Sheriff Joe Arpaio said his top priority is raises for his staff.
Yea, the last thing in the world we need is to pay Sheriff Joe's goons more money to abuse us.Arpaio softens budget pitch, saying new jail can wait
By Michelle Ye Hee Lee The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Feb 21, 2013 10:37 PM
Sheriff Joe Arpaio doesn’t actually want a new jail — yet.
Arpaio’s top administrators made a budget presentation to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors this week that included up to $274 million in new funding. Most of that — $240 million — they proposed to spend on a new jail.
But Arpaio said Thursday the new jail can wait; his top priority is raises for his staff.
Arpaio said he saw The Arizona Republic’s coverage of the presentation and thought: “Wait a minute, I can prolong that.” Arpaio was the only elected county officer who did not attend his office’s budget presentation. He said he did not want to distract from it, having heard protesters planned to disrupt it.
“Let me put it clear: That was just a wish list,” he said. “I’m not asking for that ($274 million). That’s just something, if they have tons of money, we’d love to have it.”
Uncle Sam goes hunting for local government crooks
I suspect 99 percent of what the Federal government does is unconstitutional.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.
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?
Sheriff Joe #1 racist in nation???
Maricopa County jail leads U.S. in ICE holds
Source
Maricopa County jail leads U.S. in ICE holds
By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Feb 25, 2013 10:56 PM
More inmates were tagged with federal immigration detainers in Maricopa County’s main jail than at any other facility in the country, according to a recent Syracuse University analysis.
The report released last week sought to track the number of unique federal immigration detainers, also known as immigration holds, placed over a period of more than four years on inmates suspected of being undocumented immigrants. The report surveyed thousands of detention facilities nationwide.
The report tracked 28,862 immigration holds at “Maricopa County Jail,” a figure that exceeded those of a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detention facility and a county facility in Houston. Maricopa County’s tally topped 30,000 when inmates processed at the Lower Buckeye Jail were included. The Sheriff’s Office books the majority of inmates at Fourth Avenue Jail.
The statistics Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse gathered from the start of fiscal 2008 through the early part of fiscal 2012 likely do not account for all immigration holds placed on inmates in Maricopa County jails.
The data collected by the university analysts through public-records requests with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement covered four years. But records kept by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office show nearly the same number of inmates have been subject to immigration holds in just the past three calendar years.
Sheriff’s Office records show immigration holds were placed on 27,795 inmates from 2010 through 2012.
Susan Long, professor of managerial statistics at Syracuse University, said the clearinghouse, which studies immigration statistics, received a very limited amount of information from federal officials compared with what the group requested, and the missing data could account for some of the discrepancy.
“I’m not at all surprised that it’s an undercount,” Long said.
The report notes that more than 70percent of Maricopa County inmates with immigration holds were not convicted of crimes, slightly lower than the 77percent that the clearinghouse found nationwide.
ICE officials could not verify the contents of the group’s report and noted that the analysts attempted to draw conclusions about federal immigration enforcement based on data that does not reflect whether inmates with immigration holds were actually deported.
The agency also changed some of the paperwork that detained immigrants receive to clarify how long they may be kept in custody after they would have been released following their state charges or convictions. The policy changes led ICE officials to question the validity of the information in the clearinghouse report.
“As the TRAC report itself notes, its conclusions are based on data that dates back four years, prior to many of ICE’s enforcement reforms including the new detainer guidance issued by the agency on Dec.21,” said Amber Cargile, an ICE spokeswoman in Phoenix. “This guidance limits the use of detainers to individuals who meet the agency’s enforcement priorities, and restricts the use of detainers against individuals arrested for minor misdemeanor offenses such as traffic offenses and other petty crimes, helping to ensure that available resources are focused on apprehending convicted felons, repeat offenders and other ICE priorities.”
Federal officials deported more than 409,000 people in fiscal 2012, up from the 396,000 immigrants removed in fiscal 2011, according to ICE.
The changes could diminish the number of inmates who are subject to ICE holds, continuing a trend that has developed for a variety of reasons.
A big change came in Maricopa County in late December 2011, when federal immigration officers began conducting immigration screenings for every inmate booked into a Maricopa County jail — a function that sheriff’s staff used to perform.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the change after the U.S. Justice Department issued findings about the Sheriff’s Office that alleged widespread discrimination in patrol and detention operations. The report also led federal officials to restrict the sheriff’s access to federal immigration databases.
That change led some politicians, including Sheriff Joe Arpaio, to worry that federal officers would place immigration holds on fewer inmates than the sheriff’s staff had.
That prediction came true: There were fewer immigration detainers placed on Maricopa County jail inmates in 2012 than there were in 2011. ICE holds have dropped by about 20percent in each of the last two years — both before and after ICE took control of immigration screening.
Other factors are likely contributing to the decline, however, including what most believe to be a decline in immigrants entering the U.S. illegally. That belief is based in part on the decline in apprehensions of undocumented immigrants crossing the border and in drophouses discovered in the state.
The overall jail population also has continued to decline in Maricopa County, with the total number of bookings falling by about 7percent from 2010 to 2012.
“Initially, I had concerns about ICE agents taking over this important job of screening for immigration status,” Arpaio said. “But after review of the last several months, I am pleased with the quality and level of work the ICE officers are doing in my jails. What I do not know, however, is the final disposition of these immigration holds. My hope is they are doing what they should, which is deporting border violators.”
Sen. Rich Crandall wants to create a jobs program for cops???
While this law at first sounds like it will allow ALL the teachers in Arizona to be armed it doesn't.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.
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.
Arpaio allies assail outside role in recall
Source
Arpaio allies assail outside role in recall
By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Feb 26, 2013 10:54 PM
Roles have been reversed in the attempt to recall Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
The sheriff’s supporters have taken up themes typically associated with Arpaio’s critics, calling on financial transparency from the group behind the recall, decrying outside influences in the race and raising taxpayer stewardship as reasons why the potential election is bad for Maricopa County.
Those behind the recall, meanwhile, have tempered their familiar complaints about Arpaio’s robust out-of-state financial support and influence, deciding to engage in it themselves because they say the prospect of removing Arpaio from office is so important.
