Homeless in Arizona

Ex-cop, federal mole charged with extortion, selling guns to felons

Ex-cop, federal mole charged with extortion, selling guns to felons

By Annie Sweeney Tribune reporter

7:17 p.m. CST, January 28, 2013

A former Chicago police officer whose undercover work led to charges in separate public corruption probes was himself charged Monday with extorting a tow truck operator and selling firearms to a convicted felon.

Ali Haleem becomes the 11th Chicago police officer charged in a tow truck scandal in which officers steered business to drivers for kickbacks, federal prosecutors said

According to court records and sources, Haleem worked undercover after federal authorities confronted him about the extortion in 2008, secretly recording conversations. His cooperation led to charges against a onetime campaign treasurer for former state Sen. Ricky Hendon, and six others on charges they paid kickbacks in the hopes of securing thousands of dollars in federal grants. Hendon was not charged.

Haleem’s undercover work also resulted in charges against two tax analysts for the Cook County Board of Review who allegedly pocketed a $1,500 cash payoff after agreeing to reduce property tax assessments.

Court documents in both those public corruption investigations identified the cooperating witness as a Chicago police officer who had been arrested in July 2008 as part of a probe into public corruption and gun trafficking.

The charges on Monday against Haleem alleged that in addition to extorting the tow truck operator, he also sold three firearms to the driver, who was a convicted felon who could not legally purchase weapons. Haleem resigned last September from the Police Department.

asweeney@tribune.com

U.S. Weighs Base for Spy Drones in North Africa

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U.S. Weighs Base for Spy Drones in North Africa

By ERIC SCHMITT

Published: January 28, 2013 292 Comments

WASHINGTON — The United States military is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest Africa so that it can increase surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region.

For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens.

The move is an indication of the priority Africa has become in American antiterrorism efforts. The United States military has a limited presence in Africa, with only one permanent base, in the country of Djibouti, more than 3,000 miles from Mali, where French and Malian troops are now battling Qaeda-backed fighters who control the northern part of Mali.

A new drone base in northwest Africa would join a constellation of small airstrips in recent years on the continent, including in Ethiopia, for surveillance missions flown by drones or turboprop planes designed to look like civilian aircraft.

If the base is approved, the most likely location for it would be in Niger, a largely desert nation on the eastern border of Mali. The American military’s Africa Command, or Africom, is also discussing options for the base with other countries in the region, including Burkina Faso, officials said.

The immediate impetus for a drone base in the region is to provide surveillance assistance to the French-led operation in Mali. “This is directly related to the Mali mission, but it could also give Africom a more enduring presence for I.S.R.,” one American military official said Sunday, referring to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

A handful of unarmed Predator drones would carry out surveillance missions in the region and fill a desperate need for more detailed information on a range of regional threats, including militants in Mali and the unabated flow of fighters and weapons from Libya. American military commanders and intelligence analysts complain that such information has been sorely lacking.

The Africa Command’s plan still needs approval from the Pentagon and eventually from the White House, as well as from officials in Niger. American military officials said that they were still working out some details, and that no final decision had been made. But in Niger on Monday, the two countries reached a status-of-forces agreement that clears the way for greater American military involvement in the country and provides legal protection to American troops there, including any who might deploy to a new drone base.

The plan could face resistance from some in the White House who are wary of committing any additional American forces to a fight against a poorly understood web of extremist groups in North Africa.

If approved, the base could ultimately have as many as 300 United States military and contractor personnel, but it would probably begin with far fewer people than that, military officials said.

Some Africa specialists expressed concern that setting up a drone base in Niger or in a neighboring country, even if only to fly surveillance missions, could alienate local people who may associate the distinctive aircraft with deadly attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

Officials from Niger did not respond to e-mails over the weekend about the plan, but its president, Mahamadou Issoufou, has expressed a willingness to establish what he called in a recent interview “a long-term strategic relationship with the U.S.”

“What’s happening in northern Mali is a big concern for us because what’s happening in northern Mali can also happen to us,” Mr. Issoufou said in an interview at the presidential palace in Niamey, Niger’s capital, on Jan. 10, the day before French troops swept into Mali to blunt the militant advance.

Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the Africa Command, who visited Niger this month to discuss expanding the country’s security cooperation with the United States, declined to comment on the proposed drone base, saying in an e-mail that the subject was “too operational for me to confirm or deny.”

Discussions about the drone base come at a time when the French operation in Mali and a militant attack on a remote gas field in the Algerian desert that left at least 37 foreign hostages, including 3 Americans, dead have thrown a spotlight on Al Qaeda’s franchise in the region, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and forced Western governments and their allies in the region to accelerate efforts to combat it.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death and the turmoil of the Arab Spring, there was “an effort to establish a beachhead for terrorism, a joining together of terrorist organizations.”

According to current and former American government officials, as well as classified government cables made public by the group WikiLeaks, the surveillance missions flown by American turboprop planes in northern Mali have had only a limited effect.

Flown mainly from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, the missions have faced stiff challenges as militant leaders have taken greater precautions in using electronic communications and have taken more care not to disclose delicate information that could be monitored, like their precise locations.

General Ham said in an interview on his visit to Niger that it had been difficult for American intelligence agencies to collect consistent, reliable intelligence about what was going on in northern Mali, as well as in other largely ungoverned parts of the sub-Saharan region.

“It’s tough to penetrate,” he said. “It’s tough to get access for platforms that can collect. It’s an extraordinarily tough environment for human intelligence, not just ours but the neighboring countries as well.”

The State Department has been extraordinarily wary of allowing drones to operate in the region, fearful of criticism that the United States is trying to militarize parts of Africa as it steps up its campaign to hunt down Qaeda-linked extremists in Somalia, as well as those responsible for the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

American drones regularly conduct surveillance flights over Somalia and occasionally launch airstrikes against people suspected of being members of the Shabab, a militant group linked to Al Qaeda. General Ham, who will be retiring from his command this spring after nearly 40 years in the Army, has been warning that the United States needs more and better surveillance tools in Africa to track the growing threats there.

“Without operating locations on the continent, I.S.R. capabilities would be curtailed, potentially endangering U.S. security,” General Ham said in a statement to the House Armed Services Committee last March. “Given the vast geographic space and diversity in threats, the command requires increased I.S.R. assets to adequately address the security challenges on the continent.”

Uncle Sam is reading your email???

Google will seek to limit law enforcement's access to emails

Google will seek to limit law enforcement's access to emails

Reuters

Posted: 01/28/2013 05:46:16 PM PST

WASHINGTON -- Google (GOOG) will lobby Washington in 2013 to make it harder for law enforcement authorities to gain access to emails and other digital messages.

In a blog post on Monday, linked to Data Privacy Day, Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said the tech giant, in coalition with many other powerful tech companies, will try to convince Congress to update a 1986 privacy protection law.

He cited data showing that government requests for Mountain View-based Google's user data increased more than 70 percent since 2009.

In 2012, Google said, "We're a law-abiding company, and we don't want our services to be used in harmful ways. But it's just as important that laws protect you against overly broad requests for your personal information," Drummond said in the post.

The U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in the early days of the Internet, does not require government investigators to have a search warrant when requesting access to old emails and messages that are stored online, providing less protection for them than, say, letters stored in a desk drawer or even messages saved on a computer's hard drive.

The current system also makes complex distinctions, many disputed in courts, between emails saved as drafts online, in transit, unopened or opened. Some of them are to be released with subpoenas, which have a lower threshold than search warrants as they often do not involve a judge.

A warrant is generally approved by a judge if investigators have "probable cause" to believe that their search is likely to turn up information related to a crime.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo (YHOO) and popular social media site Twitter -- among others -- have resisted turning over customer data.

They have put in place policies, based on the constitutional protection from unreasonable searches, that require search warrants for access to content of private communications.

Privacy activists say the outdated law should be reformed to extend the constitutional right to privacy online, but legislation limiting government requests will not face an easy road.

Last year, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill that would have updated the current law.

It triggered a wave of concerns from the police and FBI that new restrictions would impede crime investigations and possibly endanger victims.

"After three decades, it is essential that Congress update ECPA to ensure that this critical law keeps pace with new technologies and the way Americans use and store email today," Leahy said in a statement on Monday.

His privacy legislation died in Congress last year after his counterpart in the House of Representatives, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Republican, drafted another version of that bill, which also tackled other issues but stripped out privacy reform language.

Last year, Goodlatte said he was willing to consider the privacy law reform, but that the timeline then was too short for a "thorough examination."

Leahy has now included the change of privacy laws as one of his top priorities this year.

Will your next bag of weed come from Washington or Colorado????

Source

Wash. vows to try to keep weed in state _ but how?

By GENE JOHNSON | Associated Press

SEATTLE (AP) — So far, no one is suggesting checkpoints or fences to keep Washington state's legal pot within its borders.

But Gov. Jay Inslee insists there are ways to prevent the bulk smuggling of the state's newest cash crop into the black market, including digitally tracking weed to ensure that it goes from where it is grown to the stores where it is sold.

With sales set to begin later this year, he hopes to be a good neighbor and keep vanloads of premium, legal bud from cruising into Idaho, Oregon and other states that don't want people getting stoned for fun.

It's not just about generating goodwill with fellow governors. Inslee is trying to persuade U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder not to sue to block Washington from licensing pot growers, processors and sellers. Marijuana remains illegal under federal law.

"I am going to be personally committed to have a well regulated, well disciplined, well tracked, well inventory-controlled, well law-enforcement-coordinated approach," said Inslee, who is due to give Holder more details this week.

Keeping a lid on the weed is just one of the numerous challenges Washington state authorities and their counterparts in Colorado — where voters also legalized pot use — will face in the coming months.

The potential of regulatory schemes to keep pot from being diverted isn't clear. Colorado already has intensive rules aimed at keeping its medical marijuana market in line, including the digital tracking of cannabis, bar codes on every plant, surveillance video and manifests of all legal pot shipments.

But law enforcement officials say marijuana from Colorado's dispensaries often makes its way to the black market, and even the head of the Colorado agency charged with tracking the medical pot industry suggests no one should copy its measures.

The agency has been beset by money woes and had to cut many of its investigators. Even if the agency had all the money it wanted, the state's medical pot rules are "a model of regulatory overreach," too cumbersome and expensive to enforce, Laura Harris said in a statement.

Last fall, voters made Washington and Colorado the first states to pass laws legalizing the recreational use of marijuana and setting up systems of state-licensed growers, processors and retail stores where adults over 21 can walk in and buy up to an ounce of heavily taxed cannabis.

Both states are working to develop rules for the emerging pot industry.

The Obama administration could sue to block the legal markets from operating, on the grounds that actively regulating an illegal substance conflicts with federal drug law. The DOJ is reviewing the laws but has given no signals about its plans.

It has never sued states like Colorado that have regulated medical marijuana, even though it could under the same legal principles.

Part of the DOJ's political calculus in deciding whether to sue is likely to be how well the department believes the two states can keep the legal weed within their borders. During a meeting with Inslee last week, Holder asked a lot of questions about diversion, Inslee said.

Alison Holcomb, who led Washington's legal pot campaign, said it's important to respect states that haven't legalized weed by not flooding their black markets. The first step, she said, is for the state to figure out how much pot should be produced, and then grant licenses accordingly.

"Excess supply creates incentive to divert outside the state," she said.

Washington's Liquor Control Board is planning a comprehensive survey to estimate how much marijuana is consumed in the state.

Inslee has boasted about the effectiveness of the State Patrol's highway interdiction program in stopping drug trafficking. Traditional police work, combined with inventory controls, will be key to clamping down on diversion, he said.

Digital tracking of the weights of marijuana shipments between processors and retailers would help make sure there isn't "10- to 20-percent shrinkage that's going to the black market," he said.

But even if the state can prevent bulk pot from being diverted, there's nothing to keep customers from walking into multiple stores, or returning to the same store, to collect more than their 1-ounce limit. Some traffickers could recruit many people to buy weed for them.

Tom Gorman, head of the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug-Trafficking Area, said efforts to keep a lid on legal marijuana simply don't work.

Pot from Colorado's medical marijuana system — often described as the most closely regulated in the world — routinely makes its way into Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and points east, often from dispensaries that have sold out the back door, he said.

A brief law enforcement survey the organization conducted last summer turned up numerous cases in which suspects had made purchases at Colorado dispensaries before being busted in other states.

In the past two years, Colorado's medical pot regulators have levied 54 fines against licensed businesses, but have never revoked or suspended a license.

Matt Cook, the former director of Colorado's Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division, defended the "seed-to-store" regulations in the state.

Cook, who is applying for a job as a consultant to Washington's marijuana regulators, noted that at any time officials could check the digital records, pull the surveillance video or drop in for an inspection — and the fear of getting busted keeps people in line.

Bob Hoban, whose law firm represents nearly 100 medical marijuana businesses in Colorado, agreed, and noted another incentive for dispensaries to behave.

"It's a cutthroat business," he said. "If somebody sees something unusual, they're going to provide a tip. ... There's just about as good of a safeguard as you can have for diversion in the state of Colorado, and a lot of that is Big Brother watching you."

___

Associated Press writer Kristen Wyatt in Denver contributed to this report.

___

Johnson can be reached at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle

Tempe pigs crack down on marijuana 'compassion clubs'

Tempe police crack down on marijuana 'compassion clubs'

By Jim Walsh The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Jan 29, 2013 1:41 PM

Tempe police targeted the operator of two “compassion clubs’’ Tuesday, arrested him, serving a series of search warrants and seizing a garage full of mature marijuana plants.

The months-long undercover investigation started before an employee of Top Shelf Medicine, formerly known as the AzGoGreen Co-op, was shot and critically injured on Oct. 25.

The employee survived the shooting, but police also served a search warrant a few days later and seized marijuana, Tempe police Commander Noah Johnson said.

Because the clubs have money and cash, police are investigating whether the motive was robbery, he said.

Compassion clubs opened in Valley strip malls and office parks when medical marijuana advocates became frustrated by the long delay between the state Medical Marijuana Act passing in 2010 and dispensaries opening.

Arizona has more than 35,000 residents with medical marijuana cards, but only six dispensaries where card-holders can legally obtain the weed. The only Valley dispensary is in Glendale.

While the dispensaries are tightly regulated, the compassion clubs are not regulated in any manner, although they generally require members to have state-issued medical marijuana cards to obtain marijuana.

Before the shooting, the club had been investigated by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, but it continued to operate after a grand jury decided not to indict the operator, Johnson said.

“What I hope is that people will get the message that operating in this manner is illegal,’’ Johnson said.

He said the Arizona Medical Marijuana law allows people to grow a limited amount of marijuana and to share it, but they cannot exchange anything of value for marijuana.

Sgt. Mike Pooley, a police spokesman, said the investigation started when other business owners in a strip mall near Southern and Mill avenues complained about traffic, customers smoking marijuana in the parking lot and the smell of marijuana.

On Tuesday, a strong odor of marijuana filled the crisp, early morning air at a rental house in north Tempe, just east of Papago Park, where police found an estimated 50 to 60 mature marijuana plants that were more than five feet tall.

Pooley said the hydroponic grow involved high-grade marijuana, in high demand. He said each plant was capable of generating five to 10 pounds of marijuana, selling at $2,000 to $3,000 a pound.

Police seized plants from two houses across the street from each other, valued at several hundreds of thousands of dollars, Pooley said. Police SWAT team members wearing ski masks cut down the plants with saws and loaded the leaves in large plastic bags.

The suspected operator of two compassion clubs was arrested in an Ahwatukee neighborhood near Desert Vista High School where residents said they shocked by the early-morning raids.

Top Shelf Hydro College, which police identified as a compassion club, had a yellow and green banner hanging from its roof in a warehouse building near McClintock Drive and Curry Road. It also was raided by SWAT team members who broke down a door to enter.

No one was inside the grow houses near Papago Park or the compassion club on McClintock Drive. In all, six search warrants were served, three at houses and three at businesses.

Clubs have been raided and shutdown in unrelated cases in the past in Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert and Phoenix. Two cases have been prosecuted, with defendants placed on probation but hit with stiff fines.

Club operators interviewed by The Republic prior to Tuesday’s arrests argued they are doing nothing illegal.

They said the Arizona medical marijuana law allows for “patient-to-patient transfers’’ of marijuana, and that card-holders are sharing the marijuana with each other.

The operators said smoking marijuana helps cancer patients combat nausea from chemotherapy and a wide range of other ailments.

“I’ve seen herbs work in miraculous things,’’ said Craig Scherf, a former compassion club operator in Tempe and Mesa who lost everything after he was arrested.

He said his patients often had cancer and other life-threatening diseases and that marijuana helped them get off addictive painkillers.

But police contend the clubs are illegal, whether they charge a membership fee or if the patient makes a “donation’’ based upon the strain and quality of the marijuana.

Johnson said there are many compassion clubs located throughout the Valley but it is difficult to tell how many are operating.

Papers please!!! This isn't Nazi Germany, but Peoria, Arizona!!!

It is illegal for the police to stop people with out having "probable cause" and force them to prove they are not a criminals.

It is a violation of the 5th Amendment for the police to force someone to give then identification.

And of course this isn't Nazi police thugs rounding up Jews, but rather Peoria, Arizona police thugs rounding up Mexicans.

Of course in this case the Police in Peoria, Arizona said f*ck the law we are going to do this because it makes it easier for us to catch criminals. Government tyrants always use the "public safety" card of "catching criminals" to flush our Constitutional rights down the toilet.

And of course in the case the Peoria Police are the criminals.

Source

Peoria police set up traffic stop, ask for licenses

By Domenico Nicosia The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Tue Jan 29, 2013 11:11 PM

Peoria police officials constructed a vehicle stop in Peoria on Tuesday evening to check commercial vehicles and ask for licenses and registration for all non-commercial vehicles.

Amanda Jacinto, a public-information officer with Peoria police, said the stop involving multiple agencies was set up near Grand and Peoria avenues. But the purpose of the operation was unclear.

Prominent Latina activist Lydia Guzman, who went to the stop, said that officers were funneling traffic in from side streets. She believed the traffic stop may have been set up to get people driving back to the Valley from Las Vegas, where President Barack Obama spoke about immigration reform that could lead to the legalization of millions of undocumented immigrants.

Guzman said many young people attended the speech in Las Vegas.

“This was just a way to antagonize the activist groups,” she said.

Jacinto didn’t specify the reasons. When asked about what officers were going to do with any drivers without licenses, she said that officers are required to contact federal immigration agents.

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After gun crime, weapon history takes time to find

And of course you have to remember, just because something is illegal doesn't meant the police won't break the law and do it. In fact the police routinely commit crimes in the process of tying to find, arrest and convict criminals.

Source

After gun crime, weapon history takes time to find

By ALICIA A. CALDWELL | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the fictional world of television police dramas, a few quick clicks on a computer lead investigators to the owner of a gun recovered at a bloody crime scene. Before the first commercial, the TV detectives are on the trail of the suspect.

Reality is a world away. There is no national database of guns. Not of who owns them, how many are sold annually or even how many exist.

Federal law bars the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from keeping track of guns. The only time the government can track the history of a gun, including its first buyer and seller, is after it's used in a crime. And though President Barack Obama and numerous Democratic lawmakers have called for new limits on what kinds of guns should be available to the public and urged stronger background checks in gun sales, there is no effort afoot to change the way the government keeps track — or doesn't — of where the country's guns are.

When police want to trace a gun, it's a decidedly low-tech process.

"It's not CSI and it's not a sophisticated computer system," said Charles J. Houser, who runs the ATF's National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, W. Va.

When police trace a gun, the search starts by sending all the information they have about the gun — including the manufacturer and model — to an office worker in a low-slung brick building just off the Appalachian Trial in rural West Virginia, about 90 miles northwest of Washington.

ATF officials first call the manufacturer, who reveals which wholesaler the company used. That may lead to a call to a second distributor before investigators can pinpoint the retail gun dealer who first sold the weapon. Gun dealers are required to keep a copy of federal forms that detail who buys what gun and a log for guns sold. They are required to share that information with the ATF if a gun turns up at a crime scene and authorities want it traced. Often, gun shops fax the paperwork to the ATF.

That's where the paper trail ends.

In about 30 percent of cases, one or all of those folks have gone out of business and ATF tracers are left to sort through potentially thousands of out-of-business records forwarded to the ATF and stored at the office building that more closely resembles a remote call center than a law enforcement operation.

The records are stored as digital pictures that can only be searched one image at a time. Two shifts of contractors spend their days taking staples out of papers, sorting through thousands of pages and scanning or taking pictures of the records.

"Those records come in all different shapes and forms. We have to digitally image them, we literally take a picture of it," Houser said. "We have had rolls of toilet paper or paper towels ... because they (dealers) did not like the requirement to keep records."

The tracing center receives about a million out-of-business records every month and Houser runs the center's sorting and imaging operations from 6 a.m. to midnight, five days a week. The images are stored on old-school microfilm reels or as digital images. But there's no way to search the records, other than to scroll through one picture of a page at a time.

"We are ... prohibited from amassing the records of active dealers," Houser said. "It means that if a dealer is in business he maintains his records."

Last year the center traced about 344,000 guns for 6,000 different law enforcement agencies. Houser has a success rate of about 90 percent, so long as enough information is provided. And he boasts that every successful trace provides at least one lead in a criminal case.

"It's a factory for the production of investigative leads," Houser said of the tracing center.

A 1968 overhaul of federal gun laws required licensed dealers to keep paper records of who buys what guns and gave ATF the authority to track the history of a gun if was used in a crime. But in the intervening decades, the National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups lobbied Congress to limit the government's ability to do much with what little information is collected, including keeping track on computers.

"They (lawmakers) feel that the act of amassing those records would in essence go a step toward creating an artificial registration system," Houser said.

What the ATF can do is give trace information to the law enforcement agency that asked for it and in some cases uses the data to help point them in the direction of other crimes.

Houser said the "manually intensive process" can take about five days for a routine trace. In some cases, completing the trace can mean sifting by hand through paperwork that hasn't yet been scanned.

In more urgent situations, including the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting in Connecticut last year, ATF agents run a trace within about 24 hours. Oftentimes, that involves sending agents to the gun dealer that first sold the weapon to quickly find the paperwork listing its original buyer.

Despite having access to millions of records about gun purchases from dealers that have gone out of business, the ATF isn't allowed to create a database of what guns were sold to whom and when.

ATF does keep tabs on how many guns are manufactured and shipped out of the country every year, but only gun makers and dealers know for sure how many are sold. There are also strict limits on what the agency can do with the gun trace information. And that's just the way the gun lobby and Congress want it.

Various laws and spending bills have specifically barred the ATF from creating a national database of guns and gun owners. And due to the efforts of lawmakers, including former Rep. Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, ATF agents who trace the history of a gun can't share that information with anyone but the police agency that asked for it.

As it stands now, local law enforcement doesn't have access to regional data about gun traces. So if the police commissioner in New York City is trying to figure out where the guns are coming into the city from — whether they're going to New Jersey first or upstate New York, for example — that data is not available because of an amendment introduced by Tiahrt, said Mike Bouchard, a former ATF assistant director for Field Operations. ATF can tell police where most crime guns are traced from, by state. But it does not release information on gun shops or purchasers.

If police chiefs want that, they have to reach out to individual chiefs at other departments and ask.

"It's pretty ridiculous when we have an automated system that will do it for the chiefs," Bouchard said.

Tiahrt said he first proposed limiting access to trace data to make sure the information wasn't available under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. It was an issue of keeping undercover police, informants and innocent gun buyers and sellers out of the public eye, Tiahrt said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Knowing who legally buys guns won't prevent gun violence, the former Republican congressman said.

"We're chasing these wisps of smoke that won't solve the problem," Tiahrt said. "Get to the root cause. Put out the fire. Deal with mental illness. Deal with situational awareness."

Houser said he would prefer the tracing center's operations to be expanded and a center built that would use some technologies to help more easily trace a gun. But until the law changes, his staff will continue removing staples, turning pages right-side-up and taking digital pictures of records.

"Our job is to enforce the laws that are passed to us," Houser said. "What they give us is what we are required to work with."

___

Associated Press reporter Eileen Sullivan contributed to this report.

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Follow Alicia A. Caldwell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/acaldwellap

Kyrsten Sinema - U.S. Representative, Arizona, District 9

If you are a police officer, a fan of the drug war, hate medical marijuana, love taxes, or hate guns you will probably love Kyrsten Sinema.

Kyrsten Sinema - U.S. Representative, Arizona, District 9

Source

Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.)

U.S. Representative, Arizona, District 9 (Since 2013)

Kyrsten Sinema was born in Tucson, Ariz., and has lived in Phoenix since 1995. She attended Arizona State University where she earned a master's in social work, a law degree and a doctorate in justice studies. She practices criminal defense law in Phoenix and also is an adjunct professor at ASU's School of Social Work. Sinema served three terms as a representative in the Arizona Legislature and was the assistant leader to the House Democratic Caucus from 2009 to 2010. She was elected to the state Senate in 2010 but resigned in early 2012 to seek a seat in Arizona's newly created 9th Congressional District. Sinema ran unsuccessfully for the state Legislature in 2002 and for the Phoenix City Council in 2001, both times as an independent candidate. She is single.

