Jim Fisher True Crime

The Criminally Accused Cop: Remain on duty?

2012-02-23T05:55:00.000-05:00

Let's say two women, in separate cases, accuse a police officer of sexual misconduct. Should that cop, while these allegations are being investigated, remain on duty, or be placed on administrative leave? According to Ocean City (Maryland) Police Chief Bernadette Di Pino, a member of the executive committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), there are no national guidelines or policies dealing with this question. In Maryland, an uncharged officer can be taken off the street if the allegations seem credible. In most jurisdictions, however, accused officers stay on the job until they are charged with a crime. That's how cases like this are handled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Officer Adam Skweres

Adam Skweres, after graduating from Pittsburgh Alldedice High School, joined the U.S. Army Reserves and served a tour of duty in Iraq. In 2005, after taking a few college courses, the 29-year-old applied for a job with the Pittsburgh Police Department. As part of the hiring process, city psychologist Dr. Irvin P. R. Guyett, in determining if Skweres was psychologically fit for police duty, reviewed the results of the candidate's background investigation. Based on polygraph test results, what neighbors and others said about the applicant, his financial history, and the psychologist's interview of the candidate, Dr. Guyett concluded that Skweres was "not psychologically fit for police work." (Dr. Guyett has been evaluating police candidates for 20 years.)

Unwilling to take no for an answer, Skweres appealed Dr. Guyett's findings, and the rejection of his application, to the civil service commission. In 2006, the city appointed another psychologist, Dr. Alexander Levy, to re-evaluate the candidate. Dr. Levy, after presumably looking at the same data available to Dr. Guyett, found Skweres "psychologically suited for police work." Based on this second expert opinion, the city allowed Skweres to join the next available police academy class. Upon graduation from the police academy, the new officer was assigned to the Zone 3 station on Pittsburgh's south side.

In June 2008, a woman filed a sexual misconduct complaint against Officer Skweres. After this woman had testified as a victim in one of his cases, Skweres, as he escorted her out of the courtroom, asked to speak to her privately. Skweres said he knew that this woman and her husband were dealing with the county office of Children, Youth and Families (CYF). If she agreed to give him oral sex, Skweres would write the CYF a positive letter on their behalf. If she refused, he would write the agency a negative letter. He allegedly said that he just needed 30 minutes of her time. The woman refused, and filed a complaint with the Pittsburgh Police Department.

Two weeks later, Officer Skweres told a woman who had been in a minor traffic accident that he was writing her up, but the ticket would disappear if she gave him oral sex. According to this woman's complaint, Skweres looked at his sidearm and told her that if she told anyone about his proposal, he'd make sure she never spoke to anyone again.

Although presented with two credible citizen complaints of coercion and sexual misconduct against one of its officers, supervisors at the Pittsburgh Police Department, because they didn't have sufficient cause, did not remove Officer Skweres from active duty. Pursuant to regulations enforced by the local Fraternal Order of the Police, this officer, until charged with a crime, would stay on the job.

In December 2011, Officer Skweres entered a home in the Belthoover section of the city where the girlfriend of a man he had recently arrested lived. After asking her how much she loved the arrestee, Skweres allegedly offered to help the boyfriend if she stripped and performed oral sex on him. In making the proposal, which was more of a demand, he unclipped his holster to intimidate her. This woman filed a complaint with the Pittsburgh Police Department. Officer Skweres remained on duty.

Officer Skweres, on February 11, 2012, showed up at the home of a girlfriend of another man he had arrested. Indicating that he knew he was being surveilled, and didn't want to be recorded, Skweres communicated with the woman by writing messages on a notepad. He instructed her not to talk, and told her to lift her skirt to show she wasn't wearing a wire. (He was not being watched.) When Skweres did speak, he did so in the kitchen where he had water running in the sink to cover his voice.

After offering to help this woman's incarcerated boyfriend, Skweres allegedly forced the victim to give him oral sex. He cleaned himself off with a towel, put it into his pocket, and left the house. This victim reported the crime to the FBI.

Five days later, at 5:15 P.M., officers with the Pittsburgh Police Department arrested Officer Skweres at him home. Charged with official oppression, indecent assault, rape, and criminal coercion, Skweres was placed into the Allegheny County Jail where, for his protection, he was isolated from the other inmates. A judge set his bond at $300,000. The department suspended Skweres without pay.

On February 21, 2012, detectives searching Officer Adam Skweres's house and SUV, found marijuana and crack cocaine. His lawyer told reporters that his client would be pleading not guilty to the sexual misconduct and criminal coercion charges.

In defending the police department's decision not to remove Officer Skweres from active duty after the 2008 complaints, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl told a reporter with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that it wasn't until the fourth alleged victim filed her complaint with the FBI that the department had the "hard evidence" they needed to make the arrest, and take this officer off the street. The head of the police union told the same reporter that officers can't be taken off duty simply because a civilian makes a complaint. "If we remove someone every time an accusation was thrown at an officer, we wouldn't have any officers on the street who are hardworking and aggressive." (Really? Are there that many citizen complaints?)

Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska who is a nationally known author and scholar on the subject of policing, said the following to a reporter with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "Common sense would say if you have suspicions about this person's conduct, you take [him] off the street, period. If there were two [complaints] back in 2008, that raises the significance of it even further. There should have been something done."

Random Acts of Crime: Snapshots 5

2012-02-22T06:49:00.002-05:00

February 2012
Hope Mills, North Carolina

Evangeline Lucca was either in a hurry or having a serious BigMac Attack when she drove directly up the the McDonald's pick-up window ahead of a line of vehicles in the drive-thru lane. (Cutting off people waiting for McDonald's goodies is like snatching food from the jaws of a starving dog. Not recommended.) With her 3-year-old daughter in the car, the 37-year-old woman wouldn't budge after McDonald employees refused to serve her. Someone, perhaps envisioning a riot, or a McMurder, called the police.

When confronted by deputies with the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office, Lucca, apparently unwilling to let a couple of cops move her to the back of the line, wouldn't budge for them either. But unlike McDonalds employees, these guys carry taser guns. A deputy administered the voltage, and the hungry, impatient suspect found herself in another line. One that led directly to the county jail. A child protection officer took the little girl into custody as well. Although charged with second degree trespass, Lucca should have been charged with first degree stupid.

February 2012
Chicago, Illinois

Burglars broke into a Lincoln Park jewelry store by cutting through a wall shared by a sushi restaurant next door. The thieves cut the hole right behind the safe in a small area not covered by security cameras and the motion detecting intrusion alarm. Using a powerful saw, the burglars cut into the safe and removed the gems. To cool the saw blade as it cut into the money chest, the intruders used a bucket of ice-cold beer. Based on the M.O. of this heist, the thieves were operating with inside information. If I were on the case, I'd be checking out former employees, and asking current ones to take polygraph tests.

February 2012
Armada, Michigan

In March 2011, 25-year-old Mallorie Wilson-Strat waited in a car parked in front of a house in Armada where two men she had hired were supposedly murdering Wilson-Stat's boyfriend's estranged wife. The killing of the 32-year-old murder for hire target didn't happen because the hit men got cold feet and fled the scene. An earlier attempt to murder this woman, orchestrated by Wilson-Stat, had also failed. On her third try, the mastermind hired an undercover cop to do the job.

In February 2012, following a three-day trial at the County Circuit Court in Mount Clemens, Michigan, the jury found Wilson-Stat guilty of conspiracy to commit first degree murder, solicitation of murder, and aiding and abetting a home invasion. The would-be victim's estranged husband, Kevin Sears, testified that he had not put his girlfriend up to the murder of his estranged wife.

At her upcoming sentence hearing in March, the convicted woman's attorney will argue that his client was a puppet being manipulated by her boyfriend, Kevin Spears (who has not been charged.) According to the lawyer, she did it--tried to kill a woman three times--for love. The minimum sentence in Michigan for the crimes Wilson-Stat committed is 15 years in prison. The maximum is life. I'm pulling for that one.

February 2012
Lancaster, Pennsylvania

In November 2010, district judge Kelly Ballentine received a pair of parking tickets and a summons regarding the expired registration on her BMW. The fines totaled $268.50. Rather than pay up like the rest of us, Judge Ballentine accessed the online magisterial district judicial system and fixed her own tickets. The 43-year-old judge had been elected to the bench in 2006. (In Pennsylvania, anyone can be a district judge, all you have to do is run for the office and get enough votes.) Charged with conflict of interest, public records tampering, and obstruction of justice, Ballentine is free on $25,000 bail. (I'd like to hack into the system and raise that to $1 million.) If convicted on all counts, she could be sentenced up to seven years in prison. (That won't happen. I'd be surprised if she gets any prison time.) On paid administrative leave, Judge Ballentine could face disciplinary action imposed by the state supreme court. (Not long ago, a pair of central Pennsylvania judges were convicted of taking kick-backs from a private prison for every kid they sentenced to the facility.)

February 2012
Los Angeles, California

In Los Angeles, people who are physically disabled can be issued blue placards that allow them to park free all day. The problem is, hundreds of motorists are using cards issued to other people, depriving the city of angels needed revenue. This month, undercover officers with the Los Angeles Department of transportation, ran a sting operation that revealed how badly the system is being abused. Illegal parkers caught in the crackdown were fined between $250 and $1,000. A few could end up in jail for up to six months. (One nice thing about jail--parking is not a problem.) When caught, most of the fraudulent parking card users were not ashamed or remorseful. They were furious.

February 2012
Pasadena, California

On Sunday night, February 12, Pasadena police were called to the apartment Marston Hefner shared with his girlfriend, Claire Sinclair. Officers took the 21-year-old Hefner into custody when they discovered that his girlfriend had been injured. On Monday, after being charged with domestic assault, Hefner was released on $20,000 bail. Sinclair, that day, acquired an emergency restraining order against Mr. Hefner.

None of this would have been an event worthy of media attention had the suspect not been the son of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Adding icing to this celebrity journalism cake, the 20-year-old alleged victim was 2011's Playmate of the year. (I predict, for Claire Sinclair, a spot on next year's "Celebrity Apprentice.") Two days after Hefner's release from jail (From young Hef we might see a prison memoir based on his hellish incarceration.), Sinclair told reporters she would not press charges if Marston admitted that he had hit her more than once, and sought psychiatric help. (Too many stories like this one and I'll be looking for a shrink myself.)

February 2012
Ozark, Missouri

Edward Maher, a 36-year-old armored car driver, on January 22, 1993, drove his money truck to a remote spot near Felixstowe on England's east coast, loaded $1.5 million (U.S.) in bills and coins into his car, and disappeared. "Fast Eddie," as he became known in England, fled to America with his 3-year-old son Lee, his wife Deborah, and the money. After living in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, Edward, using the name Michael King, moved his family, in 2006, to Ozark, Missouri, a town of 18,000 in the southwest corner of the state.

In 2010, the broadband technician with a cable company called Suddelink, was $35,000 in debt, driving an old car, and living with his wife and son in a drab housing complex. That year, he filed for personnel bankruptcy. In 201l, things got better for Michael King when he won $100,000 from a scratch lottery ticket. That year, Michael's 23-year-old son Lee, married an Ozark girl named Jessica. That's when life took a wrong turn for England's "Fast Eddie."

Lee King, who liked to tell people he had been a decorated military officer, also told his friends that his father had been an infamous English armor car thief who had been on the lamb for twenty years. This story sounded so fantastic, nobody believed him. But when Lee told his new wife the story, Jessica went online to check it out, and sure enough, it was true. When Edward Maher, AKA Michael King, learned that his son had spilled the beans to his new wife, he threatened to kill her if she went to the police. Fearing for her life, that's exactly what she did.

In February, FBI agents arrested Maher at his home in Ozark. He is currently in federal custody for, as an illegal immigrant, possessing a firearm. He will eventually be extradited back to England where he can still be prosecuted for the armored car heist. Because they are not U.S. citizens, his wife and son will be going back with him. (I find it interesting that in America, an illegal immigrant can file for bankruptcy, get a driver's license, and possess a social security card. I'd also like to know how Maher converted all that money to U.S. currency, then made it to America.)

Officer James Peters: Scottsdale's Dirty Harry

2012-02-21T06:29:00.000-05:00

American law enforcement has become more militaristic, and zero-tolerant. Last year the police shot just under 1,200 people, killing slightly more than half of them. (In 2009, the police shot and killed 406 citizens.) Still, 90 percent of police officers, during the course of their entire careers, don't shoot anyone. Most don't even discharge their weapons outside of the firing range. In 2011, of the police officers who did shoot someone, 15 had used this form of deadly force before. One of the officers had a rather provocative history of three previous police involved shootings.

So, what would you say about a police officer, who, in a span of nine years, shot and killed, in separate shooting incidences, six people? Last year, the entire police forces of Delaware, North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, and Alaska, combined, shot less than six people.

During the period November 2002 through February 2012, Scottsdale, Arizona police officer James Peters shot at seven people, killing six of them. From this, one might conclude that Scottsdale, the Phoenix area suburb of 220,000, is the site of daily shootouts between the police and a large population of violent criminals. But this isn't the case. In 2011, the Scottsdale Police only shot one person, and it wasn't fatal. By comparison, the police in Phoenix that year shot 16, killing 9.

How could one member of a police department made up of 435 sworn officers, shoot so many people in a relatively low crime city? After say, the third shooting incident, why wasn't this man psychologically evaluated, and at the very least, put behind a desk? Moreover, didn't the officer himself ask himself why he was the only guy on the force doing all of the killing?

On November 3, 2002, roughly two years after joining the police department, Peters, as a member of the SWAT team, responded to a domestic violence call at the home of a man named Albert Redford. Following a 4-hour standoff, Peters and two other SWAT officers fired seven shots at the suspect, hitting him three times. Mr. Redford died a few hours later in the emergency room. As it turned out, none of the fatal bullets had been fired from Peter's rifle. An investigation by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office cleared all three officers of wrongdoing

Officer Peters, on March 25, 2003, responded to a call regarding shotgun blasts coming from the home of a distraught, disbarred attorney named Brent Bradshaw. Three hours later, Peters and his follow officers encountered the 47-year-old suspect wandering along the Arizona Canal carrying a shotgun. When Mr. Bradshaw refused to drop his weapon, Peters dropped him with a shot to the head. This shooting was declared justified.

On October 10, 2005, Officer Peters shot and killed Mark Wesley Smith. High on methamphetamine, Smith was smashing car windows with a pipe outside an auto-body shop.
In justifying his use of deadly force in this case, Peters said the subject had threatened a fellow officer with the pipe.

Brian Daniel Brown, 28, took a Safeway grocery store employee hostage on April 23, 2006 after he had hijacked a Krispy Kreme delivery truck. After killing this hostage taker, the department awarded Officer Peters a medal of valor.

Peters and Scottsdale officer Tom Myers were in Mesa, Arizona on August 30, 2006 hoping to question Kevin Hutchings, a suspect in an assault committed earlier that evening in Scottsdale. After Mr. Hutchings fired a shot from inside his house, the officers had the power cut to the dwelling. When the armed man came out of his house to investigate the power outage, Peters shot him to death. The city, in this case, ended up paying the Hutchings family an out of court settlement of $75,000. Even so, the department declared this shooting justified, and Officer Peters kept his assignment as a street cop even though he had killed two people in one year.

On February 17, 2010, Officer Peters and Detective Scott Gailbraith confronted 46-year-old Jimmy Hammack, a suspect in five Phoenix and Scottsdale bank robberies. When Hammack drove his pickup truck toward the detective, Peters shot him. A few days later, Hammack died in the hospital. This shooting, on the ground the subject was using his vehicle as a deadly weapon, went into the books as justified.

The Killing of John Loxas

John Loxas, 50, lived alone in a trash-littered house near Vista De Camino Park in Scottsdale. In 2010 police arrested him for displaying a handgun in public. On February 14, 2012, Officer Peters and five other cops responded to a 911 call concerning Loxas who reportedly was threatening his neighbors with a firearm. To complicate matters, Loxas, who regularly babysat his 9-month-old grandson, had the child in his arms while intimidating the neighbors.

When Peters and the other officers arrived at the scene, Mr. Loxas and the baby were back inside the house. When ordered to exit the dwelling, Loxas, still holding the child, appeared in the doorway. As the subject turned to reenter the house, and lowered the baby exposing his upper torso and head, Peters, thinking he saw a black object in Loxas' hand, shot him in the head from 18 feet. The subject, killed instantly by the bullet from Peter's rifle, collapsed to the ground still holding the baby. Fortunately, and perhaps miraculously, the infant was not injured.

As it turned out, at the time Officer Peters killed Mr. Loxas, the subject was not armed, or within reach of a weapon. Police did find, in the dead man's living room, a loaded handgun hidden between the arm and cushion of a stuffed chair. Farther into the dwelling, searchers discovered a shotgun, several "Airsoft"-type rifles and pistols, and a "functional improvised explosive device."

In explaining why he had shot Mr. Loxas, Officer Peters said he had been concerned for the safety of the baby. Peters is currently on paid administrative leave pending yet another police involved shooting investigation by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. Critics of the shooting, including some of Loxas' neighbors, were planning to protest the incident. A few days later, 75 protestors held a demonstration outside the police department.

Except for the Safeway hostage case in April 2006, most police officers, faced with the choices presented to Officer Peters, probably would not have exercised deadly force. This doesn't mean Peters committed criminal acts, or that his shootings were even administratively unjustified. It's just that most officers wouldn't have been so quick on the trigger. If it were otherwise, every year thousands, not hundreds, of people would die at the hands of the police.

Because Mr. Loxas had been armed shortly before the police arrived at the scene, and Officer Peters thought the subject was holding a handgun when he shot him, this case will probably be ruled a justifiable homicide. Whether or not, under the circumstances, the killing of Mr. Loxas was the right thing to do, is another question altogether.

Raymond Chandler on Writing

2012-02-21T05:09:00.001-05:00

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), the British born author of bestselling hard boiled private eye novels The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, transformed the mystery genre into literature. Chandler lived many years in southern California, and wrote for the movies. The following passages are from The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959, edited by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane:

...I have never had any great respect for the ability of editors, publishers, play and picture producers to guess what the public will like. The record is all against them.

American [writing style] has no cadence. Without cadence a style has no harmonics. It is like a flute playing solo, an incomplete thing, very dextrous or very stupid as the case may be, but still an incomplete thing.

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of the story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.

I have a peculiar idea about titles. They should never be obviously provocative, nor say anything about murder. They should be rather indirect and neutral, but the form of words should be a little unusual.

The people whom God or nature intended to be writers find their own answers, and those who have to ask are impossible to help. They are merely people who want to be writers.

...you never quite know where your story is until you have written the first draft of it. So I always regard the first draft as raw material.

I write when I can and don't write when I can't; always in the morning or the early part of the day. You get very gaudy ideas at night but they don't stand up.

The detective story is not and never will be a "novel about a detective." The detective enters it only as a catalyst. And he leaves it exactly the same as he was before. [As opposed to "straight" novels where the protagonist, by the end of the book, has to have undergone some kind of change.]

A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of.

Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives. It took a certain amount of effort to go to the movies. Somebody had to stay with the kids. You had to get the car out of the garage. That was hard work. And you had to drive and park. Sometimes you had to walk as far as a half a block to get to the theater. Then people with fat heads would sit in front of you.

...not-quite writers are very tragic people and the more intelligent they are, the more tragic, because the step they can't take seems to them such a very small step, which in fact it is. And every successful or fairly successful writer knows, or should know, by what a narrow margin he himself was able to take that step. But if you can't take it, you can't. That's all there is to it.

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective. The things which happen to him might still happen as a result of a peculiar set of chances. By making him a private detective you skip the necessity for justifying his adventures.

Talking of [literary] agents, when I opened the morning paper one morning last week I saw that it finally happened: somebody shot one. It was probably for the wrong reasons, but a least it was a step in the right direction.

The only private eye I have met personally was brought to the house one night by a lawyer friend of mine....Most of his work consists of digging up information for lawyers, finding witnesses etc. He struck me as a bombastic and not too scrupulous individual. The private eye of fiction is pure fantasy and is meant to be.

Back on the Job: The Cop That Wouldn't Stay Fired

2012-02-20T05:32:00.001-05:00

Police unions, civil service, law enforcement solidarity, and the right of arbitration, makes firing a cop twice as difficult as evicting a freeloading relative. Once a police officer is on the job, short of being convicted of a felony, he stays on the force. Poor job performance, behavior unbecoming a law enforcement officer (a concept that has lost its meaning), and general unfitness for the work, are not grounds for dismissal. (In the private sector, it's another story altogether.)

While it's easier to get your hands on top-secret CIA files than a police officer's personnel jacket, there are thousands of cops on the job with fat employment histories laden with citizen complaints, and disciplinary actions. A brutal, dishonest, lazy, and/or incompetent police officer can stick around until retirement. Many get out early by fabricating phony medical disability claims, then take up water sports in Miami. And there is very little police chiefs can do about it. In law enforcement, the higher you go, the less power you have. I'm sorry, but it's true.

Not One of New Castle's Finest

New Castle, Pennsylvania, the seat of Lawrence County 50 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, has seen better days. At one time, the town of 24,000 had been a thriving, fast-growing mill town. It's currently a shell of its former self, and struggling to come back. If any place needs a good police force, it's this town.

On the night of December 23, 2010, an off-duty New Castle police officer named James L. Paglia was a passenger in a pick-up truck. His wife Terri was driving. They were arguing, and he was intoxicated. Officer Paglia got so angry, he allegedly hit his wife in the back of the head with his 9-millimeter handgun, then shoved the barrel of the loaded firearm into the side of her face. Forced out of the truck, the terrified woman came upon another police officer who had been following them. (I don't know if this was by design, or just happenstance. I'm thinking it was by design.)

With his wife out of the vehicle, Paglia slid behind the wheel, and drove off. He didn't get far. Pulled over on suspicion of driving while drunk, he failed a field sobriety test, and was taken into custody.

Following a criminal complaint filed by his wife, the Lawrence County district attorney charged Paglia with two counts of simple assault, reckless endangerment, terroristic threats, harassment, and DUI. The police department placed Paglia on unpaid administrative leave, and opened an internal investigation that resulted in the finding that this officer had violated departmental rules and regulations pertaining to officer conduct.

In March 2011, members of the New Castle City Council voted unanimously to remove officer Paglia from the police force. Later in the year, Paglia's wife withdrew her criminal complaint. (Not an uncommon event in wife abuse cases.) Without a prosecuting witness, the district attorney had no choice but to drop the serious charges against Paglia. The DUI count remained, but Paglia, as a first offender, was allowed to plead guilty, and enter the accelerated rehabilitative disposition program. Upon completion of this sentence, his DUI conviction would be expunged from the public record.

Pursuant to the city's collective bargaining agreement with the local Fraternal Order of the Police, Paglia could appeal his job dismissal to an independent arbitrator. And that's what he did. (With the wife abuse charges dismissed, he was now just an off-duty cop who had gotten behind the wheel of his truck with too much to drink.) In October 2011, the arbitrator held that the New Castle Police Department had to re-hire Mr. Paglia. He would not, however, recover lost wages or benefits, and the department, as a condition of re-employment, could require a drug and alcohol evaluation.

So, it looks like New Castle will have a police officer pulling over drunk drivers who himself was a drunk driver. Moreover, this officer will be responding to scenes of domestic violence where the boyfriend or husband is drunk and abusive. In the latter cases, just how sympathetic can this cop be to the abused woman?

In dealing with the public, police officers do not tolerate even a trace of disrespect. They have become extremely thin-skinned. For us civilians, the police have set the behavior bar very high. However, when dealing with their own, the behavior bar is extremely low.

One would think that the citizens of New Castle, Pennsylvania would be outraged by officer Paglia's reinstatement. But, as far as I can tell, they are not. Given the history of public corruption in this town, I guess they have become numb to stories like this.

Walmartology: Crimes in Consumerland 7

2012-02-19T06:25:00.001-05:00

January 2012
Houston, Texas

The Houston Police arrested three shoplifters, a man and two women, who had walked out of three Houston Walmarts with $20,000 worth of merchandise. The thieves swiped small, high-dollar items such as electric razors and nonprescription drugs and merchandise in the pharmaceutical section of the store such as Prilosec, Rogaine, Whitestrips, and Claritin. The suspects smuggled the loot out through the home-and-garden centers where they passed the items though a hole in the fence to an accomplice. If it hadn't been for the surveillance cameras they may not have been caught. The fact they managed to leave the stores so easily with so much merchandise makes one wonder how many Walmart shoplifters are not apprehended. These were not sophisticated heists.

January 2012
Union Township, Pennsylvania

In western Pennsylvania not far from the Ohio line, police arrested three shoplifters who had stolen thousands of dollars worth of merchandise from Walmart and two other box stores in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Like the thieves in Houston, they loaded up shopping carts with small, high-priced items, and wheeled the stuff to the closed lawn and garden departments where they passed the loot to an accomplice through broken fences.

You don't have to be a retail security practitioner to realize these stores have weak loss prevention programs. Customers who take merchandise through the cash out counter instead of holes in fences, end up paying for the shoplifted stuff. As long as stores can pass the cost along to paying customers, there is no incentive to spend money on retail security.

February 2012
Bremen, Georgia

A security camera in this west Georgia Walmart caught a homicide parolee attempting to kidnap a 7-year-old girl browsing in the toy section of the store. The would-be victim, Brittney Baxter, kicked herself from the grasp of 25-year-old Thomas A. Woods of Austell, Georgia. After the girl broke free, Woods ran out of the store. (He got out of prison in October 2011 after serving time for killing is uncle in 2004.)

Arrested shortly after the failed abduction (and who knows what), and charged with attempted kidnapping, Woods insisted that he had not committed any crime. While Mr. Woods is presumed innocent under the law, if he is the man in the security video, he is guilty as hell. In his case, parole was not a good idea.

January 2012
Cheswold, Delaware

On New Year's Day, around 11:15 P.M., two men and a woman entered the Walmart store and removed assorted items of jewelry from a display case. Three days later, the trio returned to the store at two in the morning, and stole more jewelry from the display case. In all, the thieves walked off with $3,000 in merchandise. Again, where was the retail security? Aren't display cases supposed to be locked? Don't they have to be opened from the employee side of the case? Where were the clerks (or whatever they are called at Walmart)? I'm thinking these thieves may have had a little inside help.

January 2012
Portage Township, Ohio

At 4:50 A.M. on Wednesday, January 18, police and firefighters rolled onto the Walmart parking lot to find an Audi sedan fully engulfed in flames. After extinguishing the blaze, firefighters discovered, on the driver's side, the body of a fatally burned man. The driver's side front door was open, and the victim lay partially outside of the vehicle. While the body was burned beyond recognition, the car registration and other identification indicators suggested that the victim was an employee who was scheduled to start work that morning at 5 A.M.

Following a fire scene investigation by a state fire marshal, the sheriff of Ottawa County told reporters that the authorities did not suspect foul play. While the Lucas County Coroner had not determined the cause of death, the sheriff referred to the event as a "tragic accident."

Having taught arson investigation, I know that when a vehicle sitting in a parking lot bursts into flames so suddenly the driver has no time to exit the car, it is a highly unusual fire, one that demands a detailed explanation. Most automobile fires that are sudden and intense, and all consuming, are incendiary blazes aided by an accelerant. Accidental car fires not caused by traffic accidents are usually slow burning, smoldering affairs. In my opinion, immediately ruling out any form of foul play in this case was premature.

January 2012
South Jordan, Utah

In another strange Walmart parking lot blaze, four 13-year-old boys came upon a woman on the ground next to her car with her foot on fire. One of the boys used his coat to smother the flames. Police, responding to the 911 call, rushed the woman to the University of Utah Hospital's burn unit. She had serious burns on her foot and leg.

This fire victim, a heavy smoker, had been wearing jeans over a pair of nylons. Once the ash from her cigarette burned through her jeans to the flammable nylons, they ignited and produced a suddenly intense fire.

February 2012
West Whiteland Township, Pennsylvania

On Wednesday, February 15, a 6-foot-4-inch, 300 pound man from Downingtown named Verdon Lamont Taylor, parked his car in the Walmart lot, climbed out of his vehicle, took off all of his clothing, and entered the store. Customers gave the 32-year-old man wide birth as he casually walked up to a counter and put on a pair of stolen socks.

Police arrived to take the big, naked man (except for the socks) into custody. When Mr. Taylor refused to go along with the program, and spit on one of the officers, they let him have it with a stun gun. The device did its job, and the big man was led out of the store in handcuffs. (The spitting suggests schizophrenia.)

Mr. Taylor has been charged with indecent exposure (if there were a felony version of this offense it would be appropriate here), aggravated assault, simple assault (spitting on a cop), retail theft (the socks), and disorderly conduct (shopping while nude). The suspect, who did not post his $50,000 bail, is incarcerated in the Chester County Jail.

Dueling Experts: The Phil Spector Murder Case

2012-02-18T05:31:00.001-05:00

In the morning of February 3, 2003, Los Angeles County Sheriff deputies responded to a call from the Alhambra mansion owned by Phil Spector, the 67-year-old music producer who became famous in the 1960s for his "wall of sound." In the foyer, the deputies found 40-year-old actress Lana Clarkson slumped in a chair. She had been shot once in the mouth by the .38-caliber Cobra revolver lying on the floor under her right hand. When the fatal shot had been fired, Clarkson and Spector were the only people in the house.

Spector's chauffeur told the police that at five in the morning, he heard a noise that sounded like a gunshot. Shortly after that, he said Spector came out of the mansion carrying a handgun. According to the driver, Spector had said, "I think I killed somebody."

The music producer had met the victim the previous night at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip where the struggling actress worked as a hostess for $9 per hour. When the nightclub closed for the night, she had accompanied Spector back to his house for a drink. According to Spector's account of the death, Lana Clarkson had committed suicide.

The crime scene investigation and the analysis of the physical evidence featured forensic pathology, the location of the gunshot residue, and the interpretation of the blood spatter patterns. Los Angeles Deputy Coroner Dr. Louis Pena visited the scene, and conducted the autopsy. The forensic pathologist found bruises on the victim's right arm and wrist that suggested a struggle. A missing fingernail on Clarkson's right hand also indicated some kind of violence just prior to the shooting. Her bruised tongue led Dr. Pena to conclude that the gun had been forced into the victim's mouth. Its recoil had shattered her front teeth. Clarkson's purse was found slung over her right shoulder. Since she was right-handed, and would have used that hand tho hold the gun, the deputy coroner questioned suicide as the manner of death. Based on his crime scene examination and autopsy, Dr. Pena ruled Lana Clarkson's death a criminal homicide. The police arrested Spector who retained his freedom by posting the $1 million bail.

Blood spatter analysts from the sheriff's office concluded that after the shooting, Spector had pressed the victim's right hand around the gun handle, placed the revolver temporarily into his pants pocket, later wiped it clean of his fingerprints, then laid it near her body. From the bloodstains on his jacket, the government experts concluded he had been standing within two feet of the victim when the gun went off. The absence of her blood spray on a nearby wall led the spatter analysts to believe that Spector had been standing between the victim and the unstained surface when he fired the bullet into her mouth. Gunshot residue experts found traces of gunpowder on Spector's hands.

The forensic work performed by the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office and the sheriff's department had not been flawless. A dental evidence technician had lost one of the victim's teeth; a criminalist had used lift-off tape to retrieve trace evidence from the victim's dress which had interfered with the serology analysis; and the corpse had been moved at the scene, causing unnatural, postmortem blood flow from her mouth which compromised that aspect of the blood spatter analysis

The Phil Spector murder trial got underway in May 2007. On June 26, the government rested its case. The defense led off with Dr. Vincent Di Maio, the former chief medical examiner of Bexar County, Texas. Dr. Di Maio, considered one of the leading experts on the subject of gunshot wounds, testified that he disagreed with the prosecution's experts who had asserted that blood spatter can travel only three feet from a person struck by a bullet. Dr. Di Maio said blood can travel more than six feet if a gun is fired into a person's mouth, the pressure from the muzzle gas that is trapped in the oral cavity creates a violent explosion. "The gas," he said, "is like a whirlwind, it ejects out of the mouth, out of the nose." (If the defendant had been standing six feet from the victim when the gun went off, he couldn't have placed the gun into her mouth.) Because 99 percent of intra-oral gunshot deaths are suicides, Dr. Di Maio opined that Lana Clarkson had killed herself. In the witness' 35 years as a medical examiner, he had seen only "three homicides that were intra-oral."

In an aggressive cross-examination by the deputy district attorney, Dr. Di Maio was asked how much he had been paid for his work on the case. The former medical examiner said that his bill was $46,000, which did not include his trial testimony. Courtroom spectators laughed when Dr. Di Maio told his cross-examiner that the longer he kept him on the stand, the more it would cost the defendant.

On September 18, 2007, the Spector jury, following a week of deliberation, announced they were deadlocked seven to five. Two days later, the judge sent them back to the jury room with a new set of instructions on how to determine reasonable doubt. In the Spector trial, the celebrity experts for the defense (including Dr. Henry Lee) did more than just muddy the water by pointing out mistakes and erroneous conclusions by the government's experts. They had offered a conflicting scenario backed by their interpretations of the physical evidence. In circumstantial cases like this, deadlocked juries are to be expected. The hung jury is what Phil Spector paid for, and it's what he got. The jury remained split, and the judge had to declare a mistrial.