Whether the recall election will happen remains in question. Recall supporters have about 90 days left to collect 335,000 valid signatures to force the election.
When some of the same people successfully sought to recall former state Senate President Russell Pearce in 2011, they needed about 7,700 valid signatures. They turned in nearly 17,000, with county election officials validating about 10,000 of those.
William James Fisher, chairman of Respect Arizona, the group behind the recall effort, said the public is mistaken in its belief that collecting 335,000 signatures is an insurmountable obstacle.
“I believe that we can, otherwise I wouldn’t be wasting my time with this,” Fisher said. “Everyone I talk to is upset with the sheriff. I personally am upset with the way he’s handling his office, and it’s bad for Arizona. Everywhere I go, they all know who he is. They say, ‘He hates Mexicans.’ I think we’re going to be able to show that the Latino community is coming together as one community. We’re not just Democrats, and we’re not just Republicans.”
Fisher and his supporters count on galvanizing Latino voters. They also are relying on dozens of signature gatherers from out of state who have fanned out to libraries, courthouses and busy street corners throughout Maricopa County intent on meeting the May 30 petition deadline.
Fisher is quick to point out that those out-of-state signature gatherers represent just a fraction of those committed to ousting the sheriff.
Still, the issue is reminiscent of the 2012 sheriff’s campaign in which Arpaio’s critics made an issue of his out-of-state support. Analysis by The Arizona Republic during that cycle showed nearly 80percent of the sheriff’s campaign donors lived outside Arizona.
Pearce’s supporters also tried to cast his 2011 recall as a product of outside antagonists, though longtime East Valley political observers say Pearce’s unseating was accomplished at the precinct level.
Fisher is unapologetic about the reliance of Arpaio’s critics on out-of-state support. Help from beyond Arizona’s borders — particularly petition gathers from out of state — is a necessity given the number of signatures required and the relatively short time to collect them, he said.
“I think we could do it without them, but it would take a lot more work,” he said. “The truth is I will be going anywhere to raise money. I prefer to do it in Maricopa County, but if I have to go to Tucson, I’ll do it; if I have to go to (Washington) D.C., I’ll do it. … The issue is that important.”
Arpaio’s supporters also are using tactics from their opponents’ playbook. Calling for financial disclosure — a frequent complaint among Arpaio’s critics in the last election — was among the first volleys the sheriff’s supporters fired after the recall effort was announced in late January.
Chad Willems, Arpaio’s campaign manager, released a statement about 10 days after the recall drive was launched asking for the immediate release of names of donors who contributed an estimated $100,000 to the recall effort.
The role reversals are a reflection of the intensity surrounding the battle. Arpaio faced recall efforts in 2005 and 2007, but this one is different, Willems said, because of the amount of early organization that was evident, including the swarm of signature gatherers.
“That tells me they have money, at least some money to get started,” Willems said. “My sense is that they’re going to be raising money from out of state, the same labor unions that poured in money to last year’s election.”
Two labor groups contributed $500,000 to an anti-Arpaio political-action committee during the 2012 general election, but a representative of the hotel-and-hospitality union said it would not be involved in the recall; its efforts are focused on Phoenix municipal races this year.
“I don’t think they’re sitting on a pot of 1.5 to 2 million bucks, but I think probably by the end of the day, that’s what it’s going to take to get this done,” Willems said.
Arpaio’s supporters have made an issue of the recall election’s potential impact on taxpayers.
Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell estimated it would cost $1.5 million to verify petition signatures and an additional $4 million to put on a special election if enough signatures are validated.
“At a time of severe fiscal crisis, this illegal recall effort wastes the scarce resources of the taxpayers, the county and the state,” said Larry Klayman, an attorney hired by Arpaio supporters intent on blocking the recall effort.
Maricopa County has paid more than $25 million in legal claims, jury verdicts and settlements over abuses in jail operations during Arpaio’s tenure.
And the bill for a string of the sheriff’s failed public-corruption investigations, some of which were allegedly motivated by politics, is still being totaled, though taxpayers were on the hook for at least $28 million at last count.
The roles might have changed, but two constants remain in these battles involving Arpaio’s office: insults and lawsuits.
Soon after the recall effort was announced, the head of the Maricopa County Republican Committee sent a letter to Arpaio’s supporters calling for a “shadow army” to emerge and thwart attempts by “thugs” and “domestic terrorists” to collect recall petition signatures.
Recall supporters were outraged at the “inflammatory rhetoric” in the letter and demanded a retraction.
The Arpaio campaign distanced itself from the letter, despite the fact that it directed Arpaio supporters to one of his campaign workers. But after years of the sheriff being compared to war criminals, racist politicians and despots of all stripes, his campaign met the complaints about the lack of civility with a shrug.
Fisher also distanced himself from the Arpaio critics who’ve relied on making comparisons between the sheriff and Adolf Hitler to drive home their points. Instead, he said, the recall campaign would be about education and not intimidation.
“I’m not going to yell and scream; I’m not going to threaten anybody,” Fisher said. “He’s going to feel the wrath of the educated, disciplined Latino voter.”
But Fisher’s effort has already been met with threats of legal action from Arpaio’s supporters in the “tea party.”
Two men from Surprise formed Citizens to Protect Fair Election Results and hired a Washington, D.C.-based attorney to threaten legal action against Fisher if he does not drop the recall effort by Saturday. The two are affiliated with tea-party groups in the Valley and are listed in documents filed with the Arizona Corporation Commission as principals of the anti-recall group. Calls to them were referred to Klayman, who declined to discuss his clients.
Klayman said the threat of legal action is based on his belief that the Arizona Constitution prohibits recall elections for officials in their first six months of office. Any interpretations that would exclude incumbent candidates from the six-month protection are not codified in a constitutional amendment, he said.
Klayman also said recall supporters could not point to any abuse of Arpaio’s office that has taken place since the November election, when the sheriff’s opponents had ample opportunity to remove him from office.
“There are other ways if you have a problem … than to subvert the electoral system,” Klayman said.
Much as Arpaio has done in the past, Fisher said he would not let the threat of legal action from a group of activists deter him from his cause.
“We’re a hundred times bigger than them,” Fisher said. “If they want to make it a fight between the tea party and Latinos in this state, bring it on.”
