Recently in Law & Justice Category

President Obama has taken the War on Terror to a whole new level by ordering a review of our "detection methods" in the wake of the thwarted Christmas bombing.

President Barack Obama has ordered the government to review detection methods to determine how a suspected terrorist ignited an explosive aboard a Northwest Airlines plane en route to Detroit on Christmas Day.

“We are investigating, as always, going backwards to see what happened, and when, who knew what and when,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said today on ABC’s “This Week.” “There was simply throughout the law enforcement community never information that would put this individual on a ‘no-fly’ list,” she said.

Then again, does our bureaucracy really require a Presidential order to perform such a review?

Furthermore, I'd prefer if the Obama Administration referred to this as an attack that was thwarted rather than "botched".

"President Barack Obama's Christmas Day began with a briefing about a botched attack on an airliner in Detroit," began an Associated Press account published Christmas evening. "Obama's military aide told the president about an incident aboard a plane as it was landing in Detroit just after 9 a.m. here [in Hawaii]. The president phoned his homeland security adviser and the chief of staff to the National Security Council for a briefing…'We believe this was an attempted act of terrorism,' one White House official said on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive situation."

All the details haven't been released yet, but from what I've read it seems to me that the bombing failed due to the heroic actions of the other passengers and was not merely "botched". Is it hard for the government to admit that the billions of dollars spend on the Transportation Safety Administration have been largely wasted on security theater and that we citizens are still and always will be our own best defenders?

Since Obama made the promise I've asserted that there was no chance of him actually closing the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility in January, 2010... and I was right! (Along with many other people.)

President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay will not close by the January deadline he set, but he said he hoped to still achieve that goal sometime next year.

Obama refused, however, to set a new deadline. ...

Despite the slow trickle of prisoners out of the facility, Obama insisted in the interview that the facility will be shuttered eventually.

"We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantanamo will be closed next year," he said. "I'm not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend on cooperation from Congress."

Unless I'm mistaken, Obama can move those prisoners to domestic federal prisons without permission from Congress. Is there some legal obstacle I'm not aware of?

I think the fact of the matter is that Obama is now beginning to realize that the promises he made during his candidacy were naive. I suppose I could be more cynical and say that he never intended to keep any of these promises at all, but even giving him the benefit of the doubt reveals that he was not even vaguely ready to be President.

The Obama administration is apparently negotiating a secret copyright treaty whose absurd contents have been leaked.

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

That's just the start of the badness. The whole thing is completely impossible to enforce, so I'm not particularly worried about it. intellectual property is dead and a piece of paper won't bring it back to life.

(HT: RD.)

Earlier this week the coroner decided that Michael Jackson was the victim of a homicide. Here's what that means:

It's important to note that homicide indicates that Jackson was killed; it does not, necessarily, mean he was murdered (homicide with intent to kill); many previous medical homicide cases have involved euthanasia. The Los Angeles County DA has not yet announced murder or manslaughter charges against Jackson's physician,Conrad Murray, who admits to giving Jackson the drugs. ...

NEWSWEEK's Sarah Kliff spoke with Dr. Vincent DiMaio, editor of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology and former chief medical examiner in Baxter County, Texas about what constitutes medical homicide, what doesn’t and why it’s actually not too difficult to tell the difference. Excerpts:

By classifying this death as a homicide, what is the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office saying about the actions of Jackson’s doctor?

What they’re alleging is that [Michael Jackson’s doctor] gave [Jackson] a medication for a non-medical reason and that caused the death…The reason they can classify this as a homicide is that there is simply no medical reason for this drug to have been administered. Suppose he was in surgery, and the doctor had given him too much medication. That’s a different situation which would probably be signed off on as an accident. But in this situation, it’s clearly a homicide.

In general, how do you define a medical homicide? What makes it different from medical malpractice?

There are five ways that forensic pathologists categorize deaths: natural, accidental, homicide, suicide or undetermined. Essentially, homicide means that somebody has caused the death of another person…In terms of medical homicide specifically, I think the simplest way to say it is that it’s a medical decision that’s outrageous, that you could not justify your actions medically. Or you just go to extremes, like deciding to do an operative procedure for which you don’t have the support, doing an operation on your kitchen table. That’s essentially the way to say it: if you have a medical situation, where you’re using things inappropriately and have no medical justification, that’s homicide.