Birthday: July 12, 1976

Hometown: Tucson, AZ, United States

Alma Mater: JD from Arizona State University; MA from Arizona State University; PhD from Arizona State University

Web site: http://kyrstensinema.com/

Men report stolen pot pipes, get busted, cops say

Source

Men report stolen pot pipes, get busted, cops say

Associated Press Wed Jan 30, 2013 12:55 PM

LINCOLN, Neb. — Authorities say they discovered a budding marijuana-growing operation after residents of a Lincoln house called police to report the theft of marijuana pipes.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that officers were called to the house Saturday morning by residents who reported that two people, one of them armed with a handgun, forced their way inside and took two hookah pipes.

Officers questioning the residents noticed marijuana, paraphernalia and several bottles of fertilizer. They also saw light shining from under a door barred with a padlock and a power cord snaking into the room.

After getting a search warrant, police say they found three marijuana plants, grow lights and other equipment.

Police arrested a 19-year-old man on suspicion of manufacturing marijuana and ticketed his roommates for having marijuana paraphernalia.

Jail pot smokers, let government crooks go free????

Arizona Republic thinks crooked politicians should get a free ride???

On the other hand, based on past editorials the Republic has run they seem to think the government should continue to arrest and jail people for victimless crimes like smoking or selling marijuana, gambling, prostitution and other victimless crimes.

Personally I think the folks at the Arizona Republic have their values totally screwed up.

Government criminals like Ben Arredondo belong in prison, not on probation.

And of course the prisons are full of people who committed victimless drug war crimes. Those people should be ALL released. It is a waste of our tax dollars to jail these people for harmless and victimless crimes.

Source

Big waste on a small fry

Tom Tingle/The Republic

The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Jan 30, 2013 6:57 PM

In the annals of Arizona politicians who run afoul of the law, the case of United States vs. Ben Arredondo will never rank among the best of the bad.

The competition is stiff, after all. Evan Mecham. The “AzScammers” of the early 1990s. Fife Symington.

Arizona history likely will not even judge the malfeasance of this former Tempe city councilman (and, most recently, state legislator) as the political-misconduct story of 2012, a comparative down year, scandal-wise.

It isn’t even the biggest legislative scandal of the year. That “honor” goes to former state Rep. Richard Miranda, who got two years in prison for wire fraud and attempted tax evasion.

What will set the Arredondo case apart is the peculiar enthusiasm of the federal prosecution. [Per the US Constitution, Arizona cops should be investigating Arizona crooks, not Federal cops]

No one asserts Arredondo did not act badly. He solicited lots of tickets to sporting events from people with a clear political interest in pleasing him. Even though he seems to have given away all those tickets — in a glad-handing fashion — the scent of quid pro quo was all over Arredondo’s tawdry politics.

Still worse was Arredondo’s scholarship fund, which paid to educate a lot of Arredondo family members. [Arredondo use that scam to steal almost $50,000 for his relatives]

So, the former councilman and state representative got probation and house arrest. Just deserts. [That is a crock of BS!!! Ben Arredondo is a crook who should have been sent to prison]

But in the process of sentencing Arredondo, U.S. District Judge Frederick Martone took time to put the affair into some context:

Is an elaborate two-year sting operation the best use of federal resources in a case as small potatoes as this one? [On the other hand the Feds don't think anything of spending millions to investigate people for victimless drug war crimes. Crimes that hurt no one. I would rather have the put a crooked politician in prison then waste our tax dollars jailing pot smokers!!!!]

“I wonder whether the resources of the United States government were appropriately directed over the course of two years,” said Martone, who also wondered why federal prosecutors are not applying such zeal pursuing Wall Street mortgage-fraud cases.

We still know next to nothing about what prompted the Arredondo sting operation.

But we do know the government created a limited- liability corporation, staffed it with federal agents who ingratiated themselves with Arredondo by making at least $3,280 in campaign donations.

In two years beginning in 2009, the agents produced 10,000 pages of documents and more than 50 hours of video and audio tape — most of which had little or nothing to do with the Arredondo case, prosecutors would later admit.

Washington prosecutors have had a long-standing fascination with Arizona politicians. Federal investigators pored over the records of former Gov. Fife Symington’s development firm for more than five years before indicting him on counts unrelated to the original investigation. And need we even mention the Justice Department’s years-long infatuation with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio? [That investigation seemed mainly on getting votes for Obama, not sending Sheriff Joe to prison where he belongs]

At least those cases involved substantial issues, such as suspected racial profiling in Arpaio’s case. And, in Symington’s case, the sort of bank fraud Martone said ought to be occupying the time of federal lawyers now.

With l’affair Arredondo, we kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the justification for the elaborate schemes to surface. None did.

The wrist-slap penalty to Arredondo was appropriate. The mind-boggling federal expense of time, effort and money was not. [A slap on the wrist for a government crook that screwed donors out of $50,000 they donated to Arredondo's sham scholarship fund???]

Glendale detectives seize over 450 pounds of marijuana

Source

Glendale detectives seize over 450 pounds of marijuana from vehicle

By Cassandra Strauss The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Thu Jan 31, 2013 3:06 PM

Over 450 pounds of marijuana were seized from a vehicle in Glendale on Tuesday.

Jewel Eugene Johnson of Arkansas was stopped for a traffic violation when a canine detected drugs in his vehicle. Detectives with the Glendale Special Investigations unit found the marijuana in the back of Johnson’s Cadillac Escalade, according to police documents.

Police also found $26,000 in cash in the vehicle, according to authorities.

Johnson arrived from Arkansas to visit friends in Arizona, according to police documents.

It is unclear whether Johnson transported the marijuana into the state or obtained it in Arizona.

911 isn't your friend!!! 911 is the enemy!!!

Source

Trucker arrested after pocket-dialing police

Associated Press Thu Jan 31, 2013 9:19 AM

ORANGE CITY, Florida — Authorities say a Florida truck driver landed in jail after his cell phone pocket-dialed the police and dispatchers listened in on a conversation about the sale of drugs.

Deputies say 19-year-old Matthew Dollarhide was surprised when a Volusia County Sheriff’s deputy pulled him over late Tuesday and asked him about his conversation with two passengers.

The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports that dispatchers pinpointed the cell phone’s location and sent deputies to investigate.

Deputies said they found a crack pipe on Dollarhide. The man was arrested and charged with possession of drug paraphernalia. He told police the pipe belonged to his father.

Union negotiations should be public

Cops & firefighters are very well paid!!!!!

Sadly about two thirds of the people these well paid cops arrest are harmless people that commit victimless drug war crimes like pot smokers, not real criminals like robbers, rapists and murders.

Source

Union negotiations negotiations should be public, Arizona house panel argues

Posted: Thursday, January 31, 2013 8:30 am

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

Saying they are promoting transparency, members of a House panel voted Tuesday to force cities and counties to negotiate with public employee unions in the open.

HB 2330 would expand the state's Open Meeting Law which generally requires public bodies to discuss their business in the open to include any discussion of salaries and fringe benefits between a representative of a public body and any agent or officers of an employee organization. It would not matter whether there was a quorum of an elected council present -- or even if a council member was there at all.

The vote came even though two of the Republicans on the nine-member Government Committee objected to the provisions. Both Reps. Sonny Borrelli of Lake Havasu City and Doug Coleman of Apache Junction said their own experience as city council members convinced them the legislation is a bad idea.

That was enough to send the measure down to defeat in a preliminary vote.

But a procedural motion by Rep. Martin Quezada, D-Phoenix, forced them to go along with their GOP colleagues to allow the legislation to go to the House floor. Both indicated, though, they will oppose the bill there.

Rep. Steve Montenegro, R-Litchfield Park, who sponsored HB 2330 called it a simple matter of transparency.

"There's no reason why taxpayers should be kept in the dark,'' he said, particularly since the closed-door talks eventually will lead to how public dollars are spent.

"We are asking that the taxpayers be given a seat at the table,'' he said. "If you're big enough to spend the taxpayers' dollars, you're big enough to be transparent and accountable.''

Coleman, however, said taxpayers are at the table through their elected council members. He said the final vote on any deal -- along with the terms -- has to be done in public.

Montenegro responded that the council gets only an up or down vote on the final pact and cannot reject specific provisions. But Borrelli pointed out that if council members are unhappy with one or more terms they can reject the deal and send negotiators back to the bargaining table.

Taylor Earl, an attorney with the Goldwater Institute, countered that it is important for the public and council members to know what happened up until that point so they can see what was offered and what was bargained away.

Quezada, however, said Republicans are not being consistent.

He pointed out that the negotiations between legislative leaders and the governor's office over the $9 billion budget occur behind closed doors. It is only when there is a final package that there is a public vote on the deal and the details are revealed.

Quezada chided Montenegro for not proposing to require these talks be done in public.

And Coleman also found flaws in the logic behind the legislation. He said that, carried to extremes, it would require lawmakers themselves to meet only in public with lobbyists and others ahead of any votes.

Montenegro sidestepped the question of how he feels about such transparency, responding instead that anyone interested in that issue is free to introduce such a proposal.

A.J. LaFaro, newly elected as chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee, told lawmakers that union contracts are "a license to steal from the citizens of Arizona.'' He said the average salary of police officers in Tempe, where he lives, is $103,000, with firefighters earning an average of $109,000; by contrast he said the average Tempe resident earns less than $50,000.

Borrelli responded by asking LaFaro what a firefighter's life is worth. LaFaro responded by saying that's not relevant.

In separate action, the committee voted to require all cities and counties to take a public vote before the end of the year on whether to permit payroll deduction of union dues.

Ugenti, the sponsor of HB 2026, said she is not precluding such deductions. But she said if local officials want to offer that benefit to employees they should have to take an affirmative public vote.

Borrelli called it an unnecessary intrusion into local government but, like the open negotiations measure, he and Coleman agreed to support it to get the bill to the full House.

A third bill to prohibit union members from doing union work while on public time, HB 2343, was tabled amid questions by several committee members.

Focus on Mental Health Laws to Curb Violence Is Unfair

Politicians railroad the mentally ill to prove they are tough on crime???

I suspect their main goal is to pass ANY law which they can use to tell voters they are tough on crime.

Of course it doesn't matter if the law works or not. All that matters is that they can say the voted for the law and use it to get reelected.

And of course the article points out that the mentally ill folks don't have a strong lobby to protect themselves against bad laws like the NRA protects gun owners against bad laws.

I suspect this is why we have all the insane, irrational and unconstitutional drug laws. Politicians vote for them to prove they are tough on crime, mainly as a line to help them get reelected.

And of course there is there really isn't a "drug users lobby" group to protect people against these insane and unconstitutional drug laws.

Source

Focus on Mental Health Laws to Curb Violence Is Unfair, Some Say

By ERICA GOODE and JACK HEALY

Published: January 31, 2013 35 Comments

In their fervor to take action against gun violence after the shooting in Newtown, Conn., a growing number of state and national politicians are promoting a focus on mental illness as a way to help prevent further killings.

Legislation to revise existing mental health laws is under consideration in at least a half-dozen states, including Colorado, Oregon and Ohio. A New York bill requiring mental health practitioners to warn the authorities about potentially dangerous patients was signed into law on Jan. 15. In Washington, President Obama has ordered “a national dialogue” on mental health, and a variety of bills addressing mental health issues are percolating on Capitol Hill.

But critics say that this focus unfairly singles out people with serious mental illness, who studies indicate are involved in only about 4 percent of violent crimes and are 11 or more times as likely than the general population to be the victims of violent crime.

And many proposals — they include strengthening mental health services, lowering the threshold for involuntary commitment and increasing requirements for reporting worrisome patients to the authorities — are rushed in execution and unlikely to repair a broken mental health system, some experts say.

“Good intentions without thought make for bad laws, and I think we have a risk of that,” said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and clinical professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied rampage killers.

Moreover, the push for additional mental health laws is often driven by political expediency, some critics say. Mental health proposals draw support from both Democrats and Republicans, in part because, unlike bans on semiautomatic weapons or high-capacity magazines — like the one proposed in the Senate last week — they do not involve confrontation with gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association.

“The N.R.A. is far more formidable as a political foe than the advocacy groups for the mentally ill,” said Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association.

Indeed, the N.R.A. itself, in response to the massacre in Newtown, argued that mental illness, and not the guns themselves, was at the root of recent shooting sprees. The group called for a national registry of people with mental illness — an alternative that legal experts agree would raise at least as many constitutional alarms as the banning of gun ownership.

For mental health groups, the proposals under consideration are tantalizing: By increasing services for those with mental illness, they raise the possibility of restoring some of the billions of dollars cut from mental health programs in recent years as budgets tightened in the financial downturn. The measures also hold out hope for improvement of a mental health system that many experts say is fragmented and drastically inadequate. And some proposals — those to revise commitment laws, for example — have the support of some mental health organizations.

But some mental health and legal experts say that politicians’ efforts might be better spent making the process of involuntary psychiatric commitment — and the criteria for restricting firearms access once someone has been forcibly committed — consistent from state to state. And some proposals have caused concern, raising questions about doctor-patient confidentiality, the rights of people with psychiatric disabilities and the integrity of clinical judgment.

Especially troublesome to some mental health advocates are provisions like New York’s, which expand the duty of practitioners to report worrisome patients — a model likely to be emulated by other states. New York’s law, part of a comprehensive package to address gun violence, requires reporting to the local authorities any patient “likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others.” Law enforcement officials would then be authorized to confiscate any firearm owned by such a patient.

John Monahan, a psychologist and professor of law at the University of Virginia, said that such laws are often superfluous.

Although many mental health practitioners mistakenly believe that federal laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act forbid them to disclose information about patients, such statutes already include exceptions that permit clinicians to give information to the authorities when a patient presents a threat to others, Dr. Monahan said. National Twitter Logo.

Most states also have laws requiring mental health professionals to notify the authorities and any intended victim when a patient makes a direct threat.

New York’s provision, Dr. Monahan said, differs from virtually every other state’s laws in allowing guns to be taken not only from those committed against their will but also from patients who enter treatment voluntarily.

“The devil is in the details,” he said of New York’s new law. “The two fears are that people will be deterred from seeking treatment that they need or that, once they are in treatment, they will clam up and not talk about violence.”

Most mental health experts agree that the link between mental illness and violence is not imaginary. Studies suggest that people with an untreated severe mental illness are more likely to be violent, especially when drug or alcohol abuse is involved. And many rampage killers have some type of serious mental disorder: James E. Holmes, accused of opening fire in a movie theater in Colorado in July, was seeing a psychiatrist who became alarmed about his behavior; Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people and injured 13 others in Arizona, including former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was severely mentally ill.

But such killings account for only a tiny fraction of gun homicides in the United States, mental health experts point out. Besides the research indicating that little violent crime can be linked to perpetrators who are mentally ill, studies show that those crimes are far more likely to involve battery — punching another person, for example — than weapons, which account for only 2 percent of violent crimes committed by the mentally ill.

Because of this, some criminal justice experts say it makes more sense to pass laws addressing behavior, rather than a diagnosis of mental illness. In Indiana, for example, firearms can be confiscated from people deemed a potential threat, whether or not they have a mental illness.

Proposals in a number of states seek to redefine the threshold for involuntary commitment to psychiatric treatment. But in doing so, they have reignited a longstanding debate about the role of forced treatment.

In Ohio, lawmakers are expected to consider a proposal to increase access to outpatient commitment instead of hospitalization, while also doing away with language requiring people with mental illness to show a “grave and imminent risk to substantial rights” of themselves or others before they can be committed.

In Colorado, where legislators are undertaking a broad overhaul of the state’s mental health system proposed by Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, a Democrat, the proposal also includes changing the criteria for involuntary commitment.

Under the state’s current laws, caregivers can place patients on 72-hour mental health holds only if they are believed to pose an “imminent danger” to themselves or others. The governor’s plan would allow caregivers to commit people if they believe there is a “substantial probability” of harm. Virginia and some other states already have standards based on “substantial probability.”

But some mental health advocates are wary about lowering the threshold. “The evidence that we have tells us that that’s not an appropriate solution, it’s not an effective solution to this problem,” said Jennifer Mathis, deputy legal director at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, an advocacy group for people with psychiatric disabilities.

But Cheryl Miller — whose 21-year-old son, Kyle, was shot by the police last June after he pointed a toy gun at them — believes that a revised law might have saved her child.

Two weeks before Kyle was killed she took him to an emergency mental health clinic to get him hospitalized. But the staff refused to commit him.

“I said, ‘I don’t want to take him home; he needs to go to the hospital,’ ” Ms. Miller said. “They didn’t think so. It goes back to, was he an imminent danger to himself? And it was ‘No.’ ”

Thu, Feb 7 - Medical Marijuana Support Rally at the Arizona Capital

Medical Marijuana Support Rally

Summary of the event

Rep John Kavanagh has introduced legislation in the Arizona House to repeal the Medical Marijuana Act. He cites a flawed study and would have Arizona taxpayers pay for yet another vote on whether or not to allow medical marijuana.

Mr. Kavanagh, the citizens of Arizona have spoken 3 times already. Yes to medical marijuana, yes to allowing Arizona citizens the right to choose an alternative to the legal, harmful pharmaceuticals available.

Medical Marijuana patients, advocates, activists and friends are invited to join in this rally and guided tour of the Arizona House of Representatives.

If you have any questions about the event please contact

Rain Baker
(623)349-0482

Phoenixisnorml@gmail.com

More information on this event

Meet Up

Arizona Weekly Weeder

Camp 420

Italy court convicts 3 Americans in CIA kidnapping

Source

Italy court convicts 3 Americans in CIA kidnapping

Associated Press Fri Feb 1, 2013 7:53 AM

MILAN — A Milan appeals court has convicted a former CIA station chief and two other Americans in absentia in the 2003 rendition kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric.

The court on Friday sentenced former CIA station chief Jeff Castelli to seven years, and handed sentences of six years each to Americans Betnie Medero and Ralph Russomando.

All three had been acquitted in the first trial due to diplomatic immunity.

Italy’s highest court last year upheld the convictions of 23 more Americans in absentia in the abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street as part of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program.

The appeals process for Castelli and the other two was separated for technical reasons.

70 percent of Phoenix's general fund is spent on the police!!!!

"70 percent of the city’s general fund is spent on public safety"

Councilman Michael Nowakowski

I think when you consider the total budget as opposed to the general budget the figure is about 40 percent of it. Most city fire departments grab the next 20 percent of the total budget, with all other departments combined grabbing splitting up the final 40 percent of the budget up.

Now considering that two thirds of the people in prison are there for victimless drug war crimes, you could easily tell the police to stop arresting pot smokers and not affect public safety at all!!!!

And of fire a whole bunch of unneeded cops at the same time and save a whole bunch of money.

Of course the war on drugs is a jobs program for cops and the police union would hate that!!!! Even if those jobs are 100 percent unneeded the police union is not going to let them go without a fight!!!

Repeal the stinking sale tax. We don't need those cops!!!

Source

Food-tax repeal may hit Phoenix hard

By Dustin Gardiner The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Feb 1, 2013 10:38 AM

As political pressure builds to repeal Phoenix’s food tax, city officials have outlined several financial obstacles that could complicate such a move.

City Manager David Cavazos this week sent a memo to the mayor and City Council listing major budget constraints to ending the tax, including concerns that it could affect the city’s perfect credit rating or result in a loss of revenue needed to help support police and fire services. [screw the credit rating, I want lower taxes. and it certainly wouldn't hurt to fire a bunch of cops who mainly arrest people for victimless drug war crimes]

The update comes as some council members have renewed calls to repeal the tax this spring, roughly two years before its 2015 sunset. The 2 percent tax on residents’ grocery bills is shaping up to be a contentious point of spring budget negotiations.

Mayor Greg Stanton, who pledged during his 2011 campaign to repeal the tax by April, has been a focus of much of the debate. He has yet to take a definitive position on the issue and could provide the crucial fifth vote needed to abolish the tax early.

“We still have significant challenges,” Stanton said, describing the city’s murky budget picture. “The economy is not bouncing back as quickly as people had hoped.”

He said Cavazos’ memo points out the “stark circumstances” Phoenix faces as it weighs the food-tax repeal: revenue for the current budget year is less than projected. Stanton said he hopes the city can still eliminate or reduce the tax but that he plans to review detailed spending-cut options before making a decision.

Two of the council’s more fiscally conservative members, Jim Waring and Sal DiCiccio, said the city could immediately repeal the tax without affecting public-safety services. DiCiccio has questioned why the city spent tens of millions of dollars on employee raises and bonuses these past few years, costs that are fixed as part of the city’s contracts with unions.

“Delaying the promised repeal of the food tax is the kind of tactic that hurts the middle class and working families,” DiCiccio said. “If the food tax is to be removed by April 1, the public needs time to consider the details of how that will be done without affecting public safety, as promised.”

Council members created the emergency food tax in February 2010 as Phoenix was facing an unprecedented $277 million general-fund shortfall. The tax was proposed as a way to prevent large layoffs of public-safety personnel and keep libraries and senior centers open. [really the expense of libraries and senior centers is insignificant compare to the cops of paying police officers who account for 70 percent of Phoenix's budget] So far, it has generated about $127 million in additional revenue, or about $50million per year.

Although some council members hoped to remove the tax by April, Cavazos’ proposed time line makes that appear unlikely. He plans to present options for cutting the tax on March 26, along with the rest of his trial budget for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1. The council would have months to make a final decision.

City officials said two primary challenges will be maintaining the city’s AAA bond rating and continuing to provide support for public safety.

Phoenix has relied on money from the food tax to help pay for about $30 million in general-fund expenses per year, most of which goes toward public safety and court expenses. On top of that, $8 million goes to help support specialty police and fire funds that have run a negative balance.

“Because 70 percent of the city’s general fund is spent on public safety, I am concerned about how it would be affected by a possible repeal of the tax,” Councilman Michael Nowakowski said recently. “Phoenix’s leaders must consider that and all other consequences in the process.”

A loss in revenue from the food tax could also hurt how credit-rating agencies evaluate Phoenix, Cavazos said. A lower credit rating would require the city to pay higher interest rates when it borrowed money.

Cavazos and city budget staff will spend the next several weeks outlining the council’s specific options, including a budget with recommended service levels and another with cuts to compensate for the loss of the food tax. He said both options will be shown to residents at numerous public meetings.

“I think it’s pretty clear that we have lots of constraints, ” Cavazos said. “We have to work very carefully with our departments and listen very carefully to the public before we can fully identify what those consequences are.”

Look who's coming out of the closet for medical marijuana

Source

Laurie Roberts | azcentral opinions

Look who's coming out of the closet for medical marijuana

Posted on February 1, 2013 5:00 pm by Laurie Roberts

Look who's coming out of the closet for medical marijuana

“No medical authority would say it’s helping you. They all say it’s harming you.” Rep. John Kavanagh, on medical marijuana

That’s marijuana.

Now there’s a move afoot to repeal the medical marijuana law that Arizona voters have approved three times now. Bennett Black’s father is hoping the Legislature will take a pass on Kavanagh’s bill to put repeal on the 2014 ballot.

“I can’t imagine people saying ‘I’m going to take away a sick person’s lifeline, their ability to have a quality of life and to criminalize that which is keeping him alive,’ ” the father told me. “If there’s a problem, the problem doesn’t come from keeping it away from people that need it.”

Lest you think these the words of some aging hippy, think again. Black’s father is former U.S. Attorney Mel McDonald, a Ronald Reagan appointee who led the war on drugs in Arizona in the 1980s and sat on the 15-member advisory commission of attorneys general that helped set national drug policy. He’s a Mormon, a former Maricopa County prosecutor who also served as a Superior Court judge and has been appointed to various boards and commissions by six of the last seven Arizona governors.

And he’s a fierce supporter of medical marijuana, because he’s seen the relief it offers his son.

I’ve been skeptical about the whole medical marijuana movement, sold as a godsend to cancer and glaucoma patients but used mostly by people with “chronic pain.” The picture of the young man holding his skateboard and his white bag of pot in December, when Arizona’s first dispensary opened, wasn’t exactly a PR coup for the medical marijuana industry.

Then I met Bennett Black and his parents, Mel and Cindy McDonald.

In 1997, Black was riding his Go-Ped when he was hit by a car going 45 mph. The 14 year old suffered a serious brain injury that left him with a severe form of epilepsy.

He’s seen some of the best neurologists in the country. He’s had a golf ball-sized piece of his brain removed. He’s had a vagus nerve stimulator wired to his brain, a device that sends out electrical charges every 30 seconds. And still the epilepsy controls his life, racking his body with life threatening grand-mal seizures that can last up to 75 minutes.

He takes five anti-seizure medications, which leave his stomach one roiling pit of uuuugh. Every day, he is sick. All the time, sick. By 1999, his weight had dropped from 180 pounds to 119 as he would go days without food. His mother, Cindy, talks of spending hour upon exhausting hour in the dead of night, trying to coax seizure medication into his empty stomach only to find the pills minutes later in a bucket of vomit.

A neighbor, suffering the after effects of a broken neck, suggested to Cindy that her son try marijuana. At first, Cindy says she resisted giving it to her son but eventually she became desperate. It was, she says, like a miracle. A few puffs and Bennett could a least gag down a few bites of food, enough to keep him alive.