Do Fingerprints Lie?
SourceAnnals 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.’’
South African cops tie man to van and drag him thru the streets killing him.
Usually I report on corrupt and sadistic American cops, but police thugs thru out the world are capable of committing the crimes American police commit.
South African police suspended over death of man 'dragged behind van'
Fresh footage casts doubts on police claims taxi driver assaulted officer and tried to take his gun before incident
WARNING: Viewers may find this footage distressing Link to video: South African police officers suspended as van death investigated
South Africa has suspended eight police officers after the death of a man they tied to the back of a police van and dragged along the road while bystanders looked on.
Video footage showing the treatment of Mido Macia, in Daveyton, east of Johannesburg, has once more focused attention on South Africa's police force, already dogged by allegations of brutality, corruption and incompetence.
In the amateur video footage (warning: contains images that some may find distressing), published by South African newspaper, the Daily Sun, Macia's hands are tied to the rear of a police van behind his head before it moves off. Just over two hours later he was found dead in a local police cell, according to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID). A postmortem gave the cause of death as head injuries with internal bleeding.
The video provoked outrage with President Jacob Zuma labelling it "horrific, disturbing and unacceptable. No human being should be treated in that manner." He has instructed the minister of police to investigate the matter.
Police chief Riah Phiyega said the eight officers involved had been suspended and the station commander would be removed from his duties. "We would like to assure the country and the world that what is in the video is not how the South African police service in a democratic South Africa goes about its work," she said.
The IPID responded by launching an inquiry and giving details of the police version of events. The police account alleged that Macia, 27, a taxi driver from Mozambique, assaulted an officer and took his firearm after officers asked him to move his taxi because it was obstructing traffic. They admitted only that there was a "struggle" to get the taxi driver into the police van.
But a further video (warning: contains images that some may find distressing) published by the Daily Sun and provided to the Guardian casts doubt on the account. The new footage suggests Macia did not grab the gun or use violence against police, only struggling to free himself as police seized him and lifted him off his feet.
Amnesty International's human rights organisation's southern Africa director, Noel Kututwa, said the incident was "the latest in an increasingly disturbing pattern of brutal police conduct in South Africa". It comes after a series of setbacks for the South African police force, struggling to demonstrate that its low paid, reputedly poorly-trained, officers can be trusted to uphold – or even obey – the law. Last week, the case against Oscar Pistorius, accused of murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, was undermined when the lead investigating detective was removed from the case after being charged with seven counts of attempted murder himself. Last year's Marikana shootings, in which police opened fire on a crowd of striking miners, killing 34 at a platinum mine northwest of Johannesburg, are being investigated by a judicial commission.
Macia's case also evoked memories of the death of Andries Tatane, a mathematics teacher and community activist in 2011, which was also captured on video. Tatane was attacked at a peaceful protest march by 12 policemen who beat him with batons, kicked him and shot rubber bullets into his chest at close range.
The dispute between Macia and police officers began just before 7pm on Monday. Video shows him gesticulating at an officer but, although there are small gaps in the footage, there is no indication that Macia laid a hand on him. Daily Sun publisher Jeremy Gordin denounced the police account as "a tissue of lies".
Other officers move in and Macia is dragged away, being lifted head-over-heels as police attempt to get him into the police van. He is eventually tied to the van. Onlookers shout that they are going to film the incident and a bystander can be heard shouting in Zulu: "What has this guy done?"
The van moves off while Macia tries in vain to keep step. It then stops, two police officers pick up his legs and drop them to the ground as the vehicle picks up speed and drives off, beyond the view of the camera. The IPID said Macia was found dead in a police cell at 9.15pm.
South African police said the national commissioner, Riah Phiyega "strongly condemned" what had happened and urged people "to remain vigilant and continue to report all acts of crime irrespective of who is involved".
As well as provoking further soul-searching about state violence, Macia's death may also raise fresh concerns about the country's treatment of immigrants. In 2008, Mozambicans were among migrants targeted by rioters, and attacks against foreigners have continued, including allegations of police brutality.
Amnesty's 2012 annual report documented allegations against the South African police of excessive force, torture, rape and "extrajudicial executions". It said the IPID received 720 new cases for investigation of suspicious deaths in custody or in other policing contexts from April 2011 to March 2012.
The Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria has reported that the number of people shot dead by police doubled in the four years to 2010. Deaths in police custody or resulting from police action numbered 860 in 2009-10, against an average of 695 deaths a year from 2003-2008.
Have you been affected by a similar incident in South Africa? Please email us on guy.grandjean@guardian.co.uk
South African police van death: spotlight needed if change is to come
We all know that the culture of police brutality, of guns in the homes of some of us, diminishes all of us. Yet we kept quiet
South Africans are tired of being at the forefront of the global media. We have been there a lot lately – for all the wrong reasons.First it was the Marikana massacre, when the police gunned down 34 striking mineworkers within minutes last August. The Economist put us on its cover for that, saying we are in "sad decline". Then it was Oscar Pistorius shooting his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. Time magazine has put us on the cover for that, bemoaning our violent culture.
And much was made of the news that the investigating officer in the case, Hilton Botha, is up on charges of shooting at a taxi with seven passengers on board. Not long before that was the gang rape and murder of 17-year-old Anene Booysen.
Now this: mobile-phone footage of Mozambican taxi driver Mido Macia handcuffed to the back of a police van and dragged behind it – after an alleged parking dispute – surfaced this week. On Friday eight police officers were arrested over Macia's death; but only after a global outcry.
The composite that emerges is disturbing: a country that is globally at the top of the pile for murder and rape (65,000 people were raped last year in a country of 50 million); an incompetent police force that is quick to pull the trigger; a populace awash with guns (Pistorius allegedly slept with one at his bedside and a rifle on the window sill). We are not nice people, are we?
But it is worth remembering that the majority of us do not sleep with guns by our bedside, and we sleep easy. Not many of us are rapists, or murder our wives. There are about 190,000 police officers in South Africa, and not all of them are brutes of the type who dragged Macia through the streets of Daveyton.
We just want the world to look away. We don't want to be in the spotlight. We want people to ask us about Nelson Mandela when we travel abroad, instead of asking about the crime rate.
