The Historic Disaster at Waco

     The April 19, 1993 FBI raid of the Mount Carmel Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of 80 cult members, is a worst-case example of how the militaristic approach to law enforcement can lead to disaster.

     Fifty-one days before the FBI raid, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tax, and Firearms (ATF), at the conclusion of a seven month investigation, had stormed the compound to arrest cult leader David Koresh and search for a cache of guns that ATF agents suspected had been illegally converted to fully automatic weapons. That raid ended after a brief shootout in which four ATF agents were killed and 16 wounded. The officers retreated, leaving an unknown number of Branch Davidians dead and wounded.

     The AFT agents prior to the raid had several opportunities to arrest David Koresh outside the Mount Carmel compound. These chances were missed because Mr. Koresh was not under a 24-hour surveillance. Had the ATF taken him into custody when the opportunity presented itself the raid might not have been necessary. The ATF had also lost the element of surprise, and they knew it when two National Guard helicopters circling above the compound with agency supervisors aboard took gunfire from below. The supervisors launched the invasion anyway. Although several AFT agents had been trained at Fort Hood by Green Beret personnel, most of the agents participating in the 9:30 A.M. attack had not been appropriately trained or armed. Many of the 76 agents who charged the compound carried semi-automatic handguns.

     Following the AFT fiasco the FBI took charge of the stand-off. Following the 51-day siege and a series of failed negotiations several FBI SWAT teams, in full battle gear armed with shortened variants of the standard M-16 assault rifle and supported by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and M-60 tanks, stormed the compound. Forty minutes after 400 canisters of CS gas had been shot inside the building through holes punched in the walls by the armored vehicles, the structure burst into flames and burned to the ground. David Koresh and 17 children were among the 80 dead. Attorney General Janet Reno, operating on unreliable evidence that the Davidian children were being sexually mistreated authorized the assault. The Waco fiasco turned out to be the deadliest police action in American history.

     Attorney General Reno, in the wake of the Waco disaster, asked former Missouri senator John C. Danforth to investigate the government's role in the raids. In 2000, following a 14-month inquiry Danforth determined that FBI agents had not started the fire by firing bullets into the compound. The former senator also found the military's role in the raids as lawful.

     Several months after the Danforth inquiry Thomas Lynch, the director of the CATO Institute's Project on Criminal Justice published a report characterizing the Branch Davidian raids as "criminally reckless," and Danforth's investigation as "soft and incomplete." According to the CATO investigation FBI agents in National Guard helicopters fired rifle shots into the compound, a finding that contradicted the FBI's claim that the helicopters had been deployed merely to distract the Davidians.

     At a news conference Senator Danforth defended the integrity of his inquiry and attacked the CATO report. The debate over who started the fire at the Davidian compound remained unresolved. Regardless of what FBI agents did or didn't do on April 19, 1993, many believe the militaristic ATF and FBI raids should not have been launched in the first place. 

The Battered Wife Syndrome

     Traditionally, courts have not recognized the battered-wife syndrome as a valid defense in homicide trials in which a battered wife kills her abusive husband at a time when she is not being attacked. To successfully employ self-defense in a homicide case the defendant must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that deadly force was necessary to avoid the imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death. Under standard self-defense rationale the careful planning and execution of an abusive husband's death is first-degree murder. (Crime historians believe that before the science of toxicology wives were able to dispatch abusive husbands by slowly killing them with arsonic.)

     For years activists concerned with domestic violence lobbied courts and legislatures to make the battered-wife syndrome a valid murder defense in cases where the defendant was not in immediate danger of serious bodily injury or death.

CASES

Queens, New York

     In 2008, 47-year-old Barbara Sheehan shot and killed her abusive husband, the retired New York City police sergeant she had been married to for twenty-four years. Charged with first-degree murder she went on trial in September 2011. The defendant took the stand and described years of marital abuse and terror.

     According to the Sheehan prosecution, the morning the defendant killed her husband she was on the computer looking for travel bargains. The assistant district attorney called the killing a "self-serving execution." On October 5, 2011 after deliberating three days the jury found Barbara Sheehan not guilty. Proponents of the battered-wife defense see this case as a referendum on this issue. The Sheehan acquital raised a difficult legal question: Is the premeditated killing of someone who will hurt you in the future self-defense or first-degree murder?

Memphis, Tennessee

     In 1985 Gaile Owens hired a hitman to kill her abusive husband. Found guilty of first-degree murder she was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection. In 1986 the governor of Tennessee commuted her sentence to life in prison. In September 2011 the Tennessee Board of Probation and Parole released Gaile Owens from prison after twenty-six years behind bars. The hitman was still serving his time for the contract killing. Notwithstanding the fact that no crime is more cold-blooded than murder-for-hire, the general feeling in Tennessee was that Gaile Owen's sentence of death, under the circumstances, exceeded her crime.

     The message here may be this: If you're a battered woman, call for help. Do not call a hitman. But if you do, and get caught, call the lawyer who represented Barbara Sheehan.   

The Historic Fingerprint: The Jennings Murder Case

     In Chicago, Illinois on September 19, 1910 a noise at two in the morning coming from her 15-year-old's bedroom awoke Mary Hiller. She slipped into her robe and ventured into the hall where she noticed that the gaslight outside her daughter's room had been turned off. Fearing that an intruder had entered the house Mrs. Hiller returned to the master bedroom and shook her husband awake.

    Clarence Hiller, on the landing en route to his daughter's room, bumped into Thomas Jennings, a 32-year-old paroled burglar in possession of a .38-caliber revolver. The men struggled then tumbled down the stairway. At the foot of the stairs Mr. Jennings, the bigger man, got to his feet, pulled his gun and fired two shots. The first bullet entered Mr. Hiller's right arm, traveled up through his shoulder and exited the left side of his neck. The second slug slammed into his chest, piercing his heart and lung before coming out his back. The gunman left the scene through the front door, leaving behind a screaming Mary Hiller, her dead husband and a terrified 15-year-old girl who had been sexually molested.

     About a mile from the murder house Thomas Jennings, walking with a limp and bleeding from cuts on his arm passed four off-duty police officers waiting for a streetcar. When questioned about his injuries, Jennings said he had fallen off a trolley. One of the officers patted him down and discovered the recently fired handgun. The officers placed him under arrest and escorted the suspect to the police station.

     A few hours after the arrest detectives at the murder scene found the two .38-caliber bullets that passed through Clarence Hiller's body. Today a forensic firearms identification expert would be able to match the crime scene slugs with bullets test-fired through the suspect's gun. But in 1910 this type of forensic identification was 15 year in the future. Investigators also determined that the intruder had entered the Hiller house through a kitchen window. A detective who was ahead of his time found four fingerprint impressions on a freshly painted porch rail outside the point of entry. (Paint in those days dried slowly.) A technician with the police department's two-year-old fingerprint bureau photographed the the finger marks that had been left in the dark gray paint. (The science of fingerprint identification first came to America from England in 1906 when the St. Louis Police Department started the country's first fingerprint bureau.) Mary Hiller, traumatized by the murder of her husband failed to pick Thomas Jennings out of a police lineup. While roughed up and the recipient of a third-degree interrogation, Thomas Jennings did not confess.

     At Jennings' May 1911 murder trial two Chicago Police Department fingerprint examiners, a fingerprint technician from the police department in Ottawa, Canada and a private expert who had studied fingerprint science at Scotland Yard testified that the impressions on the porch rail matched the ridges on four of the defendant's fingers, placing him at the scene of the murder. While the idea that fingerprints were unique had been around for 20 years, this was the first U.S. jury to be presented with this form of impression evidence. The chance of convicting Jennings was not good because the prosecution's case--the defendant's arrest one mile from the house, his injuries, his possession of a recently fired gun and his murder scene fingerprints--was based entirely on circumstantial evidence. In those days, and to some extent today, jurors prefer direct evidence in the form of confessions and eyewitness identifications.

     Prior to the testimony of the four fingerprint witnesses, Mr. Jennings' attorney objected to the introduction of this evidence on the grounds this form of forensic identification had not been scientifically tested and was therefore unreliable and inadmissible. The trial judge, in allowing the fingerprint testimony, relied on a 1908 arson case, Carleton v. People, in which the defendant had been linked to the fire scene by impressions left by his shoes.

     The jury, following a short deliberation found Thomas Jennings guilty of first-degree murder. To arrive at this verdict the jurors placed more weight on the physical evidence than on the defendant's claim of innocence. The judge sentenced Thomas Jennings to death.

     On appeal Thomas Jennings' lawyer argued that there was no scientific proof that fingerprints were unique. By admitting the testimony of so-called fingerprint experts the trial court had sentenced a man to the gallows on pseudoscience and bogus expertise. The Illinois Supreme Court, on December 21, 1911, ruled that the Jennings trial judge had not made a judicial error by admitting the fingerprint testimony. This was good news for forensic science and bad news for Thomas Jennings who died in 1912 at the end of a rope.

     People v. Jennings laid the groundwork for forensic fingerprint identification in America. By 1925 virtually every court in the United States accepted this form of impression evidence as proof of guilt. In medicine, illness leads to cures, and in law enforcement some murder cases lead to advances in forensic science.  

Jerome Murdough's Jail Cell Death

     After graduating from a Queens, New York high school in 1976, Jerome Murdough joined the Marine Corps. He served a tour in Okinawa, Japan before his honorable discharge. Shortly after he returned to New York City, Mr. Murdough started drinking heavily and taking drugs. In his thirties, after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, he found himself living on the street and in homeless shelters. He joined the growing number of mentally ill Americans living on the fringes of urban society. To maintain a semblance of sanity he had to keep taking his anti-psychotic medication. He also took anti-seizure pills and continued to medicate himself with alcohol.