And so came Cindy the criminal, the mother who snuck around and broke the law, obtaining marijuana so that her son could live, knowing that if she were caught it would make headlines: Wife of former US attorney snared in drug bust.

But knowing, too, that she had no choice.

Mel McDonald also faced a dilemma. He knew his son needed the illegal drug. But he knew also that he could lose his license to practice that which he had always stood for and respected — the law.

For a decade, the McDonalds lived with what he calls “the iron curtain” in their house. Cindy would obtain the marijuana, storing it in a safe only she had access to and giving it to her son when he needed it, which was pretty much every day — though never when Mel was around.

And Mel? It was his job to look the other way and to live with that.

“It’s almost like the story of Les Miserables. Jean Valjean breaking in to steal bread,” he said, recounting a decade of his wife’s clandestine activity. “Here’s a mother who has found one way to keep her son eating food — the only thing that works is marijuana – to keep him alive. To have to go out there and create that barrier in our home because I can’t be a part of it, I can’t be with you. I don’t want to know what you’re doing. I’ve literally got to keep a barrier in my own home to satisfy the requirements of the law and the bar.”

Voters first approved legalizing marijuana for medical use in 1996 but the Legislature repealed the law. Voters again approved it in 1998 but it never took effect because federal officials threatened to prosecute any doctor who prescribed the drug.

Then in 2010, voters narrowly approved it a third time, this time with a requirement only that a doctor “recommend” the drug, and Cindy sobbed relief and gratitude.

For nearly two years, the state dragged its feet before finally the first dispensaries were allowed to open in December. Now Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery is asking the state Supreme Court to toss out the law, contending that it’s pre-empted by federal law.

Meanwhile, Rep. Kavanagh is working to put repeal on the 2014 ballot, noting that 90 percent of medical marijuana users are seeking relief from “chronic pain”, not cancer or glaucoma. He also cites a recent federal appellate court ruling that upheld a Drug Enforcement Agency decision to keep marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug — one deemed to have no legitimate medical uses.

Bennett Black would beg to differ. He is among nearly 34,000 Arizonans who have state permission to use marijuana.

We met at noon on Thursday, along with his parents and his service dog Aggie, who is trained to call for help when a seizure occurrs. Black hadn’t eaten for 22 hours when we met. At most, he says he has one meal a day and only then because the marijuana temporarily eases the nausea, giving him a window of opportunity to eat.

“All you have to do is see someone in my situation and see how much it helps and they would completely feel differently,” Black told me. “They would go from being against it to for it in the blink of an eye.”

Cindy says the program has given dignity to people like her son, who can now obtain the drug legally to ease his nausea and stimulate his appetite.

“It saved his life,” she told me. “I will go to my grave knowing he would have been dead.”

Mel McDonald says a repeal would have the effect of turning his wife into a criminal. Mothers will do what they must, after all. Who among us wouldn’t?

If people are abusing the law, McDonald says we should go after the abusers, not the patients whose lives are often transformed because they can get legal access to relief.

“There are tens of thousands of people that marijuana genuinely helps,” he said. “We’ve been to the best doctors in the world for Bennett, from chiefs of staff on down. Nobody gave us a medication to take away the nausea and enable him to eat. It isn’t out there except marijuana. If there was a magic pill somebody could give us that would cure the nausea and let him eat we would take the pill but marijuana is the only thing that works…

“One of the tough things is for me not to pick up the phone and call Tom Horne or Bill Montgomery, both of whom are friends of mine and who I know well, and just say, ‘For hell sakes, there’s people that really need this. If there’s a problem, tighten the laws to stop the abuse but don’ t take the medicine away from the patient.’ ”

DEA thugs defend their war on marijuana

Source

The DEA's pot defense [Blowback]

By Robert Bonner

February 1, 2013, 8:23 a.m.

Reacting to a federal appellate court decision upholding the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's denial of reclassification of marijuana, The Times states in its Jan. 25 editorial that whether marijuana should be reclassified under federal law to permit its prescription as a medicine should be based on science and an evaluation of the facts, rather than on myths. I fully agree.

And yet the editorial is based on the myth that the DEA has made it "nearly impossible" for researchers to obtain marijuana for such scientific studies. To the contrary, not a single scientifically valid study by a qualified researcher has ever been denied by the DEA or, for that matter, by the National Institute of Drug Abuse. And there is ample government-grown marijuana, specifically for research, available at the marijuana farm run by the University of Mississippi. More surprising, as your editorial points out, is that there is still no scientifically valid study that proves that marijuana is effective, much less safe, as a medicine.

As the DEA administrator 20 years ago, I denied the reclassification of marijuana from a Schedule I controlled drug because there were no valid scientific studies showing that smoking marijuana was an effective medicine. In my decision, published in the Federal Register, I interpreted federal law and set forth a five-part test that included whether there were valid scientific studies demonstrating that marijuana was safe and effective for treating any medical condition. I noted that at that time there were none of the kind of controlled, double-blind studies that the Food and Drug Administration would require before approving a new drug application, and I clearly spelled out that this would be necessary before marijuana would be reclassified to a lower schedule that would permit its use as a physician-prescribed medicine.

Essentially, I invited those who advocate marijuana use as a medicine to conduct research and then present it to the DEA. I laid out a road map for what they needed to do. If scientifically valid studies demonstrated that marijuana was “effective” and “safe,” as the FDA defines those terms, the agency would reclassify marijuana into one of the other schedules. It is amazing that 20 years later there is still no such scientific study establishing that marijuana is effective as a medicine. And yet in the interim, the well-funded marijuana lobby, including the National Assn. for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and others, have spent tens of millions of dollars on convincing voters to pass medical marijuana initiatives based on anecdotes but not science.

The reason the FDA and the DEA have scientific standards is because snake-oil salesmen are able to sell just about anything to sick people without any scientific proof that it has a truly helpful therapeutic effect. If proponents of medical marijuana had invested even a small fragment of their money in scientifically valid studies, we would know one way or the other whether it works.

One can only conclude the marijuana proponents did not go this route because doing so would have shown that cannabis is not an effective and safe medicine. Alternatively, we are left to conclude that their agenda was not about marijuana to help sick people, but rather was getting voters to pass medical marijuana initiatives as a wedge to legalize the drug for "recreational" use.

US expanding the drug war in South America

Source

U.S. expands anti-drug efforts in Latin America

By Martha Mendoza Associated Press Fri Feb 1, 2013 9:28 PM

The crew members aboard the USS Underwood could see through their night goggles what was happening on the fleeing go-fast boat: Someone was dumping bales.

When the Navy guided-missile frigate later dropped anchor in Panamanian waters on that sunny August morning, Ensign Clarissa Carpio, a 23-year-old from San Francisco, climbed into the inflatable dinghy with four unarmed sailors and two Coast Guard officers like herself, carrying light submachine guns. It was her first deployment, but Carpio was ready for combat.

Fighting drug traffickers was precisely what she’d trained for.

In the most expensive initiative in Latin America since the Cold War, the U.S. has militarized the battle against the traffickers, spending more than $20 billion in the past decade. U.S. Army troops, Air Force pilots and Navy ships outfitted with Coast Guard counter-narcotics teams are routinely deployed to chase, track and capture drug smugglers.

The sophistication and violence of the traffickers is so great that the U.S. military is training not only law enforcement agents in Latin American nations, but their militaries as well, building a network of expensive hardware, radar, airplanes, ships, runways and refueling stations to stem the tide of illegal drugs from South America to the U.S. [Wow sounds like a jobs program for Generals, as well as a welfare program for the companeis in the military industrial complex that make the military equipment to wage this war on drugs]

According to State and Pentagon officials, stopping drug-trafficking organizations has become a matter of national security because they spread corruption, undermine fledgling democracies and can potentially finance terrorists. [And because it gives high paying jobs to the Generals and Admirals that run the drug war]

The Associated Press examined U.S. arms export authorizations, defense contracts, military aid, and exercises, tracking a drug war strategy that began in Colombia, moved to Mexico and is now finding fresh focus in Central America, where brutal cartels mark an enemy motivated not by ideology but by cash. [Like I said, a government welfare program for the companies in the military industrial complex]

US troops on patrol

At any given moment, 4,000 U.S. troops are deployed in Latin America and as many as four U.S. Navy ships are plying the Caribbean and Pacific coastlines of Central America. U.S. Air Force pilots clocked more than 46,400 hours in 2011 flying anti-drug missions, and U.S. agents from at least 10 law enforcement agencies spread across the continent.

The U.S. trains thousands of Latin American troops, and employs its multibillion dollar radar equipment to gather intelligence to intercept traffickers and arrest cartel members.

These work in organized-crime networks that boast an estimated 11,000 flights annually and hundreds of boats and submersibles. They smuggle cocaine from the only place it’s produced, South America, to the land where it is most coveted, the United States.

One persistent problem is that in many of the partner nations, police are so institutionally weak or corrupt that governments have turned to their militaries to fight drug traffickers, often with violent results. Militaries are trained for combat, while police are trained to enforce laws. “It is unfortunate that militaries have to be involved in what are essentially law enforcement engagements,” said Frank Mora, the outgoing deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemisphere affairs. But he argues that many governments have little choice.

“We are not going to turn our backs on these governments or these institutions because they’ve found themselves in such a situation that they have to use their militaries in this way,” Mora said.

But the U.S. is deploying its own military. Not only is the Fourth Fleet in the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Atlantic, but the Marines were sent to Guatemala last year and National Guardsmen are in Honduras.

Shift away from Colombia

The current U.S. strategy began in Colombia in 2000, with an eight-year effort that cost more than $7 billion to stop the flow from the world’s top cocaine producer. During Plan Colombia, the national police force, working closely with dozens of DEA agents, successfully locked up top drug traffickers as an estimated 44,000 people were killed in organized-crime related deaths.

But then came “the balloon effect.”

As a result of Plan Colombia’s pressure, traffickers were forced to find new coca-growing lands in Peru and Bolivia, and trafficking routes shifted as well from Florida to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Thus a $1.6 billion, 4-year Merida Initiative was launched in 2008. Gruesome killings topped 70,000 in six years.

The latest iteration is the $165 million Central America Regional Security Initiative, which includes Operation Martillo (Hammer), a year-old U.S.-led mission. Focused on the seas off Central America’s beach-lined coasts, key shipping routes for 90 percent of the estimated 850 metric tons of cocaine headed to the U.S., the operation has no end date.

When the drug war turns bloody, the strategy is working, said Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield, head of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. [What rubbish!!! The drug war has always been a dismal failure!]

Peña Nieto continues Felipe Calderon's drug war

"Peña Nieto assures U.S. officials he will press on with the drug fight"

And that is seems to be driven by money i.e. the "$2 billion security assistance package from Washington known as the Merida Initiative"

Source

A quieter drug war in Mexico, but no less deadly

By Nick Miroff, Published: February 1

MEXICO CITY — As a tactical matter, the gangsters and government security forces fighting Mexico’s drug war have typically opted for the spectacular over the subtle.

Massacres, beheadings and other unspeakable cruelties became cartels’ preferred form of violence. In response, the government sent masked troops with machine guns to patrol Mexico’s streets and paraded its captured drug suspects on television like hunting trophies.

But in the past few months, that has changed. Mexico’s drug war has gone quiet.

Not less lethal. Just less loud.

The country’s drug-related homicide numbers remain essentially undiminished. More than 12,000 people were murdered last year in gangland violence, according to the latest Mexican media tallies, roughly the same number that were slain in 2010 and 2011.

Yet polls show public perceptions of security improving. Nearly six months have gone by since gangsters have staged one of the large-scale massacres seemingly devised for maximum shock and terror, like the slaughter of 72 kidnapped migrants near the U.S. border in August 2010 or the time killers dumped 49 human torsos along a highway last May.

Grenade attacks, car bombs and wild urban gun battles have also become more rare. In one especially telling shift, Mexico’s military says the number of attacks on its soldiers dropped more than 50 percent last year, a sign that traffickers were looking to avoid — not ambush — army patrols.

“They’re still fighting each other, but the last thing the criminals want to do right now is confront the military,” said Martin Barron Cruz, an analyst at Mexico’s National Institute of Criminal Sciences. “They have learned that spectacular acts of violence only bring more pressure to bear on them.”

The change appears to be a tactical decision, Barron and other security experts say, as cartel bosses increasingly eschew the kind of open warfare and extravagant barbarity that defined the drug war in 2010 and 2011.

The gore, it seems, was bad for business. A sickened Mexican public has backed the deployment of more and more troops and federal police, bringing new highway checkpoints and additional pressures on the gangsters that drive up the costs of smuggling drugs, most of which are bound for the United States.

Another mass killing or elaborate ambush could happen at any moment, of course. Violence has flared in recent weeks in the gritty cement-block barrios that ring Mexico City. And in northern Mexico last week, gunmen barged into a private party and kidnapped 18 musicians and crew members from the band Kombo Kolombia. One band member escaped; the other 17 were shot and thrown down a well.

But in general, while the cartels are still killing each other at almost the same clip, they’re doing it more quietly and in areas of the country where they’re drawing less attention.

It is a strategy that the Mexican government appears to have adopted as well, in its own way.

Just as the traffickers have lowered the visibility of the violence, so has the administration of Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto.

His predecessor, Felipe Calderon, made the drug fight the central focus of his presidency and his public statements. But since taking office on Dec. 1, Peña Nieto has looked to change the conversation — by talking about trade, poverty reduction, and education and energy reform.

Peña Nieto has also instructed Mexican security forces to curb the practice of dragging handcuffed criminal suspects and alleged traffickers in front of the television cameras before they’ve been charged, a custom known as “presentation” that was a near-daily feature under the previous administration.

These perp-walks often exhibited suspects with fat lips, facial bruises and other signs of rough treatment by authorities.

But if the spectacle was used by Calderon and his predecessors to show the public they were winning the war, Peña Nieto’s decision to end it is meant to signal a new approach.

Officials in his administration say the sight of suspects smirking defiantly as authorities read aloud their criminal aliases — monikers like “Tweety Bird,” “Barbie” and “The Moustache” — sent the wrong message, especially since many later go free for lack of evidence.

Peña Nieto’s government says it wants to focus on securing criminal convictions and protecting judicial integrity, not making Mexico’s bad guys into TV personalities.

‘Walking a fine line’

Still, the government’s effort to shift the public conversation away from drug violence is a risky one, analysts say, given the lingering perception that Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was corrupt and soft on the cartels when it ran Mexico for much of the 20th century.

Peña Nieto assures U.S. officials he will press on with the drug fight and forge ahead with implementation of the $2 billion security assistance package from Washington known as the Merida Initiative.

But he has also sent the message that his administration wants its relationship with the United States to be about more than drugs, said Eric Olson, a Mexico scholar at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

“The question is: In doing that, does the urgency of dealing with security issues fall off the agenda?” Olson said. “Or the urgency of judicial reform, modernizing the police and reforming the prison system?”

“He’s walking a fine line,” he said.

The more discreet violence is giving the new administration a chance to talk publicly about other issues — something that isn’t possible when authorities are busy cleaning up after a mass murder or political assassination.

According to tallies by the Mexican media organization Milenio, the number of drug-related homicides in December 2012 — Peña Nieto’s first month in office — was actually higher than during the same month in previous years.

The Mexican government no longer releases its own body count estimate. But Peña Nieto insisted during his presidential campaign his success should be judged according to whether he’s able to slow the pace of the killings.

It’s a goal that leaves him boxed in, since the reforms he has proposed — including a massive reorganization of state-level and federal police forces — will take years to implement, said Alejandro Hope, a former Mexican intelligence official who is now a security analyst at the think tank Mexico Evalua.

“If he doesn’t bring down violence, he fails,” Hope said. “But nothing that he has proposed will do that in the short term.”

And if the cartels commit another huge massacre or deadly ambush on federal forces, Peña Nieto may be forced to turn his attention back toward the fight.

“There’s more availability of drugs and more availability of guns, and if that doesn’t change, we’ll continue to see the same trends,” said Alberto Islas, a security expert at the consulting firm Risk Evaluation.

Relief in some areas

For now though, the new president seems to have some breathing room, partly the result of quieter times in the big border cities that have long been red zones, such as Tijuana and shell-shocked Ciudad Juarez, where the murder rate has dropped nearly 80 percent since 2010, when more than 3,100 were killed.

Local authorities in those cities say their police reforms are paying off and that they have purged their ranks of corrupt officers. Federal forces say they’ve weakened the cartels by taking out many of their top leaders.

But analysts say the violence has simply moved elsewhere, to new flash points in central-northern Mexican cities, like Torreon, that are hundreds of miles south of the border but strategic for control over lucrative smuggling routes.

“There may be a perception, on a national level, that security has improved. But not here,” said Javier Garza, editor of the newspaper El Siglo de Torreon.

It’s one of the places where Mexico’s two most powerful cartels are crashing into each other. The Sinaloa Cartel controls much of western Mexico and the Pacific. The Zetas dominate the country’s eastern states and the Gulf Coast.

Torreon had 114 murders in December 2012, Garza said, its second-worst month for the year. In 2012, nearly 1,100 people were slain in the city, a record.

Gabriela Martinez contributed to this report.

Market blooms for medical-marijuana experts

Link to video: http://bcove.me/k8dc9p0h

Source

Market blooms for medical-marijuana experts

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Feb 2, 2013 11:58 PM

Inside the suite of a nondescript industrial park in west Phoenix, an armed security guard in a bulletproof vest guards dozens of tents filled with lush plants that supply medical-marijuana patients throughout the state.

All day long, men and women with varying medical conditions swing through the doors of the cultivation center to tend their crops, allowing fresh air to seep into the office suite, which reeks of a musky, skunklike odor. As hard-rock music blares, the growers measure nutrients, roll blunts (cigars), prune plants and prepare buds for drying.

When they need pointers on yielding the best harvest, they go to Bruce Barnes, a 32-year-old “master grower” who works for the center and specializes in growing highly potent marijuana that patients use to treat ailments ranging from cancer to chronic pain. Barnes helps patients and caregivers grow high-grade marijuana using sophisticated techniques to manipulate the plants with light, nutrients and air.

Arizona’s medical-marijuana era is still young, and Barnes is one of the few expert growers in the state who works for dispensary operators or cultivation sites that stock the drug for some of the 33,601 patients who are permitted to use it under state law.

While marijuana is illegal in most states and under federal law, it is still a plant and, like any successful farmer, Barnes can simply look at one and determine its variety and health condition.

“It’s like being a sommelier of wine,” said Robert Calkin, president of the Cannabis Career Institute, a California marijuana school. “You have to be familiar with every aspect of the method of creating the medical marijuana. You have to be able to identify strains of marijuana, know all the different kinds, know how to grow all the different kinds, know all the different methods and know how to grade and judge the values of it just by looking at it.”

At 6-foot-4 with a goatee and dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt that covers tattoos on both arms, Barnes presides over one of the largest grow sites in the state. Since Arizona’s program is so new, the state has the potential to become a mecca for growers who can produce cost-effective plantations of marijuana that smells good and tastes better. Already, growers from other states are flocking to Arizona to sell their skills, seeing potential in this unsaturated market.

Behind the office doors, Barnes is known by some as the “marijuana king.”

He can look at plants and quickly determine whether pH levels are off or if diseases are developing. In this line of work, a career is made by growing buds that can pass the muster of both discerning marijuana aficionados — such as longtime medical-pot users and growers — and amateur patients who seek specific strains to treat specific ailments.

“It’s mentally challenging because you’re not just thinking about the day,” Barnes said. “You’ve got to be planning out the next two months, so you’re constantly cloning and preparing for plants to move into flowers.”

Still, he said with a crooked smile, “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

Must register with state

Barnes is allowed to cultivate under the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act, which was passed by voters in 2010.

The law allows people with certain medical conditions, including chronic pain, cancer and muscle spasms, to use the drug after obtaining a physician’s recommendation.

They must register with the state, which issues identification cards to qualified patients and caregivers, who can grow 72 plants for themselves and up to five other patients.

But by this time next year, state health officials expect most — if not all — marijuana cultivation to take place at dispensaries or off-site grow centers, similar to the one where Barnes works.

The Arizona Department of Health Services, which oversees the program, can license up to 126 dispensaries in designated areas statewide. As of Jan. 30, six dispensaries were operating in Phoenix, Tucson, Cochise County near Willcox, and Williams. Four more dispensaries could soon open.

Patients can obtain up to 2½ ounces of medical marijuana every two weeks. There is no limit to how much marijuana a dispensary or cultivation center can grow.

Maximizing quality

Barnes works to maximize quality for the estimated 60 caregivers who rent space at Compassion First Caregiver Circle’s grow site near 26th Avenue and McDowell Road.

One recent morning, he started his day checking nutrient levels, dipping a digital monitor into giant blue barrels that hold solutions of water and organic nutrients that feed the plants. He adjusted the warehouse’s temperature, climate, light, humidity and other elements that control the plants’ growth stages.

“It takes some time to learn the plants,” he explained, as he crouched down to analyze a stalk. “You really just learn how to adjust things on the fly.”

Barnes walked in and out of the 7-foot-tall black canvas tents that house the plants. He cut clones and replanted them. He schooled one grower, a caregiver, on how to rid his plants of spider mites and another on optimal pH levels.

Barnes, who bought pot from friends and smoked it as a teen growing up in Mesa, never aspired to be a professional marijuana cultivator. Back then, he figured he’d find a career in a science field — maybe biology or marine science.

But he followed in his father’s footsteps and started working in the construction industry as a painter. He smoked every now and then recreationally and started using marijuana medically — but illegally — around 1999 to relieve knee and shoulder pain from high-school football injuries and an all-terrain-vehicle accident.

Barnes got into the medical-marijuana industry in 2001. He moved to Rollinsville, Colo., and started working as a low-level bud tender at an indoor dispensary, where he used some of the skills that his grandfather, a Gilbert farmer, taught him.

“I grew up on the farm,” he said. “When I felt that I could make a better product, I’d use my knowledge of gardening, and so it all came together.”

Barnes read books about growing medical marijuana, traded techniques with other experts, watched video tutorials and kept up with new research, honing his skills and experimenting with different nutrients, strains and hybrids. He worked his way up to lead grower, overseeing the growth of 25 to 30 pounds of marijuana each week and supplying three dispensaries.

In late 2009, he returned to Arizona and restarted a painting business with his brother.

In 2011, a year after Arizona voters approved the medical-marijuana law, Barnes was on Craigslist looking for painting jobs. He clicked on a page and ended up on an advertisement looking for expert medical-marijuana growers.

He answered the ad and interviewed for the job, touting his experience in Colorado. He was hired in January 2012. “They weren’t just looking for a closet grower,” he recalled.

Variety of ways to grow

Some home growers still cultivate marijuana out of their closets, reminiscent of the days when high-schoolers and hippies tried to hide their plants from parents and prying eyes.

Barnes recently gave up growing marijuana at home, where he tended it in a professional tent set up in a shed attached to his house. (His wife is going to law school and he didn’t want to jeopardize her career.)

There are many ways to grow marijuana — indoor, outdoor, with soil, hydroponic, aeroponics, to name a few.

The rise of legalized medical marijuana over the years in 18 states and Washington, D.C., has led to a surge in indoor growing by both patients and cultivation centers that invest in expensive hydroponic systems, which generally use water, nutrients and non-soil mediums and can cost thousands of dollars to set up and thousands more each month to operate and maintain.

Barnes uses a hydroponic drip-to-waste system that uses a soil substitute, which allows him to control nutrient levels and maximize output. The buds are green, sticky and studded with crystals — characteristics of high-quality marijuana.

Barnes is constantly trying to improve his methods but models part of his technique after Ed Rosenthal, a renowned California cannabis grower and horticulturist, and other well-known growers.

Rosenthal, author of “Marijuana Grower’s Handbook,” published in 2010, said no method is better than another.

“If you speak with 10 gardeners, you have 20 ways of growing things like tomatoes — and that’s the same with marijuana,” Rosenthal told The Arizona Republic in a recent phone interview. “Everybody’s right — there are millions of ways of doing it, and people are constantly developing their own ways of doing it.”

Many growers also experiment with different strains, which are said to treat different ailments.

Sativa strains, for example, are typically used during the day because they provide pain relief but generally don’t affect a patient’s ability to be active. Barnes said sativas are often used to treat conditions such as depression, nausea and chronic pain and tend to suppress the appetite.

Indica strains, meanwhile, are best for nighttime because they induce what Barnes calls a “couch lock,” meaning they induce intense sedation and help treat pain, arthritis, insomnia and other conditions.

The science behind the effectiveness of marijuana in treating medical conditions is clouded in controversy. Some research generally indicates that marijuana is effective in dulling pain, controlling nausea and treating other ailments. But opponents question the legitimacy of such studies and argue that marijuana use could lead to additional health risks.

Most agree that more research needs to be conducted to determine marijuana’s effectiveness. Such efforts, however, are hampered by federal drug-control laws that restrict marijuana research.

Research — or lack of it — doesn’t prevent patients and caregivers from using marijuana for medical purposes.

Those like John Batchan, a Phoenix ticket scalper, still report to the cultivation center day after day to tend their crops. He said 25 years of walking around venues to sell tickets has taken a toll on his feet. Batchan became a medical-marijuana patient last October and began growing at the center about three months ago with help from Barnes.

