big Thing."

You bet. That is, at least as far as D.C.'s Beltway bandits are concerned. There is only one great growth area in the U.S. defense budget today -- besides health care, which now eats up roughly 10 percent of the Pentagon's spending each year. Spending on cyberweapons and network defense has been skyrocketing for years. Over the next five years, the Pentagon alone is set to spend $18 billion on cyber (it requested $3.4 billion for fiscal year 2013), and the Obama administration's 2009 decision to set up U.S. Cyber Command sanctified that emerging "war-fighting domain" and its budgetary standing. Washington's small army of IT contractors couldn't be happier.

But is this a good use of taxpayer money? There's no question that the U.S. government and national security establishment in general are pretty bad at network security, and by that I mean both fall far below the standards of the world's best corporations and banks. Most Silicon Valley experts will tell you that, but you'll never hear it from D.C.'s many contractors or the national security cyber offices they serve in parasitic symbiosis. As far as they are concerned, it's the private sector that's light-years behind.

As for cyber serving as a stand-alone war-fighting domain, there you'll find the debates no less theological in their intensity. After serving as senior managing director for half a dozen years at a software firm that specializes in securing supply chains, I'm deeply skeptical. Given the uncontrollable nature of cyberweapons (see: Stuxnet's many permutations), I view them as the 21st century's version of chemical weapons -- nice to have, but hard to use. Another way to look at it is to simply call a spade a spade: Cyberwarfare is nothing more than espionage and sabotage updated for the digital era. Whatever cyberwar turns out to be in the national security realm, it will always be dwarfed by the industrial variants -- think cyberthieves, not cyberwarriors. But you wouldn't know it from the panicky warnings from former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the generals about the imminent threat of a "cyber Pearl Harbor."

Please remember amid all this frenetic scaremongering that the Pentagon is never more frightened about our collective future than when it's desperately uncertain about its own. Given the rising health-care costs associated with America's aging population and the never-ending dysfunction in Washington, we should expect to be bombarded with frightening scenarios of planetary doom for the next decade or two. None of this bureaucratic chattering will bear any resemblance to global trends, which demonstrate that wars have grown increasingly infrequent, shorter in duration, and diminished in lethality. But you won't hear that from the next-warriors on the Potomac.

Did you know marijuana is addictive just like heroin???

Source

Arizona Legislature weighs warning labels on edible marijuana items

By Lindsey Collom The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Mar 15, 2013 11:28 PM

The individually packaged brownies, lollipops and chocolate-dipped cookies for sale at the Green Halo dispensary in Tucson look like kid-friendly snacks. They have one ingredient, however, that makes them anything but: The tempting confections are infused with marijuana.

Staff at the Green Halo say that about half of the patients using their dispensary prefer to take their doses of medical marijuana in edible items. And although the candy-wrapper medical drugs can be bought only at Arizona’s medical-marijuana dispensaries by licensed cardholders, law-enforcement officials are concerned the items will end up in the hands of children.

It’s already happened, according to Phoenix police. A West Valley eighth-grader was caught earlier this month with a piece of marijuana-infused candy, and police believe she had passed the candy out to other students at Pendergast Elementary School. [I am sure that far more grade school kids who have smoked pot got it from the black market rather then the medical marijuana market]

This week in California, a child obtained a marijuana-laced brownie that sent seven primary students to a hospital, according to an NBC report.

To solve the problem and head off any potential danger to children, new proposed guidelines would require edible marijuana products in Arizona to be packaged to look more like medicine. [Which will make it easier for the kiddies to find it]

A bill has already passed the Arizona Senate and is advancing in the House. It would require dispensaries to package their products in white, opaque wrappers with black lettering. It also empowers the Arizona Department of Health Services, which regulates the state’s medical-marijuana program, to immediately revoke the license of any dispensary that doesn’t comply. [I suspect this is a violation of Prop 203 and would require a super majority of the legislator to approve it.]