     Over the years, New York City police officers, on a dozen occasions arrested Murdough for the misdemeanor offenses of drunk in public, trespassing and drug possession. On February 7, 2014 a police officer in Harlem, New York arrested the 56-year-old homeless man for trespassing. Jerome Murdough had been sleeping in an enclosed stairwell in a public housing project.

     The arresting officer booked Mr. Murdough into Rikers Island, the nation's second largest jail system. At any given time Rikers Island is the temporary home of 1,200 prisoners, almost half of whom are mentally ill. At his arraignment the judge assigned Murdough an attorney from the public defender office and set his bail at a prohibitive $2,500.

     On February 14, 2014, a week into his incarceration, jail officials transferred Murdough to the Anna M. Kross Center, the jail system's massive mental health unit. They placed him into a 6-by-10 foot cinderblock cell at 10:30 that night. Pursuant to jail policy pertaining to prisoners in the mental observation unit, corrections officers were supposed to check on Murdough every fifteen minutes.

     At 2:30 the next morning, four hours after Murdough's transfer to the mental health unit, a corrections officer discovered Murdough dead on his cot. The first thing the guard noticed was the intense heat coming out of the cell. The temperature in the enclosure had risen to well about 100 degrees due to a heating system malfunction.

     While the forensic pathologist with the New York City's Medical Examiner's Office was unable to articulate the exact cause of death without more testing, initial indicators pointed toward extreme dehydration otherwise know as heat stroke. Since psychotropic medications can impair the body's ability to cool itself by sweating, Murdough's prescription regime may have been a contributing factor to his death.

     Jerome Murdough's 75-year-old mother learned of her son's fate a month after he essentially baked to death. She learned of  his passing from a reporter with the Associated Press. Mrs. Murdough hadn't been in contact with her son for three years.

     On April 3, 2014, a spokesperson for New York City's jail system announced that the warden of the mental health unit had been demoted over the incident. Two corrections officer were placed on thirty-day suspensions for not "following basic procedures."

     In October 2014, pursuant to a civil suit filed by Jerome Murdough's family, the city of New York authorized a $2.25 million settlement.

The David Wise Spousal Rape Case

     In 2008 Mandy Wise kicked her husband David Wise out of their home in Indianapolis, Indiana. She then filed for divorce. After eleven years of marriage she discovered on his cell phone video recordings of him having sex with her. She was unconscious. The tapes revealed to Mandy that she had been surreptitiously drugged and raped by her husband.

     When confronted with the tapes Mr. Wise responded with the following email: "I was taking advantage of you in your sleep and you kept coming to me and telling me it was not okay. I needed to stop." He did not admit to drugging her, and they never, according to the victim, discussed the matter prior to her discovery of the videotapes.

     In January 2010, not long after the finalization of the divorce the ex-wife, now going by her maiden name Boardman, complained to the police that her ex-husband had been harassing her with repeated phone calls and text messages. She also claimed that David Wise threatened to kill the man to whom she was engaged. A judge granted her a protection order, but Mr. Wise was not charged with any crime.

     In 2011, two years after the divorce, Mandy reported the rapes to the police. As evidence she submitted a DVD copy of the sex tapes. When asked to explain the delay in reporting and submission of evidence, she said she didn't want their two children to grow up without a father.

     A Marion County prosecutor charged David Wise with one count of rape and five felony counts of criminal deviate conduct. If convicted as charged he faced a maximum sentence of forty years in prison. After spending 24 days in the county detention center David Wise made bail and was released to await his trial.

     The David Wise spousal rape trial began in April 2014 in Indianapolis. Mandy Boardman's testimony for the prosecution comprised the state's principal evidence in the three-day proceeding. She took the stand and told the jury that on numerous occasions she had awaken with the feeling that her body had been "messed with." One time she woke up with a pill still dissolving in her mouth. She had also discovered, in the bedroom, eyedroppers that were not hers.

     Following two days of testimony the case went to the jury. After a brief deliberation the jurors returned a verdict of guilty on all counts. The judge set May 16, 2014 as the sentencing date. On that day the prosecutor asked the judge to sentence Wise to twenty years in prison. The convicted man's attorney argued for two years of house detention.

     Marion County Superior Court Judge Kurt Eisgruber, on May 16, 2014, sentenced the 52-year-old rapist to twenty years, with twelve of those years suspended. David Wise would serve the remaining eight years wearing a GPS monitoring device in his home. Following the house detention he would serve two years of probation.

    Following the sentencing hearing Wise's attorney, Elizabeth Milliken, told reporters that she planned to appeal her client's conviction.

     On Monday, May 19, 2014, Mandy Boardman, in speaking to a reporter with the Indianapolis Star, said, "I was very pleased with the conviction but the sentencing was a punch in the gut by the justice system. During the reading of the sentence the judge looked at me before he gave the final decision. I was told that I needed to forgive my attacker and move on. I received zero justice on Friday."

     Boardman, to a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, added: "I never thought he [Wise] would be at home, being able to have the same rights and privileges that I do."

    On July 24, 2014 Judge Eisgruber put David Wise behind bars for five years after the convicted rapist violated the terms of his house arrest by letting his GPS tracking device's battery go dead. He also failed to maintain contact with correction authorities. Mandy Boardman responded to her ex-husband's incarceration with the following statement to a local reporter: "Now that I know that he will be in prison for the next five years I think I can finally get some peace" 

The Levi Chavez Murder Case

     Levi Chavez, a 26-year-old officer with the Albuquerque, New Mexico Police Department, at nine o'clock on the night of October 21, 2007 called 911 to report that his wife committed suicide with his department-issued Glock 9 pistol. Responding officers with the APD found 26-year-old Tera Chavez in the master bedroom with a massive exit bullet wound at the base of her skull. Next to her body officers saw the 9 mm Glock that still had a round in its chamber. Nearby lay the fatal bullet's spent shell casing and, detached from the handgun, its clip. It appeared that the barrel of the gun had been inserted into the dead woman's mouth.

     Officer Chavez informed his fellow officers that he and his wife had been having marital problems for years and that on countless occasions the mother of two, who worked at a beauty salon as a hairdresser, had threatened to kill herself.

     Because it was apparent that Tera Chavez had been dead for several hours the crime scene officers wanted to know the circumstances under which Mr. Chavez discovered his wife's corpse. In response to that question he said he last saw his wife on Friday morning, October 19 before going on duty at the APD. That night he decided to stay over at his girlfriend Deborah Romero's house. Romero was also a member of the Albuquerque Police Department.

     According to Levi Chavez, on Saturday, October 20, 2007 his wife Tera called him 176 times. He ignored her calls by turning off his cellphone. Officer Chavez said he spent Saturday night with Romero, and the next day, when Tera didn't call him he began to worry. Later that Sunday evening Levi said his mother told him that Tera had not shown up for work that day at the beauty salon. At that point he rushed home to find that his wife had committed suicide.

     In 2007 the Albuquerque Police Department, due to a series of questionable police-involved shootings and allegations of institutional corruption and departmental cover-ups of officer wrongdoing, was under investigation by the FBI. Shortly after Tera Chavez's sudden and violent death critics of the APD accused the department of helping officer Chavez cover up the murder of his wife by destroying crime scene evidence. Because the police department had such a bad reputation, and a police officer's wife had died under suspicious circumstances, Detective Aaron Jones of the Valencia County Sheriff's Office took charge of the homicide investigation.

     Detective Jones, who suspected that Levi Chavez had murdered his wife eighteen to twenty hours before he called 911, had to back off when Dr. Patricia McFeeley, the state medical examiner ruled Tera's manner of death a suicide. In November 2007 Detective Jones showed Dr. McFeeley crime scene photographs that caused her to change Tera Chavez's manner of death to "undetermined." Despite Jones' efforts the homicide investigation eventually died on the vine.

     In April 2011, three and a half years after Tera Chavez's death, following a cold-case murder investigation, Dr. McFeeley changed the manner of death in the case to "criminal homicide." Assistant Sandoval County District Attorney Bryan McKay charged Levi Chavez, who was no longer on the police force, with first-degree murder in his wife's death.

     The Chavez murder trial got underway on June 3, 2013 before Sandoval District Court Judge George Eichwald. In his opening remarks to the jury lead prosecutor McKay presented the state's theory that the defendant had murdered his wife sometime between late Saturday night, October 20, 2007 and the early morning hours of Sunday, October 21. After shooting his wife in the mouth with the Glock 9 pistol the defendant staged a suicide by placing the gun, the shell casing and the clip next to her body.

     Levi Chavez's trial attorney, David Sema, a lawyer well known in New Mexico for representing several high-profile criminal defendants, told the jurors that his client's wife had committed suicide over her husband's extramarital affairs.

     Detective Aaron Jones took the stand for the prosecution. According to the Valencia County homicide detective the Glock magazine found next to the victim's body was "unseated." By that the witness meant it wasn't locked into the butt of the gun. This suggested that after the weapon had been discharged the shooter had pressed a button to release the clip.

     DNA expert Alanna Williams, who in 2007 worked for the New Mexico Crime Laboratory but was now employed by the APD, testified that she had tested the Glock and a pair of sweatpants found in the Chavez home washing machine for DNA. Williams said she had found blood on the muzzle of the pistol that contained the victim's DNA. On the handgun's grip the forensic scientist found a mixture of Tera's and the defendant's DNA. The sweatpants, believed to have been worn by the defendant, contained DNA from the victim.