“As you can see, I’ve got a green thumb now,” Batchan said while taking a break from watering a tent full of plants.

Marketable skills

Barnes’ green thumb is highly marketable.

Already, he is being wooed by other dispensary operations that want him to run their grow operations.

Barnes says expert growers can make “a good amount of money” — in the six figures — but he won’t discuss his salary.

Barnes and other industry experts say growers are hard to find in Arizona because the industry is in its infancy here.

Some growers are migrating here from California, Colorado, Montana and other states that have an established medical-marijuana industry.

Dispensary operator Mark Steinmetz said growing experts will likely find success as dispensary owners look to professionalize their operations and maximize output.

“It is basically an agricultural skill set,” he said. “You have to be part botanist, part farmer to know how to grow in some kind of volume. A lot of people can do it in small grows … but taking it to 1,000 plants is a whole different situation.”

It’s a skill that many are trying to learn.

For example, cannabis experts from Burbank, Calif., will teach about 50 participants in March how to tend buds as part of training sessions in Phoenix, said Calkin of the marijuana school. “In Arizona right now, there’s a great need for grow experts. Generally, we try to come to Arizona every couple of months.”

---------------

Best buds

There are many varieties of medical marijuana, and some strains better treat specific illnesses, according to growers. A few popular varieties:

Blue Dream: Used as an appetite suppressant, and for nausea and pain. Induces euphoric high.

Haley’s Comet: Used to treat depression, arthritis, to boost energy. Induces euphoric, social high.

OG Kush: Used to treat chronic pain, nervous-system conditions, many other illnesses. Induces deep, hypnotic high.

Confidential Cheese: Used to treat chronic pain, sleep disorders, eating disorders. Induces sleepy high.

Afghan Kush: Used for extreme pain relief, insomnia, anxiety, to stimulate an appetite. Induces heavy sedative high.

Source: Bruce Barnes

Gun Grabbing Phoenix Area Mayors

Most of them pretend to support the Second Amendment, and say "I support the 2nd Amendment but ... " and of course the but is followed by a whole bunch of reasons that show they don't support the Second Amendment.

Remember their names, and when you vote throw these tyrants who want to flush the Second Amendment down the toilet out of office.

Source

Valley mayors weigh in on gun reform

By Maria Polletta The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Feb 2, 2013 11:23 PM

Valley mayors have joined the national chorus of officials saying when it comes to gun violence, something has to give.

But there’s no consensus on what that something is.

The mayors, who range from avid hunters and National Rifle Association members to those who have never owned a firearm, have suggested tentative solutions as diverse as their backgrounds.

Some have hesitated to offer any sort of directive, and most have held off on membership in gun-control organizations. Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton for a time was the only Valley representative in the Mayors Against Illegal Guns coalition until Tempe Mayor Mark Mitchell recently joined.

“There’s just a lot of dialogue right now, and it’s hard to bring it all together,” said Gilbert Mayor John Lewis.

Lewis said he prefers to wait and weigh in on specific legislation, such as a 2012 guns-on-campus bill he opposed, rather than sign on to more sweeping efforts.

Mesa Mayor Scott Smith, a former NRA member and a gun owner for most of his life, also worries that acting too quickly on the gun issue would lead to an inadequate or ineffective solution. He said he refuses to “jump on the gun-control bandwagon,” lamenting what he described as the U.S. tendency to seek knee-jerk solutions after major crises.

Still, Smith and other mayors have said they’d support or at least be open to certain measures to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, in effect limiting firearm privileges to responsible citizens.

Glendale Mayor Jerry Weiers, a hunter, NRA member and gun-safety instructor, said he supports efforts to curtail the spread of illegal guns, for instance. “If it’s an illegal gun, it’s an illegal gun,” he said. “Why wouldn’t everybody support trying to stop (that)?”

Smith also believes the law has a legitimate role in forbidding the willful sale of guns to criminals and forbidding “straw buyers” who would channel weapons inappropriately.

Other mayors, such as Phoenix’s Stanton, have looked to the types and grades of weapons people are allowed to own. President Barack Obama recently unveiled a broad set of proposed gun-control measures that include bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Stanton has described requiring universal background checks as a “good, commonsense approach.” Checks are not done now on users who purchase firearms at gun shows and through other private sales.

Glendale’s Weiers and Peoria Mayor Bob Barrett have said training is a key component of responsible gun ownership. Weiers argued that gun-safety classes for youngsters make for “better citizens and … less problems.”

Barrett, a gun owner, has opposed legislation to allow guns in schools and city buildings and said training should be required to carry a concealed weapon.

“When you are under stress, when you are under fire … you’re more likely, A, to miss or, B, to hit somebody else,” Barrett said. “The idea of people walking around with concealed weapons and no training is not a good thing.”

Barrett contends that any initiative focused solely on how and which guns are obtained will help little if the country does not start placing a greater emphasis on mental-health care. Changing that, he said, would go further than trying to eliminate extended magazines and military-style weapons.

“What I think we need to do as a society is make mental-health treatment regarded the same way physical-health treatment is,” he said. “There is a sense of shame connected with getting counseling and getting help.”

Chandler Mayor Jay Tibshraeny said that “a lot of these folks that have done this (mass shootings) are seriously mentally disturbed” and mental-health-care funding is a “a factor that I look at on this issue.”

“At the state level, better reporting of mental-health records would be good,” Tibshraeny said. “We’ve got folks that are unstable and applying to get guns. A lot of their health history is on record, and it needs to go into a database that is checked as they’re applying.”

All Valley mayors said they believe a balance between protective measures and Second Amendment rights is vital as the gun-control debate moves forward, especially in Arizona, with the state’s historically pro-gun culture.

“I am a gun owner and a supporter of the Second Amendment,” said Surprise Mayor Sharon Wolcott. “But my right to own and carry a gun does not trump your right to live in a safe and civil society.”

Republic reporters Gary Nelson, Parker Leavitt, Dianna Náñez, Allie Seligman, John Yantis,Jen Kuhney and Paul Giblin contributed to this article.

Mayor's for Knife Control???

How many of these mayors think you should have to pass a Brady Bill test before buying really a sharp steak or cooking knife.

Or perhaps a $200 tax on the purchase of any weapons grade knives which would include steak and cooking knifes.

Or have a two week waiting period before picking up the steak or cooking knife you just purchased.

Or banning minors from using anything but dull table knives.

Source

Stabbed Scottsdale bouncer dies, played ASU football

By By D.S. Woodfill and Paola Boivin Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Sat Feb 2, 2013 10:24 PM

Those who remembered a former Arizona State University football player who died a week after he was stabbed at Scottsdale nightclub described their friend as a gentle giant.

Tyrice Thompson, a former tight end and wide receiver, passed away surrounded by friends and family at about 8:30 a.m. Saturday at Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn Medical Center.

Thompson, a 27-year-old former tight end and receiver for ASU from 2003 to 2007, was working as a bouncer at Martini Ranch in Scottsdale at 1 a.m. on Jan. 27 when a scuffle started between patrons, police said.

Although details of the investigation are still not clear, police said at some point during the scuffle, someone stabbed Thompson 5 times in the back hip and arm.

In a statement released Saturday, Martini Ranch said Thompson had become a member of the family who had a “remarkable ability to connect with people and will always be remembered for his warm smile, sense of humor and positive attitude.”

The business has created a Facebook page to help raise money for his loved ones. That can be found at https://www.facebook.com/remembertyrice

It was sadly ironic way for such a good-natured person to die, said Marques Elliott, a friend of Thompson’s since college.

“He always was a very calm, kind individual,” Elliott said. “He’s always been extremely humble, soft spoken (and) has always had a very clear head on his shoulders. (He was) a very good human being.”

Doug Yazzie, a close friend Thompson who was with his family when he passed away, said Thompson was a kind and positive man.

“He could fill any room with light,” Yazzie said.

Yazzi, who said he is the godfather to Thompson’s 2-year-old son Takai, would likely have forgiven his attacker.

“He didn’t have an angry bone in his body,” he said.

Dennis Erickson, Thompson’s coach during his senior year of school, was heartbroken over the death of his former player.

“He was an unbelievable guy, so coachable,” Erickson said. “Everything we asked, he did. It's so sad.”

Police reported that no one at the bar the night of the attack, including employees, identified who stabbed Thompson and no knife was found at the scene.

Police on Tuesday arrested, but then released pending further investigation, a 26-year-old Tempe resident Ian MacDonald.

“During interviews, Mr. MacDonald admitted to fighting with the bouncers, but denied stabbing Mr. Thompson,” a police statement said.

“Police have questioned all those we believe were witnesses or involved in the incident,” said Sgt. Mark Clark in a statement. “MacDonald remains the sole suspect at this time.”

“We are waiting for lab results to forward charges to the MCAO,” he added.

Thompson, a Laveen resident, played with 13 games his senior year as a Sun Devil, catching 15 passes for 272 yards. He was a key special teams player his final two seasons at Arizona State.

Thompson was signed as an undrafted free agent by the Indianapolis Colts, but did not play an NFL game.

Stan Ogwel mentored Thompson, who was a sophomore at South Mountain High School in Phoenix, as part of public service work he performed with his ASU fraternity.

Ogwel said Thompson was alert before he died, but unable to talk because he was on a respirator.

“I held his hands and prayed with him,” he said. “ I was able to at least spend about 10 minutes with him in the room.”

ASU Associate Athletic Director Mark Brand released a statement that said “the Thompson family is in the thoughts of everyone in the Sun Devil Athletics family.”

“The words of his teammates, our fans and media who came in contact with him are true measures of how much his smile was appreciated,” the statement said.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

Obama loves HIS guns????

Like Obama, most government rulers love guns. They love guns, because guns allow them to stay in power. Ask Hitler, Stalin and Mao if they loved guns and they will all say yes.

The only people that rulers like Obama, Hitler, Stalin and Mao don't want to have guns are the serfs they rule over.

Source

White House photo shows Obama firing shotgun

By Zachary A. Goldfarb and Howard Schneider, Published: February 2

On his 51st birthday last August, President Obama hit the links with a group of buddies and then flew by helicopter to Camp David. There, he changed into jeans and picked up a shotgun. And then, before it got too dark, he started a round of clay target shooting.

You’d be forgiven if you didn’t think this was headline-worthy news. But on Saturday morning, the White House released and promoted a photograph of Obama shooting skeet at the presidential retreat in Maryland.

White House aides were trying to end a growing distraction just as the president plans to make a fresh push to rally public support behind his ambitious agenda to tighten gun laws, traveling to Minnesota on Monday.

The photo, taken by White House photographer Pete Souza, depicts a sunglasses-wearing Obama firing what appears to be a Browning Citori 725, the shotgun wedged against his left shoulder, a pillow of white smoke emerging from the barrel.

The photo was published a week after Obama claimed in an interview with the New Republic that he routinely shoots skeet at Camp David. The surprising assertion — Obama’s golfing and basketball hobbies are far better known — instantly stirred the political zeitgeist.

Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, was asked for evidence in the White House briefing room. “The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart poked fun at the president’s apparent hobby. Gun-rights activists dismissed it, and some were skeptical that Obama was a routine skeet shooter.

A Republican congresswoman even challenged the president to a shooting contest.

“I’m sure they released the photo because there were folks raising questions about his answer, and those questions are a silly distraction in the midst of a serious debate,” David Axelrod, a longtime adviser to Obama, said in an e-mail.

“I know him pretty well. He doesn’t embellish,” Axelrod added. “If he says he’s done some shooting up there on occasion, I’m sure he has. He’s not a hunter or marksman and doesn’t pretend to be.”

The White House did not say how often Obama has gone shooting.

In the interview with the New Republic, Obama was asked if he had ever shot a gun.

“Yes, in fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time,” he said.

Asked if his whole family goes shooting, Obama replied: “Not the girls, but oftentimes guests of mine go up there. And I have a profound respect for the traditions of hunting that trace back in this country for generations. And I think those who dismiss that out of hand make a big mistake.”

But while the White House made clear Saturday that the president has shot skeet at least once, the release of the photo seemed more likely to inflame passions around the issue than douse them.

Current and former advisers to Obama compared skeptics of Obama’s skeet-shooting prowess to a group of conservatives, known as birthers, who cast doubt on whether Obama was born in the United States and kept exerting pressure until the president released a long-form birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii.

“Attn skeet birthers. Make our day — let the photoshop conspiracies begin!” David Plouffe, Obama’s senior adviser until last week, wrote on Twitter early Saturday. Later in the day, he wrote, “Day made. The skeet birthers are out in full force in response to POTUS pic. Makes for most excellent, delusional reading.”

Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s senior adviser, coined a term for those who didn’t believe Obama had gone shooting: “skeeters.”

On the other side, Obama’s critics in the gun-rights community were not impressed by the photo.

“One picture does not erase a lifetime of supporting every gun ban and every gun-control scheme imaginable,” said Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association.

Ladd Everitt, a spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, regarded the whole episode as a sideshow.

“If that’s something the president enjoys doing, God bless him,” he said. “I’m no more offended by this photo than by one showing him throwing a Frisbee.”

The White House would not confirm what firearm Obama used. But gun dealers and enthusiasts said that from the picture, it appeared to be a Browning Citori, a model popular among those involved in the sport.

The “over and under” design features two barrels, one on top of the other, allowing the gun to hold and fire two shotgun shells.

The smoke in the photo is emanating from air vents in the barrel, a feature known as “porting” that reduces recoil shock and allows for steadier aim.

Gun dealers said the shotgun appeared to be a stock model of the Browning, which retails for $2,000 to $3,000. According to the Browning Web site, some of the Citori models are made in a left-handed version, with a slight bend near the butt — though it was not apparent from the photo whether the left-handed president was using one of those.

“It looked like he was shooting regular American skeet,” said Michael Hampton Jr., head of the National Sporting Clays Association. “It’s a gun that is used for this discipline — a good middle-of-the-road gun, very functional and very standard.”

The sport originated early in the 20th century when hunters were looking for ways to practice and improve their marksmanship.

Over time, the activity developed as a sport of its own. There are several variations, all involving a shooter attempting to down a roughly three-ounce clay disk that has been launched from a spring-loaded machine.

In skeet shooting — the activity the White House said Obama was pursuing at Camp David — the clay targets are launched at different heights and travel across the shooter’s field of vision.

Hampton said that even novices can get quick satisfaction. In a 100-target session, he said even beginners will hit 25 or 30 targets and quickly develop 50-50 proficiency.

War is big business in Arizona

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Arizona defense contractors branch out; develop more products for foreign markets

By J. Craig Anderson The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Feb 2, 2013 3:25 PM

Defense contractors with operations in Arizona such as Raytheon Co., Honeywell International Inc. and the Boeing Co. are becoming less dependent on the U.S. military by branching out into new markets and inventing products for both defense and industry.

That includes seeking more foreign-military customers as well as developing technology with non-military applications such as mass-produced satellites, high-tech helicopter-maintenance systems and better thunderstorm detectors for commercial aircraft.

Unmanned drones and drone-based systems for both military and civilian use also play a prominent role in defense contractors’ diversification plans.

Innovation can carry a heavy cost, as Boeing learned in January when regulators grounded its revolutionary new commercial airliner, the fuel-efficient 787, over fire-safety concerns.

An investigation is under way into what caused a Jan. 7 fire inside an empty 787 “Dreamliner” parked on the tarmac at Boston’s Logan International Airport. The delay in rolling out new 787s ultimately could cost Boeing millions of dollars, aerospace-industry analysts said.

Still, officials at Boeing, Honeywell and Raytheon said constant innovation and diversification always have been essential to keeping their businesses viable.

“At some point, all programs go away,” said Randy Gricius, Space Applications Program manager for Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson. “You’ve got to continue to look for growth.”

Raytheon has been working on two new products at its Tucson facility: a small guided missile for drones known as Pyros and a line of relatively inexpensive, mass-produced military imaging satellites called SeeMe.

Although both products are being developed for U.S. military use, company officials said Pyros is likely to appeal to foreign allies, and SeeMe could be used by Earth-mapping companies and global-warming researchers.

Pyros is unlike anything Raytheon Missile Systems ever has produced, said J.R. Smith, senior manager of advanced-missile-systems business development.

At 22 inches long and 12 pounds, it is by far the smallest laser-guided missile Raytheon has produced and the first missile designed specifically for drones.

“It’s kind of outside the box of what we normally do,” Smith said.

SeeMe is an even greater departure for the company’s Tucson operation, Gricius said, but it made sense because of Raytheon Missile Systems’ mass-production experience.

SeeMe satellites will sell for $500,000 each, Gricius said, and an innovative system of launching them into low-Earth orbit from high-flying aircraft will cut the deployment cost to about $1million.

By comparison, launching a satellite with a Pegasus missile costs more than $30million, he said.

While Pyros missiles are expected to generate big revenue from foreign customers, SeeMe will be difficult to sell overseas because of prohibitive federal regulations governing satellite sales, Gricius said.

Still, the satellites could be used by non-military customers such as National Aeronautics and Space Administration, as well as U.S. companies that provide images to online mapping services like Google Earth.

Honeywell Aerospace in Phoenix also is tapping deeper into commercial markets with two recently developed products, Health and Usage Monitoring Systems, or HUMS, and the IntuVue 3-D Weather Radar.

HUMS is an onboard diagnostic tool for military and commercial helicopters that measures the health and performance of critical components and can detect mechanical faults before they become catastrophic failures, company officials said.

According to Honeywell, HUMS already is saving the military tens of millions of dollars and thousands of maintenance-related hours each year.

Company officials hope those figures will resonate with commercial customers looking to save time and money on helicopter maintenance.

IntuVue is an upgraded aerial radar system for commercial airliners that can detect potentially dangerous storm conditions more than 350 miles away.

It includes new capabilities to detect turbulence, hail and lightning up to 10 minutes in advance of storm cells in an aircraft’s flight path, a company official said.

“The IntuVue was designed from the ground up to provide pilots with superior information about the location of true weather threats, such as hail and lightning, relative to their aircraft,” said Ratan Khatwa, a senior chief engineer at Honeywell Aerospace.

The predictive hail and lightning system uses complex algorithms that analyze data captured from constant radar scanning from ground level to 60,000 feet and out to 320 nautical miles, equivalent to about 368 miles.

Carl Esposito, vice president of marketing and product management for Honeywell Aerospace, said the company has gotten its reliance on the U.S. military for revenue down to less than 25percent by expanding both commercial and foreign business.

“More than 50 percent of our business is in the commercial area, with customers like Boeing, Airbus, Embraer and Gulfstream,” Esposito said. “In defense, we are nearly evenly split between U.S. business and the rest of the world. We continue to expand in a variety of emerging regions throughout Asia-Pacific, Latin America, India and elsewhere.”

Foreign-military sales by defense contractors are limited by two key sets of regulations: the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and Export Administration Regulations.

The U.S. Directorate of Defense Trade Controls maintains an ever-changing list of trade policies and embargoes that dictates what kinds of products, if any, can be sold to a particular country.

Several countries — including North Korea, Cuba, Iran and China — are perennially restricted from purchasing weapons technology from U.S. companies.

Still, weapon sales to most countries in the world are possible, although they must be evaluated and approved by the U.S. government on a case-by-case basis.

Foreign sales of commercial products such as aircraft-guidance and diagnostic systems are far less restricted and represent a huge potential market for Arizona defense contractors, industry representatives said.

“As air-traffic-management needs greatly increase in markets like China, India and the Middle East, we are well-positioned to bring solutions to those markets that support infrastructure growth while providing the latest in technology and safety advancements,” Esposito said. “This is a core focus for Honeywell now and into the future.”

Reach the reporter at craig.anderson@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8681.

Supreme Court to hear fight over taking DNA from arrested people

The Fifth Amendment says:

nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Sadly I suspect the same thing will happen with DNA tests.

Source

Supreme Court to hear fight over taking DNA from arrested people

Supreme Court to hear DNA challenge

By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau

February 2, 2013, 10:12 p.m.

WASHINGTON — On a cold February night three years ago, police in suburban Arlington, Va., received a frantic call. A young woman said her roommate had been abducted at gunpoint by a short, clean-shaven man who sped away in a silver SUV.

At dawn, a motorist spotted the victim in a snowy field near a highway, raped and strangled, but alive. An alert officer, hearing the lookout report, recalled that he'd jotted down the license tag of a silver Dodge Durango whose driver lurked near bars at midnight, leading to the quick arrest of a short, clean-shaven Marine named Jorge Torrez.

Ten years ago, Virginia became the first state to require, upon arrest for a serious crime, a mouth swab for DNA. The sample from Torrez, sent to a state crime lab and entered into the FBI's DNA database, confirmed he was the rapist. A few weeks later a DNA match also led to charges against him in the rape and murder of two girls, ages 8 and 9, in Zion, Ill., where Torrez had gone to high school. Jerry Hobbs, the father of one of the girls, had been in prison for the crimes.

This month, the U.S. Supreme Court will take up a privacy rights challenge to taking DNA from people who are arrested. The case could either end the practice or make it the norm nationwide.

Arlington County Deputy Police Chief Daniel Murray says the Torrez case shows the value of taking DNA when someone is arrested for a serious crime. "It's extremely important to quickly identify someone who would be a danger to society if he were on the loose," he said. And in this instance, he said, the DNA match freed an innocent man.

Nationwide, DNA samples are taken from people who are convicted of violent crimes.

Going further, the federal government and 28 states, including California, Illinois and Florida, now take DNA samples from some or all who are arrested but not yet convicted of serious crimes. Besides taking fingerprints, the standard jail booking now often includes taking a DNA swab, which prosecutors say is as simple and painless as brushing your teeth.

Last month, President Obama signed into law the Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act, which will help pay the start-up costs for other states to begin testing people who are arrested.

"The whole purpose of this is to find serial rapists and murderers and to get them early to save innocent lives," said Jayann Sepich, a New Mexico mother whose daughter Katie was raped and murdered. Her attacker was arrested several times, but he was not identified until he was convicted of another crime and his DNA was taken.

California prosecutors say arrests for nonviolent crimes, including drug offenses, credit card fraud and burglary, have led them to rapists and murderers, thanks to DNA tests.

But the constitutionality of taking DNA upon arrest remains in doubt, particularly when it is not needed to identify the suspect. For example, police do not need DNA to identify someone who is caught with drugs or breaking into a house.

A state appeals court in San Francisco and a federal judge in Sacramento ruled it was unconstitutional to require a DNA sample from someone who had been arrested but not convicted. The California Supreme Court and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals have put the issue on hold pending a ruling from U.S. Supreme Court.

The justices will hear the case of Maryland vs. King to decide whether requiring DNA from someone taken into custody but not convicted is an "unreasonable search" forbidden by the 4th Amendment.

In 2009, Alonzo King from Salisbury, Md., was arrested for waving a shotgun in a threatening manner. That was a felony charge, calling for a DNA test. He later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge for which no DNA test was required. But the DNA sample taken upon arrest pointed to him as the man who had broken into a house and raped a woman six years earlier. King was convicted and given a life term.

But Maryland's high court threw out his conviction and ruled police may not take DNA without a search warrant and some reason to believe the suspect had committed another offense. "DNA samples contain a massive amount of deeply personal information," far more than a fingerprint, the state judges said.

Civil liberties advocates have urged the court to hold the line and to bar DNA searches until someone has been convicted.

"This could be an unprecedented expansion of search power. The rule has been the government has to have a specific suspicion before they search," said Erin Murphy, a DNA law expert at New York University. "If you are arrested for a drug crime, that doesn't mean the police can walk into your house looking for evidence of other crimes."

But victims rights groups, the Obama administration and the top state attorneys from California and 48 other states have urged the court to rule that routine DNA testing upon arrest is reasonable and constitutional. They say the mouth swab is a minor invasion of privacy at most and that it has an extraordinary potential for solving heinous crimes.

david.savage@latimes.com

Sen. Kimberly Yee wants to allow the police to steal medical marijuana

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Bills would tighten regulations on medical marijuana

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Feb 3, 2013 9:11 PM

In a move aimed at preventing children from accidentally eating marijuana and the state’s police from falling foul of federal drug laws, a state lawmaker is proposing two pieces of legislation to tighten the state’s medical-marijuana program.

Sen. Kimberly Yee, R-Phoenix, wants to force medical-marijuana dispensaries to label edible drugs, such as cookies, brownies and lollipops, to make it clear they are only for medicinal purposes. Packaging could look similar to the U.S. surgeon general’s warning labels on cigarettes.

She also wants to give police the power to dispose of any drugs seized during criminal investigations once inquiries are completed, instead of being required to take care of plants or drugs in case courts order them returned to a patient.

Yee plans to introduce the bills today. Each bill would require a three-fourths majority vote by the Legislature because it would amend the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act, a voter-approved law.

Yee said she believes both bills advance the intent of the marijuana law, a requirement under the Voter Protection Act to alter a law approved by voters. She said she has support of both Republicans and Democrats.

But Yee almost certainly will not have the support of medical-marijuana advocates, who already are gearing up to fight an effort to repeal the 2010 law.

Yee said law-enforcement agencies around the state want clarification of how to handle seized or forfeited medical-marijuana plants and products. Typically, marijuana is stored during an investigation and ultimately destroyed after the inquiry. Plants, for example, are stored but not cared for.