It seems then that a medical homicide will likely be manslaughter or murder.

Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that DNA evidence can be fabricated relatively easily.

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

I'm actually happy that DNA evidence is getting more scrutiny. I've long been uneasy with the growing dependency on DNA evidence for criminal convictions... maybe a decline in DNA credibility will lead to a resurgence of a broader range of investigatory techniques.

The monkeys are at it again, this time burglarizing a local plant nursery.

"Definitely never been robbed by a monkey before," says store co-owner Jerry Duncan.

Yes, a primate is the prime suspect in the latest break-in at this Richardson, Texas nursery.

"I said no way until I look at it and said this is crazy," said store co-owner Shelley Rosenfeld.

The owners of "Plants and Planters" are convinced that's a monkey in the bottom left hand corner of the security camera tape.

"You can see the back legs the front arms and the white head," observes Duncan.

They must be stopped.

An immigration raid of a pork processing plant in North Carolina created job openings for 1,000 citizens and led to the unionization of the plant.

The sequence of events includes:

* The Smithfield Plant, represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), failed to unionize in both 1994 and 1997. An administrative law judge found that the company committed “egregious and pervasive violations of labor law” during the 1997 effort when it used the employees’ illegal status to threaten them.

* After the initial attempts at unionizing, Smithfield and the UFCW engaged in a bitter dispute. The union launched a public relations campaign and picketed Smithfield customers. Smithfield, in return, filed a federal racketeering lawsuit against the union.

* The ICE raid, which took place in January 2007, both purged the plant of illegal workers and forced the management to set procedures to check immigration status of future hires.

* The raid opened the door for an American and legal immigrant workforce. After the raid, the Hispanic workforce dropped by approximately 1,000 workers and was replaced by mostly African American workers. Less than two years later, in December 2008, the new workforce voted for unionization.

This example shows why illegal immigration is so toxic for the Democrats: it's the perfect wedge issue that splits three of their largest constituencies: Hispanics vs. blacks and unions.

(Can we use two colons in one sentence? Yes we can!)

This is a few days old but it's still worth noting: House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Democrat) admits that no one would vote for ObamaCare if they had to read the bill first.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.

“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.

Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.

In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.

If a bill is too long and complex for our elected representatives to read and understand it, that's a good indication that the bill should not become a law. If the people creating the laws can't be bothered to read and comprehend them, how can the rest of us? It's their full-time job to do this Congress thing.

(HT: Hot Air.)

Larry Kudlow asks where's Madoff's money?

Yet while everyone can now cheer that the greatest crook in financial history will die in jail, Madoff also may die keeping his secrets with him. So far, prosecutors have come up with very little about this case. And under the tutelage of the clever lawyer Ike Sorkin, Madoff has given almost nothing up. No singing in jail. (Maybe he should have been waterboarded.) We don’t know if his wife or two sons were part of the scam. Nor do we know where most of the money -- estimated up to $65 billion -- has gone. There’s a number being used that bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard has recovered $1.2 billion of the $13.2 billion in estimated net losses. But the strength of those numbers is somewhat in doubt.

Where’s the money? Who are the accomplices? And what about some of these big-time fat cats who invested with Madoff, people we thought were victims but may turn out to be the real winners in the story?

There are several reports about Jeffry Picower and Stanley Chais, two rich businessmen who may have taken $6.1 billion in returns from the Madoff fraudulent funds -- more than they put in. There’s also businessman Carl Shapiro, a close Madoff pal. And while there is yet no number as to what he took out of the funds, years ago the guy sold his garment business for $20 million and grew that sum to nearly $1 billion -- most of it from investing with Madoff.

Madoff is obviously keeping quiet because his former partners-in-crime have threatened to kill him and his family if he talks.

Lots of outrage over a firefighter who killed his two dogs to save on boarding costs:

A Columbus firefighter admits that he took his two dogs to the basement, tied them up and blasted them with a rifle so he and a girlfriend could vacation without paying to board the animals. ...

He was convicted of "needlessly killing ... a companion animal" on Dec. 3, according to the charges filed 10 minutes before the hearing in Municipal Court. One dog was shot six times in the head.