Yet, whatever our aversion to being scrutinised so closely, the truth is that issues highlighted in the foreign media lately do cut to the deep problems that we have failed to deal with in South Africa. When the police dragged Macia behind a van this week, it was not as if these things do not happen.
They happen all the time. The most interesting part of the mobile-phone footage of Macia's ordeal was the fact that many of the spectators were using their phones to take pictures or videos.
The perpetrators were nonplussed by this. In fact, they turned up at work the next day and the day after as if nothing had happened. As one woman said, they expected applause from residents.
That is because they have been told by politicians since President Jacob Zuma ascended to power in 2009 that they should "act tough" against alleged lawbreakers.
"We cannot say to the police, retreat. We cannot say to South Africans, despair. Our job is to give people hope. Yes. Shoot the bastards. Hard-nut to crack, incorrigible bastards," said Zuma's then-deputy police minister Fikile Mbalula in 2009.
Since then numerous names have graced our front pages in cases of police brutality. Atlegang Aphane, a three-year-old, was shot and killed by a policeman allegedly because he suspected the boy was holding a gun. Olga Kekana was shot and killed by officers who suspected her of driving a stolen car. They gave no warning and they fled the scene. These officers are still in the South African police. They haven't been arrested. Then there was Marikana, a grotesque show in which the state arrested, and in some instances allegedly tortured, the survivors of the massacre – and charged them with the murder of their own comrades.
Police top brass said at the time the perpetrators should not be sorry for what happened.
This culture of acceptance of police brutality is what killed the taxi driver Mido Macia this week.
It will not end. In his state of the nation speech in February, Zuma promised an "iron fist" against protesters, without saying a word about police brutality.
We South Africans have kept quiet while this was being done in our name. In a sense, we are like the white South Africans who kept quiet while apartheid was being perpetrated in their name. We all know that the culture of police brutality, of guns in the homes of some of us, diminishes all of us. Yet we kept quiet, and are now fatigued by all the attention from across the globe.
It should continue. If South Africa is to halt the slide into wanton police brutality and ludicrously low convictions in cases of violence against women and children, then these cases have to come into the light – and the international spotlight, too.
We might not like it, but for this to stop – and for us not to lead the diminished lives we now live – the light has to continue to shine on South Africa.
South Africa's police log of brutality
A taxi driver being dragged behind a police van is not an isolated example of abuse, according to the country's police watchdog
Log on to South Africa's Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) website and read the latest news. On Wednesday, a 38-year-old police constable appeared before Welkom district court charged with raping a 42-year-old woman. She had been arguing with her sister before the police were called. Officers found her at home, proceeded to handcuff her. They took her to a field where the constable allegedly raped her next to the police van. The constable is out on R1,500 (£110) bail.
On 21 February, another constable was in court for another rape, this time in Boshoff, Free State. He gave his former girlfriend and other friends a lift from a tavern in a state vehicle. When the two were left alone, the car pulled over so that the victim could urinate. After a chase, the constable allegedly raped her, assaulted her and threatened to kill her when she refused to get back into the car.
Murder conviction
On 18 February, the case against police constable Hlengiwe Mkhize was wrapped up in the Pietermaritzburg high court. Mkhize was convicted of murder and attempted murder for shooting and killing 15-year-old Mlindeli Ngcobo. Mlindeli was riding in a car that was in an accident with the constable's. Both parties agreed to report the incident at the police station, but Mkhize fired two shots into the car and killed the teenager, who was hit in the head. She claimed it was an attempted hijacking and that she had only intended to fire warning shots, but will be sentenced on 1 March.
"The IPID is satisfied with the conviction as it sends a message to rouge [sic] police officers that they will be held accountable by the criminal justice system of our country," said the oversight body about Mkhize's conviction.
Man dragged behind police van
Only a week later, however, there is this: "IPID is investigating the death of a taxi driver at the hands of the police". According to police, Mido Macia, a 27-year-old Mozambican, was allegedly obstructing traffic in Daveyton with his Toyota taxi when they turned on their siren and asked him to move. They say he then assaulted a constable and took his gun. A warrant officer intervened and got the firearm back before driving to the police station in Macia's taxi for backup.
When he returned, the constable was struggling to put the suspect in the police van, say the officers. "The policemen then put the resisting suspect into the back of the police van and they took him to the police station where he was detained. The taxi driver was found dead at about 21:15 by another police officer. An inquest docket was later registered. An assault GBH docket against the deceased was also opened by the police," reads the police account.
The investigator's initial statement declined to mention that Macia was tied to the police van's bench and dragged through the street. The rear doors were open as he was towed behind. Officers participated in front of dozens of people. When Macia tried to resist the pain of being dragged along the road by using his feet to lift his body off the ground, the officers involved lifted both his legs and then dropped them before the police car took off to the station.
The actions of the police were a brutal attempt publicly to inflict pain and humiliation. There's no other interpretation. Dragging a person behind a car is an expression of power. Macia, while tied and being dragged at speed, was helpless and must have been terrified.
South Africa's Daily Sun broke the story on Thursday (on Wednesday it led with a man who eats frogs, but on Thursday it was the toast of the country's media). Witnesses told the paper that Macia had parked on the wrong side of the road and was assaulted when he argued with police. A source who saw him in the police cells told the newspaper not to be fooled by comments from the police: "These cops must not try to speak nicely to you … They killed him. They beat him up so badly in here." A witness on the street filmed the incident and gave the footage to Daily Sun. It has since been seen around the world after being posted online.
On Thursday, an IPID spokesman, Moses Dlamini, told eNews that the inquest into the action by officers had been upgraded to a criminal murder charge. He said Macia died of head wounds "and you can see then if you look at the footage how that came about", said Dlamini, adding that the incident was extremely disturbing.
South Africa's national police commissioner Riah Phiyega used a statement to say she "strongly condemned" the act – all things considered, a rather soft approach to the visual evidence available.
Marikana inquiry
This incident is not an isolated case, either. Alongside the Daily Sun's article – "Tied up, dragged and beaten to death" – was a report from the inquiry into the deaths of 44 people during a strike at Lonmin platinum's mine in Marikana last year. Mzoxolo Magidiwana, who was shot but lived, said of the police, "I heard them celebrate as I lay on the ground after being shot … I heard the police laugh, saying, 'Even their leader, Mgcineni "Mambush" Noki, is dead.'"