     Dr. Patricia McFeeley, now the former medical examiner, testified that the death scene Glock had been inserted at least one inch into Tera Chavez's mouth. The fatal bullet vaporized the victim's brainstem. The forensic pathologist explained that the victim, after being shot, couldn't have pressed the button that released the magazine from the butt of the pistol.

     One of the defendant's mistresses, APD officer Regina Sanchez took the stand. In September 2006 she and Levi began an intimate relationship. A month later, Sanchez, believing that Chavez was in the process of divorcing his wife, allowed him to move in with her. After the witness received an angry call from Tera Chavez he moved out.

     Rose Slama, another of the defendant's girlfriends, testified that he told her that when Tera shot herself he was in the house taking a shower.

     After the prosecution rested its case on June 26, 2013, defense attorney David Sema put Dr. Alan Berman, a suicide expert who lived in Washington, D. C., on the stand. Based on Tera Chavez's diary entries, text messages, medical history and two notes in her handwriting found at the death scene, Dr. Berman said he believed she suffered from low self-esteem and self-hate due to her emotionally abusive relationship with her philandering husband. She had been, in the witness' opinion, depressed as well. According to the psychologist these factors combined to create what he called "acute risk factors for suicide."

     Dr. Berman read several text messages Tera sent to her husband between August and October 2006. In one such message she wrote: "I am a loser. I've failed at everything, especially you. I want to die." In another text she had said, "I'm tired of being your dumb wife. You treat me like shit...please respect me...I have a job."

     Prosecutor McKay, on cross-examination asked the "suicideologist" to read Tera Chavez's last diary entry, dated July 12, 2007, which read: "...so goodbye to the person I used to be. Welcome a new day. Happiness!" Dr. Berman testified that he did not believe this statement was inconsistent with a suicidal mindset.

     On July 1, 2013 a crime scene reconstruction expert took the stand for the defense. In the course of demonstrating to the jury how Tera Chavez after shooting herself in the mouth with the Glock had pressed the button that released the magazine, failed to eject the magazine pursuant to his theory of what happened. In other words the demonstration failed.

     Defense attorney Sema, on July 9, 2013, presented his star witness. Dr. Charles V. Wetli, the former medical examiner of Suffolk County, New York who had testified for the defense in dozens of high-profile murder cases. According to the forensic pathologist, had the defendant shoved the pistol into his wife's mouth he would have broken some of her teeth. According to Dr. Wetli, Tera Chavez, in killing herself, had turned the gun upside down and used her thumb to pull the trigger.

     Prosecutor McKay's associate, Assistant District Attorney Anne Keener, on cross-examination showed Dr. Wetli a death scene photograph that appeared to show that one of Tera's lower teeth had been chipped. When asked if one of the dead woman's teeth had been broken, the forensic pathologist said, "It's possible." Prosecutor Keener asked Dr. Wetli if he visited the death scene or personally examined Tera Chavez's corpse. He said he had not.

     The second major defense witness, the defendant himself, took the stand on July 11, 2013. In describing his discovery of his dead wife on the night of October 21, 2007, Levi Chavez said, "I turned on the light and it was like terror. I couldn't believe what I was seeing." The defendant told the jury that he blamed himself for Tera's suicide and felt that God was saying to him: "This is all your fault." Chavez assured the jurors that he had found religion and had not cheated on his second wife. At several points during his direct examination by attorney Sema the defendant broke down in tears.

     On cross-examination, prosecutor Bryan McKay asked the former police officer why he had left his loaded department-issued gun "with a woman who was depressed and talked about possibly hurting herself. You had small children in the house."

     "We had," the defendant replied, "an attempted break-in. A truck was stolen right out of our driveway when she was there. And yes, I had small children in the home, but this is exactly why I left the gun in the house. (Regarding the theft of Levi's 2004 Ford F-250 truck, Tera allegedly told her fellow beauty salon workers that he and his "cop buddies" had staged the theft as part of an insurance scam. Prosecutor McKay had attempted to get this information before the jury but Judge Eichwald suppressed it.)

     On July 16, 2013, the jury, after ten hours of deliberation, found the defendant not guilty.

Alexander Edwards: The Babysitter From Hell

     In 2013 Melissa Delp lived in south central Virginia with her two daughters and her boyfriend, Daniel Janney. On December 22, 2013 the couple's friend, 20-year-old Alexander Edwards, came to the Concord, Virginia house to babysit the girls, both of whom were under 13-years-old.

     While the 35-year-old mother and her 32-year-old boyfriend were away from the house their babysitter used a home tattooing kit to ink the girls under his care.

     When Delp and Janney returned home the girls had their names tattooed on their shoulders. Janney, with the help of the girl's mother, tried to remedy the situation by removing the tattoos with a hot razor blade. This extremely painful procedure made matters worse by exposing the youngsters to infection and permanent scarring.

     Beyond being alarmingly stupid, why would these adults maim the girls in a futile attempt to erase the babysitter's unwanted ink? Perhaps Delp and Janney were worried that if the authorities got wind of the forced tattooing they would get in trouble with the law for being negligent parents.

     On January 16, 2014 a teacher noticed on one of the girls the inflamed and scabbed aftermath of Janney's botched attempt to remove the unauthorized tattoo. The scarred girl, when pressed by the teacher, spilled the beans regarding the source of her condition. The concerned teacher reported the possible child abuse case to the Campbell County Sheriff's Office. She also called child protection services.

     Two days later deputies booked the tattooing babysitter, Alexander Edwards, into the Campbell County Adult Detention Center in Rustburg, Virginia. The 20-year-old faced felony charges of malicious wounding, child abuse and abduction. (Abduction includes unlawful confining or restraint.)

     On January 18, 2014 deputies also arrested Melissa Delp and Daniel Janney. Placed into the county jail in Rustburg, the couple faced felony charges of malicious wounding and child abuse.

     Michael Mucklow, owner of the Go! Tattoo removal service in Kutztown, Pennsylvania heard of the involuntary tattooing in Virginia and offered to help. Mucklow believed he could mitigate the damage by removing what was left of the tattoos by using laser technology. There was nothing he could do, however, about the physical and emotional trauma caused by Janney's alleged razor blade removal attempt.

     On August 2014,Melissa Delp pleaded guilty to felony child abuse. The judge sentenced her to eight years in prison.

     On March 2, 2016, following the additional charges of rape and sodomy (of the 12-year-old girl); solicitation to commit a felony (Edwards asked a potential hitman to kill several witnesses against him); conspiracy to commit murder; and attempted murder, the Campbell County judge sentenced Alexander Edwards to two life terms in prison.

     The judge sentenced Daniel Janney to a year and two months in prison after he was convicted of felony wounding. 

A College Kid's Crime Spree

     On Sunday morning, November 2, 2014, paramedics in a Poudre Valley Hospital ambulance responded to an emergency involving an intoxicated student at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. When the paramedics rolled the student out of the building they found that someone had stolen their ambulance. (The patient had to be transported to another hospital in a backup vehicle.)

     Through GPS technology the police located the missing ambulance 12 miles away in Loveland, Colorado. Officers found the vehicle, its doors wide open and its front-end badly damaged and leaking fluid, sitting in the middle of Highway 34. The officers also encountered the thief, 18-year-old Stefan Sortland standing thirty yards from the wrecked ambulance. The Colorado State University sophomore, decked out in an EMT safety vest, was holding a blanket, a cellphone and a box of Wheat Thins.

     According to witnesses the ambulance hit the raised median, jumped the curb, struck a highway sign, careened the wrong way and crossed back over the median before coming to a stop.

     When the college boy refused to obey the police-issued commands they stunned him with a Taser. Referring to the police vehicles surrounding him Stefan Sortland asked, "Why are those lights flashing on those cars?" On his way to the Loveland Police Department Sortland informed the officers that he and the stolen ambulance had been en route to Vail, Colorado. For the most part, however, the college student rambled on incoherently.

     At the police station Mr. Sortland said he took the drug molly along with some cocaine at a Halloween concert where security officers kicked him out of the event. He also said that his friends and roommates, having all committed suicide, were dead and in heaven.

     While awaiting his transportation to the local jail the drugged-up college kid kicked a police department bench and a wall then started masturbating. (Apparently he wasn't handcuffed behind his back.)

     At the Larimer County Jail, while in the booking area, Sortland attacked two jail employees who brought him lunch. He punched one of the deputies in the face. A short time later officers booked Sortland on charges of aggravated vehicle theft, obstructing emergency medical personnel, reckless driving, hit-and-run, criminal mischief, unlawful possession of a controlled substance and assault.

     Stefan Sortland's father told detectives that his son had no history of mental illness and was not on medication. His father did say that on Halloween his son had sent him some odd text messages.

     On May 17, 2016 Stefan Sortland pleaded guilty to the felony counts of motor vehicle theft and second-degree assault of a police officer. Chief Judge Stephen Schapanski gave him a four-year deferred sentence. That meant that if he remained law abiding during that period he would not be sent to prison. According to his defense attorney the 20-year-old was now taking anti-psychotic medication. 

Adding Insult to Injury in a False Arrest Case

     At 1:45 in the morning of September 26, 2007, a couple returning to their home in Millcreek, a suburban community adjacent to Erie, Pennsylvania, encountered a pair of burglars. When one of the intruders pointed a gun at the home owners the husband tried to disarm him. In the scuffle the burglar fired a shot into the ceiling, then, accompanied by his partner ran out of the house. The burglars sped from the scene in a white minivan.

     Shortly after the incident a pair of Erie police officers looking for the fleeing burglars happened upon Maria Jordan parked in front of her house in a white minivan. Maria was about to pick up her husband, the night shift manager at a local Taco Bell.

     The police officers ordered Maria out of the van at gunpoint, ordered her to the ground then handcuffed the prone woman behind her back. Once they placed Maria into the patrol car (calling her an "idiot" and "retard") the officers entered the Jordon house where at gunpoint, they hauled Maria's 10-year-old stepson out of bed and arrested Maria's father. After handcuffing the boy and Jose Arenas, the officers searched the dwelling. They found nothing incriminating in the house, removed the handcuffs from the people they had arrested, then took leave of the citizens they had traumatized. 

     In 2009 Maria, her father and her stepson sued the Erie Police Department in federal court for violating their civil rights. According to the complaint the false arrests and police manhandling had caused the family "worry, humiliation and anxiety." In defense of their actions the officers said they should not be sued for doing their jobs. (Since when is making false arrests part of the job?) The city offered to settle the case out of court for $10,000. The plaintiffs turned down the offer and the suit moved forward.

     On May 11, 2012, following a 4-day trial in the Erie federal court house the jury found that the two Erie police officers had in fact violated the plaintiffs' civil rights. While finding that the defendants had acted improperly, the jurors didn't believe the false arrests and house search had significantly harmed the family. As a result, in what could be interpreted as an insult, the jury awarded Maria Jordon $2 and her stepson and father $1 each.

     If the plaintiffs were angered and insulted by the token damages they didn't let on. In fact, Maria's husband told a local reporter the family was pleased by the verdict because they had sought justice not money.

     On May 26, 2012 the assistant city solicitor, unwilling to leave well enough alone, filed a motion asking the federal judge to order the plaintiffs to pay some of the city's legal costs created by the lawsuit. According to the Erie solicitor, Pennsylvania law "obligated a prevailing plaintiff to pay the defendant's post-offer costs after rejecting an offer more favorable than the judgement." The city wanted the judge to order the Jordons--the wronged parties in the suit--to pay $5,085 of the city's legal expenses.

     In March 2013 the judge dismissed the solicitor's case.

The Nicolas Holzer Mass Murder Case

     Some of the most disturbing and puzzling murder cases are ones that even from the killer's point of view make no sense. The good-boy Eagle scout who murders his parents in their sleep or guns down teachers and students at his school falls into this category. A young mother who drowns her baby in the bathtub or a longtime employee who shows up at work one day with mass murder on his mind are cases that defy understanding.

     Out-of-the-blue murders committed by noncriminal types who didn't exhibit symptoms of mental illness are frightening because they can't be predicted and therefore prevented. The murderers in these cases simply blindside their victims. Such cases are insidious in their straightforward banality. The feeling they create is this: no place is safe and no one can be trusted. We are all in danger.

     In 2004, after he and his wife Juana were divorced, Nicolas Holzer gained custody of his two sons who were one and three-years-old. Three years later Mr. Holzer and the boys moved into his parents' house in Goleta, California, a town of 30,000 ten miles northwest of Santa Barbara.

     Just after elven o'clock on the night of Monday, August 11, 2014, 45-year-old Nicolas Holzer called 911 and without emotion informed the dispatcher that he had just killed his family.

     When deputies with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office rolled up to the Holzer house on Walnut Park Lane not far from the University of California at Santa Barbara, they were met at the front door by the composed but bloodstained 911 caller.

     Inside the dwelling deputies discovered the blood-covered bodies of William Holzer, 73, Sheila Holzer, 74, and their two grandsons, Vincent, 10 and Sebastian who was thirteen. They had been stabbed to death by a pair of large kitchen knives.

     A calm and collected Nicolas Holzer informed the officers that he first murdered his father in the den. He then stabbed the boys to death as they slept in their beds. He said he killed his mother last. Officers found her body lying in the hallway outside the boys' bedroom.

     When asked why he had wiped-out his family Nicholas Holzer simply said, "I had to." He added that in killing them he had fulfilled what he believed was his destiny. This, of course, made no sense whatsoever.

     Also dead in the house was the family pet, an Australian Shepherd.

     The Holzer residence had not been visited in the past by police officers responding to domestic violence calls. And detectives, at least in the initial stage of the investigation, found no evidence of prior mental illness.

     Charged with four counts of first-degree murder, Nicolas Holzer was held in the Santa Barbara County Jail without bond. Because California had abolished the death sentence Mr. Holzer, if convicted as charged, faced life behind bars. His attorney, a month after the killings said he planned to plead his client not guilty by reason of insanity.

     Holzer's ex-wife Juana, in August 2016 filed a wrongful death suit against the mass murder suspect.

     In August 2018 a jury in Santa Barbara County, after rejecting the insanity defense, found Nicolas Holzer guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. At his sentencing hearing Holzer's attorney said, "Nicolas Holzer is not evil or heatless and he loved his family very much, but when his delusional beliefs escalated they overtook his ability to be rational.

     The judge sentenced Holzer to four life sentences without the possibility of parole.

The Justin Schneider Sexual Assault Case

     In 2017, 34-year-old Justin Schneider, a husband and father, worked as an Air Traffic Controller at the Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage, Alaska. In August 2017 at an Anchorage service station, he asked a 25-year-old woman he didn't know if he could give her a lift. She said yes and climbed into his vehicle.

     Instead of driving the woman to her destination Justin Schneider took her to a remote area where he grabbed her, put his hands around her throat and threatened to kill her if she screamed. The victim passed out and when she awoke Justin Schneider zipped up his trousers after he had masturbated on her. He gave her tissue to clean off his semen. He told her that he hadn't really intended to kill her, that it was just a threat to keep her quiet. She grabbed her belongings and alighted from the vehicle. As he drove off she had the presence of mind to note his license plate number.

     From the side of the road the victim used her cell phone to call 911 in which she provided the attacker's license plate registration. After being examined at a local hospital the victim picked Justin Schneider out of a police lineup.

     Following his arrest a grand jury sitting in Anchorage indicted Mr. Schneider on counts of kidnapping and felony assault, crimes that together carried a prison sentence of up to 99 years. Shortly thereafter the prosecutor in charge of the case dropped the kidnapping charges because the woman had gotten into Schneider's vehicle willingly. (In Pennsylvania and most other states, simply restraining a person in a vehicle against his or her will constitutes kidnapping.)

     Following the indictment Justin Schneider lost his air traffic control job.

     On September 22, 2018 Assistant District Attorney Andrew Grannik allowed Mr. Schneider to plead guilty to one count of second-degree felony assault. Judge Michael Corey sentenced him to two years in prison then suspended the prison time by giving him credit for a year in jail. The judge sentenced this violent sex offender to a year of house arrest. Moreover, Mr. Schneider was not required to register as a sex offender.

     Justin Schneider did not have to register as a sex offender because under Alaska law "physical contact with bodily fluid such as semen" did not qualify as a sex crime.

     It's not surprising that the disposition of this case caused a public uproar. In defending the state's handling of this case a spokesperson with the Alaska Department of Law announced that the plea deal had been based on an expert's opinion that Mr. Schneider would not re-offend. This absurd rationale did not attenuate the criticism of the prosecutor or the judge.

     In responding to the public outrage over the Justin Schneider case, Alaska's governor Bill Walker said he planned to propose legislation that would make "coming in contact with semen" a sex offense that carried a sentence of two to twelve years in prison plus registry as a sex offender. Even those who believed the word of a politician were still angry about how the authorities had handled this case.

     Justin Schneider said the experience had made him a better person. But what about his victim? How did his "experience" affect her? No one asked because no one in Alaska's criminal justice system seemed to care.

The Case of the Sleeping Judge

     On December 29, 2013, 21-year-old Daquantrius Johnson and two of his friends, Keith Hickles and Quanique Thomas-Hammen, pulled into the drive-through lane at a Taco Bell in Wichita, Kansas. As they waited to put in their orders they witnessed the pickup truck ahead of them suddenly lurch forward and crash into the fast-food speaker.

     The pickup truck's driver, 43-year-old Danielle Zimmerman, lost consciousness from a ruptured brain aneurism. Daquantrius Johnson and his passengers approached the unconscious woman's vehicle. They had no intention of rendering aid. Instead, they saw an opportunity for theft. While Hickles and Thomas-Hammen rummaged through Zimmerman's purse and grabbed her wallet, 

daquantrius Johnson pulled her wedding ring off her finger.

     The next day Danielle Zimmerman died at a nearby hospital.

     Daquantrius Johnson and his friends, as they stripped the unconscious woman of her valuables, were recorded on a Taco Bell surveillance camera.

     Not long after Johnson, Hickles and Thomas-Hammen picked their victim clean, they were taken into custody. About a year later Hickles and Thomas-Hammen pleaded guilty to theft and were sentenced to nine and nineteen months respectively.

     In March 2015 Daquantrius Johnson went on trial for aggravated robbery. Following a short deliberation the jury found him guilty as charged. Sedgwick County Judge Christopher Magana sentenced Johnson, who at the time was on probation for burglary, to eleven years in prison.

     In 2016, while serving time for the Taco Bell depravity, Daquantrius Johnson was in a Sedgwick Country courtroom again, this time as a defendant in an unrelated firearms case. On the first day of the proceeding trial judge Benjamin Burgess fell asleep on the bench.

     While everyone in court witnessed the judge's nap the trial went forward and Daquantrius Johnson was found guilty. Judge Burgess sentenced him to eight months in prison, time to be served after he completed his Taco Bell sentence.

     Attorneys representing Daquantrius Johnson in the firearms case appealed his conviction to the Kansas Court of Appeals on grounds that following his nap Judge Burgess should have declared a mistrial.

     In 2017 the three-judge appellate panel in a 2-1 decision denied Mr. Johnson a new trial.

     Johnson's lawyers contested the state appeals court ruling before the Kansas Supreme Court. In November 2019 the state's highest court ruled that while Judge Burgess' courtroom snooze constituted "regrettable misconduct," it did not justify grounds for a new trial. Daquantrius Johnson's firearms conviction would therefore stand.

     While legal scholars argued over the supreme court's decision, very few commentators expressed sympathy for the man who had ripped a wedding ring off a dying woman's finger. There are some crimes that cannot be forgiven, and this was one of them.

The Rise And Fall Of The Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility

     Mount McGregor is a mountain in Saratoga County in upstate New York. In 1913 in the mountain town of Moreau, the state built a tuberculosis treatment retreat called The Sanatorium On The Mountain. The facility closed in 1945 and remained unused until the New York Department of Corrections in 1976 converted the abandoned complex into a medium security prison for men. The McGregor Correctional Facility, because of a series of prison escapes, became known as "Camp Walkaway." In 2014 the state closed the penitentiary.

     The Grant State Historic Site sits on the grounds of the empty prison. The main tourist attraction on the site is Grant's Cottage where Ulysses S. Grant spent the last weeks of his life finishing his memoir. Grant died of throat cancer in 1885. (To this day Grant's memoir is considered the gold standard in the genre.)

     On July 23, 2014 a WNYT-TV crew led by reporter Mark Mulholland showed up at Grant's Cottage to film a piece in honor of his death. The next day the television crew returned to the historic site to finish the project.

     As the TV crew shot footage of Grant's Cottage that just happened to include, in the background, a view of the former prison, a New York state collections officer drove up to inform Mulholland that he was not allowed to film anything on Mount Gregor. The officer, who identified himself as Lieutenant Dom, said, "No filming."

     The stunned reporter replied, "We're doing a story on Grant's Cottage."

     Lieutenant Dom, apparently under the illusion that the television people were on the mountain to clandestinely film and do a story on the closed prison, said, "You're up here for different purposes. You'll have to leave the mountain."

     "Are you telling me we can't visit a historic site?"

     "You can visit but you can't film at Grant's Cottage," the officer replied.

     When reporter Mulholland and his colleagues tried to film the cottage from another spot, other corrections officers came onto the scene and blocked their access to the site.

     As Mulholland and his crew started to drive off McGregor Mountain they were stopped by a state trooper who demanded they turn over the footage they had shot of Grant's Cottage. Mulholland couldn't believe a state police officer wanted to confiscate the footage of a public tourist attraction.

     The reporter, after making calls to his TV station and other officials with the state, left the mountain with his Grant's Cottage footage.

     A few days later a spokesperson for the New York Department of Corrections told a WNYT-TV correspondent that Mr. Mulholland and his people had "blatantly disregarded a state police officer who informed them they were trespassing." Moreover, according to this corrections bureaucrat, "department regulations state that photographs and video taken on prison grounds require prior permission." This policy, according to the spokesperson, was for the "safety of all staff, visitors and prisoners."

     It didn't matter that the prison seen in the background didn't have prisoners or institutional visitors. Perhaps the corrections officials were worried that the TV crew was doing an expose about a vacant prison that still employed 76 corrections officers.

     In October 2017 the state of New York announced that it had halted efforts to find a new use or a buyer for the shuttered prison. The state police used the site's old shooting range, and SWAT teams utilized the abandoned buildings for training.

     In 2019 state governments across the country continue to close prisons. These closures in part reflect the trend in American criminal justice to put fewer convicted criminals behind bars. Critics of this policy were alarmed that going soft on criminals would contribute to the rise of crime rates. And it did.

Rudy Eugene: The Case Of The Naked Flesh Eater

     As a nation of drug addicts and alcoholics, have we created a class of taser-resistant monsters and flesh-eating zombies?

Excited Delirium Syndrome

     According to  Dr. Deborah Mash, the University of Miami neurologist who coined the term Excited Delirium, men who are high on drugs and/or alcohol, and are mentally ill, can  fly off the handle when placed under stress. Their body temperatures soar to 103-5 degrees and their hearts race. When in this state these men also possess supernatural strength and can be resistant to taser shocks. Many of these men, often overweight, die of cardiac or respiratory arrest when fighting with the police. Among forensic pathologists in the United States, Canada and England, Excited Delirium Syndrome has become a recognized cause of death.

Rudy Eugene

     At two in the afternoon on Saturday, May 26, 2012, Larry Vegas while riding his bicycle on the MacArthur off-ramp to Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, saw a naked man on top of another nude man on the pedestrian walkway. The area under the causeway, populated by homeless people, was littered with cardboard mats, personal belongings, syringes and broken bottles. The person on the pavement wasn't moving as the man on top chewed away at his face. The witness on the bicycle yelled at the attacker to stop. This man, with pieces of bloody flesh hanging out of his mouth, raised his head, looked at Mr. Vegas and growled.

     Mr. Vegas, now joined by other horrified witnesses, flagged down a Miami Police officer who ordered the attacker to desist. The attacker, paying no attention to the cop, the rubber-necking motorists and the witnesses gathering at the scene, continued to tear away his victim's face. Obviously stunned and repelled by what he saw the officer shot the attacker. When the bullet didn't stop the gruesome assault the officer fired again, three times, killing the flesh eating predator.

     Paramedics rushed the bloody badly mauled victim to Jackson Memorial Hospital's Ryder Trauma Center. The homeless victim, whose face had been chewed beyond recognition, was in critical condition.

     The man shot to death by the Miami police officer was a 31-year-old man named Rudy Eugene. Police theorized that Mr. Eugene was under the influence of "Cocaine Psychosis," a condition which causes the body to heat-up. Perhaps this was why the attacker was nude.

     Forensic pathologists, police officers, emergency room doctors, EMS personnel and people who treat drug abusers had been aware of Cocaine Psychosis since 1987. Cocaine causes dopamine levels in the body to rise, causing euphoria. The dropping of the dopamine level when the drug wears off can cause schizophrenic-like symptoms and/or extremely violent behavior. Cocaine Psychosis was  common in longtime drug abusers.

     At two in the morning on the day of the attack, Rudy Eugene, while at his girlfriend's house, rifled through his clothing and hers, then drove off in his purple Chevy sedan. He told a friend he was going to Miami Beach to attend a Memorial Day party. Later in the day his car broke down and as he walked across the 3-mile causeway he stated taking off his clothes. Police found his clothing and his driver's license along the road.

     As the investigation progressed, detectives began to suspect that Mr. Eugene had been under the influence of a LSD-like synthetic drug called "bath salts." His former wife, Jenny Ductant said this to a reporter: "I wouldn't say he had mental problems but he always felt like people were against him."

     The authorities identified the victim as 65-year-old Ronald Poppo, a man who lived under the causeway and had been homeless for 30 years. He was a 1964 graduate of New York City's elite Stuyvesant High School. Before hitting the skids Mr. Poppo worked as the guidance officer at Stuyvesant. He had lived in Florida 40 years, during which time he had been arrested for petty crimes. Before the Miami police officer shot and killed Rudy Eugene the attacker had been chewing on Poppo's face for 18 minutes. When the ambulance took the victim from the scene, he had lost 80 percent of his face including his nose, cheeks, lips and an eye.

     Rudy Eugene's girlfriend told detectives that she met him in 2007. Since that time she and Rudy Eugene had an on-again off-again relationship. The man she portrayed, a guy who read from a Bible he carried everywhere with him, did not comport with a man who had eaten a stranger's face. While the girlfriend admitted that Mr. Eugene smoked pot, she believed that on the day he was shot by the police he had been unknowingly drugged. She also floated the possibility that someone put a Voodoo curse on him.

     In 2004 Mr. Eugene was arrested for battery after he threatened his mother and smashed her furniture. He had also threatened the responding police officer who shot him with a taser device.

     Toxicological tests revealed that Rudy Eugene, when he attacked the homeless man, was not under the influence of bath salts. He was, however, high on marijuana. Exactly what caused Mr. Eugene to do what he did to a complete stranger went with him to the grave.

Did Pastor Richard Shahan Murder His Wife?

     In 2013 Richard Shahan, the 53-year-old associate pastor of the First Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama lived in Homewood, Alabama with his wife Karen. Reverend Shahan functioned as the church's children and family pastor and facilities director. Karen Shahan had a job at a nearby Hobby Lobby store. The couple lived in a rental house owned by the church.

     After graduating in 1985 from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, Richard Shahan joined the staff at the First Baptist Church in Bryon, Texas where he was the Associate Pastor of Education and Family Development. From 1989 to 1999 he served at the Shades Mountain Baptist Church in Birmingham. In 2000 he became Associate Paster in Education and Administration for the Hickory Grove Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina where he worked seven years. From 2007 to 2009 he was employed by the Kimble Knight Ministries in Brentwood, Tennessee. From Brentwood in 2009 he and his wife moved back to Birmingham where he joined the First Baptist Church in that city.

     In 2003, while working in Charlotte, North Carolina, Richard Shahan formed his own company, an Internet-based curriculum provider called One Vine, Inc. In 2010, while living in Birmingham, Pastor Shahan and his wife filed for personal bankruptcy. According to court records the couple listed $443,500 in assets and $505,665 in debts. At the time they had a monthly income of $5,874 which did not include a $2,516 monthly housing allowance from the church.

     In September 2012 Pastor Shahan took a leave of absence from the First Baptist Church in Birmingham to travel to Kazakhstan where he acquired a visiting professor position at the Bible Institute in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He returned to Birmingham in May 2013.

     On July 23, 2013 Karen Louise Shahan's co-workers at Hobby Lobby became concerned when the 52-year-old pastor's wife didn't show up for work. Calls to her home went unanswered. At 11:15 that Tuesday morning police officers with the Homewood Police Department pursuant to a welfare check made a gruesome discovery. The officers found that someone had stabbed Karen Shahan to death in her bedroom. The victim's blood had been spilled throughout the dwelling. A crime scene investigator told reporters that this was the most brutal murder site he ever witnessed.

     Pastor Richard Shahan was not home the morning police discovered the body of his repeatedly stabbed wife. Detectives believed that the victim was murdered Monday night or early the next day. There were no signs of forced entry and nothing from the house had been stolen. The victim had not been sexually assaulted. Suspicion immediately fell upon the husband. The fact he was a pastor meant nothing to homicide detectives who know there is no such thing as an unlikely murder suspect.

     Detectives on August 7, 2013 questioned Pastor Shahan at the Homewood police station. When asked to account for his whereabouts that Monday night and Tuesday morning he said he had been out of town visiting one of the couple's two sons.

     On August 8, 2013, the day after the station house interrogation, detectives took Richard Shahan into custody "for investigative purposes." Under Alabama law a suspect could only be held for investigation 48 hours. If the arrestee was not charged with a crime he or she must be released.

     Following the suspect's 48 hours behind bars the authorities released him because the prosecutor didn't have enough evidence to level a homicide charge. Because he was a suspect in his wife's brutal murder officials at the First Baptist Church placed Pastor Shahan on paid administrative leave.

     A Jefferson County prosecutor, shortly after Pastor Shahan announced on December 16, 2013 that he would be leaving the United States to do three years of mission work in Germany, charged him with first-degree murder. On New Years Day, 2014 police officers in Nashville, Tennessee arrested the pastor as he was about to board a plane to Germany.

     Jim Roberson, chief of the Homewood Police Department told reporters that, "Once he [Shahan] got over to Germany or Russia the chances of extraditing him are pretty nil. We can't get Snowden [the NSA leaker], probably wouldn't get Shahan back either."

     On January 7, 2014 Richard Shahan, though his attorney said that he would waive his right to an extradition hearing. Less than a week later the authorities in Alabama booked the murder suspect into the Jefferson County Jail.

     The Shahan case prosecutor did not reveal what evidence the state had against the defendant. Some of the unanswered questions in the case involved whether investigators had identified the murder weapon. Also, did physical evidence connect Mr. Shahan to the bloody murder scene; and did detectives break the suspect's alibi? It appeared the motive in the case was money.

     On October 23, 2014 a local grand jury indicted Richard Shahan for the murder of his wife. The suspect avoided jail by posting his $100,000 bond. He was, however, due to the terms of his release, under house arrest at his mother's dwelling in Homewood, Tennessee.

     In March 2016 a Jefferson County judge postponed Richard Shahan's murder trial nine months to January 9, 2017. The judge did not reveal the reason for the delay. In murder cases delays often help the defense at the expense of the prosecution.

     The defendant's murder charge was dismissed on April 10, 2017 when the Alabama Attorney General's Office declared there was not enough evidence to prosecute the former pastor.

The "Tiger King" Murder-For-Hire Case

      From February to June 2006 the animal rights group PETA conducted an investigation into the activities of a big cat breeder and private zoo owner named Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage. The 42-year-old owner of the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park, a ramshackle petting zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, called himself "Joe Exotic." Maldonado-Passage, in addition to owning the zoo, supplied tiger cubs to the cruel petting zoo industry. 

     PETA activists had tried to shut down Maldonado-Passage's operation for several years. The PETA investigation revealed the Wynnewood zoo's tigers were beaten, deprived of food and denied basic veterinary treatment. As a result the U.S. Department of Agriculture fined Maldonado-Passage $25,000 for violating the federal Animal Welfare Act. 

     In 2011 the Humane Society conducted an investigation of Maldonado-Passage's animal park. An undercover Humane Society investigator, after working at the private zoo for four months, reported that tigers were beaten and whipped during training. Moreover, visitors to the zoo were bitten and attacked by tiger cubs that were too old to be near people. Tiger cubs that were so young they hadn't opened their eyes were handled by park visitors, traumatizing the animals.

     The results of these investigations did not result in the shutting down of Maldonado-Passage's operation.

     Joseph Maldonado-Passage, in 2015, ran for the office of U.S. President as an Independent candidate. He had also run for Governor of Oklahoma, a race he also lost.

     In 2016, after the deaths of 23 tiger cubs at the Wynnewood Animal Park, PETA members rescued 39 abused tigers, two bears and two baboons from the zoo. The place was still not shut down.

     Carole Baskin, an animal rights activist and owner of Big Cat Rescue, a 69-acre animal sanctuary in Tampa, Florida had tried to put Maldonado-Passage out of the big cat breeding and petting zoo business. She sued Maldonado-Passage for his unauthorized use of her Big Cat Rescue's trademark and in 2016 won a million-dollar civil judgment against him.

     As his debts mounted Maldonado-Passage harassed Baskin with online videos in which he accused her of all sorts of criminal behavior. In order to escape his financial responsibilities Maldonado-Passage transferred ownership of the animal park to his mother. A federal judge ruled this transfer of ownership void, an attempt by Maldonado-Passage to defraud his creditors. 

     Enraged and desperate, Joseph Maldonado-Passage in November 2017 paid an unnamed man $3,000 to travel to Tampa, Florida and murder his nemesis, Carole Baskin. The murder-for-hire mastermind promised to pay the hit man an additional $7,000 when he finished the job. For some reason the would-be assassin failed to carry out his assignment.

     In December 2017 Maldonado-Passage reached out to another unnamed man and asked him to murder the animal rights activist. This person went straight to the FBI. Later that month Maldonado-Passage and an undercover FBI agent met. At one point during the recorded conversation Maldonado-Passage said, "Just follow her into a small parking lot and just cap her and drive off." Maldonado-Passage offered to pay the FBI agent $10,000 for the hit.

     On September 5, 2018 Timmothy J. Downing, the United States Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma acquired an indictment against Joseph Maldonado-Passage charging him with two counts of murder-for-hire, several counts of violating the Endangered Species Act and multiple counts of crimes against wildlife.

     FBI agents, two days after the indictment arrested Maldonado-Passage in Gulf Breeze, Florida. He was booked into the Santa Rosa County jail to await extradition back to Oklahoma. 

     The Maldonado-Passage murder-for-hire trial got underway on March 25, 2019. After six days of testimony in which the defendant took the stand and claimed that he hadn't been serious when he solicited Carole Baskin's murder, the jury found him guilty as charged. 

     Several months after the conviction the federal district judge sentenced the 56-year-old Maldonado-Passage to 22 years in prison. Attorneys for Maldonado-Passage said they would appeal.

     Following Maldonado-Passage's sentencing Carole Baskin, on her Big Cat Rescue website, posted this: "Because of his constant threats to kill me, I have found myself seeing every bystander as a potential threat. My daughter, my husband, my mother, my staff and volunteers have all been in peril because of his obsession with seeing me dead."

     In March 2020 Maldonado-Passage, while serving his time at a federal prison in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, filed a $94 million civil suit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agent and a former business partner he blamed for his arrest and conviction.

     Netflix, in March 2020 aired "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness," a several part documentary that made Maldonado-Passage a pop culture celebrity. The following month the animal abuser and murder-for-hire mastermind was featured on the cover of People Magazine.

     In June 2020 a federal district judge granted Carole Baskin and her animal rescue group control of Maldonado-Passage's Oklahoma zoo. Homes were found for all of the abused animals.

The Michael Nolan Murder-Suicide Case

     Michael Nolan resided in his 86-year-old father's house in Brentwood, New Hampshire, a town of 4,200 in the southern part of the state. The 47-year-old son and his father, Walter Nolan, shared the two-story house in a tree-shaded neighborhood restricted to people 55 and older.

     At four in the afternoon of Monday, May 12, 2014 a neighbor on Mill Pond Road called 911 to report shouting and screams coming from the Nolan residence. Ten minutes later officer Stephen Arkell, a part time 15-year veteran of the Brentwood Police Department, pulled up to the scene and was let into the house by Walter Nolan, the owner of the dwelling.

     Four minutes after officer Arkell entered the Nolan house Derek Franek, an officer with the Fremont Police Department, arrived at the scene. Inside the house officer Arkell, as he spoke to the older man, was shot and killed by Walter Nolan's son Michael. When officer Franek entered the dwelling through the front entrance Michael Nolan opened fire on him. Both the Fremont officer and the senior Mr. Nolan managed to escape the house without being shot. Once outside officer Franek radioed that an officer was down and that he had been fired upon by someone inside the Nolan dwelling.

     Officer Franek's urgent call brought a New Hampshire state SWAT unit and the Seacoast Regional Emergency Response Team. Walter Nolan, in a state of shock and unable to communicate coherently with police officers was taken by ambulance to Exeter Hospital.

     Inside the police-surrounded house Michael Nolan poured gasoline throughout the dwelling, lit a match then began shooting out a window at the SWAT officers. When the SWAT police fired back a bullet hit a propane gas line that touched off a massive explosion.

     At six o'clock that evening, thirty minutes after the propane blast blew off a third of the roof, firefighters began dousing the charred structure with water. Firefighters remained on the scene until nine-thirty that night.

    Cause and origin arson investigators combing through the debris found Michael Nolan's remains. Lying next to his body the officers found three handguns, three rifles and a cache of ammunition.

     Brentwood police officer Stephen Arkell, killed in the line of duty, left behind a wife and two teenage daughters. He was 48-years-old.

     Although a forensic pathologist performed an autopsy on Michael Nolan the medical examiner's office did not immediately reveal if he had been shot to death by the SWAT police, died in the fire or had killed himself.

     According to neighbors Michael Nolan rarely spoke to anyone and spent most of his time in his room watching television. Police officers had not been called to the Nolan residence in the past and Michael did not have a criminal record.

     In May 2015 the authorities, under pressure from the local media, released the results of the joint investigation of the case by the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office, the State Police Major Crime Unit and the ATF. According to the report Mr. Nolan shot himself to death before the house exploded. In the report he was described as a "stressed out" alcoholic gun enthusiast.

The Lawrence Capener Knife Attack

     On Sunday morning, April 28, 2013, all hell broke loose inside St. Jude Thaddeus Catholic Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The mass had just ended and the choir had begun its final hymn when a 24-year-old man who had been nervous acting and fidgety throughout the service vaulted over several pews toward the front of the church. Lawrence Capener, the crazed churchgoer, possessed a knife which he used to stab the choir director, Adam Alvarez, several times.

     Gerald Madrid, the church flutist, came to Adam Alvarez's rescue by attempting to put Lawrence Capener into a bear hug. During the scuffle, Mr. Capener, before collapsing to the church floor under the weight of other churchgoers who mobbed him, stabbed the flutist five times in the back. Daren De Aquero, an off-duty Albuquerque police officer put the subdued assailant into handcuffs.

     Greg Aragon, an off-duty Albuquerque Fire Department Lieutenant treated the choir director, the man who came to the director's aid and a female member of the choir who was slashed by Capener's knife. None of the victims incurred life-threatening injuries.

     As Lawrence Capener was led out of the church an elderly parishioner spoke to him. She said, "God bless you, forgive yourself."

     "You don't know about the Masons," the attacker replied.

     Later that Sunday a local prosecutor charged Lawrence Capener with three counts of aggravated battery. A magistrate set his bail at $250,000.

     After detectives advised Mr. Capener of his Miranda rights the subject informed his interrogators that he was "99 percent sure" that the choir director was a Mason involved in a conspiracy "that is far more reaching than I could or would believe." He apologized for stabbing the flutist and the woman in the choir.

     While Mr. Capener did not belong to the 3,000-member church, his mother was an active parishioner. He had recently graduated from a community college and had started a new job. According to people who know him, Lawrence Capener struggled with mental illness.

     In February 2014 Carpener's attorney petitioned the court to lower his bail so he could live at home under the supervision of a GPS device. The judge, after hearing from Carpener's victims, denied the request. The trial was scheduled for September 2014.

     On September 29, 2014, pursuant to a plea deal a judge sentenced Lawrence Capener to five years in prison with one year credit for time spent in jail. 

     In June 2016, five days before he was scheduled for early release, Capener punched a prison guard. The assault kept him behind bars until his release on parole in April 2017. 

     The man who almost murdered three people and assaulted a prison guard served less than three years in prison. 

Serial Killer Samuel Little

     In 2012, FBI agents arrested 72-year-old Samuel Little at a Kentucky homeless shelter on narcotic charges that had been filed in Los Angeles. DNA samples taken from Little in Los Angeles linked him to three unsolved murders committed in the city from 1987 to 1989. The three female victims had been beaten and strangled, their bodies dumped in an alley, a dumpster and a garage. Convicted of these murders in 2014, Mr. Little, with a history of crime going back to 1956, was sentenced to three consecutive life terms with no possibility of parole.

     Following Samuel Little's DNA matches in Los Angeles, authorities in LA asked the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) to work up a full criminal profile of him. This background inquiry linked Little to several more murders of women.

     In early 2018 Samuel Little revealed to FBI interrogators that between 1970 and 2005 he murdered 93 women. He confessed to killing these victims in California, Kentucky, Florida and Ohio. These women were marginalized vulnerable prostitutes addicted to drugs. He said his M.O. involved knocking out his victims then strangling them. He dumped their bodies in alleys and other hidden places.

     Because this serial killer's victims were not shot, stabbed or bludgeoned to death, many of their deaths went into the books as drug overdoses, accidents or natural causes. Some of the bodies remained unidentified and most of these deaths did not generate criminal investigations.

     The Samuel Little case illustrates that serial killers, due to who they kill, how they kill and where they kill, often escape detection. While DNA science has helped connect multiple homicides to a single killer, without confessions these cases often remain unsolved. 

     On December 30, 2020 the 80-year-old serial killer died in a California hospital of heart failure.

The Great Milwaukee Stradivarius Heist

     At twenty after ten on the night of January 27, 2014, violinist Frank Almond, the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Orchestra, walked toward his car in the parking lot outside Wisconsin Lutheran College's auditorium where he had just performed a chamber concert. As the 49-year-old musician neared his car a man emerged out of the darkness and stunned him with a taser gun.  Mr. Almond and his violin fell to the ground. The robber picked up the 300-year-old Stradivarius and jumped into a minivan driven by a woman.

     Almond's Lipinski Strad was given to him on "permanent loan" in 2008 by an anonymous patron. As one of 650 of Antonio Stradivari's instruments still in existence, the stolen violin was valued at $5 million.

     Milwaukee detectives immediately began viewing surveillance camera footage in search of clues. FBI agents assigned to the bureau's art theft unit were dispatched to act as consultants in the case. Investigators notified authorities with Interpol in the event the thieves tried to sell the stolen violin in Europe. A $100,000 reward went up for any information leading to the recovery of the instrument.

     On Monday, February 3, 2014 Milwaukee detectives assigned to the high-profile case arrested two men and a woman. One of the men, 41-year-old Salah Salahadyn, had pleaded guilty in 2000 to possessing a $25,000 sculpture that had been stolen from a Milwaukee art gallery in 1995. The judge sentenced him to five years in prison.

     The second man taken into custody, a 36-year-old suspect who went by the name Universal Knowledge Allah, had no criminal record. Both suspects were charged with robbery, an offense in Wisconsin that can bring up to 15 years in prison.

     Court Commissioner Katherine Kucharski set Salahadyn's bail at $10,000, an extremely low amount given the fact he had a lengthy criminal history that included bail jumping. The magistrate set Allah's bond at $500.

     Charges against the suspected female get-a-way driver were dropped. The authorities did not release this woman's name.

     On Wednesday, February 5, 2014, two days after the arrests, Milwaukee chief of police Edward A. Flynn announced that one of the suspects led detectives to the stolen Stradivarius. The violin was found in a suitcase in the attic of a house in Milwaukee. The stolen instrument had never left the city. (Perhaps the woman driver in the case was the one who cooperated with detectives in return for her dropped charges.)

     In July 2014 Universal Allah was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. The Milwaukee County judge, in November 2014, sentenced Salah Salahadyn to seven years behind bars.

A Short History Of Scientific Criminal Identification

     In 1901 Scotland Yard became the first law enforcement agency in the world to routinely fingerprint its arrestees. Fingerprint identification came to America in 1904 when the St. Louis Police Department established its fingerprint bureau. Before fingerprinting, arrestees were identified by sets of eleven body measurements, a system created in the 1870s by the Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon. By 1914, the year of Bertillon's death, fingerprinting had replaced anthropometry or Bertillonage in every country except the United States where, in many jurisdictions, the outdated system was used until the 1920s.

     Because a set of inked, rolled-on fingerprint impressions can be classified or grouped into ridge patterns--loops, whorls and arches--arrestees who use aliases can be physically identified. Through centralized fingerprint repositories comprised of millions of fingerprint data, individual arrest histories can be maintained on habitual offenders. These fingerprint collections have been responsible for the apprehension of tens of thousands of fugitives.

     Beyond the use of fingerprinting to maintain crime records and catch repeat offenders and fugitives, crime scene finger marks--so called latent fingerprints--constitute one of the most common methods of linking suspects to the sites of their crimes. While latents can be made visible by various chemicals, iodine fuming and laser technology, the most popular method of identifying and preserving fingerprints, particularly on hard surfaces, involves the use of fingerprint powder and special lifting tape.

     Crime scene latents can be scanned into a massive computer--the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS)--and matched to single fingerprints in the data base. Identifying unknown crime scene latents involves the ability to prove who committed the offense.

     Perhaps the three most significant developments in the history of law enforcement are fingerprint classification, AFIS and the cutting edge science of DNA "fingerprinting" that burst upon the scene in the mid-1990s. 

Breaking Into a House Can Be Fatal

     Eighty-year-old Thomas Greer lived in Bixby Knolls, a neighborhood in Long Beach, California. Mr. Greer came home at nine o'clock on the night of July 22, 2014 and found two burglars in his house. He shot and killed one of them who, prior to being shot, said, "Don't shoot me, I'm pregnant. I'm going to have a baby."The homeowner shot her anyway.

