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.”
Lee Rogers On Overnight America w/ Jon Grayson Discussing The FEMA Camp Bill
Below is an mp3 file of Lee Rogers as a guest on the syndicated CBS Radio show, Overnight America w/ Jon Grayson discussing HR 645 or the National Emergency Centers Act which authorizes existing facilities to be used as National Emergency facilities as well as the Homeland Security Secretary to build additional FEMA facilities on open and closed military bases.
Typical of the mainstream media, Jon attempts to debunk the significance of this legislation by ignoring obvious patterns of past behavior by the government in preserving and setting up detention facilities under the guise of illegal immigration, continuity of government and more. He also ignores the fact that the government does not follow the Constitution and is engaged in a myriad of criminal activity. For example, the John Yoo torture memo which was obviously unconstitutional and broke international law, was used to justify the torture of so called terrorists by the criminal Bush regime. The same type of thinking could easily be applied if HR 645 is passed into law.
Jon claims that the provision in the bill which authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to use these facilities for whatever purposes they deem to be necessary is irrelevant because it doesn’t authorize the government to break the law. Since when has the government followed the Constitution which is the supreme law of the land? They break the law all the time. The argument is null and void.
He also references the Wannsee Conference which was a meeting of high level Nazi officials to discuss the concentration camp plan for the Jews during World War II. It was a meeting whose contents were kept top secret throughout the war. Hitler never came out and told the people that he was building death camps, but like in America today he incrmentally and quietly built the infrastructure necessary to carry out what was codenamed the Final Solution. The point is, is that the plan was secret which he fails to mention.
State report on gangs questioned
Compiled by analyst with limited criminal justice background, it says we’re battling growing gang problem
MADISON – A 23-year-old analyst with a limited criminal justice background compiled a state Department of Justice report that relied on anecdotal reports to conclude northeast Wisconsin is battling an increasing gang problem. Read the rest of this entry »
S.C. becomes focal point to track funds for gangs, narcotics
South Carolina’s political and military leaders fear that U.S. street gangs are conspiring with international terrorists, an alarming scenario they said highlights the need for a specialized unit that targets major drug runners and their bankrollers.
And they want the South Carolina National Guard to run the federally-funded pilot program.
U.S. Reps. Joe Wilson and Henry Brown, both Republicans, have asked U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to back the creation of a military unit that would bridge a perceived security gap between the international drug trade and the war on terror.
“The National Guard has the capacity and the authority to play a unique role in our nation’s counter-narcotics mission,” Wilson told The Post and Courier. “The counter-narcotics pilot program would specifically target the illicit finance generated by the narcotics industry here at home and abroad which is used to fund terrorist operations around the world.”
Proponents said a successful program in South Carolina could serve as a national model and that several factors make the state a strategic location to set up shop:
–The state boasts an abundance of major military installations and resources that already serve key national security roles, including Charleston Air Force Base and its fleet of C-17s, Charleston’s port and the Navy brig, which has housed terrorism suspects.
–Organized gangs with international ties already are operating in the state. One of these organizations, the notorious Mara Salvatrucha-13 (MS-13), has possible links to hostile groups in Afghanistan and the Middle East, according to Wilson and Brown.
–Wilson cites a new report by the Congressional Research Service on the emerging international threat posed by the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. The report states that “alarms have been sounded in some circles that international terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda could exploit alien and narcotics smuggling networks controlled by these gangs to infiltrate the United States.”
–The state National Guard already is working in some counter-narcotics programs, and its citizen soldiers are accustomed to collaborating in drug investigations with state and local law enforcement.
But questions remain. Among them: How strong is the evidence linking terrorists, gangs and drug-trafficking? How would this new program square with existing federal, state and local drug enforcement efforts? And is South Carolina the best place for this mission?
The gang connection
Gang activity in South Carolina has increased steadily over the past decade as these criminal organizations have spilled from urban centers into rural and suburban nooks across the nation in search of new territory and customers.
