Monday, January 30, 2012

DEA Inquiries into Medical Marijuana Industry Include Legislators


Diane Sands is used to having her name taken in vain.

That's just part of being a liberal from Missoula in the Montana Legislature.

But her name surfaced recently in a way that offended and troubled her at a profound level.

A possible witness in a federal drug investigation was asked whether Sands might be part of a conspiracy to sell medical marijuana. The questions came from Drug Enforcement Administration agents from Billings who were investigating medical marijuana businesses, and Sands learned about the inquiry from the witness' attorney.

"So now, if you're a state legislator who has been working on medical marijuana laws, you are somehow part of a conspiracy," said Sands, who represents House District 95 in Missoula and works as development director for the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula. "It's ridiculous, of course, but it's also threatening to think that the federal government is willing to use its influence and try to chill discussion about this subject."

Sands isn't the only one with concerns. At least one other legislator declined comment regarding DEA questions about the legislator's duties out of concern over "additional harassment."
And the American Civil Liberties Union in Montana, which is itself full of attorneys, spoke with an outside attorney in regards to its advocacy work regarding marijuana.

"When you hear this sort of thing, there's a part of you that just gets irritated, but there's a part of you that knows you have to, as an organization, make sure you've dotted the I's and crossed the T's," said the ACLU's executive director, Scott Crichton.

Sands and the ACLU aren't actually worried about criminal charges. They've done nothing wrong other than advocate a point of view counter to the opinion held by federal law enforcement.
But both have played high-profile roles in the discussion over medical marijuana in Montana, and the ACLU has been vocal for years in its support for the legalization of marijuana. And they find abhorrent the idea that mere advocacy might be questioned.

"It's chilling, and it dredges up darker days from the '50s and '60s," said Crichton.
Sands is more blunt: "Can you say McCarthy? This sounds like stuff from the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy. So once you talk about medical marijuana in reasonable terms, you're on some sort of list of possible conspirators."

Sands was chairwoman of an interim legislative committee that went to work before the 2011 Legislature to try to fashion a fix for Montana's medical marijuana laws, which many viewed as responsible for the unregulated, Wild West atmosphere that seemed to be part of Montana's medical marijuana industry.

The committee's efforts, which would have imposed new regulation but kept the industry substantially intact, ultimately were swept aside as the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted a far more rigorous regulatory scheme.

In June, after the session ended, Sands suggested that the federal government "delist" medical marijuana - as it had done with wolves - and leave the issue to state control.


Sunday, January 29, 2012

The Caging of America

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.



Thursday, January 26, 2012

FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG) 2008 Version

The FBI’s DIOG was issued on December 16, 2008 to help implement the new Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations that were issued earlier that year. These guidelines reconciled a number of previously separate guidelines, the first of which had been issued in 1976. This release consists of the first version of the DIOG, issued on December 16, 2008; it was publicly released and posted to the FBI Vault in early 2011. 

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Crimmigration Law: Good Resource

Find yourself practicing some hybrid criminal and immigration law? An excellent blog that has articles and resources is Crimmigration.com. Run by a Capitol University Professor and practicing attorneys, it is a good resource for criminal/immigration overlapping issues.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Fourth Amendment is Back: Justices Hold 9/0 that GPS Tracking Violates Fourth Amendment


The U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion this morning in United States v. Jones upholding the suppression of evidence obtained by police using GPS tracking technology. The Supreme Court, in a 9/0 decision, held that the placing and monitoring of an individual's movements through GPS tracking is a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

The case stems from the conviction of Antoine Jones, a Washington D.C. nightclub owner who was suspected of drug dealing. Police had obtained a warrant to place a GPS device on Jones's car but they did not remove it when the warrant expired. They reinstalled the device and subsequently tracked Jones's movements for 28 days whereever his car went. Police used the GPS device to track Jones to a stash house, where they found cocaine, weapons and drug paraphernalia. He was convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and sentenced to life in prison. The Supreme Court held that such an electronic search was a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The Court did not consider whether the search was "reasonable" under the Fourth Amendment because the Government did not raise that below. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the Court, stated:
We hold that the government's installation of a GPS device on a target's vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements, constitutes a 'search'"

"The government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information," Scalia said. "By attaching the device to the Jeep, officers encroached on a protected area."