Senate Bill 1440 would expand current health-department rules, which say dispensaries must put a standard warning label on their products similar to those found on cigarettes, among other labeling requirements. [OK, lets compare how many people die from smoking pot compared to smoking legal tobacco? Smoking tobacco causes 1 in 5 deaths in the USA or about 443,000 deaths a year. Smoking marijuana cause zero deaths every year. Of course that statistic is probably wrong and I bet at LEAST 1 or 2 people die every year from marijuana - big stinking deal]

“We are seeing in the marketplace materials that resemble candy, resemble soda, are branded in a way that you couldn’t tell from looking at them that they’re medicine,” said Kimberly MacEachern, staff attorney for the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys’ Advisory Council. [What the F* does Kimberly MacEachern know, he is a prosecutor, not a doctor]

Speaking before the House Public Safety, Military and Regulatory Affairs Committee this week, MacEachern said the nondescript packaging would conform to federal regulations for the packaging of medicine. [I thought marijuana had no medical use whatsoever per the morons at the DEA and FDA???]

To illustrate the point, Sen. Kimberly Yee, R-Phoenix, has been passing around to legislators a series of photographs taken of candy and other medical-marijuana products seized during criminal investigations. Among the images are colorful gummy candies wrapped in cellophane and chocolate bars in packaging that mimics the Wonka brand.

Yee said the items were seized from dispensaries, but Heather Manus, who oversees production of marijuana-infused products at the Green Halo, said the items were produced by caregiver collectives or from illegal sources. The Green Halo is the only dispensary to operate a state-licensed kitchen, and it supplies edible medical-marijuana products to several other licensed dispensaries in Arizona.

“We’re just creating gentle, loving medicine here, and it’s not something that is scary or freaky,” Manus said.

Known to patients as Nurse Heather, Manus first produced edibles in New Mexico for legal cardholders in hospice care and says it’s the best way to use medical marijuana because the relief is long-lasting. Smoking provides the quickest onset and lasts two to three hours, while people who ingest the marijuana will feel its effects for up to six hours, she said.

The Green Halo’s edible marijuana items are easy to see through the clear cellophane packaging. Each product is labeled as required by the health department, including the dry weight of the marijuana before the cooking process — patients are allowed up to 2.5 ounces of medical marijuana a week — and this text: “ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH SERVICES’ WARNING: Marijuana use can be addictive and can impair an individual’s ability to drive a motor vehicle or operate heavy machinery. Marijuana smoke contains carcinogens and can lead to an increased risk for cancer, tachycardia, hypertension, heart attack, and lung infection. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN.” [Hmmm, so according to the liars at Arizona Department of Health Services marijuana kills people by causing cancer, heart attacks and lung infections? The liars at ADHS also say marijuana is addictive just like heroin!!! What rubbish!!!]

If the law requires products to be more plainly wrapped and the contents hidden, Manus said, the dispensary will abide by the rules. “We’re trying to do everything and anything they want us to do,” she said. “We simply want to comply. As of right now, we are working very hard to make sure everything is appropriately labeled.”

The House Public Safety committee passed SB 1440 on Thursday by a 5-2 vote. One dissenting member, Rep. Mark Cardenas, D-Phoenix, said he agreed with the premise but questioned the need for legislation.

“The law passed by the voters gave the rule-making authority to the Department of Health Services,” Cardenas said, addressing Yee. “I am a co-sponsor of your bill because I believe the same caution we have with tobacco products should be given to medical marijuana. My question is: Why do we need this bill if basically we’re stripping the authority away from DHS to do the job the voters told them to do?” [Again the law is almost certainly unconstitutional because it conflicts with Prop 203 and needs to be passed by a super majority of the legislator]

Yee said it wasn’t her intention to reduce the ADHS’ authority. By making the packaging requirements law, she said, “you now have penalties where law enforcement can go after these individuals who violate that law in state statutes. There’s a difference between a rule and a statutory reference, and I think that’s why this bill is so important.”

Did you know marijuana is addictive just like heroin???

Source

Arizona Legislature weighs warning labels on edible marijuana items

By Lindsey Collom The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Mar 15, 2013 11:28 PM

The individually packaged brownies, lollipops and chocolate-dipped cookies for sale at the Green Halo dispensary in Tucson look like kid-friendly snacks. They have one ingredient, however, that makes them anything but: The tempting confections are infused with marijuana.

Staff at the Green Halo say that about half of the patients using their dispensary prefer to take their doses of medical marijuana in edible items. And although the candy-wrapper medical drugs can be bought only at Arizona’s medical-marijuana dispensaries by licensed cardholders, law-enforcement officials are concerned the items will end up in the hands of children.