Santuomo, who did not give a statement in court, will spend 90 days in jail, pay $4,500 to cover the cost of his investigation and serve five years' probation, Judge Harland H. Hale ruled.

"This is a travesty and abhorrent behavior to those in this community who work to save the lives of animals," said Jodi Buckman, executive director of the Capital Area Humane Society.

And yet killing unborn babies for the sake of convenience is a "right". The people who evince the most outrage over animal abuse tend to be the most vociferous supporters of abortion.

I mocked President Obama's "clarification" of Sotomayor's racist comments a few days ago, but unsurprisingly Thomas Sowell skewers the judge even more effectively.

In Washington, the clearer a statement, the more certain it is to be followed by a "clarification" when people realize what was said.

The clearly racist comments by Judge Sonia Sotomayor at the University of California at Berkeley in 2001 have forced the spinmasters to resort to their last-ditch excuse, that it was "taken out of context."

If that line is used during Judge Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearings, someone should ask her to explain just what those words mean when taken in context.

Exactly. In what context is it ok to say:"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life."? The only context I can think of is when you're surrounded by a bunch of fellow racists.

Sowell goes on to demolish "empathy" as a basis for judging:

It is dangerous because citizens are supposed to obey the law, which means they must know what the law is in advance - and nobody can know in advance what the "life experiences" of whatever judge hears a case will happen to be.

If judges are to be making law rather than interpreting it, then anyone who appears in their courtroom should be protected from their rulings by the ex post facto clause(s) of our Constitution.

It's hard for me to interpret what President Obama is saying in defense of Sonia Sotomayor:

President Barack Obama on Friday personally sought to deflect criticism of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who finds herself under intensifying scrutiny for saying in 2001 that a female Hispanic judge would often reach a better decision than a white male judge. "I'm sure she would have restated it," Obama flatly told NBC News, without indicating how he knew that.

There are several ways this could be interpreted, and I think the President was intentionally ambiguous so that we can each believe in the way that makes Sotomayor look the best in our own minds.

1. Sotomayor didn't mean what she said. She meant to convey an entirely different meaning, and she would have restated herself to convey that meaning if she had the opportunity. (Which she didn't?)

2. Sotomayor meant what she said, but if she had known that she would be nominated to the Supreme Court eight years later she would have phrased it more ambiguously so that her beliefs couldn't be so easily held against her.

3. Sotomayor meant what she said but now wishes she could take it back because she has changed her mind.

4. Sotomayor meant what she said but now wishes she could take it back because she thinks it will hurt her chances of being confirmed.

Is there another option? Which of these really speaks well of a person who could very well get a life-long appointment to the Supreme Court?

A couple is claiming that a San Diego County official has threatened to shut down their home Bible study unless they apply for a permit. Please.

Attorney Dean Broyles of The Western Center For Law & Policy was shocked with what happened to the pastor and his wife.

Broyles said, "The county asked, 'Do you have a regular meeting in your home?' She said, 'Yes.' 'Do you say amen?' 'Yes.' 'Do you pray?' 'Yes.' 'Do you say praise the Lord?' 'Yes.'"

The county employee notified the couple that the small Bible study, with an average of 15 people attending, was in violation of County regulations, according to Broyles.

Broyles said a few days later the couple received a written warning that listed "unlawful use of land" and told them to "stop religious assembly or apply for a major use permit" -- a process that could cost tens of thousands of dollars.

If this happened (I smell a hoax) there's no way their Bible study will ultimately be stopped. It's ludicrous.

Why do I smell a hoax? Saying "amen" and "praise the Lord" cannot possibly be on any list of questions that the county uses to determine whether or not a religious use permit is required for anything. I just find it hard to believe that any government employee would ask those kinds of questions, even if a permit were legitimately required.

I don't think the CIA interrogation memos should have been released by the Administration, but former Vice President Dick Cheney is right when he says that they only tell part of the story.

"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort," Cheney said.

Cheney said he's asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

Obama is in perpetual campaign mode and doesn't seem to know what it means to actually be President. When you're a candidate you can play up information that supports you and leave it to your detractors mention anything contrary. You're not (realistically) expected to be a responsible, neutral dispenser of information because you're speaking for yourself and you're trying to win political office. However, once you've won, when you're actually President, you don't just speak for yourself anymore. You can't wield the levers of government power to manipulate information in your favor.