Arizona’s legalization of marijuana for medical purposes has created dilemmas for law-enforcement officers who want to avoid violating the federal Controlled Substances Act, which makes possession, sale or use of marijuana a crime.

The question, in these instances, Yee said, is: “Do they (police) hold onto it? If they do, it creates a problem with respect to them holding something that is a federally banned substance.”

A recent legal battle in Yuma County underscored the dilemma when the sheriff argued he could not return medical marijuana to a California patient because doing so may violate federal law. The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office must give back marijuana seized from a California woman who had permission to use the drug for medical purposes.

Yee said the edible-marijuana bill is geared toward consumer protection. Under the proposal, the Arizona Department of Health Services, which oversees the medical-marijuana program, would be required to immediately revoke the registration certificate of dispensaries that package or advertise the drug in a way that states, suggests or implies it’s for a use other than medicinal purposes allowed under the law.

“We are finding the products being produced that contain marijuana appear to be geared toward the youngest consumer — we’re talking about lollipops, chocolate bars and things that appeal to a minor,” Yee said. “And it is something the parents and consumer should clearly be aware of before purchasing that product.”

Such labeling is not currently required, although edible packaging is supposed to identify the amount of marijuana in the product.

ADHS Director Will Humble said no dispensaries are making edible medical-marijuana products yet. Dispensaries would have to obtain a food establishment license from state health officials and would have to remain in good standing in order to be in compliance.

Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk, who has aggressively battled sales of methamphetamine and “bath salts” in her county, is among law-enforcement officers who support Yee’s legislation.

Polk said it is impractical to require police — who are sworn to enforce state law and can be authorized to enforce federal law — to return marijuana to patients since the drug is federally illegal. Other complications can arise, she said: whether plants must be returned in the same condition they were in when seized, for example.

“If law enforcement goes in, and there’s 14 plants, and they pull out the plants… and the expectation is that they have to be returned, what’s law enforcement to do?” Polk asked. “Plant the plants, water them and continue to cultivate them? The idea that law enforcement would be cultivating marijuana is an outrageous idea.”

Since Arizona voters approved the medical-marijuana law in 2010, nearly 34,000 Arizonans have been approved to smoke or grow marijuana. Of them, the overwhelming majority cite severe and chronic pain as a debilitating medical condition.

Yee’s legislation comes weeks after Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, filed a bill that would refer the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act back to the ballot in November 2014. House Concurrent Resolution 2003 would require the Legislature’s approval but not Gov. Jan Brewer’s signature.

The medical-marijuana industry has come out strongly against his legislation, saying he is attempting to undo the will of voters. And one attorney said the requirement of labeling in Yee’s bill could violate free-speech rights.

Doug Banfelder, board member of the Arizona Wellness Chamber of Commerce, said the language in the edible-marijuana bill is “overly broad” and too subjective.

“We’re not opposed to working with legislators … so we could address their concerns and come up with language that allows people to market their products but does not subject them to varied interpretations.”

Banfelder said he also is concerned about law enforcement destroying seized medical marijuana.

“What if the accused are acquitted or charges aren’t brought — it’s still their property,” he said. “They’d have a right go have it back. It’s still their property.”

Reach the reporter at yvonne.wingett@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4712.

Postal Service says it’s immune from local traffic laws

All you have to do to figure that out is read the 9th and 10th Amendments.

9th - The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

10th - The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Postal Service says it’s immune from local traffic laws, report says

Published February 02, 2013

FoxNews.com

A government lawyer is attempting to get dismissed almost $700 in traffic tickets given to U.S. Postal Service employees in Cleveland, claiming it is immune from state and local regulations, Yahoo! News reported.

Postal Service attorney Jennifer. S. Breslin says the infractions, which include speeding citations and red-light infractions, should be ignored.

"In providing mail service across the country, the Postal Service attempts to work within local and state laws and regulations, when feasible," she said in a letter responding to a summons for payment, according to Cleveland.com.

“However, as you are probably aware, the Postal Service enjoys federal immunity from state and local regulation,” Breslin wrote.

The attorney for American Traffic Solutions, the company that enforces East Cleveland's camera citations, referenced the Postal Service's own safety manual, which says truck drivers should and have been held accountable, Yahoo! News reported.

“By attempting to hide behind an immunity claim, you are aiding and abetting your drivers in their blatant disregard for the traffic laws in East Cleveland, which have endangered other drivers, pedestrians and school children," ATS attorney George Hittner said in a response to Breslin.

East Cleveland Mayor Gary Norton told Cleveland.com he questions why the Postal Service did not decide to make their drivers pay for the infraction.

The mayor said he is unsure about the validity of the agency's immunity claims.

“I was unaware that the post office doesn’t have to stop at red lights or obey the speed limit,” he told Cleveland.com. “But since they are, I wish I’d get my mail faster.”

Source

Postal Service Lawyer Argues Agency Is Immune From Paying Nearly $700 Worth Of Traffic Tickets

Posted: 02/02/2013 5:31 pm EST

The U.S. Postal Service is trying to get out of paying some traffic tickets.

A lawyer for the USPS sent the city of East Cleveland as well as the company that operates the town’s speeding cameras a letter last month arguing that the USPS is exempt from paying nearly $700 in traffic tickets, according to USA Today. In the letter, posted on Scribd by Yahoo! News, Jennifer Breslin, senior litigation counsel for the Postal Service, cites the Constitution in explaining why the agency should be exempt from paying the tickets.

“The Postal Service attempts to work within local and state laws and regulations, when feasible,” Breslin wrote in the letter. “However, as you are probably aware, the Postal Service enjoys federal immunity from state and local regulation.”

A USPS spokesman backed up Breslin’s claim in an interview with USA Today, saying that while Postal Service workers are required to obey traffic laws like any other citizen, “the Postal Service cannot legally be billed for any traffic violation fines incurred by its employees.”

The Postal Service could probably use the extra cash. The agency reported a record annual loss of $15.9 billion in November.

An attorney for American Traffic Solutions, the company that operates East Cleveland’s photo-enforcement system, responded to Breslin’s letter urging the USPS to transfer the liability for the tickets onto the drivers responsible for the violations, according to Yahoo! News.

“By attempting to hide behind an immunity claim, you are aiding and abetting your drivers in their blatant disregard for the traffic laws in East Cleveland, which have endangered other drivers, pedestrians and school children,” he wrote.

East Cleveland’s Mayor Gary Norton offered a response of his own to Breslin’s claims.

“I was unaware that the Post Office doesn’t have to stop at red lights or obey the speed limit,” he told Cleveland.com. “But since they are, I wish I’d get my mail faster.”

New drug task force HQ aims to end agency rivalry

But they are not, and it seems that to the cops the most important thing is that their agency get more money then the other agencies.

Of course if you ask me the drug war is an insane and unconstitutional waste of money.

Source

February 03, 2013

New drug task force HQ aims to end agency rivalry

CHICAGO — A first-of-its-kind headquarters has opened in Chicago for 70 federal agents, police and prosecutors to work side-by-side, year-round to fight drug traffickers — a set-up meant to end inter-agency rivalry and miscommunication that can hamper investigations.

The recent, fanfare-free opening of the Chicago Strike Force building comes as Mexican cartels now supply over 90 percent of the narcotics in Chicago, and as street gangs vying for turf to sell those drugs kill each other and bystanders caught in the crossfire.

In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2012 photo, Jack Riley, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Chicago, discusses local Mexican drug cartel problem areas, in the new interagency Strike Force office. The first-of-its-kind drug enforcement headquarters has opened in Chicago where 70 federal agents, local police and prosecutors work side-by-side, all year round to fight drug trafficking - a set-up meant to end inter-agency rivalry and miscommunication that can plague investigations. The opening of the Chicago Strike Force office comes as Mexican traffickers have taken control of more than 90 percent of the drugs market in Chicago, which the syndicates also use as a hub for distribution across the Midwest, the DEA says. (AP Photo)

Inter-agency and -department cooperation is hardly a novel concept, but typically takes the form of occasional meetings or temporary joint task forces on specific investigations, said Jack Riley, the head of Chicago's DEA office.

"But you can't talk to your counterparts in once-a-week meetings _ you have to talk as things are happening," said Riley, who took the lead in pushing for the facility. "When we get information here, it's not put in a pile and forgotten. It's acted on, now."

Riley gave The Associated Press an exclusive tour of the three-story brick building. Citing security, he asked the AP not to reveal its exact location.

The staff includes city and suburban police, as well as agents from the DEA, FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the IRS and a half-dozen other agencies. In another rarity, U.S. and state prosecutors also work alongside one another. Riley declined to reveal its budget.

It'll take time to see if the headquarters makes anti-trafficking efforts in Chicago more efficient, said Fred Burton, a security analyst for the global intelligence firm Stratfor.

"It sounds great on paper," he said. "But getting federal agencies to act in unison can be like herding cats."

Over the years, competition has led to situations where agencies end up unknowingly targeting the same traffickers, creating the risk that they could inadvertently foil each other's investigations, Riley said.

Thus, the headquarters was designed to foster camaraderie. Employees' desks all sit in a warehouse-sized room with no dividers or signs identifying who belongs to what agency. Response teams are comprised of members from each agency.

A major focus of their investigations will be the point of contact between major traffickers and local gangs, who serve as street-level salesmen. That's when traffickers are especially vulnerable, Reilly says, because they meet at unfamiliar places or use phones that can be wiretapped.

The ultimate goal is to arrest suspects, squeeze them to cooperate and then move along the cartel's chain of command to indict everyone from the street dealer to the kingpins in Mexico. They hope to replicate investigations like one that led to the 2009 indictment of key leaders of the Sinaloa cartel and the extradition of Sinaloa lieutenant Vicente Zambada, who'll stand trial in Chicago this year.

Beat officers should also benefit from the new headquarters, Riley said. A single office with a range of experts on everything from which gang controls what block to cartel structures in Mexico should help officers in the field make sense of anything suspicious, he said.

"They can call and say, `Hey, I saw this guy who I think is a gang member hand a bag to this other guy. Does it mean anything? '" he said. "Before, there really wasn't a good place to call. There is now."

British police used dead children's IDs

Report: British police used dead children's IDs

By RAPHAEL SATTER | Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — The Guardian newspaper says that London's Metropolitan Police Service stole the identities of dozens of dead children to use as aliases for undercover officers, mining those children's personal histories to build covers and even issuing fake passports in their names.

The allegation is another potential embarrassment for Scotland Yard's undercover program, which has previously been rocked by revelations that police spies had sex with their targets and fathered children with activists under surveillance.

It wasn't exactly clear how long or often the police used the dead children's identities. The Guardian said it had seen a document suggesting that around 80 officers used such identities between 1968 and 1994, but said that one case may be as recent as 2003.

Police said in a statement Monday that they had received a formal complaint about the practice and "appreciate the concerns." The practice "is not something that would currently be authorized," they said.

Stealing the identities of dead people is a classic piece of spycraft and features prominently in Frederick Forsythe's famed 1971 thriller "The Day of the Jackal."

But lawmakers and law enforcement officials were left wondering Monday whether taking on the identity of a dead child was an appropriate technique for British police. Opposition lawmaker Keith Vaz told Sky News television "that the parents of those involved should be informed immediately."

The Guardian, which has run a series of stories exposing the seamy side of Scotland Yard's undercover work, based its story on detailed accounts provided by two undercover officers — neither of whom it identified by name — and an ex-girlfriend of a third one, who was identified with a pseudonym.

The newspaper said all three men were members of Scotland Yard's Special Demonstration Squad, which was disbanded in 2008.

One of them, the newspaper said, assumed the identity of an eight-year-old boy who died of leukemia in 1968 — going so far as to assume the boy's hometown and even his parents' names when he infiltrated an anti-capitalist group in the 1980s. The officer was found out when he left his girlfriend — part of the group he was spying on — and she pulled up his vital records in an effort to track him down.

The newspaper described her horror when she realized that the person her boyfriend was pretending to be had died 25 years ago.

Former director of public prosecutions Ken Macdonald said that the latest revelation, coupled with past reporting about undercover officers fathering children with their targets, suggested a police force gone wrong.

"How are you supposed to maintain a level of fair and objective evidence-gathering if you are having sex with the person you are targeting, fathering a baby and then abandoning it, using a dead child's identity?" he said in an interview with BBC radio.

"These are all examples of areas in which the police have completely lost their moral compass and have completely failed to understand the boundaries," he said. "We don't know quite how these units were operating in days gone by. It looks as though they've effectively gone rogue."

Kyrsten Sinema a gun grabber???

I should also note that US Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema when she was a member of the Arizona Legislator tried to slap a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana. She is fairly well hated in Arizona for that.

Source

County attorney says he would bring gun to a hearing

By Brahm Resnik 12 News Fri Feb 1, 2013 6:14 PM

"Sunday Square Off" is the leading weekend political news program in Arizona. "Square Off's" newsmaker interviews feature elected officials at the national, state and local levels. Our political roundtables bring together insiders with unique perspectives on the stories of the day and insight on what's next.

This Sunday

• Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema • Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery • State Rep. John Kavanagh • Promise Arizona's Petra Falcon • Panel: Chris Herstam, Christina Martinez, Stan Barnes

Maricopa County attorney says he would bring weapon into a hearing

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery says he would probably carry a gun into a mediation hearing like the one that led to the fatal shootings this week of a Phoenix lawyer and his client.

Montgomery is one of my newsmaker guests on this weekend's special edition of "12 News Sunday Square Off." The show was taped before a studio audience taking part in a daylong "Politics and the Press" event sponsored by ASU's Cronkite School of Journalism, the Arizona Republic and 12 News.

Also on the show:

-Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema (D-9th District) says she believes universal background checks on gun buyers have the best chance of passing Congress this year.

-Republican State Rep. John Kavanagh, a border hawk, debates Promise Arizona executive director Petra Falcon, an immigrant rights advocate, on the new immigration plans released this week.

--The roundtable of Stan Barnes, of Copper State Consulting; Christina Martinez, of Adalante Public Affairs; and 12 News political insider Chris Herstam make the cold political calculations on which big bills -- immigration reform and gun controls -- can get through Congress.

"12 News Sunday Square Off" airs at 8 a.m. Sunday on 12 News, right after "Meet the Press."

Nude photos of Tucson cop Lt. Diana Lopez

I wonder when these cops ever have time to hunt down real criminals.

Now I said real criminals, and I meant real criminals, not busting harmless pot smokers and other victimless drug war criminals which account for two thirds of the people the police send to prison.

I don't have a problem if Tucson cop Lt. Diana Lopez wants to shoot naked photos of her self and send them to her co-workers, but maybe she should limit these activities to her off time and not do it at work.

And the same for here boyfriend cop. I don't have a problem if he and his buddies look at naked pictures of Lt. Diana Lopez, but they shouldn't be doing it at work.

Source

Tucson policewoman demoted after explicit videos

Associated Press Mon Feb 4, 2013 7:47 PM

TUCSON — A Tucson police lieutenant has been demoted after allegedly taking sexually explicit photos and videos of herself wearing her police uniform.

Police said Monday that Lt. Diana Lopez used her personal cellphone to send videos and photos to a subordinate officer with whom she was in a relationship. They say Lopez was reduced to the rank of sergeant following an investigation that began last August.

The Arizona Daily Star (http://bit.ly/WMXjxM ) says anonymous letters sent to the police department about Lopez prompted the probe.

A police report says Lopez’s boyfriend apparently showed the videos and photos to other officers from May 2011 through August 2011.

Police say Lopez violated several department regulations, code of ethics and professional standards. They say a recommendation was made to reduce her in rank.

Source

Tucson policewoman demoted over sexually explicit photos, video

Carmen Duarte Arizona Daily Star

A Tucson police lieutenant was demoted after officials said she took sexually explicit videos and sexually provocative photos of herself wearing her police uniform and sent them to a subordinate officer with whom she was in a relationship, department officials said Monday.

Lt. Diana Lopez, a former public information officer for the department, was reduced to the rank of sergeant following an investigation that began in August 2012. Anonymous letters sent to the department about Lopez prompted the probe, according to a report that was released Monday.

The department did find that Lopez took sexually explicit videos and at least one provocative photo where she was wearing a Tucson police uniform shirt. She sent those images and videos using her personal cell phone to the subordinate officer.

That officer then apparently showed the videos and photos to other TPD officers, the report said. This happened between May 2011 through August 2011, the report said.

Lopez violated several department regulations, code of ethics and professional standards and a recommendation was made to reduce her in rank from lieutenant to sergeant, the report said.

"Justice Dept justifies killing Americans if they pose ‘imminent threat

Of course you have to remember that MSNBC reports the news as objectively and unbiased as the FOX network reports it so you have to take that with a grain of salt.

Here is a link to the 16 page document is titled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaeda or An Associated Force.” which was released by NBC. [http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf ]

Source

Justice Dept. document justifies killing Americans overseas if they pose ‘imminent threat’

By Karen DeYoung, Published: February 4

The United States can lawfully kill a U.S. citizen overseas if it determines the target is a “senior, operational leader” of al-Qaeda or an associated group and poses an imminent threat to the United States, according to a Justice Department document published late Monday by NBC News. [http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf ]

The document defines “imminent threat” expansively, saying it does not have to be based on intelligence about a specific attack since such actions are being “continually” planned by al-Qaeda. “In this context,” it says, “imminence must incorporate considerations of the relevant window of opportunity” as well as possible collateral damage to civilians.

Guiding the evolving U.S. counterterrorism policies: White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan is compiling a “playbook” that will lay out the administration’s evolving procedures for the targeted killings that have come to define its fight against al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

The memos outline the case for the targeted killing of U.S. citizens in counterterror operations overseas.

It says that such determinations can be made by an “informed, high-level official of the U.S. government.”

NBC said the document was provided by the Obama administration last summer to members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees as a summary of a classified memo on targeted killings of U.S. citizens prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

The memo was written months prior to a September 2011 drone strike in Yemen that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Muslim cleric accused of helping al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate plan attacks against the United States. Three other Americans, including Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, have also been killed in U.S. strikes in Yemen.

The Obama administration, in decisions upheld in federal court rulings, has repeatedly denied demands by lawmakers, civil rights groups and the media to release the memo and other information on targeted killings — or even to acknowledge their existence. Senators are expected to closely question John O. Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, on drone strikes, the memo and the Awlaki killing during Brennan’s confirmation hearing Thursday on his nomination to become Obama’s new CIA director.

Justice officials could not be reached for comment on the document, which NBC posted on its Web site. The 16-page document is titled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaeda or An Associated Force.”

In announcing Awlaki’s death, Obama described him as the leader of “external affairs” of Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday night called the document a “profoundly disturbing” summary of “a stunning overreach of executive authority — the claimed power to declare Americans a threat and kill them far from a recognized battlefield and without any judicial involvement before or after the fact.”

The ACLU sought the original Justice Department memo as part of a case dismissed last month by a federal judge in New York. Last Friday, the ACLU filed a notice of appeal in that case.

“Needless to say, the white paper is not a substitute for the legal memo. But it’s a pretty remarkable document,” ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said. [http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf ]

Source

Justice Department memo: Drone strikes on U.S. citizens can be legal

By Cheryl K. Chumley

The Washington Times

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

The U.S. Justice Department finds it legal to target American citizens with drone strikes under certain circumstances, according to a memo that just surfaced.

The undated memo, titled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operation Leader of al Qaeda or An Associated Force,” was obtained by NBC News. The memo defines as legal drone attacks on U.S. citizens who were involved in violent attacks, according to United Press International. [ The memo can be viewed here http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf ]

Specifically, the memo states: “The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” according to UPI. Citizens who present such “imminent threats” were defined as those who participated in violent acts — and maintained the views that led to their violent acts, according to UPI.

In those instances, a fatal drone attack would be considered a “legitimate act of national self-defense that would not violate the assassination ban,” according to the memo.

The memo was distributed to various members of Senate and House intelligence committees.

Source

Drone strikes on Americans on U.S. soil are LEGAL, says confidential Justice Department memo

By Damian Ghigliotty

PUBLISHED: 23:58 EST, 4 February 2013

The U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be ‘senior operational leaders’ of the Islamic terrorist organization Al Qaeda or ‘an associated force,’ according to a confidential Justice Department memo leaked on Monday.

The U.S. government can do so even if there is no clear evidence that the American targeted is engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.

The news was first reported by NBC’s Open Channel, which obtained a copy of the 16-page document and released it to the public.

The undated memo, which is not an official legal document, sheds new light on the reasoning behind a reported increase in the number of drone strikes used against Al Qaeda suspects in recent years -- including those aimed at American citizens -- under the Obama administration.

The memo, ‘Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force,’ was reportedly provided to members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees in June by unnamed administration officials.

It was provided on the condition that authorities keep the memo confidential and not discuss its contents publicly, according to NBC.

‘The condition that an operational leader present an “imminent” threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,’ the memo states.

Insight: The document sheds new light on the legal reasoning behind a reported increase in the number of drone strikes used against al-Qaida suspects in recent years, including those aimed at American citizens

Insight: The document sheds new light on the legal reasoning behind a reported increase in the number of drone strikes used against al-Qaida suspects in recent years, including those aimed at American citizens

The Justice Department told MailOnline that it would not comment on the news.

The Obama administration has remained relatively hush about reports of increased drone strikes carried out since 2008.

The Long War Journal reports that the U.S. has been conducting a covert program to target and kill Al Qaeda and Taliban commanders in Pakistan's northwest region.

‘The US ramped up the number of strikes in July 2008, and has continued to regularly hit at Taliban and Al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan,’ the non-profit news outlet writes.

‘There have been 332 strikes total since the program began in 2004; 322 of those strikes have taken place since January 2008.’

The New York Times reported in November that the Obama administration had been mapping out a strategy weeks before the presidential election to develop definitive rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by drones, so that a new president would ‘inherit clear standards and procedures’ if Obama was not re-elected.

The secrecy surrounding such strikes may soon be unraveled, as indicated by the release of the 16-page Justice Department memo.

Proponent: John Brennan, Obama's pick for CIA director, has called drone strikes 'consistent with our inherent right of national self-defense'

John Brennan, a White House counter-terrorism adviser, one of the leading architects behind the government’s drone policy and Obama’s pick to become the country’s new CIA director, is expected to face tough questions about his involvement in Obama’s drone program during his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday.

Brennan was the first administration official to formally acknowledge drone strikes in a speech he gave at the Woodrow Wilson Center in April 2012, calling drone strikes ‘consistent with our inherent right of national self-defense.’

A bipartisan group of 11 senators wrote a letter to Obama on Monday asking his administration to provide its legal justification for its use of drone strikes over the past four years.

‘We ask that you direct the Justice Department to provide Congress, specifically the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, with any and all legal opinions that lay out the executive branch's official understanding of the President's authority to deliberately kill American citizens,’ the senators lead by Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote in their letter.

Political blogger Marcy Wheeler, who says she has closely tracked the group’s repeated requests, writes that it was at least the 12th time Congress had asked for those documents.

Among the overseas attacks that have killed U.S. citizens with terrorist ties on Obama's watch, a September 2011 missile strike in Yemen took out alleged Al Qaeda members Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan.

Both men were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government or charged with any specific crimes.

Read the full Justice Department white paper released on Monday night here. [http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf ]

California high court seems inclined to uphold bans on pot shops

California high court seems inclined to uphold bans on pot shops

By Maura Dolan, Los Angeles Times

February 6, 2013, 3:00 a.m.

SAN FRANCISCO — The California Supreme Court appeared inclined Tuesday to uphold municipal bans against medical marijuana dispensaries.

Meeting for oral arguments, the state high court considered the legality of a ban on dispensaries by the city of Riverside. Several justices noted that the state Constitution gives cities wide policing power over land use and suggested that the state's medical marijuana laws have not undercut that authority.

"The Legislature knows how to say 'Thou Shall Not Ban Dispensaries,' " Justice Ming W. Chin said. "They didn't say that."

The court's ruling, due in 90 days, will determine the fate of about 200 local bans on cannabis dispensaries. If the justices uphold the bans, more such measures are anticipated. Medical marijuana advocates said that outcome would force tens of thousands of patients to drive long distances or resort to the black market.

But the justices appeared more focused on the regulatory rights of cities than on patient access to cannabis.

Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye said she viewed the case as a test of the "authority historically invested in municipalities" over land use.

J. David Nick, representing a dispensary, argued that municipalities could regulate, but not prohibit, an activity the state has permitted. He said the goal of the medical marijuana laws was to provide for uniformity from county to county.

"You can pass local laws, but they have to be consistent" with the state laws intended to make medical marijuana available, Nick told the court during the televised hearing.

Justice Marvin R. Baxter seemed skeptical.

"If the Legislature wanted to prevent localities from banning the dispensaries, why didn't it say so expressly?" he asked.

Justice Goodwin Liu noted that state medical marijuana laws provided limited immunity from state sanctions, not from local rules. The laws' "language doesn't seem to get you very far," Liu told the dispensary attorney.

Some justices suggested that the Legislature might not have legal authority to prevent cities from banning dispensaries through zoning.

Justice Carol A. Corrigan noted that the California Constitution confers on local governments the right to police their borders. "It is not for the Legislature to try to retract that which it does not confer," she said.