Suspicious deaths in custody
After Macia's death, Amnesty International said that the IPID had received 720 new cases for investigation of suspicious deaths in custody between April 2011 and March 2012. "Amnesty International urges the South African government to make a public commitment to ensure that the police stop the use of excessive force and deliberate targeted killings," said the organisation's southern Africa director, Noel Kututwa.
The police union Popcru said it was "mortified by these actions which demonstrate the opposite of what the men and women in blue represent". It added its support to the IPID investigation. Popcru, no doubt, would rightly be worried about the image of South Africa's police and remind us that there are law-abiding officers out there who are committed to their jobs.
President horrified
The abuse, however, has developed to levels that cannot be tolerated. South Africa's president, Jacob Zuma, released a statement on Thursday sending his "heartfelt condolences" to Macia's family.
"Members of the South African police service are required to operate within the confines of the law in executing their duties," said Zuma. "The visuals of the incident are horrific, disturbing and unacceptable. No human being should be treated in that manner."
He has asked the police minister, Nathi Mthethwa, to investigate.
Police abuse – both on the streets and in the cells – calls for much more than an investigation by Mthethwa into a single incident. Officers are being charged with rape and murder, not to mention a list of other crimes, and Phiyega needs to show South Africans she can institute changes to make police accountable to the country's laws, rather than empowered to enforce their own arbitrary forms of "justice" and punishment.
Unless Mthethwa, Zuma and Phiyega start to make drastic changes to the pattern of abuse in the SAPS, the country will lose hope in an improved system. With the brutal death of Macia and the scores who died at the hands of the police before him, there's certainly little hope in the system we have.
Have you been affected by a similar incident in South Africa? Please email guy.grandjean@guardian.co.uk
Recall leader refuses to drop bid to oust Arpaio
Source
Recall leader refuses to drop bid to oust Arpaio
Posted: Saturday, March 2, 2013 9:06 am
Associated Press
The leader of an effort to recall Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio says his group won’t abandon its bid to oust the sheriff even though Arpaio supporters are threatening legal action.
Recall leader William James Fisher says Arpaio supporters haven’t sent him the cease-and-desist letter that they said they were going to send when they threatened legal action if the effort wasn’t folded by this coming Saturday. Click here to find out more!
Arpaio supporters contend the effort is unconstitutional, while recall organizers say the sheriff has put immigration enforcement above other law enforcement priorities.
Recall organizers face a May 30 deadline for handing in valid petition signatures from more than 335,000 voters.
Larry Klayman, a lawyer representing the Arpaio supporters, didn’t return a call seeking comment on the refusal to abandon the recall effort.
Congress - It's secret, you can't sue us!!!!
Supreme Court rules out secret surveillance lawsuitsCongress 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.
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
Maricopa County’s insurance cost will increase
By Michelle Ye Hee Lee The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Mar 3, 2013 10:36 PM
Maricopa County will pay more in insurance premiums for the upcoming year, as it becomes more difficult for the county to find insurance carriers based on its exposure to legal claims.
The county will pay $2.3 million to renew its insurance policies, the highest amount in at least three years. That pays for up to $55 million in insurance coverage for the county through six different companies.
Part of the increase is because the county must pay for coverage from two companies for its excess-liability plan. The liability plan was renewed March 1, and it covers claims that exceed the $5 million limit that can be paid out by the county’s self-insured risk trust fund.
For the first time, the county will use two new, separate insurance companies to cover sheriff-related claims and non-sheriff related claims. The company that previously covered the county’s excess liability was financially unstable and could not afford to insure the county anymore, said Pauline Hecker, risk-management director.
Other reasons for the premium increase relate to changes in the market. It has become more difficult to find insurance carriers because there is a lack of supply, Hecker said. Insurance companies are increasing premiums, and underwriters are becoming less risky when weighing potential exposure.
The Risk Management Department had expected insurance costs to rise, based on recent claims that increased the county’s legal exposure.
Those claims include several auto-liability claims, awrongful-death case and a wrongful-prosecution case.
They also include the high-profile jail-death lawsuit filed by the family of Ernest “Marty” Atencio and 495 property and auto claims stemming from the October 2010 hailstorm.
Public safety is generally considered the area that exposes the county to the most legal and financial risks compared with other government functions.
But the large land area and population of Maricopa County expose it to greater legal risks. Open and closed claims are an important factor in the price of the county’s insurance premium. So are the number of the county’s employees, which is roughly 13,000, and the population of Maricopa County, at 3.8 million.
The number and type of county vehicles, and how much they travel in the 132-mile-wide county, also influence premiums.
“With Maricopa County being the fourth-largest county in the United States, it’s not unusual to have this type of a ($55 million insurance) program,” Hecker said.
Some of the most-recent large payouts by the county have been $4 million to settle a medical-malpractice case involving the Maricopa Medical Center and a $3.25 million payment to settle a lawsuit over the 2005 death of a diabetic inmate. But those payments individually did not exceed the $5 million the county can pay out of its self-insured risk trust fund.
Still, Hecker said, the Risk Management Department is paying for a robust insurance program to protect taxpayers, in case of a payout exceeding $5 million.
Arpaio loses appeal on pink-underwear case
By Jacques Billeaud Associated Press Mon Mar 4, 2013 1:21 PM
The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to hear Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s appeal of a ruling that criticized a decision by his jail officers to force pink underwear onto a mentally ill inmate who erroneously believed jailers were trying to rape him.
The refusal by the court means the lawsuit by the estate of Eric Vogel appears headed to trial for a second time.
Arpaio’s office won the case at trial, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the verdict and called for a new trial in a ruling a year ago.
The 9th Circuit said dressing inmates in pink underwear — a hallmark of Arpaio — appeared to be punishment without legal justification and noted that it’s fair to infer that the selection of pink as the underwear color was meant to symbolize the loss of prisoners’ masculinity.
The Sheriff’s Office and Vogel’s attorney didn’t immediately return a request for comment on Monday.