It’s already happened, according to Phoenix police. A West Valley eighth-grader was caught earlier this month with a piece of marijuana-infused candy, and police believe she had passed the candy out to other students at Pendergast Elementary School. [I am sure that far more grade school kids who have smoked pot got it from the black market rather then the medical marijuana market]

This week in California, a child obtained a marijuana-laced brownie that sent seven primary students to a hospital, according to an NBC report.

To solve the problem and head off any potential danger to children, new proposed guidelines would require edible marijuana products in Arizona to be packaged to look more like medicine. [Which will make it easier for the kiddies to find it]

A bill has already passed the Arizona Senate and is advancing in the House. It would require dispensaries to package their products in white, opaque wrappers with black lettering. It also empowers the Arizona Department of Health Services, which regulates the state’s medical-marijuana program, to immediately revoke the license of any dispensary that doesn’t comply. [I suspect this is a violation of Prop 203 and would require a super majority of the legislator to approve it.]

Senate Bill 1440 would expand current health-department rules, which say dispensaries must put a standard warning label on their products similar to those found on cigarettes, among other labeling requirements. [OK, lets compare how many people die from smoking pot compared to smoking legal tobacco? Smoking tobacco causes 1 in 5 deaths in the USA or about 443,000 deaths a year. Smoking marijuana cause zero deaths every year. Of course that statistic is probably wrong and I bet at LEAST 1 or 2 people die every year from marijuana - big stinking deal]

“We are seeing in the marketplace materials that resemble candy, resemble soda, are branded in a way that you couldn’t tell from looking at them that they’re medicine,” said Kimberly MacEachern, staff attorney for the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys’ Advisory Council. [What the F* does Kimberly MacEachern know, he is a prosecutor, not a doctor]

Speaking before the House Public Safety, Military and Regulatory Affairs Committee this week, MacEachern said the nondescript packaging would conform to federal regulations for the packaging of medicine. [I thought marijuana had no medical use whatsoever per the morons at the DEA and FDA???]

To illustrate the point, Sen. Kimberly Yee, R-Phoenix, has been passing around to legislators a series of photographs taken of candy and other medical-marijuana products seized during criminal investigations. Among the images are colorful gummy candies wrapped in cellophane and chocolate bars in packaging that mimics the Wonka brand.

Yee said the items were seized from dispensaries, but Heather Manus, who oversees production of marijuana-infused products at the Green Halo, said the items were produced by caregiver collectives or from illegal sources. The Green Halo is the only dispensary to operate a state-licensed kitchen, and it supplies edible medical-marijuana products to several other licensed dispensaries in Arizona.

“We’re just creating gentle, loving medicine here, and it’s not something that is scary or freaky,” Manus said.

Known to patients as Nurse Heather, Manus first produced edibles in New Mexico for legal cardholders in hospice care and says it’s the best way to use medical marijuana because the relief is long-lasting. Smoking provides the quickest onset and lasts two to three hours, while people who ingest the marijuana will feel its effects for up to six hours, she said.

The Green Halo’s edible marijuana items are easy to see through the clear cellophane packaging. Each product is labeled as required by the health department, including the dry weight of the marijuana before the cooking process — patients are allowed up to 2.5 ounces of medical marijuana a week — and this text: “ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH SERVICES’ WARNING: Marijuana use can be addictive and can impair an individual’s ability to drive a motor vehicle or operate heavy machinery. Marijuana smoke contains carcinogens and can lead to an increased risk for cancer, tachycardia, hypertension, heart attack, and lung infection. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN.” [Hmmm, so according to the liars at Arizona Department of Health Services marijuana kills people by causing cancer, heart attacks and lung infections? The liars at ADHS also say marijuana is addictive just like heroin!!! What rubbish!!!]

If the law requires products to be more plainly wrapped and the contents hidden, Manus said, the dispensary will abide by the rules. “We’re trying to do everything and anything they want us to do,” she said. “We simply want to comply. As of right now, we are working very hard to make sure everything is appropriately labeled.”

The House Public Safety committee passed SB 1440 on Thursday by a 5-2 vote. One dissenting member, Rep. Mark Cardenas, D-Phoenix, said he agreed with the premise but questioned the need for legislation.

“The law passed by the voters gave the rule-making authority to the Department of Health Services,” Cardenas said, addressing Yee. “I am a co-sponsor of your bill because I believe the same caution we have with tobacco products should be given to medical marijuana. My question is: Why do we need this bill if basically we’re stripping the authority away from DHS to do the job the voters told them to do?” [Again the law is almost certainly unconstitutional because it conflicts with Prop 203 and needs to be passed by a super majority of the legislator]

Yee said it wasn’t her intention to reduce the ADHS’ authority. By making the packaging requirements law, she said, “you now have penalties where law enforcement can go after these individuals who violate that law in state statutes. There’s a difference between a rule and a statutory reference, and I think that’s why this bill is so important.”

Drunk cop driving the wrong way causes fatal crash???

More of the old "Do as I say, not as I do" from our government masters!!!

Source

Cops: Wrong-way driver caused fatal LSD crash, alcohol suspected

By Carlos Sadovi, Mick Swasko and Peter Nickeas Tribune reporters

7:59 p.m. CDT, March 15, 2013

Police believe that alcohol may have played a factor when a wrong-way driver struck two vehicles and injured three people, two fatally, in a crash early today on Lake Shore Drive.

The crash happened at about 4 a.m. after a man driving a silver SUV got on the southbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive near LaSalle and Lake Shore Drive, said Chicago Police News Affairs Officer John Mirabelli.

The man was driving northbound on the southbound lanes when the crash happened between Belmont and Diversey Parkway, Mirabelli said. The man's vehicle hit a 2006 Toyota driven by a woman, said Mirabelli.

The man is a North Chicago police officer who has been with the department since 2008, according to statement by the North Chicago police. The statement names the officer, who was off-duty, but the Tribune is not naming the officer because he has not been charged with a crime.

The 35-year-old man lives in the far north suburbs. He was relieved of his police powers while the investigation is ongoing, according to the City of North Chicago release. Sources said that the officer had his 35th birthday on Friday.

After hitting the first vehicle, the man smashed into a 2013 Jeep, killing Fabian Torres, 27, of the 2800 block of South Avers Avenue, and Joaquin Garcia, of the 2200 block of West 18th Place, according to Mirabelli and the Cook County medical examiner's office.

The wrong-way driver is estimated to have been traveling more than 60 mph. Drivers traveling southbound told police that they were veering to avoid the man. They also say they had flashed their lights to let him know that he was traveling the wrong direction, Mirabelli said.

The man was the only occupant in his vehicle, a 2008 Chevy SUV. He is at Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital with a fractured hip. His condition had stabilized, Mirabelli said.

The woman was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital where she was to be treated and released for her injuries, Mirabelli said.

Police are investigating whether alcohol played a factor in the crash.

The crash and the investigation closed southbound Lake Shore Drive as traffic was diverted off at the Belmont Avenue exit for more than five hours. The lanes were reopened by about 9 a.m., police said.

North Chicago Mayor Leon Rockingham Jr. confirmed that one of the city’s police officers was involved in the crash.

Rockingham said the officer was off-duty at the time of the crash and has been placed on leave pending the completion of the Chicago Police Department's investigation into the crash.

A woman at the officer's boyhood home, who identified herself as his mother, refused comment Friday evening.

Nathan Horton, a long-time friend and neighbor of the house where the officer grew up, said the officer “was a really good” basketball player on school teams in both elementary school and North Chicago High School.

Horton said his neighbor has always been an outgoing guy, “quick to approach people as a friend, and someone who always helped people out."

"This is a bad neighborhood and some kids were climbing over the fence in our backyard, and it was [the officer] who talked to the kids and told them to stay away,” Horton said.

Horton said the officer was not known to be a reckless driver in the close-knit, dead end section of houses in the North Chicago neighborhood.

“He rides a motorcycle and if he was a drinker, he wasn’t one around here," Horton said. "I never saw him at the local parties and I never saw him intoxicated."

“Honestly, when he became a cop I was surprised because you have to be a physical person to be a cop, and he was a helpful guy but never the type of guy to be confrontational or intimidating,” Horton said.

The mayor lamented that it was the latest trouble involving the North Chicago Police Department, which has faced multiple claims of excessive force over the past and the recent arrest of its former police chief.

“We can’t get out from under that cloud,” the mayor said.

Tribune reporter Robert McCoppin and freelance reporter Denys Bucksten contributed.

csadovi@tribune.com

Twitter: @csadovi

mswasko@tribune.com Twitter: @mickswasko

pnickeas@tribune.com Twitter: @peternickeas

More on photo radar bandit Redflex's Chicago problems.

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Probe deepens as U.S. attorney subpoenas ex-city official

By David Kidwell, Chicago Tribune reporter

12:50 a.m. CDT, March 16, 2013

Federal authorities have launched a criminal probe of bribery allegations in Chicago's red-light camera program, issuing a subpoena for financial records of the former city official at the center of the escalating international scandal.

The subpoena, confirmed Friday by the former official's attorney, was the first indication that the U.S. attorney's office has opened a case since the Tribune raised questions in October about the city's contract with Redflex Traffic Systems, triggering a series of investigations that now threaten to consume the company.

Redflex Holdings Ltd., the Australian parent company, has said an internal investigation uncovered evidence that its decadelong Chicago program was likely built on a $2 million bribery scheme involving the city manager and a longtime friend who was hired as the company's Chicago consultant. The program is also the subject of an investigation by city Inspector General Joseph Ferguson.

The subpoena was signed by an assistant U.S. attorney and delivered to the ex-wife of retired managing deputy transportation commissioner John Bills, his attorney Nishay Sanan said. Bills has denied any wrongdoing. Sanan said he sent a letter to federal prosecutors asking that all further requests for records come to him.

"I don't know why they didn't just subpoena my client directly, but they delivered a subpoena to his ex-wife," Sanan said.

The U.S. attorney's office declined to comment. Bills' ex-wife did not return a telephone message.

In October, the newspaper raised questions about Bills' ties to Redflex consultant Marty O'Malley and disclosed a 2010 company whistle-blower letter alleging an inappropriate relationship between Bills and Redflex that included lavish hotel accommodations. Bills and O'Malley, longtime friends from the same South Side neighborhood, said they had done nothing improper.

Bills oversaw the red-light program from its beginning in 2003 until he retired in 2011. It became Redflex's largest traffic camera program in North America, raising about $100 million for Redflex and more than $300 million in ticket revenue for the city.

In response to Tribune inquires, the company told the newspaper and City Hall that the whistle-blower allegations had no merit and that an internal investigation found only one instance of an improper hotel reimbursement for Bills, at the Arizona Biltmore. But the company hired a second law firm to take another look.

That investigation, led by former federal prosecutor and city Inspector General David Hoffman, found that the whistle-blower's allegations did have merit.

Redflex said earlier this month that Hoffman found the company paid $2.03 million to its Chicago consultant, with some of the money intended for Bills. The company also acknowledged that it plied Bills with 17 company-paid trips from 2003 through 2010, including airfare, hotels, golf outings, rental cars and meals.

"The arrangement between the city program manager, the consultant, and Redflex will likely be considered bribery by the authorities," said a summary of the Hoffman findings publicly released March 4 by the company to the Australian Securities Exchange. The summary said company officials misled City Hall and the Tribune.

Redflex acknowledged last month that it is sharing Hoffman's work with law enforcement. The chairman of the Australian company and the top executives of its Phoenix-based subsidiary have all left amid the unfolding controversy, and Redflex stock has plummeted.

Emanuel's administration referred the matter to the inspector general and barred Redflex from bidding on the city's speed camera program after the Tribune's initial report. Last month — after the company acknowledged its problems were more widespread and that it was sharing information with law enforcement — the mayor banned Redflex from renewing its contract to run more than 380 red-light cameras when it expires in June.

Tribune reporter Todd Lighty contributed.

dkidwell@tribune.com

Right to Lawyer Can Be Empty Promise for Poor

But I think this article shows that the government courts and government criminal justice system doesn't serve the people it pretends to serve, but rather serves the government rulers who run it.

If the court and criminal justice system is impossible to navigate with out a highly paid lawyer it certainly isn't working.

And if a judge who is supposed to be unbiased can't tell people what they need to do to get a fair trial, again the system isn't working.

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Right to Lawyer Can Be Empty Promise for Poor

By ETHAN BRONNER

Published: March 15, 2013 186 Comments

ADEL, Ga. — Billy Jerome Presley spent 17 months in a Georgia jail because he did not have $2,700 for a child support payment. He had no prior jail record but also no lawyer. In Baltimore last fall, Carl Hymes, 21, was arrested on charges of shining a laser into the eyes of a police officer. Bail was set at $75,000. He had no arrest record but also no lawyer. In West Orange, N.J., last summer, Walter Bloss, 89, was served with an eviction notice from the rent-controlled apartment he had lived in for 43 years after a dispute with his landlord. He had gone to court without a lawyer.

Russell Davis, 37, was jailed three times over child support payments during court proceedings that he faced without a lawyer.

Fifty years ago, on March 18, 1963, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that those accused of a crime have a constitutional right to a lawyer whether or not they can afford one. But as legal officials observe the anniversary of what is widely considered one of the most significant judicial declarations of equality under law, many say that the promise inherent in the Gideon ruling remains unfulfilled because so many legal needs still go unmet.

Civil matters — including legal issues like home foreclosure, job loss, spousal abuse and parental custody — were not covered by the decision. Today, many states and counties do not offer lawyers to the poor in major civil disputes, and in some criminal ones as well. Those states that do are finding that more people than ever are qualifying for such help, making it impossible to keep up with the need. The result is that even at a time when many law school graduates are without work, many Americans are without lawyers.

The Legal Services Corporation, the Congressionally financed organization that provides lawyers to the poor in civil matters, says there are more than 60 million Americans — 35 percent more than in 2005 — who qualify for its services. But it calculates that 80 percent of the legal needs of the poor go unmet. In state after state, according to a survey of trial judges, more people are now representing themselves in court and they are failing to present necessary evidence, committing procedural errors and poorly examining witnesses, all while new lawyers remain unemployed.

“Some of our most essential rights — those involving our families, our homes, our livelihoods — are the least protected,” Chief Justice Wallace B. Jefferson of the Texas Supreme Court, said in a recent speech at New York University. He noted that a family of four earning $30,000 annually does not qualify for legal aid in many states.

James J. Sandman, president of the Legal Services Corporation, said, “Most Americans don’t realize that you can have your home taken away, your children taken away and you can be a victim of domestic violence but you have no constitutional right to a lawyer to protect you.”

According to the World Justice Project, a nonprofit group promoting the rule of law that got its start through the American Bar Association, the United States ranks 66th out of 98 countries in access to and affordability of civil legal services.

“In most countries, equality before the law means equality between those of high and low income,” remarked Earl Johnson Jr., a retired justice of the California Court of Appeal. “In this country for some reason we are concerned more with individuals versus government.”

With law school graduates hurting for work, it may appear that there is a glut of lawyers. But many experts say that is a misunderstanding.

“We don’t have an excess of lawyers,” said Martin Guggenheim, a law professor at New York University. “What we have is a miserable fit. In many areas like family and housing law, there is simply no private bar to go to. You couldn’t find a lawyer to help you even if you had the money because there isn’t a dime to be made in those cases.”

Even in situations where an individual is up against a state prosecutor and jail may result, not every jurisdiction provides lawyers to the defendants. In Georgia, those charged with failing to pay child support face a prosecutor and jail but are not supplied with a lawyer.

Mr. Presley lost his job in the recession and fell way behind on support payments for his four children. In 2011, he was jailed after a court proceeding without a lawyer in which he said he could not pay what he owed. He was brought back to court, shackled, every month or two. Each time, he said he still could not pay. Each time, he was sent back.

A year later, he contacted a public defender who handles only criminal cases but who sent his case to the Southern Center for Human Rights. Atteeyah Hollie, a lawyer there, got him released that same day, helped him find work and set up a payment plan.

An important service lawyers can provide defendants like Mr. Presley is knowledge of what courts want — receipts of medical treatment, evidence of a job search, bank account statements. On their own, many people misstep when facing a judge.

In Adel, Ga., a town of 5,000, child support court meets monthly. On a recent morning, a dozen men in shackles and jail uniforms faced Chuck Reddick, a state prosecutor, on their second or third round in court.

“In most cases, they simply can’t pay,” said John P. Daughtrey, who was sheriff here until losing an election in November. “An attorney could explain to the judge why jail is not the solution and how to fix it. As a sheriff, I want criminals in my jail, not a debtor’s prison.”

Mr. Reddick and Judge Carson Dane Perkins of Cook County Superior Court in Adel both said they would welcome lawyers for defendants because it would make the process clearer and smoother.