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Gitmo Report




ACLU Reports: Ten years have passed since the first prisoner arrived in Guantánamo Bay, making it the longest-standing war prison in U.S. history. Almost 800 men have passed through Guantánamo’s cells. Today, 171 men remain. Fashioned as an “island outside the law” where terrorism suspects could be detained without process and interrogated without restraint, Guantánamo has been a catastrophic failure on every front. It is long past time for this shameful episode in American history to be brought to a close.


SOPA Protest


You may have noticed that many websites dimmed their pages yesterday in protest of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). The proposed new law that would result in our government blocking access to websites that contain copyright infringing material. Many web based companies and non-profit organizations have come out in strong opposition to SOPA. As Justice William O. Douglas once said, "Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance."

Here is more from the ACLU's press release:

There are two bills pending before Congress — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate — that would not only impact unlawful infringing content, but also a wealth of completely legal content that has nothing to do with online piracy.

We opposed SOPA in its original form mostly because the impact on non-infringing content would violate the First Amendment right to free speech of the owners and authors of that content, as well as the rights of Internet users to access that content. In fact, we were asked to present our views at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee scheduled for today and submitted our testimony in preparation for that hearing. But the hearing was postponed after SOPA’s proponents promised to significantly change the bill and after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor proposed not to bring any bill to the floor for a vote unless it represented a true consensus of those who support and those who oppose SOPA.

Because of those developments over the weekend — and because the White House also issued a statement opposing any bill that would impact First Amendment-protected online content — we are redoubling our efforts to find the compromise that will not only inhibit online infringement of original works of art, but also will truly eliminate online access restrictions to lawful non-infringing content.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

National Defense Auth. Act - What the Hell?

From the ACLU - 

As Congress considers the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the 2012 fiscal year, a handful of senators have turned the bill into a vehicle for dangerous provisions that would authorize the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and imprison people, including U.S. citizens, without charging them or putting them on trial.

Earlier this year, the House passed its own version of the bill, with an even smaller group of members pushing for inclusion of a provision that would authorize worldwide war, and worldwide imprisonment, in virtually any country where a terrorism suspect lives, even here in America itself.

Now, both houses of Congress are now rushing to come up with a joint version and rush it through Congress within the next week or two. 

The "Big Four" leaders of the Senate and House Armed Services Committee are huddling behind closed doors and may very well spring a new bill on Congress, once again without so much as a hearing.

The president isn't the one asking for this legislation – in fact, the White House has repeatedly threatened to veto the bill over its concern for indefinite detention provisions. And, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the FBI and the head of theJustice Department’s National Security Division have all said that the indefinite detention provisions in the NDAA are harmful and counterproductive.

The provisions – which were negotiated by a small group of members of Congress, in secret, and without proper congressional review – are inconsistent with fundamental American values embodied in the Constitution. Fundamental American values and fundamental freedoms are on the line.

County Has No Public Defenders for Capital Cases


(AP) - Indiana's second most populous county has no certified public defenders to handle capital cases as the state wrestles with prosecuting one of its most notorious slaying cases in recent years. 

Such certification allows counties to be reimbursed by the state for defense costs incurred during capital cases, The Journal Gazette reported Sunday (http://bit.ly/zaMpq7 ). However, with prosecutors filing fewer death penalty cases, defense attorneys are finding other ways to meet continuing legal education requirements, said Paula Sites, assistant executive director of the Indiana Public Defender Council. 

Across Indiana, only three capital cases were filed last year, down from 11 in 2000, according to the council. 

"We used to provide death penalty training every year, but we have cut back to every other year," Sites said. "It just doesn't make sense, not just for lawyers to take it every year, but for us to provide it every year." 



In a case that has gripped Fort Wayne and Allen County since before Christmas, Michael Plumadore, 39, of Fort Wayne, has admitted to killing and dismembering Aliahna Maroney-Lemmon, a 9-year-old neighbor he was babysitting. Not guilty pleas to charges of murder, abuse of a corpse and removing a dead body from the scene have been entered for Plumadore. 

Allen County Prosecutor Karen Richards hasn't determined whether she will seek the death penalty in the case. 

Plumadore's appointed attorneys, Anthony Churchward and Mark Thoma of Fort Wayne, both have handled capital cases before as public defense attorneys but neither is currently certified by the state. 

Allen County Chief Public Defender Randall Hammond said Plumadore will have certified public defenders available if Richards decided to pursue the death penalty. 