The second trial, this one not televised, got underway on October 20, 2008. The case went to the jury on March 26, 2009, and 19 days later, the jury found the defendant guilty of first degree murder. Two months later, the judge sentenced Phil Spector to 19 years to life. In May 2011, the California Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction. The California Supreme Court, when it declined to review the case, guaranteed that Mr. Spector will die in prison. Because so many high-profile forensic scientists disagreed on the interpretation of the physical evidence in this case, it will not be a positive landmark in the history of forensic science.

Amish Nightmare: Shaken Baby Misdiagnosis

2012-02-17T06:14:00.001-05:00

On December 23, 1999, Liz Glick, the 4-month-old daughter of Samuel and Liz Glick, Amish dairy farmers in Dornsife, Pennsylvania, died in the hospital two days after her parents had found her unconscious in her crib. The baby had been ill with a fever and had been vomiting. At the Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, pediatricians experienced in treating Amish babies determined that the infant had died of vitamin K deficiency, a genetic and sometimes dietary condition associated with babies born at home and breastfed who have not been given the vitamin through precautionary shots or formula. The symptoms of vitamin K deficiency include bleeding in the brain and eyes as well as the presence of bruises caused by normal handling and movement.

Dr. Michael Kenny, a pathologist at Geisinger, performed the autopsy and, as Kate Rush would later report in "Genomics in Amish Country," concluded that the baby had died of a "closed-head injury" (as opposed to a "penetrating head injury" caused by a bullet, stabbing instrument, or a blunt object.) Since Dr. Kenny was not the medical examiner, and it was not his job to make an official manner of death ruling, that decision fell to the county coroner, an elected official without a medical degree. Instead of conferring with pediatricians familiar with Amish patients, the coroner took the unusual step of convening an inquest, a jury-empannelled hearing to determine if the death was suspicious enough to warrant a full-scale criminal investigation. The coroner's inquest, as a first step in the criminal justice process, while still available in most states, is an antiquated way of determining manner of death.

Dr. Kenny's "closed-head injury" finding, combined with the bruises, and the brain and eye bleeding, led the coroner's jury to rule that Liz Glick may have been the victim of a shaken baby syndrome (SBS) homicide.

The Glick case became national news when a child protection agency speculated that the other seven Glick children, in the wake of the coroner's jury decision, were in danger. For their own protection, the children were placed in foster homes until the Pennsylvania State Police, and perhaps a jury at a murder trial, determined if their parents had committed criminal homicide. The Glick children were split up and sent to non-Amish (English) foster parents, an action that stunned and terrified the residents of this traditional central Pennsylvania community.

The plight of the Glick family caught the attention of Dr. Holmes Morton, a Harvard trained pediatrician who in the 1980's had treated Amish patients at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. Dr. Morton had moved to Strasburg, Pennsylvania, where in 1989, he had founded a nonprofit clinic in the heart of Amish country called the Clinic for Special Children, specializing in the treatment and study of illnesses and disorders affecting the Amish. Supported by donations and fund-raising events, the clinic incorporated a state-of-the-art laboratory for the diagnosis and study of biochemical genetic disorders. Dr. Morton should have been one of the first experts consulted by the authorities in the Glick case. He was well-known, had expertise pertinent to the case, and was local. No one, however, sought his opinion on the cause of the Glick baby's death.

Without being asked, Dr. Morton conducted his own inquiry into the Glick baby's medical history. A few days later, he announced that the infant had been born with a genetic liver condition that rendered her body incapable of breaking down vitamin K. The symptoms of vitamin K deficiency--the bleed in the brain and eyes, and the severe bruising--could easily be mistaken for signs of SBS. In Dr. Morton's opinion, the Glick child had not been killed by shaking. There had been a terrible mistake; this baby's death had been of a natural cause.

But criminal investigations are like freight trains--once they get rolling they are hard to stop. Even though Dr. Morton had thrown his body across the tracks, the train kept coming. Weeks passed. Finally, in February 2000, the case went before a state medical advisory board of physicians. The doctors heard testimony from several pediatricians who agreed with Dr. Morton's diagnosis. The panel of physicians voted to recommend that the manner of death in the Glick case be changed to natural.

The local coroner, in light of the physicians' recommendation, changed his cause of death ruling, and shortly thereafter, the child protection agency gave the Glick children back to their parents. A month later, the district attorney announced that Samuel and Liz Glick were no longer the targets of a homicide investigation. One can only guess how far down the criminal justice track the prosecution train would have rolled had it not been for Dr. Morton's intervention. One or both of these parents could have been sent to prison.

Showdown Semester: Advice From a Writing Professor

2012-02-17T05:32:00.000-05:00

Martin Russ' classic 1980 memoir, Showdown Semester: Advice From a Writing Professor, is an entertaining and practical instruction manual for anyone interested in the art and craft of creative writing, or in the difficult job of teaching students how to write for publication. Almost everything in this book is quotable, but here are a few passages that stood out for me:

The brute fact is, the instructor in a fiction workshop earns his pay by telling students what's wrong with their stories. The students themselves are convinced they need encouragement more than anything, and of course you'll encourage them as much as you can; but what they need most of all is discouragement, so that they'll come to realize how appallingly low their standards are and break the terrible habits they've learned.

As I believe in passive sadism in childrearing, so I advocate the same stance in dealing with the obstreperous student. Kill him with kindness or at least benevolent inattention. Not only must you never let yourself be drawn into any sort of emotional escalation, you must avoid acknowledging his attitude.

Make sure you have something to say before you write it down. One of the most difficult things undergrads have to learn is they have as yet little to say.

Many nonfiction teachers make the dumb mistake of providing subjects or topics. Let the student choose them himself, and make damn sure he says something about the subject--rather than merely turning in a description or summary or noncommittal analysis of it.

For some cockeyed reason it is assumed that if you have the required degree you can therefore do an adequate job of teaching.

Often a classroom of students will unconsciously follow a peer leader--a sarcastic put-down artist, for instance, who by dint of personality and precocious verbal skills will turn your course into a living nightmare unless you step in and blandly damp him off.

It's quite true that fiction can't be taught; but you can pass along a few shortcuts and get them interested in the craft of it. I don't think any student wastes his time in a good fiction workshop, not even the talentless ones.

Undergrads tend to use more words than they need to, and much of your work involves showing them that a certain word or phrase or sentence or paragraph can be deleted without loss.

The most prevalent problem in student fiction writing is lack of plot or suspense, or drama.

Undergrad fiction writers are intensely interested in the possibilities of metaphor, simile, alliteration, allusion, parallelism, symbolism, and all the other literary devices. Which is fine. The problem is that they're more interested in the devices themselves than in using them effectively.

For student writers one of the most difficult problems is "creating character"--and it's a damned hard thing to teach.

Fiction-writing students would much rather describe than narrate. Would rather tell than show. Would rather summarize than dramatize. Would rather explain than demonstrate. Would rather obscure than clarify. I don't know why...but students seem to want to do everything wrong.

The amateur's attitude: It is I who am doing this thing, and I'm more important than the thing I am doing. The professional's attitude: This thing I'm doing is more important than me. (In other words, just because you wrote it doesn't make it good, or even interesting.)

Albert Hamilton: One of America's First Experts from Hell

2012-02-16T16:43:00.001-05:00

In 1908, Albert Hamilton self-published a brochure about himself called, That Man From Auburn. In this piece of self-advertisement, the druggist from Auburn, New York presented himself as an expert in chemistry, microscopy, handwriting identification, ink analysis, photography, fingerprints, and forensic toxicology. He also claimed expertise in the fields of gunshot wounds, bullet identification, blood stain analysis, cause of death determination, anatomy, embalming, and toxicology. To match his impressive qualifications, he awarded himself a medical degree, and from then on was known as Dr. Hamilton.

Hamilton came into prominence in 1915 when he testified for the prosecution as a firearms identification expert in a rural New York murder case. The defendant, Charlie Stielow, an illiterate farmhand who stood accused of shooting to death the elderly couple who owned the farm where he worked, was facing the death sentence. The jury found Stielow guilty of first degree murder on the strength of a coerced confession, and the testimony of Albert Hamilton who identified a defect inside the barrel of the defendant's .22-caliber revolver as having left its individualistic mark on one of the fatal bullets. Having earned $50 a day for his work on the case, Hamilton impressed the jury with his enlarged photographs of the murder bullet. It all looked quite scientific.

In reality, Hamilton's testimony was pure hokum. The science of firearms identification, as it came to be practiced in the mid-30s, did not exist in 1915. The comparison microscope, an instrument essential to the comparison and analysis of firearms evidence, was invented in 1926. Nevertheless, Hamilton assured the jurors that the fatal bullet had been fired from the defendant's handgun. His findings went unchallenged by the defense, and no one seemed to notice that he hadn't even test-fired the so-called murder weapon. The judge sentenced Steilow to death.

Two years later, a pair of felons confessed to the murder, and the governor of New York formed a commission to review the case. The governor appointed Charles Waite, an investigator in the New York State Attorney General's office, to lead the inquiry. Waite took Stielow's revolver to a New York City police detective who knew about guns. An examination of the weapon convinced the officer that the revolver had not been fired in at least four years. Moreover, a naked eye examination of the bullets the New York police officer test-fired from the .22-caliber revolver, showed vastly different barrel marks than those on the murder slugs.

As a result of these and other post-conviction findings, the governor granted Charlie Stielow, and another defendant in the case, full pardons. Charles Waite, having been introduced to the possibilities of forensic firearms identification, went on to become a prominent practitioner in the field. In 1922, he formed the Bureau of Forensic Ballistics in New New York City. The bureau, the first of its kind, was taken over in 1926 by Dr. Calvin Goddard, an Army surgeon and ordinance officer from Baltimore who became the most important and qualified firearms identification expert in the world.

In 1923, two Italian-American anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolemo Vanzetti, were convicted of shooting a factory paymaster and his bodyguard to death in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The defendants' attorneys were seeking grounds for a new trial, and called upon the services of Albert Hamilton. Since the Sacco-Vanzetti case had been grabbing headlines for months, Hamilton eagerly got involved in the case.

Nicola Sacco's conviction was based chiefly on the testimony of three firearms identification witnesses who said the bullet that killed the guard had been fired from his Colt .32-caliber handgun. The experts also believed that the gun the police found on Vanzetti had belonged to the slain guard.

After examining the firearms evidence, Hamilton reported that the fatal bullet had not been fired from Sacco's gun, and the weapon that had been in Vanzetti's possession was not the weapon that had once belonged to the bodyguard. Relying on Albert Hamilton's report, the Sacco-Vanzetti defense team filed a motion for a new trial. To counter the motion, the prosecution acquired the services of two experts who had not testified at the trial.

In November 1933, during the hearing on the motion for the new trial, Hamilton conducted an in-court demonstration involving two new Colt revolvers, and Sacco's handgun. The two Colt .32-caliber demonstration revolvers belonged to Hamilton. In front of the judge, and lawyers for both sides, Hamilton disassembled all three revolvers and placed their parts in three piles on the defense table. He then explained the functions of each part, and demonstrated how they were interchangeable. After reassembling the handguns, Hamilton placed the two new weapons back into his pocket, and handed Sacco's Colt to the court clerk. Before he left the courtroom, the judge asked Hamilton to leave his two guns behind.

Several months later, when the judge asked one of the prosecution firearms experts to reinspect Sacco's revolver, the expert discovered that the barrel to Sacco's gun was brand new. Following an inquiry, Albert Hamilton admitted that the new barrel on Sacco's Colt had come from one of his revolvers. Although it was obvious to everyone that Hamilton had made the switch, presumably with a mistrial in mind, he denied any wrongdoing. Hamilton continued his association with the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, but he no longer played an important role in the case. He had destroyed his credibility as a firearms expert and witness.

The Sacco-Vanzetti motion for a new trial was denied, and in 1927, the two men died in the electric chair. Prior to their deaths, Dr. Calvin Goddard, the most qualified firearms identification expert in the world, stated that Sacco's gun had in fact been the murder weapon. (Several modern firearms identification experts have examined the ballistics evidence in the case, and agree with Dr. Goddard's findings.)

The barrel-switching incident in the Sacco-Vanzetti case apparently had little effect on Hamilton's phony career as a forensic scientist. Eight years after the Sacco-Vanzetti debacle, he testified for the defense in a New York murder case. In 1932, Stephen Witherell murdered his father, Charles. The defendant admitted shooting his father at point blank range with a Remington rifle he had stolen from his cousin. An expert with the New York City Police Department identified this rifle as the murder weapon.

By the time the trial rolled around, Stephen Witherell had recanted his confession. He took the stand on his on behalf and denied shooting anyone. In fact, he denied the body in question was even his father's. (Decomposition and the massive gunshot wound to the victim's head had made the corpse unrecognizable.) Albert Hamilton took the stand, and testified that there were two gunshot wounds on the body: the head wound caused by a rifle, and a wound on the victim's hand, made by a handgun. Actually, there was no hand wound at all, the victim had lost two fingers in an industrial accident. Once again, Hamilton had proven that he was incompetent, and a charlatan.

In 1934, Hamilton tried to insert himself in the Lindbergh kidnapping case by identifying a man named Manny Strewl as the writer of the ransom letters. Hamilton was not a qualified questioned document expert, and the writer of the extortion notes turned out to be Bruno Richard Hauptmann. The carpenter from the Bronx, an illegal alien from Germany with a criminal history in his home country, was executed in 1936 for the murder of the Lindbergh baby.

Albert Hamilton continued to disgrace himself as an expert witness in several forensic fields for another ten years, making him one of the most notorious forensic charlatans in American history. If there is anything to learn from this man's career, it is that the woods are full of phony experts, and if judges let down their guards, we will have charlatans in our court rooms, and baloney in our verdicts.

To Protect and Speed: Cops with Lead Feet

2012-02-16T05:26:00.000-05:00

Nobody likes being pulled over for speeding. It just ruins your day. And I hate it when the cop asks, "Do you know how fast your were going?" If you answer "no," you sound like an idiot. If you answer "yes," you're essentially confessing. Anyway, it really doesn't matter if you knew you were speeding or not because it's an offense that doesn't require criminal intent. (It's what lawyers call a prohibita violation.) One time I had gotten so many speeding tickets I had to pass a written test to hold onto my driver's license. That baby was more difficult than most bar exams. I think I was the only person in the room who passed it. I consider that feat my greatest academic achievement, which says a lot about my history as a scholar. Okay, enough about me.

The police want us to believe their jobs are extremely dangerous and difficult, you know, war is hell and all of that. But let's face it, besides the good salaries and outstanding benefits (early retirement and generous pensions), there are a lot of advantages to being a cop. Perhaps the greatest joy in law enforcement is that cops don't ticket each other for speeding. They have a license to speed--off-duty, and in their personal vehicles. If I were still teaching, and a criminal justice student asked me why he or she should become a cop, I'd say, "Free speeding!"

Exceeding the Limit in the Sunshine State

In the state of Florida, police officers, as a group, are the most egregious speeders. A three-month investigation by Sun Sentinel journalists found that 800 cops from a dozen law enforcement agencies were driving 90 to 130 mph to and from work in their take-home patrol cars. Since 99 percent of these officers were not stopped for speeding, how did the newspaper come up with this information? They figured out how fast cops were driving by analyzing state highway toll records. They simply measured the time it took officers to travel from one toll plaza to the next. Moreover, according to the Sun Sentinel investigation, speeding Florida officers, since 2004, have caused 320 vehicular accidents resulting in 19 deaths. Only one of these officers went to jail, and that was for 60 days.

Officer Fausto Lopez

Last fall, while commuting from his home in Coconut Creek to his job as a police officer with the Miami Police Department, Fausto (or Fasto) Lopez was clocked going 120 mph by a Florida state trooper. The stopped 36-year-old cop offered a familiar explanation for speeding: he was late for work.

According to an analysis of toll records by Sun Sentinel journalists, officer Lopez is the king of law enforcement speeders. During the year before his October 11, 2011 traffic stop, Lopez averaged 90 mph over a period of 237 days of driving. But don't worry, Lopez's Coral Springs attorney has assured the public that his client is a good driver. Let's hope so. "Certainly," said the lawyer, "he at no time has put any member of the public in any type of danger." Fair enough, but can you see yourself defending a speeding ticket by telling the officer that you are a good driver? Good luck with that. To a police officer, or a judge, driving 90 mph makes you a bad driver. But we are mere civilians, and civilians get speeding tickets handed out by people who are worse drivers than us.

Literary Life: A Second Memoir

2012-02-16T04:51:00.000-05:00

In Literary Life: A Second Memoir, the second of a three-volume autobiography, Larry McMurtry, the author of 30 novels, and more than 30 screenplays, sums up his life as a man of letters. Volume 1 of his memoir set deals with his life as a bookman and owner of a massive used book store in Archer City, Texas. The third installment will focus on his adventures in Hollywood as a screenwriter. McMurtry won a Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, a novel made into a popular television series. I enjoyed Literary Life: A Second Memoir because it's honest, devoid of false bravado, and provides a look into the literary life of a person who has been able to support himself on his writing. There aren't many of those people around. What follows are some passages from this engaging book:

I hoped to be a writer, but it was not until I had published my fifth book, All My Friends are Going to be Strangers, that I became convinced that I was a writer and would remain one.

Journalists mostly don't expect to be liked--Vanity Fair is not paying its writers big money to write nice things about their subjects.

Probably at least 85 percent of the books I've inscribed both to friends and strangers have found their way into the [book] market, and rather rapidly.

To this day it is not easy to get started in fiction, but the speed with which self-publishing has been established is making getting started a good deal easier....Much trash will get published, but then much trash is published even by the most reputable publishers.

Minor writers provide the stitchery of literature. Besides, major writers often find themselves writing minor books. Major writers aren't major all the time, and minor writers occasionally write better than they normally do, sometimes producing a major book. The commonwealth of literature is complex, but a sense of belonging to it is an important feeling for a writer to have and to keep.

Never discount luck, in the making of a literary career, or any other career, for that matter.

Inside Jobs: What's Yours is Mine 2

2012-02-15T06:20:00.001-05:00

While it's impossible for a normal person to understand why, for example, a 14-year-old boy sets a building on fire for a sexual thrill, we all know why people steal. We understand because either as children, adolescents, or adults, we have taken something that didn't belong to us. The motive for theft is simple and direct, to get something for nothing. Theft is immoral, and of course, illegal. As a matter of morality, and certainly in law, the more you steal, the more serious your crime.

In criminal law, there are several forms of theft, or illegal taking. Customers who steal merchandise from stores are retail thieves. People who slip out of restaurants without paying their bills commit theft of service. Employees who steal from their employers are larcenists security professionals call internal thieves. Criminals who threaten to expose victims' secrets if not paid money to remain silent, are blackmailers. A thug threatening future physical harm if the victim doesn't pay up is called an extortionist. (If you don't pay me $1,000 a month I'll burn down your business, is not how fire insurance is supposed to work.) Robbers are thieves who take money and valuables through the use of force or threat of immediate physical force; and burglars steal (and commit other crimes) by unlawful intrusion into homes and buildings. Swindlers and con artists acquire their loot through deception and fraud. And don't forget the passers of bad checks, forged money orders, and stolen and fake credit cards. It seems there are as many ways to steal as there are ways to acquire things legally.

Except for major armored truck ambush jobs, big time jewelry heists, and massive credit card cases, the thieves who hit their victims the hardest financially, are the embezzlers. (The average bank robbery haul, for example, is just a few thousand dollars.) An embezzler is a person who's in what is called a fiduciary relationship with the victim, a position of trust. The embezzler--accountants, company and organization treasurers, financial managers, and various financial institution employees--steal from private and government employers and clients who have entrusted them with their money. While an embezzler can make a big, one-time haul, most steal smaller amounts over extended periods of time. To accomplish these illegal diversions of funds, embezzlers often alter financial documents, and commit the separate crimes of forgery and false swearing. Quite often, embezzlers, to get away with their thefts, have accomplices within the victim companies and organizations. Detectives and federal agents who investigate these cases (particularly when they involve sophisticated computer crimes), should be specialists in the investigation of financial offenses and criminal conspiracies.

January 2012
Ligonier Township, Pennsylvania

A recent audit of the personal finances of 95-year-old Dr. Robert Monsour led to criminal charges against 58-year-old Maureen A. Becker who was hired in 2000 to take around-the-clock care of the doctor, and to look after his money. She has been charged with diverting to her own use, between January 2008 and March 2010, $340,000 of the old man's money. Becker stands accused of depositing, into her own bank account, $167,000 from the sale of 67 acres of the doctor's estate. When asked why she had diverted these funds to her own bank account, Becker claimed the money had been a gift from her employer. (This, apparently, was news to Dr. Monsour.) Becker also told investigators that the doctor had raised her salary from $300 a week to $800. Detectives also found that the suspect deposited a number of her employer's CDs into her account, money she claims the doctor wanted her to have. (She must have been one hell of an employee.)

Following Becker's arrest, a judge released her on a signature bond. She is scheduled for a preliminary hearing on March 2, 2012.

January 30, 2012
New York City

Anita Collins, in 1986 and 1999, pleaded guilty to fraud in connection with the theft of funds from a pair of her New York City employers. In return for her pleas, she avoided prison. In 2010, Collins, at age 65, worked in the finance office of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. She had been hired without a background investigation. In an article published in the archdiocese newspaper, Catholic New York, she received praise for volunteering at St. Patrick's Cathedral when Archbishop Timothy Dolan presided over a mass welcoming 600 people to Catholicism. Described as an "unassuming" person, Collins told the author of the piece that "My faith has always been a steadfast part of my life."

An outside auditor, in November 2011, discovered $350,000 of the church's money missing. Following a criminal investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, Collins was charged with siphoning $1 million in church donations. Over a period of seven years, Collins allegedly sent fake invoices to the archdiocese, then issued some 450 checks to accounts she controlled. All of the transactions were in sums just under the $2,500 threshold that required a supervisor's approval.

The church fired Anita Collins in December 2011. According to the chief investigator on the case, the suspect spent the $1 million on mortgage payments and on "a lifestyle that was not extravagant but was far from her lawful means." The archdiocese now conducts criminal background checks on all employees. The church is also reviewing its financial oversight procedures.

February 2012
Belgrade, Montana

In November 2010, police were called in when members of the Belgrade Little League Baseball Association couldn't figure out why outstanding bills for uniforms and supplies had not been paid. During a period of four years, league board members had signed blank checks, and gave them to the treasurer, Amy Jo Erickson, to pay the bills.

In January 2011, after the police discovered that $92,000 from the organization had vanished, they confronted Erickson. The little league treasurer admitted that she had made the blank checks out to herself in "cash," and to her husband's plumbing company. She started embezzling in 2007 because, according to court records, she "needed help financially." Indeed.

Anita Collins took money from the church, and Amy Jo Erickson stole from the parents and sponsors of little league baseball players. These thieves weren't starving, they didn't use the money for life saving surgery, and they didn't play Robin Hood by giving it to the poor. They simply redistributed a little wealth to themselves.

February 2012
Lakewood, Washington

On November 29, 2009, a police assassin named Maurice Clemmons walked into a coffee shop in Parkland, Washington and shot four Lakewood police officers to death. Two days later, a police officer in Seattle killed Clemmons in a gun battle. Following the mass murder, the police department formed a charity to help the families of the slain officers called the Lakewood Police Independent Guild (LPIG). Officer Timothy Manos became the treasurer of the fund.

Although the 34-year-old treasurer received a police salary of $93,347 a year, Manos had serious financial problems. In June 2006, Ford Motor Credit Company sued him for $12,000 he owned in car payments. He had been sued for unpaid medical expenses, and owed a lot of money to credit card companies. He and his wife also enjoyed what some would consider an extravagant lifestyle.

In 2010 and 2011, citizens in the Lakewood community donated $3.2 million to the fund from which Manos allegedly skimmed $150,000. During the period the FBI believes he was embezzling the money, this debt-ridden cop took his wife to Las Vegas to enjoy the Cirque du Soleil, and several nights of gambling. Also during this period, Manos spent $1,700 on snowboarding and other outdoor gear. He bought a high-definition video camera; a computer; a stainless-steel refrigerator; and a high-definition television set. Between February 12, 2010 and February 20, 2011, Manos withdrew $50,000 from ATMs.

This month, FBI agents arrested Manos on 10 counts of wire fraud. The head of the LPIG has been placed on paid, administrative leave pending the completion of the federal investigation. Officer Manos is currently out on bail awaiting his first appearance in federal court in Tacoma.

Stealing from the Catholic church and the little league is bad enough, but the ripping-off of a charity for the families of slain police officers--by a fellow officer--is almost as bad as it gets. If convicted, officer Manos will be looking at some serious prison time.

Hellementary Education: Cases for Home Schooling 3

2012-02-14T05:51:00.002-05:00

January 1989-May 1992
Scarsdale, New York

When I was a kid, the vast majority of elementary teachers were women, some mild-mannered and kind, others hard-nosed and borderline cruel. But the notion of an elementary teacher committing a vicious, cold-blooded murder, was simply out of the question. I imagine people thought the same thing about Carolyn Warmus.

In September 1987, Carolyn Warmus, with a B.A. from the University of Michigan, and a Master's Degree in Education from Teacher's College, Columbia University, landed a job as a third grade teacher at the Greenville Elementary School in Scarsdale, New York. It was there she met and fell in love with a married fifth grade teacher named Paul Solomon. Carolyn, while having an affair with Paul, associated closely with his wife Betty Jean, and the couple's daughter Kristan. At some point in her clandestine relationship with Paul, Carolyn asked him to leave his wife, and marry her.

Just before midnight on January 15, 1989, Paul Solomon came home to find Betty Jean shot to death. The killer had pistol-whipped then shot her nine times with a .25-caliber handgun. Investigators initially suspected the murdered woman's husband. However, when Paul established an alibi, they began looking at other possibilities.

Following Betty Jean Solomon's murder, Paul ended the affair with Carolyn Warmus and took up with another woman. This infuriated the school teacher who began stalking him. On one occasion, Warmus followed Paul to Puerto Rico. She also telephonically harassed Solomon's new girlfriend and her family.

Warmus' pathological behavior caught the attention of the detectives investigating the murder, and she became their prime suspect. They learned of the affair which provided a motive. Moreover, shortly before the homicide, Warmus, using a driver's license she had stolen from a co-worker at a summer camp, purchased a .25-caliber Beretta. Forensic ballistic analysis determined that the fatal bullets had been fired through the barrel of that handgun. At the interrogation following her arrest, Warmus proclaimed her innocence.

Indicted in February 1990, Warmus went on trial in April 1991 at the West Chester County Court House. Twelve days later the judge declared a mistrial after only eight jurors voted for conviction. In January 1992, at Warmus' second trial, the prosecution presented new evidence in the form of a bloody crime scene glove that belonged to the accused. This jury, after deliberating six days, found Warmus guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced her to 25 years to life. She is currently serving her time at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. (The West Chester County prison has been home to several infamous inmates including Amy Fisher (no relation), Jean Harris, Barbara Kogan, Pamela Smart, and the child serial killer, Marybeth Tinning.)

Carolyn Warmus was one scary school teacher who liked to get her way, and if she didn't get it, watch out.

January 2012
Hercules, California

It would be interesting to know what it is about elementary education that drains so many school administrators of their discretion, judgement, and sense of proportion. Is it the job, or are people devoid of these qualities drawn to this line of work?

In Hercules, California, a 6-year-old boy at the Lupine Hills Elementary School, while roughhousing with a male schoolmate during recess, touched either the boy's upper thigh or his groin. The school's principal, Cynthia Taylor, upon learning of this incident, suspended the alleged offender. In her suspension notice, Taylor wrote that the suspect had "committed or attempted to commit a sexual assault or sexual battery."

The young suspect's mother, thinking that being labeled a possible sex offender was not a good thing for her son, sought advice from an online forum for bay area families called Berkeley Parents Network. When other parents learned of this idiocy, they expressed their outrage. If this could happen to one kid, it could happen to all of them.

Elementary education experts believe such overreaction is caused by school administrators' concerns over bullying. Fine. In America we are concerned about a lot of things. We are worried about another 911 terrorist attack, but that doesn't justify yanking 92-year-old women out of wheelchairs and bracing them against airport walls for strip searching. We should also be concerned about idiot school administrators, and mindless airport security personnel. Maybe we should overreact to that reality. How about firing this school principal, and dumping half the TSA?

In the Lupine Hills Elementary debacle, thanks to the firestorm of criticism, the 6-year-old boy was cleared of sexual wrongdoing, and the record of the incident purged. What we shouldn't purge, however, is our memory of what happened, and who was responsible.

February 2012
Redwood City, California

A teacher's aid at the Roosevelt Elementary School, having witnessed behavior toward students by one of the teachers she considered abusive, called a state child protection agency. Following an investigation, a child protection agent notified the police.

Alexia Aliki Bogdis, a 44-year-old who taught developmentally disabled and autistic children at the school, had allegedly slapped a 4-year-old boy and twisted his wrist. Bogdis, hired in August 2006 as a tenured employee, was also accused of denying another 4-year-old boy food, and kicking him in the stomach. She also kicked the back of a desk chair that banged into another kid. These events, and presumably others, took place over a period of months.

After being booked into the San Mateo County Jail on five counts of child cruelty, and four counts of battery, Bogdis made her $5,000 bail and was released. A week later, following an internal investigation by the school district, eight Roosevelt teachers, suspected of abusive behavior themselves, were placed on paid, administrative leave.

February 2012
Cleveland, Texas

At the Eastside Elementary School, fourth grade teacher Carlos Artieda got into an argument with a fifth grade boy. The confrontation intensified to the point where the teacher choked the student. The boy's parents filed charges, and the police arrested Artieda. He stands accused of causing injury to a child, and is on paid administrative leave. Artieda has been working at the school since August 2006.

January 2012
Kansas City, Missouri

Matthew J. Nelson, a 33-year-old second grade teacher at the Grain Valley Prairie Branch Elementary School, has been charged with one count of child molestation, and three counts of sodomy. He is incarcerated in the Jackson County Jail under a $250,000 cash-only bond.

According to witnesses, this teacher fondled young boys in class when they approached his desk for help with assignments. In addition, Nelson allegedly abused students during reading and movie sessions. One of the sexual molestations allegedly took place at a Kansas City Royals baseball game during the 2009-10 school year.

Nelson, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, has taught second and third grades at the school for ten years. In 2007, he was honored as the "Teacher of the Year." Since the initial sexual molestation charges were filed against him, four other students have come forward with accusations of sexual abuse.

February 2012
Winona, Minnesota

On a lighter note, a 9-year-old student at a Catholic school in Winona, was suspended after he grabbed his crotch--Michael Jackson style--at a school fundraiser. The boy, at two previous fund raising events, had entertained approving adults with Michael Jackson moves absent the self-groping.

Raid the Wrong House, Kill the Wrong Person

2012-02-13T06:25:00.000-05:00

     Sixty-four-year-old John Adams and his wife Loraine lived in Lebanon, Tennessee, a town of 20,000, 14 miles east of Nashville. John, suffering from arthritis, had retired after working 37 years for the Precision Rubber Company. With his lump-sum disability payment, John had purchased a new Cadillac and a double-wide trailer on Joseph Street, a short, dead-end road on the eastern side of town. His place and the house next door were the only dwellings on the block.

     At 10 o'clock Wednesday night, October 4, 2000, John and Loraine were watching television in their living room when someone pounded loudly on their front door. Loranine got out of her chair, "Who is it?" she asked. Whoever it was didn't respond. The pounding grew more intense. Realizing that someone was breaking down the door, Loraine, thinking that criminals were invading their house, yelled to John, "Baby, get your gun!"

     John Adams grabbed the cane next to his easy chair and hobbled out of the room. Seconds later, five men, wearing helmets and ski masks and dressed in black combat fatigues, burst into the house. They shoved Loraine against a wall and forced her to her knees. Handcuffed and terrified, she said, "Y'all have got the wrong place! What are you looking for?"

     Officers Greg Day and Kyle Shedron, rookies in their mid-twenties, encountered John standing in the hallway holding a sawed-off shotgun. Mr. Adams fired one shot, and the officers returned fire, hitting him in three places. Mr. Adams crumbled to the floor, and died four hours later on the operating table at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

     At a news conference the following day, Lebanon chief of police Billy Weeks admitted that his officers had raided the wrong house. He acknowledged that because there were only two residences on that block, and one was a house trailer, people had a right to know how this could have happened. Chief Weeks said that the narcotics officer in charge of the case, a person he would not identify, had written the correct address on the search warrant. This address belonged to the drug suspect's house located next door to the Adams's dwelling. The narcotics officer, in directing the SWAT team to the place to be entered, relied on the description of the raid target rather than the address written on the warrant. Nobody could figure out what the hell that meant.

     According to Chief Weeks, the narcotics officer who had acquired the search warrant had been watching the drug suspect's house for more than a month. The judge had issued the warrant after this officer had sworn to him that an informant had purchased drugs at this house. The drug suspect's car had been parked in the Adams's driveway, which may have caused the mix-up. Although this explained how the narcotics cop might have incorrectly assigned the drug suspect's address to the Adams trailer, it also suggested that the officer had not actually witnessed the snitch enter the suspect's place to make the buy. If he had, the wrong description would not have ended up on the search warrant. Nevertheless, Chief Weeks said, "We did the best surveillance we could do, and a mistake was made. It's a very sincere mistake (what does that mean?), a costly mistake. They [Mr. and Mrs. Adams] were not the target of our investigation. [Mr. Adams was, unfortunately, the target of the shooters.] It makes us look at our own policies and procedures to make sure this never occurs again." Mr. Adams had been shot, the chief went on to say, because he fired a shotgun at officers Shedron and Day. The incident (the homicide) was being looked into by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI).

     Chief of Police Weeks called a second news conference on October 19 to update the media on the status of the case. Having earlier assured the public that "We did the best surveillance we could do," he now revealed that "We lost sight of our informant, and that never should occur." It seemed the head of the narcotics unit who had watched the suspect's house, and acquired the search warrant, had not actually witnessed him enter the dwelling for drugs. "What we think happened is that we have a particular [narcotics] supervisor who made a very unwise decision." The "unwise decision" presumably, was to lie to the magistrate who had issued the search warrant.

     Chief Weeks placed this officer on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the TBI investigation. "We are not trying to make excuses for what happened. But I can tell you that we did identifiy ourselves [before breaking into the wrong house], and maybe they [the occupants] got confused. [Mr. and Mrs. Adams were not confused. They were in the right house.] And I know we were reacting to him [Mr. Adams] shooting at us. But obviously, this wouldn't have happened if we had not been in the man's house.

     John Fox, the mayor of Lebanon, also appearing before reporters that day, made the point that, wrong house or not, Mr. Adams would be alive had the SWAT team not been deployed in the first place. "We're going to back off this knocking down doors," he said. "There's going to have to be some really strong evidence that something life-threatening is actually there. I told him [Chief Weeks] to get rid of those damn black uniforms, get rid of them!" [The Lebanon SWAT team had been trained by DEA agents who recommend that officers dress in the "narco ninja" style which consists of all-black outfits and ski masks.] When we go up to knock on a door, we're going to have our suit and tie, or our [regular] police uniform, and that's it. And when they open the door, a citizen is going to be a citizen until there is actually proof of guilt."

    Mayor Fox also provided information that possibly explained how the narcotics supervisor had confused the suspect's residence with the Adams trailer. According to the mayor, the confidential informant was merely an anonymous tipster. Moreover, the so-called surveillance was nothing more than a "drive-by" scan of the neighborhood. If this were true, it's hard to imagine how the narcotics officer could have acquired the search warrant without fudging the facts.

     The TBI completed its investigation, and on November 3, 2000, a Wison County grand jury indicted Lieutenant Steve Nokes, the head of the Lebanon narcotics unit. Lieutenant Nokes stood accused of criminal responsibility for reckless homicide, tampering or fabricating evidence, and aggravated perjury, all felony offenses. At his trial, Nokes pleaded not guilty, and in June 2001, the jury acquitted him of all charges.

     The city of Lebanon, in May 2002, agreed to pay Loraine Adams the lump sum of $200,000. Pursuant to the court settlement, she would also receive $1,675 a month for the rest of her life. The city also paid Mr. Adams's $45,000 hospital bill, and his $5,804 funeral expenses.

Hey Kid, Want to be a Star? Pedophiles in Tinseltown

2012-02-12T06:15:00.002-05:00

     While child sexual molestation takes place behind closed doors (or in lockeroom showers), pedophiles groom their potential victims in plain sight. They do this in classrooms, churches, gymnasiums, and day care centers--anywhere vulnerable children are subjected to the influence and control of adults. They also do it in Hollywood where parents eagerly offer up young, aspiring actors and entertainers to pedophiles working as talent managers, agents, publicists, acting coaches, and casting directors. For a pedophile in the entertainment industry, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

     Former child star Corey Feldman openly discussed his own Hollywood molestations in an interview with the British tabloid, "The Sun:" "When I was 14 and 15 things were happening to me. These older men were leching around like vultures....It was basically me laying there pretending I was alseep and them going about their business."

     State legislators in California have proposed a bill that will require all entertainment personnel working closely with children to undergo stringent background checks. Unless the politicians can create a law that will put an end to America's obsession with celebrity and fame, and turn stage-struck parents from entertainment pimps into protectors, fame-seeking children will continue to be sexually abused by Hollywood dream merchants.

Jason James Murphy

     In Edmonds, Washington, 19-year-old Jason James Murphy, an aspiring actor working as a camp counselor, met and began grooming a 5-year-old boy for sexual encounters. In December 1995, an employee of the Hazelwood Elementary School in Lynnwood, Washington, saw Murphy kissing this boy who was now 7. The teacher notified the police who took Murphy into custody on a child molestation charge. Murphy's family posted his bail, and shortly after his arrest, he was released.

     In January 1996, Murphy's fixation on this child was so intense, he disguised himself as a woman and lured the boy from the elementary school. Murphy and the abducted child flew to New York City and checked into a hotel. After a massive police hunt for the missing victim followed by a segment featuring the case on "America's Most Wanted," a New York City hotel clerk recognized Murphy and the boy, and notified the authorities. A short time later FBI agents rescued the child, and arrested Murphy. Eight months later, a federal jury found Murphy guilty of kidnapping and child molestation. He served 5 of his 7 year sentence behind bars.

     Four years after getting out of federal prison, Murphy moved to West Hollywood, California where he registered as a sex offender under his legal name, Jason James Murphy. Under California law, there are strict rules regarding the circumstances under which a registered sex offender can work with children under 16. The law also requires registered sex offenders to notify law enforcement if they change their names or use aliases.

     Murphy, under the professional name Jason James, became a successful freelance child actor casting director. He worked on films such as "Bad News Bears," "The School of Rock," and "Cheaper by the Dozen 2." Director and co-producer J. J. Abrams hired him as a freelancer on "Super 8." And more recently, Murphy cast child actors in the upcoming feature, "The Three Stooges."

     On November 17, 2011, J. J. Abrams, having been tipped off by his manager David Lonner who had just learned of Jason James' true identity, informed Paramount Pictures, the studio that released "Super 8." Someone at Paramount called the police.

     Officers with the Los Angeles Police Department, on December 9, 2011, arrested Murphy on charges he had violated California's sex offender registry regulations. Violations of these laws are felonies that carry sentences of up to three years in prison. Murphy's attorney blamed the arrest, and the attention it drew from the media, on the highly publicized Penn State child molestation story that was breaking at the time. The lawyer also claimed that the people who had hired Murphy as a casting director knew his full, legal name. Murphy has not been accused of molesting any of the children he has worked with professionally.

Martin Weiss

     Less than two weeks after producer J. J. Abrams notified Paramount Pictures of who Jason James really was, Los Angeles detectives with the Topanga Division's Sexual Assault Unit arrested 47-year-old Martin Weiss, a Hollywood manager who specialized in child actors. Weiss stood accused of committing 30 to 40 sexual crimes against an aspiring singer and musician he represented from 2005 to 2008. The sexual encounters allegedly took place at Weiss' apartment/business office in Santa Monica, and at his home in Woodland Hills. After being taken to the Los Angeles County Jail, a judge set his bond at $300,000. (As of this writing, Weiss has not made bail.)

     According to the alleged victim, now 18-years-old, the molesting stopped when he turned 15. After that, he and Weiss parted ways. The victim didn't report the abuse then because he didn't think anyone would believe his story. But after the Penn State scandal became big news, the victim decided to report his abuser, and come forward with evidence that backed up his story.

     On November 15, 2011, the victim confronted Weiss at his apartment in Santa Monica, and secretly taped their conversation. (In the Penn State case, the victim's mother taped her confrontation with former football coach Jerry Sandusky.) In discussing their past relationship, Weiss did not deny having sexual relations with his accuser. When the victim compared their situation with that of Jerry Sandusky and his boys, Weiss reportedly said, "Those kids didn't want it." Weiss' accuser pointed out that their sexual encounters, when he was 11 and 12, had also not been consentual.

     Martin Weiss, at a December 15 pretrial hearing, entered a plea of not guilty. If convicted of the felonies he is charged with, the owner of Martin Weiss Management could serve up to 34 years in prison.

     Paula Dorn, the co-founder of the non-profit child talent support organization BizParentz Foundation, reportedly said that, over the years, she and members of her group have heard rumors of Weiss' sexual relationships with some of his clients. But without any hard evidence of sexual abuse, no one reported this to law enforcement.

Dr. Ralph Erdmann: Forensic Pathologist From Hell

2012-02-11T05:29:00.002-05:00

     Most forensic pathologists are hardworking, well intentioned, and competent. Even the best of them make honest mistakes. But over the years, there have been several high-profile embarrassments to the profession. These forensic pathologists, because they were careless, incompetent, corrupt, or weak, did great harm to criminal defendants, victims of crime, and forensic science. Dr. Ralph Erdmann, a run-amok forensic pathologist who worked many years in west Texas, represents the worst of the worst.

     In 1981, 25 years after acquiring a medical degree in Mexico, Dr. Erdmann moved to Childress in Lubbock County, Texas. He began, on a private contract basis, doing autopsies for five small hospitals in the county. He moved to Amarillo in 1983, and began performing autopsies for hire throughout the Texas panhandle region. Over the next decade, Dr. Erdmann conducted more than 3,000 autopsies in 41 jurisdictions. In 1990, at the height of his activity, he performed 480 autopsies. The following year he did 310, most of which were performed in Lubbock County. For his work in Lubbock County, Dr. Erdmann received an annual fee of $140,000. In the smaller counties, Dr. Erdmann charged $650 per autopsy. The forensic pathologist had a large territory to cover and was constantly on the move, performing autopsies on the run.

     Because he covered a rural area, Dr. Erdmann did not always work under ideal conditions. In cases of decomposing bodies, many of the smaller hospitals denied him access to autopsy space because of the stink. As a result, he performed autopsies in funeral home garages, hospital loading docks, parking lots, and abandoned houses. Dr. Erdmann once performed an autopsy on a door laid across two 55-gallon drums.

     It wasn't just his take-charge work ethic that made Dr. Erdmann so popular with detectives and county prosecutors. What they especially liked about this pathologist was his unabashed eagerness to tailor his autopsy findings to their law enforcement needs. If the prosecution needed a victim or suspect to have alcohol in his or her blood, no problem. It didn't matter that no blood-alcohol test had been administered. If a certain time of death was necessary to incriminate a defendant, Dr. Erdmann would provide it, even if such a precise estimation was not scientifically feasible.

     Because Dr. Erdmann made their jobs so easy, many detectives and prosecutors turned a blind eye to his personal weirdness, sloppy work habits, questionable science, embarrassing omissions, and patent dishonesty. Even with the support of the law enforcement community, Dr. Erdmann was so obviously unfit for the job, he was eventually drummed out of the profession. He was that incompetent and corrupt.

     By 1992, after a number of defense attorneys began challenging and exposing Dr. Erdmann's methods and findings, the outlandish nature of his malpractice began to catch up to him. That year he was forced to surrender his Texas medical license to the State Board of Medical Examiners. He also pleaded guilty to charging several counties for autopsies he had not conducted. The judge sentenced Erdmann to 10 years of probation and 200 hours of community service. He also had to pay $17,000 in restitution. The following year, Dr. Erdmann left Texas for the state of Washington.

     A review of Dr. Erdmann's work explains how he had been able to perform so many autopsies. He cut corners. For example, he didn't bother to weigh the internal organs he removed. And in many cases, he didn't even bother to cut them out of the corpse. He simply estimated their weights. Dr. Erdmann got caught doing this when the family of a man he had autopsied noticed, in his report, the weight of the dead man's spleen. Years before his death, this man's spleen had been surgically removed.

     Even in situations where the cause of death was obviously murder, Dr. Erdmann didn't always get it right. In the case of a body found in a dumpster, Dr. Erdmann reported the cause of death as pneumonia. The police later arrested the suspect who had stolen the dead man's car, shot him in the head, then disposed of his body in that dumpster. Perhaps this man had pneumonia when he was shot to death, but it was the bullet that killed him. In another body-in-the-dumpster case, Dr. Erdmann lost the dead man's head, the body part containing the fatal bullet that would have connected the shooter to the murder. Without the head, or the bullet, the suspect could not be prosecuted. How does one go about losing a human head?

     In a fatal hit-and-run case, Dr. Erdmann testified that the victim had died instantly of a broken neck. He based this finding on his examination of the 14-year-old victim's brain. But when the body was exhumed, another forensic pathologist found that Erdmann had not even bothered to open the boy's skull.

     In the case of an infant who died in a bathtub, Dr. Erdmann determined that the baby had been killed by a blow to the stomach. This led to the arrest of the man who was in the house when the infant died. After a second forensic pathologist examined the body, the prosecutor had to drop the murder charge. The baby had drowned accidentally. The cause of death: asphyxia.

     As reported in the "ABA Journal," as a result of Ralph Erdmann's bungled and incomplete autopsies, the defendants in 20 murder cases had grounds to appeal their convictions. The panel of experts who looked at 300 of his autopsy reports--a relatively small sampling--found that 1/3 of the bodies had not even been cut open. When confronted with this evidence, Dr.Erdmann explained it away as clerical error. He never admitted wrongdoing, and would continue to insist that he was not dishonest or incompetent. Yes, he had made a few mistakes, but he had been forced to work under unfavorable conditions. The forensic pathologist accused his critics of being revenge-minded defense attorneys, and characterized the investigation of his work and career as a witch hunt.

Whackademia: Nutty Professors 6

2012-02-10T05:14:00.002-05:00

College Education: A Good Investment?

     In his book, "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much," Richard Vedder makes the case that a college education costs too much and delivers too little. On average, tuition plus room and board costs more than $17,000 a year at four-year, state supported universities. The author believes that university presidents pay less attention to students--the customers--than to rich alumni, athletic coaches, big name professors who attract grants, key administrators who can raise money, and politicians. These presidents bribe powerful faculty members with low teaching loads, high salaries, and good parking.

     Today, students who borrow to finance their educations graduate with an average debt of $24,000. More and more college graduates are asking themselves if this money was well spent. Vedder, at least in some cases, doesn't think so. In 2008, 30 percent of flight attendants, 25 percent of retail salespersons, and 18 percent of airport baggage porters, had bachelor's degrees or higher. (To be fair, this doesn't mean that they will always have jobs like this.) More than 17 million college graduates, according to some estimates, were underemployed in 2008.

     Recently, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, using U.S. Census Bureau data, determined what group of college graduates, according to what they majored in, were the most likely to find employment in their fields. All of the graduates who did find work--from medical technology and nursing, to civil engineering and elementary education majors--held vocational degrees. Students who majored in liberal arts programs--English, sociology, psychology, history, and philosophy--seem to be the most likely degree holders on their way to graduate school, or to employment opportunities at the shopping mall.

     Employers are generally as interested in what a college graduate can do as in what he or she knows. The problem is, how much do they know? And how relevent is it to the job in question? Professor Richard Arum of New York University, and Professor Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, recently tracked several thousand undergraduates as they worked their way through 24 universities. The researchers found that nearly 50 percent of these students didn't significantly improve their reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college. After four years, more than 1/3 of the students showed no improvement in these areas.

     In his book, "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory," New York University Professor Jonathan Zimmerman argues that the nation's colleges and universities have no idea if their students are learning anything. That's because there are no effective measures in place to find out. Students pay all that money for college degrees that designate nothing other than they've killed four years, and put themselves in debt. (Okay, that may be a little strong.)

Phony Prestige

     To stay afloat, many colleges have to grossly overcharge their students, and the best way to get away with that is to convince potential tuition payers they are entering a prestigious institution. It's a lot like buying a bottle of pretentious wine. The fact the bottle is expensive is evidence of its superiority. This is probably true of perfume and other status purchases as well.

     The so-called elite colleges and universities, to prove they deserve their status, flaunt the high SAT scores of their students. In rating institutions according to how prestigious they are, "U.S. News & World Report" uses SAT scores as one of the factors. Recently, an administrator with California's Claremont McKenna College resigned after being caught falsifying SAT scores to "U.S. News & World Report." (The current "U.S News" rankings lists Claremont McKenna as the 9th best liberal arts college in the country.) It will be interesting to see how the college will be rated next year.

Poaching Students

     A survey released in September 2011 by "Inside Higher Education," reveals that public universities have been increasing their focus on recruiting out-of-state students. According to a "Wall Street Journal" report, eight state universities get more than 40 percent of their tuition from out-of-state students. These students are attractive because they pay as much as three times what in-state students pay for the same education. It's about money, and sometimes at the expense of in-state students who don't get in because outsiders have taken their places. Parents have raised such a fuss that some politicians are pushing for laws limiting the percentage of out-of-state enrollment.

From Academic Hero to Heel

     Professors who attract federal research money--and there is plenty of it out there--are considered faculty heroes by university presidents. Between June 2006 and February 2011, Graig Grimes, professor of material science and engineering at Penn State, after acquiring $3 million in grant money from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), established himself as an academic star. (Every year the NIH grants billions in taxpayer dollars to advance medical research.) Professor Grimes suddenly lost that status when the U.S. Attorney in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania charged him with research grant fraud. In addition to making false statements on his grant application, the 55-year-old professor is accused of failing to turn over $500,000 of the grant money to the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. This money, related to detecting necrotizing enterocolitis, a disease that affects infants, was supposed to fund clinical/trials at the medical center.

Fired Fire Setting Firefighter Gets Job Back

2012-02-09T06:00:00.001-05:00

     In 1997, 34-year-old Mary Wolski became the first female firefighter in Erie, Pennsylvania. From all accounts, she did an excellent job, and all was well until her mother fell ill from a staph infection in 2005. Following her mother's death that year, Wolski became deeply depressed and came under the care of a psychiatrist who prescribed six medications which, according to Wolski, induced thoughts of suicide.

     The firefighter, on December 28, 2006, attempted to kill herself in a vacant house owned by her father. Wolski started a fire in a bathtub by igniting a pile of clothing. When the heat became too intense, she threw a pan of water on the blaze. After dousing the fire, Wolski made shallow cuts (hesitation marks) across her wrists with a knife. She called a family member for help, stating that she had tried to kill herself by smoke inhalation. Four fire department units rushed to the scene where a firefighter added more water to the smouldering clothing. (The vast majority of pathological fire setters are men. Women who set these attention-getting, cry-for-help fires usually ignite pieces of clothing piled on their beds. Wolski, a firefighter, had the good sense to set her fire in the bathtub so the house wouldn't burn to the ground.)

     In April 2007, the district attorney of Erie County decided not to charge Wolski with an arson-related offense. (I've thought about this decision, and believe the proscutor would have made the same decision even if Wolski had not been a firefighter.) Shortly after the district attorney's decision not to pursue the matter, the fire chief, citing the firesetting as the reason, fired Wolski. In December of that year, the Erie Civil Service Board upheld the dismissal. Set out in its report, the civil service rationale was: "The act of establishing [setting] a fire in a residence is wholly incompatible with the role of a firefighter, despite the mitigating circumstances of Ms. Wolski's psychological state."

     Wolski's attorney, Paul Susko, in October 2008, filed a wrongful termination suit against the city in federal court. The plaintiff, citing the Americans with Disability Act (ADA), claimed that Wolski had not been fired because she set the fire in the bathtub, but because she suffered from a mental illness. This, according to Susko, was in clear violation of theADA.

     Assistant City Solicitor Gerald Villella defended the city against Wolski's suit. In February 2011, he filed a motion asking federal judge Sean J. McLaughlin to dismiss the action. Villella argued that because the city had fired Wolski for setting the fire, not for being mentally ill, she had no case under the ADA. The judge refused to dismiss the case, ruling that a jury would decide "...whether or not Wolski's disability was a motivating factor in the city's decision to terminate her employment."

     The civil trial got underway on January 30, 2012. Wolski's attorney, Paul Susko, told the panel of eight jurors that the city had no evidence that his client's bout with mental illness posed a threat to her or others. According to Wolski, once city officials learned of her attempted suicide, she was treated "like a pariah." The ADA had been passed, he said, by congress to protect people like his client aginst unfair treatment by their employers.

     Assistant City Solicitor Villella argued that the ADA was not meant to protect a firefighter who had started a fire in a house. The solicitor denied that Wolski's mental illness per se caused her termination. He said her reinstatement would erode firefighter morale and public trust.

     The jury, on February 6, found in favor of Wolski. Judge McLaughlin ordered the city to hire her back as soon as a firefighter's retirement provided an opening. The judge said Wolski had "clawed" her way back from death's door, and was ready to serve the city again. He encouraged the community to take pride in the jury's verdict. Solicitor Villella, telling reporters that this was "...the first time a firefighter had started a fire and had gotten her job back," would explore the possibility of an appeal. (This is unlikely.)

     The firing of this firefighter cost the city of Erie $206,665, $186,624 of it in back wages, plus various other reimbursements.

     When all is said and done, how one feels about the Wolski case depends on one's opinion of the Americans with Disability Act being applied to cases of mental illness. Had Wolski been injured in a car accident that rendered her physically incapable of doing the job, the ADA wouldn't apply. Does the fact Wolski set a pathologically motivated fire, then tried to kill herself, make her unfit to be a firefighter? What if she is confronted with another tragedy, and is given depression medication that induces suicidal thoughts? If she had been a police officer instead of a firefighter, would the results of this case been any different? What if she had been a public school teacher?

Mark Berndt: The Elementary Teacher From Hell

2012-02-08T05:44:00.004-05:00

     People without sexual perversions are normal in generally the same way. Sexual perverts, on the other hand, are deviant in disturbingly diverse ways. Adults who use innocent children to satisfy their perverse sexual compulsions are not mentally ill in the sense they are detached from reality. To other adults, even to people they work with every day, they seem normal. Sexually perverse elementary teachers are hard to detect because they victimize kids who are under their control. Sometimes the children don't even know they are being victimized. Teachers like this can get away with sexually abusive behavior for decades. Most of them probably die before they are caught. This is something to worry about. Short of launching McCarthy-like witch hunts, how can these sexual preditors be identified and stopped?

     Mark Berndt, a 61-year-old third grade teacher at the Miramonte Elementary School in Florence Firestone, an unincorporated community in Los Angeles County, began teaching at the school in 1979. Miramonte, situated in an hispanic neighborhood, is in the Los Angeles Unified School District which is comprised of hundreds of campuses and 650,000 students. During his tenure at Miramonte, Berndt, according to his personnel file, had performed up to school standards without a single disciplinary action taken against him. Moreover, he had never been arrested for anything more serious than a traffic ticket.

     In October 2010, a technician at a CVS drugstore in the South Bay area of Los Angeles, came across a set of disturbing photographs of grade school boys and girls depicted in situations suggesting a bizarre form of sexual bondage. The film processor, as mandated by state law, notified the Redondo Beach Police Department. On December 2, 2010, the Redondo police turned the 40 photographs over to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office.

     In some of the photographs, Mark Berndt either has his arm around a third grade boy or girl, or his hand covering their mouths. Some photographs show children with live bugs crawling on their faces. Other kids are either blindfolded, or have their mouths covered with clear tape. Some of the girls are depicted holding spoons containing a white liquid up to their mouths. Children are also pictured about to eat cookies topped with the teacher's semen. (In Berndt's classroom trash can, police recovered a blue, plastic spoon containing traces of his semen.)

     Detectives with the sheriff's office's Special Victims Unit, started identifying the students in the photographs for interview. On January 3, 2011, a detective showed up at Miramonte to question Berndt. The teacher refused to speak to the investigator without first consulting with an attorney. To this day, the police have not interrogated the suspect.

     A former fourth grade student of Berndt's, a woman now 30, told detectives that in 1990, she and two other girls spoke to a school counselor about their teacher's odd, inappropriate behavior. They had seen him, seated at his desk at the front of the room, playing with himself. The counselor accused the girls of making up the story. As a result, nothing came of their complaint. (In 1993, police investigators looked into similar complaints against Berndt. The Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, on grounds the police had not gathered sufficient evidence against the teacher, decided not to pursue the case. Presumably, school officials knew of the investigation.)

     Shortly after Berndt refused to be interviewed by the police, school administrators removed him from the classroom. A month later, February 201l, they fired him. (Actually, he wasn't fired. School officials induced him to retire by offering him $40,000 which he accepted. Firing a public school teacher is no small feat.) While the parents of the children depicted in the photographs were told of the investigation, the police kept the public in the dark. (Placed under police surveillance, Berndt, between the time of his discharge and arrest, was not in contact with children.)

     On January 30, 2012, following a 13 month investigation, the case went public with Berndt's arrest at his home in Torrance. A search of his dwelling resulted in the discovery of 400 photographs similar to the ones seen by the CVS employee. (A normal person, knowing that he was under police investigation, would have destroyed these photographs. The fact that Brendt didn't, reveals how important these photos were to him. The police have recommended that the children in the photographs be tested for sexually transmitted diseases.) Charged with 23 counts of lewd acts against minors, Brendt was hauled off to jail where he is being held on $23 million bond. The criminal charges against him pertain to his contact with children ages 6 to 10 from 2008 to 2010.

     On February 3, 2012, the police arrested a second Miramonte teacher on charges unrelated to the Berndt case. Martin B. Springer, 49, is charged with three counts of committing lewd acts in connection with the alleged fondling an 8-year-old girl in one of his classes. He has been fired, and is being held on $300,000 bail. From Alhambra, Springer has been teaching at the school since 1986. The judge who set bail has decreed that if Springer makes his bond, he is to wear an ankle monitoring device, and stay 250 away from schools and parks. On February 7, one of the two girls who accused Springer of fondling her, recanted her story.

     A lawyer representing "Jane Doe 1," one of Berndt's victims who ate a sugar cookie laced with the teacher's semen, has announced plans to sue the Los Angeles Unified School District. The plaintiff will claim that the school district did not take adequate steps to prevent Berndt from repeatedly abusing his students after numerous complaints had been filed against him. (Since Berndt's arrest, seven more students have come forward with allegations of abuse.)

     On February 6, perhaps in response to allegations of an institutional cover-up, and to regain parent's trust, the 88 teachers and 40 staff employees at Miramonte were suspended with pay. They have been replaced by a substitute crew of teachers and clerks. Over the past few days, angry parents have been protesting outside the school.

     The Miramonte situation continuted to worsen on February 7 when the mother of a former fourth grader told the "Los Angeles Times" that in 2009, a 50-year-old female teacher's aide wrote three love letters to her then 11-year-old son. One of the letters read, "...when you get close to me, even if you give me the chills, I like that. Don't tell nobody (oh boy) about this!"

Daycare Nightmares: The Rent-A-Parent Epidemic

2012-02-07T05:54:00.001-05:00

     Millions of children in the United States are being partially raised (or warehoused) in 400,000 or so licensed and regulated child care facilities. Forty-one percent of preschool children whose mothers are employed, find themselves in daycare 35 or more hours a week. In America, daycare has become a big business.

     Suzanne Venker, in an online "National Review" article entitled, "Will America Ever be Ready for the Truth About Daycare?" points out that politicians and media journalists avoid talking about the harm daycare is doing to the nation's children. Politicians don't want to offend female voters, and women in the media rely on daycare services themselves, and are therefore not prone to publicly discuss the issue. Venker, and others, consider daycare one of the greatest tragedies of modern America. They see the phenomena as a growing epidemic of parental abandonment.

     In her "National Review" piece, Venker discusses a recent e-book by May Saubiek called, "Doing Time: What It Really Means to Grow Up in Daycare." According to the author, daycare children receive very little individualized attention, and when they do, because of the high daycare employee turnover rates, it's often from a stranger. Because daycare is a business that relies on customers who believe their children are happy, and being cared for by people who care, parents aren't told how miserable their children really are. On the contrary, parents receive rose-colored reports of how well their kids are adapting and progressing. Parents are often told that the daycare experience helps "socialize" their children. According to Saubiek, Daycare life fosters aggressive behavior by forcing kids into survival mode. If a child wants a toy, he or she learns to fight for it. (This is probably true at home as well, and who knows, might not be a bad thing. But what do I know?)

     Saubiek, who has worked in child care, and has a master's degree in special education, equates children's time in daycare to the institutionalized nature of prison life. Some child care facilities are obviously better than others, and conditions might not be as bleak as this author describes. But it seems to me that, to some degree, a good number of working mothers' children are paying a price for the realities of modern society. Daycare workers are not highly paid, thoroughly investigated, or highly trained. The country is awash in drug use, alcoholism, mental illness, and pedophilia. Who are these rent-a-parents, and what are they doing to America's preschool population?

January 2012
Ludlow, Kentucky

     In October 2011, at a child care facility in this northern Kentucky town, a daycare employee duck-taped an 18-month-old to a mat to calm him down during nap time. The matter didn't come to light until a fellow employee reported the incident to the police. The suspect, 20-year-old Alicia Lyons, has been charged with a felony offense that carries a maxium 10 year prison sentence. She has admitted taping the baby to the nap mat, and will probably receive a probated sentence. Lyons, following the state required background check, began working at the facility in August 2011. The daycare company has been in business three years, and has locations in two other Kentucky towns.

January 2012
Hopkinsville, Kentucky

     The police arrested a daycare employee named Erica Jones who allegedly left a 3-year-old girl in a company van. The 40-year-old suspect had dropped the vehicle off at a tire company for maintenance. She left the van, and 45 minutes later, when a tire company employee climbed into the vehicle to move it into the garage, found the little girl crying and "very disoriented." Jones has been charged with first-degree wanton endangerment of a child.

February 2012
Port Arthur, Texas

     The daycare center in Hopkinsville, Kentucky is called House of Angels. In April 2010, an employee of Little Angel's Faith Development Center, left a 4-year-old "angel" in the back of the company van after she had driven home to take a nap. After two hours in the vehicle, the child managed to unlock the door and climb out. The 4-year-old walked several blocks to a major highway. Onlookers rescued the kid as she crossed the highway. The child's mother sued the daycare company for $1 million. In February 2012, the defendant settled the suit for an undisclosed amount. These daycare places are supposed to care for "angels," not make them.

February 2012
Lodi, California

     Dorothy Bernhoft, 66, ran a licensed child care business out of her home. When investigators with the state Department of Social Services made a surprise visit to Bernhoft's house, they found 9 infants, in darkened upstairs bathrooms and closets, strapped into car seats. The district attorney is deciding whether or not to charge this child care provider with criminal offenses. If I were her, I'd get a lawyer, quick.

January 2012
Midland, Texas

     Rashawn Rapheal Lewis, an employee of Peppermint Plantation Daycare, was taken into custody on charges he sold two grams of crack cocaine to a user, and made the deal at the daycare facility. He faces up to 20 years in prison.

February 2012
New York, New York

     A longtime New York Fire Department inspector has pleaded guilty in federal court to accepting bribes from the owners of daycare centers in the city. In exchange for the money, Carlos Montoya, 54, certified that these facilities had complied with fire safety standards. So far, six city employees and eight daycare operators have pleaded guilty in the $1 million bribery case.

The Columbine Effect: The SWAT Explosion

2012-02-07T04:50:00.001-05:00

     SWAT team use is no longer a backup, last resort law enforcement measure. Since the mid-1990's, police administrators have significantly increased the number of paramilitary units, and have incorporated SWAT-like methods and a militaristic philosophy into routine patrol duty, order maintenance, and crowd control. The expanding role of SWAT team policing parallels the history of American spree killing. For example, after a deranged shooter masssacred 21 people inside a San Diego McDonald's in July 1984, the San Diego police department began putting more SWAT-trained officers on routine patrol. (The mass murderer was killed by a SWAT team sniper.) A pair of heavily armed men, during a February 1997 bank robbery and shootout, wounded 10 Los Angeles police officers and 7 civilians before they were killed by SWAT bullets. Following this event in North Hollywood, the police department issued 600 high-powered rifles to officers on regular patol.

     The Columbine High School killing spree on April 20, 1999 has been the single greatest catalyst to the militarization of routine policing in America. The Littleton, Colorado killing of 12 and wounding of 24 other students by a pair of their bullied schoolmates has provided the rationale for arming and training "front line" patrol officers for SWAT operations. Critics of the police response to the mass murder point out that SWAT teams didn't enter the school until 1:09 P.M., almost 30 minutes after the killers had taken their own lives, and almost 2 hours after the shooting had started. Had the first responders been trained in SWAT policing techniques and appropriately armed, they wouldn't have waited for the SWAT units while people inside the building were being shot.

     Prior to the Columbine shootings, law enforcement's approach to killing sprees of this nature involved a contain-and-wait strategy designed to prevent officers and bystanders from being killed and wounded in the crossfire. Under this policy, responding patrol officers set up perimeters to contain the situation until the arrival of SWAT teams. Following the Columbine tragedy, police agencies across the country developed "active shooter" programs in which responding patrol officers are trained to rush toward the gunfire. Rather than wait for a paramilitary unit, many police departments now employ "contact teams" comprising heavily armed patrol officers who band together to enter the buildings and confront the shooter or shooters as soon as possible.

     Notwithstanding police assault training, more police officers in the schools, metal detectors, and the like, there have been, since Columbine, more than 85 school-site shootings. High-powered weapons and SWAT team tactics have not kept young psychopaths and lone-wolf depressives from unleashing their fury on vulnerable students and teachers.

Excited Delirium Syndrome: Cause of Death or Police Cover-Up?