“If we could extend the right to a lawyer to civil procedures where you face a loss of liberty, that would be good,” Judge Perkins said. “Lawyers can get affidavits from employers and help make cases for those who can’t pay.”

The Southern Center for Human Rights has filed a class-action suit seeking a guarantee of a lawyer for such cases in Georgia. Sarah Geraghty, a lawyer there, said the center had received thousands of calls from Georgians facing child support hearings. Among them was Russell Davis, a Navy veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder who was jailed three times and lost his apartment and car while in jail.

Georgia also offers a case study on the mismatch between lawyers and clients at a time when each needs the other. According to the Legal Services Corporation, 70 percent of the state’s lawyers are in the Atlanta area, while 70 percent of the poor live outside it. There are six counties without a lawyer and dozens with only two or three.

Mr. Bloss, who faced eviction in New Jersey, went to legal services, which won for him the right to stay in his apartment while his case is under appeal.

In Baltimore, where Mr. Hymes was accused of shining a laser at a police officer and assigned bail of $75,000, first bail hearings do not include a lawyer. Tens of thousands are brought through Central Booking every year, facing a commissioner through a glass partition, who determines whether to release the detainee on his own recognizance or assign bail and at what level.

“For the poor, bail is a jail sentence,” said Douglas L. Colbert, a law professor at the University of Maryland. A study he conducted on 4,000 bail cases of nonviolent offenders found that two and a half times as many detainees were released on their own recognizance and bail was set at a far more affordable level if a lawyer was at the hearing.

Mr. Hymes was relatively lucky. When he eventually faced a judge with the help of a public defender, bail was slashed to $200 cash. It took his family a few weeks to pay. A student of Mr. Colbert’s, Iten Naguib, acted as an intermediary.

“If there had been an attorney involved at the initial stages,” Ms. Naguib said, “Mr. Hymes would likely have been released much earlier.”

You think you will get a fair trial??? Don't make me laugh!!!!!

The way the system works is people are almost always grossly over charged with crimes which will send them to prison for 20+ years, and then the people are offered a plea bargain which will only send them to prison for a year if they plead guilty.

And sadly 99 percent of the people charged with crimes accept these plea bargains because they don't have the money to fight the charges, or they know if the do fight the charges and are convicted they will effectively be sent to prison for the rest of their lives.

As a Libertarian I don't think people should get free lawyers.

On the other hand the system clearly does not work and is unfair because it is too complex and confusing for a normal person to understand without the help of a lawyer. And I suspect it was intentionally designed that way to give the government the upper hand in both criminal and civil cases.

Source

Experts: Right to attorney is at risk as cuts hit

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Mar 16, 2013 10:01 PM

As landmark civil-rights cases go, the Gideon case doesn’t have the renown of Brown vs. Board of Education or the notoriety of Miranda, a local case that went national and led to the “right to remain silent” warning familiar to any suspect or fan of TV crime dramas.

But the impact of Gideon vs. Wainwright, published 50 years ago Monday, has fundamentally altered the American legal system in a variety of ways, according to experts. And they suggest budget crises at the state and federal level are a threat to those protections.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision of March 18, 1963, guaranteed the right to representation by an attorney in state courts for any suspect who could not afford one. It came 25 years after a ruling made the same guarantee for defendants in federal courts. It stemmed from a case involving a man accused of burglary in Florida who showed up for court without an attorney.

Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who wrote the opinion, believed the decision was the most important he rendered in the court, said Larry Hammond, a Phoenix attorney who served as a law clerk for Black.

Hammond said the system has since fallen short of the promise the decision offered.

“I have mixed feelings about it,” Hammond said, noting the unrealistic workloads and lack of resources that tie the hands of public defenders at all levels. “It breaks my heart a little bit that we’re not better off, but I love the public defenders. What they’re doing is God’s work.”

It took awhile for Maricopa County to get on board with the notion of a public defender’s office. Two years after the decision was reached, the county Board of Supervisors paid for a division with an appointed administrator, five attorneys and a handful of investigators and staff members.

Craig Mehrens, a Phoenix attorney, went to work in the office shortly after it opened and said the variety of cases — ranging from first-degree murder to contributing to the delinquency of a minor — and staff shortages offered ample opportunity for young lawyers to hone their skills. For Mehrens, whose introduction to the legal community came through books he read, it solidified the value of a vigorous defense.

“Until you’re involved in the criminal-justice system, you have no concept how frightening it is. The public defender is the only human being that stands between that person and his going to prison or put to death. And, of course, in almost every case, the person accused has no concept of how the law works, has no idea what their rights are,” Mehrens said.

“Unfortunately, the public sees defense lawyers as thinking, ‘How do I get this guy off?’ Almost all the defense lawyers I know, they see their job as simply to make sure that person’s rights are not violated. We all know we are going to lose most of our cases.”

The office encountered problems almost from the outset. The first appointed public defender was dismissed after several years because he was alleged to have run his private practice from the public defender’s office, Mehrens said.

His successor held the position for 18 years, but he was fired by the Board of Supervisors in 1987 after he allowed attorneys in the office to testify in a court case about staffing shortages and caseloads.

Bob Storrs, a criminal-defense lawyer who began practicing in Arizona 45 years ago, said the Gideon decision also led to a host of other changes in the system.

Court-appointed lawyers conducted investigations and challenged prosecutors where a suspect might have been unwilling or unable, Storrs said. As investigations and prosecutions became more technical, those court-appointed lawyers became even more vital, he said.

“All of these kinds of things really have evolved out of Gideon. You have to look at it, and you try to make a determination and say, ‘Is this a good case? Do they have the right guy?’ It’s interviewing witnesses, getting a second opinion on the state’s experts,” Storrs said.

“Before Gideon, if they didn’t have the money to hire a lawyer, they went without a lawyer. The number of defendants that hire lawyers is still low in comparison with those that have court-appointed lawyers.”

Court-appointed attorneys accounted for about 80 percent of the lawyers in non-capital felony cases filed in Maricopa County in the last fiscal year.

Today, the system in Maricopa County relies on an administrative office that doles out cases to public defenders as well as to private attorneys who are assigned to cases as contract counsel. But time has not changed many of the issues that made Gideon such an important decision, said Paul Bender, an Arizona State University law professor and constitutional-law expert.

“In a principled way, everybody would agree, I think, that people — regardless of whether they have money or not — are entitled to an adequate defense. If public defenders are swamped the way they are, that means that it’s going to be impossible for some people to get an adequate defense. That can lead to innocent people being convicted. It also leads to plea bargains of cases that shouldn’t be plea- bargained,” he said.

“People should be concerned about that ... just as a matter of fairness and constitutional principle. It’s in everybody’s interest to have that system work well.”

On the 50th anniversary of the landmark decision, it is the notion that budget cuts are once again jeopardizing the chance for indigent suspects to receive a fair trial that concerns legal observers, particularly at the federal level, where the right to counsel was solidified by a 1938 court decision.

Last month, the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Arizona laid off 10 staff members, including six attorneys, because the budget gridlock in Washington, D.C., has led to stagnant funding while prosecution costs have increased, said Jon Sands, federal public defender for Arizona. The sequester just made that worse, he said.

And the federal budget crisis comes at a time when the focus on certain crimes, including drug smuggling, immigration-related offenses, mortgage fraud and crime on tribal lands, has led to a deluge of cases in Arizona’s federal courts. Much of that falls on the shoulders of the Public Defender’s Office.

The federal public defender opened slightly more than 12,000 cases in Arizona in the most recent fiscal year, compared with 5,500 cases in fiscal 2001.

“What this (layoff) means is that indigent defendants will not be given counsel as quickly as they have in the past; cases will not be processed as quickly,” Sands said.

Employees who remain in his office also face furloughs, as do federal prosecutors, U.S. marshals and FBI agents.

“The whole system slows down, which seems to be counterproductive to everyone’s interest in having justice delivered fairly and swiftly,” Sands said.

The federal budget cuts also will affect private attorneys appointed as counsel for indigent defendants, said David Eisenberg, Arizona’s representative for a panel of attorneys appointed through the Criminal Justice Act.

The private attorneys pay experts and other expenses associated with their clients’ defenses and submit reimbursement vouchers. Eisenberg expects delays in attorneys’ voucher reimbursements but said it should not fundamentally alter the work the defense attorneys do on behalf of their clients.

“I think the delay in paying is going to make it more difficult for lawyers to run their practices,” he said.

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