Justice Joyce L. Kennard appeared to agree. She said municipalities had a "preexisting power" to regulate land use that is independent of the state's medical cannabis laws.

But Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar observed that local bans on dispensaries might thwart the intent of the medical marijuana laws. Although the Legislature has given cities the right to regulate dispensaries, it was "debatable" whether regulation means outright prohibitions, she said.

Even considering Werdegar's remarks, Los Angeles Special Assistant City Atty. Jane Usher said the court seemed headed for a unanimous decision in favor of permitting bans. Usher said Los Angeles does not plan to introduce any new regulations until voters consider three medical marijuana measures on the May ballot.

Joe Elford, chief legal counsel for a medical marijuana advocacy group, said he was disappointed that the hearing failed to elicit much concern for patients.

"I didn't really feel like the patients' voices were heard," he said. He agreed that the court was likely to give municipalities discretion to ban dispensaries but expressed hope that the ruling would otherwise affirm their legality.

"I am hopeful the court will let them know it is a discretion, not an obligation, and they can do the right thing if they chose," Elford said.

maura.dolan@latimes.com

3rd trial for S.F. drug lab tech who stole cocaine???

Source

Feds mull 3rd trial for S.F. drug lab tech

Published 4:28 pm, Tuesday, February 5, 2013

The feds have until Feb. 15 to decide whether to take a third shot at the former civilian drug tech at the center of the San Francisco Police Department's crime-lab scandal - and the $72,000-a-year-pension she receives from the city.

"I hope they give up the ghost," said Paul DeMeester, the attorney who has defended Deborah Madden in two felony trials that ended in hung juries - the most recent just last week.

"If you look at the results, it's not going the feds' way," DeMeester said. "The first jury voted 9-3 for conviction. The second vote was 6-6."

The U.S. attorney's office isn't talking about whether it will try again to convict Madden of stealing cocaine from the police crime lab.

Had Madden, 62, been convicted, she stood not only to serve as much as four years in federal prison but also to lose the $72,000-a-year pension she earned by working in the crime lab for 29 years.

Madden told police in February 2010 that she had taken home small amounts of cocaine from the lab to combat her drinking problem.

Madden's confession, and the subsequent audit that found shoddy work at the lab's drug unit, led to a shutdown of the unit and forced San Francisco prosecutors to dismiss hundreds of drug cases.

The San Francisco D.A. handed off the case to then-state Attorney General Jerry Brown, who declined to prosecute, saying there was insufficient evidence.

So the feds, intent on making an example of Madden, stepped in and hit her with the felony charge of fraudulently obtaining the drugs. The charge is usually used in prescription drug cases.

Madden admitted taking the cocaine from the lab, but there was no fraud involved, DeMeester said.

Initially, Madden was willing to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of possessing cocaine, but drew the line at a felony conviction that could have stripped her of her pension.

Her fight, however, has come at a cost. Other attorneys familiar with the case estimate her legal fees for the two trials are between $30,000 and $50,000.

"She's been on pins and needles, but she's turned things around," said DeMeester, who wouldn't comment on his fee. "She's been clean and sober and is now back in school."

And what is she studying?

"Substance abuse counseling - she wants to help others," DeMeester said.

SNIP

Drug war prisoner gets 30 days for flipping off judge!!!

No freedom of speech in Miami!!!!

Woman gets 30 days in jail for flipping off judge

Source

Video: Miami woman flips off judge, gets 30 days in jail

ASSOCIATED PRESS February 6, 2013 8:52AM

Updated: February 6, 2013 8:57AM

MIAMI — A Miami woman was jailed on contempt charges after flipping off a judge during a drug possession hearing.

Miami television station NBC 6 reports 18-year-old Penelope Soto laughed Monday when Circuit Judge Jorge Rodriguez-Chomat asked how much her jewelry was worth as he inquired about her financial assets.

The judge told Soto “we’re not in a club, be serious about it.” Soto said she was being serious.

He set Soto’s bond at $5,000 and said, “bye-bye.” Soto laughed again and replied, “Adios.” He summoned her back to the podium and reset bond at $10,000.

Soto asked, “Are you serious?” The judge replied, “I am serious. Adios.”

Soto flipped him off and blurted an expletive as she walked away.

The judge then sentenced her to 30 days in jail.

Source

Girl flips off judge in court, gets expected result

A giggly 18-year-old Penelope Soto ended up in a Miami courtroom on charges of possession of Xanax without a prescription.

Laughing and playing with her hair, she told the judge she owned a lot of jewelry. When he asked her how much jewelry, she replied, ” A lot. Like Rick Ross.” To which the judge said,” Huh??”

The judge set her bond at five thousand dollars and dismissed her. That’s when things got worse.

It rubbed him the wrong way when in response to his “bye-bye” she answered, “adios”.

He then upped her bond to ten thousand.

She then flipped him off.

Not surprisingly, the judge tacked on 30 days in county jail for contempt of court, in addition to the possession charge.

Source

Miami Judge Smacks Down Teen After She Gave Him The Finger In Court

Abby Rogers | Feb. 6, 2013, 9:28 AM

A Miami teen's bad attitude got her 30 days behind bars after the judge decided he wasn't going to put up with it.

Penelope Soto, 18, was in Judge Jorge Rodriguez-Chomat's bond court Monday on charges of possessing Xanax, Local 10 reported Monday.

Rodriguez-Chomat was prepared to let her off on a $5,000 bond when the giggling girl made the mistake of sarcastically saying "Adios" before flitting away from the bench, NBC Miami reported Tuesday.

But the judge wasn't having her sarcastic attitude and upped her bail to $10,000.

"Are you serious?" Soto asked, to which Rodriguez-Chomat replied that he was, adding "Adios."

"[Expletive] you," Soto said, raising her middle finger as she walked out of court, according to NBC Miami.

Rodriguez-Chomat then called the girl back again, charged her with contempt of court, and sentenced her to 30 days behind bars.

Watch the entire exchange, courtesy of YouTube user NewsRoss:

Border Patrol shoots 16 year old in the back

New theory on Border Patrol killing of boy

By Bob Ortega The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Feb 6, 2013 11:25 PM

An autopsy report raises new questions about the death of a Mexican youth shot by at least one U.S. Border Patrol officer four months ago in Nogales.

The Border Patrol has maintained that Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, 16, was throwing rocks over the border fence at agents on the U.S. side when an agent fired across the international border the night of Oct. 10.

But entry and exit wounds suggest that all but one of as many as 11 bullets that struck the boy entered from behind, according to the report by two medical examiners working for the Sonora Attorney General’s Office.

Those bullets also entered the boy’s body at a lower point on his frame than they exited, the report found.

“The only way I can fathom that report is that he was lying on his face when he was hit,” said Luis Parra, an attorney representing the Elena Rodriguez family.

Border Patrol spokesman Vic Brabble declined to comment on the autopsy report, citing an ongoing FBI investigation. The FBI also declined to comment.

Gregory Hess, the Pima County medical examiner, said after reviewing the report that the trajectories it describes could be consistent with someone being shot and falling, with subsequent shots hitting the prone body. But he said that there could be other interpretations and that without seeing photographs, and without knowing the examiners or the quality of their work, he couldn’t draw any conclusions.

Absalon Madrigal Godínez, the lead examiner, hadn’t replied by deadline to e-mail requests for an interview.

Parra, reached by phone in Hermosillo, Sonora, where he was seeking ballistics reports, said that Elena Rodriguez’s family feels frustrated “because it seems like there hasn’t been any collaboration at all between U.S. and Mexican authorities on this.”

Nineteen people have been killed by Border Patrol agents since January 2010, with all but two of those deaths along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Elena Rodriguez’s death led Mexican officials to question whether Border Patrol agents were too quick to use deadly force.

The Department of Homeland Security, of which the Border Patrol is part, has said it is reviewing the patrol’s use-of-force policies.

The current policy treats rocks as potentially lethal and allows agents to fire at rock-throwers if they perceive a threat to their lives or the lives of others.

In this incident, agents were chasing two men they believed had carried bundles of drugs over the fence and were trying to escape back into Mexico. As the men climbed the fence, rocks were hurled at police and Border Patrol agents, according to police reports. That’s when an agent standing near the fence opened fire, the reports said.

At the spot where Elena Rodriguez’s body was found, the border fence runs along a bluff. The bottom of the fence is about 25 feet above street level, where the boy would have been standing. The top of the fence is another 18 feet above that.

According to Nogales police, whoever was throwing rocks was flinging them over the fence, not through the 3 1//-inch gaps between the metal poles.

Given the arc that a rock would have to travel to pass over the fence from the street below, it would be nearly impossible for a projectile to hit someone next to the fence, where the shooter would likely have been standing in order to fire through the fence’s metal bars.

In addition to the bullets that struck Elena Rodriguez, police investigators marked holes from 11 bullets on the walls of a medical office behind where the boy’s body was found, with some holes 9 or 10 feet off the ground.

According to Hess, it’s unlikely Elena Rodriguez would have been struck by ricochets, because ricochet entry wounds are readily identifiable and would have been noted in the report.

Reach the reporter at bob.ortega@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8926.

Obama tries to convince Congress he can kill any American he feels like???

Lawmakers to get classified drone info

Associated Press Wed Feb 6, 2013 6:52 PM

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has directed the Justice Department to give Congress' intelligence committees access to classified legal advice providing the government's rationale for drone strikes against American citizens working with al-Qaida abroad, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

A drumbeat of demands to see the document has swelled on Capitol Hill in recent days as the Senate Intelligence Committee prepares to hold a confirmation hearing for John Brennan, who helped manage the drone program, to be CIA director.

Those demands were only intensified by the leak this week of an unclassified "white paper" on how decisions are made to target U.S. citizens abroad that the Justice Department confidentially sent to key lawmakers last year. The unclassified memo says it is legal for the government to kill U.S. citizens abroad if it believes they are senior al-Qaida leaders continually engaged in operations aimed at killing Americans, even if there is no evidence of a specific imminent attack.

The senior official said Obama decided to send lawmakers the classified rationale on Wednesday as part of his "commitment to consult with Congress on national security matters." Obama directed the Justice Department provide the Senate and House intelligence committees access to classified advice from its Office of Legal Counsel that the white paper is based on, the official said.

Legal opinions produced by the legal counsel's office are interpretations of federal law that are binding on all executive branch agencies.

The administration official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter by name.

Earlier Wednesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama was engaged in an internal process deliberation to determine how to balance the nation's security needs with its values. He said Obama was committed to providing more information to Congress, even as he refused to acknowledge whether the drone memo even existed.

"He thinks that it is legitimate to ask questions about how we prosecute the war against al-Qaida," Carney said. "These are questions that will be with us long after he is president and long after the people who are in the seats that they're in now have left the scene."

Eleven senators, including Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon, called on Obama to provide lawmakers "any and all legal opinions" that outline the president's authority to use legal force against Americans.

Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The Associated Press that Obama called him Wednesday evening to alert him to the decision to release the legal opinions. The president pledged to launch a "very extensive" public discussion on the government's ability to target Americans abroad, Wyden said.

"This is an encouraging first step," Wyden said. "There is now an opportunity to build on it."

The Oregon lawmaker said he expects members of the intelligence committees to be able to read the classified legal opinions before voting on Brennan's nomination to lead the CIA, but likely not before Thursday's hearing.

Justice's unclassified 16-page white paper says that it is lawful to target al-Qaida linked U.S. citizens if they pose an "imminent" threat of violent attack against Americans and that delaying action against such people would create an unacceptably high risk. Such circumstances may necessitate expanding the concept of imminent threat, the memo says.

"The threat posed by al-Qaida and its associated forces demands a broader concept of imminence in judging when a person continually planning terror attacks presents an imminent threat," the document added.

A September 2011 drone strike in Yemen killed Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both U.S. citizens. A separate drone strike two weeks later killed al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, a Denver native. The strikes came after U.S. intelligence concluded that the elder al-Awlaki was senior operational leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula plotting attacks on the U.S., including the abortive Christmas Day bombing of an airplane landing in Detroit in 2009.

The memo does not require the U.S. to have information about a specific imminent attack against the U.S. But it does require that capture of a terrorist suspect not be feasible and that any such lethal operation by the United States targeting a person comply with fundamental law-of-war principles.

U.S. drone use could set dangerous example for rogue powers

U.S. drone use could set dangerous example for rogue powers

By Carol J. Williams

February 7, 2013, 2:00 a.m.

Imagine if North Korea or Iran or Venezuela deployed thousands of unmanned surveillance aircraft in search of earthbound enemies, a swarm of robotic hunters armed with lethal weaponry and their governments’ go-ahead to exterminate targets.

It’s a frightening scenario but far from an unimaginable one, given that dozens of nations now build, program and deploy their own drones.

Newly disclosed U.S. guidelines on drone warfare appear to authorize a more permissive practice of targeted killings in the global fight against terrorism than previously articulated. And the Obama administration’s embrace of a right to strike those it has identified as threats to U.S. security has prompted warnings from rights advocates and international security experts that the White House is setting a dangerous precedent that rogue nations could follow.

The U.S. military and intelligence communities have increasingly turned to drones for precision strikes against terrorism suspects in Pakistan and Yemen, executing more than 300 remote-controlled attacks during President Obama’s first term. That is a sixfold increase from the Bush administration’s use of drones, according to the British nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Muting any serious debate on the morality and legality of targeted killings is the U.S. public’s positive response to the arm's-length attacks that eliminate terrorism suspects without putting troops at risk in a more conventional offensive. More than 80% of Americans expressed support for the administration’s drone policy in a Washington Post-ABC News poll a year ago. A Pew Research Center survey in June showed similarly high regard among Americans questioned but majority disapproval among respondents in 19 other countries surveyed.

Escalating U.S. drone use in counter-terrorism is both hurting the country’s image and raising the stakes in what promises to be a protracted war to defeat the global network of militants bent on doing America harm, security and legal experts argue.

“Technological capabilities are developing far faster than the laws and international frameworks to regulate their use,” said Amy Zegart, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and former National Security Council staffer under President Clinton.

Drone use was a rare and almost exclusively U.S. military capability a decade ago, Zegart said, yet today at least 70 countries have unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as drones are called in security parlance. Although most of that use is aimed at reducing the costs and risks of intelligence-gathering and search-and-rescue missions, the increasingly affordable and versatile aircraft can be programmed for combat as easily as for peaceful civilian uses.

Despite a credible threat of spreading drone warfare, there is little interest among the nations employing the devices to yield to any agreed rules of engagement, Zegart said.

“The question is, can the United States lead by example? Can we realistically put forward policies and ideas” that would establish permissible uses and prevent a perilous free-for-all, she said, intimating that such self-imposed restraint is unlikely.

Avner Cohen, a professor of nonproliferation policy at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, agrees there is little incentive for countries making the most aggressive use of drones -- the United States and Israel first among them -- to impose restrictions on themselves.

He points to what he sees as “seductive” elements of drone use as a danger for both international security and thoughtful decision-making.

Israeli drone surveillance pinpointed Hamas militia leader Ahmed Jabari in the Gaza Strip in November, encouraging the Israeli leadership to order a targeted killing in a likely streamlined analysis of potential consequences, Cohen recalled. Jabari’s death set off eight days of fighting between Israel and the Palestinian enclave that ended with a cease-fire seen as having strengthened Hamas and Palestinian cohesion.

“The temptation to use it is so high that it can obscure and overpower all kinds of other considerations,” Cohen said of drones’ offensive capabilities.

Human rights and international law advocates have expressed growing concern that Washington’s expanding use of targeted killings by drones violates its obligations to treaties guaranteeing protection of civilian life and prohibiting extrajudicial killings off the battlefield.

Ben Emmerson, the U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, announced two weeks ago that he was investigating U.S. strikes on suspected terrorists to evaluate their compliance with human rights treaties and the international law of armed conflict.

Rights groups contend the U.S. actions stray far beyond the limited circumstances under which international accords allow the use of preemptive lethal force.

“When the U.S. government violates international law, that sets a precedent and provides an excuse for the rest of the world to do the same,” said Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty International USA’s Security with Human Rights Campaign.

“We have now seen, under two administrations, the emergence of a claimed global war framework in which the U.S. tries to treat the whole world as a battlefield, to the exclusion of human rights law,” Johnson said.

“I sincerely doubt most members of the U.S. government would be happy with China or Russia or North Korea using drones and lethal force the way the U.S. government is doing, which is outside the bounds of international law,” said Johnson.

“Everyone should be concerned by the idea that any government can basically deny its human rights obligations,” he warned. “That puts all of us at greater risk in the long run.”

Secret drone strikes simplify Obama Doctrine

Secret drone strikes simplify Obama Doctrine

February 7, 2013

For years, scholars and journalists have struggled without much success to define the Obama Doctrine — the president's foreign policy principles.

As a Democratic candidate, Barack Obama couldn't even define his own doctrine as he sought to succeed outgoing Republican President George W. Bush.

In a debate in 2007, back when he was Sen. Civil Liberties and the darling of the left that hated Bush for leading the war party into Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Obama said the world was too complicated for him to formalize his doctrine.

"Well, I think one of the things about the Obama Doctrine is it's not going to be as doctrinaire as the Bush Doctrine because the world is complicated," the senator from Chicago said. "And I think part of the problem we've had is that ideology has overridden facts and reality."

But now President Obama has finally stripped away those complications to define the Obama Doctrine this way:

He can assassinate American citizens abroad without trial if they're suspected terrorists.

His weapon of choice? Drone strikes from the air.

Drones are politically antiseptic weapons of death, almost like a video game, except that real blood and tissue is blown against the walls. And it's all being done in secret. The White House won't publicly release the rationale explaining how the Obama administration has shredded the Constitution and taped the bits back together again.

Two things are astounding here: The lack of Democratic outrage over Obama's convoluted policy, and the ease with which Republicans and Democrats have brought us to this point.

Just think about what the president's assassination campaign means. Not for the terrorists, who deserve their fate. But for the rest of us. A president has put it in writing: He can kill you if he finds that you're a threat.

Many of us — and to my shame I include myself — bought into many Bush Republican policies after al-Qaida killed thousands of our countrymen on Sept. 11, 2001. And then came more cameras watching us, and more eavesdropping, and a steady erosion of American privacy.

It came in the name of efficiently thwarting the terrorists. Now the supreme efficiency is offered by a president who campaigned in opposition to waterboarding terrorists for information to find Osama bin Laden.

The president's drone strikes against American citizens overseas "are legal, they are ethical and they are wise," said White House press secretary Jay Carney. He added that such drone strikes are "fully consistent with our Constitution."

Carney must be talking about some other little booklet. He can't mean our American Constitution. If he actually believes that the Constitution allows the president to kill Americans without trial, someone should lead him by the nose to a loony bin.

Not all Republicans are for this. But many establishment Republicans just love it, like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, an Obama critic and friend of defense contracts.

He stopped thwacking Obama for a day or so to support the president in the assassination doctrine.

"Every member of Congress needs to get on board," Graham said. "It's not fair to the president to let him, leave him out there alone quite frankly. He's getting hit from libertarians and from the left."

Some on the port side are angry, including the severe high priestess of the political left, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. Unconfirmed reports had her hair smoldering the other evening.

But she's not an elected official. Where was Democratic outrage? You'd think Sen. Dick Durbin would scream. He made plenty of loud public demonstrations during the Bush years, and I almost expected him to start yanking his burning hair from the roots while referencing storm troopers and gulags and such.

Sadly, Durbin and other Democratic pols are rather church-mousian about Obama's drones. With their own guy on the throne, they're worried about damaging the dignity of the presidency.

To his credit, Durbin quietly signed his name to a letter from 11 senators of both parties asking Obama to make public the White House rationale allowing assassinations.

But they won't hound Obama. Expect them instead to shake their jowls angrily at John Brennan.

Brennan is the career CIA officer and supporter of drones and "enhanced interrogation techniques" who was nominated by Obama to run the CIA. He is scheduled to testify Thursday at a Senate confirmation hearing .

There is a big difference between intelligence officers and politicians. Obama seemed to understand this once, when the world was complicated for him. Intelligence officers do what's necessary, and once the work is done and the threat removed, they're often thrown under the bus by politicians.

But politicians? They change the rules to justify what they want to do. And in so doing, they make the future far more dangerous and far less free.

"Who'd we get today?" was the famous question asked repeatedly by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, when he was the pro-drone Obama White House chief of staff, according to Bob Woodward's book "Obama's Wars."

Emanuel's was a gleeful question, full of bureaucratic malice, asked by a man with his loafers on safe White House carpets. Those same carpets still caress Obama's shoes.

The president once opposed "enhanced interrogation" of terrorism suspects. But now he claims constitutional protection to kill them without trial, if they're Americans overseas.

That complicated, nuanced world Obama once lived in? It's been simplified.

jskass@tribune.com

Twitter @John_Kas

Proposition 203 violates Arizona "Equal Protection Clause"???

The "equal protection" clause of the Arizona Constitution says:

13. Equal privileges and immunities

Section 13. No law shall be enacted granting to any citizen, class of citizens, or corporation other than municipal, privileges or immunities which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens or corporations.

I suspect Prop 203 also violates the "equal protection" clause in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The "equal protection" clause in the 14th Amendment is in Section 1 and says:

Section 1. ... No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

My solution is to allow ANYBODY to get a medical marijuana prescription or recommendation as the law calls it.

Of course the real solution to this problem is to legalize ALL drugs and let anybody take any drug they want without having to ask the government for permission.

Medical marijuana laws violates Arizona "Equal Protection Clause"???

The "equal protection" clause of the Arizona Constitution says:

13. Equal privileges and immunities

Section 13. No law shall be enacted granting to any citizen, class of citizens, or corporation other than municipal, privileges or immunities which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens or corporations.

I suspect Prop 203 also violates the "equal protection" clause in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The "equal protection" clause in the 14th Amendment is in Section 1 and says:

Section 1. ... No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

My solution is to allow ANYBODY to get a medical marijuana prescription or recommendation as the law calls it.

Of course the real solution to this problem is to legalize ALL drugs and let anybody take any drug they want without having to ask the government for permission.

Illinois auditor general arrested on DUI charge in Springfield

Source

Illinois auditor general arrested on DUI charge in Springfield

By Ray Long and Rafael Guerrero Clout Street

3:17 p.m. CST, February 8, 2013

SPRINGFIELD --- Illinois Auditor General William Holland said today he has been cited for allegedly driving under the influence of alcohol in Springfield.

Holland, 61, confirmed he received tickets for alleged drunken driving and improper lane usage at about 11:45 p.m. Wednesday. A police report stated that Holland "had a very strong odor of an alcoholic beverage on his breath, red, blood-shot glassy eyes."

Police reported Holland failed field sobriety tests. Holland said he refused to take a breath test. Such refusal triggers a suspension of a license for a year, according to the police documents and the Illinois secretary of state’s office. He posted $100 bail.

Holland called the matter “unfortunate.”

“I was in my own car,” Holland said. “It was not a state vehicle. There was nobody else with me. I was on my own time. I’m happy to say that there was no damage to any property or any individual.” “I view this as a personal matter,” Holland said, declining further comment. He is scheduled for a court appearance next month.

Just appointed last year to his third, 10-year term as the state’s government watchdog, Holland has been in his statewide oversight position since 1992. When the House and Senate voted to reappoint him for a third term, he won widespread praise from lawmakers for his investigations into the administration of Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Holland’s testimony buttressed Blagojevich impeachment proceedings, and his audits pointed out how Blagojevich officials repeatedly attempted end runs around rules for contract bidding and other basic government procedures.

The House impeached Blagojevich following his December 2008 pre-dawn arrest by FBI agents on corruption charges that included trying to trade for personal benefit the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama when he was elected to his first term as president. The Illinois Senate then tossed Blagojevich from office in January 2009. The former governor was convicted in federal court of wide-ranging corruption and began a 14-year sentence in prison last year.

Holland is paid $150,346 a year, according to state records.

long@tribune.com raguerrero@tribune.com

Twitter @RayLong

Phoenix Police looking for dangerous pot smoker???

Source

Phoenix man escapes hospital, police custody

By Jackee Coe The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Feb 10, 2013 1:23 PM

Phoenix police are searching for a man who escaped custody while being treated for an illness at a hospital, authorities said.

The man, who Phoenix Police Department spokesman Sgt. Tommy Thompson said they believe is 48-year-old Wadsworth Jennings, was taken into custody Friday in connection with a marijuana investigation. He was being held on suspicion of criminal impersonation after reportedly giving officers several different aliases while police have been trying to determine exactly who he is, he said.

He was taken to Maricopa Medical Center in Phoenix because he was sick, and at about 9:30 a.m. Sunday, when the officer who was watching him was distracted for a few minutes, Jennings pulled the IV out of his arm, got out of the hospital bed and walked away, Thompson said.

Police don’t know whether or not he is dangerous because his identity is still uncertain.

“The crime that he’s arrested for is a Class 6 felony, but we don’t know for sure who he is,” Thompson said. “Generally, when a person gives a bunch of aliases, it generally means they’re trying to hide something.”

Jennings still could be in the hospital, but police believe he has left, he said. People still can come and go from the hospital.