2012-02-06T06:14:00.002-05:00

     When people die suddenly and unexpectedly without a clear reason, forensic pathologists, rather than classify them as deaths of undetermined causes, explain these fatalites as being caused by a syndrome. Attributing a mysterious or suspicious death to a syndrome, while it sounds scientific, isn't always forensically enlightening. Some of the more common causes of death syndromes include the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), the Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS), and the more recent, Excited Delirium Syndrome (EDS). As causes of death, syndromes are based less on forensic science than on human behavior and the circumstances surrounding these deaths. These postmortem determinations often leave a lot to interpretation, and are therefore controversial, and subject to intense debate.

Excited Delirium Syndrome (EDS)

     Forensic pathologists in the United States, Canada, England, and Wales, in situations involving agitated, violent, incoherent, and erratic male subjects who die suddenly while fighting with police officers or prison personnel trying to subdue them through physical force or taser jolts, often attribute these deaths to EDS. Most of these men are overweight, a high percentage are black, and they are all high on drugs and/or alcohol. Many are also seriously mentally ill. Under intense stress, the hearts of these men race wildly, their body temperatures soar to 103-5 degrees, and they either die of cardiac or respiratory arrest. Dr. Vincent Di Maio, the former medical examiner of Bexar County, Texas, a well known forensic pathologist and textbook author, believes EDS subjects die from overdoses of adrenaline.

Dr. Deborah Mash

     The term "excited delirium" was coined by Dr. Deborah Mash, the neurologist who founded the Excited Delirium Education, Research and Information Center at the University of Miami where she has studied the brain tissue of 120 men she believes have died of EDS. Called a junk scientist and charlatan by her critics, Dr. Mash has appeared as an expert witness on behalf of Taser International, the stun gun company that has been sued by families of men who have died after being tasered. When asked about her relationship with the firm, Dr. Mash has reportedly said, "I don't care about the taser, and I'll tell you why. Excited delirium was happening before the taser....If it happened with pepper spray, you'd say, 'oh, it's the pepper spray that's killing them.'...We have some cases where there were no police involved, and they still died....Medical examiners have described cases where paramedics got to the scene and the room is trashed, there are ice cubes everywhere, and the subject is dead. That tells me that person was trying to cool down." (Miami-Dade County fire rescue paramedics carry excited delirium survival kits designed to cool overheated brains.)

     Critics of EDS as a cause of death determination include the ACLU and other civil libertarian organizations. Noting that EDS is not recognized by the American Medical Association, these critics believe the authorities use EDS to cover-up and white-wash the real causes of death--police brutality and excessive force. They see EDS as a forensic device used to excuse and exonerate heavy-handed law enforcement.

Cases

September 5, 2006
Louisville, Kentucky

     The police encountered 52-year-old Larry Noles, an ex-Marine, standing nude in the middle of the street. After failing to subdue Noles by force, officers shot him with a taser three times. The highly agitated subject suddenly stopped breathing and died. The Jefferson County Medical Examiner attributed the death to EDS.

October 29, 2006
Jerseyville, Illinois

     Roger Holyfield, 17, was walking in the middle of the street carrying a phone in one hand and a Bible in the other. He was screaming incoherently when approached by the police. After struggling with the out-of-control man, officers tasered him. Holyfield went into a coma and died the following day. The local medical examiner attributed the death to EDS.

December 17, 2006
Lafayette, Louisiana

     High on cocaine and delirious, 29-year-old Terill Enard, with a broken bone sticking out of his leg, was creating a disturbance at a Waffle House restaurant. The police came, tried to restrain him, then shocked him with a taser. Enard collapsed and died at the scene. The coroner's office listed the death as "cocaine-induced Excited Delirium."

January 2008
Coral Gables, Florida

     At two in the morning, Coral Gables police found ex-con Xavia Jones lying in the middle of a highway screaming "God is coming to take me!" When officers approached him, Jones yelled, "Kill me, shoot me." Instead of shooting him, an officer tasered him four times. When that had no effect, another officer gave Jones five more jolts. The subject sort of locked-up, then died with a white liquid trickling from his mouth. The Miami-Dade County Associate Medical Examiner cited, "excited delirium syndrome, associated with cocaine use," as the cause of death.

July 22, 2011
Bangor, Maine

     The Bangor police were called at 6:45 P.M. to deal with 32-year-old Ralph E. Willis, a man addicted to an hallucinogenic stimulant called MDPV, the key ingrediant in bath salts. Officers found him running wildly around yelling at people on the street. When Willis resisted being taken into custody, several officers had to subdue him. In so doing, they used their nightsticks.

    At the Penobscot County Jail, Willis continued to be agitated and uncooperative. He fought with jail personnel who put him into a holding cell. Thirty minutes later, when they checked on him, Willis appeared unresponsive. When deputy sheriffs entered the cell, Willis began to yell, grab his testicles, and bang his head against the wall. He then rolled onto his stomach, flailed his arms and legs, and stopped breathing. A short time later, they pronounced him dead at a local emergency room. Willis died of cardiac arrest, and at the time of his death, had a body temperature of 103 degrees.

     The state's medical examiner ruled the manner of Willis' death accidental. The cause: MDPV toxicity. In her report, the forensic pathologist described Willis as having been in a state of excited delirium. As a result of the Willis case, the Penobscot County Jail no longer accepts prisoners who are under the influence of bath salts.

EDS in England and Wales

     Research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a not for profit organization based at City University in London, has disclosed that excited delirium was first used in a British case in 1996. Since then, the condition has been used by coroners in England and Wales to explain 10 police restraint related deaths. In researching EDS, bureau journalists interviewed several forensic pathologists, and Dr. Deborah Mash who told an interviewer that "Just because you die in police custody, doesn't mean that what the police were doing at the time you died led to your death. That's why [the symptoms of EDS] the police are called to the scene to begin with."

     In Great Britian, Dr. Mash has drawn the wrath of several prominent critics in the field of forensic pathology. Dr. Derrick Pounder, a forensic pathology expert at the University of Dundee said, "Excited delirium is a theory....It has come from the United States, where the science is very politicized, without a robust enough analysis. If you write off a death as excited delirium, then you close the door to guilt being attributed, and more importantly, lessons being learned from the types of [police] restraint used."

     Dr. Richard Shepherd, another English forensic pathologist who spoke to journalists with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, said this: "We know there are a group of people who exhibit this very bizarre behavoir. Whether they strictly fall into this group called 'excited delirium' or not, I think will become clearer as more research is done....I think it is a term that should be used with great care...."

     Like its cause of death counterparts, SIDS and SBS, EDS will attract supporters and critics, and remain controversial until it is either totally rejected in the medical community, or accepted as valid forensic science.

Random Acts of Crime: Snapshots 4

2012-02-05T05:51:00.002-05:00

January 2012
Hanford, California

     A Kings County Court Clerk, in October 2011, received a call from attorney Michelle Winspur who said she would be late for her client's trial that day. Because Winspur sounded intoxicated, the 45-year-old lawyer was given a breath-alcohol test when she finally arrived at the court house. The booze test registered more than twice the legal alcohol limit for driving. In December, Winspur failed a sobriety test as she left the court house after representing a client at a hearing. In 2010, she had been professionally disciplined for being drunk during a trial in Montgomery County.

     In January 2012, the state of California suspended Winspur's law license, and the Kings County district attorney charged her criminally with appearing in court drunk. I had no idea that lawyering under the influence was a crime. I can see charging wasted operating room surgeons with drinking while cutting, and airline pilots with flying under the influence. But don't you think this is a little harsh? In the Lindbergh kidnapping case, defendant Bruno Richard Hauptmann's attorney was drunk throughout the six weeks trial. Although Hauptmann went to the electric chair, I think his attorney did a fine job. I would be a lot more concerned if the jurors had been drunk.

February 2012
Gaston, North Carolina

     In 2009, Danny Robbie Hembree, Jr. was found guilty of murdering 17-year-old Heather Catterton. A judge, in November 2011, sentenced Hembree to death. The 50-year-old is currently on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. In March, Hembree is scheduled to go on trial for the murder of 30-year-old Randi Dean Saldana whose burnt remains were found near Blacksburg, South Carolina in 2009. He has also been accused of murdering a third woman named Deborah Ratchford. Hembree, after confessing to all three murders, recanted with the absurd story he had confessed to these homicides to cover-up a series of robberies he had committed.

     This month, Hembree pulled a stunt that reveals just how arrogant and sadistic a sociopathic serial killer can be. He wrote a taunting letter to his hometown newspaper, "The Gaston Gazette." Lest the community and members of his victims' families thought he was being punished for his murders, Hembree wrote: "Is the public aware that I am a gentleman of leisure, watching color TV in the A.C. [?], reading, taking naps at will, eating three well balanced hot meals a day. I'm housed in a building that connects to the new 55 million dollar hospital with around the clock free medical care...." The death row prisoner assures his readers that the chance of him being executed within the next 20 years is "very slim." Hembree closes his letter with: "I laugh at you self righteous clowns and I spit in the face of your so-called justice system. The state of North Carolina has sentenced me to death but it's not real."

     Perhaps, but what is real is this: Hembree is not free, he has killed his last woman, and he will die behind bars, one way or another.

January 2012
Seattle, Washington

     In July 2010, police in the Bahamas captured 20-year-old Colton Harris-Moore, the so-called "Barefoot Bandit" who had eluded the authorities for two years. The Barefoot Bandit had escaped arrest in stolen cars, boats, and even a plane he crashed in the Bahamas. To taunt the police, he once left chalk outlines of bare footprints at one of his crime scenes.

     In December 2011, Harris-Moore pleaded guilty in Seattle to burglary, car theft, identity theft, and a variety of other property crimes. (He had committed more than 30 residential burglaries.) Under his plea agreement, he will give up profits from book or movie deals stemming from his larger than life crime spree. That money will go to his victims. In January 2012, a federal judge sentenced the Barefoot Bandit to 6 1/2 years in prison. According to his attorney, he will be out in 4 1/2 years at which time he plans to enter college to study aviation. (He's already proven he can take off and fly, he just needs to work on his landings.) A movie is already in the works with 20th Century Fox. By the time he walks out of prison, Colton Harris-Moore will be a celebrity, and an American hero--a modern day Charles Lindbergh.

January 2012
Santa Barbara County, California

     Late in 2009, 51-year-old Eugene Darryl Temkin, asked a friend if he knew someone who would kill Temkin's former business partner, his partner's wife, and one of their business associates. The friend alerted the police who arranged to have an undercover cop, posing as a hitman, meet with Mr. Temkin.

     In a series of meetings in June and July 2010, Temkin furnished the undercover office with details regarding the identities and habits of his intended targets. He also gave the officer $3,000 in cash as a down payment on the $30,000 murder contract. Temkin instructed the "hitman" to extort $15 million from his victims, money to be deposited into a special bank account in Uruguay. Once the money got into the mastermind's bank account, the hitman was to torture the two men, rape the woman, then murder all three.

     Shortly after Temkin's final meeting with the undercover cop, the police took him into custody. Found guilty in federal court, the judge, in January 2012, sentenced Temkin to 6 years in prison. I've looked at hundreds of cases like this one, and this is the lightest sentence I've seen for a murder for hire solicitation mastermind. Over a business deal gone wrong, Mr. Temkin wanted to kill three people. He wanted to torture them first. Al Capone would have been impressed. The fact this mastermind was talking to a cop instead of a real hitman does not, in my view, mitigate the seriousness of his crime. In cases like this, 35 years is the typical sentence.

January 2012
Syracuse, New York

     Nicole Osbourne was in criminal court as a defendant in a felony assault case. Theodore Murphy, her boyfriend, the victim who had reported the assault, was in the courtroom as well. At Murphy's request, an order of protection prohibiting Osbourne from making any kind of contact with him had been issued by the presiding judge. At the hearing, the prosecutor asked the judge to lift the protection order so that the assault victim could ask the defendant to marry him. The judge lifted the order, the victim popped the question, and the assault defendant accepted the marriage proposal. It's enough to make you puke.

     I don't think you have to be Nostramdamus to predict a bleak future for this couple.

Where Have All the Pickpockets Gone?

2012-02-04T05:47:00.003-05:00

     In Indianapolis, the home of this year's Super Bowl, the chief of police recently declared that his force is prepared for the chaos of Super Bowl week, and that includes undercover officers who will be on the lookout for pickpockets. To avoid pickpocket victimization, the chief recommends that men carry their cash and credit cards in front-pocket wallets, and that women tote their purses diagonally across their bodies. Pickpockets? Really?

     Today, when people say they've had their pockets picked, they're usually referring to politicians, not those dexterous thieves who actually pick pockets and lift wallets from handbags. You don't hear much any more about those street larcenists with the educated fingers and nerves of steel. In the old days, as-told-to memoirs featuring the exploits of these soft-touch artists had a small niche in the true crime genre. But as far as I know, there hasn't been a book like this published for decades. Are these guys still around plying their sticky-fingered trade? Has pickpocketing become a lost art?

     In Europe, particularly Rome, Italy and Barcelona, Spain, pickpockets still mingle with the tourists. Most of them are from Bulgaria and Romania. But even in those cities, pickpockets are vastly outnumbered by their less talented criminal cousins, purse snatchers. In America, they have been replaced by armed street thugs. The FBI, through its uniform crime reporting system, no longer keeps track of reported pickpocketing cases nationwide.

     New York City has always been paradise for pickpockets. But even in the Big Apple, pickpocketing has been a dying criminal trade. In 1990, there were 23,000 reported cases, but in 2000, less than 5,000. Up until the 1970s, the city was home to organized pickpocket schools where students lifted wallets from mannequins outfitted with bells that would ring if the trainee lacked the required finesse. These academys are gone, and no one is passing the torch to a new generation of wallet-lifting thieves.

     The beginning of the end for professional pickpocketing came when people started carrying credit cards instead of cash. About the only people still practicing this ancient trade are a handful of professional magicians whose motives are entertainment rather than theft. These entertainers have the skill, but without the threat of detection, arrest, and jail, they don't possess the nerves of steel.

The LAPD and Birth of SWAT Policing

2012-02-04T05:12:00.001-05:00

     In 1967, amid a period of civil unrest in the form of anti-Vietman War protests and race riots, the Los Angeles Police Department formed 15 four-man paramilitary units to protect the department's facilities. Members of these Station Defense Teams possessed street-patrol backgrounds and prior military service. These were not, however, full-time assignments. The concept of combat-trained paramilitary police units came from an officer named John Nelson, who passed the idea on to Inspector Darryl Gates, who presented it to the top brass. Gates wanted to call these units Special Weapons and Attack Teams, but this was considered a bit too militaristic for a civilian agency. In 1969, these units became known as Special Weapons and Tactical (SWAT) teams.

     On December 9, 1969, when police officers tried to serve search warrants for illegal weapons at the Black Panther headquarters at 41st Street and Central in Los Angeles, the occupants fired on the officers with shotguns and automatic rifles. SWAT teams from around the city were called to the scene. Following a four-hour gun battle between six Black Panthers and 200 officers, the shooters in the house surrendered. Three SWAT team members and three Black Panthers had been wounded.

     Following the Black Panther shoot-out, police administrators concluded that SWAT team response times would be improved by reassigning the 15 teams dispersed throughout the county to police headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. In 1971, SWAT team assignments became full-time positions. The Los Angeles Police Department, for several years, was the only law enforcement agency in the country with a paramilitary capability.

     Four years after the Black Panther violence, the Los Angeles SWAT force consisted of 10 six-man teams. Each team had two five-man units called "elements," with a leader, two "assaulters," a scout, and a rearguard officer. SWAT weapons included a .245-caliber, bolt-action sniper rifle, two .223-caliber semiautomatic rifles, and a pair of shotguns. Officers were also equipped with service revolvers and gas masks. Dressed in their helmets, gloves, and body armor, they could not be distinguished from combat troops.

     On May 17, 1974, six members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) barricaded themselves inside a house on East 54th Street at Compton Avenue, and ignored orders from the police to surrender peacefully. The domestic terrorists responded to tear gas canisters lobbed into the premises by opening fire on three SWAT teams and hundreds of regular police who had gathered at the scene. The police returned fire, eventually wounding all six occupants. The gun battle consisted of 3,772 bullets fired by SLA members and thousands of shots from the police. The shoot-out ended when a fire broke out inside the house, burning the dwelling to the ground. The occupants either died from their wounds, or from the blaze. Investigators speculated that the fire started when a bullet hit a Molotov cocktail or a tear gas grenade. Viewers around the country watched as the battle unfolded on live television.

     Although there was little sympathy for the terrorists who had fired on the police, the Los Angeles Police Department was criticized for allowing the situation to evolve into a scene of urban warfare. The department responded by tightening SWAT unit admission standards and upgrading the paramilitary training to reduce the occurrence of such spectacular violence.

Deputy Shaquille O'Neal: The Missed Slam Dunk

2012-02-03T05:25:00.003-05:00

     In 2006, Michael Harmony, a lieutenant with the Bedford County Sheriff's office, commanded the battle against child pornography in south central Virginia. Lieutenant Harmony headed a high-profile regional task force called Blue Ridge Thunder. Shaquille O'Neal, the 7 foot 1, 325-pound center for the Miami Heat professional basketball team, an off-season reserve deputy with the Bedford County Sheriff's Office, was a member of the regional task force. The sheriff had enlisted the famous basketball player, also a gun-carrying reserve officer in Miami Beach, as the public face of the area's anti-child pornography campaign. O'Neal had accompanied the Blue Ridge Thunder team on several military-style child pornography raids.

     In September 2006, a cyberspace undercover investigator assigned to the task force, downloaded child pornography via an Internet Provider (IP) address. Based on this information, a local magistrate subpoenaed Fairpoint Communications, the source IP, requiring the company to identify the person or persons at this IP site. The IP complied, providing the authorities with the name of A. J. Nuckols, a resident of Gretna, Virginia. The police didn't know it, but someone at Fairpoint Communications had misread the subpoena. Therefore the identification of the Nuckols family in connection with the IP address was a mistake. Without further investigation into the identify of Mr. Nuckols and his family, the police used this faulty information to acquire a warrant to search his house.

     Mr. Nuckols, a 45-year-old tobacco and cattle farmer, lived with his wife, Lisa, an elementary school teacher, on a farm near Gretna. Two of their children, ages 12 and 16, lived at home. Their 21-year-old daughter attended a nearby college. The family kept their one computer, mostly used by the children for homework, in their living room. The parents didn't know their own email address, and rarely shopped online or downloaded information from the Internet. There was nothing in their histories, lifestyle, or associations that suggested any connection to child pornography.

     Saturday morning at 10:30 A.M., September 23, 2006, two officers from the Blue Thunder Task Force knocked on the Nuckol's front door. Invited into the house by Lisa, they informed her of the warrant allowing them to search the dwelling for child pornography. "I was in shock," Lisa later told a newspaper reporter. "At first it was not just disbelief. I told them, 'We don't live that way.' "

     As the police officers spoke to Lisa Nuckols, a fleet of police cars from Bedford and Pittsylvania Counties rolled up to the house. Suddenly 10 officers, dressed in black and camouflage, and wearing flak jackets, were moving about the yard carrying semiautomatic weapons. Mr. Nuckols, working near the barn, looked across the field and saw all the police vehicles. Fearing that something awful had happened to his wife, or one of his children, he jumped into his truck and sped to the house.

     "What's going on?" Mr. Nuckols asked as he climbed out of the pickup. Instead of getting an answer, one of the officers dropped into a shooting position, aimed his pistol at the farmer, and said, "Turn around and put your hands on the truck." Another member of the team handcuffed Mr. Nuckols behind his back. As they led him toward the house, Lieutenant Michael Harmony reportedly said, "Had a rough day? It's about to get a whole lot worse."

     Lieutenant Harmony informed Mr. Nuckols that he or someone in his family was suspected of having downloaded child pornography from 150 web sites. The police were there to search the house for evidence of this crime. Later, in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, Mr. Nuckols expressed how he felt at that moment: "When it finally became clear what they were there for, I was just flat-out mad. They came and assaulted my family for something we had nothing to do with."

     The Nuckols children came home at 2 P.M. from a high school cross-country meet. The police, still in the house, asked them if they had downloaded child pornography. The children were as stunned by the accusation as their parents. Ninety minutes later, the officers departed, taking with them the family computer, DVDs, videotapes, and other personal belongings. Before he left, Lieutenant Harmony told Mr. Nuckols that the child pornography investigation would take between six and nine months to wrap up, noting that the state crime lab was backed up.

     At one point durng the siege, Mr. Nuckols recognized the famous basketball player. "You're Shaquille O'Neal," he said. The big man, dresssed like the others, and armed, replied that his name was Tony. Nine days later, when the Nuckols family learned that the search and seizure had been based on an erroneous IP address identification, O'Neal denied involvement in the raid. However, after the Bedford County Sheriff's Office confirmed his participation, he admitted his role.

     After the raid, before they were aware of the mistake, Lisa Nuckols told neighbors and friends what happened. Worried that she might lose her job, she advised the principal and the school superintendent as well. In his letter to the newspaper editor, Mr. Nuckols wrote: "When you come into someone's home, that's an intrusion. I feel the same about the raid as I would about any assault on our home and family. A robber would be wrong, and these officers were wrong. No matter what the spin the police put on it, the public will always believe it's wrong. People can't believe this happens in this country."

     In response to the criticism following the revelation that the Blue Ridge Thunder team had raided the wrong house, Lieutenant Harmony blamed the Fairpoint Company. According to him, the IP had made the mistake, not the police. Lieutenant Mike Taylor with the Pittsylvania County Sheriff's Office, though not a participant in the raid, apologized to the Nuckols family.

     Shaquille O'Neal, however, took another approach by accusing Mr. Nuckols of exaggerating his account of the raid to make the police look bad. When members of the media questioned him about his role in the operation, the basketball player reportedly said, "We did everything right, went to the judge, got a warrant. You know, they [the Nuckols] made it seem like we beat them up, and that never happened. [Well good for you Shaquille.] We went in, talked to them, took some stuff, returned it--bada bam, bada bing."

     If there is one thing in law enforcement rarer than a slam dunk case, it's an apology for shoddy police work.

Al Capone a Nice Guy? Give Me a Break

2012-02-02T05:42:00.004-05:00

     Except for books about writers and the writing life, the memoir has become my least favorite literary genre. I'm sick of manufactured sob stories, celebrity drivel you can get from "People" magazine, fiction passed off as fact, revisionist, self-serving history, autobiographical narcissism, and memorists trying to create something out of nothing. While there are very few of us worthy of a memoir (myself included), everybody seems to be writing one, including people with relatives who were once famous, or better yet, infamous. A memoir published in 2010 by Deirdre Marie Capone, the grandniece of the prohibition ganster Al Capone, represents, in my view, a new low in this form of literary exploitation.

     When Al Capone died on Jaunuary 25, 1947, the author of "Uncle Al Capone: The Untold Story From Inside His Family," was 7-years-old. During the first six years of her life, great uncle Al was doing time at Alcatraz for the least of his crimes, tax evasion. When they released him in November 1939, Capone's brain was partially destroyed by untreated syphillis. He spent his last months on earth fishing in his swimming pool on Palm Island in Biscayne Bay, Florida.

     It's safe to say that the author of this memoir had no direct contact with her great uncle. And even if she had, she was 7-years-old. This book was obviously not written from her journal entries. Nevertheless, Deirdre Capone wants us to believe that Al Capone was the victim of heavy-handed law enforcers who exaggerated the extent of his criminality. The author is telling us that Capone was nothing more than a successful businessman giving the American public what it wanted--illegal booze. Moreover, the man loved his family and liked to cook. What a load of crap. If half of what has been written and said about Al Copone is false, he is still one of the most violent and evil criminals in American history.

       As a "businessman," Capone killed his competitors, and anyone who refused to buy his alcohol. Sure, people wanted their prohibition era booze, but they didn't bargain for the extortion, arson, kidnapping, aggravated assault, and first-degree murder that went with doing business with a man who employed more than 600 thugs and gangsters. Having paid-off most of the cops and federal prohibition agents in Chicago, Capone had a license to kill, and he used it. Calling Al Capone a "businessman" is like calling Hitler a statesman with a softspot for his German Sherpard.

     Like most mob leaders, Capone moved up the gangster career ladder by murdering people who stood in his way. He killed several men over petty arguments and barroom insults. Those he didn't murder ended up with broken arms, legs, and skulls. At an organized crime banquet he once hosted, Capone beat an associate to death with a baseball bat as he sat over his pasta. And on February 14, 1929, he masterminded the execution style mass murder of seven members of a rival gang in the so-called St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Some businessman, this Capone.

     I wonder how many of the grandnieces and grandnephews of the gangsters, killers, booze industry workers, and bystanders killed directly or indirectly by Al Capone are writing their I-was-related-to memoirs? I hope not many. Too many innocent trees have already died for dreadful books like this.

     I wouldn't have known that this book existed had I not seen the author on yesterday morning's "Fox and Friends." How in the hell did this woman get on national television with that book? Perhaps the young producers at Fox TV don't know that Al Capone is dead. Please, before even thinking about buying this book, think of the trees.

Michael Phelps and the Mysterious Bong

2012-02-02T04:56:00.001-05:00

      On February 1, 2009, a British newspaper published a photograph of Michael Phelps, the star of the 2008 Olympics, smoking a marijuna pipe at a party in Columbia, South Carolina. Although the photograph had been taken three months earlier, Leon Lott, the television-friendly sheriff of Richland County, known for his aggressive approach to drug enforcement, opened a narcotics investigation of the famous gold medalist swimmer.

     Sheriff Lott, in September 2008, had overseen the purchase of an Army surplus armored personnel carrier equipped with a .50-caliber belt-fed machine gun. The combat vehicle was used to transport his SWAT team to drug raids. Six days after he had launched the Phelps investigation, a 12-man Richland County SWAT team, guns drawn, broke into a Lake Murray house rented by four Univeristy of South Carolina students believed to have attended the November 2008 party. After confiscating less than a gram of marijuana, Lott's deputies arrested the students for drug possession, and grilled them about Michael Phelps.As it turned out, none of the arrestees had attended the party, and were of no help in the Phelps investigation.

     From Lake Murray, Sheriff Lott's SWAT officers traveled to Columbia and raided the party house where they seized six grams of marijuana and the bong depicted in the newspaper photograph. The deputies arrested four more students, and charged them with misdemeanor possession of marijuana. Thanks to the sheriff and his SWAT team, the peace and dignity of the great state of South Carolina was being secured, one marijuana possession bust at a time.

     At a news conference on February 15, 2009, Sheriff Lott announced that his officers had not gathered enough evidence to charge Michael Phelps with a crime. (This must have put fear in the hearts of the good citizens of Richland County.) "We had a photo," he said, "and we had him saying he was sorry for his inappropriate behavior. That behavior [however] could have been merely going to a party....He never said, 'I smoked marijuana.' He never confessed to that. We don't have enough we could go and arrest him."

     When a reporter asked Sheriff Lott why he, in an effort to make a case out of a 3-month-old photograph of an Olympic swimmer smoking pot, had deployed his SWAT team to raid houses occupied by college students suspected of attending the party, Lott, either missing or ignoring the point, said, "As a cop, my responsibility is to enforce the law, not to create it or ignore it. Marijuana in the state of South Carolina is illegal."

     In response to Sheriff Lott's assessment of his responsibilites as a law enforcement officer, two reporters for "Newsweek" wrote: "If cops chased down every kid who took a bong hit at a frat party, the jails would be full, and the lecture halls empty. Half the professors would wind up in the clink, too." But the media's principal take on the story had nothing to do with heavy-handed, militaristic law enforcement. It focused on Michael Phelp's fall from grace, and the loss of millions of dollars worth of product endorsements. (I guess he could have become a spokesman for bongs in states where grass is essentally legal.) The news coverage of Sheriff Lott's idiotic SWAT raids would have been different if one of the frat boys, believing the house was being invaded by criminals, had picked up a gun.

Randall Dale Adams: An Innocent Man

2012-02-01T05:41:00.004-05:00

     Last June a 61-year-old man who had been living a quiet life in a central Ohio town, died without much notice. His name is Randall Dale Adams, and in the history of 20th Century criminal justice--or rather injustice--he is a towering figure. What happened to Randall Dale Adams in 1976 and beyond caused me to rethink just how just our criminal justice system is. The Adams case perfectly illustrates the doleful saying: "Any prosecutor can convict a guilty defendant, it takes a great prosecutor to convict an innocent one."

     On November 27, 1976, Adams, an employed 27-year-old manual laborer with no history of crime or violence, while walking along a street in Dallas, Texas after his car had run out of gas, met 16-year-old David Ray Harris. Harris, a kid from Vidor, Texas who had aleady been in trouble with the law, and driving a car he had recently stolen, offered Adams a ride.

     After getting into the stolen car with Harris, Adams and his new acquaintance drank some beer, smoked marijuana, and took in a porn flick at a drive-in theater. Shortly after midnight, on November 28, Harris, while driving his blue sedan with its headlights off, and Adams in the front passenger's seat, was pulled over by two officers in a Dallas patrol car. As patrolman Robert Wood approached the driver's side of Harris' vehicle, Harris, using a handgun he had stolen from his father, shot officer Wood five times, killing him on the spot. The dead officer's partner, Teresa Turko, fired at the car as Harris sped off. None of her bullets hit the fleeing vehicle. Officer Turko was certain the man who had shot her partner was the only person in the car.

     After dropping Adams off at his place of residence in Dallas, Harris drove southeast 300 miles to his parents' house in Vidor. During the next several days, Harris bragged to his friends that he had "offed a pig" in Dallas. This drew the attention of the local police who recovered the pistol Harris had stolen from his father. Through ballistics analysis, a firearms expert identified this gun as the murder weapon. Detectives also gave Harris a polygraph test which he failed. At first, Harris denied any knowledge of the shooting, but after the ballistics report, and the lie detector results, he fingered Randall Adams, a hitchhiker he had picked up in Dallas, as the cop killer.

     Following a police interrogation in Dallas in which Randall Adams identified David Harris as the police shooter, and passed a polygraph test with that account, the Dallas County District Attorney, Norm Kinne, decided not to prosecute Harris. Kinne didn't want to prosecute Harris because, at age 16, he was too young for the electric chair.

     At Adams' May 1977 murder trial, prosecutor Kinne manufactured incriminating evidence in the form of three eyewitnesses who testified they had ridden by the shooting scene just as officer Wood approached the blue car. Although it was dark, and the inside of the stolen car was unlit, the three witnesses identified Randall Adams as the driver of the stopped vehicle. These identifications were patently ridiculous, and obviously motivated by something other than the truth. Two of the eyewitnesses, a husband and wife team, were looking for a piece of the $21,000 ransom. The other witness had a daughter in trouble with the law who, after the Adams trial, had the charges against her dropped. All three of these prosecution witnesses, bought for and coached, committed perjury. Officer Turko took the stand, and while admitting she hadn't seen the shooter clearly, said his hair was the same color as the defendant's.

     Randall Adams took the stand on his own behalf, and proclaimed his innocence. The prosecutor and the defense attorney made their closing arguments, and the case went to the jury. Without taking much time to deliberate, the jurors found the defendant guilty of murdering officer Robert Wood. This led to the penalty phase of the trial which involved the determination of whether or not there was a probability that the convicted man would, if given a life sentence, commit future acts of violence.

     District Attorney Norm Kinne put two expert (so-called) witnesses on the stand who testified that Randall Adams was still a dangerous man. The fact that Adams was innocent, and had no history of violence, proves that both of these psychiatrists were bogus prosecution hacks. The first of these thoroughly corrupt experts to take the stand, Dr. John Holbrook, had been the chief of psychiatry with the Texas Department of Corrections. (This alone should have disqualified him as an unbiased witness.) The second, a creepy shrink named Dr. John Grigson, after having spoken to Randal Adams fifteen minutes, told the jurors that this defendant was qualified to be electrocuted. Dr. Grigson's testimony was so predictably prosecution friendly--he had testified in more than 100 trials that ended in death sentences--defense attorneys around the state called him "Doctor Death." (According the American Psychiatric Association, then and now, future dangerousness is impossible to predict.)

     Relying on corrupt and erroneous psychiatric testimony pertaining to an innocent man, the Dallas County jury voted to sentence Randall Adams to death.

     In January 1979, the Texas Court of Crimminal Appeals affirmed Adams' conviction and death sentence. A judge sentenced Adams to die on May 8 of that year. On May 5, three days before his date with the electric chair, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a stay of execution. The governor of Texas, Bill Clements, decided to commute Adams's sentence to life in prison.

     While Randal Adams sat in prison, David Harris, the man who had murdered officer Wood, joined the Army. While stationed in Germany, Harris committed a series of burglaries that led to a stretch in the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. After his release from Leavenworth, Harris moved to California where he committed several kidnappings and robberies. In 1985, Harris was back in Texas where, in Beaumont, he murdered a man. A year later, a jury sentenced Harris to death. Had Harris been convicted of killing officer Wood, he wouldn't have had the opportunity to kill the Beaumont man.

     In 1988, producer Errol Morris made a documentary about the Adams case called "The Thin Blue Line." In the film, Morris exposed the prosecution's eyewitnesses as liars, and Dr. John Grigson as a courtroom fraud. A year later, following the airing of the documentary, Dallas District Court Judge Larry Baraka, following a 3-day hearing on the Adams case, recommended to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that Randall Adams be granted a new trial.

     On March 1, 1989, the appeals court, in an unanimous 27-page opinion that cited gross prosecutoral wrongdoing, ordered a new trial. Three weeks later, the Dallas County District Attorney (not Kinne) dropped all charges, and Randall Adams, after 12 years behind bars, walked free. Because he had not been pardoned by the governor, Adams was not eligible for the $25,000 he would have otherwise been awarded.

     In 2004, the state of Texas executed David Harris for the 1985 murder. Before he died, Harris admitted shooting officer Wood to death. Now both men who were in the stolen car the night officer Wood died, are dead as well. Except for the occasional reairing of "The Thin Blue Line," the Randall Adams case is almost forgotten. But it shouldn't be forgotten because it reminds us of how much damage "a great" prosecutor can do.

Brittany Norwood: Cold-Blooded Killer

2012-01-31T06:02:00.001-05:00

     In some cases, when it comes to predicting who is capable of committing bloody, premeditated murder, you can't tell the book by its cover. This is particularly true in a murder committed last year by a 29-year-old woman named Brittany Norwood.

     Norwood played high school soccer in Kent, her hometown outside of Seattle, Washington. She continued her career as an athelete at Stony Brook University on Long Island. At Stony Brook, her soccer teammates accused the 5 foot, 120 pound player of stealing cash from them. A member of the team reported the thefts to the coach who chose to ignore the allegations.

     In 2010, Norwood was working as a sales clerk at a downtown Bethesda, Maryland store called Lululemon Athletica where upper-middle class customers could buy $98 yoga pants and $58 running shirts. Jayna Murray, a 30-year-old graduate student at John Hopkins University, worked in the store with Norwood. Although the two young women were not close friends, they worked well as a sales clerk team.

     At 9 P.M., March 11, 2010, the two Lululemon clerks closed the doors to the public, and began shutting down the shop for the night. Forty-five minutes later, pursuant to one of the chain's anti-employee theft measures, Jayna and Brittany checked each other's handbags for unpurchased store merchandise. This led to Jayna's discovery of a pair of yoga pants in Brittany's purse. As they walked out the door, Jayna told her fellow employee that she would have to report the attempted theft to the store manager.

     On her walk to the Metro station, Brittany, as a ruse to get Jayna back into the store where she could talk her out of reporting the incident, phoned Jayna to tell her that she had left her wallet in the shop. Since Jayna possessed the key to the store, the two clerks headed back to Lululemons.

     As soon as Brittany and Jayna re-entered the store at 10:05, Norwood made her pitch. But it was to no avail, Jayna had already called the store manager. There was nothing she could do. This infuriated Norwood, and led to a shouting match overheard by employees of a nearby Apple store. The screaming and shouting turned violent when Norwood picked up a heavy metal rod used to support a mannequin and bludgeoned Jayna in the back of the head, crushing her skull. As Jayna staggered toward the store's rear exit, Norwood beat her with a hammer, then picked up a knife and started stabbing her.

     Norwood's assault lasted six minutes, and produced, on the dying victim, 332 wounds which included a severed spinal cord and 83 defensive injuries.

     In an effort to make the murder look like a violent store invasion, Brittany Norwood tossed mops, brooms, and chairs around the shop, used a pair size 12 Reebok sneakers to track bloody shoe prints about the crime scene, and inflicted minor injuries on herself. She then bound her own hands and feet with pieces of rope, and waited overnight on the restroom floor. The next morning, the store manager found Jayna Murray dead in the back hallway, and Brittany Norwood in the bathroom tied up and moaning.

     On the morning after the murder, from her hospital bed, Norwood told detectives that two intruders in ski-masks had attacked her, and killed Jayna. According to Norwood, one of the attackers, a white man making racial slurs (Norwood is black), threatened to cut her throat if she resisted. "It was my fault because I left my wallet," she said.

     From the beginning, detectives had problems fitting the crime scene evidence to Norwood's story. Six days after the crime, the prosecutor charged Norwood with first-degree murder. Under Maryland law, first-degree, premeditated murder carries a sentence of life without parole. Second-degree murder, on the other hand, leads to a sentence of 30 years maximum with a chance of parole after 15 years. Although the defendent didn't make a full confession, she did not maintain her innocence. Her attorney's defense involved making the argument that the killing was a spontaneous homicide, or second-degree murder.

     Norwood's trial, held in the Montgomery County court, got underway in November 2010 and lasted 6 days. The defense attorney didn't put on a single witness, relying instead on his closing statement to the jury. His client was not, he told jurors, "in a right state of mind" when she attacted the victim. The murder, he said, "was the product of an explosion."

     The jury didn't buy the defense theory of the case, and after deliberating less than an hour, returned with their verdict: they found Norwood guilty of first-degree murder. This meant the sobbing defendant would spend the rest of her life behind bars, with no hope of parole.

Disaster at Waco

2012-01-31T05:15:00.000-05:00

     The April 19, 1993 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 assault, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tax, and Firearms (ATF), at the conclusion of a 7 month investigation, had raided 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 4 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 Koresh had not been uder 24-hour surveillance. Had the ATF taken Koresh 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 launced the invasion anyway. Although several AFT agents had been trained at Fort Hood by Green Beret personnel (the unsupported suspicion that the compound housed a methamphetamine lab served to justify the military's role in the operation), 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, had 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 found that although an FBI agent had fired tear gas rounds at a concrete pit 75 feet from the Davidian living quarters, a fact the FBI had tried to suppress, agents had not started the fire. The former senator also concluded that FBI agents had not fired bullets into the compound, and that the military's role in the raids had been lawful. (Today, that issue wouldn't even come up.)

     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 had 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 continues. Regardless of what FBI agents did or didn't do on April 19, 1993, many believe the military-supported ATF and FBI raids should not have been launched in the first place. That is my opinion as well.

The FBI Crime Laboratory: The Dark Years

2012-01-30T05:50:00.004-05:00

     Until the mid-1990a, all of the forensic scientists working in the FBI Crime Lab had at least three years' experience in the field as ordinary special agents. Staffing the lab with former criminal investigators (J. Edgar Hoover's idea) was supposed to make them better forensic scientists. Critics of this policy believed it made them part of a law enforcement team instead of independent forensic scientists. Moreover, by basing the hiring criteria on specal agent qualifications, the FBI Lab was not attracting or being staffed by first-rate scientists.

Agent Versus Agent

     Special Agent Michael P. Malone had earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in biology, and taught high school science for two years before he joined the FBI in 1970. After working four years in the field as a criminal investigator, Malone was assigned to the FBI Crime Lab. During his 25 years there as a hair and fiber analyst, Malone testified in hundreds of criminal trials. He became popular as a prosecution expert, testifying in dozens of high profile cases where the fate of the defendant depended upon his identification of a crime scene hair or fiber. As an expert witness he was confident and hard to rattle, and he knew how to impress a jury.

     In the early 1990s, Frederic Whitehurst, an FBI Lab bomb residue analyst who identified chemical components of explosive substances, alerted lab supervisors to problems in the trace evidence section of the facility. Whitehurst complained that the laboratory was so dirty the physical evidence was always in danger of being contaminated. Whitehurst was especially critical of hair and fiber analyst Michael Malone, whom he accused of allowing his loyalty to police and prosecutors to attenuate his independence and objectivity as a forensic scientist. In memos to the director of the lab, Whitehurst pointed out tht hair and fiber identification was an inexact and subjective process, making this form of crime scene identification highly unreliable. The whistleblower noted that Malone's testimony had sent many defendants to prison, some of whom might have been innocent.

     When Whitehurst's internal complaints fell on deaf ears, he began writing long, detailed letters to Michael Bromwich, the U. S. Department of Justice inspector general. Between 1991 and 1994, Whitehurst wrote Bromwich 237 letters. In September 1995, the inspector general launched an investigation after ABC's "Prime Time Live," having gotten hold of some of these letters, aired a story about Whitehurst's campaign to improve the FBI Lab. In April 1997, almost six years after Whitehurst began documenting problems in the nation's largest crime lab, Bromwich issued a 517-page report critical of the laboratory. Bromwich singled out seven lab employees, including Michael Malone, whom he described as having provided "false testimony." The inspector general recommended Malone for disciplinary action.

     Two years later, a second Department of Justice investigation revealed that Agent Malone had made hair and fiber identification errors in four homicide cases in the Tampa Bay area. In the same report detailing these findings, Department of Justice investigators also criticized Whitehurst for overstating the forensic implications of his scientific analysis in some of his own cases. Whitehurst, who had been transferred to the paint identification unit of the lab, was suspended. After the bureau denied his petition for reinstatement, Whitehurst retired and entered private practice. To some, Whitehurst was a hero. To the FBI however, he was a traitor, a whistleblower, the lowest form of bureaucratic life.

     Michael Malone denied lying under oath or playing fast and loose with hair and fiber evidence. He blamed the FBI Lab scandal on jealous colleagues whom he described as incompetent. Regarding those cases in which DNA analysis had exonerated defendants whose hair he had identified as being at crime scenes, Malone blamed overzealous prosecutors who overstated the implications of his findings. Following the inspector general's investigations and recommendations, Malone was reassigned back to the field. He retired in December 1999. To the FBI, Malone was the hero.

     Today, the FBI Crime Lab is staffed by civilians hired on the basis of their backgrounds in science. Even for crime lab civilians, maintaining scientific objectivity is not easy. But there is no question that the lab is far superior now than it was during those dark years. And as often the case in governmental scandals that result in improved conditions, it was a courageous whistleblower who made it all possible.

"A Reader's Manifesto"

2012-01-30T05:09:00.002-05:00

In his controversial analysis of what passes for modern literary fiction, B. R. Myers, in "A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose," uses the works of prize-winning novelists Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, David Gusteson, and Annie Proulix as good examples of bad writing. Since I find these "great writers" virtually unreadable, I'm a big fan of Myers' 2002 book. In his Preface, Myers lays out his basic intent and theme: "In late 1989 I wrote a short book called 'Gorgons in the Pool.' Quoting lengthy passages from prize winning novels, I argued that some of the most accclaimed contemporary prose is the product of mediocre writers availing themselves of trendy stylistic gimmicks. The greater point was that we readers should treat our own taste and perception instead of deferring to received opinion." Wow, what a refreshing and helpful idea! Finally, someone was saying that the problem isn't you, the reader--but them--the pretentious literary critics who have been for years pushing this rubbish on serious readers of fiction. Here are some passages from this honest and courageous book:

...one way that contemporary writers like to lower our expectations for their work is to claim that something as inadequate as language can never do justice to the complexity of what they're trying to say.

You don't have to read anything published after 1960 to know at once what you're in for: a tale of Life in Consumerland, full of heavy irony, trite musing about advertising and materialism, and long, long lists of consumer artifacts, all dedicated to the proposition that America is a wasteland of stupefied shoppers. (I have to plead guilty to that myself. But I'm just a nonfiction hack, not a great novelist.) Critics like to call this kind of thing "edgy" writing, though how an edge can be decerned on either style or theme after fifty years of blunting is anyone's guess. This will always be foolproof subject matter for a novelist of limited gifts.

Anyone who doubts the declining literacy of book reviews need only consider how the gabbiest of all prose style is invariably praised as "lean," "spare," even "minimalist."

A thriller [genre novel] must thrill or it is worthless; this is as true now as it ever was. Today's "literary" novel, on the other hand, need only evince a few quotable passages to be guaranteed at least a lukewarm review. It is no surprise, therefore, that the "literary" camp now attracts a type of writer who, under different circumstances, would never have strayed from the safest crime-novel formulae, and that so many critically acclaimed novels today are really mediocre "genre" stories told in an analgam of trendy stylistic tics.

At the 1999 National Book Awards Ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say she had to puzzle repeatedly over many of the latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was: "That, my dear, is called reading." Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing. Great prose isn't always easy but it's always lucid; no one of Oprah's intelligence ever had to puzzle over what Joseph Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence.

The American literary press is faced with a clear choice. It can continue plugging unreadable new books until the last advertiser jumps ship, and the last of the stand-alone book-review sections is discontinued--as "The Boston Globe" was in 2001--or it can start promoting the kind of novels that will get more Americans reading again. (I'm afraid it's too late for that.)

Forensic Hair and Fiber Identification: An Inexact Science

2012-01-29T05:23:00.001-05:00

     Forensic analysts who microscopically compare crime scene hair follicles with samples from a suspect's head or other part of the body note similarieties or differences in hair length, thickness, texture, curl, color, and appearance of the medulla, the stip of cells that runs up the center of the hair shaft. A follicle, however, cannot be individualized like a fingrprint. A hair identification expert can declare, for example, that the defendant's hair looks like a crime scene follicle, or is consistent in appearance with the questioned evidence, but they are not supposed to testify that a follicle at the scene of a crime could have come from the defendant and no one else. What nobody knows about forensic hair identification is this: if two follicles look alike in all respects, what are the chances they have come from the same person? Just how strong an identification is this, and how incriminating?

     Hair identification experts also analyze crime scene strands of fiber and compare them with samples of clothing, carpets, blankets, and other fabrics associated with the defendant. Fibers can be distinguished by material, shape and color--there are 7,000 dyes used in the United States. A fiber expert can testify, for example, that a fiber on a murder victim's body is consistent in appearance with carpet fibers from the trunk of the defendant's vehicle. To go further than that is crossing the line, scientifically.

     Up until the mid-1990s, hair and fiber experts were routinely pushing the scientific envelope by identifying crime scene follicles and fibers the way an expert would identify a latent fingerprint. In hundreds, if not thousands of cases, defendants went to prison on the strength of this form of expert testimony. When DNA came on the scene, abuses in hair and fiber identification were exposed, and the scientific unreliability of these matches was dramatically revealed.

     In Texas alone, between 1995 and 2002, DNA analysis exonerated 30 men who had been convicted solely on crime scene hair identification. Dr. Edward Blake, the Berkeley, California DNA pioneer, put forensic hair identification in perspective: "They did it because they could get away with it. A defendant in Idaho and another in Florida were sent to death row in cases where the only evidence against them were jailhouse informants and crime scene hair identifications."

Dr. Pamela Fish: DNA Expert From Hell

2012-01-29T05:00:00.002-05:00

     In 1990, prosecutors in Cook County, Illinois charged John Willis with several counts of rape in connection with a series of sexual assaults committed in the late 1980s on Chicago's South Side. Willis, a petty thief, and illiterate, denied raping the women even though several of the victims had picked him out of a lineup.

     The only physical evidence in the Willis case was a scrap of toilet paper containing traces of semen. Police took this evidence to the Chicago Police Lab where it was examined by Dr. Pamela Fish. Dr. Fish had come to the lab in 1979 with bachelor's and master's degrees in biology from Loyola University. Ten years later, after taking courses at night, she earned a Ph.D in biology from Illinois Institute of Technology. According to her handwritten lab notes, Dr. Fisher determined that the secretor of the semen had type A blood. John Willis had type B blood, thereby excluding him as the rapist. Dr. Fish reported, however, in contradiction to her lab notes, that the semen on the tissue possessed type B blood. She testified to this fact at Willis's 1991 trial. At the trial, the jury, in addition to believing in Dr. Fish, believed eleven prosecution rape victim/eyewitnesses who identified the defendant as the rapist. The jury found Willis guilty, and the judge sentenced him to 100 years in prison.

     Eight years later, a south Chicago rapist confessed to these sexual assaults after being linked to the crimes through DNA. A judge set aside the Willis conviction, and he was freed. On the day of his release, Dr. Fish, now head of biochemistry testing at the state crime lab, spoke at a DNA seminar for judges. (The Chicago Police Lab had been incorporated into the Illinois crime lab system in 1996.)

     The Willis reversal led to a 2001 review of Dr. Fish's cases by the renowned DNA expert from Berkeley, California, Dr. Edward Blake. Dr. Blake studied nine cases in which Dr. Fish had testfied that her blood-typing tests had produced inconclusive results. Dr. Blake found that Dr. Fish's test results had actually exonerated the defendants involved, and that she had given false testimony at those trials. Dr. Blake characterized what Dr. Fish had done as "scientific fraud."

     In the summer of 2001, a state representative at a legislative hearing on prosecutorial misconduct suggested to the head of the Illinois State Police that Dr. Fish be transferred out of the crime lab into a position where she could do less harm. (If you work for the government, this is about as bad as it can get for you.) The suggestion was ignored.

     In 2002, three more Illinois men, in prison for rape since 1987, were exonerated by DNA. Dr. Fish had testified for the prosecution in all three cases. Two years later, after the state paid John Willis a large settlement for his wrongful prosecution and incarceration, the state refused to renew Dr. Fish's employment contract. Rather than firing Dr. Fish, the state simply refused to rehire her.

Drug War Informants: Collateral Damage

2012-01-28T05:40:00.003-05:00

     Americans love drugs, and hate informants. But as a result of the endless war on drugs, more and more citizens are snitching on each other. Many arrested users are being turned into informants, or "flipped" by narcotics officers. Instead of avoiding prison sentences, some of these reluctant drug informants end up dead. In the language of war, they are collateral damage.

     For good or bad, informants have always played a vital role in law enforcement. Most of them can be placed into one of three groups: paid "professionals;" jailhouse snitches; and flipped drug arrestees. The professionals snitch for money, the jailhouse types do it for lighter sentences, and many of the flipped drug informants cooperate with the police out of fear and desperation. People caught in possession of small quantities of marijuana tend to be the least street-wise, and ill-equipped to protect themselves against the targeted professional drug merchants. A good number of flipped informants are addicts who feel they have no choice but to put themselves in harm's way.

The Rachel Hoffman Case

     In February 2007, a Tallahassee police officer pulled over 23-year-old Rachel Hoffman for a routine traffic violation. The Florida State University graduate consented to a search of her vehicle which resulted in the discovery of less than an ounce of marijuana. A few weeks later, narcotics officers found, in her apartment, 5 ounces of grass and 4 ecstasy pills. The prosecutor charged her with several narcotics counts which, according to her arresting officers, would send her to prison. However, if she agreed to act as a snitch/undercover operative in a bust-buy drug sting, the prosecutor would put in a good word with the judge. After some initial resistence, Hoffman agreed to buy 1,500 ecstasy pills, 2 ounces of cocaine, and a handgun from two drug dealers she had never met. The fact a gun was involved didn't seem to bother Hoffman's police handlers. This was a deal made in hell.

     At seven in the evening on May 7, 2008, when Hoffman arrived at the sting site, the two suspects told her the deal would go down at another location. Surveillance officers watched as she climbed into a stolen BMW with the two drug dealers. They drove off, and Hoffman's handlers, unprepared for a last minute change of plans, lost touch with their civilian undercover operative. The drug suspects had figured out that Hoffman was a snitch, and shot her to death in the car with the firearm she was supposed to buy.

     In response to the publc outrage over Rachel Hoffman's murder while working for the Tallahassee Police, Chief Dennis Jones publicly called her a criminal who was responsible for the botched undercover drug operation that led to her death. His mindless statement created such a firestorm of public criticism, the chief was forced to apologize. (I'm sure that was sincere.) The narcotics officers were suspended with pay, and the chief had to admit that his officers had put an untrained informant in harms way, then bungled the job of protecting her. Rachel Hoffman's parents sued the police department and the city for the wrongful death of their daughter.

     In 2010, the two men who killed Rachel Hoffman were convicted of murder and sentenced to life. Also that year, the Florida legislature passed "Rachel's Law," a statute that requires law enforcement agencies in the state to do the following two things with regard to drug informants: upon arrest, advise them they cannot promise light sentences in return for their cooperation as snitches; and instruct them they have a right to consult with an attorney before agreeing to go undercover. If the drug arrestee agrees to help catch other drug offenders, they have to receive a certain amount of training.

     I doubt that the Florida law has had much impact on how many drug arrestees Florida cops flip. In my view, the practice of using arrestees as undercover narcotic agents should be prohibited. Most police officers are not trained or suited for this kind of work, and for their safety, are not put into these situations. But in America, the priority is not citizen safety, but the safety of police officers. Citizens are collateral damage.

Wrong House Raid in Georgia

2012-01-28T04:56:00.000-05:00

     In Gwinnett County, Georgia, a suburban community of 700,000 within the Atlanta metropolitan area, narcotics officers had been watching a house in Lawrenceville for three months. Members of the county police department's Special Investigations Section suspected that the man living at 2934 Valley Spring Drive was selling methamphetamine. At 9:15 A.M. on December 9, 2008, 20 officers with the department's 60-member SWAT unit began making final preparations for a no-knock raid. Thirty minutes later, after a detective with the Special Investigations Section pointed out the meth suspect's house, the SWAT team moved in on the target. The officers didn't know it, but the detectives had sent them to the wrong house. The suspected drug dealer lived a few places down the street.

     The day after the raid, John Louis, the 38-year-old whose house the police wrongfully entered, described the intrusion to a television reporter: "They came in here and put guns on us. The house was full of police. I never had a gun in my face before...All I see is a bunch of police, guns drawn, yelling, 'Hands in the air! Hands in the air!' "

     When the SWAT officers broke down the front door, Heather Jones, John Louis's girlfriend who had been asleep with their three-month baby, stepped out of the bedroom in her nightgown. Police ordered her to the floor at gunpoint. The couple asked the police what they wanted and were told to shut up and remain still. The raid came to an abrupt halt when one of the officers, seeing the baby, realized they had broken into the wrong place. As the SWAT unit decamped to raid the suspect's house, one of the officers apologized for the intrusion and promised to have the front door repaired.

     In an interview with a TV correspondent the next day, a Gwinnet Police Department spokesperson pointed out that the narcotics officers had been watching the meth suspect's house for three months. In response to this, John Louis said, "If you had this house under surveillance for three months, why did you come here? You broke in and put all our lives in danger, and all you can say is you're sorry?" (Mr. Lewis was lucky to get an apology. That was unusual.)

     The police spokesperson, in explaining what went wrong, said, "Somehow there was an investigator that had been working closely with the case that...mistakenly pointed out the wrong house, the wrong location." When asked if the police department had any kind of policy regarding no-knock raids, the police representative replied, "We double check the address, there's a description of the location as well as an address of the house that we're looking at on the search warrant, and we always have someone double check that every time." (Always?)

   Three days after the raid, the commander of the Special Investigations Section, in a news release, announced that the detective who had directed the SWAT team to the wrong house had been transferred to the uniform division. Without identifying this officer, the commander characterized the incident as a "case of human error and not deliberate malfeasance on the part of the investigator."

     Had Mr. Louis, thinking that his home was being invaded by criminals, picked up a gun for self-protection, he would be dead. As long as the war on drugs rages on, and officer safety trumps all other considerations, SWAT teams will be deployed in low-risk situations. Non-violent criminal suspects and innocent people will continue to be traumatized, injured, and in some cases, killed.

Random Acts of Crime: Snapshots 3

2012-01-27T06:14:00.003-05:00

January 1, 2012
Sandringham, England

     Lidija Nesterova, a Latvian immigrant living in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, on September 6, 2011, reported her 17-year-old granddaugher missing. Alisa Dmitrijeva was last seen in the town of King's Lynn shortly after midnight on August 31. Witnesses saw her get into a green Lexus with two men.

     According to the missing girl's grandmother, Alisa, stuggling to learn English, had been recently arrested for theft. She had also been staying out all night, and using drugs.

     On New Year's Day, a man walking his dog in a wooded area on Queen Elizabeth's 31-square mile Sandringham estate 115 miles northeast of London, came across a decomposing human body. The remains belonged to Alisa Dmitrijeva, and according to a forensic pathologist, she had been murdered. Although Alisa had not been shot or stabbed, the exact cause of death remains undetermined.

      The Queen's estate, made up of several villages, orchards, tenant farms, and a 590-acre forest, is home to 500 families. Dmitrijeva's body was found outside the village of Anmer, about three miles from the queen's country mansion which sits on 59 acres. The dog walker found the body in an area open to the public. The hamlet of Anmer is inhabited by roughly by 200 people. The police have no suspects, and are looking for the victim's moble phone.

     The case has attracted international media attention because of the location of the murdered girl's body. Otherwise, the murder would have been a locally reported crime story.

January 7, 2012
Sidney, Montana

     Sherry Arnold, a 43-year-old Sidney, Montana school teacher, went out for an early morning run on January 7, and never returned. As of this writing, canine units, private planes, a helicopter, searchers on ATVs, and hundreds of volunteers on foot have not found her body. A searcher did find one of the missing woman's sneakers along a road.

     A week after Arnold went missing, the police arrested two men in Williston, North Dakota, an oil boom town on hour north of Sidney. Since the oil rush in Williston and neighboring towns, crime in that area has shot through the roof. (See: "Full Employment and Crime," November 10, 2011) The influx of workers has overwhelmed the real estate market. The Walmart parking lot in Williston has become a makeshift trailer camp.

     The arrested men have been charged with aggravated kidnapping in connection with Arnold's disappearance and presumed death. According to reports, one of the men has confessed to killing the teacher.

January 16, 2012
El Cajon, California

     In this community east of San Diego, a 10-year-old stabbed to death his neighbor friend, a 12-year-old boy. According to kids in the neighborhood, the young homicide suspect has a belicose and aggressive tantrum-prone personality. Although on medication, the boy, according to reports, is easily provoked. Under California law, children must be at least 14 to be charged as adults. As a result, this boy will be dealt with in the juvenile system. If found guilty of killing the 12-year-old, he can be incarcerated until he's 25.

     From 1976 to 2010, 242 kids 10 and under have committed criminal homicide. (During the 1940s, 50s and 60s, I would be surprised if 5 kids ten or younger commited murder.) In 2010, 12 children under twelve intentionally took another person's life.

January 2012
New Castle, Pennsylvania

     In February 2009, in a township near New Castle, Pennsylvania in the western part of the state, 11-year-old Jordan Brown allegedly killed his father's pregnant fiancee with a shotgun blast to the head. The district attorney wanted to try the boy as an adult, but a judge moved the case to juvenile court. The adjudication of the case has been delayed over this issue, and the fact prosecutors want the juvenile proceeding to be closed to the public. Various media outlets have filed suit to make this case resolution open to the public. In the meantime, the boy's attorneys have asked a judge to set him free. If found guilty as a juvenile, Jordan Brown could be incarcerated until he turns 21.

January 17, 2012
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

     London Eley, 19-years-old and a participant in a murder for hire plot, pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit murder. She received an immediate parole on her prison sentence.

     In May 2011, Eley posted the following messsage on Facebook: "I will pay somebody a stack [$1,000] to kill my baby father." Timothy Bynum, an 18-year-old from Darby, Pennsylvania outside of Philadelphia, responded to Eley's message: "Say no more...what he look like...where he be at...need that stack 1st [first]."

     The aunt of the murder for hire target, Corey White, Eley's ex-boyfriend and father of their child, saw the Facebook posting and called the police. Eley and Bynum were quickly taken into custody. Bynum, claiming that the whole thing was a joke, is going on trial in March. As for Corey White, the intended target, he was killed last August in a drug-related shooting.

     I don't understand the light sentence for London Eley. But I do know this: only an idiot would solicit murder on Facebook, and only a really stupid person would make a social media response. But if you are killed by a couple of idiots, you are just as dead as if you have been murdered by a genius.

January 17, 2012
Hollywood, California

     Two people walking their dogs in Bronson Canyon Park not far from the famous Hollywood sign, noticed that their pets were playing with a pastic bag. On closer inspection, the stunned dog walkers realized the bag contained a human head.

     The next day, detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department, assisted by officers on horseback, fanned out across the 7-acre park. The search led to the discovery of a set of hands and two feet. A few days later, forensic experts were able to identify the owner of the body parts. His or her name has not been released to the public. For me, the thought of murder and dismemberment in LA brings to mind the infamous Black Dalia case of 1947. It also calls to mind a James Ellroy novel.

January 18, 2012
Sharon, Pennsylvania

     Fred L. Parker walked into Lucky's Internet Cafe (where customers buy phone cards and play computerized games such as poker and craps) and demanded money from the cashier. The 41-year-old robber did not display a gun or a knife. Instead, he threatened to touch and infect the cashier with a highly contagious disease. Notwithstanding Parker's claim to have a deadly MRSA staph infection, the intended robbery victim called the police. Shortly thereafter, the police arrested the germ bandit. He is currently infecting the Mercer County Jail. Had I been the clerk at Lucky's Internet Cafe, the contagious Mr. Parker would have walked out of the joint with the money. I'm feeling a little ill just writing about this.

Rewards: Buying Good Citizenship

2012-01-26T06:05:00.001-05:00

     In response to crimes that create public outrage and/or fear--abducted children, missing women found dead, venerated objects vandalized or stolen, acts of terrorism, serial killings, and highly publicized murders--law enforcement agencies almost always post monetary rewards for information leading to the capture and successful prosecution of the perpitrators. The highest rewards come from the federal government. The U.S. State Department put up $25 million for the head of Osama Bin Laden, and $2 million for the capture of James "Whitey" Bulger, the Boston mobster suspected of 18 murders. For years, both of these fugitives lived normal lives in public view. Bin Laden was killed last May, and Bulger, on the lam since 1995, was caught last year in California.

     Allthough the federal government pays out more than $100 million a year in rewards, and claims this money is well-spent, there is no emperical evidence that monetary incentives play a significant role in bringing criminals and terrorists to justice. Reward offering may not only be ineffective, it may actually have an adverse effect on the administration of justice.

     In cases where rewards have been posted, there is no data that indicates the percentage of instances in which the incentive produced a positive result. Moreover, in those cases where reward seekers did come forward with important information, we don't know if those cases would have been eventually solved anyway. There is a real possibility that the police are substituting rewards for good old-fashioned shoe leather. The question is: do rewards serve the public, or are they merely public relations gimicks for lazy investigators?

     In my opinion, the over use of rewards encourages citizens not to cooperate with the police unless they are paid. In many high profile murder cases, the first thing the police do is offer a big reward. I think this sends the following message to the perpitrators:: "We don't have a clue, and we are desperate for a lead."

     My principal objection to law enforcement rewards, particularly in nationally publicized cases, involves the extra investigative hours it takes to run down all of the false leads created by tipsters hoping for a piece of the reward money. The publicity alone draws all manner of false confessors, phony eyewitnesses, visionaries, psychics, psychotics, and people bored and lonely, out of the woodwork. Adding a reward incentive to this mix exacerbates the problem.

     Whether they help or hinder, and I doubt we will ever know for sure, rewards are here to stay. Law enforcement administrators love them, and the public has come to expect them. I think they are, at best, a criminal investigative placebo.

Drew Peterson and His Dead and Missing Women

2012-01-25T05:58:00.002-05:00

     Last year the wife of a Utah man went missing one night in the middle of a blizzard. Her husband has come under suspicion, but until the woman's body is found, that's probably all he'll be--a suspect. It seems the country is littered with the bodies of wives whose murdering husbands have successfully disposed of their remains.

     A few days ago my wife and I watched, on the Lifetime Network, a TV docudrama about the Drew Peterson murder case. Peterson is the former Bolingbrook, Illinois police sergeant currently awaiting trial for the 2004 killing of his third wife, Kathleen Savio. The film, starring Rob Lowe and called "Drew Peterson: Untouchable," is principally about Peterson's volatile relationship with his fourth wife Stacy who disappeared in October 2007. As told from Stacy's point of view, the TV drama portrays Peterson as an insecure, clownish, homicidal psychopath masquarading as a cheesey lady's man. He is also played, I believe accurately, as a star-struck media whore.

     After watching the movie, I can't imagine any of the 5.8 million people who saw it believing that Peterson didn't kill his last two wifes. Probably most people who didn't see the film feel the same way. While the case has been out of the news for a couple of years, the film brought it back into the limelight.

     Having paid good money to see a lot of really bad movies in our local theaters, I found this one fairly interesting and entertaining. However, the critics, as well as Stacy Peterson's relatives, hated it. Stacy's sister called it "far-fetched and off-the-mark." Peterson himself watched it from the Will County Jail in Joliet. According to reports, Peterson thought the flick was "hysterical." (I find it hard to believe that Peterson found a movie portraying him as a cold-blooded, double-murderer, funny. If he really did, this is one strange guy.) His attorney, Joel Brodsky, didn't find it so amusing. In his view, the film will make it even more difficult to find an impartial jury. Brodsky has asked a judge to move his client's trial to another venue. But since Peterson, much to his own media antics, is a nationally known and reviled person, where can he go to get a fair trial?

     Drew Peterson and Kathleen Savio, after eleven years of marriage, were divorced in October 2003. Before that, in response to domestic disturbance calls, the police had been to their house eighteen times. On March 1, 2004, Savio's nude body was found in her bath tub. A forensic pathologist determined the manner of death to be accidental, and the cause, death by drowning.

     Shortly after divorcing Savio, Peterson, then 50, married 19-year-old Stacy Ann Coles. In October 2007, after four years of marriage to his fourth wife, Stacy went missing. Investigators believe that after Peterson killed Stacy in the house, he stuffed her body into a blue, 55-gallon drum which he and his stepbrother disposed of. Her body has not been recovered. Shortly after the disappearance, Peterson retired from the police department with a $6,000 a month pension. (His record as a police officer features allegations of bribery and brutality.)

     Following Stacy Peterson's disappearance, the authorities exhumed Kathleen Savio's body. The famed forensic pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden, performed the second autopsy. Based on Dr. Baden's findings (which have not been made public), the medical examiner changed the manner of Savio's death to homicide. In May 2009, police arrested Peterson for the murder of his third wife. Although Stacy Peterson is presumed dead, Peterson has not been charged with her murder.

     Unless Dr. Baden discovered something that physically links Drew Peterson to Savio's corpse, this will be one of those cases with a good suspect but with no forensic evidence. Motive, means, and opportunity, without more, is not enough to sustain a murder conviction. (I hope the most incriminating evidence against Peterson isn't the TV movie.) The Savio trial is on hold pending the decision of an appellate court regarding the admissibility of hearsay evidence pertaining to threats Peterson made on his wife's life.

     Drew Peterson may end up joining the ranks of Lizzie Borden, O.J. Simpson, and Casey Anthony, people presumed innocent by the law, but not by the public.

Tattoos: Human License Plates Identifying Criminals and Victims

2012-01-24T05:54:00.001-05:00

     A mother is Georgia recently got into trouble for taking her 10-year-old son to a tattoo shop where he got tattooed in honor of his dead brother. The local prosecutor's office charged the woman with child cruelty. Under Georgia law, only physicians and osteopaths can tattoo people under 18. (Why would a doctor ink a kid in the first place?) This story got me thinking about tattoos, and the role they play, and have played, in the identification of criminals and their victims.

     Not too long ago, people most likely to get a tattoo were enlisted military personnel, prison inmates, and members of street gangs. Truman Capote, the author of "In Cold Blood," once told a journalist that of the dozens of mass murderers and serial killers he had interviewed, all of them had tattoos. Today, that would surprise no one. In 2006, according to a Pew Research Center survey, more than 36 percent of people between the ages 18 and 40 have at least one tattoo. This percentage is probably much higher now. (It seems that 90 percent of college and professional football and basketball players are tattooed. And as a boxing fan, I have noticed that more and more prize fighters are heavily tattooed.)

     Tattoos, along with clothing, personal belongings, fingerprints, scars, moles, and teeth, are helpful in the identification of corpses that have been dumped in the water, in fields and in the woods. In 1935, two fishermen caught a shark off the coast of Sydney, Australia. They took the live fish to a local aquarium where it disgorged a human arm that had been severed by a knife. The arm also bore a distinctive tattoo that led to the identification of a murder victim named James Smith. Smith had been an ex-boxer with a history of crime. The case became known as the Shark Arm Murder.

     The police routinely ask crime victims and eyewitnesses if the suspect had any tattoos. Former prison inmates and members of street gangs assist law enforcement by identifying themselves as such through their inked, individualized body markings. In England in the late 1800s, before criminal identification bureaus adopted fingerprints, ID clerks took note of arrestees' tattoos and their locations, data classified and filed for future retrieval. Today, in California, the CALGANG database consists of a collection of gang tattoos. In Florida, a database has been recently created that features approxiamately 372,000 tattoos of people who have been arrested in that state.

     In 2010, Michigan State University licensed tattoo matching technology to Morpho Trak, the world's leading provider of biometric (eye, hand, signature, and voice ID) identification systems. Corrections and law enforcement officers use the tattoo database to identify criminal suspects and homicide victims.

     Dr. Nina Jablonski, head of the anthropology department at Penn State, says that "Tattoos are part of an ancient and universal tradition of human self-declaration and expression." In some cases, these tattoos express anti-social attitudes, and declare that their owners have histories of crime.

Random Acts of Crime: Snapshots 2

2012-01-23T06:12:00.001-05:00

January 15, 2012
Dorset Township, Ohio

     Police arrested 34-year-old Angel Brown after she had given a man $4,000 to kill her husband's former wife. The potential hitman informed the police who arrested Brown on the charge of conspiracy to commit aggravated murder. The mastermind's husband had been killed in a bizarre car accident caused by an Amish man's runaway horse. The dead man's first wife put herself in Angel Brown's cross-hairs when she filed a claim for a share her ex-husband's estate. This case, in terms of the people involved, is not unusal. It serves to remind us that you don't have to be in the Mafia to become the target in a murder for hire plot.

January 9, 2012
Logan, Ohio

     Darlene Gilkey was dying of cancer. Confined to a hospital bed set up in her living room, the 59-year-old was being cared for by hospice, her husband Paul, and her two sisters. Earlier in the day, she had been served a light meal of toast and tea by her sisters. This angered her husband Paul who had peeled her an orange. During a heated argument next to the sick woman's bed, Paul shot both sisters to death, then turned his gun on his 38-year-old son, killing him as well. (Another son escaped, unhurt.) Sparing his stunned wife, the 62-year-old stepped out onto the front porch, sat down, then used his gun to kill himself. Nine shots were fired in this tripple murder-suicide.

     Leroy Gilkey, the 38-year-old murdered by his father, had taught Spanish at a Columbus area high school. As for his father, a relative described him as unpredictable and unstable. Before the shootings, Paul Gilkey had been drinking, and had taken some kind of medicatation. This case reveals the disturbing truth that most violence occurs within the family, and often involves alchohol, drugs and mental illness.

January 15, 2012
Fresno, California

     When residents of the Silver Lakes apartment complex heard 23-year-old Aide Mendez arguing loundly with Eduardo Lopez, the 33-year-old father of her two children, they called the police. Officers arrived at the scene and found Lopez outside the apartment. He was alive but had been shot and stabbed. As officers attended to Lopez, they heard gunshots coming from within the Mendez's apartment. Upon entering, the police found Lopez's 27-year-old cousin, Paul Medina, shot dead. In the bathroom, officers discovered the bodies of Mendez and her two children. The 3-year-old had died at the scene. His 17-month-old sister passed away at a nearby hospital.

     Prior to the shooting her boyfriend, his cousin, her two children, and then herself, Aide Mendez had recorded, on her iPad, herself and Medina smoking methamphetamine. Police recovered 10 grams of meth, worth $8,000, from the apartment. They also seized three firearms.

     While even tripple murder-suicide cases are no long uncommon, this one is unusual because murder-suicides are almost always committed by men. And when a female does commit such violence, they usually spare their children. But in America's exploding culture of drugs, there will be no such thing as an unusual crime.

January 17, 2012
Anaheim, California

     The district attorney of Orange County filed four counts of murder against Itzcoatl Ocampo, a 23-year-old former Marine from Yorba Linda who had served six months in Iraq. Ocampo stands accussed of stabbing to death, over a period of a month, four homeless men in Anaheim.

     After graduating from Yorba Linda's Esperanza High School in 2006, Ocampo went straight into the Marine Corps. When he returned from Iraq in the summer of 2010, he showed signs of mental illness. He also started drinking. During his killing spree, Ocampo had been living with two younger siblings. His fatehr, Refugio, educated at a lawyer in Mexico, immigrated to the U.S. with his wife and Itzcoatl in 1988. Refugio became an American citizen, got a job as the manager of a warehouse, and purchased a home in Yorba Linda. But after he and his wife divorced, Refugio himself became homeless. Mr. Ocamp told a reporter that after his son left the Marine Corps, he became isolated, and trusted no one. The suspect is being held, without bond, in the Orange County Jail.

January 16, 2012
Los Angeles, California

     Young Lee, a kick-boxer turned successful architect who co-founded the Pinkberry Company, a low-calorie yogurt chain with more than 100 locations in the U.S., Mexico, and the Middle East, was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport. The 47-year-old South Korean entrepreneur is accused of chasing down a homeless man in June 2011 after the transient approached his car and asked for a hand-out. Lee and a passenger in his car allegedly beat the homeless man with a tire iron. Lee is currently out of jail on bail awaiting his trial. The condition of the homeless man is unknown.

January 14, 2012
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

     Philadelphia is a violent city. Last year the police shot 16 people, and so far this year, there have been 20 homicides. Last week, a 30-year-old man gunned-down seven teenagers in a car. Three of the boys died.

     Keven Kless, a May 2010 graduate of Temple University, and an employee of a Philadelphia insurance company, yelled at a cab driver in the tourist district near the Liberty Bell didn't when the taxi didn't stop for him, his girlfriend, and her companion. Four men in a vehicle behind the cab though Kless had shouted at them. Three of the men got out of the car, punched Kless to the ground, then repeatedly kicked him. The 23-year-old died a few hours later at a local hospital. The city and the Fraternal Order of Police posted a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of these killers.

     On January 20, the police arrested three hispanic men in their twenties who had been bragging about beating up a white guy on the old city part of town. A tipster hoping to get the reward money had turned them in. One of the suspects has already confessed. None of the arrestees posses a criminal record.

Sam Mullet: Amish Outlaw or Just Outlaw?

2012-01-22T05:56:00.002-05:00

     Is a child still a child after he intentionally kills someone? Is a priest still a priest after sexually molesting a boy? A teenager kills his parents, should we consider him an orphan? A wife knocks-off her husband, is she still a widow and beneficiary of his life insurance? And what about an Amish man who threatens to kill people, and orchastrates terroristic home invasions? Should we consider this man Amish? I'm refering to Sam Mullet, the 66-year-old bishop of the Bergholz Amish group in eastern Ohio. Bishop Mullet is currently residing in another place where everybody wears the same clothing, the Jefferson County Jail.

     During a three week period in late September and early October 2011, men from the Bergholz clan, allegedly on Sam Mullet's orders, invaded Amish dwellings in Holmes and other Ohio counties where the intruders forceably cut the hair and beards off the men, and shaved the heads of the Amish women. These terroristic raids were intended to degrade, intimidate, and humiliate the targets of Sam Mullet's wrath. The bishop had allegedly asked his raiders to bring back photographs and clippings of his victim's hair as proof his orders had been carried out. (According to author and Amish scholar Donald B. Kraybill, men's beards and the uncut hair that Amish women roll into buns are treasured symbols of religious identity.)

     On October 8, 1011, Jefferson County Sheriff Frank Abdulia's (The sheriff claims that Sam Mullet has threatened to kill him.) deputies arrested Sam Mullet's sons, 38-year-old Johnny and 53-year-old Lester. The deputies also arrested Levi and Lester Miller. Johnny and Lester Mullet were charged with burglary and kidnapping in connection with the hair and beard cutting invasions in Holmes, Carroll, and Trumbell Counties. Shortly after their arrests, the Amish men were released after making bail.

     FBI agents and Jefferson County deputies, on November 22, arrested Sam Mullet, three of his sons, and three other men from the Bergholz group on federal civil rights charges as well as a number of state violations related to the hate crime home invasions. The United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio said, "While people are free to disagree about religion in this country, we don't settle those disagreements with late night visits, dangerous weapons, and violent attacks."

     Since his incarceration, Sam Mullet, through his federal public defender's office attorney, Ed Bryan, has been trying to get out of jail. Four of the home invasion defendants have been released on bond. The United States Attorney has successfully kept the bishop behind bars by arguing that he has a "penchant for violence," and is a danger to society.

     Last week, attorney Bryan suggested that his client be placed on electronic monitoring like many other defendants awaiting trial in federal court. The problem is, being old-order Amish, the bishop's house isn't connected to the power grid. Suddenly the bishop is a fan of electricity. In his recent release request, Mr. Mullet asserts that he is needed at home to tend to his household and farm related chores. Really? The man has 16 children, and who knows how many grandkids.

     While Sam Mullet dresses like an Amish man, has the beard, and rides around in a horse and buggy, I don't consider him Amish. But under the law, and our criminal justice system, it really doesn't matter if the bishop is Amish or not. If the judge considers him a danger to society, and I believe that he is, the bishop will not be at home doing his chores while attached to an electronic device. If he were truly Amish, he would be pleased by this.

False Confessions: The Cost of Unprofessional Interrogations

2012-01-21T06:02:00.001-05:00

     Years ago I wrote a book about two youngsters who in 1956 and 1958 confessed falsely to Pittsburgh area murders they didn't commit. ("Fall Guys: False Confessions and the Politics of Murder," 1996) In those days people believed that short of physical abuse, innocent persons would not confess to crimes they didn't commit. Although we know better now, innocent people continue to confess because the police either don't know how to properly interrogate, or they know how to elicit false confessions.

     Anyone, under the right conditions, can falsely confess, but those most prone to this are young people, the mentally slow, and arrestees terrified of the police. False confessors often think that the investigators will eventually catch the real criminal and everything will be staightened out. These people obviously don't know much about law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

     An interrogator more interested in getting at the truth than acquiring a confesson should suspect that something is wrong when the physical evidence contradicts the confessor's account of the crime. Factual inconsistency within the confession is another sign of trouble. To avoid false confessions, interrogators should be careful not to feed details of the crime to interrogatees, and to ask open ended questions. Contradictions in confessions should be resolved before the written statements are signed. To reduce the risk of coercion, prolonged questioning should be avoided, and it's best that only one officer conduct the interrogation in a calm and professional manner. Ideally, an interrogator should only question a suspect that he believes, based on solid evidence, is guilty of the crime at hand. Interrogation techniques should not be used on weak suspects.

     All interrogations should be video-taped (In some states this is required by law.), and no conviction should be based solely on the strength of a confession.

The Juan Rivera Case

     On the night of August 17, 1992, someone raped and stabbed to death an 11-year-old girl named Holly Staker who was baby-sitting two young children in Waukegan, Illinois. The Lake County police questioned 200 people, including a 19-year-old with a ninth-grade education named Juan Rivera. Rivera said he had attended a party that night not far from the murder house. At the party he had noticed a man who had behaved strangely. Weeks later, on October 27, 1992, the police brought Rivera back to the station for a second interview. Rivera told the same story, but the interrogators didn't believe him.

     Following a psychologically brutal, nonstop 24-hour interrogation, Rivera broke down and confessed to raping and murdering Holly Staker. When asked why his fingerprints were not at the scene of the crime, Rivera provided a helpful explanation. After stabbing the girl 27 times, then raping her, Rivera said he bashed in a door with a mop to simulate a break and entering. Before leaving the house, he removed his fingerprints by wiping off the mop handle with a towel. He then broke the murder knife and tossed the pieces in the victim's backyard.

     In 1993, a jury found Rivera guilty, and sentenced him to life. In two subsequent trials, the last being in 2009, juries found him guilty again, even though DNA testing in 2005 ruled him out as the depositor of the semen inside the victim's body. (The prosecutor wished this exonerating evidence away with the preposterous theory that the 11-year-old had had sex with another man just before being murdered by Rivera.) The fact Rivera had been convicted of such a serious crime without the benefit of physical evidence linking him to the crime scene or the murder weapon, reveals the power confessions have over juries.

     On December 10, 2011, an Illinois appellate court reversed Rivera's murder conviction. The judge also barred Lake County prosecutors from going after Rivera for the fourth time. A week later, the 39-year-old, after 19 years served at the Statesville Correctional Center near Joilet, walked out of prison. Because Rivera's interrogators manufactured a false confession, Holly Staker's killer has not been brought to justice.

Whackademia: Nutty Professors 5

2012-01-20T06:39:00.003-05:00

Hug a Tree, Punch a Student

     Upon earning her Ph.D from Kansas State University in 2008, Meghan Buckley began teaching in the Soil and Waste Resources program at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. She had earned a B.S. degree in agronomy and international agriculture at Iowa State University. In July 2011, the assistant professor led students on a field trip to a forest in Lincoln County. After it was time for the kids to get back on the bus, Dr. Buckley got off the vehicle to round-up a few no-shows. When the professor returned to the bus with the straglers, a 23-year-old student named Wesley Shaw sarcastically clapped for them. Angered by this, Dr. Buckley walked over to Shaw and punched him several times in the face as he sat in his seat. The punched-out student filed a complaint.

     Following the results of an internal investigation conducted by the university (this was hardly a case for Sherlock Holmes), Dr. Buckley resigned from the school effective at the end of the school year. In the meantime, although out of the classroom, the professor would perform research duties. Dr. Buckley has filed a lawsuit to block the public release of the contents of her personnel file. (I can't imagine anything less interesting than the personnel file of a college professor. But in this case, who knows?)

UCLA Lab Fire: Accident or Crime?

     In December 2008, in a UCLA chemistry lab, a fire broke out when air-sensitive chemicals burst into flames during an experiment. The fire ignited the clothing of a 23-year-old research assistant. Sherarbano Sangji, who was not wearing a protective lab coat, died eighteen days after the accident. The synthetic sweater she wore caught fire and melted onto her skin, causing second and thirt-degree burns over half of her body.

     The Los Angeles County district attorney's office, on December 27, 2011, charged 42-year-old chemistry professor Patrick Harran with three counts of willfully violating occupational health and safety standards that resulted in the lab assistant's death. If convicted, the professor could be sentenced up to four and a half years in prison. The university could be fined up to $1.5 million on each of the three counts.

     UCLA's vice chancellor for legal affairs called the criminal charges unwarranted, outrageous and appalling. To a reporter with the "Los Angeles Times" he said, "What happened in December 2008 was a tragedy, an unfathomable tragedy. It was not a crime."

It's Not Booze, It's My Heart Medicine

     Over the past seven years, Dipak Das, the director of the University of Connecticut's Health Center's Cardiovascular Research Center, has published the results of his research in dozens of scientific journals. Dr. Das is known for his findings that red wine is good for the heart. In 2008, the university initiated an internal review of the doctor's work after an anonymous complaint of irregularities in his research.

     In January 2012, the university reported that its investigators had uncovered 145 instances, over a seven year period, in which Dr. Das fabricated, falsified, and manipulated data. As a result, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (do these people carry guns?) has opened an independent investigation of his work. Journals that have published his articles have been notified.

     Other scientific studies, ones not involving Dr. Das, have shown that red wine is good for you. It's the ingredient resveratrol. So, if you're a wino, or a lab mouse being fed this stuff, the news is not all bad. You can keep taking your heart medication.

The Book Professors Would Like to Burn

     "Higher Education?", a new book by Andrew Hacker, a retired Queens College professor, and Claudia Dreifus, a "New York Times" journalist, is based on the idea that what takes place on campus isn't education, high or low. The authors blame our failed higher education system on, among other things, the emphasis on research and publishing over classroom teaching. And they don't like tenure.

     In a recent article about "Higher Education?" in "The Atlantic," Jennie Rothenberg Gritz interviews professor emeritus Hacker. The following are excerpts of the professor's responses to her questions:

There are two ways to pick a college. One is to go to a prestigious college, and when you graduate the world will know you went to Princeton or Stanford. It dosen't matter what happened in the classroom as long as you have that brand behind you....The second reason to go to college is to get a good liberal arts education. We argue that you can get a better education at second or third tier colleges.

The problem is that there are just too many [academic] publications and too many [professors] publishing...and many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article. Somebody did a count on how many publications had been written on Virginia Woolf in the past 15 years. The answer is several thousand. Really? Who needs this?

Academics typically don't get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from ages 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line....So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom....And even people who get tenure really don't change....What bothers us, too, is that over 300,000 professors have tenure....What that means is these people never leave. There's hardly any turnover in the senior ranks....You go to a campus and over two thirds of the faculty have been there at least 25 years. They begin to stagnate....They become infantilized, embroiled in ideological issues like faculty parking.

More on Tenure and Academic Publishing

     For more than 30 years, Martin Russ taught creative writing in several college and university English Departments. A published novelist, he wrote, in 1980, "Showdown Semester: Advice From a Writing Professor." This is one of the most entertaining, informative, and helpful books I have ever read on the subject of teaching people how to write. In his book, Professor Russ also provides a professor's take on college administrators (they are mostly idiots) and gives the reader a peek inside the ivory tower. Professor Russ says this about tenure: "I have the impression...that it is the untenured in most English departments who are the most effective teachers. This is largely due to the anxiety arising from job insecurity, which forces them to work at full capacity....The tenured professor is never forced to justify his classroom work to his students, and can go on year after year in a take-it-or-leave-it way in which arrogance overrides the kind of teaching that has to do with helping, sharing, giving."

     Professor Russ, back in 1980, realized that too many professors were taking time away from their teaching to write books nobody reads: "English professors are always turning out extraneous 'textbooks'....or else collecting other people's writing and publishing them as anthologies."

Prosecutorial Misconduct: Winning at All Costs

2012-01-19T06:32:00.001-05:00

     The criminal trial, as designed, is not the most efficient method of getting to the factual truth of a matter. Too much relevant evidence is excluded from the jury to make this the main purpose. The principal goal of a trial, at least in theory, is not to produce information, but to produce due process, and justice. Prosecutors, as officers of the court, have a legal and ethical duty not to pursue defendants in cases involving weak or exonerating evidence. But some do, because regardless of the evidence, their priority is to convict, and to win.

The Michael Morton Case

     In 1987, a jury found Michael Morton guilty of beating his wife to death a year earlier in their Austin, Texas home. The prosecution, based on flimsy circumstantial evidence, convinced the jury the defendant had killed his wife because the night before, she had sexually rebuffed him. Mr. Morton, a supermarket manager, claimed that an intruder had murdered his wife that morning after he had left for work.

     The judge sentenced Michael Morton to life in prison. In 2005, attorneys for the prisoner began petitioning the court to have a bandanna found near the murder site tested for DNA. The Williamson County district attorney (who had not prosecuted Morton) fought this request for six years. He did this on advice from Ken Anderson, the man who prosecuted Morton, and has since become a judge.

     In 2010, a Texas court ordered the DNA testing of the blue bandanna as well as other physical evidence associated with the murder case. DNA analysts found that the bandanna contained the murder victim's blood mixed with the DNA of a man named Mark A. Norwood, a convicted felon with an extensive criminal history. At the time, Norwood lived 12 miles from the murder scene. Norwood had also been a suspect in a similar 1988 murder case. The police have arrested Norwood and charged him with the Morton homicide.

     In December 2011, after living 25 years behind bars, Michael Morton walked out of prison exonerated and free. His lawyer, and attorneys with the New York based Innocence Project, have asked for a "Court of Inquiry," a special hearing to determine if prosecutor Ken Anderson broke laws, or rules of ethics by withholding evidence that would have exonerated Mr. Morton in 1987.

     Morton's attorneys have discovered that prosecutor Anderson had withheld the transcript of a telephone conversation between a police officer and the defendant's mother-in-law in which she reported that her 3-year-old grandson had seen a "monster"--not his father--attack and kill his mother. Also withheld were statements from neighbors who had seen a man park a green van and walk into the woods behind the murder house.

     In the Morton case, there are other claims of prosecutorial misconduct. If the Court of Inquiry agrees with Morton's legal team, former prosecutor, now judge, Ken Anderson could face bar association disciplinary action, or even criminal prosecution.

Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction

2012-01-18T06:26:00.002-05:00

     For purposes of this discussion, I'm defining a wrongful conviction as the conviction of an innocent person rather than an overturned guilty verdict based on a procedural issue. Nearly 300 prisoners convicted of violent crimes have been released after being exonerated by DNA analysis. And all of these convictions had been upheld on appeal before forensic science set these prisoners free. Since only a fraction of murders, rapes, and aggravated assault crimes feature DNA evidence, it is reasonable to assume the above exonerations represent the tip of an injustice iceberg.

     More than 90 percent of criminal convictions in this country are based on guilty pleas, and it is a fact that defendants who are innocent plead guilty to avoid the risk of maximum sentences. Since plea bargained cases do not involve trials, there is no way to know what percentage of these cases involved trumped-up evidence, prosecutorial wrongdoing, and/or incompetent defense attorneys.

     In a criminal justice system based upon the presumption of innocence and due process, how can a defendant be convicted of a crime he didn't commit? Wrongful convictions are not caused by flaws in the system, but by the way the system is administered by criminal justice practitioners. What follows are common elements of wrongful conviction cases:

Incompetent and Unscrupulous Investigators

     There are too many inexperienced, poorly trained, and/or unethical police detectives. These officers often ignore or destroy exculpatory evidence. They employ interrogation techniques that produce false confessions, pressure uncertain eyewitnesses into positive identifications, and in the worse cases, fabricate or plant evidence. These detectives also make up probable cause to acquire search warrants, and commit perjury at trials.

Overzealous Prosecutors

     Unethical, over-eager, and politically motivated prosecutors often pressure forensic scientists to tailor their expert testimony to the prosecution's theory of the case. They introduce coerced confessions, and put unreliable eyewitnesses on the stand. When short of solid evidence of guilt, they produce jailhouse informants and phony, hired-gun expert witnesses. These prosecutors are more about winning the case than prosecuting the right person.

Useless Defense Attorneys

     There are too many criminal defense attorneys who are either professionally unqualified, or go into court unprepared because they are lazy. These practitioners do not spend much time consulting with their clients and do not carefully go over the prosecution's case. They don't file pretrial motions to challenge questionable confessions, expert witnesses, eyewitnesses, jailhouse snitches, and search warrants. At trial they do not aggressively cross-examine prosecution witnesses, or mount effective defenses. Following convictions caused by their own poor performances, they don't file appeals. Many public defenders offices in the U.S. are underfunded, and overwhelmed by huge caseloads.

Biased and Indifferent Judges

     As the nation witnessed in the O. J. Simpson trial, judges aren't always up to the job. Many are incompetent, biased, unfocused, or weak. The worst are simply corrupt. Police detectives can be disciplined, and prosecutors can be voted out of office. Bad judges, however, are rarely recalled, and are hard to weed out.

     The American criminal justice system, made up of police, courts, and prisons, is broken. Crime solution rates are at an all time low. Too many innocent people are convicted, and too many guilty people walk. I don't know why we call it the criminal justice system. There is very little justice, and certainly no system.

Random Acts of Crime: Snapshots

2012-01-17T06:17:00.004-05:00

December 22, 2011
Taylorsville, Utah

   Three male roommates were drinking at their residence when one of them shot at a mouse. The bullet missed the rodent and sailed into the bathroom where it hit one of the drinkers in the chest. He survived, but when police and emergency personnel arrived at the house, they found a 13-year-old girl hiding in a basement closet. The 34-year-old roommate not involved in the shooting has been charged with sexual offenses related to the underage girl.

December 23, 2011
Port Richey, Florida

     When a 52-year-old man drinking in a bar ran out of money, he ducked out of the gin mill and robbed a nearby Wells Fargo bank. The robber returned thirty minutes later and picked up where he had left off until the police entered the bar. The cops recovered the bank's money and hauled the suspect off to jail. A surprising number of banks are robbed by people who are drunk.

December 2011
Los Angeles County

     Burglars have been breaking into high school band rooms and stealing tubas. A high quality tuba costs $5,000 and up. Used tubas can go as high as $2,000. The black market for hot tubas has been created by the popularity of Mexican dance band music that features brass and woodwind instruments anchored by the tuba.

December 8, 2011
Breckenridge, Colorado

     After Royal "Scoop" Daniel III went missing in April 2007, authorities discovered that the well-liked and respected Breckenridge attorney had run off with $1 million of his clients' money. On December 8, Border Patrol agents arrested Daniel as he tried to cross into Mexico by foot near San Diego. The missing attorney had been living in Acapulco where he had been working as a translator.

December 2011
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

     Reverend Bartley Sorensen, a 62-year-old Catholic priest in possession of thousands of pornographic images of 5 to 10-year-old boys, has been charged with state and federal crimes related to child porography. A parish employee at the St. John Fisher Church in Churchill had called a child abuse hotline after seeing the priest looking at child pornography on his computer. A search of Father Sorensen's church office produced 5,000 images on three CDs. Ordained in 1976, this priest, before coming to St. John Fisher in November 2011, had served in three parishes and a hospital, all in western Pennsylvania. One can only speculate how many times this priest, having come under suspicion during his long career, had been moved on to new assignments. This information will probably not be revealed, especially if Sorensen pleads guilty.

January 10, 2012
Jefferson City, Missouri

     Alyssa Bustamante pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in connection with the October 2009 death of 9-year-old Elizabeth Olten in the small town of St. Martins, Missouri. Bustamante told the judge she had stangled, stabbed and cut the neighbor girl to know what it felt like to kill someone. At the time of the murder she was 15, had never been in trouble with the law, and was a good student. Two years before the murder Bustamante had tried to kill herself.

January 9, 2012
Fayetteville, Arkansas

     At ten-thirty in the morning, 73-year-old Betty Davis walked into a bank and told the employees that a man wearing a ski mask had taped a bomb to her ankle. This man had entered this woman's home and taken her and her husband hostage. He had tied up the husband and sent her to the bank to withdraw $10,000 from her account. The building emptied out quickly. The police arrived, and members of the Bentonville bomb squad removed the device that was not a bomb.

     The police rushed to the Davis home where they found the husband tied up but unharmed. The suspect had fled in the couple's pickup truck. The police found the stolen vehicle abandoned in a park a few miles from the house. A few days later, the cops arrested 60-year-old Paul Lewis Bradley. The suspect faces charges of burglary, robbery and kidnapping. Bradley had planned to meet Mrs. Davis at the bank where he'd collect the money, but when he approached the scene, the place was crawling with police.

     In August 2003, in Erie, Pennsylvania, a group of criminal idiots committed an equally boneheaded bank robbery when they wrapped a real bomb around the neck of a pizza delivery man named Brian Wells. The bomb went off shortly after Wells left the bank, killing him in front of police and a TV crew. If Paul Lewis Bradley had been inspired by the Erie pizza bomb case, he is one stupid criminal.

Hellementary Education: Cases For Home Schooling 2

2012-01-16T06:12:00.001-05:00

The Criminal Compliment

     An elementary school principal in North Carolina recently suspended a fourth grader for sexual harassment after the 9-year-old called one of his teachers "cute." (One can only imagine what would have happened to the kid if he had called her "ugly.") The reason behind the school suspension caused such an uproar the school board forced the principal, after a 44-year career in education (I'm thinking of the Peter Principle here), to retire. While admitting that he may have been a little quick on the sexual harassment trigger, the public school administrator blamed his fall from grace on media overreaction to his overreaction. The principal now wants us to believe that because he has lost his job, he, not the sexually abused teacher, is the victim.

No Holding or Biting

     A fifth grade teacher near Albany, New York, during an arm wrestling contest with several students yanking on his arm, bit one of his opponents. The girl on the receiving end of the bite, suffered a deep bruise on her forearm. The principal placed the biting educator on administrative leave, and the local prosecutor charged him with endangering the welfare of a child. If the defendant pleads not guilty, and denies inflicting the wound, I can imagine a battery of prosecution bite mark identification and DNA analysts testifying at his trial. While this case does not reflect the best in American elementary education, it could become a triumph in forensic science.

All Students in Illinois Are Above Average

     An investigation by the "Chicago Tribune" in 2008 revealed that elementary school teachers in Illinois, to produce better state required test results, helped their students cheat. The cheating involved excessive coaching to providing kids with answers to the tests. While the state legislature, since 2009, has given the Ilinois State Board of Education $1.3 million to investigate educator misconduct, teachers throughout the state caught in the test cheating scandal have not been disciplined. They are still teaching, and I presume, still cheating with their students. (When I was a kid we learned to cheat on our own.)

Left Hanging

     In December 2009, a special education student at an elementary school in Baltimore complained to his teacher that he was being bullied. The teacher, apparently busy with another student, ignored the kid. To get her attention, this student threatened to hurt himself. When the distracted tearcher didn't respond, the boy stood on a chair, tied his coat around his neck, attached the other end to a hook, then kicked the chair over. As the boy dangled in the air, the teacher grabbed her cellphone, and instead of calling 911, photographed the boy as he gasped for air. "Now that's the picture I want," she reportedly said before placing the chair back under the kid's twitching feet.

     When summoned to the school, the student's grandmother was shown the photograph of her dangling grandson. The boy survived his swing, but spent a week in the hospital. Grandma, claimng gross negligence, has sued the school. She want $10 million. If she has that photograph, she just might get it.

"Thank You For Not Reading"

2012-01-15T04:54:00.001-05:00

Dubravka Ugresic, the author of "Thank You For Not Reading," a 2003 collection of essays about the writing life, the literary marketplace, popular culture, and the media, lives in Amsterdam. A native of the former Yugoslavia, and in self-imposed exhile since 1993, Ugresic has taught at several American universities. She is unusual because as an intellectual she is interesting and writes well. Ugresic is therefore quotable:

Realizing that they have been deprived forever of their position as protected losers, writers have radically changed their image. Tubercular neurotics, humble burglars, drunks, wastrels, bohemians, thin men and women in black wool sweaters leaning against a well-stocked home bookshelf, bearded intellectuals in tweed jackets with academic patches on the elbows and books in their hands, short-sighted smokers of pipes and cigars--they are all a thing of the distant past....Resigned to the cruel laws of the marketplace, women writers submit to face-lifts, justifying themselves by saying that their profession demands it of them. In their photographs, male writers increasingly display intelligently formed muscles and bare their shaggy chests. They are all regularly photographed with a self-confident "I know what I want" expression. In the short biographies on book jackets, no one mentions the year of their birth....If they are physically attractive, their photograph appears on the book's cover.

My surroundings are dominated by the culture of public confession, where the television has taken over the role of the church, and the role of church confessors is played by popular TV presenters. Memoirs are no longer reserved for those who have climbed the Himalayas or swum the Atlantic. On the contrary, what is valued are the ordinary accounts of ordinary people about ordinary things....In the culture of public confession, everyone has acquired the right to his personal fifteen minutes, just as Andy Warhol predicted.

When East European writers finally began crawling out of their underground...[they discovered that their fellow writers] are prostitutes who write their memoirs, sportmen who discribe their sporting lives, girlfriends of renowned murderers who describe the murderer from a more intimate perspective, housewives bored with daily life who have decided to try the creative life. There are lawyer-writers, fisherman-writers, literary critic-writers, innumerable searchers after their own identify, a whole army of those whom someone has offended, raped, or beaten up, or whose toes have been stepped on, and who rush to inform the world in writing of the drama of their long-repressed injury.

The media, television in particular, transform events into entertainment, simply because entertainment, and not information, has become the main engine of the mass media. Media presentation has reduced American trials (O. J. Simpson) and American political life...to mass amusement.

Amish News: Smicksburg to Hollywood/Kentucky to Jail

2012-01-14T06:11:00.001-05:00

The Big Makeover

     The "Los Angeles Times," on January 9, 2012, ran a puff-piece about how a former Amish girl has transformed herself into a quasi-celebrity who does hair and owns a salon in Echo Park, a trendy LA neighborhood not far from Hollywood. The article, in reflecting the author's utter revulsion of the Amish lifestyle when compared to the glitzy Hollywoodesque American dream, treats the story's protagonist as though she were a cold war East German who made it over the wall.

     Until she was 15, Miriam Jones (Is this her real name?) lived on an Amish dairy farm with her parents and five siblings near the western Pennsylvania village of Smicksburg, an old order enclave of 250-300 families 90 minutes northeast of Pittsburgh. Readers are not told why, in 1997, Miriam's parents left the Amish--for me the most interesting aspect of the story--beyond this: "But after losing his inheritance in what Jones described as a shady deal countenanced by old order Amish elders, her father lost faith." According to this Amish coming of age tale, Miriam's faher sold their homemade furniture, bought a car (he had a driver's license?) and hid it in the barn under hay until the family could make its escape. They settled in an unnamed town in Missouri where Jones and her parents "went through an intense spiritual and emotional crises. Overwhelmed by English life, Jones became depressed, and pregnant.

     Amish life, as described by Jones, is extremely primitive. Her younger siblings didn't speak a word of English, her parents were so uneducated they didn't "even know about wars that had happened," and "when we...saw white jet streams, we didn't kow they were planes. We thought they were clouds." (Give me a break.)

     A beauty makeover in a Missouri shopping mall changed Mirian's life, and put her on the road to success. The experience inspired her to acquire a high school equivalency certificate, and to become a hairdresser. In 2003, the beauty school graduate set out for Los Angeles with her daughter. She is now the proud owner of the high-end salon in Echo Park. She has been featured in a segment of the reality TV show, "Tabatha's Salon Takeover," has a license to fly a helicopter (huh?) as well as a hot-air balloon. Speaking of hot air, I feel an upcoming Miriam Jones TV reality adventure followed by a ghost-written memoir. I'll let you put a title to the show and the book.

     As to the whereabouts and fates of Miriam's parents and siblings, the "Los Angeles Times" reporter doesn't give us a clue. And why would she? That kind of information, although interesting, would spoil what is essentially a pitch for the TV and book deals. After reading this article, I'm tempted to get into my hot-air baloon and drift over to Smicksburg to get the real story.

Scofflaws or Shunned

     Recently, and over the past several years, members of the Swartzentruber Amish, a subgroup of old order Amish who refuse to mark their buggies with orange reflector signs, have gone to jail for not paying their traffic violation fines. These Swartzentruber Amish consider the orange relectors as fancy and worldly, therefore to display them is in violation of their religious doctrine of plain and simple. Several states such as Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania have allowed religious exemptions from the orange triangles, and the courts in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan have sided with the religious argument. Most Amish, however, even in these states, use the signs as well as battery operated lights as a matter of safety.

     In Kentucky, the orange triangle sign requirement is still the law, and last September, seven Swartzentruber Amish men from the western part of the state went to jail for refusing to pay their fines. On January 12, 2012, ten men from the same group in Graves County, Kentucky were put behind bars. According to one of the jailed men, Jacob Gingerich, if he and the others obeyed the Kentucky law, or paid the fine, they would be shunned by the out-of-state Swartzentruber clans. Gingerich and the other Amish men also use lanterns instead of the battery operated buggy lights, and reflective tape instead of the fancy orange signs.

     Legislators in Kentucky are considering exempting the Amish from these highway safety requirements.

Haley "Hacksaw" Barbour and the Great Escape

2012-01-13T05:47:00.000-05:00

     If you think that all conservatives are hard on crime, think again. In his last days in office, Haley Barbour, the two-term Republican Governor of Mississippi, granted pardons to 208 prisoners. Among those who will walk free are people convicted of murder, manslaughter, rape, and aggravated assault. Forty-one of those pardoned were behind bars because they had killed someone. Governor Barbour pardoned five men who had been working as prison trustees at the Governor's mansion. Two of these prisoners had murdered their wives, and another had killed a man during a robbery. One of the questions that jumps to mind is this: whose idea was it to employ convicted murderers at the Governor's house? In Mississippi, are convicted pedophile trustees working in daycare centers?

     While most of Governor Barbour's acts of clemency are controversial and puzzling, two cases are especially outrageous and beyond understanding.

Karen Irby

     While driving under the influence in 2009, Karen Irby, the socialite wife of a Jackson, Mississippi business executive, killed two physicians in a violent car accident. In 2010, after pleading guilty to two counts of manslaughter, the judge sentenced Irby to 18 years in prison. Pursuant to Barbour's conditional pardon, Karen Irby, now 40, will serve just two years of house arrest and another two years of community corrections supervision.

     Althought the judge in the Irby case considered 18 years an appropriate punishment for the defendant's crime, one could argue it was a bit harsh for unintentional killings. But you can't say this for the following Barbour pardon.

David Glenn Gatlin

     In 1994, a jury found David Glenn Gatlin, then 23, guilty of murder, aggravated assault, and burglary. He had walked into the home of his estranged wife and shot her fatally in the head as she held their 6-weeks old child. Gatlin then turned his gun on RandyWalker and shot him in the head. Walker survived the assault. This was a case of cold-blooded murder. (Gatlin promised, if he ever got out of prison, to finish the job on Walker.) The judge, who obviously didn't want Gatlin to get out of prison, sentenced him to life, plus 20 years for the aggravated assault, and 10 years for the burglary. Had Randy Walker died from his head wound, Gatlin would have been eligible for the death penalty.

     Gatlin was one of the killer/trustees who worked at the Governor's house. Two week before being pardoned by Barbour, a parole board had denied Gatlin's petition for release.

Karla Faye Tucker

     The Gatlin pardon got me thinking about Karla Faye Tucker. In 1983 Tucker was in her early 20s and running around with a gang of bikers. That year, while living in Texas, she murdered a woman with a pickaxe during the commision of a home invasion robbery. It was a brutal, gratuitious, cold-blooded killing. The following year a jury found Tucker guilty, and she was sentenced to death.

     At some point between the brutal crime and her conviction, Karla Faye Tucker found Jesus and became a spokesperson for the power of redemption. As her execution date approached, Tucker appeared on numerous national TV shows such as "Larry King Live." Various religious groups and conservative politicians put pressure of Texas Governor George W. Bush to commute Tucker's sentence to life. The Governor held his ground, and on February 3, 1998, Karla Faye Tucker died in Huntsville, Texas by lethal injection. It had been fourteen years since a woman had been executed in the United States.

     While Karla Faye Tucker may have been forgiven by a higher power, she had not been forgiven by the state of Texas.

Pardons

     Whenever a prisoner guilty of a crime is pardoned, it means this person has been officially forgiven by the state. It's an act of executive mercy, or clemency. I would argue that certain prisoners, by virtue of the heinous nature of their crimes, and respect for their victims, should never be pardoned. I believe that David Glenn Gatlin is one of those people. It seems that in the state of Mississippi, Governor Haley Barbour is the only one who has forgiven Gatlin. But under the law, that's all it takes. If Gatlin, or any of the others released by the governor commit violent crimes, Haley Barbour should be sent to prison to serve out their sentences.

Inside Jobs: What's Your's is Mine

2012-01-12T06:32:00.001-05:00

     In criminal law, when a person steals without force or unlawful intrusion, it's the crime of larceny, or theft. The vast majority of thefts are committed by employees against their employers. Security practitioners call this internal theft, and it involves, every year, the loss of billions of dollars to business and industry. Employees rip-off cash, merchandise, equipment, supplies, and time. In the retail business, employees steal 75 percent of all pilfered cash and merchandise. Customer and vendor thieves account for the rest.

     You rarely hear economists or politicians speak of this problem, but internal theft is one of the reasons employers try to get the job done with as few employees as possible.

     American employees steal a lot because they either live beyond their means; are hooked on drugs, booze, gambling, or shopping; are ethically corrupt; or are narcissists who simply feel entitled. When caught, employee thieves come up with various sob stories and all manner of excuses, but they all steal for the same basic reason: to get something for nothing.

Bad Employee, Good Thief

     Until she was caught in July 2011, 57-year-old Patricia K. Smith, a controller at a suburban new car dealership near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, stole $10.2 million from her employer. On 800 occasions, over a period of six years, Smith shifted money from the dealership's operating funds to its peronnel account, then to an out-of-state financial clearinghouse, then into her personal bank accounts. She kept her embezzlement scheme going by inflating vehicle inventory, and doctoring various financial records and bank statements.

     This employee thief on steroids explained her affluence and lavish spending by claiming gains in the stock market, and success as an online travel agent. Smith's massive internal theft operation supported an extravagent life style that would have impressed Robin Leach, the host of the old TV show, "Lives of the Rich and Famous."

     Smith bought four houses, ten vehicles, a mink coat, and a vault full of expensive jewelry. She traveled the world first-class, running up charges of $5.5 million on her American Express card. She spent $44,500 on 6 club-level tickets to the Super Bown in Arlington, Texas last February. She also paid $32,500 to have lunch with a Food Network star; $5,000 on a Vatican trip featuring VIP seating at a Mass with the pope; and $2,500 for a "Phantom of the Opera" package that included dinner with Kevin Spacey.

     On January 12, 2012, at her federal plea hearing--Smith had pleaded guilty to several counts of wire fraud that could put her in prison for five years--the employee thief wept. I can see why. Her life of excess at her employer's expense had come to a sudden end. No more fancy meals with celebrities. In fact, no more fancy meals, or fancy anything.

     I can't believe this woman paid $32,500 of the car dealership's money to have lunch with a TV cook.

Travelatrocity: Horrors of Commercial Aviation 2

2012-01-11T06:04:00.001-05:00

Altitude Sickness

     Studies show that air travelers suffer hight rates of disease infections than people who move about on the ground. (Although I don't imagine that buses are that germ free either.) One study showed a 20 percent increase among flyers to catch colds. Cabin air-filters catch 99 percent of bacterial and virus carrying particles, but when the plane is on the ground before take-off and after landing, the air circulation system is turned off. That's when infections spread like wildfire.

     Scott McCarney, in a December 20 article in the "Wall Street Journal," wrote: "A number of factors increase the odds of bringing home a souvenir cough and runny nose. For one, the environment at 30,000 feet enables easier spread of disease. [Much of the danger comes from sick passengers sitting nearby.] Air in planes is extremely dry, and viruses tend to thrive in low-humidity conditions. When mucous membranes dry out, they are far less effective at blocking infection. High altitudes can tire the body, and fatigue plays a role in making people more susceptible to catching colds, too. Also, viruses and bacteria can live for hours on some surfaces--some viral particles have been found to be active up to a day in certain places. Tray tables can be contaminated, and seat back pockets, which get stuffed with used tissues, soiled napkins and trash, can be particularly skuzzy. It's also not difficult to know why germs are lurking in an airline's pillows and blankets." (I guess it's kind of ironic that the great germophobe, Howard Hughes, was a commercial aviation pioneer.)

     As germ factories, airplanes sound almost as bad as hospitals. Almost as bad because when most people go to the hospital they are already sick and vulnerable to infection. But this could also apply, I guess, to people who fly every day.

Celebrities, Communists, A-Holes and Pigs

     Actors Maria Conchita Alonso (I have no idea who this is) and Sean Penn got into a heated argument recently in the lost luggage area of the Los Angeles International Airport. The Cuban-born actress asked Penn why he was so enamored with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. When Penn called Alonso "a pig," she came back with: "And you are a communist a-hole!" (Is there any other kind?) I guess lost luggage brings out the worst in everyone, especially celebrity pigs and celebrity communist a-holes.

     Speaking of lost luggage, in 2010, nearly four of every 1,000 passengers filed a complaint about mishandled bags. In October 2011, 130,000 pieces of luggage were "mishandled" by domestic airlines alone. Even if your luggage arrives at your destination with you, thanks to thieving baggage handlers, it may be a little lighter that what you had checked-in.

The Unruly Passenger

     Screening for terrorists doesn't filter out the drunks, jerks, and clowns. In May 2011, on a Delta flight from Dallas to Atlanta, a drunken passenger told a seat mate he had a gas cannister that could put all onboard to sleep. Before the diverted plane landed in Memphis, the idiot passed out. When the cops hauled him off the plane, the clown thought he was in Atlanta.

     During the first six months of 2011, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, 36 unruly passengers were arrested for assault, issuing threats, intimidation, and flight-crew interference. In 2010, there were 121 such incidents.

This is Not Your Captain Speaking....

     On December 20, 2011, 100 passengers onboard a British Airways flight from London to Glasgow were informed over the PA system, twenty minutes after take-off, that the plane was returning to Heathrow. The "panicked" message came from the senior flight attendant to the flight deck, not the pilot or the co-pilot. According to a website account by one of the passengers, all of the flight attendants had "worried faces." The plane made it safely back to London.

     A spokesperson for British Airways told a news agency that both pilots on board the Airbus A321 had become "unwell," and had reported feeling "light-headed." As a precaution they put on oxygen masks. (This is not a good image.) The passengers didn't have a clue what was going on except that flight attendants had worried faces, something you don't want to see on a plane after take-off.

In Greece, You're Not a Criminal, Just Disabled

2012-01-10T06:03:00.000-05:00

     In Greece, a welfare state in financial crises, the Labor Ministry issues government disability payments to, among others, pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, sadomasochists, and peeping Toms. That's right. Before being too critical of this form of governmental generosity, put yourself in the shoes of a pyromaniac. Who's going to hire a compulsive firesetter? (Surely you don't want fire-bugs lying on their job applications.) While sadomasochists can find satisfying jobs as bureaucrats, what do you do with the peeping Toms? (Those not afraid of heights could work as window washers, but how many jobs is that?) Lest you think the Greek government treats is pathological criminals harshly, the labor minister just expanded the list of state-recognized disability categories to include: pedophiles, exhibitionists, and keptomaniacs.

     At the risk of coming off a bit insensitive to compulsive firesetters, child molesters, and serial killers, why aren't these pathological criminals receiving the full benefits of the state while serving time in prison? How can one declare himself a pedophile and not be questioned, arrested, and put in jail?

     Perhaps you have to be a socialist to understand what's going on here. I'm also not an economist, but I do think I know why the country of Greece is in financial trouble.

3-D America: Demented, Drugged and Drunk

2012-01-10T05:41:00.002-05:00

     The results of a pair studies published a few days ago are quite disturbing. One concerns the use of illegal drugs worldwide, and the other, mental decline as one ages.

     According to researchers in Paris, France, the notion that mental decline doesn't start before age 60 is not correct. In reality, cognitive ability--memory, reasoning, and comprehension--begins to go south at age 45. That means my mental abilities have been slipping for 27 years. Since I didn't start with much, it's a miracle I can think at all. But forget me, what does this mean for America? In a country of 313 million, 100 million citizens are over 50, and 35 million are older than 65. And look at our politicians, a vast majority of them are over 50, and many into their 60s and 70s. People with deteriorating minds are running a country getting too old to grasp the problem. (Young people have good, fresh brains, but they don't know anything.) What a mess.

     On the illicit drug front, according to a review of use studies by two Australian researchers, between 149 million and 271 million people worldwide took an illegal drug at least once in 2009. Other studies have shown that the heaviest drug users in the world are Americans. In 2009, 22 million Americans (This figure is low because it is based on self-reporting.) used illegal drugs. The narcotic of choice, Marijuana was followed by meth, cocaine, ecstasy, and heroin. In addition, 9 million Americans abuse legal drugs, and millions more take prescription pills to make them feel better. The latter is particularly true among older Americans who are losing their minds.

     On top of the dementia and the drug taking, the U.S. is home to 12 million alcoholics, and an additional untold number of people who drink too much but don't go to the meetings. According to a recent study, 38 million Americans, at least once a week, binge drink.

     So, what do we have here? We've got at least half of the adults in this country either losing their minds, taking drugs, and/or drinking too much. (Americans also eat too much, but that's another story.) If this is the greatest country on earth, what does that say about the rest of the world?

Shirley McKie Case: Fingerprint Misidentification

2012-01-09T06:05:00.000-05:00

     For most of the 20th century, the testimony of a prosecution fingerprint expert was never challenged by the defense. Jurors considered fingerprint identification infallible evidence, the gold standard of forensic science. However, due to a series of high-profile fingerprint misidentifications beginning in the late 1990s, this is no longer the case. More and more defense attorneys, in trials in which their clients have been linked to crime scenes through latent fingerprints, are now seeking second opinions from independent examiners. One of the most publicized latent fingerprint misidentification cases, featuring Amercan and Scottish examiners, centered around a police officer in Scotland named Shirley McKie.

The Shirley McKie Case

     In January 1997, Scottish officers from the Strathclyde Police Department responded to the scene of a murder in nearby Kilmarnock. Marion Ross, a 51-year-old bank clerk had been stabbed to death in her bathroom. Her ribs were crushed and she had been stabbed in the eye and throat with a pair of scissors that had been left stuck in her neck. There had been no sign of forced entry. Police officers theorized that Marion Ross had been killed by one of the men who recently had been doing remodeling work in her home.

     Shortly after the crime, the police arrested 23-year-old David Asbury, a construction worker from Kilbirnie in Ayshire. Although no latent fingerprints belonging to Asbury had been found at the scene, examiners with the Scottish Criminal Records Office (SCRO) identified a print on a container, a biscuit tin, found in the suspect's apartment, as being the murder victim's. The tin contained money the police believed the killer had stolen from the murder site. Asbury claimed that the money and the tin were his.

     The all-important latent on the biscuit tin had been lifted at Asbury's apartment by Shirley McKie, a 34-year-old detective constable with the Strathclyde Police Department. Her feeling of accomplishment in discovering this key piece of evidence ended when she was called on the carpet for leaving her own print at the scene of the murder. SCRO examiners had identified a bloody left thumprint on the bathroom door frame as hers. According to Office McKie, she had gone to the murder site three times but had never gotten beyond the front porch. The SCRO examiners must have made an identification mistake. Too depressed to work, McKie went on leave for two months.

     In May 1997, just three months after his arrest, David Asbury was brought to trial in Glasgow. He still maintained his innocence. Shirley McKie took the stand at his trial and described lifting the latent off the biscuit tin in his house. On cross-examination, Asbury's attorney asked McKie if she had helped process the Marion Ross murder scene. McKie said she had not been inside the murder apartment. But didn't SCRO fingerprint examiners identifiy one of the latents in the murder woman's bathroom as McKie's? Yes, they had. But didn't you just say you weren't in the apartment? Yes. So the SCRO examiners had made an incorrect fingerprint examination? That latent was not mine, replied McKie.

     Following the 13 day trial, the jury chose to believe the SCRO had correctly identified the biscuit tin latent as the defendants and convicted him of murder. By implication, the Asbury jury believed that Detective McKie had been at the murder scene as well, and had committed perjury.

     In March 1998, police came to Mckie's house and arrested her on the charge of perjury. At her trial in May 1994, two highly respected American fingerprint experts testified that the latent in the murdered woman's bathroom--Print Y7--was not McKie's. The jury, deliberating less than an hour, came back with a verdict in favor of McKie. The acquittal was an embarrassing defeat for the SCRO.

     In December 1999, despite her perjury acquittal, Shirley McKie was dismissed from the Strathclyde Police Department. On suspension since March 1998, the dismissal made McKie ineligible for a pension.

     Shirley McKie, in October 2003, sued the Scottish government for 850,000 pounds. She accepted an out of court settlement for just under that amount in February 2006. David Asbury won his appeal, and on retrial, featuring the two American fingerprint examiners testifying on his behalf, the jury acquitted him of murdering Marion Ross. Notwithstanding a good suspect in the case, no one had been tried for that murder.

Aftermath

     In 2011, the Scottish Special Services Authority (SPSA) held hearings on the SCRO fingerprint misidentifications in the McKie and Asbury cases. The proceedings featured 64 witnesses giving 250 hours of testimony over a period of five days. The authors of the SPSA report, published on December 14, 2011, concluded that human error (rather than a conspiracy) was to blame for the misidentifications. (A lot of people believe there was a conspiracy and cover-up, especially in the McKie case. I am one of them.) The authors of the report also concluded that fingerprint identification should be treated as opinion-based testimony rather than fact-based. This recommendation has angered members of the forensic fingerprint identification community worldwide.

     After researching and writing my book, "Forensics Under Fire" which contains a chapter on the Shirley McKie case, I agree that fingerprint identification testimony should be treated as opinion. In American law, only juries can determine what is fact and what is not. (If a jury believes that O.J. Simpson did not commit murder, in law, that is a fact.) When two forensic experts take the stand, one for the prosecution and one for the defense, jurors decide which expert represents the truth. They both can't be correct. Fingerprint identification, like the identification of human bite marks, handwriting, tire tracks, and footwear impressions, is subjective, and therefore subject to human error. It's opinion evidence. If it were otherwise, forensic science wouldn't have the dueling expert problem.

Police Involved Shootings 2011: Annual Report

2012-01-08T06:08:00.005-05:00

     In 2011, according to data I have collected, police officers in the United States shot 1,146 people, killing 607. Since January 1, 2011, I have been using the internet to compile a national database of police involved shootings. The term "police involved shooting" pertains to law enforcement officers who, in the line of duty, discharge their guns. When journalists and police administrators use the term, they include the shooting of animals and shots that miss their targets. My case files only include instances in which a person is either killed or wounded by police gunfire. My data also includes off-duty officers who discharged their weapons in law enforcement situations. They don't include, for example, officers using their firearms to resolve personal disputes.

     I collected this data myself because the U.S. Government doesn't. There is no national database dedicated to police involved shootings. Alan Maimon, in his article, "National Data on Shootings by Police Not Collected," published on November 28, 2011 in the "Las Vegas Review-Journal," wrote "The nation's leading law enforcement agency [FBI] collects vast amounts of information on crime nationwide, but missing from this clearinghouse are statistics on where, how often, and under what circumstances police use deadly force. In fact, no one anywhere comprehensively tracks the most significant act police can do in the line of duty: take a life."

     The government does maintain records on how many police officers are killed every year in the line of duty. In 2010, 59 officers were shot to death among 122 killed while on the job. This marked a 20 percent jump from 2009 when 49 officers were killed by gunfire. In 2011, 173 officers died, from all causes, in the line of duty. The fact police officers feel they are increasingly under attack from the public may help explain why they are shooting so many citizens.

Who The Police Shoot

     A vast majority of the people shot by the police in 2011 were men between the ages 25 and 40 who had histories of crime. Overall, people shot by the police were much older than the typical first-time arrestee. A significant number of the people wounded and killed by the authorities were over fifty, some in their eighties. In 2011, the police shot two 15-year-olds, and a girl who was 16.

     The police shot, in 2011, about 50 women, most of whom were armed with knives and had histories of emotional distress. Overall, about a quarter of those shot were either mentally ill and/or suicidal. Many of these were "suicide-by-cop" cases.

     Most police shooting victims were armed with handguns. The next most common weapon involved vehicles (used as weapons), followed by knives (and other sharp objects), shotguns, and rifles. Very few of these people carried assault weapons, and a small percentage were unarmed. About 50 subjects were armed with BB-guns, pellet guns or replica firearms.

     The situations that brought police shooters and their targets together included domestic and other disturbances; crimes in progress such as robbery, assault and carjacking; the execution of arrest warrants; drug raids; gang activities; routine traffic stops; car chases; and standoff and hostage events.

     Women make up about 5 percent of the nation's uniformed police services. During 2011, about 25 female police officers wounded or killed civilians. None of these officers had shot anyone in the past. While the vast majority of police officers never fire their guns in the line of duty, 15 officers who did shoot someone in 2011, had shot at least one person before. (This figure is probably low because police departments don't like to report such statistics.) Most police shootings involved members of police departments followed by sheriff's deputies, the state police, and federal officers. These shootings took place in big cities, suburban areas, towns, and in rural areas. Big city shootings comprised about half of these violent confrontations in 2011.

Police Shooting Investigations

     Almost all police involved shootings, while investigated by special units, prosecutor's offices, or an outside police agency, were investigated by governmental law enforcement personnel. It is perhaps not surprising that more than 95 percent of all police involved shootings were ruled administratively and legally justiified. A handful of cases led to wrongful death lawsuits. Even fewer will result in the criminal prosecution of officers. Critics of the system have called for the establishment of completely independent investigative agencies in cases of police involved shootings.

Where People Were Shot

     Most Deadly States

     California 183 total (102 fatal)
     Florida 96 (49)
     Illinois 64 (26)
     Texas 58 (26)
     New York 49 (23)
     Pennsylvania 49 (23)
     Ohio 45 (28)
     Arizona 45 (27)
     Maryland 41 (16)
     Washington 39 (29)

     Least Deadly States

     Delaware 0
     Vermont 0
     North Dakota 1
     Wyoming 2 (1)
     Alaska 2 (2)
     Montana 3 (2)
     South Dakota 3 (3)
     Hawai 4 (3)
     Conneticut 6 (1)
     West Virginia 6 (5)
     New Hampshire 6 (5)
     Idaho 7 (2)
     Kansas 7 (5)

     Most Deadly Cities

     Chicago 46 total (10 fatal)
     Los Angeles 22 (14)
     Philadelphia 17 (7)
     Las Vegas 17 (15)
     New York City 16 (6)
     Phoenix 15 (10)
     Baltimore 15 (5)
     Columbus, OH 14 (8)
     Atlanta 12 (4)
     St. Louis 11 (3)
     Cleveland 10 (7)
     Miami 10 (6)
     Houston 10 (3)

     Least Deadly Cities

     Boston 1
     New Orleans 1 (1)
     Portland, ME 1
     Buffalo 2
     Detroit 2 (1)
     Seattle 2 (1)
     Denver 2 (2)
     Pittsburgh 3 (1)

     Cities with High Per Capita Shooting Rates

     Fresno, CA 9 total (4 fatal)
     Tucson, AZ 8 (6)
     Aurora, CO 7 (6)
     Oakland, CA 7 (6)
     San Jose, CA 7 (3)
     Albuquerque, NM 6 (5)
     Mesa, AZ 6 (2)
     Jacksonville, FL 5 (4)
     Syracuse, NY 5 (3)
     Orlando, FL 5 (2)
     N. Miami Beach, FL 5 (2)
     Little Rock, Ark. 5 (1)
     Yakima, WA 4 (1)
     Bakersfield, CA 4 (3)
     Long Beach, CA 4 (2)
     Garden Grove, CA 4 (3)
     Redding, CA 4 (2)

New York City

     In 1971, police officers in New York City shot 314 people, killing 93. (In California, the state with the most police involved shootings in 2011, the police shot 183, killing 102.) In 2010, New York City police shot 24, killing 8. Last year, in the nation's largest city, the police shot 16, killing 6. In Columbus, Ohio, a city one eighth the size of New York, the police shot 14, killing 8. Statistical diversities like this suggest that in the cities with the highest per capita shooting rates, better people ought to be hired, or the existing forces need a lot more training in the use of deadly force.

Kurt Cobain's Sudden Death: Suicide or Murder for Hire

2012-01-07T06:13:00.001-05:00

     Kurt Cobain was the lead singer of the band Nirvana. Married to Courtney Love, he had a history of heroin addiction, clinical depression, and bipolar disorder. In April 1994, following a stint at a drug rehabilitation facilty, Courtney Love reported him missing, and suicidal. She hired celebrity private investigator Tom Grant to find him.

     On April 8, 1994, a worker hired to install security lighting at Kurt Cobain's Seattle estate, found the 27-year-old dead in the space above his garage referred to as "the greeenhouse." The lighting installer found Cobain lying on the floor with a severe head wound and a shotgun (purchased for him by a friend) resting on his chest. Cobain's left hand was wrapped around the barrel. Nearby lay a one-page, handwritten note.

     The King County Medical Examiner, Dr. Nicholas Hartshorne, determined the cause of death to be a point blank shotgun blast to the head. The forensic pathologist estimated that Cobain had died on April 5, three days before the discovery of his body. (When someone is reported missing, it's not a bad idea to search his house, and garage.) According to the toxicologist, "The level of heroin in Cobain's bloodstream was 1.52 milligrams per litre." Dr. Hartshorne ruled the manner of Cobain's death a suicide.

     Sometime after the manner of death ruling, Courtney Love told an editor from "Rolling Stone" that Cobain had tried to kill himself in Rome by taking 50 Rohypnol pills.

     Tom Grant, the private investigator hired to find her husband, has come to believe, along with a pair of true crime book writers, and others, that Kurt Cobain had been the victim of a murder for hire plot orchastrated by Courtney Love for the inheritance. Grant and his supporters believe the killer drugged Cobain with heroin, shot him, then staged the sucide. They believe the physical evidence in the greenhouse, and in the toxicology report, make murder a more plausible manner of death than suicide.

     The Cobain murder theory proponents believe the death scene did not contain the amount of blood one would expect from a point blank shotgun blast to the head. (Several forensic pathologists have noted that a shotgun shot inside the mouth often results in less blood.) In support of this theory, Tom Grant has pointed out that Cobain's latent fingerprints were not found on the death scene shotgun. (People do not leave identifiable fingerprints on everything they touch. Therefore, the fact that Cobain's latents were not lifted from the gun doesn't prove anything. For all we know, crime scene investigators bungled the job.)

     Regarding the death scene suicide note, Grant and his supporters believe the document was really a letter written by Cobain announcing his plan to leave his wife and the music industry. The private investigator also thinks the last few lines at the bottom of the page had been written by Courtney Love. Five forensic document examiners hired by the TV shows "Dateline NBC" and "Unsolved Mysteries" examined a photocopy of the note. One of the handwriting experts concluded that the entire document was in Cobain's hand. The other four weren't sure if the last lines were added by someone else.

     Those who believe someone had murdered Cobain argue tht he had been so heavily drugged he couldn't have pulled the trigger. Of the five forensic pathologists who have considered this issue, two believe that Cobain had built up enough tolerance to have the strength to kill himself. The other three forensic pathologists were not sure.

     Based upon what I understand about this case, I think the weight of evidence supports suicide. The fact that Cobain was holding the barrel of the gun (referred to as the death grip) tells me he was the shooter. If someone had shot Cobain, that person would not have been able to place the dead man's hand around the barrel like that. Moreover, the vast majority of murder for hire cases unravel quickly after the hitman, or someone the mastermind has reached out to, spills the beans. To my knowledge, that has not happened in this 17 year old case.

Walmartology: Crime in Consumerland 6

2012-01-06T06:28:00.001-05:00

The Walmart Duck-and-Run

     To avoid catching a stray bullet, or getting caught in a crossfire between cops and robbers or robbers and robbers, people know to stay out of certain neighboroods of the inner city, especially at night. Since criminals follow the money, and the police follow the criminals, shoppers can now catch a bullet in broad daylight in the parking lots of shopping malls and Walmart stores all across the country. Except for consumers who buy everything online, suburban shopping has become a form of risk taking. (Online shoppers, with identify theft and the like, have their own problems.) While most retail shoppers are probably aware they are entering spaces where bullets fly, they take the risk because we live in a consumer society. The saying, "shop until you drop," has a new, more ominious meaning.

     Late in the afternoon of Monday, January 2, shots rang out in the parking lot of a Walmart store in Modesto, California. Three Latino men, after an argument (apparently of a racial nature) with two black men and two black women, fired on their adversaries. While several bullets went into a parked car, no one was shot. By the time the police arrived, the shooters had fled the immediate area. A SWAT team rolled up to the scene, and with a police helicopter hovering overhead, officers evacuated 200 customers to make certain the shooters weren't hiding in the store. They were not in the building.

     Consumers at the Modesto scene brushed off the event and continued shopping. To a reporter, a shopper said, "I don't feel any less safe. Walking out my front door is a danger." Another consumer minimized the shooting incident as something that has become commonplace in the city.

    In recent years, Modesto, a city of 200,000, has had a high rate of violent crime. The police in Modesto shot eight people in 2010. In 2011, they shot four. For a town this size, that's a lot of police involved shootings. In 2011, Modesto ranked number 4 on the Forbes Magazine list of America's 20 most miserable cities. I guess the residents of this town aren't about to let a parking lot shootout mar an otherwise good Walmart outing.

Other Parking Lot Shootouts

     In Danbury, Connecticut, a few days before Christmas, an argument in the Walmart parking lot between two men over a woman led to one of the combatants being shot in the back. Unoccupied vehicles in the lot were hit by stray bullets. The shooter and the woman left the scene before the police arrived. That night, while the shooting victim underwent treatment at a local hospital, the police arrested the shooter and his girlfriend.

     In San Leandro, California, between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, the Walmart Parking lot was the scene of two shootouts. In the first, a customer was shot during a robbery, and in the second, a man was shot as he smoked a cigarette in a parked car.

     At a Walmart store in Jacksonville, Florida, an employee was shot in the face when he tried to help a co-worker who was arguing in the parking lot with her boyfriend. When the boyfriend pulled a gun, the co-worker produced his gun and shot the boyfriend in the leg. No one died in the duel. Because the incident took place at five in the morning, there weren't many shoppers around.

     At 5:30 AM, two days after Christmas, two men shot at each other in the parking lot of a Walmart store in Hampton, Virginia. The man who was hit managed to drive his car 15 miles before he stopped in the middle of the street and passed out. Although seriously injured, he survived the shooting. Back at the store, because the parking lot had become the scene of a crime, customers were detained in the building for several hours.

Those Crazy Walmartians

     On Christmas eve in Monticello, Indiana, a 64-year-old woman with a cast on her right foot, lost control of her SUV. The monster vehicle lurched wildly about the Walmart parking lot, crashing into eleven parked cars before a fellow Walmartian jumped into the runaway vehicle and grabbed the ignition key. While there was plenty of property damage, no one was hurt.

     Just before noon on the day before Christmas, Jacquetta Simmons, as she left the Walmart store in Batavia, New York, punched and knocked down the 70-year-old greeter who asked the 26-year-old Walmartian to show her receipts for items in her shopping bags. After assaulting the Walmart greeter, Simmons ran out of the store. A posse of Walmart employees gave chase, surrounding her in the parking lot until the police showed up. Charged with second-degree assault for fracturing the left side of the greeter's face, Simmons was placed in the Genesse County Jail on $20,000 bond. As it turned out, Simmons had receipts for everything in her bags. Apparently she just didn't like being challenged by this greeter. Merry Christmas. (I once thought the Walmart greeter's job was so easy that even someone like me could do it as a retirement gig. I am no longer interested, and will not be auditioning for the job.)

     On November 17, Michael Anthony Fuller, in an effort to pay for a vacuum cleaner, a microwave oven, and a few other items at the Walmart store in Lexington, North Carolina, tendered a fake (obviously) $ l million bill. The cashier took the gesture as a prank, but Fuller insisted that the bill was real. Someone called the cops who arrested Fuller for attempting to obtain property by false pretense and uttering a forged document. (I don't get the last charge--how can one forge a fake document?)

     Since there is no such thing as a $1 million bill, Mr. Fuller will not be charged with the federal crime of counterfeiting. In 1969, the government discontinued printing $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills. Currently, the $100 bill is the largest denomination in circulation. Although it is hard to believe, Mr. Fuller is not the first person who has tried to pass a $1 million bill.

Criminal Misidentification

2012-01-05T05:50:00.001-05:00

     Before an Englishman named Sir Edward Henry, in 1901, created a method of filing arrest histories and criminal records according to arrestees' fingerprint set classifications, arrested offenders, to avoid detection as fugitives and repeat offenders, simply used different names. The Henry method of fingerprint classification--based upon organizing prints according to their basic patterns such as whorls, loops, and arches--brought law enforcement into the modern era. Notwithstanding the arrival of DNA technology in the mid 1990s, fingerprint classification remains the principlal method of criminal identification and crime file organization in American and the rest of the world. (This type of fingerprint identification should be distinguished from the identification of crime scene fingermarks, called latent prints.)

     Thanks to fingerprints and Sir Edward Henry (and Francis Galton before him), no one who enters the criminal justice pipeline should ever be the victim of a misidentification, especially in the modern era of computer science. While this should never happen, it does occur because criminal justice is government, and most govermental operations are sloppy affairs at best.

     A recent investigation by the "Los Angeles Times" has revealed that in the past five years, 1,480 people, wrongfully identified as wanted offenders, have been arrested and incarcerated in Los Angeles County Jails. Police officers are arresting people they have misidentified as fugitives; magistrates issue warrants without precisely identifying the subjects to be arrested; and jail keepers do not make fingerprint checks to insure they are holding the people they think they are incarcerating. Misidentified arrestees have been locked-up for weeks, even months before fingerprint checks revealed their true identities.

     Victims of wrongful incarceration based on misidentification, because of soveriegn immunity from lawsuits, have no legal recourse or remedy as long as government employees were merely lazy or stupid rather than malicious. One attorney who has represented wrongfully held citizens blames the problem on bureacratic "sloth and indifference." He is right, there is no other explanation for this. Even for government work, this is below par. Sir Edward Henry, the father of fingerprint based criminal identification and record keeping, would never have imagined this degree of inefficiency in modern law enforcement.

     Technology and innovation is only as good as the people who administer it.

Armed and Mentally Ill

2012-01-04T05:56:00.000-05:00

     According to the data I collected in 2011, about 25 percent of the people shot by the police (about 300 of them) were mentally ill and/or suicidal. As a group, they were much older than ordinary arrestees, with many over 50 years old. Last year the police shot about 80 women, most of whom had histories of mental illness.

The Michael Ferryman Shootout

     On New Year's Day, 2011, the Clark County Sheriff's Office received a report that someone was firing a gun from a trailer at a campground near Enon, Ohio, fifty miles west of Columbus. Deputy Sheriff Suzanne Hopper responded to the call and was photographing a set of shoe impressions at the campground when someone inside a trailer with a shotgun killed her with a blast to the head. (Hopper would be the first of 173 police officers in 2011 to be killed in the line of duty.)

     Dozens of police officers responded to the shooting and identified the shooter as 57-year-old Michael Ferryman. Using a bullhorn, a police officer tried to coax Ferryman out of the trailer. When the subject didn't respond, his girlfriend gave it a try but failed as well. The standoff ended following a brief gun battle in which Ferryman was shot to death by the police. In the exchange, an officer was shot in the shoulder. Rushed to a hospital in Dayton, the officer survived his wound.

     Michael Ferryman had a history of mental illness and violence. In 2001, he had shot at a police officer. At his trial, the jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. After a few years in a mental institution, Ferryman received a conditional release. Without the close supervision provided by the institution, he eventually stopped taking his anti-psychotic medication.

Legislators to the Rescue

     On the one year anniversary of Officer Hopper's death, several state legislators in Ohio floated the idea of creating a database containing the names of people who have committed crimes but were found not guilty by reason of insanity. In addition to the constitutional and ethical issues a law like this would raise, such legislation would not make law enforcement any safer. It wouldn't have saved Deputy Hopper's life. She had been killed before anyone knew Michael Ferryman was the shooter in the trailer. Moreover, insanity defences are successful less than one percent of the time. In the state of Ohio, the database would contain only a handful of names.

     This idea is another example of politicians proposing absurd, feel-good legislation aimed at fooling voters into thinking they are solving serious and difficult problems.

FBI: Tarnished Badges

2012-01-03T05:40:00.001-05:00

     During J. Edgar Hoover's reign as the fourth director of the FBI (1924-1972), I don't believe a single agent committed a crime serious enough to send him to prison. During the bureau's entire history, I don't think a female agent has been put behind bars. Since 1972, however, dozens of male agents have gone from investigators to inmates. At least four have been convicted of murder, and several have been put away for espionage. Many others have been imprisioned for perjury, theft, and even child molestation.

Special Agent Darin McAllister and the Root Of All Evil

     After growing up in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, Darin McAllister earned a degree in divinity from Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. At age 26, he moved to Los Angeles where he became a staff minister at the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in south LA. His wife Judith, a gospel singer, became minister of music.

     In the early 1990s, the Los Angeles Police Department actively recruited African American officers in an effort to improve its relationship with the city's minority population. In March 1991, the Rodney King beating led to race riots in the city. McAllister joined the department that year as a patrol officer. In 1996 he applied to the FBI, was hired as a Special Agent, and assigned to the Los Angeles Division where he gathered street gang intelligence as an undercover agent.

     Seven years later, in 2003, the bureau transfered McAllister to the Nashville Resident Agency out of the Memphis Division. McAllister moved to Tennessee with his wife, three children, and a profit of $236,000 from the sale of his house in California. With that money, and mortgage loans from several banks, McAllister purchased, fixed-up and rented out several duplexes.

     The FBI agent/real estate investor was doing quite well until the housing market crashed in 2008. McAllister lost tenants and fell behind in his mortgage payments. His loans were called in, he couldn't pay, and the banks foreclosed. In 2009, after he filed for bankruptcy, bank examiners discovered that McAllister, when he had applied for the mortage loans, had inflated his personal income by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

     In May 2010, a federal grand jury indicted McAllister of wire fraud, false bank declarations, and other banking fraud related offenses, 19 counts in all. In December of that year, in a U.S. District Court in Franklin, Tennessee, a jury found McAllister guilty of several counts of mortgage fraud. The judge sentenced him to four years in prison, and fined him $675,000. He is currently serving his time in a minimum security prison in eastern Kentucky.

     McAllister's attorney is appealing his client's conviction, claiming that McAllister was duped by shoddy real estate appraisers and loan officers.

     People have gone to prison for crimes a lot worse than McAllister's. He lied, and picked the wrong time to get into real estate. Had he been a member of congress, no problem. But he was a FBI agent, and he should have known better.

Three Biggest Crime Stories of 2011

2012-01-02T05:56:00.001-05:00

Mass Murder and Shooting of Gabrielle Giffords

     On January 8, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner shot eighteen people at a political gathering outside a supermarket near Tuscon, Arizona. Loughner, some kind of mental case, killed six of his victims. While spree killings of this nature are not uncommon--there were at least a dozen in 2011--this mass murder became big news because Loughner shot a congresswoman named Gabrielle Giffords. Shot in the head at close range, Giffords not only survived the wound, but made a remarkable recovery. Her husband, a recently retired astronaut, has already published a book about the incident.

     In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, TV talk show hosts, news readers, and television correspondents launched a puerile campaign against "uncivil" political rhetoric laced with metaphores that call up images of violence. You know, murder inducing remarks like, "let's kill that piece of legislation," or this or that politician has a target on his back, or putting a rival politician in one's cross-hairs. Oh my, has it gotten that bad? No wonder America is such a violent country. It's the way we talk. We need to watch what we say, especially when we talk about politics and politicians.

     A month or so after being scolded by vacuous communications department graduates with TV hair, we are, I'm relieved to say, back to rhetorical uncivility. Bills can still be dead on arrival, and politicians can still shoot themselves in the feet and hang themselves with their own ropes. When the great H. L. Menchen was asked how he would reform higher education, he said something like, "Burn down all the buildings and kill all the professors." Compared to the old days, we are not that uncivil.

Casey Anthony Murder Case

     On July 15, 2008, Cindy Anthony, the mother of 22-year-old Casey Anthony, reported her 2-year-old granddaughter Caylee, missing. Cindy had not seen the little girl for 31 days. Caylee lived in her grandparents' Orlando, Florida home with her mother. In reporting the child missing, the grandmother said the trunk of her daughter's car smelled like it had contained a dead body. Casey Anthony, during the 31 days her daughter was missing, had been partying with friends. When confronted by the police, Casey said her daughter had been abducted by nanny who, as it turned out, didn't exist.

     On October 2008, the authorities charged Casey Anthony with first-degree murder, and promised to seek the death penalty. Two months later, the child's skeletal remains were found in the woods near the Casey home. The little girl's nose and mouth had been duct-taped. The medical examiner ruled the death homicide.

     Casey Anthony went on trial in May 2011. By now the case had become a media sensation with virtually all of the TV talking heads and their on-screen experts predicting a muder conviction. There hadn't been such TV true crime unanimity since the O. J. Simpson trial. The expert commentators ridiculed the defense attorney's theory that the baby had drowned in the family swimming pool on June 16, 2008. Clearly the jury would buy the prosecution's version of the death: the defendant had killed the child by administering chloroform, then duct-taping her nose and mouth.

     On July 5, with millions of TV viewers sitting on the edges of their seats, the judge announced the jury's murder verdict: not guilty. For the next two weeks, TV's talking heads could talk of nothing else. How could this murderous mother walk free? What went wrong? Who blew the case? What will become of this woman?

     The Casey Anthony case has slipped out of sight. But it won't take much to bring it back into the news, at least briefly. If Casey Anthony is arrested for DUI, makes an incriminating remark (think O. J. Simpson), or a witness comes out of the woodwork (Natalie Wood), the case will be newsworthy again.

UPDATE

     Just after the first of the year, a video diary recorded last October by Casey Anthony surfaced on YouTube. In speaking to her computer three months after her murder acquittal, she said, "...things are starting to look up and things are starting to change in a good way...." Anthony never mentions Caylee in the four minute video, but talks about a dog "I've adopted and I love." This was her "first video diary" entry that she promised would be followed by many others. Her attorney assured reporters that Casey did not upload or release the video, and has no idea how it got on YouTube. (That's good enough for me.) She currently lives somewhere in Flordia.

The Jerry Sandusky Sex Molestation Case

     The massive Penn State sex molestation scandal began on November 5 with the arrest of former coach Jerry Sandusky and two Penn State administrators. Sandusky, who left the university in 1998, stands accused of sexually molesting dozens of young boys between 1994 and 2009. The scandal has caused the firing of coach Joe Paterno, the face of Penn State football for decades. Since Sandusky's arrest, and revelations regarding his longtime relationships with boys associated with his youth program, authorities around the country have seen a spike in child abuse reporting. High profile coaches with other universities have been fired following similar allegations. The Jerry Sandusky story will be with us for awhile, and may also be one of the big crime stories for 2012.

Stephen Glass: Discredited Journalist to Ethical Lawyer?

2012-01-01T05:48:00.001-05:00

     Stephen Glass, whose father is a physician and his mother a nurse, grew up in an affluent neighborhood in Chicago's North Shore. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he moved to Washington, D.C. In 1995, Glass joined the staff of "The New Republic," a hip magazine read by influential political insiders referred to by some as the onboard magazine of Air Force One.

     Ambitious, talented, and eager to please his editor and colleagues, Stephen, in 1996, began dolling up his pieces by fudging quotes and doctoring anecdotes. He continued to fictionalize his nonfiction work through 1997. Early in 1998, Glass submitted stories that were completely made up, accompaning these pieces with phony footnotes, fake email correspondence, and manufactured interview notes.

     Stephen's editor, Charles Lane, became suspicious when he couldn't cooberate the young journalist's sources in several of his submissions. This caused an internal review which led to Stephen's termination in May 1998. (The scandal is the subject of a TV docudrama called "Shattered Glass.") During his tenure at "The New Republic," Glass fabricated thirty-six articles, about half of his journalistic output. (As a free-lancer, he had also fabricated stories for three other publications.)

     After being thrown out of journalism, Glass became a law student at Georgetown University. After acquiring his degree, he moved to New York where he passed the bar exam. After a short stay in New York, Glass took up residence in Los Angeles. Although he passed the California bar exam, because of his history as a journalist, he did not apply to become a licensed attorney. Instead, he took a job as a para-legal at a Beverly Hills law firm.

     In 2003, Glass published an autobiographical novel called "The Fabulist" in which he glossed over the extent of his journalistic fraud. Reviewers were unkind, and the public uninterested. Glass had lost his credibility as a journalist and as a novelist. Moreover, a lot of people were put off by his attempt to capitalize on his journalistic crimes.

     Glass, in 2005, applied for admission to the California Bar. The bar committee, finding him morally unfit to become a lawyer, denied him membership. He appealed the decision to the state bar court which, in 2010, found in his favor. The matter is now before the California Supreme Court which will take up the case in 2012.

    So, should a (presumably) former compulsive liar be permitted to practice law in the state of California? It's not as though a rotten apple is being tossed into a barrel of fresh fruit. There is little doubt that Stephen Glass will become a practicing attorney. And no doubt he will become an extremely successful one. He has, afterall, all the right tools for the job.

The Serial Arsonist: Burning Hollywood

2011-12-31T06:01:00.004-05:00

     Robbers and thieves commit their crimes for financial gain. Arsonists, on the other hand, set fires for a variety of reasons. As a result, motive and criminal profiling is an important lead in arson investigations. Regarding motive, unlawful firesetters generally fall into one of two categories: rational and irrational. The rational arsonists can be put into two groups: people who set fires for direct gain, and those who do it for indirect benefit or gain. Direct gain arsonists torch their homes, cars, and businesses for the insurance money. (Jaunuary is usually a busy month for these people.) The indirect gain fire is set, for example, as retaliation, revenge, competitor elimination, or to cover-up another crime such as homicide. People who set fires for reasons that make sense are usually not repeat offenders. If they do repeat their crimes, it's rarely more than twice.

     Arsonists who are irrationally or pathologically motivated are almost always young men. They are powerless losers who are mad at the world. They set fires to get even with society, to experience feelings of power, to play the role of hero, and in a small percentage of cases, for sexual gratification. Many of them have had problems at school, with their parents and with the police. Some are mildly retarded, others have mental health problems. Older pathological firesetters often have drug and/or alcohol addictions.

     Because the vast majority of serial arsonists are pathological firesetters who have no regard for human life, they are the most dangerous. Unlike rational firesetters, they tend to hang around the fire scenes soaking up the excitement they have created. When taken into custody, they should be interrogated by arson investigators trained and experienced in questioning this type of suspect. For the pathological arsonist, the bigger the fire the bigger the rush. Serial arsonists have been know to set several fires in one night.

     In California, a serial arsonist set 15 fires in Hollywood and 4 fires in neighboring West Hollywood during the early morning hours of Friday, December 30, 2011. Dozens of residents were rousted from their homes. The only injury involved a firefighter who fell while battling one of the blazes. Many of the structural fires were started when the arsonist set fire to vehicles parked nearby. All of the firess were set in an area of four square miles.

     In 2008 and 2009, in and around Coatesville, Pennsylvania in the eastern part of the state, a group of arsonists set 23 fires. One of the arsons killed an 83-year-old woman. Dozens of homes were destroyed, and many residents were displaced. In 2009 the police arrested five arsonists. The oldest, a 25-year-old volunteer firefighter, had responded to his own fires. The rest were young, unemployed men with histories of mental illness and problems with the law. One of the firesetters, a 19-year-old misfit, matched the classic profile of a pathological arsonist. He set a number of copy cat house fires simply for the excitement. The fact these dwelling were occupied at the time only enhanced his experience.

     When the police apprehend the California arsonist, it will be interesting to see how closely he matches the profiles of the Coatesville firesetters.

UPDATE: "I hate America."

     The authorities, on January 2, charged 24-year-old Harry Burkhart with setting more than 50 fires in Hollywood, West Hollywood and in the San Fernando Valley. From Frankfurt, Germany, Burkhart had been upset over his mother's immigration problems. He had recently attended her hearing in immigration court. When taken into custody, Burkhart reportedly said, "I hate America." He is being held in the Los Angeles County Jail without bail. Since his arrest, there have been no further arson fires.

     Burkhart and his 53-year-old mother Dorothee came to the United States from Neukirchen, Germany in October 2011. Just before leaving Germany their house went up in flames. Arson investigators, after locating to separate points of origin, suspect the fire had been intentionally set to defraud the insurance company. In Germany, Dorothee Burkhart has been charged with 19 counts of fraud, crimes unrelated to the house fire. One of the counts involves defrauding the surgeon who had enlarged her breasts.

     A few weeks ago, police in Los Angeles pulled Dorothee Burkhart over for a traffic violation. The traffic stop led to her recent appearance in immigration court. The prospect of being deported apparently set off Harry Burkhart's firesetting spree. Dorothee and her son have been living in an apartment in Hollywood.

UPDATE

     Before coming to the U.S., Burkhart and his mother resided for awhile in Vancouver, Candada. In March 2010, a Vancouver team of psychiatrists, in connection with a civil court case, examined Harry Burkhart. The battery of shrinks diagnosed him as suffering from autism, severe anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression. The police in Vancouver, in the wake of the LA fires, are looking into the possibility that he set a series of fires in that city. A German national, Burkhart was born in Chechnya.

Whackademia: Nutty Professors 4

2011-12-30T06:07:00.003-05:00

Give 'Em Hell, Professor

     Southern Indiana University Theater Professor Robert Broadfoot yelled as some of his students, allegedly calling one of them the "B-word." (I presume that stands for bitch rather than butthead, bumpkin, or bastard.) Frustrated that some of his students were lax about their assignments, and didn't seem to care about the course, Professor Broadfoot, according to a report in the school newspaper, "made aggressive gestures and used bad language." One of Broadfoot's students reportedly said, "I don't think it was necessary, I think everyone has their problems...but he shouldn't take it out on his students, it's not fair." Poor thing. Wait until you get into the real world. Perhaps the professor was taking out his problems on his students because they were his problem. Another theater student thought it was "inappropriate" for the professor to be singling out those who weren't performing (pun intended) in class. If this complaintant gets a job, he or she may be in for a shock. One way to avoid being singled out is to do your work.

     I taught 32 years, and had criminal justice majors who wanted to be police detectives and FBI agents complain that they couldn't find me when they needed something signed. I yelled at students, and rarely missed an opportunity to humiliate them. I didn't do this to prepare them for real life, I did this to prepare them for college. I also enjoyed it. (Just kidding, I think.) Unlike poor Professor Broadfoot, I managed not to get myself fired. Kids who want to be cops and kids who want to be on stage are obviously different. Had I been in the theater department, I wouldn't have lasted a week.

Dumbing Up

     Professors really don't like to be fired. It's undignified, and shatters their exhalted self images. As a result, in academia, wrongful terminations lawsuits are not uncommon. What is uncommon, however, is a plaintiff/professor who prevails in one of these cases.

     In November, former New York University Professor Jose Angel Santana sued the school after they denied him reappointment in August 2011. According to Santana, he had been fired because of his Cuban and African American heritage. Hired in September 2008 as an assistant visiting professor in the acting school with an annual salary of $70,000, Santana claims he was discriminated against because of his race and color. But the plaintiff didn't leave it at that. According to the suit, the straw that broke the camel's back involved the grade Santana had given to a student in his graduate class called, Directing the Actor II. It was this claim that brought Santana and his suit into the national news. The D-grade that sent Santana packing had been given to the famous actor, James D. Franco. Oh boy.

     According to Santana, Franco had only attended two of the courses' fourteen sessions. This gave the professor no choice but to give Franco, in the spring of 2010, the bad grade. Despite the D, Franco, the holder of a Master's Degree of Fine Arts from Columbia, earned his Master's Degree from NYU's Film Production Department. Currently pursuing a Ph.D in English at Yale, Franco is now on NYU's Tisch School faculty, teaching a course on adopting poetry into film. (Huh?) So, the student who got the D is teaching at the school that fired the professor who gave it to him. No wonder the ex-professor is in such a snit. But wait, in this academic drama, there is more.

     According to plaintiff Santana, Mr. Franco has rubbed salt into his wound by making disparaging remarks and inaccurate statements about him in public. For one thing, Franco has called Santana's course an "acting class" when it was in fact a directing class. Santana says he didn't give Franco a D for bad acting, but for missing class. In other words, Mr. Santana wasn't grading Mr. Franco's acting ability, he was grading his attendance ability. Mr. Franco wasn't a bad actor, he was just a bad attender.

     I'm lucky that before I retired none of the students I gave Ds to got rich and famous. I didn't have many bad actors, but I did have my share of bad attenders.

Contributing to What ?!

     In Menlo Park, California, Stanford University Professor Bill Burnett and his wife Cynthia hosted a party for their son and 44 high school students. (What were they thinking?) The kids were celebrating the last football game of the season. The parents had made it clear that alcoholic beverages were prohibited. Well, as you can imagine, booze found its way into the Burnett house. When the basement party got loud and a neighbor complained, police entered the house, found the alcohol, and hauled the professor and his wife off to jail in handcuffs. Charged with 44 counts of contributing to a minor's delinquency, Professor Burnett faces up to a year behind bars.

     While it is not unreasonable to assume that these 44 students are being taught or coached by at least one pedophile who will never see the inside of a jail cell, it's professor Burnett and his wife who have criminally endangered the welfare of these kids. If the Burnetts are guilty of anything, it's stupidity. If they hadn't hosted the party, the kids could have gotten drunk in a Walmart parking lot. In law enforcement it's not about arresting the right people, it's about arresting who you can.

Anger Mismanagement in High Education

     In 2007 police arrested a New Hampshire professor who threatened to kill a colleague for turning him in for a parking violation that resulted in a ticket. Because the university alerted its staff to report the threatening professor if he stepped on compus, he sued the scholl for defamation. The plaintiff lost his case at the trial level, and lost again on appeal. The court battle took two years to resolve. And it was all over a parking ticket. Welcome to academia.

     In 2010, a then professor of criminology and sociology at Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts, using a variety of Facebook usernames, threatened to kill a New Orleans police officer. The 58-year-old professor, in accusing the officer of raping his girlfriend in 2007, urged to officer to "own up to what you did," and hinted of having friends in a Hell's Angels biker gang pay him a visit. In December 2011, a federal judge, after the professor had pleaded guilty, fined him $5,000 and sentenced him to three years probabion.

The Case of the Stray Bullet

2011-12-29T05:54:00.001-05:00

     On Friday night, December 16, a 15-year-old Amish girl named Rachel Yoder, while on her way home in a horse-drawn buggy from a Christmas party at an Amish produce farm, fell dead out of the rig with a bullet in her head. She died not far from her central Ohio home in Wayne County. The girl's brother found her when he saw the horse walking around her body. The Summit County medical examiner, without the benefit of an investigation, ruled the death a homicide. This manner of death ruling triggered speculation the girl had been murdered at the behest of Bishop Sam Mullet, the cult like leader of the band of renegade Amish outlaws recently charged with a series of Ohio home invasion, hair-cutting felonies. (See: "Bishop Sam Mullet: Amish Outlaw," November 25, 2011.)

     A few days after Rachel Yoder's death, the local sheriff announced she had been killed by a stray bullet fired a mile and a half away by a young Amish man cleaning is muzzle-loading rifle. (A rifle loaded through the muzzle end of the barrel. I don't know if this gun was a modern replica or an antique.) The Amish girl's death, according to the gun cleaning theory, was simply a freak accident. The sheriff says he has not ruled out a negligent homicide charge. (Such a charge would be ridiculous. If the Amish man had been clearning his gun in Starbucks, that's one thing, but in Amish country?)

     You could drive around the most violent neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Miami, and Detroit twenty-four hours a day for twenty years, and never catch a stray bullet. Rachel Yoder had been riding in her buggy in the country, a bullet (I don't know the caliber) fired a mile and a half away not only found her, it killed her. For me, that's hard to believe. After traveling that far, a bullet, particularly one fired from a muzzle-loader, loses its velocity and the force to become deadly. This theory of Rachel Yoder's death is so farfetched, a writer who put such a scene into a mystery novel would be laughed out of the business. But, if a firearms identification expert matches the fatal bullet to the Amish man's rifle, then this is what happened.

     One of Rachel Yoder's Amish neighbors was quoted as follows: "We can't understand how it could happen, but I guess it was the Lord, maybe. Her time was up is what we think." I'll tell what I think--on second thought, I better not, other than to say I don't subscribe to that line of reasoning. In my view, if Rachel Yoder was not murdered, she died of extreme bad luck.

Reckless Writing: Crimes Against Language

2011-12-28T05:25:00.002-05:00

     In the world of sloppy crime reporting, guns shoot "rounds," indictments are "squashed," homes are "robbed," crime scenes are investigated by "criminologists," and negligent drivers are charged with "wreckless driving." Also, criminal suspects are "allegedly arrested."

     Rifles and handguns shoot bullets, not rounds. The bullet is the projectile, the round is comprised of the bullet (usually lead made from a used car battery) and the cartridge case which contains the gun powder. The round is the whole package. In semi-automatic handguns--pistols--cartridge cases are automatically ejected, and can become crime scene evidence. In revolvers, cartridges remain in the handgun. The term "firearm" generally applies to revolvers and pistols.

     Criminal indictments, "true bills" handed down by grand juries, are quashed. Bugs are squashed. An indictment is an early step in the criminal justice process which merely indicates there is enough evidence to justify moving the case forward to the trial stage. Indicted subjects are still presumed innocent.

     Since the crime of robbery is theft by force or threat of force, a crime against persons--homes and cars cannot be robbed. Homes can be burglarized. Burglary is an unlawful intrusion into a dwelling or occupied structure motivated by the intent to commit a crime--usually theft. It is a crime against property. Cars are broken into for purposes of theft.

     Reporters often use "murder" and "arson" inappropriately. These are legal terms. An intentionally set fire--an incendiary fire--is not an arson until someone is found guilty of unlawfully setting it. A killing or homicide becomes murder after someone is found guilty of unlawfully, and intentionally, taking a life.

     A criminologist is a sociologist interested in criminal subgroups such as juvenile delinquents, prison inmates, or prostitutes. They are usually academics who think about the causes of crime, and invent terminology crime writers consider mealy-mouthed and vague such as "anti-social behavior" which runs from first-degree murder to a burp in church. Criminalistics (an unfortunate term coined in 1947 by Dr. Paul Kirk), refers to a form of forensic science practiced by crime scene investigation experts interested in latent fingerprints, blood stains, bullets, cartridge cases, tire tracks, and other types of physical evidence commonly found at the scenes of crime. Criminalists analyze physical evidence for the purpose of interpreting the crime scene and identifying the people who were there. Criminologists are usually found in the classroom, criminalists are found at crime scenes, in crime labs, and in courtrooms.

     A wreckless driver is a careful one who has not had a wreck. A grossly negligent driver can be charged with reckless driving.

     Criminal suspects who are taken into custody have not been allegedly arrested. The arrests are facts. Until proven guilty, they are the alleged perpetrators of the charges against them.

     Not to sound like a fuddy-duddy (I don't even know if that's a word), it would be nice if journalists who cover the U. S. Supreme Court would quit calling the nine justices the "supremes." It makes me think of the motown singing trio.

The Cost of Free Speech: Watch What You Say About Iowa

2011-12-27T05:53:00.003-05:00

     A sickening combination of political correctness, cultural touchiness, and the profit motive has killed the kind of rough and tumble journalism once practiced by H. L. Mencken and the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens. It's been replaced by the kind of feel-good public relations slop you see on morning TV. Today, a journalist takes a risk attacking anyone other than a politician or a celebrity. (I don't have a problem mocking and exposing politicians and celebrities, but why just them?) Stephen Bloom, a journalism professor at the University of Iowa, recently said some unflattering things about certain lower class Iowans. It's the kind of writing you rarely see anymore, especially from a professor. (If free speech has an arch enemy, it's the university.) The professor from Iowa is now paying the price for speaking his mind in print.

     In an essay Stephen Bloom wrote called, "Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life," published on December 9 on "The Atlantic" magazine website, Bloom, in questioning whether Iowa was worthy of being the nation's first caucus state, portrayed certain Iowans in a pretty bad light. For example, he says the rural citizens of the state "...are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking education) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Anne, that 'the sun'll come out tomorrow.' Bloom described the municipality of Keokuk as a "depressed, crime-infested slum town," and other Iowa communities as "skuzzy" and "slummy." Ouch.

     As could be expected, Bloom's opinions and observations angered and offended many people, including some of his fellow journalism professors, current and former students (particularly those from Keokuk I'd imagine), the university administration, local politicians ( pandering idiots who I am sure share Bloom's opinion of these "hard-working Americans"), and of course, rural Iowans with bad teeth and a drug habit.

       In response to his description of the lower rung of Iowa's socio-economic ladder, Professor Bloom has received threatening emails which have sent him into hiding until the firestorm of indignation burns itself out. (Next fall he is scheduled to teach a semester at the University of Michigan.) In discussing his situation to a media blogger, Bloom said, "...I don't want some of those crazy people who are reading everything they want into my story to know where I am." To avoid adding fuel to the fire, Professor Bloom has turned down offers to appear on several cable TV news shows. (I don't blame him. Who wants to be spit on by a red-faced talking machine like Chris Matthews?)

     Bloom's incendiary essay comes at a time when the University of Iowa's master's degree program in journalism is in trouble. (Not to be confused with Iowa's famous Writer's Workshop.) The program lost its accreditation last year because it lacked a sufficient number of students. The undergraduate program, not doing well either, is operating on provisional accreditation. David Perlmutter, the director of the journalism school, is worried that the Bloom flap will dissuade prospective journalism majors from applying to the program. Perhaps the director should worry about the message this firestorm is sending to students already enrolled in the crippled (should I use that word?) journalism program.

     To his credit, Perlmutter said this to the "Des Moines Register," "I'm nobody's editor. I'm nobody's publisher. We don't want the kind of system where somebody has to send me something before it gets published, and I'm supposed to censor it...."

     The president of the university, Sally Mason, apparently not a big fan of fee speech, sent an open letter to "The Atlantic" disowning Professor Bloom and his essay. "Please know that he does not speak for the University of Iowa." If Iowans didn't already know this, Bloom had described them correctly. With a degree of pandering one can expect from a university president (these people are worse than politicians), Mason laid it on: "What defines Iowans are their deeds and actions and not some caricature." If this piece of puiblic relations crap had been written by a graduate of the school's journalism program, the program should be shut down.

     Professor Bloom has attributed all the fuss to the state's need to protect its first-in-the-nation caucuses. "There's a financial incentive for the Iowa media not to rock the caucuses' boat," he said. "Political advertising means revenue for newspapers, TV and radio stations."

     Fortunately for Professor Bloom, he's tenured. (I'm usually not a fan of tenure--professors should be fired like everyone else--but in this case, I am.)