Enshrined in our highest governing document, this principle had been considered uncontroversial for most of American history. But then we saw the advent of state-sanctioned torture and forced confessions in the last decade, and now a new criminal prosecution in Denver may end up with a court declaring that the mind can be forcibly opened to searches under a threat of jail time.

Continue Reading...

"Voter fraud" is a right-wing obsession used to justify restrictive ballot access-limiting measures that are actually designed to suppress turnout among people who tend to vote for Democrats. It does not and cannot exist in anything approaching a large enough scale to affect an election, and even isolated incidents of fraud prove difficult for right-wingers to dredge up to prove that their concerns have merit. Dozens of people have spent years tirelessly attempting to prove that organized "voter fraud" is a real thing and all they have ever managed to prove is that sometimes lazy volunteers make fake registration forms, sometimes former felons mistakenly vote despite being disenfranchised, and sometimes people double-vote. There is nothing remotely resembling coordinated voter fraud, carried out with the intention of stealing an election, taking place anywhere in the United States. Those who sincerely believe that there is are deluded, though most of the people who constantly crow about it don't sincerely believe in it; they just want to make it harder for blacks and Latinos and poor people to vote.

Continue Reading...

What is it that makes this particular piece of jewelry so potentially valuable? Is it the elegance of the piece? Is it the fact that it was purchased by an internationally renowned, Oscar-winning director? Or is it because the ring was allegedly worn by his pretty, pregnant wife the night she was savagely murdered by the Manson family?

Continue Reading...

"Don't Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America" is Kennedy's passionate account of that work, which has seen striking results not just in the roughest sections of Boston but in many of the bleakest neighborhoods of the United States. While his goals were lofty -- healing toxic relationships between the police and blighted communities, rewriting the conventional wisdom on gangs, drugs and violent crime -- Kennedy proposed solutions so simple that cops often laughed him out of the room.

Continue Reading...

Today, in an astonishing twist, New York is one of the safest cities in the country. Its current homicide rate is 18 percent of its 1990 total -- its auto theft rate is 6 percent. The drop exceeded the wildest dreams of crime experts of the 1990s, and it's a testament to this transformation that New Yorkers now seem more likely to complain about the city's dullness than about its criminality.

Continue Reading...

In 2001, just after Rick Perry assumed the job, he vetoed a bill that would have ended the practice of arresting those suspected of class C misdemeanors — fine-only crimes that don’t require jail time, such as traffic offenses.

But fast-forward to 2007. That year, he signed a law allowing police officers to issue citations instead of making arrests for certain class A and B misdemeanors, including marijuana possession. Perry’s reversal came about in part because the state faced a projected shortfall of 17,000 inmate beds.

In Texas and other red states, formerly law-and-order GOP lawmakers are taking the lead in reforming criminal justice systems.

That shift is the result of two curves sloping in opposite directions — a dramatic fall in crime rates and exploding state spending on corrections (the second-fastest-growing category of state spending behind Medicaid).

So should a Republican win the presidency, a return to get-tough approaches seems unlikely. Yet ill-targeted budget cuts or sensational crimes linked to reforms still could take policy in the other direction.

Continue Reading...

Four aged right-wingers apparently plotted to carry out a mass murder based on the plot of a thriller written by frequent Fox guest Mike Vanderboegh. They planned to "save this country" by attacking Washington, D.C., and Atlanta with ricin and botulinium toxin. And they were targeting the government:

Continue Reading...

Across the street, Donald Harrington peered out his window. Down the block, Gretchen Barton called 911. A neighbor named Ray lumbered down his steps and rumbled, “Hey, what’s going on?”

The man loosened his grip on the woman. She sprinted up the block screaming. He ran too. Patrol cars arrived. They sped around the block to look for the woman and the assailant, but found neither.

When the police returned, Ray said he had a video that captured part of the attack.

“They said they didn’t want to see it because they didn’t have a complaining witness,” Ray, who did not want to give a last name, told the Crime Report. “Then they drove off.”

The incident shook the residents of the block in Park Slope, a brownstone-lined area in south Brooklyn. A month after the screams, they had heard nothing from the police. The neighbors did the only thing they could think to. They called the New York Daily News.

Continue Reading...

Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam also was fined $10 million and ordered to forfeit $53.8 million by U.S. District Judge Richard J. Holwell, who said he concluded that Rajaratnam made well over $50 million in profits from his illegal trades.

"His crimes and the scope of his crimes reflect a virus in our business culture that needs to be eradicated," Holwell said. "When the integrity of the marketplace is called into question, the public suffers."

The sentence eclipsed by one year the prison term given to one of Rajaratnam's co-defendants just weeks ago.

The Sri Lanka-born Rajaratnam, 54, was ordered to report to a yet-to-be-designated prison on Nov. 28. His lawyers asked that he be allowed to report to the medical facility at the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina, where Bernard Madoff is serving his 150-year sentence after admitting to a multi-decade Ponzi scheme that cheated thousands of people out of billions of dollars.

Continue Reading...