Most Americans understand that there's a trade-off between liberty and safety. It's a clever turn of phrase that "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." but as with most absolutes it cannot be quite right. There are trade-offs in everything, and though it is noble for one man to die for a cause it is absurd for an entire civilization to do the same. People desire both liberty and safety, but when they are obtained they are both temporary and must be constantly defended. Despite Franklin's implication, however, you can never escape the slippery slope between them.

This is the discussion that Candidate Obama doesn't want to have, but President Obama is responsible for leading. Candidate Obama doesn't want to tell people "this much 'torture' bought you this much safety" because he's afraid that the verdict of the American people at large will be different from the verdict of the groups that put him in power. To avoid the discussion, he "leaked" memos that help his cause as if he were a whistleblower rather than The Man. As President he has a responsibility to all Americans and not only his supporters. When he begins to realize that he will perhaps begin to grow into the Office he already occupies.

(Cross-posted at 24th State.)

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has written an incredibly myopic piece that tries to tie gun rights proponents to mass murders (also ).

After each horrific shooting, some leaders in Washington have said the solution is to do nothing, simply continue to enforce the existing laws, just as we have been doing. The gun lobby, meanwhile, calls for weakening our already paltry laws to get more guns to more people in more places. It is time for the gun lobby to stop stoking fear among gun owners with false claims about the government. It is time for the gun industry to stop capitalizing on those ginned-up fears to spread weapons of war among the public.

The gun lobby's rhetoric has consequences. We have seen how profound those consequences can be.

We have a gun crisis in America. As important as the economic crisis is, the right to be safe at home and work and play needs at least as much attention from our policymakers as the right to economic security. It is time for leaders in Washington to drop empty platitudes after each horrific shooting, and instead do what they're paid to do: show backbone, and enact reasonable laws to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people.

Helmke's argument is completely disingenuous: does he really think psychos who want to murder dozens of people will be stopped by yet another law? No, I don't think he does. Is the Brady Campaign only in favor of "reasonable laws" that "keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people"? No, they favor banning all guns. (As does President Obama.)

Let's turn the tables: how many people have died because of anti-gun nuts? How many murders could have been prevented if the victim were armed instead of helpless? How many rapes? How many kidnappings? How many robberies? How many millions? Guns are used in self-defense every day.

And of course, what's the difference between a citizen and a peasant? A gun.

More kids being charged with child porn offenses for taking pictures of themselves.

Police in Holbrook are investigating charges against three minors who allegedly created a video of two of them having sexual intercourse while the third recorded it, then distributed the video to junior high students.

"The video depicts two minors engaging in sexual intercourse," Holbrook police officer Keysha Mitchell said. She said the person recording the scene was also a minor.

"Some of the kids involved could be looking at possession of child pornography, dissemination of child pornography. There's also the possibility of statutory rape and if there's any audio discovered on the video there's also the possible charge of wiretapping," Mitchell said.

So the fact that the junior high girl was having sex with two junior high boys is fine, but making a video of it gets you years in jail.

Police said the video was taken at a home, not at the school. The alleged victim, a girl under 16, told them she did not realize she was being captured on cell phone. She went to police with her parents when she realized the video was circulating.

I'm not sure that a girl having sex with two boys has much of an expectation of privacy. Just based on the details given in the story, it's hard for me to view the girl here as a "victim". Am I wrong? Was she any more in the right than the boys?

A 14-year-old girl has been charged with distributing child pornography for posting naked pictures of herself on the internet.

A 14-year-old girl faces child pornography charges after she allegedly posted nearly 30 nude pictures of herself on a social networking site, authorities said. ...

Following a month-long investigation, detectives discovered that the person posting the pictures was the same person featured in them — the 14-year-old girl. Anyone who was “friends” with the girl through MySpace or knew her full name could have accessed the photos.

The teen was charged with one count of possession of child pornography and one count of distribution of child pornography. She was released into her mother’s custody, Maer said.

You can't fix stupid, and you can't outlaw it either.

Charging the girl seems like a waste of law enforcement resources. She's apparently old enough to get an abortion without parental consent in New Jersey, and if she's capable of making that decision then can't law enforcement officers and prosecutors find something better to do?

