Archive for the 'motorcyclist' Category
Religious divide drives bikie war
- Dylan Welch Police Reporter
- February 16, 2009
AN ANCIENT religious enmity is at the centre of a new conflict in the Sydney bikie scene, with a new gang comprised mainly of Sunni Muslims warring with a group of bikies with a Shiite Muslim background.
While detectives continue to investigate the February 4 bombing of a Hells Angels clubhouse in Crystal Street, Petersham, police and other sources are indicating that the city chapter of the Comanchero is involved in an escalating feud with a new club, Notorious.
The president of Notorious is a Lebanese-Australian with a long-standing association with a bikie from a colourful Sydney Sunni Lebanese family. The two are among Sydney’s original “Nike” bikies - sporting white sneakers, fashionable T-shirts and clean-shaven instead of the traditional boots, dirty vests and bushy beards - and both are from Sunni families from Sydney’s west.
Notorious is considered by gang squad detectives to be the prime suspect in the Crystal Street bombing. One of its mottos is “Only the dead see the end of war” and its “colours”, or coat of arms, is a turbaned skeleton holding twin pistols with “Original Gangster” beneath it. Today is the first time the club’s colours have been revealed publicly.
On the other side of the conflict is the president of the Comanchero City Crew, a Beirut-born Shiite who grew up in the St George area. Comanchero has been one of the motorcycle gangs that have embraced the new breed of “Nike” bikie, and have been recruiting from the Lebanese and Islander communities for several years.
Traditionally, Lebanese Muslim migrants to Sydney have been geographically and religiously divided. The Sunni majority live in Sydney’s west and south-west, mainly around Auburn and Bankstown, while the Shiite minority live in the St George area. “The two groups have no love lost between them,” a senior police source told the Herald.
They have been fighting since the Sunni bikie, one of Sydney’s most well-known gangsters, became president of the Nomads Parramatta chapter in the late 1990s.
In 2006, he was jailed over a Newcastle shooting. The following year, the Parramatta chapter’s Granville headquarters was bombed, allegedly by the Comanchero, and the chapter subsequently disbanded.
A few of its members formed Notorious, probably at the request of the Sunni bikie.
“[The Sunni bikie] left the Nomads while he was on remand,” said an investigator who has watched the two groups for years. “He was telling people he was planning to start up his own club. Around about the same time, Notorious appeared.”
Unlike the Sunni bikie and the Notorious president, the Comanchero City Crew president was born in Beirut and grew up in Sydney’s southern suburbs. He appeared on television in 2005 following the Cronulla riot and Maroubra reprisal violence, when he met members of the Bra Boys to calm tensions.
When the Herald asked the president of the Hells Angels city chapter about the bombing, he was succinct: “I’ve got nothing to say, thank you.”
But bikie sources said the Angels believe Notorious may be responsible for the attack, which closed down Crystal Street for a day and damaged seven neighbouring businesses.
Neither police nor the Hells Angels have established why Notorious may have attacked the club, though the senior police source offered a simple answer: “They’re just bloody crazy.”
In the latest violence, a Comanchero member was shot in the leg when he was confronted by five Hells Angels at a park in Silverwater on February 7.
Source: National Post
An Ontario Superior Court ruling could open the door to police routinely using Internet Protocol addresses to find out the names of people online, without any need for a search warrant.
Justice Lynne Leitch found that there is “no reasonable expectation of privacy” in subscriber information kept by Internet service providers (ISPs), in a decision issued earlier this week.
The decision is binding on lower courts in Ontario and it is the first time a Superior Court-level judge in Canada has ruled on whether there are privacy rights in this information that are protected by the Charter.
The ruling is a significant victory for police investigating crimes such as possession of child pornography, while privacy advocates warn there are broad implications even for law-abiding users of the Internet.
“There is no confidentiality left on the Internet if this ruling stands,” said James Stribopoulos, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto.
The ruling by Judge Leitch was made in a possession of child pornography case in southwestern Ontario.
A police officer in St. Thomas faxed a letter to Bell Canada in 2007 seeking subscriber information for an IP address of an Internet user allegedly accessing child pornography. The court heard that it was a “standard letter” that had been previously drafted by Bell and the officer “filled in the blanks” with a request that stated it was part of a child sexual exploitation investigation.
Bell provided the information without asking for a search warrant. The name of the subscriber was the wife of the man who was eventually charged with “possession of child pornography” and “making available child pornography.”
Most ISPs in the country require search warrants to turn over subscriber information unless it is a child pornography investigation.
Ron Ellis, the lawyer for the defendant, stressed to the judge that there was no allegation of attempted luring or of a child in immediate danger. The “making available” charge stems from peer-to-peer websites that permit the downloading of images from other users.
Mr. Ellis argued that police should have been required to seek a search warrant to obtain the subscriber information.
Judge Leitch accepted the arguments of Crown attorney Elizabeth Maguire that the information is similar to what is in a phone book.
“One’s name and address or the name and address of your spouse are not biographical information one expects would be kept private from the state,” said Judge Leitch.
The reasoning of the judge misses the context of what police are seeking, suggested Mr. Stribopoulos.
“It is not just your name. It is your whole Internet surfing history. Up until now, there was privacy. An IP address is not your name; it is a 10-digit number. A lot more people would be apprehensive if they knew their name was being left everywhere they went,” he said.
This information should require a search warrant by police if there is suspected criminal activity, said Mr. Stribopoulos. Judges are accepting the argument that this is “just your name” because “everyone wants to get at the child abusers,” he said.
The federal Personal Information Protection Electronics Documents Act permits ISPs to provide this information to someone with “lawful authority,” which Judge Leitch interpreted as meaning a police officer and not requiring a court ordered warrant.
There is an irony that exemptions in federal privacy legislation have been used to increase police powers and potentially reduce privacy rights, said Mr. Stribopoulos.
The trial of the defendant in St. Thomas will resume this spring. Mr. Ellis declined on Thursday to comment about the ruling because the case is ongoing.
California DMV considering facial recognition
Proposed $63M facial recognition contract would help flag applicants applying for fraudulent licenses
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San Jose Mercury News (CA)
via NewsEdge Corporation
Feb. 4–SACRAMENTO — Even as cost-conscious Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looks to trim state spending every way he can, officials at the Department of Motor Vehicles are planning to spend tens of millions of dollars on new driver’s license technology.
And privacy advocates say finances are the least of the plan’s problems.
The proposed $63 million contract includes facial recognition software that would allow the DMV to quickly compare an applicant’s new photo against other photos in the agency’s database in an effort to deter identity theft. The system could eventually include as many as 25 million images of drivers statewide.
Similar software is used in Oregon, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado and Georgia. California DMV officials say that by flagging applicants who already have a license under a different name, the software has led to a reduction in fraudulent licenses and identification cards by as much as 10 percent in those states.
But the five-year contract, which is being fast-tracked and could be approved as early as next month, is drawing objections from privacy advocates who fear state and local authorities could use the biometric technology to monitor the movements of “innocent people” — for instance, spectators at a sporting event or an anti-war rally.
“What this would allow law enforcement to do is scan a crowd of folks, check that image against the database and have their names and addresses,” said Valerie Smalls
Navarro of the American Civil Liberties Union in Sacramento.
The ACLU is fighting the proposal with a handful of other groups, including Consumers Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Consumer Federation of California, which says the plan poses “massive threats” to personal privacy.
“We see this as sort of creeping Big Brother government, an invasion of people’s privacy,” said Richard Holober, executive director of the San Mateo-based Consumer Federation of California.
The DMV says privacy concerns are overblown because, under its interpretation of state law, police departments don’t have “open access” to the current database that contains drivers’ information.
When police need to track down a license holder’s address or driving record, said Dennis Clear, a DMV assistant director for legislation, they must request it from the department. Similarly, police would have to ask in order to check a suspect’s picture against the new database. The database is protected, he said, “and that’s not going to change.”