In 2004, the state Law Enforcement Division had identified 84 groups in South Carolina that fit a general definition of a gang: an organized group of five or more people who adopt a common name and engage in crime. By 2007, that figure had ballooned to 325 identified gangs, authorities said.
The number of crimes attributed to gangs has mushroomed as well. In 2007, gangs were linked to more than 950 crimes in South Carolina, including drug trafficking. By comparison, 370 gang-related crimes were reported statewide in 2001, according to SLED.
Many of these groups are what police describe as “hybrid gangs,” small, independent groups connected by turf or friendship. But highly organized gangs with cross-border connections also are present — gangs such as MS-13, Surenos, 18th Street and the Mexican Mafia.
“The number of Hispanic gangs is drastically growing,” said Special Agent Nicole Bryan, SLED’s coordinator on gangs in the Midlands. “As the Hispanic community has grown, Hispanic gangs have increased as part of that growth.”
Across the country, MS-13 and other gangs increasingly have become involved in narcotic trafficking at the wholesale level. They’ve cultivated connections with Mexican drug cartels and other power criminal organizations to gain access to international suppliers and large- volume shipments, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center. These affiliations have increased the availability of illegal drugs and the profits flowing out of the country.
The revenue stream is huge, with traffickers employing myriad of methods to launder and smuggle drug money to foreign destinations. The drug intelligence center estimates that Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers generate and launder as much as $39 billion in wholesale profits annually, much of which is smuggled out of the United States along the Mexican border.
Over the years, South Carolina has emerged as a key distribution point in this narcotics pipeline, serving as a smuggling route for drugs from California, Florida, Georgia, New York, Texas and Mexico. South Carolina’s location along Interstates 95 and 85, between New York and Florida, makes it ideal for drug runners shipping marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin along the Eastern Seaboard, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
“Project 9496″
The pilot program would target this stealthy underworld of drugs and money. The new unit is shrouded in secrecy, with scant details of its origin, funding and status. The Pentagon refers to the program as “Project 9496.”
Col. Pete Brooks, director of public affairs for the S.C. National Guard, said it’s too early to talk about the effort in detail. “We are not even out of the blocks yet. This whole new mission is at the ‘good idea’ stage and is not funded.”
But a Jan. 14 letter from Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard J. Douglas to the National Guard Bureau indicates the pilot program already is approved. The letter states that the South Carolina Counter Narco-Terrorism Pilot Program is to be run and funded separately from an existing network of states’ National Guard counter-drug units.
Brooks said the pilot program would expand the South Carolina Guard’s anti-drug unit, which employs 40 full-time employees and hires about a dozen temporary workers each summer to help destroy marijuana crops.
The program receives about $1.6 million in federal money each year in support of the drug eradication efforts of SLED and local police agencies. How the two agencies would partner under the pilot program is unclear because SLED considers it only “an idea at this point,” according to a statement the agency issued in response to questions from the newspaper. Exactly how much the program would cost also remains unclear.
The letters of support from Brown and Wilson suggest that Gov. Mark Sanford also is pushing for the new mission. But Sanford’s press secretary, Joel Sawyer, said the governor was unaware of the proposal until The Post and Courier inquired about it.
After discussing the plans with state Guard officials, however, Sanford thinks the program is “an intriguing idea,” Sawyer said.
Still, the program’s status and future remains unclear. The National Guard Bureau said federal seed money was set aside only to study the program’s feasibility. The agency couldn’t provide a figure.
Tracking the money
Efforts to choke off terrorist financing began in earnest after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, with then President George W. Bush announcing two weeks later a “major thrust of our war on terrorism … a strike on the financial foundation of the global terror network.”
Within months, the U.S. government froze the assets of dozens of alleged terrorists, banks and nonprofit groups.
Investigators learned that al-Qaida financiers used everything from electronic transfers to camels to move money and fund their operations. Making matters even more challenging was the existence of the hawala system, a centuries-old money loan and transfer system that is based on the honor system among brokers across the world.
Unlike traditional banking systems, which leave trails of paper and records, hawalas typically don’t keep records of individual transactions.
But financing experts and government officials have said tracking down terrorism financiers has suffered in recent years. A report last year by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force said international efforts have had limited success and that the United States and other countries need to create new counter-terrorism techniques.
Reports by the Government Accountability Office in the past two years have said the nation needs an “integrated strategy to coordinate the delivery of counter-terrorism financing training.” A Pentagon report in 2007 called for “one over-arching organization” devoted to international terrorism financing.
John Cassara, a former CIA officer and U.S. Treasury Department agent, said the military in recent years has become more focused on narco-terrorists and their paymasters. He said that this emphasis is a natural outgrowth of the military’s efforts in Afghanistan, where most of the world’s opium is produced.
“We’ve seen over the years how the Taliban has used it to bankroll their operations,” said Cassara, author of “Hide & Seek - Intelligence, Law Enforcement and the Stalled War on Terror Finance.” “The classic line is that if you take away the money, there’s no terrorism. The military realizes this.”
But Cassara said he hasn’t seen any solid evidence showing connections between Latin American gangs and Central Asian and Middle Eastern terrorism. “Could it happen? Absolutely. Does it happen? Frankly I don’t know,” he said, adding that organized criminal gangs are “opportunists, and they will naturally reach out to organizations that can facilitate their operations.”
A recent assessment from the National Drug Intelligence Center reached a similar conclusion, saying such connections are possible but not supported by evidence. The report identified U.S. prison gangs that have spread outside the bars as having the most potential for relationships with terrorists.
While government officials know of no concrete connection between gangs selling drugs in the United States and Middle East terrorist groups, authorities have long known that terrorist organizations in South America, especially in Colombia, fuel much of their activity with drug money. And authorities say they have watched with growing concern as Nigerian criminal groups increasingly have brought drugs, some of it from the Middle East, into this country, including the Southeast.
Money may aid new festival, enforcement
As spring draws closer, the picture of how the city of Myrtle Beach is spending its anti-motorcycle-rally money is coming into focus. Read the rest of this entry »
Combining biometrics and sensors: Fingerprints and faces can be faked, but not brain patterns
Author: goldironSource: CORDIS
Since 9/11, the need to secure important facilities from terrorist attack has become a top priority around the world. And one of the keys to this is making sure the right people are allowed into sensitive areas and the wrong people are kept out.
A range of technologies and systems have been deployed in the past few years, but the more successful they are the more obtrusive they tend to be, causing disruptions and delays.
For the past three years, a consortium of academic and research institutions and private-sector companies have been looking at developing new technologies that aim at enhancing both security and safety across a wide spectrum of applications.
At the same time, they have been improving existing technologies with the aim of making recognition techniques much more unobtrusive.
Combining biometrics and sensors
At the heart of the EU-funded HUMABIO research project is combining new types of biometrics – methods used for the unique recognition of humans – with the latest sensor technologies.
As well as developing sensorial and connectivity hardware for specific biometric applications, the researchers had to come up with sophisticated new software to extract the biometric profile of individuals, based on physiology and behaviour characteristics. This is stored in a database and then compared to profiles created when individuals enter the monitored area.
Until now, the most widely used forms of biometric identification have been fingerprints, facial recognition and voice recognition, all of which can be faked. HUMABIO has introduced new forms of biometric recognition which are considerably more difficult to get around.
Headgear scans brainwaves
Uniquely, this includes using electrocardiograms (ECGs), which record heart rhythms, and electroencephalograms (EEGs), which record brain patterns, to identify people. The researchers have come up with prototype headgear which includes two electrodes to take the readings.
Unlike some of the other achievements of the project, this technology is still at pre-commercial, proof-of-concept stage and might take several years before becoming widely used.
“Unobtrusiveness was one of the most important aspects of what we were trying to achieve,” says project coordinator Dimitrios Tzovaras, “but a lot of work will need to be done on the EEG and ECG sensors to make them unobtrusive”.
The project is delighted with the results to date, however, and Tzovaras says: “This is the first time this type of biometrics has been used for identification, and it solves most of the problems other biometric systems face.”
Other new types of biometrics the project has been working on are much closer to commercialisation. These include analysis of gait, or the way people walk and carry themselves, and analysis of seated posture. The project has also been enhancing facial and voice recognition techniques, and putting everything together into a multimodal biometric identification system which is more secure than the unimodal biometrics that comprise it.
Successful pilot projects
The new technologies developed by HUMABIO were tested in three pilot projects. The first was in a truck provided by one of the project’s industrial partners, Volvo. It combined facial and voice recognition with posture recognition via a seat cover fitted with a new type of inbuilt sensor for analysing how the driver sits. The system continually updates the driver’s biometric information both to warn if there is a change of driver, possibly following a hijack, and to make sure the driver is fit to drive.
A second pilot was at the Euroairport in Basel, with voice, facial recognition and gait recognition being used to provide on-the-go authentication of airport personnel, such as security guards and airline pilots. The third demonstration, in a laboratory at Stuttgart, used biometric authentication to restrict access to a specific, high-value machine which can only be used by trained, authorised personnel.
“In the first pilot, the seat cover was as comfortable as a normal [one], and the facial and voice sensors did not bother the driver at all. In the other two pilots, people at the airport and lab were able to move around freely in the monitored areas while their identities were authenticated. The goal of unobtrusiveness was attained, while security and safety was considerably enhanced compared to conventional systems,” says Tzovaras.
The truck pilot was so successful that Volvo is now planning to install the authentication system on all its trucks, and other parts of the system, such as the enhanced facial recognition camera, are also on the way to being commercialsed.
While work is still needed on some of the technologies, there are working prototypes for all of them including EGC/EEG, which Tzovaras believes will one day be integrated into sophisticated biometric systems that terrorists and criminals will find it next to impossible to fool.
HUMABIO is funded under the ICT strand of the Sixth Framework Programme for research.
Source: IPS
NEW YORK - In what promises to be the first major test of the Barack Obama administration’s new approach to the rule of law, the Supreme Court will soon hear what could be one of the most consequential cases in U.S. history.
It will be asked to answer the question: Can a U.S. president declare a legal resident an ‘enemy combatant’ and hold him or her indefinitely without charge or trial?
The legal U.S. resident in question is Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who has been detained in solitary confinement at a Navy brig in South Carolina since June 2003. Al-Marri is the only remaining person held in the United States as an “enemy combatant”. He is being represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The case, Al-Marri v. Spagone, is a habeas corpus action, challenging al-Marri’s indefinite detention. The defendant is Navy Commander Daniel Spagone, who runs the Navy brig in South Carolina where Al-Marri is being held by the military.
The central pre-Supreme Court question is what position the new Obama administration will take when it files its brief, currently due on Mar. 23. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments during the last week of April and is expected to hand down its ruling in June. The brief filed by the government in the lower courts during the George W. Bush administration defended the president’s authority to designate “enemy combatants” and to detain them indefinitely.
The ACLU says that the Al-Marri case “provides the Obama administration with an early and critical opportunity to repudiate the abuses of the past eight years and restore the rule of law.”
Jonathan Hafetz, ACLU’s lead attorney on the Al-Marri case, told IPS, “This is one of most extreme examples of the Bush administration’s abuse of executive power. It is a case where President Bush sought to push the outer limits of the Constitution. It is legally and morally indefensible.”
A separate case, Al-Marri v. Gates, is contesting al-Marri’s abusive treatment and conditions of confinement at the Navy brig.
Al-Marri, a Qatari national, came lawfully to the United States in September 2001with his wife and five children to pursue a master’s degree at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. He was arrested by the FBI at his home that December and subsequently indicted for credit card fraud and false identification.
Al-Marri asserted his innocence and prepared to contest the charges. But on Jun. 23, 2003, on the eve of a hearing to suppress illegally seized evidence and less than a month before trial, President Bush declared al-Marri an al Qaeda agent and designated him an “enemy combatant” in the “war on terrorism”. That same day, the military took custody of al-Marri and incarcerated him in the Navy brig, where he has been detained without charge ever since.
At stake in Al-Marri v. Spagone is whether the president can order the military to seize and detain indefinitely, without charge or trial, individuals lawfully residing in the United States, including U.S. citizens, based on government assertions that they planned to commit terrorist activities.
In 2007, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the government cannot hold individuals arrested in this country in military detention without charge.
But in July 2008, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in a narrowly divided decision that the president had legal authority to imprison al-Marri indefinitely without charge based on the facts alleged. As one judge noted in dissent, however, to accept the government’s claim of extraordinary detention power would have “disastrous consequences for the Constitution - and the country”.
The ACLU says Al-Marri’s detention represents “one of the gravest expansions of executive detention power since Sep. 11.” The United States was founded on the principle that “individuals living in this country cannot be imprisoned without charge and that civilian government must remain supreme over the military. Al-Marri’s detention represents a radical departure from that celebrated legal tradition - one that was never authorised by Congress and that violates the Constitution.”
According to the ACLU, documents recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that standard operating procedures developed for Guantánamo Bay “were secretly applied at the Navy brig in an effort to create a prison beyond the law within the United States. Today, al-Marri remains in virtual isolation at the Brig, denied even meaningful communication with his family.”
“It is clearly illegal to imprison legal residents of the United States without trial. It is also the type of false choice between our safety and our ideals that has pervaded America’s approach to fighting terrorism for the past eight years,” said the ACLU’S Hafetz. “We are confident that upon review, the Court will strike down this radical departure from our nation’s most basic values and traditions.”
Former United States Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, former FBI Director William Sessions and numerous former generals, admirals and diplomats joined the ACLU in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the president’s authority to indefinitely imprison a legal resident of the U.S. without charge or trial. These and other top military and civilian leaders have filed friend-of-the-court briefs.
“A decision upholding our government’s right to arrest and imprison anyone within its borders, without charge, will not only undercut our ability to convince dictatorial regimes to abandon similar practices, it will substantially undermine efforts to restore our international reputation and to obtain more cooperation from our allies in combating terrorism,” they said in the brief.
The second Al-Marri case, Al-Marri v. Gates, contests al-Marri’s treatment and conditions of confinement since he was declared an “enemy combatant”. During the first 16 months of his military confinement, al-Marri was held incommunicado and subjected to a range of highly coercive interrogation measures, including being held in total isolation, exposed to painful stress positions, shackled in a freezing cell for hours at a time, and threatened with violence and death.
Al-Marri is the second U.S. person to have been held as an enemy combatant within the United States. The first was José Padilla, a United States citizen. Padilla was arrested in Chicago in May 2002, and was detained as a material witness until Jun. 9 2002, when President Bush designated him an illegal enemy combatant and transferred him to a military prison, arguing that he was thereby not entitled to trial in civilian courts.
Padilla was held for three-and-a-half years as an “enemy combatant” after his arrest on suspicion of plotting a radioactive “dirty bomb” attack. That charge was dropped when his case was moved to a civilian court after pressure from civil liberties groups.
In August 2007, Padilla was found guilty by a federal jury of charges that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was sentenced to 17 years and four months in prison.
Bombs and choppers used during military exercises startle New Orleans residents
Author: goldironSource: WWLTV
NEW ORLEANS – Residents in and around New Orleans have been hearing the sounds of low-flying helicopters and what sounds like bomb blasts over the past few nights, but the sounds are part of a training exercise for some of America’s elite military troops.
At one Lakefront home, Gigi Burk normally hears her son, 6-year-old Beau, practicing the piano, but last night she heard something much different at around 10 p.m.
“I said, oh my God! They’re bombs. That’s what I thought it was, somebody dropping bombs,” Burk said.
Burk said she panicked, not knowing why she was hearing what sounded like explosions and low-flying helicopters.
“We’re a little skittish around here with things that have happened,” Burk said.
But according to military officials, it’s a training exercise that brought about 150 U.S. troops from the U.S. Special Operations Command to train in New Orleans for urban warfare.