Early in his 20-year tenure as sheriff of Maricopa County, Arpaio won points with voters for making inmates wear pink underwear, housing them in canvas tents during triple-digit summer heat, and dressing them in old-time striped jail uniforms.
Arpaio’s attorneys wanted the nation’s highest court to examine whether having pink boxers as part of the standard jail uniform can constitute punishment before a trial is held.
Vogel had refused to get out of his street clothes after he was arrested in 2001 for investigation of assaulting an officer who was responding to a burglary call. A group of officers in the jail stripped Vogel and put him in pink underwear and other prison clothing as he shouted that he was being raped.
A lawyer for Vogel’s estate has said the officers didn’t sexually assault Vogel and that his client didn’t suffer injuries at the jail.
Vogel, who was determined by a counselor to be paranoid and psychotic, died less than a month later, after he and his mother got in a minor car accident. When an officer handling the accident told Vogel that he might be jailed on a warrant stemming from his previous struggle involving jail clothes, Vogel ran several miles from the scene back to his home.
He died the next day, and medical examiners concluded the cause was cardiac arrhythmia.
Brewer loses appeal of Arizona day-laborer rules
By Michael Kiefer The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Mar 4, 2013 1:30 PM
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Monday upheld an injunction against another section of SB 1070, the controversial Arizona immigration law.
The injunction was first imposed in February 2012 when a U.S. District Court judge in Phoenix ruled that statutes prohibiting people from stopping their cars to hire and pick up day laborers soliciting work are unconstitutional. The 9th Circuit panel agreed that the statute infringed on the constitutionally guaranteed right to commercial speech.
“It’s another in a series of defeats for 1070, and it recognizes that the law unconstitutionally targets the rights of day laborers,” said Omar Jadwat, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the organizations that brought suit against Arizona.
Whether the state asks for an en banc hearing from a larger group of 9th Circuit judges or petitions the U.S. Supreme Court remains to be seen.
“Governor (Jan) Brewer is still reviewing today’s disappointing decision, and has not yet made a determination whether to appeal,” said her spokesman, Matt Benson.
Brewer signed SB 1070 into law in spring 2010. It was immediately challenged in lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice and numerous civil-rights and advocacy groups.
Before the law took effect, a U.S. District Court judge enjoined four sections of the law: one that required immigrants to carry "alien-registration papers"; one that allows for warrantless arrest if an officer thinks there is probable cause to believe the individual committed a public offense that makes him or her removable from the U.S.; one that makes it a crime for illegal immigrants to solicit, apply for or perform work; and one that requires law-enforcement officers to check the legal status of people stopped during the investigation of possible crimes.
Those injunctions went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld all but the injunction against the requirement for police to check identification. That provision is still being challenged in pending lawsuits.
Two other provisions of SB 1070 were subsequently enjoined as well, including the soliticion of day labor, and a statute making it unlawful to transport or harbor individuals suspected of being in the country illegally.
Jadwat said he would be surprised if the state appeals Monday’s ruling, though he described Arizona as “still stuck in anti-mmigrant madness. The rest of the country has moved on.”
Of course I am an atheist and to me this is nothing but superstitious rubbish.
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.
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.”
I won't even think about that in the case of Sheriff Joe because he probably would throw me in prison for just thinking the idea.
Arpaio recall off to impressive start
Leaders of a group seeking to recall Sheriff Joe Arpaio today announced that they have 120,000 valid signatures, which would put them well over a third of the way to the promised land.
If that’s true, Arpaio might want to start sending away for brochures from Carnival and Royal Carribean. I’ve heard a cruise is a nice way to ease into retirement.
Of course, the question is, does Respect Arizona have the money needed to finish the job? Signatures don’t come cheap and any campaign of this magnitude will certainly need paid circulators.
Respect Arizona must turn in 335,317 valid signatures by May 7 to force a November recall, according to Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne. The group will likely need 450,000 or 500,000 signatures to ensure a cushion. (They actually have until the end of May to turn in signatures, but that would put them into a March election.)
Other than the campaign to recall then-Gov. Evan Mecham in 1988, I can’t think of any grassroots campaign on this scale. In the end, the Mecham recall wasn’t needed. He was impeached and tossed out of office.
As for Arpaio, if Respect Arizona gets this to a ballot, the sheriff might want to start packing up his pink undies.
A recall election isn’t like a regular election, where a Republican nominee faces a Democrat or an independent (or both). Recall organizers will surely look for a fellow Republican to run against Arpaio, who won in November with a skimpy 50.7 percent of the vote despite a multi-multi-million-dollar campaign.
Split the Republican vote and Arpaio is gone.
Then again, never underestimate the sneakiness of certain Republican operatives. I imagine they’re out there, even now, scouring the county in search of a spoiler or two.
Hey, I wonder if Olivia Cortez has any law enforcement experience?
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.
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.”
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Legislature acts to boost Arpaio’s chances in recall
On Wednesday, anti-Joe Arpaio forces announced that they are on track in their drive to recall the sheriff this fall. On Thursday, Arpaio got an early 81st birthday present from his friends the state Capitol.
The Arizona House passed a bill making it harder for the citizens of this state to exercise their constitutional right to recall elected officials.
Then they made the bill retroactive to Jan. 1.
Which would affect, oh I don’t know…..
One person. One.
Two things seem certain. Arpaio is really sweating this recall threat. The idea of going one-on-one against a challenger must terrify the guy who was once Arizona’s most popular politician.
And two, this bill, should it become law, will head to court faster than Joe can crank out a frantic fundraising plea about the “radical extremists” out to get him.
Attorney Tom Ryan — who fended off legal challenges and other dirty tricks in the Russell Pearce recall — on Friday pledged to sue the state should House Bill 2282 pass. The bill, he says, is “clearly unconstitutional.”
“This is not their job to protect Sheriff Joe,” he told me. “Their job is to protect the process and now they’re violating the process to protect the very man that many of them owe their political careers to. That’s shameful.”
Shameful, and transparently blatant.
Now Smith is trying to add a primary election to the recall process, never mind that the Arizona Constitution calls for one special election and sets out how it’s supposed to work.
Had there been a primary in the Pearce recall, Pearce likely would have won. By forcing him to stand in a special election against another member of his own party, the Republican vote was split and his opponent, Jerry Lewis, prevailed.