Much of the anger and bafflement expressed by Knox’s supporters throughout this four-year carnival has been directed at the Italian court: its fervid passion for vacations and postponements; its clownish atmosphere, in which lawyers and defendants shout over each other and wring their hands as in a Pietro Germi comedy; and the fact that jurors are not sequestered, so that the court of public opinion often appears to be the highest court in the land.

Continue Reading...

This month, the agency made a major step forward to doing just that.

At a meeting in Washington last Friday, members of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), including representatives from police agencies in Chicago, Baltimore and Philadelphia, came together with FBI officials and victims' advocates to discuss the importance of broadening the definition of a crime that most experts believe is significantly underestimated by the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR).

Currently, the only sexual assault the UCR collects data on is "forcible rape," which it defines as "the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will."  Because "carnal knowledge" is defined as penetration of the penis into the vagina, the definition excludes oral and anal rape, as well as assaults with foreign objects. It also excludes male rape.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

The two unnamed women, ages 53 and 45, are said to have been kept in a single room in a large, picturesque house in a hamlet on the outskirts of the small town of Braunau am Inn, which is close to the German border and best known as Hitler's birthplace.

The women also accused their father, identified only as Goffried W, of subjecting their mother to the same treatment until her death in 2008. He is said to have beaten them and threatened to kill them with a pitchfork and gun.

Gottfried W, as he is known, was arrested on suspicion of assault, torture, neglect, threats of violence, coercion, rape and other sexual crimes, according to the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten newspaper, which broke the story the police later confirmed. He denies all wrongdoing.

Continue Reading...

In May 1993, the naked bodies of three young boys were found hog-tied in a ditch in the Arkansas woods. The crime appeared to have the additionally heinous elements of sexual abuse and ritual torment. And soon three older boys, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, teenagers who shared a troubled history of petty crime and a fondness for heavy metal and Stephen King, found themselves chief suspects in a triple murder. They were convicted, based largely on a confession coaxed from Misskelley, who is mentally handicapped. He later recanted, but was nonetheless sentenced to life plus 40 years for the crime. Baldwin got life as well. Echols was sentenced to death.

Yet the story didn't end with a trio of misfits going off to prison, or with a tidy sense of justice for a shattered community. In the ensuing years, the story of Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley has become an ongoing source of public outrage -- and an inspiration for filmmakers and musicians. In 1996, HBO Films and directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky released "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills," the haunting, exasperating tale of a nightmarish crime, Satanist hysteria, and three black-clad boys sent away forever. The movie was a sensation, and resparked criticism that the investigation and trial were wildly botched at best -- and at worst, deliberately unfair.

Continue Reading...

From Martin's Livejournal:

Continue Reading...

Earlier this summer, Rochester authorities arrested Emily Good for videotaping police while on her own property -- and then later used parking tickets to try to punish and intimidate those protesting Good's arrest. In Las Vegas, it was even worse -- the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Friday reported that a police not only arrested Mitchell Crooks but then beat him to a pulp -- all for the "crime" of innocently videotaping them from his own driveway. Importantly, Crooks may have been specifically marked for police revenge after he had made headlines in 2002 by documenting Inglewood, California police beating a 16-year-old boy.

Continue Reading...

Despite the fact that the Pope resides among them, Italians are not as Catholic as one might expect. Italy remains, as the journalist Luigi Barzini put it, "gloriously pagan." In Italy, "Christianity has not deeply disturbed the happy traditions and customs of ancient Greece and Rome" but is a "thin veneer over older customs."

Pagan pantheism survives in the Italian proliferation of saints. But in Italy, one feminine deity has always been venerated above the rest. Throughout Italy, one confronts images of a beatific young mother holding or nursing a baby, gazing down mysteriously from a roadside edicola -- tiny shrine -- or from a niche in a church, or from the walls of art museums.

Continue Reading...

Even after 40 years, the FBI hasn't been able to pinpoint his real identity -- until, possibly, this week. The FBI claims to have a new lead in the case: A retired police officer suggesting the real D.B. Cooper died in a car crash in the Pacific Northwest 10 years ago. (So far an attempt to match the man's fingerprints, obtained from an old guitar strap, to Cooper's has proved unsuccessful.)

It's no small feat to hijack a plane and elude capture for decades, but what's more astounding is the iconic status D.B. Cooper has gained ever since. Perhaps it's because, as a nation of rugged individualists (or so we like to think), Americans are drawn to stories of rebels who stick it to the man. Or perhaps we just like a good mystery.

Continue Reading...

The "false accusation" trope in a rape case, so dear to the hearts of trial lawyers and sexual predators, has been with us for a long time. It dates back to the Old Testament and the Code of Hammurabi, texts that I feel compelled to note were written by men.

Continue Reading...

The 71-year-old Trebek tells KGO-TV that he also injured his other leg while falling down during the chase early Wednesday. He was on crutches later Wednesday when he hosted the National Geographic World Championship at Google headquarters in Mountain View.

San Francisco police Lt. Troy Dangerfield says 56-year-old old Lucinda Moyers was arrested on suspicion of felony burglary and receiving stolen property. The cash and bracelet haven't been found but other items were recovered. Dangerfield says officers found several items near the hotel ice machine.

Trebek is scheduled for surgery on Friday and is expected to be in a cast for six weeks.

Continue Reading...