After Churchward and Thoma were appointed to the case, the Allen County Public Defender's office inquired about upcoming training seminars that would allow the two to meet the 12-hour training requirement and get certification for capital cases, the newspaper reported. While no such training is scheduled in Indiana, classes are available soon in other states that would qualify, Sites said. 

While the council provides training sporadically, the certification comes from the Indiana Public Defender Commission, which was established in 1989 by the Legislature, primarily to recommend standards for indigent defense in capital cases. Counties that meet those standards can apply to the commission for reimbursement from the public defense fund in capital cases. Since 1997, that reimbursement can be up to 40 percent of a county's cost for a death penalty case. 

Deborah Neal, staff counsel at the Public Defender Commission, said the public defense of a capital case can cost a county between $200,000 and $800,000. That does not include other costs for prosecutors, a jury and other court expenses. 

To be certified by the commission in capital cases, a lead attorney must have at least five years of criminal trial experience, needs to have handled multiple felony cases and should have worked on at least one case -- as either lead or co-counsel -- in which the death penalty was sought, Indiana Rules of Criminal Procedure state. 

To serve as co-counsel, an attorney must have at least three years of criminal trial experience and have experience as co-counsel or lead counsel in at least three felony trials. 

Attorneys must have taken, within the two previous years, a 12-hour course provided by the Indiana Public Defender Council. Other states and organizations also have the course. 

------ 

Information from: The Journal Gazette, http://www.journalgazette.net 

Friday, January 6, 2012

Lawmakers to Open an Inquiry on Undercover Drug Operation

From The New York Times:

Congressional Republicans said Monday that they would open an investigation into undercover operations by the Drug Enforcement Administration in which agents have laundered and smuggled millions of dollars in drug money as part of an effort to help Mexico fight organized crime.


The operations, which drug officials said had the support and cooperation of the Mexican government, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars across borders and moved millions more through shell accounts to help American agents identify how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and who their leaders are.
Critics said the operations blur the line between surveillance and facilitating crime, raising questions similar to those around a gun-smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious that involves agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The gun operation has been under investigation for months by Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. In a letter on Monday to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., Mr. Issa said he would expand that investigation to include the drug agency, describing its money-laundering investigations as “dangerous schemes” and adding that “the consequences have been disastrous.”
Mr. Issa, Republican of California, asked Mr. Holder to provide a briefing on the undercover operations to his staff on Wednesday. He wrote, “It is almost unfathomable to contemplate the degree to which the United States government has made itself an accomplice to the drug trade, which has thus far left more than 40,000 people dead in Mexico.”

Rough Justice

From the Inlander:


Fred Rice is an authoritative man, particularly when it comes to explaining car crashes. The Idaho State Police officer’s eight-page résumé spells out his expertise. Thirty years in law enforcement. Experience investigating more than 800 wrecks, including 400 fatal ones. Twenty-six years as an expert witness in accident reconstruction.

Now, according to the Idaho Supreme Court, another line likely belongs on Rice’s résumé: perjury in a murder trial.

In 2006, Jonathan Ellington of Hayden, Idaho, stood accused of using his car to menace two young women and run over their mother, Vonette Larsen, while Larsen’s gun-wielding husband tried to stop him. The tragic case grew out of a wild road-rage incident and, in the end, underscores the power of expert witnesses in the courtroom.

Ellington, then 45, was a long-haul trucker and had been in trouble before, but not like this. He had been charged with driving under the influence twice and had received tickets for not wearing a seat belt, not having proof of insurance and speeding.

Ellington’s trial started on Aug. 23, 2006. The prosecutor called police officers, the medical examiner and Vonette Larsen’s family. Ellington’s lawyer called people who had encountered Ellington before the incident, as well as a firearms expert and an accident reconstructionist.
And then the prosecutor called Fred Rice. Over the objections of Ellington’s attorney, Rice took the stand to rebut the testimony of the defense’s accident investigator, who argued that Ellington didn’t intentionally strike Vonette Larsen. Rice countered that claim.

“I think that he was quite pivotal in the verdict,” says Anne Taylor, a Kootenai County deputy public defender. “Fred Rice had a definite presence in the courtroom. He’s a person who’s testified quite a bit before.”

The jury deliberated for a day and a half before finding Ellington guilty of aggravated assault and second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 25 years and would have to serve at least 12.