If anything, Clear said, the new system will significantly improve privacy. “We believe this new contract is in the best interest of the citizens; it is in the best interest of all of us.”
But the proposal also is eliciting criticism for the hasty manner in which it’s being driven through the state’s bureaucracy — using an expedited process for select budget items that can be funded without the scrutiny of public hearings.
The state Department of Finance, which allocates the DMV’s budget, is processing the contract proposal through a so-called Section 11 application, which in many cases allows for a speedy, 30-day approval. The state would be able to sign the contract after Feb. 14, unless the Legislature intervenes before then, and the biometric features could be in place as early as 2010.
The current contract to manufacture driver’s licenses expires in June. Under that contract, the state pays 65 cents for each license. The new contract will push the price to $1.40 per card, which amounts to $63 million in a five-year period, Clear said.
“We feel it’s worth it as an investment because, frankly, the system we have today is wearing out,” Clear said. “We have cameras that are no longer functioning, we have hardware that is breaking down.”
State officials turned to the fast-track process — instead of waiting for the state budget to be approved in what has become an increasingly drawn-out process — because they say California desperately needs to improve security features on its licenses.
Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, perhaps the most outspoken lawmaker when it comes to privacy issues, is urging his colleagues to put the contract proposal before a public hearing, where DMV officials could provide more details about the facial recognition technology.
“There are at least four questions I want to ask,” Simitian said. They are: Does the technology work? How much does it cost? Does it make the public safer? How will privacy be protected?
“None of those questions should be avoided or evaded by doing an end around the process, which is really what’s being proposed here,” Simitian said.
Wednesday, he formally asked the Joint Legislative Budget Committee to reject the finance department’s fast-track application for the contract.
Committee spokesman John Ferrera said the committee is aware of the concerns raised by the application and is “giving the request consideration.”
Judge Says Trooper’s Stop Was Improper
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - A state trooper attempted on Wednesday to defend himself against charges that he made an improper traffic stop.
Video: Witnesses Testify In Motorcycle Stop
Trooper Jimmy Knowles came face-to-face with his accuser, and one witness came from as far away as Atlanta to testify in the hearing.
Andru Evans and Eddie Jennings both testified in traffic court that they told Knowles that he had pulled over the wrong person for speeding in October.
“I’m coming out of my truck, and I’m yelling him, telling, ‘You got the wrong guy. You got the wrong guy,’” testified Jennings.
The men were in separate vehicles traveling on Interstate 40 in Wilson County in October. Both said they remember seeing another biker, Rick Laude, on his motorcycle with his girlfriend going the speed limit with traffic.
Somewhere around mile marker 217, two other motorcycles zoomed by going at least 133 miles per hour. Not long after that, the witnesses said they saw blue lights and Knowles stopping Laude.
The trooper’s in-car video showed Laude with his hands up and Knowles pulling him from his bike. What was not on the video were the witnesses pleading with Knowles, telling him he had the wrong motorcycle rider.
“There were two separate cars where people were hollering out of their window, ‘You have the wrong guy,’ It was two bikes, not two people,” said Evans.
In court on Tuesday, Knowles admitted he made a mistake in believing Laude was part of the group of speeders, but stuck by his belief that Laude was reckless in driving on the shoulder of the interstate.
In the end, the judge ruled the October stop was improper and threw out the charges against Laude.
Knowles expressed regret but stuck by his claim that Laude was driving recklessly.
“I seen him pass on the shoulder. I made an honest mistake of pulling him over, thinking he was part of the pursuit,” said Knowles.
Knowles said he never struck Laude, but said he pulled the man from the bike because he believed he was ignoring his commands to get off the motorcycle.
He said he has been a trooper for seven years, and his record doesn’t reflect any past problems of this nature.
An internal investigation by the Tennessee Highway Patrol has recommended that Knowles be suspended for five days without pay. The suspension is going through the appeals process.
www.ghsa.org/html/publications/directions/2009/Winter/index.html
Governors highway Safety Association
Directions in Highway Safety - Winter 2009
Motorcycle related only:
Antilock Brakes on Motorcycles Found to Save Lives
Two new studies show that motorcycles equipped with antilock brakes can
reduce both crashes and fatalities. As the number of motorcyclists on
American roads increases (nearly 5,000 last year alone), and with it the
number of crashes and deaths, equipping bikes with antilock brakes is
also becoming more important.
The first study, conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety
(IIHS), compared the rates of fatal crashes for motorcycles with and
without antilock brakes. The results showed there were 6.6 fatal crashes
per 10,000 registered motorcycles without antilocks during 2005-06. The
same bike models, when equipped with antilocks, had a 38 percent lower
rate of fatal crashes (4.1 per 10,000 registered bikes). IIHS
statisticians note that the findings are statistically significant at
the 90 percent confidence level.
The Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDA), an IIHS sister organization that
examines insurance loss data, also conducted a study comparing insurance
losses under collision coverage for 12 motorcycle models with optional
antilock brakes, versus the same models without that option.
Motorcyclists with antilocks were found to have 21 percent lower
insurance losses than those without. Their claim frequency was also 19
percent lower than for bikes without antilocks.
Antilock breaks have been found to be more beneficial on motorcycles
than on cars, because two wheeled vehicles are much less stable.
Antilock breaks reduce wheel lockup during braking and can keep a
motorcycle from overturning.
For more information, visit www.iihs.org . Select Status Reports, Volume
43, Number 9.
———————–
NHTSA Reports: 21 Drinking Age and Motorcycle Helmets Save Lives
A new statistical report by NHTSA illustrates the lifesaving impact of
21 drinking age laws and motorcycle helmet use. Minimum 21 drinking age
laws prevented an estimated 4,441 drunken driving deaths in the last
five years alone according to the report released on November 6. GHSA
strongly supports the 21 drinking age and will push back against any
effort to repeal it.
Former NHTSA Acting Administrator David Kelly presented the report at a
MADD symposium on the topic of underage drinking. According to Kelly,
“Turning our back on these laws would be a deadly mistake. Minimum
drinking age laws are among the most effective measures ever used to
reduce drunken driving deaths among America’s young people.”
The same report also notes that the number of lives saved by motorcycle
helmets has risen sharply in recent years, parallelling an increase in
motorcycle use. Estimates indicate that lives saved by helmets rose from
1,173 in 2003 to 1,784 in 2007. For the five-year period ending last
year, more than 7,502 lives were spared because motorcyclists used
helmets. GHSA continues to support helmet laws and will urge Congress to
allow states to spend federal highway safety funds on helmet promotion
in the next highway reauthorization.
The NHTSA report is available at: http://tinyurl.com/6bo2sc . GHSA’s
positions on the 21 drinking age law and motorcycle helmets can be found
in the issues section of the GHSA website.
——————-
Table of Contents
* Cell Phone Use and Driving Garners Attention
* 2007 Traffic Safety Fact Sheets
* Former Congressman Ray LaHood Confirmed as DOT Secretary
* GHSA is Going Green!
* Roadway Safety Foundation Announces Technical Assistance Winners
* NTSB Releases 2009 “Most Wanted” Transportation Safety
Improvements
* Emergency Nurses Association Reviews State Highway Safety Laws
* Maryland Creates Unique Highway Safety Partnership
* Missouri Law on Reporting Unfit Drivers Serves as Model for Other
States
* NHTSA Offers New Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement
* New FHWA Products, Websites of Interest
* Performance Measures for State Traffic Record Systems in
Development
* Antilock Brakes on Motorcycles Found to Save Lives
* Roadway Safety Award Applicants Sought
* NHTSA Reports: 21 Drinking Age and Motorcycle Helmets Save Lives
* NCHRP Evaluates Behavioral Highway Safety Programs
* State Farm: Committed to Saving Teens’ Lives
* In 2009, Resolve to Strengthen Your Partnerships
* Mark Your Calendars
* Georgia’s on GHSA’s Mind in 2009!