He is described as Black, between 5 foot 5 inches and 5 foot 7 inches tall, about 120 pounds, skinny, with short hair. He last was seen wearing a hospital gown.

Anyone with information is asked to call Silent Witness at 480-WITNESS or 480-TESTIGO for Spanish speakers.

Gun-licensing mandate an affront to our rights

Gun-licensing mandate an affront to our rights

Mon Feb 11, 2013 1:14 AM

Comparing guns to cars is a common and seductive but subtle error of logic.

If it makes sense to license drivers and register cars, then it would make sense to license pilots and register airplanes. And we do. That’s parallel logic.

However, if it makes sense to license gun owners and register guns, then it would make sense to license writers and register printing presses. That would be parallel logic, too. But we don’t do that, because that doesn’t make sense. That’s because those are rights, and government has no legitimate power to license your rights.

So, why would an honest writer object to having a license? Most reporters I know can’t answer that question, which explains why so many support “universal registration” — they understand the issue very poorly. I’ll answer it for you.

If you must pass a government test, pay a tax called a “fee,” get fingerprinted, photographed, listed in the criminal database and carry around your card with an expiration date to publish an article, or else go to prison, that’s flat out wrong. Licensing and registering freedom is tyrannical, assaults the innocent and serves no legitimate purpose in America. That’s why.

—Alan Korwin, Scottsdale

The writer is author of “The Arizona Gun Owner’s Guide.”

Cops over react to trivial comments as they always do.

Police take precautions for trivial Dobson HS bomb threat

But don't think of it as a waste of our tax dollars. I am sure the cops who do this view it as a jobs program to justify the high pay they receive.

And of course H. L. Mencken had it nailed perfectly with his comment:

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

Incidents like Dobson HS bomb threat force schools, police to take extra precautions

Posted: Saturday, February 9, 2013 8:12 am

By Michelle Reese, Tribune

Just one day after schools in Tempe were put into lockdown, Mesa’s Dobson High School was partially evacuated Friday following a bomb threat.

School and police officials said they collaborate to determine when to ask school principals and teachers to lock their doors and keep students away from potential harm.

“We work together with the schools to try to determine, for the safety of the students and staff, when it would be best to lockdown a school, depending on the situation,” said Mesa Police’s Det. Steve Berry.

Friday’s lockdown of Dobson High was prompted after a student made a comment about a bomb during class, Berry said. It was heard by students and his teacher, who contacted the school resource officer — a licensed Mesa Police officer — who was on campus.

“The boy was detained. The wheels were set in motion to make sure this was not a credible threat,” Berry said. “Once he realized he was going to be taken serious, that this was not a joke, he tried to recant. That’s not going to stop us from moving forward to assure everything is safe.”

After students were evacuated from parts of the school — and other parts were put on lockdown — police determined it was safe to return to class.

Since December’s tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., East Valley school officials say they are fielding more calls and questions from parents about safety.

“Since December, many people are on heightened alert mode,” Tempe Elementary School District spokesperson Monica Allread said. “Parents want to know anything that happens at the school that’s out of the ordinary. We’re working hard to make sure they know that.”

Mesa Unified School District spokesperson Helen Hollands said there are a few reasons for lockdowns in a school.

“There are lockdowns that happen because of an external incident. That would be if police are dealing with a suspect in an area. Those are always called by the law enforcement agency,” she said. “The other would be if we go into a lockdown for a campus related or internal reason. Most of the time, it’s a collaboration between the school district and the police or law enforcement agency to decide if it’s appropriate to go into lockdown.”

A school principal may also put a school in lockdown if there is an active situation, she said.

“If the event is active and there is an immediate threat or danger, the site administrator would call the lockdown immediately and then notify police,” she said.

After the Sandy Hook shooting, the Mesa school district decided to move up plans to do a campus-by-campus safety analysis. The Mesa school district governing board will hear that report Tuesday during a work study session that begins after an executive session at 5 p.m.

“That will look at what we need to do to make our sites physically more safe for students and staff,” Hollands said.

The district is also looking at the policies, procedures, practices and protocol that are used on campuses.

“That’s underway right now. That will be a report that could change protocol. Sometimes it’s helping to close a gap between practice and protocol,” she said.

Tempe’s Allread said during the last two school years, she sent out three letters each year notifying parents that a lockdown took place. This year, including Thursday’s incident, she has already sent out five.

A handful of schools in Tempe were put on lockdown while police searched an area for a suspect from a road rage incident.

Mesa didn’t have a count of the number of lockdowns used so far this school year as of press time.

Allread said the Tempe Elementary School District looked at its safety and security measures last summer.

“But we’re always looking a safety and security and certainly after what happened in December, we took a look at what they had in place and tried to learn any lessons we could,” she said.

The 16-year-old student detained by police could face charges, Mesa Police’s Berry said. The student could also face punishment from the district, from a short suspension to expulsion, depending on the circumstances, Hollands said.

“At this point, without having any due process evaluation, I couldn’t say where within this guideline it would fall. It has a range, because you need to take into account all the mitigating circumstances,” she said.

Contact writer: (480) 898-6549 or mreese@evtrib.com

A serial killer speaks out against the death penalty

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Ex-Virginia executioner becomes opponent of death penalty

By Justin Jouvenal, Published: February 10

Jerry Givens executed 62 people.

His routine and conviction never wavered. He’d shave the person’s head, lay his hand on the bald pate and ask for God’s forgiveness for the condemned. Then, he would strap the person into Virginia’s electric chair.

Former executioner opposes death penalty: Jerry Givens executed 62 people in Virginia’s electric chair. Since leaving his job he has become one of the state’s most visible — and unlikely — opponents to capital punishment.

Givens was the state’s chief executioner for 17 years — at a time when the commonwealth put more people to death than any state besides Texas.

“If you knew going out there that raping and killing someone had the consequence of the death penalty, then why are you going to do it?” Givens asked. “I considered it suicide.”

As Virginia executed its 110th person in the modern era last month, Givens prayed for the man, but also for an end to the death penalty. Since leaving his job in 1999, Givens has become one of the state’s most visible — and unlikely — opponents of capital punishment.

His evolution underscores that of Virginia itself and the nation. Although polls show that the majority of state residents still support the death penalty, Virginia has experienced a sea change on capital punishment in recent years that is part of a national trend.

The state has had fewer death sentences over the past five years than any period since the 1970s. Robert Gleason, who was put to death Jan. 16, was the first execution in a year and a half. As recently as 1999, the state put 13 to death in a single year.

Nationwide, the number of death sentences was at record lows in 2011 and 2012, down 75 percent since 1996, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Five states have outlawed capital punishment in the past five years, and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) affirmed plans to push for a moratorium there. Gallup polls show support for capital punishment ebbing.

Givens’s improbable journey to the death chamber and back did not come easily or quickly for the 60-year-old from Richmond. A searing murder spurred his interest in the work, but it was the innocent life he nearly took that led him to question the system. And he was changed for good when he found himself behind bars.

His story helps explain how a state closely associated with the death penalty for decades has entered a new era.

“From the 62 lives I took, I learned a lot,” Givens said.

The first execution

Friends and strangers regularly ask Givens the essential question: What is it like to take another man’s life? In answering, he vividly recalls his first execution, in 1984.

That it involved one of America’s most notorious killers helped solidify Givens’s feelings then that the death penalty was just.

Linwood Briley was one of three brothers in a gang responsible for one of the bloodiest murder sprees — and death row escapes — in state history.

The day before Briley’s execution, Givens said, the death row team began a standard 24-hour vigil, monitoring Briley at the now-shuttered Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond. The goal, as Givens put it, was to keep the condemned from killing himself before the state could. [Wow, those government folks will do anything to get their bloodthirsty wish of killing people they consider scum]

Nevertheless, the first execution took a toll. Givens said the most difficult part of that execution — or any other — was something he called the “transformation.”

Givens worked as a prison guard “saving lives” most of the time, as he put it, but when he took on the role of executioner, he had to become a killer.

Before Briley was put to death, he asked to be baptized, Givens said. The death team took him to the penitentiary’s chapel, and Givens prayed alongside the man whose life he would soon end.

Find Virginia executions from 1982 to present by year, method of execution and by the victims’ names.

“We don’t know our day and time, but these guys do,” Givens said of death row inmates. “They can repent. This is the advantage they have.”

The team moved Briley to the death chamber, and he was strapped in the electric chair. Givens took up a position along a wall outside, where the button was located. He could see Briley’s back through a small window.

At these moments, Givens said, he would empty his mind to avoid fear, insecurities or regret. He was solely focused on the grisly mechanics of electrocution.

“You are concentrating on the body itself,” he said. “With that much electricity, you are going to get burning and smoke. You want to make sure the current is right.”

At 11 p.m. Oct. 12, 1984, Givens pushed the button. He saw Briley’s body spasm through the window. And then it was over. He had taken his first life.

Inevitably, Givens said the emotion of an execution would come flooding back.

“You are not going to feel happy,” Givens said. “You feel for the condemned man’s family and the victim’s family. You have two sets of families that are losing someone.”

The chamber and back

Givens grew up in the Creighton Court housing complex in Richmond, where he also graduated from high school in the early 1970s. By 1974, he had gotten a job at a Philip Morris plant and then lost it after fighting with a co-worker.

He recalled someone telling him that he should apply for a job at the state penitentiary before he got sent there. Givens did just that.

After two years as a prison guard, he said, a supervisor approached him about working on death row. He would not be paid extra, but he accepted the job. The deciding factor, he said, was an event that marked him early in life.

When he was 14, Givens said, he was at a house party in Creighton Court. He spied a girl next to a window, and as he was trying to get up the confidence to ask her to dance, a gunman burst up a flight of stairs.

The man was looking for someone at the party, but he fired randomly and killed the girl.

Givens was furious. The incident left him with a firm conviction: Killers such as that shooter deserved to die.

In the years ahead, Givens said, he would recall the girl’s shooting each time he had to prepare for an execution. It was a touchstone that helped him carry out the grim work of the death chamber.

After Briley, the executions would come in quicker succession through the 1980s and 1990s. Givens executed Linwood Briley’s brother James in 1985. In 1993, it was Syvasky Poyner, who killed five women during an 11-day spree in southeast Virginia, and David Mark Pruett, who admitted to raping and killing his best friend’s wife.

Ultimately, though, it was a man he didn’t execute who would make the biggest impression. Earl Washington Jr. was sentenced to death in 1984 in the rape and killing of a 19-year-old mother of three in Culpeper.

Washington, who has an IQ of about 69, admitted to the killing, although many of his answers were inconsistent with the facts of the case. Just days before his scheduled execution in 1985, lawyers secured a stay based on doubts about his guilt.

In 1993, DNA tests provided strong evidence that Washington was not the killer. Then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder (D) commuted his sentence to life in prison. After testing with a more advanced forensic science, Washington was cleared and eventually granted an absolute pardon, making him the first person on Virginia’s death row to be exonerated by DNA evidence.

It was a landmark moment locally and nationally. The case was among the first in a wave of exonerations based on post-conviction DNA testing. There have been 302 such cases across the nation, including 18 death row inmates, according to the Innocence Project.

Experts and opponents of the death penalty say the exonerations have been a key factor in the recent decline in death sentences in Virginia and elsewhere. They say judges and juries have become more sophisticated about how the system can fail and therefore more leery of applying a penalty that cannot be reversed.

The DNA testing “was a scientific process totally outside the system that said, ‘You’ve got the wrong guy,’ ” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center and an opponent of the death penalty. “The fact that you had the entirely wrong person was a revelation to some people.”

The man who would have been Washington’s executioner was one of them. Givens said the case shook his faith in the justice system. He came within days of putting an innocent man to death.

“If I execute an innocent person, I’m no better than the people on death row,” Givens said.

From executioner to inmate

Despite his growing reservations, Givens continued to work as Virginia’s chief executioner through the late 1990s. He had risen to the rank of captain in the Department of Corrections, raised a family and become an assistant football coach at a Richmond area high school.

But then it fell apart. Givens was charged with money laundering and lying to a federal grand jury about it in 1999. Prosecutors said Givens and an old friend from Creighton Court purchased a car together using proceeds Givens knew came from drug dealing. Givens was put on trial.

“There’s a fine line between lawfulness and unlawfulness,” the U.S. attorney reportedly told the jury in the case. “There are a lot of good things about Jerry Givens. He is by no means the worst criminal any of us will ever meet, but he did cross the line.”

Givens maintains his innocence, but he was convicted and forced to resign from the Department of Corrections. His distrust of the justice system was cemented.

The prison guard became an inmate and spent four years behind bars.

“This was God’s way of waking me up,” Givens said.

His incarceration gave him time to think and deepened his Baptist faith. He said he read the Bible more often — the story of Jesus’s crucifixion held a lot for a man who had spent his adult life putting people to death.

Givens said a pivotal moment came one day as he was walking around the prison track, where he often talked with God. He said God asked him a thorny question: Would Givens have executed His son if He were on death row?

Givens said he could give only one reply: No, because Jesus was the son of God. He said he realized what he had done as executioner was not compatible with Jesus’s teachings of forgiveness. He realized that he could no longer support the death penalty. He said God told him to share his story.

Evelyn Givens said she thought her brother’s change was possibly the result of guilt about what he had done and a desire to spare others from “walking in his shoes.”

“He doesn’t want anyone else to feel what he felt,” she said.

After he was released from prison in 2004, he found work as a truck driver. Jonathan Sheldon, a lawyer and former executive director of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (VADP), recalls hearing about Givens through a mutual acquaintance.

They agreed to meet at a Burger King off Interstate 95 outside Richmond. The activist and the former chief executioner sat across from each other, talking about the death penalty.

“It was quite a funny meeting,” Sheldon said.

It also planted a seed that would grow in the coming years.

Givens started attending VADP meetings and joined the board about 2009. He began giving speeches across the country about his experiences as chief executioner and his newfound opposition to the death penalty.

The work hit a high point in 2010, when he testified at a state legislative hearing on a bill that would expand the death penalty to accomplices in murders. Givens’s emotional testimony about the impact of death row work helped defeat it.

“The people who pass these bills, they don’t have to do it,” Givens said afterward. “The people who do the executions, they’re the ones who suffer through it.”

Sen. J. Chapman “Chap” Peterson (D-Fairfax) said it was a key moment.

“It was so dramatic, you could have heard a pin drop,” Peterson said. “No one knew who he was, and then he announced he had been the state’s chief executioner and gave an emotional and raw speech. It was something out of Dickens.”

All the while, Virginia was changing as well.

David Bruck, a law professor at Washington and Lee University’s law school and an opponent of capital punishment, said a number of other factors have contributed to the decline in use of the death penalty in Virginia.

Like most states, Virginia has enacted sentences of life without parole, giving juries and prosecutors an alternative. The creation of the state’s capital public defender system has given those facing the death sentence better representation.

Bruck also said the state’s prosecutors, who are elected in Virginia, feel less public pressure to pursue the death penalty than in years past because it has faded as a key political issue.

“Our death sentencing rate is becoming similar to states like Colorado that have the death sentence on the books but hardly use it,” Bruck said.

That’s good news to someone such as Givens. He said he has gained a measure of peace through his new calling. He wrote a book about his experiences, which was released last year.

Nevertheless, he still wonders whether there were any innocents among the 37 people he executed via the electric chair and the 25 by lethal injection. The man who prayed for the forgiveness of each of the condemned said he may need it himself.

“The only thing I can do is pray to God to forgive me if I did,” Givens said. “But I do know this — I will never do it again.”

Cop pulls gun in washing machine dispute

I guess this is one good reason the police should NOT be allowed to be the only people allow to have guns. Although I don't think in the case the cop was legally allowed to have the gun she pulled.

Us serfs need weapons to fight against government tyranny!!!!

Source

Cops: Washing machine dispute lands deputy in hot water

By Melissa Jenco Tribune reporter

6:59 p.m. CST, February 10, 2013

A Cook County corrections officer is facing felony charges after authorities say she displayed a weapon during a dispute over a washing machine, according to court records.

Sonjia L. Dennis-Brown, 36, of Dolton, got into an argument with another woman over a washing machine in the 1100 block of East Sibley Boulevard, Dolton, about 4:34 p.m. Feb. 8, according to a police report.

During the argument, she removed a 9 millimeter semi-automatic handgun from her purse and said, "This is all the protection I need," the report says. Dennis-Brown denied to police she displayed the weapon.

She was charged with aggravated unlawful use of a weapon and possession of a firearm without firearm owner identification. She appeared in court Sunday where Cook County Judge Israel Desierto set her bail at $25,000.

The Sheriff's Office of Professional Review is investigating the charges, said Sheriff's Spokesman Frank Bilecki. The officer is currently on maternity leave and until the investigation is complete she has been dedeputized, Bilecki said.

mjenco@tribune.com

Dorner manhunt: Officers opened fire on mother, daughter

Look I will trust the teachers with a gun any day of the year, but I wouldn't let these trigger happy cops get anywhere near the school campus

Source

Dorner manhunt: Officers opened fire on mother, daughter

February 9, 2013 | 7:47 am

In their pursuit of a fugitive ex-cop, at least seven officers opened fire on what turned out to be a mother and daughter delivering newspapers on a quiet residential street, law enforcement sources told The Times.

It was "a tragic misinterpretation" by officers working under "incredible tension," LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said Friday in an interview with The Times. Margie Carranza, 47, and her mother, Emma Hernandez, 71, were the victims.

Early Thursday morning, Christopher Jordan Dorner, 33, allegedly shot three police officers, one fatally. And, in an online posting authorities attributed to him, Dorner threatened to kill more police and seemed to take responsibility for the slaying over the weekend of the daughter of a retired LAPD captain and her fiance.

Then around 5 a.m. Thursday in Torrance, police from nearby El Segundo saw a pickup truck exit a freeway and head in the general direction of the Redbeam Avenue residence of a high-ranking Los Angeles police official, which was being guarded by a group of LAPD officers.

A radio call indicated that the truck matched the description of Dorner's gray Nissan Titan. As the vehicle approached the house, officers opened fire, unloading a barrage of bullets into the back of the truck. When the shooting stopped, they quickly realized their mistake. The truck was not a Nissan Titan, but a Toyota Tacoma. The color wasn't gray, but aqua blue. And it wasn't Dorner inside the truck, but Carranza and her mother delivering copies of the Los Angeles Times.

Beck and others stressed that the investigation into the shooting was in its infancy. They declined to say how many officers were involved, what kind of weapons they used, how many bullets were fired and, perhaps most important, what kind of verbal warnings — if any — were given to the women before the shooting began.

"How do you mistake two Hispanic women, one who is 71, for a large, black male?" said Richard Goo, 62, who counted five bullet holes in the entryway to his house.

Glen T. Jonas, the attorney representing the women, said the police officers gave "no commands, no instructions and no opportunity to surrender" before opening fire. He described a terrifying encounter in which the pair were in the early part of their delivery route through several South Bay communities. Hernandez was in the back seat handing papers to her daughter, who was driving. Carranza would briefly slow the truck to throw papers on driveways and front walks.

As bullets tore through the cabin, the two women "covered their faces and huddled down," Jonas said. "They felt like it was going on forever."

Hernandez was shot twice in her back and is expected to recover. Her daughter escaped with only minor wounds from broken glass.

Beck said he had not yet received a detailed briefing, which typically occurs a few days after officer-involved shootings to give investigators time to collect evidence and put together the basic summary of what happened. But he did say that the gunfire occurred in two bursts: The first came from an officer positioned down the block from the LAPD official's residence, and the second when Carranza accelerated away from the gunfire and toward other officers.

After the investigation is completed, Beck and an oversight board will decide if officers were justified in the shooting or made mistakes that warrant either punishment or training.

Senate allows cops to destroy illegally seized medical pota????

Source

Arizona Senate panel votes to allow police to destroy seized medical pot

Posted: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 9:38 am

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

Ignoring a threatened lawsuit, a Senate panel voted Monday to let police destroy marijuana they have seized, even if it was taken wrongly from a medical marijuana patient.

SB 1414 is designed to address situations where police come into custody of marijuana and later learn that the person was a medical marijuana patient and allowed to have it. Under the law as it has been interpreted by the state Court of Appeals, police are now required to give it back.

Sen. Kimberly Yee, R-Phoenix, said she believes that puts police in the position of violated the federal Controlled Substances Act which continues to make marijuana illegal. Her legislation would let officers destroy the drugs once any investigation was completed, even if the person was entitled to have them in the first place.

The 5-3 party-line vote by the Judiciary Committee came even after Anjali Abraham, lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, warned lawmakers that they are courting legal action.

Abraham pointed out the Arizona Constitution generally does not permit legislators to tinker with voter-approved measures. She said the only changes they can make are those which "further the purpose'' of the underlying law.

In this case, Abraham pointed out, the 2010 initiative specifically says that marijuana held by those who are entitled either to sell it as dispensary operators or possess it as patients "is not subject to seizure or forfeiture.'' Abraham said Yee's legislation not only does not advance the intent of the voters but actually works contrary to what they wanted.

Yee was unconvinced, saying she simply wants to plug a "loophole'' in the law.

The loophole was discovered after Valerie Okun, a California woman was stopped by Border Patrol just inside the Arizona border. Agents found hashish on her and turned them over to the Yuma County Sheriff's Department.

It turns out Okun was a registered medical marijuana user. And the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act says those from other states with similar laws are subject to the same protections against prosecution in state courts.

So while the sheriff's department dropped the case, it refused to return her drugs. She sued and the appellate court ruled she's entitled to get them back.

Kim MacEachern who represents the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys Advisory Council, acknowledged the court ruling. But she said it provides little comfort to police agencies who are being asked, in essence, to violate federal laws by giving out drugs.

MacEachern said the appellate court, in its ruling, said there is virtually no chance that the federal government is going to prosecute any law enforcement agency for returning someone's medical marijuana. But she told lawmakers that misses the point.

"The fact remains, we tell our children when they're growing up, 'the law is the law and you should obey the law even when someone's not looking,' '' MacEachern said.

"In this case, law enforcement is being told to disobey the federal law because they probably aren't going to get in trouble for it anyway,'' she continued. "That adds to their identity crisis.''

MacEachern told lawmakers that not all situations may be as cut and dried as the Okun case.

She pointed out that sometimes police seize growing marijuana plants.

"Are we supposed to water the plants and keep the plants viable in case we have to return them at the end of the case?'' she asked.

Abraham said there's a simple answer for that: Once police see an individual has a medical marijuana card they should immediately return the plants. She said that would take away the need for them to worry about keeping them alive.

MacEachern suggested an alternate option: Let police destroy the plants but then give the rightful owners the same ability to seek compensation when any other seized property is wrongfully destroyed: seek financial compensation.

Sen. Steve Gallardo, D-Phoenix, said he did not support Proposition 203 when it was approved in 2010. He said, though, the voters approved it and lawmakers should not try to undermine its provisions.

But Rep. Rick Murphy, R-Glendale, said one problem with voter-crafted laws is that there are unforeseen consequences. He said it is the responsibility of the Legislature to make those fixes.

That law allows individuals with a doctor's recommendation to get a card from the state allowing them to obtain up to 2 1/2 ounces of marijuana every two weeks. It also envisions a statewide network of dispensaries to sell the drugs.

The bill now goes to the full Senate.

Arizona AG Tom Horne wants his hit and run case tossed

Source

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne wants traffic case tossed

Associated Press Wed Feb 13, 2013 5:10 PM

PHOENIX — Lawyers for Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne asked a judge Wednesday to dismiss a misdemeanor hit-and-run case against him, arguing he’s being singled out for prosecution and FBI agents who witnessed the incident while tailing him are refusing to answer questions.

A court filing obtained by The Associated Press accused the FBI’s top agent in Arizona of personally calling Phoenix Police Chief Daniel V. Garcia and asking him to investigate after FBI agents tailing Horne saw him back into another vehicle and leave. Horne’s lawyer, Michael D. Kimerer, wrote in his court filing that police did so even though it violated their own written policy of not investigating cases involving less than $5,000 in private property damage.

Kimerer wrote that singling out Horne for prosecution violates the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. The only logical explanation for doing so when others are not investigated or prosecuted for similar crimes is that Horne is an elected official.

Horne is accused in Phoenix city court of not stopping or leaving a note after he backed a borrowed car he was driving into another vehicle. FBI reports released by Phoenix police in October say he left the scene because he was having an affair with a female employee who was in the car and he didn’t want their relationship to be reported.

Horne has declined comment on allegations of an affair and repeatedly said he didn’t know he had caused any damage. He declined comment Wednesday, referring instead to the court filing.

The agents who were following Horne in March 2012 had apparently been doing so during the course of a campaign finance investigation, although agents interviewed by Kimerer refused to say that was the case.

The FBI waited seven months before notifying Phoenix police, until after the Maricopa County attorney’s office filed civil charges in the campaign finance case.

“It just shows animus the way they pursued this,” Kimerer said in an interview. “They were just rabid to get him.”

In the campaign finance case, Horne and employee Kathleen Winn are accused of illegally coordinating with an independent expenditure committee during the 2010 election. Horne is appealing Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery’s findings that Horne illegally coordinated his 2010 campaign with a group that was supposed to be operating independently. The group aired television advertising critical of Horne’s general election opponent.