Of course, I don't think 14-year-old girls should be allowed to get abortions without parental consent -- I'm just illustrating the absurdity of the system. Other than our heritage of Judeo-Christian morality, there's no reason that it should be illegal for a person to publish pictures of herself when there is no coercion or exploitation involved. The "no one gets hurt" standard of modern secular morality would appear to be satisfied since the girl posted these pictures of her own volition, so what's the problem?

Secularists who reject Christianity as a basis for morality will no doubt be quick to employ hand-waving arguments to explain why teenage girls shouldn't be allowed to distribute naked pictures of themselves. The most common such argument is that pictures of naked children encourage pedophiles to abuse children. I don't know if that's true or not, but even if it is, should we outlaw banks because they encourage bank robbers? Should we outlaw violent video games because they (possibly) encourage violence? Should we outlaw images or movies that portray crimes other than sexual abuse? ("Jackass" has inspired idiots to do all sorts of stupid and illegal things.)

Without Christianity or some other revelatory source of morality, there's no way to justify the prohibition of possession of child pornography by a person who has not herself abused a child.

Full Disclosure reports that attorney Richard Fine has been sentenced to indefinite incarceration by a judge who refused to recuse himself when it was revealed that he had illegally accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the other party in Fine's case.

The hearing involved the case of Marina Strand Colony II Homeowners Association vs County of Los Angeles and was prompted by attorneys representing the Del Rey Shores Development who sought to collect legal fees awarded to them. Richard Fine challenged the credentials of the Debtor Court Referee and Judge Yaffe who he claimed had been receiving illegal payments, estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from the County Board of Supervisors since 1988. ...

This extraordinary judicial action of ordering the indefinite incarceration of such a prominent attorney whose long and distinguished career included service in the U. S. Department of Justice in Washington D. C. followed an intensive exchange where attorney Fine objected to Judge Yaffe's failure to disqualify himself. According to Richard Fine, Judge Yaffe along with all of the Los Angeles County judges have each been accepting up to hundreds of thousands of illegal dollars from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, that is specifically prohibited by the California Constitution and the Canons of Judicial Ethics. ...

In concluding his argument before Judge Yaffee's ruling, Richard Fine noted on the record that the California Legislature, the Governor and Judicial Council, all have admitted and recognized the illegal and criminal acts committed by Judge Yaffe and all Los Angeles Superior Court Judges and Supervisors when the Governor signed into law the State Budget legislation this February. Inserted into the budget bill was a provision granting Judges and elected officials immunity for criminal acts specifically prohibited by the State Constitution.

Obviously, if Judge Yaffe had recused himself he would have implicitly been admitting that no Superior Court Judges could preside over any case involving the County of Los Angeles.

Only a crazy man would behead a random stranger and eat the corpse on a public bus. But crazy men can't be punished, because their insanity requires treatment not punishment. Therefore, beheading random strangers and eating their corpses is no longer a crime in Canada.

WINNIPEG, Manitoba – A Canadian judge ruled Thursday that a man accused of beheading and cannibalizing a fellow Greyhound bus passenger is not criminally responsible due to mental illness. The decision means Chinese immigrant Vince Li will be treated in a mental institution instead of going to prison. The family of victim Tim McLean said Li got away with murder.

It's great that Belkis Gonzalez is facing jail time, but it should be for murder not bogus sop charges.

Belkis Gonzalez, 42, was arrested Tuesday and charged with practicing medicine without a license and tampering with evidence, both felonies, said Ed Griffith, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade State Attorney's office. If found guilty, Gonzalez would face at least a year in prison and up to 15 years.

The teenage mother, Sycloria Williams, has filed a lawsuit alleging that Gonzalez knocked the infant off the chair where she had given birth, and then scooped the baby, placenta and afterbirth into a red plastic biohazard bag, and threw it out.

The charges are bogus because they're politically-based. If Gonzales weren't charged at all there would be an uproar from common-sense Americans who know a baby when they see one; if Gonzales were charged with murder though, the abortion industry would foam at the mouth over the bad/truthful publicity.

The Miami District Attorney is trying straddle the fence by charging Gonzales with felonies that don't address the most significant matter at hand: she murdered a baby. Despicable, all around.