“They are regularly engaged in combat operations,” said U.S. Special Operations Command staffer Kimberly Tiscione. “They are the best of the best we have to offer across all the branches of the military.”
Black Hawk and “Little Bird” helicopters are transporting troops to several locations around New Orleans, according to Tiscione.
“They’re going to be flying near buildings, doing approaches on them,” Tiscione said. “You might see them landing on the roof tops or landing on the ground near them as well.”
“I heard a bunch of explosions starting at about 10 p.m. They were about ten seconds apart, and then they’d stop, and we thought it was over, but then they started again,” said Burk.
Tiscione said that the ground troops were performing “breeches at several different locations.
“So, they’re moving through doorways or walls or that sort of thing. They’re also doing weapons proficiency,” Tiscione said.
The forces are using simulated ammunitions, almost like paintball pellets, to conduct the training. And even though the noise may affect your neighborhood, the night-time training is only supposed to last from sundown to 11 p.m., according to Tiscione.
“They are the best of the best because they get these kind of training events,” she said.
Burk said she wishes the training had been better publicized before-hand to avoid a scare Tuesday night.
“People were talking about it everywhere today,” Burk said.
The NOPD did put a press release out about the training, and WWL-TV aired a story about it; however, that was a week ago.
Since U.S. Special Operations Command hasn’t done a similar training here since 2000, it has caught many people by surprise.
The training will go on every night through the end of this week.
Some frustrated with lead mandates
Libraries, bike shops scramble to comply with new requirements
With Congress saying “get the lead out,” local retailers and librarians are wondering if common sense gets chucked along with it.
The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which goes into effect Feb. 10, is meant to protect children from lead-laden products. But when the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission gave libraries two options, get rid of all your children’s books or ban anyone under 12 from entering the library, librarians across the country waited for the punch line. But it never came.
“I was speechless,” said Mary Beth Revels, director of the St. Joseph Public Library. “To know it wasn’t a joke and those were our choices.”
After discussing the situation with the library board, she deduced that they would not pack away the library’s 70,000 children’s books and they weren’t going to close the library doors to children.
“We felt that if libraries didn’t comply with this across the country, that we would be taking a stand of continuing to connect children with books,” Ms. Revels said.
The publishing industry has tested the lead content in books, Ms. Revels said, and the levels are within legal limits. But the commission won’t recognize those tests because they weren’t carried out in a “certified lab.”
“But there are no certified labs,” she said incredulously.
And though librarians can’t give an estimate of how many of their children’s books end up in the mouths of readers, Ms. Revels said they’ve never had to replace a book destroyed by an orally fixated patron.
Luckily, libraries have received a reprieve that will last one year, and the commission will consider which products should be exempt from the law.
But local motorcycle shops that sell kid bikes aren’t so lucky. They will not be allowed to sell motorcycles to children as of Feb. 10.
Motorcycles contain lead parts on the batteries and various other areas of the engine.
“It’s so stupid,” said Mike McBride, owner of McBride’s Yamaha on the Belt Highway. “You’d have to suck on an engine case for hours a day to get any lead out of it.”
He’s got about 10 motorcycles that he’ll have to pull off the showroom floor on the 10th if he doesn’t sell them first, which he said won’t happen.
With fines up to $150,000, Mr. McBride said he’s not going to risk keeping them on the floor. Instead, he’ll pay interest on them until “it gets resolved.”
“I think everybody thought (the commission) would have a flash of common sense, but that didn’t happen,” he said.
Jimmy Myers can be reached at jimmym@npgco.com.
Indiana Bill Allows DNA To Be Taken After Arrest Whether Guilty or Not
Author: goldironSource: Journal Gazette
INDIANAPOLIS – Tens of thousands of Hoosiers never convicted of a crime could find their DNA in state and federal databases under a bill making its way through the Indiana Senate.
The legislation is an attempt to take the next step with a scientific advance many consider to be the best crime-fighting tool in decades. But others wonder whether government is going too far and invading the privacy rights of citizens.
“Why not just get everyone’s DNA when they are born?” asked Sen. Tim Lanane, D-Anderson. “There is still a presumption of innocence in our system.”