     At a press conference regarding the shootings Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell said the woman, 28-year-old Andrea Miller, showed no outward signs of being pregnant.

     Officers arrested Andrea Miller's accomplice, 26-year-old Gus Adams on charges of residential burglary and murder. Because Miller had been killed during the commission of a felony perpetrated by Mr. Adams, he was charged with criminal homicide under the felony-murder doctrine. The judge set Adams' bail at $1 million.

     Both Andria Miller and Gus Adams had criminal histories involving burglary. Investigators believed the couple broke into Mr. Greer's home three times before. When Mr. Greer returned home that night and encountered the intruders the suspects attacked him, hitting him with their fists and body slamming him to the floor, breaking his collar bone.

     While Gus Adams tried to pry open Mr. Greer's safe, the burglary and assault victim snuck into a room and grabbed his .22-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver. As Mr. Greer opened fire the burglars fled through the garage and into an alley. The homeowner chased after them firing his gun. One of his bullets hit Andrea Miller who died in the alley.

     On July 29, 2014 police officers arrested Gus Adam's 49-year-old mother, Ruby Adams on suspicion she had acted as a lookout in the burglary of the Greer home. The judge set her bail at $175,000.

     The authorities also announced that according to the medical examiner's office Andrea Miller was not pregnant.

     In January 2015 the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office decided not to prosecute Thomas Greer for killing Andrea Miller.

     Ruby Adams, in April 2016, pleaded no contest to residential burglary. The judge sentenced her to three years in prison.

     In August 2016 a jury acquitted Gus Adams of felony-murder but found him guilty of first-degree residential burglary and elder abuse. The judge sentenced him to 12 years behind bars.

Actor Lillo Brancato's Role In A Police Officer's Murder

     In 1993 a 17-year-old actor from the Borough of Yonkers in New York City named Lillo Brancato Jr. starred with Robert DeNiro in the movie "A Bronx Tale." Brancato, in 2000, appeared as a minor character in the HBO series "The Sopranos."

     On December 10, 2005 Mr. Brancato and an accomplice, Steven Armento, broke a window at an unoccupied home in Pelham Bay Queens. The 29-year-old actor and Armento were looking for drugs.

     Daniel Enchautegui lived next door to the house Brancato and Armento broke into. The 28-year-old New York City patrolman with three years on the force just arrived home following his 8  PM to 4 AM shift. When the officer heard the sound of breaking glass he called 911 and went outside to investigate. It was 5:15 in the morning.

     Steven Armento, when confronted by Daniel Enchautegui, shot the officer in the chest. Enchautegui returned fire, wounding both of the intruders. Shortly thereafter physicians at the Jacobi Medical Center pronounced the police officer dead.

      Lillo Brancato and Steven Armento were tried separately for the officer's murder in 2008. A jury found Armento guilty of first-degree murder. A judge in 2009 sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole.

     At Lillo Brancato's trial the defendant admitted breaking into the house with Steven Armento to score drugs. Mr. Brancato also testified that he was going through heroin withdrawal that day.

     Pursuant to the felony-murder doctrine, if a person is killed during the commission of a felony, all of the participants of the crime can be held culpable for the death. Under the law the fact Mr. Brancato wasn't the one who pulled the trigger did not exempt him from legal culpability for the officer's killing.

     The jury acquitted Brancato of burglary and felony-murder. They did find him guilty of attempted burglary. The judge sentenced Mr. Brancato to ten years in prison but gave him credit for the three years he spent in jail awaiting his trial.

     Lillo Brancato, on December 31, 2013, after agreeing to a five-year period of parole that included a ten PM curfew, walked out of the Hudson Correctional Facility.

     Brancato's early release angered members of the New York City Police Department as well as relatives of the slain police officer. In speaking to reporters a spokesperson for the New York Patrolman's Benevolent Association said: "It is our firm belief that Lillo Brancato is guilty of the murder of police officer Daniel Enchautegui even though he was only convicted of attempted burglary."

     Enchautegui's sister, Yolanda Rosa, said, "I'm still upset that Brancato was not convicted of murder and that he did not serve enough time."

    In 2018, Lillo Brancato starred in the Netflix documentary, "Wasted Talent," a film that chronicled his time in prison, his decision to get off heroin and his struggle to redeem himself.

The Eye-Drop Poison Case

     Dr. Harry Johnston since June 2009 had treated Thurman Nesbitt for a mysterious illness. The 45-year-old patient, a resident of McConnellsburg in central Pennsylvania, suffered from nausea, low blood pressure and breathing difficulties. Dr. Johnston, suspecting that his patient was being poisoned, had his blood analyzed. On July 27, 2012 the serology tests revealed the presence of tetrahydrozolin, a chemical found in over-the-counter eye-drops.

     On August 10, 2012 troopers with the Pennsylvania State Police arrested Thurman Nesbitt's girlfriend, Vickie Jo Mills. The 33-year-old McConnellsburg woman, on probation for forgery, admitted putting Visine drops into her boyfriend's drinking water. Vickie Mills told her interrogators that she had been making Nesbitt sick since June 2009. She said it was not her intention to poison her boyfriend to death. To the obvious question of why she had done this she explained that she made Mr. Nesbitt sick in an effort to get him to pay more attention to her.

     Most women who use illness to attract attention make themselves sick pursuant to a syndrome called Munchausen. In Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy these women make their children sick. It's not clear why Mills thought poisoning her boyfriend would improve their relationship.

     The Fulton County prosecutor charged Vickie Jo Mills with ten counts of aggravated assault which carried a combined maximum sentence of 240 years in prison and a $300,000 fine. Shortly after her arrest the authorities released her on a $75,000 surety bond.

     On October 16, 2002 the district attorney dropped nine of the ten counts in return for the defendant's guilty plea. A Fulton County judge on February 14, 2013 sentenced Vickie Jo Mills to two to four years in prison.

     It's odd that something you can put into your eyes will make you sick if you put it into your stomach.

Criminal Voyeurism

     The act of voyeurism runs the gamut of watching reality TV to window peeping to the use of hidden and clandestine cameras for one's sexual gratification. In an era of adult entertainment it seems odd that so many teachers, clergymen, politicians, bosses, lawyers and physicians have been caught using covert devices like pen cameras to satisfy their sexual curiosities.

     A man (this is not a crime usually committed by women) who risks his family, career and position in society by secretly videotaping females (and young boys) changing clothes, showering, using the restroom or merely going about their daily activity must possess a powerful sexual compulsion that by any standard is deviant. Because this form of pathological voyeurism is also a crime, the clandestine video-taper also risks going to prison. The risk/reward imbalance inherent in this bizarre behavior suggests that these voyeurs are beyond the reach of counselors and medication.

Richard Watkins

     In March 2010 an elementary school teacher in Calne, a town of 13,000 in southwest England was caught using a pen camera to video-record boys as they changed their clothes for physical education class. Richard Watkins had been doing this for two years and had thousands of clandestinely acquired images on his home computer.

     The 28-year-old teacher and former children's entertainer (said to possess "circus skills") pleaded guilty to thirteen counts of criminal voyeurism. The judge sentenced Watkins to four years in prison.

James Mucha

     In March 2011 James Mucha, an employee of a small manufacturing company in Avon Lake, Ohio, was caught using a pen camera in the women's restroom. A female employee noticed a pen standing upright behind the door after she closed it. Thinking this was an odd place for a writing instrument the woman picked it up, unscrewed the cap and found a mini-camera.

     The 43-year-old pen camera owner was charged in August 2011 with three counts of voyeurism. (The company fired him.) Three months later the judge sentenced Mr. Mucha to 150 days in the county jail followed by one year of probation. The judge also fined him $2,000. (Voyeurs who video adult women usually get lighter sentences than men who record children.)

Joshua Waguespack

     In April 2012 in LeLand, Florida, police officers arrested Joshua Waguespack, a seventh grade math teacher at St. Peter's Catholic School. The 33-year-old had used a pen camera to take videos of two girls, ages 12 and 13, who used his teacher's storage closet to change into their gym clothes. He had downloaded these images onto his iPhone and iPad.

     After pleading no contest to two counts of criminal voyeurism in February 2013 the judge sentenced Mr. Waguespack to five years in prison. (This is a relatively heavy sentence for a defendant who pleaded guilty which suggests that Waguespack had a criminal history the judge didn't like.)

Dr. Adam Levison

     Having studied at the University of California Berkeley, Georgetown University and the New York Medical College where he graduated at the top of his class, Dr. Adam Levison taught robotic surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital's School of Medicine in Manhattan. The 39-year-old assistant Professor of Urology lived in a posh West Greenwich Village apartment. Dr. Levison had prestige, good-looks and money. From all appearances this man had it all. He also had a lot to lose.

     On Tuesday, August 2, 2012 a New York subway transit officer, acting on a tip from two passengers riding on the train with Dr. Levison, arrested the urologist for using a pen camera clipped to a folded newspaper to take shots up women's skirts. Taken into custody at the Union Square Station during the evening rush-hour, the doctor did not protest or proclaim his innocence.

     At his arraignment the day after his arrest the judge charged Dr. Levison with second-degree unlawful surveillance. If convicted he faced a maximum sentence of four years in prison. Dr. Levison posted bail and was released.

     A search of the doctor's pen camera video footage confirmed the suspicions of his fellow subway passengers and the arresting transit officer.

     Mount Sinai Hospital, two months after the subway arrest, announced that the physician was no longer employed by the institution.

     In January 2014 Dr. Levison pleaded guilty in return for a sentence of five years probation.