Montgomery is demanding that Horne’s 2010 campaign and the other group, Business Leaders for Arizona, return up to $513,000 of contributions. There also could be large civil fines.

Because of the alleged coordination, the contributions made to a group headed by a Horne ally who now works in his office actually were contributions that exceeded campaign finance limits on money given to candidates, Montgomery said. Candidates aren’t allowed to discuss strategy or other matters with so-called independent expenditure committees, but there’s evidence that Horne was involved in both raising money and deciding how to spend it on advertising by Business Leaders for Arizona, Montgomery said in October.

Horne, a lawyer who is the top-elected law enforcement official for the state, denied any coordination. He had been considering running for governor but now says he’ll seek re-election in 2014.

Tempe cops seize 1,761 fake IDs on Mill Ave

That means the police spent 440 hours on this which at a min pay rate of $25/hr cost the taxpayers a total of $11,000. And that is just a low ball estimate, it probably is much higher in reality. Tempe cops start at about $50,000/year which is about $25/hr before benefits. Many cops make in excess of $100,000 or even $150,000 a year which is $50/hr to $75/hr.

My question is wouldn't that money be better spent hunting down real criminals instead of teenagers trying to have a beer???

Don't laugh many countries don't have a minimum age for drinking liquor. When I used to travel in Mexico there was no minimum age for drinking.

Source

Tempe police: 1,761 fake IDs seized on Mill Avenue in 2012

By Jackee Coe The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Feb 13, 2013 4:44 PM

The Tempe Police Department and businesses on Mill Avenue seized more than 1,750 fake identifications from underage people last year, authorities said.

They seized 1,761 fake IDs from people trying to get into bars, clubs and other businesses on Mill Avenue that sell alcohol, Tempe Police Department spokeswoman Molly Enright said.

Mill Cue Club had the most seizures, with 378, followed by School of Rock Mill Ave club with 285, according to police data. Rounding out the top five were Canteen Tequila Bar with 194; Firehouse Tempe, which opened Sept. 12, with 149; and Vintage Lounge and Grill with 136.

School of Rock Mill Ave, Mill Cue Club and Canteen were the top three locations for arrests, with 54, 31 and 14, respectively.

The total number of cards seized last year is the lowest in the last three years. There were 2,138 seized in 2011, and 1,926 seized in 2010.

The Police Department and businesses in downtown Tempe work together each year to prevent underage people from using fake IDs, Enright said. Officers provide training to staff and management on current trends and how to spot fake IDs.

Enright said the number of fake ID cards seized last year illustrate “the commitment and dedication by the management of Tempe businesses to follow the law and prevent the serious consequences that can result from underage drinking.”

“We want to send a clear message that the person to whom you hand your ID is trained in the area of falsified identification detection,” she said. “Those using a fake identification can be arrested and fined.”

Drug War is a jobs program for cops????

Source

Arizona court ruling upholds DUI test for marijuana

Associated Press Wed Feb 13, 2013 5:10 PM

PHOENIX — An appeals court has issued a ruling that upholds the right of authorities to prosecute pot smokers in Arizona for driving under the influence even when there is no evidence that they are actually high.

The ruling by the Court of Appeals focuses on the chemical compounds in marijuana that show up in blood and urine tests after people smoke pot. One chemical compound causes drivers to be impaired; another is a chemical that stays in people’s systems for weeks after they’ve smoked marijuana but doesn’t affect impairment.

The court ruled that both compounds apply to Arizona law, meaning a driver doesn’t have to actually be impaired to get prosecuted for DUI. As long as there is evidence of marijuana in their system, they can get a DUI, the court said.

The ruling overturns a decision by a lower court judge who said it didn’t make sense to prosecute a person with no evidence they’re under the influence.

The lower court judge cited the proliferation of states easing their marijuana laws, but the Court of Appeals ruling issued Tuesday dismissed that by saying Arizona’s medical marijuana law is irrelevant regarding DUI.

The Legislature adopted the decades-old comprehensive DUI law to protect public safety, so a provision on prohibited substances and their resulting chemical compounds should be interpreted broadly to include inactive compounds as well as active ones, the Court of Appeals said.

The case stems from a 2010 traffic stop in Maricopa County. The motorist’s blood test revealed only a chemical compound that is found in the blood after another compound produced from ingesting marijuana breaks down.

According to testimony by a prosecution criminalist, the compound found in the man’s blood doesn’t impair the ability to drive but can remain detectable for four weeks.

The man’s lawyer argued Arizona’s DUI law bars only marijuana and “its metabolite,” so only the first derivative compound that actually impairs drivers is prohibited.

Two lower court judges agreed, with one upholding the other’s dismissal of the case against the motorist, Hrach Shilgevorkyan.

Superior Court Commissioner Myra Harris’ ruling noted that several states have decriminalized pot, and that a growing number of states, including Arizona, have legalized medical marijuana.

“Residents of these states, particularly those geographically near Arizona, are likely to travel to Arizona,” Harris said in her 2012 ruling upholding the dismissal. “It would be irrational for Arizona to prosecute a defendant for an act that might have occurred outside of Arizona several weeks earlier.”

However, the Court of Appeals sided with prosecutors who appealed, saying that allowing the testing for marijuana’s active compound would unduly restrict law enforcement.

The ruling said it serves the Legislature’s intention to have a flat ban on driving under the influence to interpret the DUI law’s reference to a prohibited substance and “its metabolite” as covering both a substance’s active and inactive compounds.

Michael Alarid III, a lawyer for Shilgevorkyan, said he’ll ask the Arizona Supreme Court to consider an appeal.

He added the testing issue is increasingly important because people legally using pot in two Western states — Washington and Colorado — that last year approved marijuana decriminalization laws could be convicted of DUI if arrested while driving in Arizona weeks later.

Sassing a cop is constitutionally protected free speech!!!

Sassing a cop may be unwise, but it’s constitutionally protected

Talking back to a police officer while you’re under arrest is usually not the smartest move, a bit like tugging on Superman’s cape, or spitting into the wind. But it’s legal, according to a federal appeals court — and if the officer retaliates in some way, like hauling you off to jail instead of giving you a ticket and letting you go, you might be entitled to damages.

“Police officers may not use their authority to punish an individual for exercising his First Amendment rights,” the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said in a 2-1 ruling Feb. 8 that reinstated a lawsuit against the city of Yakima, Wash., and two of its policemen.

Eddie Ford, an African American who grew up in the central Washington community, was driving to his night-shift job at a bottling company in July 2007 when a police car came up from behind and stopped him, apparently for playing his stereo too loud. As Officer Ryan Urlacher approached, Ford got out of the car shouting that the stop was racially motivated. Urlacher told him to get back in the car, then said he would arrest Ford for violating a city noise ordinance, and commented, according to the court, that “he might only get a ticket if he cooperates.”

Ford kept talking for awhile after Urlacher handcuffed him, put him in the patrol car and threatened to jail him unless he shut up. He quieted down, but the officer drove him away and booked him at the suggestion of a superior officer, telling Ford that “your mouth and your attitude talked you into jail.” Urlacher later testified that he jailed Ford because of “his rageful … behavior towards the law enforcement,” which, the officer said, put public safety at risk.

Ford went to trial on the noise-violation charge, was found not guilty, and then sued for damages. A judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Urlacher had acted reasonably and had not punished Ford for freedom of speech, but the appeals court said a jury might conclude otherwise.

The Constitution protects “a significant amount of verbal criticism and challenge directed at police officers,” the court said, quoting a 1987 Supreme Court ruling. Even if police had reason to arrest Ford in the first place, they were not entitled to jail him in retaliation for speaking his mind, said the court majority, Judges Procter Hug and Dorothy Nelson.

Dissenting Judge Connie Callahan looked at the case through the other end of the telescope, the viewpoint of the officers. Once someone is under arrest, she said, that person’s free-speech rights are reduced, and police are entitled to jail someone like Ford based on what he says, which might indicate he posed a danger to himself or others. In this case, Callahan said, Urlacher may have simply been trying to give Ford “an opportunity to change his attitude,” and the court oversteps its bounds when it tries to “impose such etiquette upon peace officers.”

Robert Christie, a lawyer for the city and its police, said they agreed with Callahan and were considering whether to ask the full appeals court for a rehearing. Ford’s lawyer, William Pickett, said the court had reaffirmed a basic constitutional principle.

“Citizens have an absolute right to be critical of law enforcement, and they can vocalize that criticism without any fear of being retaliated against,” Pickett said.

The ruling can be viewed here.

Let the police decide which rights we have???

Vanessa Goldberg thinks the police should decide which rights we are allowed to have

And of course the police are the arm of government that tyrants use to force their will on us.

So if we let the "police" pick and choose which "rights" we get to keep, we will soon have no rights.

Source

Listen to police, not NRA

Wed Feb 13, 2013 9:08 PM

Listen to the police on the weapons issue!

Who would know the weapons issue better than the police, who are on the front lines of combating gun-related crimes and dealing with the horrific aftermaths? Should we not therefore listen to what they have to say about the question of gun control?

Should we not be made thoughtful by the fact that the International Association of Chiefs of Police has historically backed gun-control measures?

Their IACP website recently stated: “Our membership was, and remains, a leading proponent of universal background checks for gun purchases, the ban on military-style assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and ensuring that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (and Explosives) has both a permanent director and sufficient resources to enforce our nation’s gun laws.”

I ask my fellow readers: Should we listen to police chiefs or to the NRA?

— Vanessa Goldberg

Scottsdale

Drones will be coming to the "drug war" in Arizona???

Of course later on in the article it says there will be exceptions for cops in the "drug war".

When you consider that two thirds of the people in American prisons are their for victimless drug war crimes, that means the police will be allowed to use drones in two thirds of police work they do which is about drug war crimes.

I am a little bit more negative on this issue, and my question is when will the police begin using drones to murder suspected "drug war" criminals, like the American government uses drones to murder suspected "terrorists" in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries throughout the world.

Source

Arizona seeks to be a key player in drone work

By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Feb 13, 2013 11:35 PM

Arizona lawmakers are bidding to make the state a center for aerial-drone research, but they also want to make sure local police don’t use the unmanned surveillance aircraft to spy on Americans.

As the sophisticated eye-in-the-sky technology deployed by the military in the war on terror in Afghanistan and against drug cartels on the Mexican border becomes a Pentagon fixture, state lawmakers have introduced several bills this session to ensure that the state is part of the high-tech revolution, without turning Arizona into a “police state.”

The U.S. military has used drones around the world for more than a decade, patrolling hot spots, gathering evidence and launching airstrikes. The unmanned craft are nothing new to Arizona, either.

The federal government has used them within the state to help fight forest fires and patrol the border. The Fort Huachuca Army base in southern Arizona houses the largest unmanned-aircraft-system training center in the world, according to the Army, employing hundreds of private contractors and civilian instructors and training more than 1,300 students a year.

Arizona-based defense contractors are cashing in on what has become a $4 billion-a-year investment for the military alone, not to mention the growing private and foreign government uses.

And local universities are pushing to develop the necessary workforce. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, the University of Arizona and Arizona State University offer programs related to drones.

Arizona lawmakers are doing their part via legislation to prepare for greater growth.

House Concurrent Resolution 2009, sponsored by Rep. Tom Forese, R-Chandler, reinforces Arizona’s push to be selected by the Federal Aviation Administration as one of six national drone- testing sites.

The National Defense Authorization Act, which President Barack Obama signed in 2011, authorized the establishment of sites where officials could test drones in civil airspace near commercial air traffic. The sites were scheduled to be chosen in December, but the FAA delayed a decision indefinitely, saying it needed to address safety and privacy concerns.

Arizona officials said they are hopeful the state will still be chosen. HCR 2009 has passed the House Public Safety, Military and Regulatory Affairs Committee with unanimous bipartisan support. It now awaits a vote of the full House.

Officials are also preparing for what they fear could be a worst-case scenario in the future of drone technology.

House Bill 2574, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Dial, R-Chandler, makes it illegal for state or local law-enforcement officials to use a drone to collect information unless they have a search warrant.

It also makes it illegal to monitor individuals inside their homes or places of worship. It has exceptions for law-enforcement officials investigating human trafficking or drug smuggling as long as they are doing so on public property or with permission on private property.

Dial said he is working on the bill and expects to make some changes. It has been assigned to the House public-safety committee but is not yet scheduled for a hearing.

Rep. Carl Seel, R-Phoenix, also introduced a bill that would forbid the state and local governments from assisting in any way with enforcing portions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 that allows the military to detain a U.S. citizen. But Seel said he is putting his support behind Dial’s bill.

The bills come amid controversy surrounding a White House legal argument justifying drone-missile strikes against U.S. citizens who are part of terrorist groups overseas.

“We need to protect something called the Fourth Amendment,” Seel said, adding that he has heard “unverified” reports of drones being used to survey citizens in Arizona. The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable searches.

He said the bills restricting drones are not intended to limit the federal government’s use of drones to protect the border.

Dial said his bill is intended to be pre-emptive.

“What I want to do is protect citizens’ rights,” he said. “We don’t want to live in a police state. We don’t want to have drones everywhere in society.”

Dial also supports the resolution seeking to make Arizona a test site and efforts to promote drone research and business opportunities in the state. “I want the jobs here, and there are definitely uses for drones,” he said. “But I don’t want civil liberties and privacy invaded.”

He said the two bills address separate issues and can work together.

“The problem isn’t technology,” Dial said. “It’s how humans use the technology.”

Assistant House Minority Leader Ruben Gallego, D-Phoenix, a former Marine who serves on the House public-safety committee, said he wants to see the final details of Dial’s bill but supports the effort in general.

“Technology is always advancing, and we have to put safeguards in place to protect people’s civil liberties while still allowing drones to be used as a law-enforcement tool,” he said. “As long as we can find that balance, I don’t have any problem with the bill.”

Tom Horne continues to self destruct

But sadly the police routinely selectively enforce the law. The police routinely apply the full force of the law to people they dislike while ignoring the same violations committed by other people that are not on the police hate list.

Of course one group of people the police routinely let violate the law are elected officials, and government employees. Cops are rarely if ever arrested and put on trial for crimes they commit. Source

Posted on February 14, 2013 8:25 am by Laurie Roberts

Tom Horne continues to self destruct

The attorney general of the state of Arizona is asking a judge to dismiss his misdemeanor hit-and-run charge.

Tom Horne says he’s being singled out because the head of the FBI in Arizona actually called the Phoenix police chief and asked him to investigate after his agents saw Horne back into a Land Rover and drive away without even checking for damage. Then, the Phoenix police chief actually agreed to investigate.

Oh, the agony, the utter unfairness of it all.

Horne’s attorney, Mike Kimerer, says police violated their own policy of not investigating such cases when the damage is less than $5,000.

And so it seems Horne’s constitutional rights have been trampled, shredded into bits just like his credibility.

There certainly are questions about why the FBI was following Horne in March 2012, as he and one of his employees at the AGs office were en route for a little lunchtime rendezvous at her apartment. Perhaps Horne will escape a misdemeanor conviction given the oh-so-outrageous conduct of the FBI and police chiefs.

Horne has denied doing anything wrong and pointed out that the damage, if any, was minor.

Perhaps so, as far as the Land Rover goes.

But damage to Horne’s career? That’s significant — and getting worse all the time as the top law enforcement official in the state attempts to wiggle his way out of responsibility for his own actions.

Legal Loophole Could Hold Up $1M Christopher Dorner Reward

Legal Loophole Could Hold Up $1M Dorner Reward

By RUSSELL GOLDMAN | ABC News

A legal loophole could prevent good Samaritans, instrumental in ending the manhunt for a fugitive ex-cop accused of killing four people, from claiming more than $1 million in reward money because Christopher Dorner died and was not captured.

Last weekend, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa pledged $1 million, sourced from private individuals, companies and unions, "for information that will lead to Mr. Dorner's capture."

The L.A. City Council followed up with its own promise of a $100,000 reward, for information "leading to the identification, apprehension and conviction of Christopher Dorner."

But Dorner, accused of killing four people and threatening the lives of several dozen more, was never captured, apprehended or convicted. Instead, he died following a standoff with police near Big Bear, Calif., when the cabin in which he was barricaded burned down with him inside.

The mayor's office has not yet determined if the reward could still be paid out given Dorner died.

"At this time, no decision has been made on the reward," Villaraigosa's spokesman Peter Sanders told ABC News.com in an email.

So far, none of the privately sourced "funds have been deposited into the City's 'Special Reward Trust Fund,'" according to the Frank T. Mateljan, spokesman for the city attorney.

That still leaves an additional $100,000 that the city council could pay with municipal money, but there legal questions there, as well.

"The reward is definitely still on the table," said Jessica Tarman, spokeswoman for Councilman Daniel Zine.

But there are still plenty of questions.

The council ultimately decides how and to whom the reward will get paid. If its members are feeling generous, they could interpret the language of the original offer to make sure a worthy recipient gets paid.

"Arguably, city law is broad enough to allow payment to persons who assisted in the "identification, apprehension OR arrest and conviction" of a suspect," Metaljan said in an email [emphasis his].

If the city decides to honor the reward, there are still multiple steps before a claimant can be paid.

Anyone who thinks they are worthy must apply in writing. That claim would then be reviewed by the LAPD robbery and homicide division, and a recommendation would be made to the police commissioner. The commissioner would tell the council to consider the claim, and the council would vote on it.

So far, no one has come forward to ask for the reward. More than 1,000 leads were called to a city hotline

One couple seems most deserving, if they decide to seek the reward. Jim and Karen Reynolds, a couple in whose Big Bear, Calif., home Dorner is believed to have hidden for days, called in the tip Tuesday that ultimately put police on the trail to Dorner's final location.

On Tuesday, the couple found Dorner at their home. He briefly held them captive, but they managed to escape and call in their tip.

Drones are taking to the skies in the U.S.

Source

Drones are taking to the skies in the U.S.

By Brian Bennett and Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times

February 15, 2013, 5:20 p.m.

WASHINGTON — While a national debate has erupted over the Obama administration's lethal drone strikes overseas, federal authorities have stepped up efforts to license surveillance drones for law enforcement and other uses in U.S. airspace, spurring growing concern about violations of privacy.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Friday it had issued 1,428 permits to domestic drone operators since 2007, far more than were previously known. Some 327 permits are still listed as active.

Operators include police, universities, state transportation departments and at least seven federal agencies. The remotely controlled aircraft vary widely, from devices as small as model airplanes to large unarmed Predators.

The FAA, which has a September 2015 deadline from Congress to open the nation's airspace to drone traffic, has estimated 10,000 drones could be aloft five years later. The FAA this week solicited proposals to create six sites across the country to test drones, a crucial step before widespread government and commercial use is approved.

Local and state law enforcement agencies are expected to be among the largest customers.

Earlier this month, TV footage showed a midsized drone circling over the bunker in southeast Alabama where a 65-year-old gunman held a 5-year-old boy hostage. After a tense standoff, an FBI team stormed the bunker, rescued the boy and shot his captor. Authorities refused to say who was operating the AeroVironment drone, which has a 9-foot wingspan.

In Colorado, the Mesa County Sheriff's Office has used a fixed-wing drone to search for lost hikers in the mountains, and a helicopter drone to help crews battling fires. Flying manned planes or helicopters would cost at least $600 an hour, explained Ben Miller, who heads the program.

"We fly [drones] for less than $25 an hour," Miller said. "It's just a new way to put a camera up that's affordable." [I kind of doubt that. In Arizona most cops start at $50,000/yr which is about $25 an hour. So in Phoenix the minimum cost of operating a drone would be about $25/hr before you figure in the cost of the drone and related equipment.]

Big-city police departments, including Los Angeles, have tested drones but are holding back on buying them until the FAA issues clear guidelines about operating in congested airspace, among other issues.

"You've got to take baby steps with this," said Michael Downing, the LAPD deputy chief for counter-terrorism and special operations.

Los Angeles Police Department officials went to Simi Valley in December, he said, to watch a demonstration of a helicopter-like device that measured about 18 inches on each side and was powered by four propellers. It could fly about 90 minutes on its battery.

Downing said the LAPD was "pursuing the idea of purchasing" drones, but wouldn't do so unless the FAA granted permission to fly them, and until the department could draw up policies on how to keep within privacy laws.

If the LAPD bought drones, Downing said, it initially would use them at major public events such as the Oscars or large protests. In time, drones could be flown to track fleeing suspects and assist in investigations. Tiny drones could even be used to fly inside buildings to shoot video if a suspect has barricaded himself within.

In theory, drones can offer unblinking eye-in-the-sky coverage. They can carry high-resolution video cameras, infrared sensors, license plate readers, listening devices and other high-tech gear. Companies have marketed drones disguised as sea gulls and other birds to mask their use.

That's the problem, according to civil liberties groups. The technology is evolving faster than the law. Congress and courts haven't determined whether drone surveillance would violate privacy laws more than manned planes or helicopters, or whether drone operators may be held liable for criminal trespassing, stalking or harassment.

"Americans have the right to know if and how the government is using drones to spy on them," said Catherine Crump, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has called for updating laws to protect privacy.

A backlash has already started.

In Congress, Reps. Ted Poe (R-Texas) and Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) introduced privacy legislation Thursday that would require police to get a warrant or a court order before operating a drone to collect information on individuals.

"We need to protect against obtrusive search and surveillance by government and civilian use," Poe said in a telephone interview. A similar bill failed last year.

Legislatures in 15 states are considering proposals to limit drone use. The City Council in Charlottesville, Va., passed a resolution on Feb. 4 barring local police from using drones — which they don't yet have — to collect evidence in criminal cases.

In Seattle, Mayor Mike McGinn ordered police to return two Draganflyer X6 helicopter drones earlier this month after privacy advocates and others protested. The police said they had hoped to use them for search-and-rescue operations.

Federal agencies fly drones to assist in disasters, check flood damage, do crop surveys and more. U.S. Customs and Border Protection flies the largest fleet, 10 unarmed Predators, along the northern and southern borders to help track smugglers and illegal immigrants.

Although flying drones might appear as easy as playing a video game, pilots and crews require extensive training.

In 2004 and 2005, the U.S. Marshals Service tested two small drones in remote areas to help them track fugitives, according to law enforcement officials and documents released to the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act. The Marshals Service abandoned the program after both drones crashed.

Except in rare cases, the military is barred from using drones in U.S. airspace to conduct surveillance or pursue individuals. No state or federal agency has proposed arming domestic drones with weapons, but the prospect has raised alarms in Congress and elsewhere.

In response to a question during an online Google chat Thursday, President Obama said drones had never been used to kill "an American citizen on American soil."

"The rules outside of the United States are going to be different than the rules inside the United States, in part because our capacity, for example, to capture terrorists in the United States are very different than in the foothills or mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan," Obama said.

No drone was sent up to help find suspected killer Christopher Dorner after his truck was found burning near Big Bear Lake on Feb. 7, said Al Daniel, an officer in the aviation division of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. But Customs and Border Protection transmitted secure video from a Pilatus PC-12 plane to police commanders on the ground.

Despite a massive manhunt, Dorner vanished and authorities speculated he had escaped to Mexico. Five days later, however, he was found in a snowbound cabin near his truck and died after a shootout and fire.

The long delay, and the embarrassing fact that Dorner was hiding close by the police command post, sparked sharp criticism of police tactics and abilities.

Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, said an aerial drone might have helped find Dorner more quickly.

"The search would have been much wider and quicker because you'd have an unmanned aircraft looking," he said. "You can cover more ground."

brian.bennett@latimes.com

joel.rubin@latimes.com

Bennett reported from Washington and Rubin from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Robert Faturechi in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Booze & Drug Wars - Jobs program for cops???

Source

Des Plaines cops face suspensions in DUI pay investigation, city says

By Jonathan Bullington Tribune reporter

4:23 p.m. CST, February 15, 2013

Several Des Plaines police officers face possible suspensions stemming from a city investigation of alleged misreporting of DUI arrests to obtain overtime pay, officials said.

The overtime pay reportedly came from a federally funded grant designed to catch drunk drivers and seat-belt violators.

Des Plaines Police Chief William Kushner said Friday that several officers would be suspended and the department may seek a resignation in one case. He would not name the officers or comment on how many officers faced discipline.

Kushner declined to provide details on what the officers may be accused of doing, but said an internal investigation of this nature typically centers on violations of department rules and policies.

The city’s internal investigation, which Kushner said concluded last week, does not preclude any officer from criminal prosecution in the ongoing federal investigation.

Kushner said the department is “putting steps in place to ensure nothing like this would ever happen again.”

“We want to put this behind us and move forward,” he added.

City Manager Michael Bartholomew confirmed that several officers face suspensions, but referred specific questions on any possible disciplinary action to Kushner.

Des Plaines launched an internal investigation independent of an ongoing federal investigation into how the city’s police department managed the grant, according to Bartholomew.

In 2011, Des Plaines was awarded $116,190, the third-largest Sustained Traffic Enforcement Program grant in the state. The department had taken in $22,504 as of last March, when city leaders told the Illinois Department of Transportation that paperwork submitted for the grant might have included arrests made by officers who weren't actually working on grant-funded time, IDOT officials have said.

IDOT cut off the grant and allowed Des Plaines to investigate. The former commander who oversaw the program retired shortly after the grant was suspended.

jbullington@tribune.com

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