Testing of deoxyribonucleic acid provides a genetic blueprint shared only by identical twins.
Indiana’s DNA database began in 1996 and has slowly been expanded over the years. Law enforcement currently takes DNA samples from all convicted felons, resulting in a database with about 122,000 samples.
Police around the state then use the database to see whether it matches evidence in unsolved crimes.
About 40 percent of the time the database returns a suspect, said Major Ed Littlejohn, head of the Indiana State Police Laboratory.
Statistically, the more samples in the database the more likely a crime can be solved.
“We don’t begin to maximize the potential of DNA technology until we are actually at the stage where we are preventing crimes,” said Chris Asplen, a DNA consultant from Pennsylvania who testified last week in support of Senate Bill 24.
“The nature of serial crimes is the sooner we identify the perpetrator the sooner we prevent crime,” he said.
Only seven states have laws requiring everyone arrested for a felony to give their DNA, according to information given at last week’s hearing.
But Asplen said taking the DNA at the point of arrest – rather than conviction – can prevent crimes.
A Chicago study found that requiring DNA upon arrest could have prevented dozens of murders and rapes. For instance, Andre Crawford was arrested for felony theft in March 1993. His DNA was not taken upon his arrest.
Six months later, Crawford committed a murder and left DNA evidence at the crime scene.
Asplen said Crawford’s DNA had been in the system from the theft arrest, police could have immediately caught him after the first homicide. Instead, Crawford went on to kill 10 women.
But there is a cost to running all the DNA samples.
According to a fiscal analysis by the Legislative Services Agency, it would cost $3.8 million annually to analyze and maintain the additional DNA samples.
Currently there is a $2 DNA sample processing fee included in court costs for all Hoosiers convicted of misdemeanors or felonies. That fee would have to increase to $11 to process the new felony arrestee DNA.
“Whether you are going to get much bang for the buck is unclear,” said Larry Landis, executive director of the Indiana Public Defender Council. “We would spend millions in public funds upfront and all the savings are speculative.”
But a representative from Strand Analytical Laboratories in Indianapolis gave members of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week a study that showed state and local government would save almost $20 million a year in law enforcement and judicial costs owing to the number of crimes being prevented.
Then there are the privacy concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union fought a measure last summer to expand the federal DNA database to arrestees, noting it could be a Fourth Amendment violation. This amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures.
But the author of the bill, Sen. Joe Zakas, D-Granger, said initial court rulings have upheld the arrestee laws as constitutional.
In the only challenge to reach the state Supreme Court level, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the taking of DNA upon arrest “is analogous to the taking of a suspect’s fingerprints upon arrest and was not an unlawful search under the Fourth Amendment.”
Zakas and members of the committee last week did amend Senate Bill 24 to include a provision allowing those whose cases never result in formal charges or were later dismissed or acquitted to expunge the DNA from the database.
The process was described as “fairly” automatic, although the person would have to send a request to the Indiana State Police with supporting documentation.
“The person falsely accused ought not bear any burden,” Landis said. “It’s just another hoop to jump through. If you get dismissed, there should not only be an automatic expungement, there should be an apology.”
Sen. John Broden, D-South Bend, voted for the bill but wants to tweak it so the removal is more automatic and people don’t fall through the cracks.
Littlejohn said the state police might have to conduct more than 100 expungements a day under the law, something that would “overwhelm” the lab.
The high number is because 40 percent of cases statewide are dismissed, Landis said. Also, some people are arrested but not formally charged, and others who are charged with felonies later plead guilty to misdemeanors.
In comparison, there are few convictions that are overturned or vacated annually that would require the DNA to be removed.
Landis did say the public defender council has previously supported the general idea of the database, when convictions are entered and the presumption of innocence is gone. An added feature is that the DNA database can be used to exonerate people.
“It cannot only convict the guilty but it can, and has, freed the innocent,” said Sen. Richard Bray, R-Martinsville.
The bill passed out of committee 7-2 last week and now must go to the Senate Appropriations Committee because of its price tag.
goldiron