Smith told the House Judiciary Committee last month that the Legislature has a constitutional duty to add a primary election to the recall process. He offered some tortured logic for why, ignoring the part of the Constitution that says “a special election shall be ordered” in the event of a recall.
“We’re starting to see a usurpation of our elections system through what I would call a loophole in our recall election law,” he said.
A usurpation? In 101 years, we’ve had one successful recall of a state officer.
Regardless, Smith’s bill passed on a party line 5-2 vote, and on Thursday Republicans sent it sailing over the Senate, 36-23.
Kavanagh tells me he made the bill retroactive not because he wants to throw a lifeline to Arpaio but because he wants to abide by the wishes of voters, who in November rejected the top-two primary initiative.
“We have a mandate from the voters based upon the 2-to-1 defeat of Prop 121,” he said. “The voters said partisan elections need to stay partisan and that’s what this bill does and I wanted to make sure that what the voters said from then forward is what they get.”
The fact that he decided to make sure of that just 24 hours after Respect Arizona announced it has collected 120,000 valid signatures toward Arpaio’s recall is just coincidental, I suppose.
I wasn’t a fan of this recall, figuring that voters ought to have a reason to want to reconsider their vote before we spend $5.5 million on another election. But here’s the thing: the law allows it. If those 120,000 signatures are good and the group can raise the money to collect another 215,000 by May — no small feat – then a recall we should have.
Our founding fathers risked statehood to make sure of it. But don’t take my word for it.
When Pearce threw out a multitude of reasons for why his 2011 recall election should be cancelled – arguing that a tougher standard should apply to make it harder to recall elected officials — the Arizona Supreme Court sent him packing.
“The delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1910 were willing to risk statehood over a robust recall system that subjected every official to removal,” Chief Justice Rebecca White Berch wrote, in a unanimous opinion. “Adopting a standard that makes it more difficult for the public to remove its own officers would frustrate that historical intent.”
Translation: if our leaders want to change Arizona Constitution – even for a pal — they should do it the old-fashioned way.
By asking our permission.
Of course the reason the Founders created the Second Amendment was
to protect us from tyrants like Nixon, Bush and Obama.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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
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.
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.
Maricopa County’s insurance cost will increase
I guess you can blame the sadistic thugs and murders that work for Sheriff Joe for this.
Arpaio loses appeal on pink-underwear case
And while we are talking about how Sheriff Joe's sadistic goons who routinely murder inmates in the Maricopa County Jail are driving up insurance rats this article just popped up.
Courts shoot down Arizona's racist SB 1070 again.
Source
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.
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.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio recall off to impressive start
Back in the Ev Mecham days I offered to donate a rifle to the Recall Mecham campaign.
Secret Police in Phoenix????
Phoenix Police to encrypt radio transmissions making them secret
Phoenix Police to encrypt radio transmissions and make them secret.
Politicians making it harder for us to recall them?
Politicians passing a retroactive law making it harder to recall Sheriff Joe Arpaio?
Our government masters love to tell us they are "public servants" who work for us.
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.
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.
Az Legislature tries to keep Sheriff Joe Arpaio from being recalled???
Source
The bill is brought to you by Rep. Steve Smith, the Maricopa Republican who last year spearheaded a sweet piece of work that would have reimbursed Russell Pearce $260,000 for his non-existent recall expenses. Even his fellow legislators lacked the chutzpah to go along with that scheme.
But first Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, amended the bill to be retroactive to Jan. 1. If that sounds like special-interest legislation – which would, of course, be illegal – think again.
Richard Nixon wished for total handgun ban
One more reason to hate Nixon???
Google says the FBI is spying on some of you
Source
Year National
Security
Letters Users
Accounts2009 0-999 1000-1999 2010 0-999 2000-2999 2011 0-999 1000-1999 2012 0-999 1000-1999 This is also at here on the web.
AG Holder - Obama OK to murder Americans with drones!!!!!
Attorney General Eric H. Holder says Obama is allowed to murder American citizens!!!!!
Dr. Patterson - It's time to legalize marijuana!!!
I agree with him, except for the taxing and regulating part!!!
Gabrielle Giffords' husband, Mark Kelly buys AR-15
Astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of Gabrielle Giffords, recently purchased an assault weapon.
'Truth serum' may be used to assess Holmes' sanity
This sounds more like witchcraft then sound science.
Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist - Freedom fighter or criminal???
Source
How do you spell hypocrite - Gun grabber Mark Kelly
It's seems like Mark Kelly and his wife U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords are gun grabbers who want to keep us from having guys, while they have their own private arsenal.
No ethics for Phoenix City Council members???
Source
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
Veterans Administration suppresses and manipulates health data for political reasons???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???
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
SourceVA 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
SourceResearcher 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
SourceWhistleblower: 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
SourceWhistleblower: 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???
SourceIs 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?
Well sadly there isn't a dime worth of difference between Emperor Obama and Emperor Bush.
Emperor Obama has continued Bush's illegal unconstitutional wars, and is continuing to turn America into a police state like Emperor Bush did.
US citing security to censor more public records
Remember how George W. Bush was the "police state" President and Obama was going to change all of that.
US citing security to censor more public records,
Source
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
SourceMar 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
SourceMedia 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.
The "9 Step Reid Method" is pretty much a version of the good cop, bad cop questioning method. The bad cop tells the suspect he will be sent to the gas chamber if he doesn't confess, and the good cop tells the suspect he will get a slap on the wrist if he confesses. And the suspect usually confesses to the good cop, because after all he will only get a slap on the wrist if he confesses.
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.
The article pretty much confirms that.
And I guess you can also say the same thing about the "War on Drugs".
Of course instead of being a jobs program for generals the "War on Drugs"
is a jobs program for cops, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation officers
and prison guards.
In addition to be a government welfare program for the same companies in
the military industrial complex, the "War on Drugs" is also a government
welfare program for the corporations that build prisons and for drug testing
companies.
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.
OK, I guess if you spend 20 hours a day monitoring these striker bills you could figure out what the crooks in the Arizona legislator are doing, but for most of us that takes too much time.
It’s 'striker' season at the Capitol
By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Mar 16, 2013 10:18 PM
Watch out, it’s striker season.
No, that’s not some obscure reference to spring training or a new term for haboobs, but a favorite subversive tactic of Arizona lawmakers at the Capitol this time of year.
About halfway through the legislative session, as proposed bills get bogged down in the politics or lawmakers come up with a bold new idea they neglected to introduce in January, they begin to file what are called strike-everything, or “striker,” amendments.
Lawmakers take a bill that offers only a technical change or that they don’t mind sacrificing and propose an amendment that strikes out all the existing language and replaces it with an entirely different proposal.
The motivation varies. Strikers can revive an idea that was voted down in its original bill form, introduce an entirely new idea or allow a controversial idea to skip parts of the public-hearing process.
House Minority Leader Chad Campbell, D-Phoenix, is critical of the tactic.
“One strike-everything is one too many,” he said. “I don’t think it’s an appropriate way to do business. It’s not a transparent process.”
[Well then why haven't you introduced a bill to out law this practice??? Probably because you like this tactic because it keeps the people you pretend to represent from knowing what you are doing!!!!]
But Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, said the tool has value, such as in a situation where a particular committee chairman refuses to hear a bill that’s vital to a lawmaker’s constituents.
[Well if that is the case then the system is NOT working and needs to be change!!!]
Striking that bill for another that’s been past the chairman can keep the bill alive.
“It’s kind of like attorneys. You don’t always like them until you need one,” she said. “In some cases, it’s not fair that one person can block an important bill. A striker allows you to get around that person and get a fair hearing.”
[Again, if that is the case then the system is NOT working and needs to be change!!!]
Lawmakers introduce dozens of strikers each year.
This year, 75 have already been approved, covering topics that include boosting campaign contributions, establishing a Cowboy Day, creating tax incentives for employers and tax exclusions for religious institutions, and banning goldfish prizes at school fairs.
The Cowboy Day striker appears to be a case of timing as opposed to trying to avoid a public hearing or certain committee.
[What rubbish!!! That is the whole purpose of these "striker bills", to keep the public from hearing about the bills]
Senate Bill 1139 started out proposing technical changes to existing state law regulating the sending of unsolicited goods.
At some point after the session deadline for introducing new bills, Republican lawmakers decided they wanted legislation honoring cowboys as a symbol of Arizona’s culture.
Sen. Gail Griffin, R-Hereford, allowed a striker to SB 1139 declaring the fourth Saturday of July as Cowboy Day during a Senate Government and Environment Committee hearing.
The revised bill passed that committee, the full Senate and then the House Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Committee. It still needs a final vote of the full House before going to the governor.
If the trend follows prior sessions, hundreds more strikers will be introduced over the next month. All but two striker bills already approved belong to Republicans.
So far, nothing enormously controversial has emerged. But that’s not always the case.
Last year, Sen. Kimberly Yee, R-Phoenix, then a state representative, and Sen. Steve Yarbrough, R-Chandler, replaced a House bill addressing attorney fees with a striker making numerous changes to state abortion laws.
They added the striker after the more mundane bill had already passed the House Government Committee and the full House, meaning the more controversial abortion bill only had a public hearing in the Senate instead of both chambers.
Strike-everything amendments
Arizona lawmakers each session propose dozens of strike-everything, or "striker," amendments. The amendments propose to replace all of the wording in an unrelated bill with an entirely different proposal. This year, lawmakers have already approved 75 strikers. Here are some of them:
Tax credits: Converted House Bill 2037 from making technical corrections to malpractice law to a proposal to allow school tax-credit money be spent on certain sports programs.
Animal prizes: Converted HB 2121 from funding security barriers at the Capitol to banning live-animal prizes.
Tax incentives: Converted HB 2264 from making technical corrections to mobile-home-park law to creating tax benefits for businesses that create new jobs and for the self-employed.
Drones: Converted HB 2269 from a technical correction on liquor-supplier law to a proposal creating a study committee on the use of drones.
HOAs: Converted HB 2371 from a technical correction on construction materials to proposing numerous changes to homeowners-association regulations, including limiting local government ability to require planned communities, allowing HOAs to vote by e-mail and prohibiting HOAs from charging extra fees to renters.
Special education: Converted HB 2395 from a technical correction on medical-malpractice laws to proposing limits on civil lawsuits based on negligence by private schools that provide special-education services.
Religious exemption: Converted HB 2446 from a technical correction on limited partnership laws to proposing property-tax exemptions for religious institutions.
Contribution limits: Converted HB 2593 from technical correction on veterans issues to proposing an increase on campaign-contribution limits.
Early ballots: Converted Senate Bill 1003 from a technical correction on agricultural regulations to proposing restrictions on who can return an early ballot for another person.
Cowboy Day: Converted SB 1139 from a technical correction on unsolicited merchandise to a proposal to make the fourth Saturday of July Cowboy Day.
Adoption subsidies: Converted SB 1062 from a technical correction on boating laws to proposing expanded behavioral-health services for adoptees.
Independent expenditures: Converted SB 1336 from regulating the election commission to a proposal to make it a felony to violate independent-expenditure regulations.
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]
And
here
are even some more
articles on Sheriff Joe and this thugs
in Phoenix, Arizona and Maricopa County, Arizona.
Detective Saldate gets confessions from unconscious people on hospital gurneys???
So these are the brave cops who protect us from criminals
Phoenix Police Detective Armando Saldate 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.
On the last post I made about this case I said the confession was probably obtained using the "9 Step Reid Method". While the "9 Step Reid Method" pretty much uses psychological beatings with mental rubber hoses to get confessions, I have never heard of it getting confessions from unconscious suspects.
The military's Chicken Littles want you to think the sky is falling
I have said this before, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are just a jobs program for generals along with a government welfare program for the corporations in the military industrial complex.
Strikers bills - how our elected officials prevent us from knowing what they are doing.
The elected officials who pretend to work for us and who claim to be "public servants" routinely use this tactic to pull the wool over our eyes and prevent us from knowing what they are doing.
Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton is a gun grabber???
From this article it sure sounds like Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton is a gun grabber.
Previous Articles about Sheriff Joe
Here are some previous
articles
about Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arapio, who most folks
in Maricopa County consider the worst sheriff on the planet.