* GHSA Remembers Kevin Quinlan
* Alcohol Screening Conference Scheduled for May
* Study Shows Unlicensed Teen Drivers More Prone to Fatal Crashes
Canada: Court Throws Out Work Zone Tickets without Workers
Winnipeg, Canada court decision finds workers must be present for a work zone speed camera ticket to be valid.
“Work zone” speed camera tickets are invalid if they are issued in an empty work zone, according to a Winnipeg, Canada court ruling issued last month. Judicial Justice of the Peace Norman Sundstrom tossed citations issued to nine defendants who traveled through workerless work zones without exceeding the normal speed limit for the road they were on. The decision was based on a nuanced reading of the interplay between the provincial photo radar law and the law governing construction zone warning signs.
www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25039636-5010760,00.html
Barriers blamed for bike deaths
By Mark Hinchliffe
February 10, 2009 11:00pm
THE sharp rise in motorcycling deaths could be dramatically reduced if
an additional rail was used on roadside barriers, a rider representative
group claims. Read the rest of this entry »
Laconia council mulls extra day for Bike Week vendors
Saying it represents a “goodwill gesture” as well as an opportunity to bring in some extra licensing revenues, the City Council is supporting the idea of letting vendors sell their wares one day before the official start of Bike Week 2009.
Following a meeting of the council’s Finance Committee Monday, City Manager Eileen Cabanel was directed to draft an ordinance that, following a public hearing, could be in place for the rally, which this year runs from June 13-21.
For $100 extra, a vendor would be able to start doing business as of a time to be determined on June 12. A regular Bike Week licensing permit costs $450.
The rationale behind the early vending fee is that the vendors are already here, that they want to sell and that locals are eager to buy before the activities really start rolling, said Councilors Armand Bolduc and Bob Hamel.
The city’s public safety heads say the extended vending wouldn’t change the way they already did business on the Friday before the rally, but both Police Chief Mike Moyer and Fire Chief Ken Erickson expressed concern about the “slippery slope” of Bike Week stretching beyond its current nine days.
While its was agreed that food vendors might also want to begin doing business as their t-shirt or leathers-selling brethren, the chiefs and the committee members were adamant that they would not support the early opening of three beer tents.
Moyer, in conversations he had with rally promoter Charlie St. Clair of the Laconia Motorcycle Week Association, estimated that the earlier vending could see the city make up to an additional $1,200 this year. Erickson speculated that up to 30 vendors might take advantage of the extra selling opportunity.
However many vendors do show up, said Bolduc, who represents the city on the LMWA board of directors, that’s better than seeing those vendors and potential customers go to another venue outside of Laconia.
“Let’s try this for a year and see what happens,” Hamel said. “I think we can get a fair amount of people open.”
With the city of Myrtle Beach, S.C. canceling its two motorcycle rallies this year, “we could have a huge influx of vendors and visitors,” Hamel added, suggesting that vendors could be allowed to sell from 2 p.m. until Midnight on Bike Week Eve.
Erickson expressed surprise that “we’re not shortening this thing,” later explaining that to keep costs down for the city and also for vendors, the rally could be shorter than it is now. The extra several hours that a vendor gets to sell his merchandise at Bike Week will not mean significantly more income for the vendor, Erickson said.
Hamel suggested that the council hold a public hearing on the vending changes and Cabanel agreed, noting that some residents of The Weirs already “complain very loudly” that the rally is too long.
Joe Driscoll, of the Weirs Action Committee, said if the council allows the early vending,” this would be seen very much as a good will gesture” by property owners and vendors while also helping to keep Bike Week money in Laconia.
Driscoll went so far as to suggest that the vendors be able to open up on Friday for free. He discounted Cabanel’s concern that if Laconia allows earlier vending, competing venues in other communities would do the same. Driscoll said most Bike Week visitors don’t show up much sooner than the Friday before the start of the rally.
Police Agencies in Texas Stealing Property from People Who Haven’t Even Been Charged with Criminal Activity
Author: goldironSource: Express News
TENAHA — A two-decade-old state law that grants authorities the power to seize property used in crimes is wielded by some agencies against people who never are charged with — much less convicted of — criminal activity.
Law enforcement authorities in this East Texas town of 1,000 people seized property from at least 140 motorists between 2006 and 2008, and, to date, filed criminal charges against fewer than half, according to a review of court documents by the San Antonio Express-News.
Virtually anything of value was up for grabs: cash, cell phones, personal jewelry, a pair of sneakers, and often, the very car that was being driven through town.
Some affidavits filed by officers relied on the presence of seemingly innocuous property as the only evidence that a crime had occurred.
Linda Dorman, an Akron, Ohio, great-grandmother had $4,000 in cash taken from her by local authorities when she was stopped while driving through town after visiting Houston in April 2007. Court records make no mention that anything illegal was found in her van. She’s still hoping for the return of what she calls “her life savings.”
Dorman’s attorney, David Guillory, calls the roadside stops and seizures in Tenaha “highway piracy,” undertaken by a couple of law enforcement officers whose agencies get to keep most of what was seized.
Guillory is suing officials in Tenaha and Shelby County on behalf of Dorman and nine other clients whose property was confiscated. All were African-Americans driving either rentals or vehicles with out-of-state plates.
Guillory alleges in the lawsuit that while his clients were detained, they were presented with an ultimatum: waive your rights to your property in exchange for a promise to be released and not be criminally charged.
He said most did as Dorman did, signing the waiver to avoid jail.
The state’s asset seizure law doesn’t require that law enforcement agencies file criminal charges in civil forfeiture cases. It requires only a preponderance of evidence that the property was used in the commission of certain crimes, such as drug crimes, or bought with proceeds of those crimes.
That’s a lesser burden than is required in a criminal case. And it allows police departments and prosecutors to divvy up what they get from such seizures — what critics say is a built-in incentive for unscrupulous, underfinanced law enforcement agencies to illegally strip motorists of their property.
Some lawmakers, fed up with calls from irate constituents, say enough is enough. Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, said the state’s asset forfeiture law is being abused by enough jurisdictions across the state that he wants to rewrite major sections of it this year.
“The idea that people lose their property but are never charged and never get it back, that’s theft as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen, believes some law enforcement agencies in his cash-strapped district in the Rio Grande Valley have become so dependent on the profitable seizures that they routinely misapply the state’s civil forfeiture law.
“In a lot of cases, they’re more focused on trying to find the money than in trying to find the drugs,” he said.
That means law enforcement agencies in the Valley tend to target vehicles heading south into Mexico rather than northbound cars, Hinojosa said, because the southbound vehicles are more likely to be transporting cash — the profits from the drug trade — as opposed to just the drugs.
In 2008, three years after stripping a man of $10,032 in cash as he drove south along U.S. 281 to buy a headstone for his dying aunt, Jim Wells County officials returned the man’s money — and the county then paid him $110,000 in damages as part of a settlement. Attorney Malcolm Greenstein said criminal charges never were filed against his client, Javier Gonzalez, nor any of the dozens of people whose records he reviewed. People were given the option of going to jail or signing a waiver, Greenstein said. Like Gonzalez, most signed the waiver.
Cash-poor Tenaha
Supporters tout the state’s forfeiture law, when used right, as an essential law enforcement tool, allowing state and local departments the ability to go after criminals — using the crooks’ money. Law enforcement agencies last year captured tens of millions of dollars from such seizures statewide, according to records from Whitmire’s office.
But in Tenaha, a town of chicken farms that hugs the Louisiana border, critics say being a black out-of-towner passing through with anything of value is seen as evidence of a crime.
Tenaha Mayor George Bowers, 80, defended the seizures, saying they allowed a cash-poor city the means to add a second police car in a two-policeman town and help pay for a new police station.
“It’s always helpful to have any kind of income to expand your police force,” Bowers said.
Local police, he said, must take aggressive action to stem the narcotics trade that flows through town via U.S. 59 — drugs heading north, cash going south.
“No doubt about it. (U.S. 59) is a thoroughfare that a lot of no-good people travel on. They take the drugs and sell it and take the money and go right back into Mexico,” said Bowers, who’s been Tenaha’s mayor 54 years.
Bowers said he’d defer questions about whether innocent people were being stripped of their property to Shelby County District Attorney Lynda Russell.
Russell couldn’t be reached for comment, and her attorney declined comment.
Randy Whatley, a local constable who himself deposited more than $115,000 into the county’s seizure account for fiscal year 2007 (state records show $45,000 eventually was returned to its owners), also couldn’t be reached for comment.
Russell, Whatley and Bowers are among a half-dozen officials named in Guillory’s lawsuit.
Waiving rights
Harris County District Attorney Patricia Lykos said the state’s forfeiture law, which last year put millions in the coffers of local law enforcement agencies, including hers, takes some of the profit out of crime.
“These ill-gotten gains are used to further the aims of law enforcement and public safety,” she said. “It’s kind of poetic justice, isn’t it?” Lykos said she believes the law, if followed, provides residents with adequate safeguards. Rarely, she said, do seizures take place locally without the filing of criminal charges.
She added that the most perfect law in the world could be sullied by the individuals carrying it out.
“It goes to the integrity of the people enforcing the law,” Lykos said.
An official with Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed’s office did not return a call for comment.
Several now-former district attorneys in Texas already have landed in hot water over their use, or misuse, of their forfeiture accounts. Before his primary defeat last year, then-Montgomery County District Attorney Michael McDougal acknowledged spending hundreds from the fund on alcohol for a community event, and thousands more on staff parties and donations to charities.
The law stipulates that seized money be used for law enforcement purposes but doesn’t specify what those are.
Key lawmakers say more oversight is needed everywhere in the process. The apparent practice in Tenaha of presenting waivers just after people’s property is seized raises troubling questions about how the law is applied there.
The Shelby County district attorney made legal agreements with some individuals that her office wouldn’t file criminal charges so long as the property owner waived all rights to the valuables.
“In exchange for (respondent) signing the agreed order of forfeiture, the Shelby County district attorney’s office agrees to reject charges of money laundering pending at this time,” read one waiver, dated April 10, 2007.
The property owners named in the waiver had just signed over $7,342 in cash, their 1994 Chevrolet Suburban, a cell phone, a Blackberry and a stone necklace. The law forbids a peace officer at the time of seizure to “request, require or in any manner induce any person ….. to execute a document purporting to waive the person’s interest in or rights to the property.”
In Monroe, La., Jason Clemons, an unemployed 36-year-old, says he’d desperately like to reclaim the $3,500 in cash authorities in Tenaha seized from him when the car in which he was a passenger was stopped in 2007 and a marijuana roach was found in the ashtray.
A judge threw out a money laundering charge against him a while back, but his attorneys told him it’s too late to reclaim his money. “If you ask me, they’re running a scam from the district attorney’s office to the police,” Clemons said. “I’m in a real good bind. It’d be nice to see that money.”
Myrtle Beach Asks Atlantic Beach for Biker Ban
Atlantic Beach, SC - (AP) — Officials from Myrtle Beach want their counterparts in nearby Atlantic Beach to join them in getting rid of motorcycle rallies.
The Sun News of Myrtle Beach reports that leaders in Atlantic Beach say the annual rally that attracts black motorcyclists makes money for the town.
Councilman Donnell Thompson says he would consider banning the rally if Myrtle Beach helped his town with its financial problems.
Myrtle Beach passed 15 laws last year designed to get rid of two May motorcycle rallies — the Harley-Davidson spring rally that attracts mostly white riders, and the Atlantic Beach Bikefest.
Myrtle Beach City Manager Tom Leath detailed the new laws at the meeting, and said it is time to regain control of the Grand Strand.
goldiron