Ellington is still in jail, but no longer as a convicted murderer: In a ruling released at the end of May, the Idaho Supreme Court threw out his conviction and ordered that Ellington be given a new trial, which is scheduled to start on Monday, Aug. 29.

The state Supreme Court didn’t rule that the case was tainted by some legal technicality, but something much simpler: evidence that Rice lied on the stand.

The judges also found misconduct in the case by the Kootenai County prosecutor’s office, which has had several convictions tossed out in recent years because of similar issues.

“It is extremely disturbing to this Court that an officer of the law would present false testimony in any case, especially a murder case,” Justice Warren Jones says in the Supreme Court decision (pdf). “In this case, however, it is impossible to believe there was any truth to the testimony of Cpl. Rice.”

Full article can be found here.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Immigration rights: U.S. Launches New Hotline for Detainees

From the LA TimesMolly Hennessy-Fiske in Houston


Federal immigration officials Thursday announced the creation of a telephone hotline to ensure that detainees held by local police are informed of their rights.
The toll-free number, (855) 448-6903, will field queries from detainees held by state or local law enforcement agencies if the detainees "believe they may be U.S. citizens or victims of a crime," the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said in a statement.
An ICE official in Washington said agency representatives had not been authorized to comment about the hotline but that more information soon would be posted online.
The hotline will be staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week by ICE personnel, according to the statement, with interpreters available in several languages.
"ICE personnel will collect information from the individual and refer it to the relevant ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations field office for immediate action," the statement said.
As part of the new initiative, ICE officials plan to issue a form to all detainees informing them that ICE will assume their custody within 48 hours, according to the statement. The form will be available in English as well as Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese and Vietnamese, the statement said. ICE posted a sample copy of the form online Thursday.
"It also advises individuals that if ICE does not take them into custody within the 48 hours, they should contact the [law enforcement agency] or entity that is holding them to inquire about their release from state or local custody," the statement said.
The hotline comes amid controversy over local law enforcement agencies’ ability to detain people they believe to be illegal immigrants.
Scores of local law enforcement agencies partner with the federal government under the 287(g) program, established in 1996, which deputizes police to turn over suspects or criminals to immigration authorities for possible deportation. Normally, police do not enforce federal law.
ICE has 287(g) agreements with 69 law enforcement agencies in 24 states, including the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Since January 2006, the program is credited with identifying more than 217,300 potentially removable illegal immigrants, mostly at local jails, according to ICE records. Also under the program, ICE has trained and certified more than 1,500 state and local officials to enforce immigration law, the agency says.
Immigrant rights groups say the program has led to civil rights violations and racial profiling, and such authority has been especially controversial in Arizona. There, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been criticized for what many people call mistreatment of suspected illegal immigrants.
This month, the Justice Department announced it was suspending its 287(g) agreement with Arpaio and his deputies after an investigation found they had pursued a campaign of racial profiling against Latinos, making unlawful arrests and violating civil rights laws in an effort to crack down on illegal immigration.
Separately, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona, ended the Maricopa County jail officers' authority to detain people on immigration charges, barring them from holding immigration violators who have not been charged with local crimes.
Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, called the new hotline  “a positive development,” but said it was “overdue” and “inadequate.”
“Often people who are subject to ICE detainers have no idea why they are being held,” said Saenz, who is based at the national Latino civil rights group’s Los Angeles headquarters. “This kind of step should have been in place the very first time ICE undertook an expansion of its detainers.”
“ICE needs to focus on fixing the problems up front,” Saenz added, avoiding unconstitutional arrests and monitoring local law enforcement agencies it partners with rather than relying on detainees to report abuses.
“It relies on the individuals being detained to have the courage, knowledge and wherewithal to make a call to the hotline and follow up. They may feel intimidated or unable to adequately navigate their case,” Saenz said.


Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Condon Names Chief, Reigns in Treppiedi



Today was Spokane Mayor David Condon's first day on the job, and he wasted no time.
He held a press conference today, announcing his pick for an interim police chief while he continues the nationwide search for a permanent chief.
He also said he immediately took assistant city attorney Rocky Treppiedi off his duties advising the police department, something the mayor had repeatedly promised to do on the campaign trail. (Check out 12 minutes into the video for his statements regarding Treppiedi.)
And he created an "advisory board on policing" that he says will help him implement his goals for the department.
KXLY put up a raw video of the press conference. Check it out: