Federal Criminal Defense Investigation

Facebook Is Using You

2012-02-09T08:20:00.000-08:00

Last week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion. But unlike other big-ticket corporations, it doesn’t have an inventory of widgets or gadgets, cars or phones. Facebook’s inventory consists of personal data — yours and mine.

Facebook makes money by selling ad space to companies that want to reach us. Advertisers choose key words or details — like relationship status, location, activities, favorite books and employment — and then Facebook runs the ads for the targeted subset of its 845 million users. If you indicate that you like cupcakes, live in a certain neighborhood and have invited friends over, expect an ad from a nearby bakery to appear on your page. The magnitude of online information Facebook has available about each of us for targeted marketing is stunning. In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States.

Facebook made $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, 85 percent of its total revenue. Yet Facebook’s inventory of data and its revenue from advertising are small potatoes compared to some others. Google took in more than 10 times as much, with an estimated $36.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2011, by analyzing what people sent over Gmail and what they searched on the Web, and then using that data to sell ads. Hundreds of other companies have also staked claims on people’s online data by depositing software called cookies or other tracking mechanisms on people’s computers and in their browsers. If you’ve mentioned anxiety in an e-mail, done a Google search for “stress” or started using an online medical diary that lets you monitor your mood, expect ads for medications and services to treat your anxiety.

Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful, or at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.

Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages. Employers sometimes decide whether to hire people based on their online profiles, with one study indicating that 70 percent of recruiters and human resource professionals in the United States have rejected candidates based on data found online. A company called Spokeo gathers online data for employers, the public and anyone else who wants it. The company even posts ads urging “HR Recruiters — Click Here Now!” and asking women to submit their boyfriends’ e-mail addresses for an analysis of their online photos and activities to learn “Is He Cheating on You?”

Stereotyping is alive and well in data aggregation. Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done. If guitar players or divorcing couples are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you’ve looked at guitar ads or sent an e-mail to a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy. When an Atlanta man returned from his honeymoon, he found that his credit limit had been lowered to $3,800 from $10,800. The switch was not based on anything he had done but on aggregate data. A letter from the company told him, “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped have a poor repayment history with American Express.”

Full article can be found here.

Threats to Non-Mandatory Federal Sentencing Guidelines

2012-02-03T16:28:00.000-08:00

Both NPR and the ACLU have recently ran news stories of concern to many federal practitioners: the Republican party's movement in Congress to return to mandatory federal sentencing schemes. In 2005, the United States Supreme Court held that mandatory federal guidelines were unconstitutional in United States v. Booker. Since that time, federal judges have been able to consider more than just numbers in a chart to determine an appropriate sentence. However, some critics have said that the post-Booker sentencing universe leads to disparity in sentencing. At a recent hearing, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin, stated:

"A criminal committing a federal crime should receive similar punishment regardless of whether the crime was committed in Richmond, Va., or Richmond, Calif., and that's why I am deeply concerned about what's happening to federal sentencing."

On the other hand, proponents of the advisory guideline sentencing guidelines can point to issues as the financially crippling and soaring incarceration rates, the reduction in crime rates overall, and the fact that sentencing is now subject to more "fact based" inquiry as reasons to keep the advisory system intact. The ACLU and the American Constitution Society held a panel discussion on the issue that can be watched here.

Eric Holder's 'Fast and Furious' Woe

2012-02-01T10:13:00.000-08:00

From CNN:

Schadenfreude -- joy at the misfortune of others -- is a bad thing.

So I've been trying to resist temptation these past months as I watch Attorney General Eric Holder deal with public and congressional reaction to the "Fast and Furious" scheme, the failed attempt by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to seed and then track U.S. firearms to Mexican drug cartels.

Fast and Furious was a secretive, high-risk operation seemingly intended to deal with an intractable problem abroad. On those grounds, some may be tempted to equate it to a CIA covert action.

But even if some attributes are similar -- tough problem, edgy solution, inherent complexity, great secrecy, high operational and political risk -- it was definitely not a covert action since those are clearly defined in an executive order as the province of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Beyond that, if it had been a true covert action, the attorney general would have had to give his opinion as to its lawfulness beforehand; the implementing agency would have been required to exhaustively articulate risk; the National Security Council would have had to judge it favorably; President Barack Obama would have had to authorize it; and the Congress would have had to have been briefed before its implementation.

And all concerned would have had the opportunity to reject a bad idea, whatever its rationale.

These routine safeguards not only protect agencies, their leaders and their officers from legal and political jeopardy, they also protect the government from serious missteps.

Now Holder, without such safeguards in place, must defend himself against some very tough accusations, including one by some skeptics that the operation was intended principally to discredit, and thereby justify further regulation of, firearms dealers.

This is where the schadenfreude comes in.

After the congressional elections of 2006, the CIA was forced to defend edgy (often controversial and sometimes unsuccessful) actions in a tough political environment. President George W. Bush was politically weakened, the Senate and the House were under Democratic control and a presidential election was in the offing.

On the Hill, the questions were aggressive, often partisan and, in my view, sometimes even deeply mean-spirited and unfair to the many intelligence professionals who were putting their lives and careers on the line in a very successful effort to protect America from further attack. The agency dealt with the committees as best a nonpolitical organization could, fully recognizing that, although congressional oversight was a necessary instrument, it could sometimes be a difficult one.

But any personal instinct toward some common "executive branch" empathy for Holder is muted not only by the dubious character of Fast and Furious, but by some of the attorney general's other actions, as well. While out of office, for example, he famously called for a "reckoning" for CIA officers and other officials who authorized and conducted operations that were edgy and risky and intended to deal with difficult circumstances.

Once in office, he launched a "reckoning" of CIA renditions, detentions and interrogations of terrorists by directing the Justice Department to reopen investigations closed years before by career prosecutors. This decision was opposed by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and seven of his predecessors, and Holder reportedly made the decision without reading detailed memos prepared by those career prosecutors declining to pursue further proceedings.

The CIA officers affected by this may be forgiven some feelings of irony when they now hear the attorney general repudiating some of the charges made against his officers by stating: "Those who serve in the ranks of law enforcement are our nation's heroes and deserve our nation's thanks, not the disrespect that is being heaped on them by those who see political advantage."

Of course, it was also Holder who decided in 2009 to release what had been secret DOJ memos outlining the details and providing the legal justification for the Bush administration's interrogation program. The release was defended by the administration as part of a broad commitment to "transparency."

Full article can be found here.

DEA Inquiries into Medical Marijuana Industry Include Legislators

2012-01-30T08:39:00.000-08:00

The Missoulian:

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.

The Caging of America

2012-01-29T12:24:00.000-08:00

From the New Yorker, by Adam Gopnik:

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.

FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG) 2008 Version

2012-01-26T22:11:00.000-08:00

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.

Crimmigration Law: Good Resource

2012-01-24T13:00:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2012-01-23T10:41:00.000-08:00

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."

Gitmo Report

2012-01-19T11:33:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-19T11:17:00.000-08:00

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.

National Defense Auth. Act - What the Hell?

2012-01-18T10:40:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-18T10:36:00.000-08:00

(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

Lawmakers to Open an Inquiry on Undercover Drug Operation

2012-01-06T07:49:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-06T07:40:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2012-01-05T07:42:00.000-08:00

From the LA Times, Molly 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.

The Letters That Became a Documentary Movie: A Short Mitigation Film

2012-01-04T09:38:00.000-08:00

Condon Names Chief, Reigns in Treppiedi

2012-01-03T17:30:00.000-08:00

From The Inlander:

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:

Seattle Police Issues in US DOJ Report

2011-12-19T18:10:00.000-08:00

An 11-month investigation by the Department of Justice into the Seattle Police Department has uncovered widespread use of excessive force and constitutional violations, especially against people of color, by officers at the Seattle Police Department. The 67 page report details a number of issues with the Seattle Police Department with interesting findings, for example:

"Use of Force – We find that SPD engages in a pattern or practice of using unnecessary or excessive force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Section 14141. Deficiencies in SPD’s training, policies, and oversight with regard to the use of force contribute to the constitutional violations."

Good to know if litigating in Seattle. Full coverage in the Seattle Times as well including the Seattle Police's response today.

Did You Get That Memo?

2011-12-19T09:39:00.000-08:00

Extreme Police Makeover

2011-12-19T09:31:00.000-08:00

From The Inlander:

David Condon has inherited an opportunity — a once-in-ageneration chance to reform the Spokane Police Department.

"It is my No. 1 issue. Make no mistake about it," says Condon, the incoming mayor of Spokane. "I've told directors of the other departments that it is my top priority. Everything is on the table.

"We're going to have a new mayor, new police chief, new assistant chief, a new council. There's a tremendous opportunity before us," says Tim Burns, the department's civilian ombudsman. "As I told Mayor Condon, [outgoing Mayor Mary] Verner inherited an impending train wreck. Mayor Condon has inherited an opportunity."

"Once in a generation," adds Breean Beggs, a longtime advocate for police reform who is representing Otto Zehm's family in a lawsuit against the city.

This fall, Officer Karl Thompson was convicted of using excessive force and lying to investigators about Zehm, who died in 2006 after being beaten and hog-tied by police. "The public understands broadly what went wrong," Beggs says. "It's totally the time [for reform]. This is the closest I've ever seen."

In addition to new political leaders, there's new leadership coming to the police department as well, with the retirements of Chief Anne Kirkpatrick and her assistant chief, Jim Nicks. The Thompson verdict and subsequent invitation from City Hall for the U.S. Department of Justice to review SPD's polices have put the force on notice: Times are changing.

The months ahead could see cameras installed on officers' uniforms, or perhaps the creation of a new position at City Hall — an elected city attorney. The police department could also be put under the purview of the sheriff.

These are all potential answers to the one question everyone seems to be asking: How do you reform the police department?

Full article can be found here.

December 15th is Bill of Rights Day

2011-12-15T16:58:00.000-08:00

The Bill of Rights was ratified on Dec. 15, 1791, when Virginia’s support gave the amendment a three-fourths majority needed to become a law. The Bill was drafted by James Madison, and it included the first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution. How to celebrate this sometimes seemly evaporating group of important rights? Bill of Rights.com has some ideas including taking this quiz to test your Bill of Rights knowledge or watch some of their informative videos. Or just take a moment to remember the Rights and be inspired to keep fighting for them.

The Bill of Rights:

The Preamble to The Bill of Rights

Congress of the United States
begun and held at the City of New-York, on
Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.

THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all, or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.

ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.

Note: The following text is a transcription of the first ten amendments to the Constitution in their original form. These amendments were ratified December 15, 1791, and form what is known as the "Bill of Rights."

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Amendment VII
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

DOJ Releases Findings of Misconduct in Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff's Office

2011-12-15T16:47:00.000-08:00

The Justice Department announced its' findings today in a civil rights investigation into the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. The Justice Department found constitutional and civil rights abuses including discriminatory stops and arrests of Latinos. An excerpt of the press release follows and the full report is available here:

The Justice Department found reasonable cause to believe that MCSO, under the leadership of Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio, has engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct that violates the Constitution and federal law. The investigation, opened in June 2008, was conducted under the provisions of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Title VI implementing regulations.

The department found reasonable cause to believe that a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law occurred in several areas, including:

Discriminatory policing practices including unlawful stops, detentions and arrests of Latinos;
Unlawful retaliation against individuals exercising their First Amendment right to criticize MCSO’s policies or practices, including but not limited to practices relating to its discriminatory treatment of Latinos; and
Discriminatory jail practices against Latino inmates with limited English proficiency by punishing them and denying them critical services.

The Justice Department found a number of long-standing and entrenched systemic deficiencies that caused or contributed to these patterns of unlawful conduct, including:

A failure to implement policies guiding deputies on lawful policing practices;
Allowing specialized units to engage in unconstitutional practices;
Inadequate training;
Inadequate supervision;
An ineffective disciplinary, oversight and accountability system; and
A lack of sufficient external oversight and accountability.

In addition to these formal pattern or practice findings, the investigation uncovered additional areas of serious concern, including:

Use of excessive force;
Police practices that have the effect of significantly compromising MCSO’s ability to adequately protect Latino residents; and
Failure to adequately investigate allegations of sexual assaults.

While no formal findings of pattern or practice violations have been made in connection with these issues, the investigation remains ongoing.

Holder to GOP Critic: 'Have You No Shame?'

2011-12-09T08:43:00.001-08:00

From CNN:

GOP critics cranked up the political heat Thursday on Attorney General Eric Holder, threatening impeachment and accusing him of withholding information from Congress about Operation Fast and Furious, a severely flawed and discredited federal gun-sting program.

At the end of a long, combative day of testimony before the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee, California GOP Rep. Darrell Issa compared Holder to disgraced Nixon-era Attorney General John Mitchell.

Holder shot back by comparing Issa to Sen. Joe McCarthy, the infamous Wisconsin Republican censured by the Senate in 1954 for leading what critics called a Communist witch hunt.

"As they said in the McCarthy hearings, have you no shame?" asked Holder, referencing a famous retort to McCarthy.

Holder acknowledged mistakes were made, but said he would not resign over the controversy. The attorney general, accusing the GOP of playing political games, said he also didn't think any of his top aides should step down.

Operation Fast and Furious, which started in 2009, allowed illegally purchased firearms to be taken from gun stores in Arizona across the Mexican border to drug cartels. The intent of the operation was to monitor the flow of weapons to their ultimate destination.

However, hundreds of weapons were lost or unaccounted for, and a storm of outrage erupted when two of the missing weapons were found at a site where Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010.

Democrats and Republicans have since been at odds over who knew what about the operation and when.

Wisconsin GOP Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner told Holder Thursday that "heads should roll" over the matter.

Full article can be found here.

US Agents Laundered Drug Money: Report

2011-12-05T14:48:00.001-08:00

(AFP) - Anti-narcotics agents working for the US government have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds to see how the system works and use the information against Mexican drug cartels, The New York Times reported Sunday.Citing unnamed current and former federal law enforcement officials, the newspaper said the agents, primarily with the Drug Enforcement Administration, have handled shipments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal cash across borders.Some 45,000 people have been killed in Mexico since 2006, when its government launched a major military crackdown against the powerful drug cartels that have terrorized border communities as they battled over lucrative smuggling routes.According to these officials, the operations were aimed at identifying how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and, most important, who their leaders are, the report said.The agents had deposited the proceeds in accounts designated by traffickers, or in shell accounts set up by agents, the paper noted.While the DEA conducted such operations in other countries, it began doing so in Mexico only in the past few years, The Times said.As it launders drug money, the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests, the report said.According to The Times, agency officials declined to publicly discuss details of their work, citing concerns about compromising their investigations.But Michael Vigil, a former senior official who is currently working for a private contracting company called Mission Essential Personnel, is quoted by the paper as saying: "We tried to make sure there was always close supervision of these operations so that we were accomplishing our objectives, and agents weren?t laundering money for the sake of laundering money."

For those in trial...

2011-11-16T20:22:00.001-08:00

The Right of Citizens to Videotape Police

2011-11-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

By Jonathan Turley, Los Angeles Times

Twenty years ago, as Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police officers, a private citizen in a nearby apartment turned on his video camera. Largely because of that tape, four officers were criminally charged. In July, a homeless schizophrenic man died after a police beating in Fullerton. Audio from a cellphone video caught Kelly Thomas' cries for his father and helped force an investigation that resulted in a first-degree murder charge against one police officer.

The increasing availability of cellphones and video cameras has fundamentally changed police abuse cases, creating vital evidence in cases that were once dismissed as matters of conflicting accounts between officers and citizens. With that change, however, has come a backlash from officers who, despite court rulings upholding the right of citizens to tape police in public, have been threatening or arresting people for the "crime" of recording them. In many states, prosecutors have fought to support such claims and put citizens in jail for videotaping officers, even in cases of police abuse.

In New York this year, Emily Good was arrested after videotaping the arrest of a man at a traffic stop in Rochester. Good was filming from her frontyard; an officer is heard saying to her, "I don't feel safe with you standing behind me, so I'm going to ask you to go into your house." When she continued to film, the officer said, "You seem very anti-police," and arrested her.

DOCUMENT: 1st Circuit Court decision: Citizens' right to record

In Illinois last month, Brad Williams filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department because, he said, he was beaten by police in response to his filming an officer holding and dragging a man down the street from inside a moving squad car. Ironically, Chicago has rejected complaints about the installation of thousands of cameras in the city that film citizens in public for use in prosecutions.

In Maryland in July, Anthony Graber got a well-deserved speeding ticket, but his real mistake was posting footage from his motorcycle helmet-cam on YouTube. It showed an irate off-duty, out-of-uniform officer pulling him over with his gun drawn. Prosecutors obtained a grand jury indictment against Graber on felony wiretap charges, which carry a 16-year prison sentence.

In Boston in August, the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unambiguously that the Constitution protects citizen videographers filming in public. In that case, attorney Simon Glik was walking past the Boston Common on Oct. 1, 2007, when he came upon three Boston officers arresting a man. Glik turned on his cellphone camera after hearing a witness say the police were being abusive. An officer told Glik to turn off his camera. When Glik refused, he was arrested for violation of the state wiretap statute, disturbing the peace and, for good measure, aiding in the escape of a prisoner.

The charges were dismissed after a public outcry, but in a later civil rights case, city attorneys fought to deny citizens the right to videotape police. The court rejected Boston's arguments and found that the police had denied Glik his 1st and 4th Amendment rights.

But other federal judges might not be so sure. Take Richard Posner, the intellectual leader of conservative judges and scholars who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago. Posner shocked many last month when he cut off an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which had filed suit to challenge an Illinois law preventing audio recording of police without their consent.

The ACLU lawyer had uttered just 14 words when Posner barked: "I'm not interested, really, in what you want to do with these recordings of peoples' encounters with the police." Posner then added his concerns about meddling citizens: "Once all this stuff can be recorded, there's going to be a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers.... I'm always suspicious when the civil liberties people start telling the police how to do their business."

Many judges may privately share Posner's view of such confrontations. And the near-total silence of politicians in dealing with the question of the public's right to record what they see and hear suggests that many legislators may also find these cases inconvenient.

Actions against citizen videographers run against not just the Constitution but good public policy. Yet, without a videotape, Rodney King would have been just another guy with a prior record claiming abuse, against the word of multiple officers.

The outcome once was all but inevitable: no tape, no case. As long as police abuse is out of sight, it can also be out of mind. If successful, the backlash against citizens recording police could guarantee that Rodney King is never repeated — the officers' trial, that is.

Full article can be found here.

How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police

2011-11-09T08:20:00.000-08:00

From The Atlantic:

Over the past 10 years, law enforcement officials have begun to look and act more and more like soldiers. Here's why we should be alarmed.

At around 9:00 a.m. on May 5, 2011, officers with the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff's Department's Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) team surrounded the home of 26-year-old José Guerena, a former U.S. Marine and veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq, to serve a search warrant for narcotics. As the officers approached, Guerena lay sleeping in his bedroom after working the graveyard shift at a local mine. When his wife Vanessa woke him up, screaming that she had seen a man outside the window pointing a gun at her, Guerena grabbed his AR-15 rifle, instructed Vanessa to hide in the closet with their four-year old son, and left the bedroom to investigate.

Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot--or even switching his rifle off of "safety"--he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the S.W.A.T. team barrage came from a S.W.A.T. team gun, not Guerena's. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.

Sadly, the Guerenas are not alone; in recent years we have witnessed a proliferation in incidents of excessive, military-style force by police S.W.A.T. teams, which often make national headlines due to their sheer brutality. Why has it become routine for police departments to deploy black-garbed, body-armored S.W.A.T. teams for routine domestic police work? The answer to this question requires a closer examination of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and the War on Terror.

Ever since September 14, 2001, when President Bush declared war on terrorism, there has been a crucial, yet often unrecognized, shift in United States policy. Before 9/11, law enforcement possessed the primary responsibility for combating terrorism in the United States. Today, the military is at the tip of the anti-terrorism spear. This shift appears to be permanent: in 2006, the White House's National Strategy for Combating Terrorism confidently announced that the United States had "broken old orthodoxies that once confined our counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain."

In an effort to remedy their relative inadequacy in dealing with terrorism on U.S. soil, police forces throughout the country have purchased military equipment, adopted military training, and sought to inculcate a "soldier's mentality" among their ranks. Though the reasons for this increasing militarization of American police forces seem obvious, the dangerous side effects are somewhat less apparent.

Undoubtedly, American police departments have substantially increased their use of military-grade equipment and weaponry to perform their counterterrorism duties, adopting everything from body armor to, in some cases, attack helicopters. The logic behind this is understandable. If superior, military-grade equipment helps the police catch more criminals and avert, or at least reduce, the threat of a domestic terror attack, then we ought deem it an instance of positive sharing of technology -- right? Not necessarily. Indeed, experts in the legal community have raised serious concerns that allowing civilian law enforcement to use military technology runs the risk of blurring the distinction between soldiers and peace officers.

This is especially true in cases where, much to the chagrin of civil liberty advocates, police departments have employed their newly acquired military weaponry not only to combat terrorism but also for everyday patrolling. Before 9/11, the usual heavy weaponry available to a small-town police officer consisted of a standard pump-action shot gun, perhaps a high power rifle, and possibly a surplus M-16, which would usually have been kept in the trunk of the supervising officer's vehicle. Now, police officers routinely walk the beat armed with assault rifles and garbed in black full-battle uniforms. When one of us, Arthur Rizer, returned from active duty in Iraq, he saw a police officer at the Minneapolis airport armed with a M4 carbine assault rifle -- the very same rifle Arthur carried during his combat tour in Fallujah.

The extent of this weapon "inflation" does not stop with high-powered rifles, either. In recent years, police departments both large and small have acquired bazookas, machine guns, and even armored vehicles (mini-tanks) for use in domestic police work.

Full article can be found here.

ARTHUR RIZER & JOSEPH HARTMAN - Arthur Rizer, a former Washington state peace officer who earned a Bronze Star and Purple Heart while serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq, currently works at the U.S. Department of Justice. (His views do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Justice.) Joseph Hartman, a Ph.D. candidate in government at Georgetown University, practices law in Arlington, Virginia.

Fourth Amendment Future: Virtual Searches

2011-11-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

Susan Brenner, a law professor, has written a law review to be published later this year. The abstract:

This article examines the 4th Amendment implications of two tactics that may become part of law enforcement’s efforts to investigate and otherwise control criminal activity. The first is the use of certain types of software, most notably Trojan horse programs, to conduct surreptitious, remote searches of computers and computer media. The other tactic is the use of “virtual force,” e.g., using Distributed Denial of Service and other attacks to shut down or otherwise disable websites that host offending content and/or activities.

The text of the full article is available here. The topic raises interesting and alarming questions about the future of the Fourth Amendment in light of the information age in which we now live.

Keep Your Eyes Out for Eyewitness ID Ruling: Argument This Week

2011-10-31T10:00:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court will hear the case of Perry v. New Hampshire on November 2, 2011. The issue presented is whether an eyewitness identification should be excluded when the circumstances make the identification unreliable even where the police did not create the circumstances. The Supreme Court last considered eyewitness identification in 1977 in Manson v. Brathwaite where the Court held that eyewitness identification should not be excluded if the circumstances are reliable.

Mistaken identifications lead to wrongful convictions. Of the first 250 DNA exonerations, 190 involved eyewitnesses who were wrong, as documented in “Convicting the Innocent,” a recent book by Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia. A number of groups have written amicus briefs for the Court to consider in Perry including the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the Innocence Project, and the American Psychological Association. All briefing is available on Scotus. Stay tuned.

New Report from ACLU on "Sneak and Peek" Warrants Permitted by Patriot Act

2011-10-30T17:05:00.000-07:00

The ACLU reports that between October 1, 2009 and September 30, 2010 federal judges permitted government "sneak and peak" warrants permitted by the Patriot Act. The ACLU contacted the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to obtain up-to-date numbers on how frequently the government uses the "sneak and peek" searches (also called delayed-notice searches), a government surveillance tool authorized by the Patriot Act. The report (available here) shows that in 2010, sneak and peek warrants were issued more than twice as often as in 2009, and more than three times as often as in 2008.

Google Refuses to Take Down Videos of Police Brutality

2011-10-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

Google refused the request of a U.S. law enforcement agency earlier this year to remove a YouTube video showing police brutality, it has been revealed.

The web giant did not give details about the contents of the video, not pictured, but said it turned down the petition for it to be taken down between January and June this year.

'We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove,' Google wrote in its Transparency Report. The Google Report delineates content removal requests by party requesting the removal, the reason for the removal, and whether the request was complied with.

Full article here.

Monday...

2011-10-24T08:25:00.000-07:00

Collateral Consequences of Criminal Record: NACDL to Start Task Force

2011-10-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

NACDL released today that they will be holding an inaugural hearing in Chicago, Ill. this Thursday and Friday to address the issue of the criminal record syndrome. It goes something like this: Potential Employer: Have you been convicted of a felony?Potential Applicant: Yes, as a juvenile.The collateral consequences of a criminal conviction are far reaching and NACDL proposes to address the issue starting this week in Chicago for two days of hearings from

Press Release(Oct. 17, 2011) – It has been reported that as many as one in four American adults have a criminal record, some 65 million people. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) is a leading national voice calling attention to this matter of significant public concern -- the vast expansion in recent decades of the criminal law and its intended and unintended consequences in American society.In addition to its ongoing work in our courts, legislatures and the public square to combat the overcriminalization of conduct in U.S. society, NACDL is also focused on the consequences of conviction – specific legal barriers, generalized discrimination, and social stigma – which have likewise become more numerous and severe, more public, and more permanent. They affect jobs and licenses, housing, public benefits, judicial rights, parental rights, interstate travel, and even volunteer opportunities. To this end, NACDL recently established the national Task Force on Restoration of Rights and Status After Conviction to undertake an inquiry into how legal mechanisms for relief from the collateral consequences of conviction are actually working, in state and federal systems, and develop comprehensive proposals for reform. The co-Chairs of the Task Force are attorneys Rick Jones of New York City and Vicki Young of San Francisco.The Task Force will be holding its inaugural hearing in Chicago, Ill., this Thursday and Friday, Oct. 20 and 21, 2011. Approximately two dozen witnesses over the course of two full days will testify before the task force providing a range of personal and professional experiences, perspectives and expertise on the important practical issues surrounding barriers to re-entry and the collateral consequences of a criminal record. Witnesses will include Judge Paul Biebel, Presiding Judge, Cook County Circuit Court, Criminal Division and John Schomberg, General Counsel, Office of the Governor of Illinois, as well as individuals who themselves confronted barriers to re-entry and other stakeholders.

DNA Training Resources One Stop Shopping

2011-10-12T12:05:00.000-07:00

The National Institute of Justice has gathered all of the animations and videos from the training courses on DNA.gov. The NIJ encourages people to use these as resources in teaching or other work and ask only that acknowledgment is given to DNA.gov and NIJ as the source. Here is a link to everything that is available. A list of topics include: Forensic DNA for Officers of the Court; DNA: A Prosecutor's Practice Notebook; Collecting DNA Evidence at Property Crime Scenes; Laboratory Orientation and Testing of Body Fluids and Tissues for Forensic Analysis; DNA Amplification for Forensic Analysts; Amplified DNA Product Separation for Forensic Analysts; STR Data Analysis and Interpretation for Forensic Analysts; Population Genetics and Statistics for the Forensic Analysts; Communication Skills, Report Writing and Courtroom Testimony for Forensic Analysts; and Advanced and Emerging DNA Technologies and Techniques.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Steve Jobs..."How To Live Before You Die"

2011-10-05T20:22:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs

Barry Scheck Interview: Public Defenders, "Liberty's Last Champion"

2011-10-04T19:53:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting profile of Barry Scheck on New York 1 where he addresses Troy Davis's recent execution, DNA exoneration, the O.J Simpson case, his early career as a public defender in the Bronx and how it all led to the birth of the Innocence Project.

Millions in complex assets mishandled or lost while under US Marshals Service care

2011-09-29T12:49:00.000-07:00

From the International Association for Asset Recovery:

A new audit report from the Department of Justice Inspector General largely supports allegations made by a contract forfeiture support whistle-blower, detailing wasteful procedures and undervaluation of complex assets.

The Justice Department’s top internal investigator released a scathing audit report last Tuesday confirming many of the allegations made by a former government contractor who accused the US Marshals Service, its director and his employer of improprieties 10 months ago. The report, from the Office of the Inspector General, not only calls into question the leadership and oversight of the Marshals’ Complex Assets Group from 2005 to 2009, it also portrays an asset management strategy that allowed the unit to mishandle, undervalue and ultimately lose millions of dollars that might have gone to restitution for victims of financial crimes.

The report exonerates former Complex Assets Group leader Leonard Briskman of wrongdoing, while exposing significant deficiencies in asset management practices during his tenure. His group, operating under the service’s Asset Forfeiture Program and forfeiture director Eben Morales, handles intricate, high-dollar assets such as financial instruments or interests in partnership businesses. The value of these complex assets, according to the report, ranges from $1 million to $49 million. The OIG found that the group disposed of $136 million between 2005 and 2010.

Whistleblower’s lawsuit sparked investigation

Briskman brought to the position a wealth of experience in managing retail and other properties in the private sector. But in 2009, Brian Aryai, a certified public accountant working for the largest government forfeiture contractor, Forfeiture Support Associates (FSA), began to notice irregularities in the valuation of assets handled by the Complex Assets Group. In a federal court complaint filed in November 2010, Aryai claims some assets were sold for significantly less than they were worth, often to buyers who got the inside track on the sales, which were not opened to public auction. Audit trails, he alleged, were nonexistent or obscured.

Briskman, Aryai suggested, was operating a fiefdom in which he was the ultimate arbiter of the value and the seller of these instruments, and no one else in the Marshals’ Asset Forfeiture Division was overseeing his activities.

While other employees of the service were in no position to question Briskman’s expertise – according to the audit, Morales says his staff was not well versed in these types of assets – Aryai was better qualified to render judgment. A longtime US Treasury agent and fraud examiner, Aryai has worked in complex financial fraud and assets investigations throughout his career. The undervaluation of assets was immediately apparent to him, he claims.

In his 2010 complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, Aryai says Briskman’s decisions “were not supported by a process whereby independent valuations were secured” to ensure a better sale price. Briskman, Aryai claims, would place low values on items and then negotiate with buyers – who were often his personal contacts – to sell the items without public notice.

Aryai says he approached his bosses at the contractor, FSA, about what he discovered. But during the March 2010 disposition of a minority interest in the so-called Delta Fund – another asset Aryai says he found to be vastly undervalued and undersold by Briskman – Aryai received an e-mail from his FSA supervisor, Yolanda Lopez.

“Brian. Be careful,” the e-mail said. “Len is the Senior USMS for Business and Complex assets. We are contractors and must cover for him, present a united front. US Attorneys should not get the impression that we are in differing levels.”

But that is exactly what did happen. From the Inspector General’s report:

“According to the AUSA [Assistant U.S. Attorney] who is working on the Madoff case, the Complex Asset Team’s lack of transparent disposition procedures in part undermined her confidence in the Complex Asset Team’s ability to manage and dispose of complex assets effectively.”

Further investigation led Aryai to suspect that Briskman was operating his own private assets valuation firm, Asset Valuation Advisors LLC. On various websites, AVA claimed to be working assets valuation cases that were actually Marshals Service forfeiture matters – an ethical grey area for professionals in the public sector. According to a cached historical page stored on the American Society of Appraisers website, Briskman as recently as 2009 listed AVA as his employer. Tax documents filed with the state of Maryland show that AVA shares a Rockville, Md., address with Briskman. In several professional associations and on other private websites, Briskman did not disclose his work for the Marshals Service.

Briskman cleared of wrongdoing, but his unit’s practices ripped

While Tuesday’s report does not explicitly credit Aryai, it was he who got the ball rolling. Before litigating, he took his concerns to Barbara Ward, an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York, who the report says alerted the Inspector General to the problems.

The resulting investigation found Briskman had not used his position to funnel business to his private business, but Aryai claims otherwise. His complaint describes Briskman’s LinkedIn profile, which he says describes disposed assets credited to AVA’s efforts but were remarkably similar to assets handled by the Marshals Complex Assets Group.

Briskman has since been reassigned. Reached by e-mail on Wednesday, he said he could not comment on the report. [In the interest of full disclosure, Briskman is an IAAR member, and FSA is a frequent sponsor of IAAR events.]

“This report … fully validates the legitimate concerns [Aryai] had with the manner and means in which Leonard Briskman operated and controlled the Complex Assets Group,” said Joshua L. Weiner, Aryai’s attorney. His whistleblower case is currently before the Southern District of New York.

Full article can be found here.

Making Yourself Indispensable

2011-09-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

From the Harvard Business Review by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott K. Edinger

A manager we’ll call Tom was a midlevel sales executive at a Fortune 500 company. After a dozen or so years there, he was thriving—he made his numbers, he was well liked, he got consistently positive reviews. He applied for a promotion that would put him in charge of a high-profile worldwide product-alignment initiative, confident that he was the top candidate and that this was the logical next move for him, a seemingly perfect fit for his skills and ambitions. His track record was solid. He’d made no stupid mistakes or career-limiting moves, and he’d had no run-ins with upper management. He was stunned, then, when a colleague with less experience got the job. What was the matter?

As far as Tom could tell, nothing. Everyone was happy with his work, his manager assured him, and a recent 360-degree assessment confirmed her view. Tom was at or above the norm in every area, strong not only in delivering results but also in problem solving, strategic thinking, and inspiring others to top performance. “No need to reinvent yourself,” she said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. Go with your strengths.”

But how? Tom was at a loss. Should he think more strategically? Become even more inspiring? Practice problem solving more intently?

It’s pretty easy and straightforward to improve on a weakness; you can get steady, measurable results through linear development—that is, by learning and practicing basic techniques. But the data from our decades of work with tens of thousands of executives all over the world has shown us that developing strengths is very different. Doing more of what you already do well yields only incremental improvement. To get appreciably better at it, you have to work on complementary skills—what we call nonlinear development. This has long been familiar to athletes as cross-training. A novice runner, for example, benefits from doing stretching exercises and running a few times a week, gradually increasing mileage to build up endurance and muscle memory. But an experienced marathoner won’t get significantly faster merely by running ever longer distances. To reach the next level, he needs to supplement that regimen by building up complementary skills through weight training, swimming, bicycling, interval training, yoga, and the like.

So it is with leadership competencies. To move from good to much better, you need to engage in the business equivalent of cross-training. If you’re technically adept, for instance, delving even more deeply into technical manuals won’t get you nearly as far as honing a complementary skill such as communication, which will make your expertise more apparent and accessible to your coworkers.

In this article we provide a simple guide to becoming a far more effective leader. We will see how Tom identified his strengths, decided which one to focus on and which complementary skill to develop, and what the results were. The process is straightforward, but complements are not always obvious. So first we’ll take a closer look at the leadership equivalent of cross-training.

The Interaction Effect

In cross-training, the combination of two activities produces an improvement—an interaction effect—substantially greater than either one can produce on its own. There’s nothing mysterious here. Combining diet with exercise, for example, has long been known to be substantially more effective in losing weight than either diet or exercise alone.

In our previous research we found 16 differentiating leadership competencies that correlate strongly with positive business outcomes such as increased profitability, employee engagement, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Among those 16, we wondered, could we find pairs that would produce significant interaction effects?

Full article can be found here.

Little Red Rules App

2011-09-22T18:45:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to the design team behind the Little Red Rules App Evidence Quick Reference App now available on the I-Tunes Store. The minds from the Federal Defenders of Eastern Washington and Idaho are pleased to announce the new app that contains the Federal Rules of Evidence, Drug Quantity and Sentencing Charts, select US Constitution Amendments, and selected annotations to case law. A handy reference tool for court, the jail, and where ever you may find yourself asking, "Is this hearsay?". Available for both I-Phone and I-Pad, stay tuned for Droid App.

Colin Powell: A Leadership Primer

2011-09-22T15:30:00.000-07:00

LESSON ONE

"Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off."

Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your actions and decisions. It's inevitable if you're honourable. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity: You'll avoid the tough decisions, you'll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted, and you'll avoid offering differential rewards based on differential performance because some people might get upset. Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult choices, by trying not to get anyone mad, and by treating everyone equally "nicely" regardless of their contributions, you'll simply ensure that the only people you'll wind up angering are the most creative and productive people in the organization.

LESSON TWO

"The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership."

If this were a litmus test, the majority of CEOs would fail. One, they build so many barriers to upward communication that the very idea of someone lower in the hierarchy looking up to the leader for help is ludicrous. Two, the corporate culture they foster often defines asking for help as weakness or failure, so people cover up their gaps, and the organization suffers accordingly. Real leaders make themselves accessible and available. They show concern for the efforts and challenges faced by underlings—even as they demand high standards. Accordingly, they are more likely to create an environment where problem analysis replaces blame.

LESSON THREE

"Don't be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world."

Small companies and start-ups don't have the time for analytically detached experts. They don't have the money to subsidize lofty elite, either. The president answers the phone and drives the truck when necessary; everyone on the payroll visibly produces and contributes to bottom-line results or they're history. But as companies get bigger, they often forget who "brung them to the dance": things like all-hands involvement, egalitarianism, informality, market intimacy, daring, risk, speed, agility. Policies that emanate from ivory towers often have an adverse impact on the people out in the field who are fighting the wars or bringing in the revenues. Real leaders are vigilant—and combative—in the face of these trends.

LESSON FOUR

"Don't be afraid to challenge the pros, even in their own backyard."

Learn from the pros, observe them, seek them out as mentors and partners. But remember that even the pros may have leveled out in terms of their learning and skills. Sometimes even the pros can become complacent and lazy. Leadership does not emerge from blind obedience to anyone. Xerox's Barry Rand was right on target when he warned his people that if you have a yes-man working for you, one of you is redundant. Good leadership encourages everyone's evolution.

LESSON FIVE

"Never neglect details. When everyone's mind is dulled or distracted the leader must be doubly vigilant."

Strategy equals execution. All the great ideas and visions in the world are worthless if they can't be implemented rapidly and efficiently. Good leaders delegate and empower others liberally, but they pay attention to details, every day. (Think about supreme athletic coaches like Jimmy Johnson, Pat Riley and Tony La Russa). Bad ones—even those who fancy themselves as progressive "visionaries"—think they're somehow "above" operational details. Paradoxically, good leaders understand something else: An obsessive routine in carrying out the details begets conformity and complacency, which in turn dulls everyone's mind. That is why even as they pay attention to details, they continually encourage people to challenge the process. They implicitly understand the sentiment of CEO-leaders like Quad/Graphic's Harry Quadracchi, Oticon's Lars Kolind and the late Bill McGowan of MCI, who all independently asserted that the job of a leader is not to be the chief organizer, but the chief dis-organizer.

LESSON SIX

"You don't know what you can get away with until you try."

You know the expression "it's easier to get forgiveness than permission?" Well, it's true. Good leaders don't wait for official blessing to try things out. They're prudent, not reckless. But they also realize a fact of life in most organizations: If you ask enough people for permission, you'll inevitably come up against someone who believes his job is to say "no." So the moral is, don't ask. I'm serious. In my own research with colleague Linda Mukai, we found that less effective middle managers endorsed the sentiment, "If I haven't explicitly been told 'yes,' I can't do it," whereas the good ones believed "If I haven't explicitly been told 'no,' I can." There's a world of difference between these two points of view.

LESSON SEVEN

"Keep looking below surface appearances. Don't shrink from doing so (just) because you might not like what you find."

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the slogan of the complacent, the arrogant or the scared. It's an excuse for inaction, a call to non-arms. It's a mindset that assumes (or hopes) that today's realities will continue tomorrow in a tidy, linear and predictable fashion. Pure fantasy. In this sort of culture, you won't find people who proactively take steps to solve problems as they emerge. Here's a little tip: Don't invest in these companies.

LESSON EIGHT

"Organization doesn't really accomplish anything. Plans don't accomplish anything, either. Theories of management don't much matter. Endeavours succeed or fail because of the people involved. Only by attracting the best people will you accomplish great deeds."

In a brain-based economy, your best assets are people. We've heard this expression so often that it's become trite. But how many leaders really "walk the talk" with this stuff? Too often, people are assumed to be empty chess pieces to be moved around by grand viziers, which may explain why so many top managers immerse their calendar time in deal-making, restructuring and the latest management fad. How many immerse themselves in the goal of creating an environment where the best, the brightest, the most creative are attracted, retained and-most importantly-unleashed?

LESSON NINE

"Organization charts and hence titles count for next to nothing."

Organization charts are frozen, anachronistic photos in a workplace that ought to be as dynamic as the external environment around you. If people really followed organization charts, companies would collapse. In well-run organizations, titles are also pretty meaningless. At best, they advertise some authority—an official status conferring the ability to give orders and induce obedience. But titles mean little in terms of real power, which is the capacity to influence and inspire. Have you ever noticed that people will personally commit to certain individuals who on paper (or on the org chart) possess little authority—but instead possess pizzazz, drive, expertise and genuine caring for team-mates and products? On the flip side, non-leaders in management may be formally anointed with all the perks and frills associated with high positions, but they have little influence on others, apart from their ability to extract minimal compliance to minimal standards.

LESSON TEN

"Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it."

Too often, change is stifled by people who cling to familiar turfs and job descriptions. One reason that even large organizations wither is that managers won't challenge old, comfortable ways of doing things. But real leaders understand that, nowadays, every one of our jobs is becoming obsolete. The proper response is to obsolete our activities before someone else does. Effective leaders create a climate where people's worth is determined by their willingness to learn new skills and grab new responsibilities, thus perpetually reinventing their jobs. The most important question in performance evaluation becomes not, "How well did you perform your job since the last time we met?" but, "How much did you change it?"

LESSON ELEVEN

"Fit no stereotypes. Don't chase the latest management fads. The situation dictates which approach best accomplishes the team's mission."

Flitting from fad to fad creates team confusion, reduces the leader's credibility and drains organizational coffers. Blindly following a particular fad generates rigidity in thought and action. Sometimes speed to market is more important than total quality. Sometimes an unapologetic directive is more appropriate than participatory discussion. To quote Powell, some situations require the leader to hover closely; others require long, loose leashes. Leaders honour their core values, but they are flexible in how they execute them. They understand that management techniques are not magic mantras but simply tools to be reached for at the right times.

LESSON TWELVE

"Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier."

The ripple effect of a leader's enthusiasm and optimism is awesome. So is the impact of cynicism and pessimism. Leaders who whine and blame engender those same behaviours among their colleagues. I am not talking about stoically accepting organizational stupidity and performance incompetence with a "what, me worry?" smile. I am talking about a guns ho attitude that says "we can change things here, we can achieve awesome goals, we can be the best." Spare me the grim litany of the "realist"; give me the unrealistic aspirations of the optimist any day.

LESSON THIRTEEN

"Powell's Rules for Picking People"—Look for intelligence and judgment and, most critically, a capacity to anticipate, to see around corners. Also look for loyalty, integrity, a high energy drive, a balanced ego and the drive to get things done."

How often do our recruitment and hiring processes tap into these attributes? More often than not, we ignore them in favour of length of resume, degrees and prior titles. A string of job descriptions a recruit held yesterday seem to be more important than who one is today, what she can contribute tomorrow or how well his values mesh with those of the organization You can train a bright, willing novice in the fundamentals of your business fairly readily, but it's a lot harder to train someone to have integrity, judgment, energy, balance and the drive to get things done. Good leaders stack the deck in their favour right in the recruitment phase.

LESSON FOURTEEN

(Borrowed by Powell from Michael Korda): "Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand."

Effective leaders understand the KISS principle, or Keep It Simple, Stupid. They articulate vivid, overarching goals and values, which they use to drive daily behaviours and choices among competing alternatives. Their visions and priorities are lean and compelling, not cluttered and buzzword-laden. Their decisions are crisp and clear, not tentative and ambiguous. They convey an unwavering firmness and consistency in their actions, aligned with the picture of the future they paint. The result? Clarity of purpose, credibility of leadership, and integrity in organization

LESSON FIFTEEN

Part I: "Use the formula P=40 to 70, in which P stands for the probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired." Part II: "Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut."

Powell's advice is don't take action if you have only enough information to give you less than a 40 percent chance of being right, but don't wait until you have enough facts to be 100 percent sure, because by then it is almost always too late. His instinct is right: Today, excessive delays in the name of information-gathering needs analysis paralysis. Procrastination in the name of reducing risk actually increases risk.

LESSON SIXTEEN

"The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise."

Too often, the reverse defines corporate culture. This is one of the main reasons why leaders like Ken Iverson of Nucor Steel, Percy Barnevik of Asea Brown Boveri, and Richard Branson of Virgin have kept their corporate staffs to a bare-bones minimum. (And I do mean minimum—how about fewer than 100 central corporate staffers for global $30 billion-plus ABB? Or around 25 and 3 for multi-billion Nucor and Virgin, respectively?) Shift the power and the financial accountability to the folks who are bringing in the beans, not the ones who are counting or analyzing them.

LESSON SEVENTEEN

"Have fun in your command. Don't always run at a breakneck pace. Take leave when you've earned it. Spend time with your families."

Corollary: "Surround yourself with people who take their work seriously, but not themselves, those who work hard and play hard."

Herb Kelleher of Southwest Air and Anita Roddick of The Body Shop would agree: Seek people who have some balance in their lives, who are fun to hang out with, who like to laugh (at themselves, too) and who have some non-job priorities which they approach with the same passion that they do their work. Spare me the grim workaholic or the pompous pretentious "professional;" I'll help them find jobs with my competitor.

LESSON EIGHTEEN

"Command is lonely."

Harry Truman was right. Whether you're a CEO or the temporary head of a project team, the buck stops here. You can encourage participative management and bottom-up employee involvement, but ultimately, the essence of leadership is the willingness to make the tough, unambiguous choices that will have an impact on the fate of the organization I've seen too many non-leaders flinch from this responsibility. Even as you create an informal, open, collaborative corporate culture, prepare to be lonely.

Preparation of Letters Rogatory

2011-09-22T10:24:00.000-07:00

If you need information from a foreign country and must use Letters Rogatory or Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties to obtain the information. This information furnished by the US Dpartment of State.

Preparation of Letters Rogatory

Disclaimer: The information in this circular relating to the legal requirements of specific foreign countries is provided for general information only and may not be totally accurate in a particular case. Questions involving interpretation of specific foreign laws should be addressed to foreign counsel. This circular seeks only to provide information; it is not an opinion on any aspect of U.S., foreign, or international law. The U.S. Department of State does not intend by the contents of this circular to take a position on any aspect of any pending litigation.

Summary: Letters rogatory are the customary method of obtaining judicial assistance from abroad in the absence of a treaty or executive agreement. Letters rogatory are requests from courts in one country to the judiciary of a foreign country requesting the performance of an act which, if done without the sanction of the foreign court, could constitute a violation of that country's sovereignty. Letters rogatory may be used in countries where multi-lateral or bilateral treaties on judicial assistance are not in force to effect service of process or to obtain evidence if permitted by the laws of the foreign country. 22 CFR 92.54provides a definition of letters rogatory.

Country Specific Information: See the Department of State’s country specific judicial assistance information on our Internet page.

Time Frame for Execution of Letters Rogatory: Execution of letters rogatory may take a year or more worldwide. Letters rogatory are customarily transmitted via the diplomatic channel , a time-consuming means of transmission. The time involved may be shortened by transmitting a copy of the request through local legal counsel if permitted in the foreign country. Lists of foreign attorneys are available on the Internet pages of the consular sections of U.S. embassies and consulates abroad .

Letters Rogatory Checklist:

First, review the country specific judicial assistance information on the Department of State internet page.
Then review U.S. state or federal law on the subject.
See suggested text for letters rogatory at the end of this guidance.
After you prepare your draft, consider whether a judge in a foreign country speaking another language will understand what you are requesting.
You will then need to secure the signature of a judge in the United States on your Letters rogatory.
Next, obtain any necessary authentications specified in the Department of State country specific information.
If the language of the country where the letters rogatory are to be presented is not English , you will need to obtain a certified translation of the letters rogatory and any supporting documents and prepare the entire package in duplicate for transmittal to the U.S. Department of State.

Suggestions for Drafting Letters Rogatory:

Letters rogatory should be written in simple, non-technical English and should not include unnecessary information which may confuse a court in the receiving foreign country.
Avoid use of the term discovery.
Requests for documents should be as specific as possible to avoid the appearance of a fishing expedition which may result in refusal of the foreign country to execute the request. Try not to use phrases such as any and all documents.
If particular procedures to be followed by the foreign court are preferable, include the specifics in the letters rogatory (for example, verbatim transcript, place witness under oath, permission for U.S.or foreign counsel to attend or participate in proceedings if possible, etc.)
The letters rogatory should be addressed To the Appropriate Judicial Authority of (Insert name of Country).
The form of letters rogatory depends on the country to which it is addressed and the assistance being sought. Some countries have statutory guidelines for granting assistance. See our country specific judicial assistance information .

Essential elements of letters rogatory:

A statement that a request for international judicial assistance is being made in the interests of justice;
A brief synopsis of the case, including identification of the parties and the nature of the claim and relief sought to enable the foreign court to understand the issues involved;
The type of case [e.g. civil, criminal, administrative];
The nature of the assistance required [compel testimony or production of evidence; service of process];
Name, address and other identifiers, such as corporate title, of the person abroad to be served or from whom evidence is to be compelled, documents to be served;
A list of questions to be asked, where applicable, generally in the form of written interrogatories;
A list of documents or other evidence to be produced;
A statement from the requesting court expressing a willingness to provide similar assistance to judicial authorities of the receiving state;
Statement that the requesting court or counsel is willing to reimburse the judicial authorities of the receiving state for costs incurred in executing the requesting court's letters rogatory.

Signature and Authentication: Letters rogatory must be signed by a judge. The clerk should not sign on behalf of the judge. For most countries, the seal of the court and signature of the judge is sufficient. Consult our country-specific information for guidance about authentication procedures for particular countries. Many countries will not accept letters rogatory issued by an Administrative Law Judge. In administrative cases, it is possible to obtain letters rogatory issued by a federal district court under the All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. 1651.

Translation: The letters rogatory and any accompanying documents must be translated into the official language of the foreign country. The translator should execute an affidavit as to the validity of the translation before a notary.

Number of Copies: Forward to the U.S. Department of State for transmittal to the foreign authorities:

The original English version bearing the seal of the court and signature of the judge [or a certified copy]; a photocopy of the English.
The original translation and a photocopy of the translation.
The original documents will be served upon the designated recipient or deposited with the foreign court in connection with a request for evidence, and the copies returned to the court in the U.S. as proof of execution.
For requests involving multiple witnesses in diverse locations, either prepare a separate letters rogatory for each witness, or provide a certified copy of the single letters rogatory (plus translation and duplicate copy noted above) for each witness. The foreign country may assign the matter to different courts.

Fees: The current consular fees for transmittal of letters rogatory are available in 22 CFR 22.1 Schedule of Fees. Counsel are requested to submit a certified bank check payable to the U.S. Embassy (insert name of capital of the foreign country, for example, U.S. Embassy Tokyo). Corporate or personal checks are not acceptable. Foreign authorities may also charge a fee. Counsel will be notified by the U.S. embassy and/or the Office of American Citizens Services and Crisis Management in the Department of State if the embassy is advised by foreign authorities of any applicable local fees. There is no consular fee for letters rogatory on behalf of federal, state or local government officials. If the letters rogatory request compulsion of evidence from more than one witness or service of process on more than one person, multiple fees may be charged if more than one foreign court is required to execute the request due to multiple jurisdictions.

Transmittal to the Department of State: The letters rogatory and accompanying documents may be submitted to the Office of American Citizen Services, (CA/OCS/ACS), U.S. Department of State, SA-29 4 th Floor, 2201 C Street NW, Washington, DC 20520-0001. Phone 1-888-407-4747.

Cover Letter: The documents should be accompanied by a cover letter including the following elements:

Name of case;
Docket number;
Foreign country;
Nature of request: (service of process; compulsion of testimony; production of documents, etc.)
Person to be served or from whom evidence is to be obtained: (name and address mandatory, phone number if possible.)
Mailing address of U.S. court to which the executed letters rogatory should be returned:
Special instructions: (Example, Federal Express account number; U.S. hearing/trial date, etc.)
Fee enclosed
Deposit (if required) enclosed:
Statement of responsibility for additional costs incurred in excess of the required deposit which accompanies the letter.
Local foreign counsel (if any): (name and address, phone number)
Name, address, telephone, fax number and email address of requesting attorney in United States.

Transmittal of Letters Rogatory by Department of State to the Foreign Authorities through Diplomatic Channel: Letters rogatory generally are transmitted to foreign judicial authorities through the diplomatic channel. The diplomatic channel is a route by which the documents are sent to the foreign court. The normal process is as follows:

Letters rogatory transmitted by court or counsel to Department of State;
Letters rogatory transmitted by Department of State to U.S. Embassy;
Letters rogatory transmitted to Ministry of Foreign Affairs by U.S. Embassy;
Letters rogatory transmitted to Ministry of Justice by Ministry of Foreign Affairs;
Letters rogatory transmitted to Foreign Court by Ministry of Justice.

Execution of Letters Rogatory by the Foreign Court: The foreign court will execute letters rogatory in accordance with the laws and regulations of the foreign country. In compelling evidence, for example, many foreign courts do not permit foreign attorneys to participate in their court proceedings. Not all foreign countries utilize the services of court reporters or routinely provide verbatim transcripts. Sometimes the presiding judge will dictate his or her recollection of the witness' responses.

Return of Executed Letters Rogatory: When letters rogatory are executed by the foreign authorities, they are generally returned to the Department of State via the diplomatic channel and the Office of American Citizens Services will send them to the requesting court in the United States via certified mail. Requesting counsel is also notified. At the request of the court, the executed letter rogatory and proof of service/evidence produced can be returned directly to requesting counsel. If transmittal by commercial express delivery service is preferred, please include your account number in the covering letter.

Authority: The issuance of letters rogatory by federal courts is provided for under Rule 28(b) Fed. R. Civ. P. and Rule 4(f)(2)(B), Fed. R. Civ. P . Letters rogatory have also been issued under the All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. 1651. 28 U.S.C. 1781 and 28 U.S.C. 1782 describe the transmittal of letters rogatory through the Department of State and through the district courts; 28 U.S.C. 1696 provides for the use of letters rogatory for service of process pursuant to a request by a foreign tribunal; Consular procedures for transmittal of letters rogatory are detailed in 22 CFR 92.66: Article 5(j), Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 21 U.S.T. 77, 596 UNTS 261; TIAS 6820 (where applicable); and Bilateral Consular Conventions(where applicable.)

Questions: Additional questions regarding letters rogatory should be addressed to the appropriate geographic division of the Office of American Citizens Services, Tel: 1-888-407-4747.

Selected Reference:

American Bar Association, Obtaining Discovery Abroad (2006).

Born and Rutlege, International Civil Litigation in United States Courts, Aspen Publishers (2006).

Epstein, Snyder and Baldwin, International Litigation: A Guide to Jurisdiction, Practice and Strategy, Transnational Pub. (1998).

McClean, David, International Co-operation in Civil and Criminal Matters, Oxford University Press (2002).

Ristau, Bruno, International Judicial Assistance, Civil and Commercial, International Law Institute (1995).http://travel.state.gov/law/judicial/judicial_683.html#summary

Troy Davis execution: Did the death penalty deliver justice?

2011-09-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

From the Christian Science Monitor, By Patrik Jonsson:

For his supporters, the execution of Troy Davis marked a grave injustice and showed the death penalty at its worst. But others found their faith in the justice system reaffirmed by the fact that the Davis verdict stood after an abundance of case reviews.

A last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court pushed back Troy Davis's execution by several hours, but in the end, Mr. Davis died by lethal injection Wednesday night in a prison in Jackson, Ga.

"I am innocent," were his last words to the family of Mark MacPhail. "I did not have a gun."

Mr. Davis was convicted of the 1989 murder of Mr. MacPhail, a Savannah, Ga,. police officer.

For thousands around the world, Mr. Davis's death marked a grave injustice, given vexing questions and new doubts about his guilt.

But while many saw the execution as symbolic of a fallible justice system, and an immoral punishment, others found their faith in the system reaffirmed by an abundance of court and executive reviews that, time after time, let the verdict against Davis stand.

The Davis case is but one in a long series of death penalty cases that push individual states to debate the morality, legality, and efficacy of the death penalty.

This week alone, the US Supreme Court ordered stays for two men in Texas scheduled to be executed, while a third, Lawrence Brewer, was executed Wednesday night for the dragging death of James Byrd near Jasper, Texas, in 1998. Alabama has an execution scheduled Thursday.

Davis was convicted in 1991 for the shooting death of off-duty police officer MacPhail, who had come to the aid of a homeless man being beaten near a Savannah, Ga., Burger King. A jury of seven blacks and five whites found that Davis had shot a man earlier in the evening and used the same gun to fire into MacPhail's face and chest, killing the young father of two before he had a chance to draw his weapon.

The murder weapon was never found and defense lawyers cast doubt on a ballistics test that linked shell casings at the scene to casings found at another shooting for which Davis was convicted.

Since the verdict, seven of nine witnesses in the case changed or retracted their accounts, and new witnesses have pointed to the possibility that another man at the scene fired the weapon. But Federal District Court Judge William T. Moore said those new statements amounted to "smoke and mirrors" to obfuscate the original verdict.

On Tuesday, a Georgia clemency board, for the fourth time, declined Davis's request to commute the sentence to life in prison. The Georgia board has commuted three other death row sentences in the last decade.

Full article can be found here.

Troy Davis' Clemency Denial: The Failure of a Legal 'Safety Valve'

2011-09-20T15:31:00.000-07:00

From Time:

When Texas Governor Rick Perry said in a recent Republican presidential candidates' debate that his sleep is untroubled by doubts about the guilt of any of the 235 men and women who have been executed on his watch, he pointed out that his state has "a very thoughtful, a very clear process in place" to review death penalty cases. A cornerstone of that process, in Texas and elsewhere, is the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which is designed to act as a safety valve, removed from the emotion of the crime and the courtroom. It's a last resort, not to retry a case, but to ensure that a conviction is so ironclad that there is no doubt that it merits the ultimate punishment.

That safety valve failed in Georgia Tuesday, just as it has on a number of occasions in Texas. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied convicted murderer Troy Davis' last appeal for clemency, setting him on a seemingly unstoppable course for execution Wednesday evening.

For the simplest picture of why that decision was so wrong — as so many of Davis' myriad supporters have pleaded for years — just look at the numbers.

— 7: that's how many of the nine original eyewitnesses have recanted their testimony against Davis.

— 0: the amount of physical evidence linking Davis to the crime (no fingerprints, no DNA, no weapon recovered).

— 3: the number of jurors who voted for death in the original trial who now believe their vote was a mistake.

— 22: the number of years the family of slain police officer Mark McPhail has had to wait for an answer to the question of whether or not Davis would die for the crime.

The last number — a symptom of the interminable appeals process — would seem to speak in favor of simply executing Davis and getting it over with. Justice delayed, as Newt Gingrich said when he fought for a law that limited death penalty appeals, is justice denied (a statement that he seemed to believe pertained only to the families of the victims, not the convicted). But the truth is that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles should have ended this macabre theater when they had the chance three years ago, by commuting Davis' death sentence and either letting him serve out a life term or granting him a retrial.

Beyond all the evidentiary problems of Davis' case — to take one example, police Re-enacted the crime scene with all the eyewitnesses together and talking to each other, a practice which is now unheard of — it never had any hallmarks of a case that should have been eligible for the ultimate penalty. It was a senseless murder late at night that was only half-seen in a half-lit Burger King parking lot. A good man was killed, but even death penalty supporters, a number of whom have called for clemency in Davis' case, would agree that death cases should be reserved for those with the most incontrovertible evidence. Even before witnesses started recanting and jurors started regretting, Davis' case never met that standard.

"Seven of the nine witnesses have recanted at this point. That in and of itself is problematic," says Mary Schmid Mergler, Senior Counsel for the non-profit Constitution Project, whose high-profile advisers (a mix of abolitionists and death penalty supporters) have come out in favor of clemency for Davis. "But the most troubling thing is just the fact that a death penalty conviction rests solely on eyewitness testimony to begin with."

That was one of the arguments made in Monday's board meeting before the five board members appointed by former Governor Sonny Perdue (three of the members are new since Davis' case was initially heard in 2008). It was a quick affair: three hours for the defense, the same for the prosecution — though defense lawyers complained the prosecution got more time — followed by a decision released just after 8am the next morning.

Full article can be found here.

Changes Coming to Police Line-Up Procedures?

2011-09-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

A new report released by the American Judicature Society has found that double-blind sequential lineups, which are lineups where the administrating officer does not know which person is the suspect and the witness only views one suspect at a time, produce fewer mistaken identifications that lineup procedures that present all of the suspect photographs at once or simultaneously. The report, “A Test of Simultaneous vs. Sequential Lineup Methods: An Initial Report of the AJS National Eyewitness Identification Field Studies,” has implications for reducing wrongful convictions in the United States criminal justice system. Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75% of the 273 convictions overturned through DNA testing. The report is released on the heels of a decision from the New Jersey Supreme Court cited this “troubling lack of reliability” in setting new rules for addressing those weaknesses in New Jersey courtrooms. The United States Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments, in November, in its first significant eyewitness identification case in 34 years. The case, Perry v. New Hampshire, is concerned with whether judges must take a hard look at all identifications arising from suggestive circumstances or only those involving official misconduct. Read more from New York Times or Innocence Project.

FBI Lesson Plan: Muslims Are Terrorist Sympathizers

2011-09-15T10:35:00.000-07:00

Whistleblowers say agency's anti-Islamic lesson plans are counterproductive.

From Slate:

One of al-Qaida’s goals is to convince mainstream Muslims that their faith requires them to violently oppose American interests. Apparently, the FBI agrees.

Citing documents leaked by FBI whistleblowers, Wired’s Danger Room blog reports that the agency has been teaching its counter terrorism agents that mainstream American Muslims are “likely to be terrorist sympathizers” and that the Islamic pillar of zakat, or almsgiving, is a “funding mechanism for combat.” Other gems from the Quantico lesson plans include a description of Mohammed as a “cult leader” and a pseudo-scientific graph showing that while Jews and Christians have become more peaceful over time, Muslims have always been violent.

Danger Room, which has exposed crude anti-Muslim FBI training materials in the past as well, writes that the FBI has dismissed some of those documents as “rudimentary” lesson plans that are no longer in use. But it finds that at least one of the newly uncovered briefings took place as recently as March 21.

As Mother Jones' Adam Serwer points out, that’s around the same time that Sens. Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding to know what standards the FBI uses to vet its counter terrorism trainers. The call followed a Washington Monthly investigation showing that some of those trainers were little more than Islamophobic cranks spewing jokes and anecdotes designed to promote an us-vs-them worldview.

In the latest Danger Room post, an FBI spokesman responds with the excuse that “a disclaimer accompanied the presentation stating that the views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government.” Danger Room adds:

Several of these briefings were the work of a single author: an FBI intelligence analyst named William Gawthrop. In 2006, before he joined the Bureau, he gave an interview to the website WorldNetDaily, and discussed some of the themes that made it into his briefings, years later. The Prophet “Muhammad’s mindset is a source for terrorism,” Gawthrop told the website, which would later distinguish itself as a leader of the “birther” movement, a conspiracy theory that denies President Obama’s American citizenship.

Frustrated with Obama’s inaction on the issue, Lieberman, an Independent from Connecticut, and Collins, a Maine Republican, are now considering drafting legislation to address the problem, Talking Points Memo reported on Tuesday. In a letter to the president, the senators wrote:

"As we have previously stated in letters to this administration, we have serious concerns that improper training may not be isolated occurrences and could be detrimental to our efforts to confront homegrown terrorism. Since Muslim Americans are our main allies in the fight against violent Islamist extremism domestically, any training that implies otherwise is both inaccurate and counterproductive."

Full article can be found here.

Department of Justice Report Suggests Corruption in Puerto Rico Police

2011-09-08T19:25:00.000-07:00

Today, the New York Times reports that a Justice Department investigation has accused the Puerto Rico Police Department of widespread civil rights violations, corruption and illegal conduct.ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero responded to today's story:

The report confirms a breathtaking level of violence and corruption throughout the PRPD. With the facts laid bare, it is now the responsibility of the Puerto Rican government and the Justice Department to make sure the police abuse and brutality end as quickly as possible.Calling the report "a blistering condemnation of the second-largest police force in the United States," the Times notes: The Justice Department began the investigation in part due to complaints by the American Civil Liberties Union. In June, when President Obama visited the island, the A.C.L.U. sent him a letter contending that the police had “engaged in a level of brutality against U.S. citizens” with a degree of impunity that “would not be tolerated in the 50 states.”

The Department of Justice issued a press release which included these highlights:

The Justice Department found reasonable cause to believe that a pattern and practice of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law occurred in several areas, including: Use of excessive force; Use of unreasonable force and other misconduct designed to suppress the exercise of protected First Amendment rights; and Unconstitutional stops, searches and arrests.

GPS Monitoring & the Fourth Amendment in PI Magazine

2011-08-28T22:27:00.000-07:00

Check out the latest issue of PI Magazine for our featured article on GPS Monitoring and the Fourth Amendment. The latest on the topic is that we still wait for a Supreme Court opinion which is slated for the 2011 term. The United States just filed its brief in the case of United States v. Jones. The issue the 2011 Supreme Court will decide is: (1) Whether the warrantless use of a tracking device on petitioner's vehicle to monitor its movements on public streets violated the Fourth Amendment; and (2) whether the government violated respondent's Fourth Amendment rights by installing the GPS tracking device on his vehicle without a valid warrant and without his consent. Stay Tuned

Public Defender -- Chapter 2

2011-08-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

Seattle Community Court Misdemeanor Offenders Create Lake City Mural

2011-08-11T23:02:00.000-07:00

NIJ Fingerprint Sourcebook Released

2011-08-11T22:26:00.000-07:00

The National Institute of Justice has released the complete edition of The Fingerprint Sourcebook, the definitive guide to the science of fingerprint identification.

Prepared in consultation with law enforcement and forensic experts, The Fingerprint Sourcebook consists of fifteen chapters covering: the anatomy and physiology of friction ridge skin (the uniquely ridged skin found on the palms and soles); the FBI’s Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS); latent print development, preservation and documentation; equipment and laboratory quality assurance; and legal issues.

Midtown Community Court

2011-08-11T22:23:00.000-07:00

Social Intelligence

2011-08-05T09:23:00.001-07:00

Social Intelligence Corp solely generates reports based on employer pre-defined criteria, both positive and negative. Negative examples include racist remarks or activities, sexually explicit photos or videos, and illegal activity such as drug use. Positive examples include charitable or volunteer efforts, participation in industry blogs, and external recognition.

Federal and state protected class information is redacted from the reports we provide. Employers are only exposed to information that is job relevant and may legally be considered in the hiring process.

Additionally, per FCRA requirements, a new report is run for every job applicant each time they are background checked. While reports must be stored for FCRA compliance, the data within past reports is never re-used.

CIO Summit: Coming to grips with the future of Cloud computing

2011-07-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

From CIO:

The challenges faced by the chief information officer of 2015 will include changes to outsourcing, a winnowing of the number of Cloud vendors and increasingly converged IT, according to IDC's Chris Morris.

Speaking at CIO Summit 2011 in Sydney, IDC's Asia Pacific Cloud services and technologies principal analyst said there are four trends set to change the Cloud model forever.

The first was 'Outsourcing 3.0' — the Cloud evolving to include integration with services built on mobile devices, mobile applications and information analytics.

"If you just assume that the Cloud is a place to put your application in, or replace infrastructure than you are going to get left behind," Morris said.

According to Morris, Outsourcing 3.0 will mean that by 2015 the Cloud will be just another tool in the CIO's toolkit.

"Outsourcing 3.0 using the Cloud would have a full portfolio of services from commodity to mission critical services, and because of that service management plays a critical part of the IT service cycle," he said.

"Just as we do in outsourcing, playing close attention to due diligence — where you check if the provider has long term status for your organisation — becomes very critical."

The second prediction is the hybrid environment of public and private Cloud will evolve and converge to include data centre transformation.

"There is a long way to go with data centre transformation, as the target for large enterprises is 100 virtual machines per server by 2012," Morris said. "We are getting there, because 2010 was the first year where more applications were deployed in a virtual machine environment than deployed in physical server environment," he said.

However, CIOs need to look at a different architectural approach because the deployment is taking place in systems based on older technology.

"The network and storage is being overstressed by the number of virtual machines and the ROI is not being addressed," Morris said.

Morris also predicts that the provision for 'Big Data' will become part of the Cloud suppliers' portfolios.

According to IDC statistics, in 2010 9.8 exabytes of disk storage was bought by Cloud service suppliers in the Asia Pacific.

"The Cloud service provider has a big part to play in this as they have the relationships with the storage providers that are on demand," he said.

He added that the supplier portfolio will change, as there will be fewer suppliers but each of those suppliers will offer more services.

"By 2015 public Cloud will probably be more important than virtual private Cloud because those security and reliability levels will have come up and there will be 80 per cent of new applications developed for public Cloud," Morris said.

"Your future will depend on your ability to source and manage these applications from a public Cloud environment.

"You as a CIO are going to be dealing more with Cloud service hosters, far fewer technicians, and the vendors are going to vanish. We predict that up to 35 per cent of your key vendors will be 'Wiki[pedia] trivia' by 2015."

According to Morris, many vendors will be taken over because they have good reach and a strong customer base in the Cloud market. Finally, the Cloud skills base will change as IT operations become sourcing organisations that manage technology and technicians

"If you are looking at the future mix of an organisation, it would be 80 per cent technicians and 20 per cent management. That means you need to retrain and reskill people who can manage services."

Morris said that as chief information officers offloaded more services into the Cloud, they had the potential to be more agile and concentrate on running the business.

Full article can be found here.

NIJ releases "The Fingerprint Sourcebook"

2011-07-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

NIJ has completed their Fingerprint Sourcebook. The Fingerprint Sourcebook aims to be the definitive resource on the science of fingerprint identification. The Sourcebook was prepared by the International Association for Identification and topics covered include the anatomy and physiology of friction ridge skin (the uniquely ridged skin found on the palms and soles); techniques for recording exemplars from both living and deceased subjects; the FBI's Automated Fingerprint Identifications Systems (AFIS); latent print development, preservation and documentation; equipment and laboratory quality assurance; perceptual, cognitive and psychological factors in expert identifications; and legal issues.

Room for Debate: Is Law School a Good Idea?

2011-07-24T22:30:00.000-07:00

Thinking about law school? The New York Times posted this discussion worth a read suggesting that law school may not be such a good idea in the shrinking job/rising debt universe. An excerpt below (full article here):

Law school tuition is rising four times as fast as the cost of an undergraduate degree, which itself is soaring. Despite the high price, students are still flocking to law schools, even if it means going into heavy debt to enter a tight job market with few top-paying openings.
Should the standard three-year model of legal education, followed by taking and passing the bar exam, be the only path toward becoming a lawyer? Could law school be shortened, or should those three years of classes have a different focus?

Police Officer That Killed Two Teens Driving Twice the Speed Limit

2011-07-15T11:01:00.000-07:00

Reports released by the Texas Department of Public Safety Office this week indicated that an officer was driving more than 80 miles per hour when he struck a car containing two teens in Wichita Falls, Texas. The report indicates that the teens had stopped at a stop sign then proceeded into the intersection where they were struck by the patrol car. The report also indicates that the patrol car took no evasive action. The teens were both killed and the officer is recovering from injuries. The initial report indicated that the officer may have taken prescription medications prior to the accident. One of the teens killed was eight months pregnant.

The Vidocq Society: Solving Murders Over Lunch

2011-07-15T08:59:00.000-07:00

From NPR:

The Vidocq Society sounds like something straight out of a Sherlock Holmes novel.

Once a month, the members of the 20-year-old club — mostly detectives and forensic experts — meet at an old Victorian dining room in the middle of Philadelphia to eat lunch and solve crimes that have perplexed investigators for decades.

"I think of it as CSI to the 10th power but real," says journalist Michael Capuzzo. There are profilers and pathologists, experts in white-collar crime, terrorism and sadism. They have Interpol represented, and a captain from the Egyptian army — and for good measure, they even have a psychic.

Capuzzo has spent years becoming intimately familiar with the Vidocq Society, which is named for the 18th-century criminal-turned-crime-fighter Eugene François Vidocq. Capuzzo's new book, The Murder Room, details how the three founding members gathered crime experts from around the world to solve cold cases. He also profiles some of their more famous investigations.

Both Capuzzo and Richard Walter, a forensic psychologist considered to be the father of criminal profiling, join Dave Davies for a conversation about how the monthly lunchtime meetings turn into round-table discussions about possible motives and murder suspects.

Walter describes one case, the brutal 1984 murder of a night manager named Terri Brooks in Falls Township, Pa. She was stabbed inside the Roy Rogers restaurant where she had been working. The extremely violent attack — her head was wrapped in cellophane, and a knife wound had punctured her throat — was perplexing to local officers. The safe inside the restaurant had been manipulated, so investigators thought the murder was the result of a "robbery gone wrong."

For 14 years, the case went unsolved — until the case was brought to a Vidocq Society meeting. After listening to officers from Falls Township describe the case, Richard Walter stood up and told the officers that this wasn't a robbery gone wrong — and that Terri Brooks had been targeted and murdered by someone she knew.

"When you looked at the body, when you looked at the crime scene itself, it was obvious that it was not a robbery," Walters explains to Davies. "What robbery suspect would stab someone so viciously that the knife enters the tile floor and wrap the head in cellophane? A robber is simply not going to do that. It's not efficient. There's no value in that kind of an activity. So you have to look how he spends his time and his interest by what's there and by what's not there."

Walter thought the staged robbery was simply a red herring staged by the suspect to throw police off his trail. The police then asked Walter to create a profile of a potential suspect.

"Given the amount of violence at the scene and how it was personalized to the victim," Walter suspected that the murderer wasn't a stranger. "Also, the victim had to let the suspect in, and so, therefore, the presumption is that she knew him. ... There's extreme hostility, and you see that he doesn't really care when the victim dies. He cares when his anger has been sated. ... So it was simply a matter of watching and plugging in the bits and pieces along the way. In this case, it was reasonable to assume by police that a boyfriend may be involved."

Members of the Vidocq Society talked to Brooks' parents, asking them about any possible boyfriends. They remembered one, a man they thought was named O'Keefe. The detectives scoured arrest records and articles for any mention of an O'Keefe, and found nothing — until they looked at the funeral guest book for Terri Brooks.

Sure enough, a man named Alfred Scott Keefe had signed in to Brooks' funeral registrar. Police officers obtained a warrant to get Keefe's DNA — from cigarettes he threw out at the curb. It matched DNA from the crime scene. After an interrogation, he confessed. Sixteen months later, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Walter says members of the Vidocq Society try to look at cases — like the murder of Terri Brooks — from all angles.

"I think that many times, we tend to look at things linearly on a straight, flat line and don't see a relationship between evidence," he says. "I try, particularly when humans and people are involved and motives and all of these sorts of things, to look at the evidence on a differential plane. And so you get a sense of depth and insight into [the crime.]"

Full article and story can be found here at NPR.

Bitcoins: Currency of the Geeks

2011-07-12T01:54:00.000-07:00

From Business Week:

Mike Caldwell, the founder of a small company in Salt Lake City that makes timekeeping software, considers himself financially conservative. He's also a geek, and couldn't help but get excited late last year when he heard about bitcoin, a new virtual currency. In February, on one of the handful of online exchanges that have appeared over the past year, he bought about $20,000 worth at less than a dollar per bitcoin. "I felt that maybe I would get a 20 or 50 percent return," says Caldwell, 33. By early June, when he sold the last of his stake, a bitcoin was worth around $30. Caldwell says his total return was well over 1,000 percent. "That magnitude was totally unexpected," he says.

For those who got in early, it's a gold rush. In the last few months this online cash has exploded in usage, notoriety, and value. Like dollars or yen, a bitcoin's worth fluctuates with demand, but in its short history it's gone mostly up. About $130 million worth of bitcoins are now in existence, and the value of that stash has grown more than 6,000 percent this year. Bitcoin partisans are breathless: "This is the biggest invention since the Internet," says Bruce Wagner, an entrepreneur who hosts a monthly bitcoin meet-up group in Manhattan.

The project was started in 2009 by an enigmatic programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto. He always communicated electronically, never answered personal questions, and disappeared from online forums in December. The conspiracy-minded speculate that Nakamoto was actually a group of people, or a government cryptographer, or a pseudonym for Gavin Andresen, the Amherst (Mass.) programmer who took over the project after Nakamoto vanished. "I spoke to one guy who thought aliens might have come to earth to bring us this technology, it's so perfect," says Wagner.

Digital transactions normally require a trusted intermediary such as PayPal to credit and debit accounts properly and prevent cheating. With bitcoins, "there is no middleman, says Andresen or," more accurately, there's a distributed middleman. Individual transactions are encrypted, logged by a decentralized network running on thousands of home computers, and recorded in a public ledger. The system works similarly to peer-to-peer music-sharing networks in that files are shared among swarms of users, rather than downloaded from a central server.

Suppose you're in the market for alpaca socks, one of the few consumer items you can buy with bitcoins. Step one: Get some BTC—that's the symbol—at a currency exchange site such as Mt.Gox. Then download a desktop app from bitcoin.org, which will store your lucre (some use an online service such as Instawallet.org instead) and connect you to the decentralized bitcoin network. Next, find the alpaca farms bitcoin address, a string of characters also known as a public key. Click the send coins button.

The purchase is unconfirmed until a miner certifies it. Miners are power users who crunch numbers on behalf of the network, and some have racks of computers dedicated to the task. They're called miners because, just as gold miners increase the supply of gold, they create new bitcoins, at an algorithmically controlled rate. The greater their computing power, the more they generate for themselves. Once a miner's computer has processed a transaction, the alpaca farm gets bitcoins and you get socks. It's complex but fast: The bitcoin network has handled as many as 87 quadrillion calculations per second, 35 times more than the top supercomputer.

Bitcoins have all the advantages of cash—free to use, very hard to trace—as well as its disadvantages. That digital wallet is a file on a hard drive or online, and if it's lost or stolen there's no recourse. The currency is backed only by the faith and credit of its participants and outside the scope of any banker, politician, or the Federal Reserve. To a certain breed of libertarian nerd who grew up on cyberpunk, it's the Digital Rapture.

Full article can be found here.

Speed Bumps on the Road to Virtual Cash

2011-07-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

MONEY is accumulated, traded and transferred online every day, but can there be a form of currency that exists only online and yet has real-world value?

That is the premise of Bitcoin, an open-source virtual currency system that since 2009 has grown to a market worth more than $100 million.

But the past few weeks have shown that a virtual currency can be just as vulnerable as the paper kind. Bitcoin accounts have been subject to hacking and theft; the currency itself experienced a bubble and a crash. And at least one group that was collecting donations in Bitcoins has decided against using them because of possible legal entanglements.

Gavin Andresen, who is the lead developer of the open-source software that operates the currency, said in an interview from his home in Amherst, Mass.: “I expected it to have lots of speed bumps along the way — but I didn’t expect there to be so many speed bumps in a row.”

There are several appeals to the idea of an online currency. The standard way to ensure the validity of online transactions, according to Jerry Brito, a technology expert at George Mason University, is “to have an intermediary to keep the ledger,” that is, a service like PayPal or a credit card company that takes a percentage of the transaction.

A virtual currency would not need an intermediary. It would also make it harder for authorities to track transactions (particularly appealing for gambling sites or other quasi-legal activities).

Bitcoin began as a kind of thought experiment. In 2009, an anonymous programmer published a paper proposing a virtual currency that would elegantly solve many of the problems surrounding currency that exists only on the Internet, including the main one, that the money would simply be copied like, say, music files, and plummet in value.

Another part of the challenge was to create a currency without having to resort to a central bank to issue the currency and track the transactions. In other words, the transactions would be genuinely “peer-to-peer” rather than pass though a virtual bank.

The solution of the Bitcoin programmer, who wrote under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, was to ensure that each “coin” was its own certificate of authenticity — that the coin, in essence, would be nothing more than that certificate.

In the Bitcoin system, a new coin is produced whenever a computer can calculate an answer to a difficult problem, and then attaches that answer to a digital record of every transaction of every Bitcoin ever traded — a breathtakingly large amount of information to carry around in order to buy a pack of gum, but in a time when information can zip around the Internet, not too much to ask. Anyone would be free to create a new coin, within proscribed supply limits, by having a computer do the work needed to prove that it was in fact a valid Bitcoin.

“The incentives are right, they are a check that everyone is following the rules,” said Mr. Andresen. “Early adopters want it to succeed, because they already own the currency. And if you generate Bitcoins no one thinks is valid, you have wasted a lot of computer time.”

In fact, Bitcoin is a rarity for a currency in that it is neither a so-called fiat currency — one like dollars, which are valuable because the government says they are — nor is it a specie currency, one that gets its value because it can be converted into a precious metal like silver or gold.

But why would a Bitcoin have value if it is only a stream of numbers, unsupported by government fiat or by some underlying asset?

“Why does any tool have value?” Mr. Andresen asked. “It is valuable because it is useful.”

Starting almost as soon as the coins were introduced, they have been traded for dollars at online exchanges, serving as a crude measure of the currency’s popularity and health (and also giving a market where owners can trade in Bitcoins for real dollars).

After two years, there are seven million of these “coins” in circulation and the rate of increase — currently 50 coins are added every 10 minutes — will slow each year until the number tops out at 21 million coins around 2025. The coins, which trade for about $17 each at online exchanges, have a cumulative value of about $100 million. “I do think of it as the market cap of Bitcoin,” said Mr. Andresen. Today, a list of businesses that accept Bitcoin currency is a motley collection of companies on the fringe of the computer world, groups that conduct gambling or the like, and, notably, the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, which accepts contributions in Bitcoins. You certainly can’t stock the pantry or furnish your home with Bitcoins.

Full article can be found here.

Supreme Court Grants Review on GPS Monitoring Cases

2011-06-27T11:24:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court granted Certiorari in United States v. Jones (Docket: 10-1259) this morning. The issues presented are as follows:

1)Whether the warrantless use of a tracking device on petitioner’s vehicle to monitor its movements on public streets violated the Fourth Amendment.
2) Whether the government violated the respondent’s Fourth Amendment rights by installing the tracking device without a valid warrant and without his consent.

The issue is perhaps the most important privacy/Fourth Amendment case since the Katz decision involving telephones. GPS trackers have become a prevalent law enforcement tool that not only allows the police to track movements of a person, but construct meaning from those movements. Stay tuned.

Interesting Article Life as Undocumented Immigrant

2011-06-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

Recently, the New York Times had an interesting article authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas where he admitted that he is an undocumented immigrant. His article highlights the plight of as many as eleven million illegal residents living in the United States. The article details Mr. Vargas's arrival in the United States, experiences in school as a non-native English speaker, and his experiences living undocumented. It is worth a read for those doing immigration work.

criminal court arraignment

2011-06-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

Public Defender

2011-06-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

FBI's New Rules to Give Agents More Leeway on Surveillance

2011-06-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

From FoxNews.com:

The FBI sought Monday to downplay its expanded surveillance powers for agents as civil liberty groups sounded an alarm that the new rules not only make it easier for agents to investigate suspects but give them startling leeway to spy on ordinary Americans.

The changes are expected to be outlined in a new edition of the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, a lengthy 2008 document detailing how far agents can go in tracking suspects. They will expand the use of techniques ranging from dispatching surveillance teams to digging through trash cans.

Civil liberties groups were briefed on the policy changes in May, and came out of the meeting worried the changes would allow agents to investigate innocent people, with less oversight than before.

"It's the government saying we can know all about your private life, but you can't know what the government is doing," Michael German, a former FBI agent now working with the American Civil Liberties Union, told FoxNews.com.

For instance, the new rules would allow agents to look up people on various databases without opening up a low-level inquiry known as an "assessment." Currently, agents have to take that formal step before looking into someone's background and provide some semblance of justification.

Full article can be found here.

Jose Guerena SWAT Raid Video From Helmet Cam

2011-06-08T12:47:00.001-07:00

Interviewing Witnesses

2011-06-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

From: John E. Reid & Associates, Inc.

A witness is anyone who possesses direct information pertinent to an investigation. Developing accurate and complete information from witnesses is critical to any criminal investigation. This information may determine whether or not a crime was committed, the direction in which an investigation goes and the identification of the perpetrator of a crime.

Sometimes witnesses are forthcoming and fully cooperative, other times they are reluctant to get involved and occasionally they are deceitful in an effort to protect themselves, an accomplice or loved one. There are many factors that may influence the accuracy of a witness' statement including trauma, passage of time, prejudices, influences of drugs or alcohol, age, and psychological/ physiological disorders. Finally, witnesses are interviewed in a number of different settings, ranging from a totally uncontrolled setting (outside a bank that was just robbed) to a semi-controlled environment (the witness' home or office) or in a controlled setting (the investigator's office).

With all these variables, obviously there is no single best technique to develop information from a witness; there is, however, a single underlying principle that does apply. This web tip will present a number of different concepts relating to witness interviews which investigators need to appropriately apply.

Continue reading for more 'Interviewing Witnesses' information as well as answers to the following questions.

How can an investigator identify a good witness within a group of people?
Three individuals witnessed the same incident, what important procedure should the investigator use when interviewing these witnesses?
When, during an interview, should the investigator elicit personal information from a witness?
What are some simple techniques the investigator can use to enhance a witness' memory?

New Misconduct Allegations Against San Francisco Police as 26 Cases Dropped

2011-06-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

Twenty-six felony cases have been dismissed by San Francisco Prosecutors that involve misconduct allegations against the San Francisco Police Department. All 26 cases that were dropped on May 27, 2011, involve Mission Station officers that are currently under investigation for illegal searches, perjury, and theft.

At a news conference, San Francisco Jeff Adachi showed surveillance footage of an April 22, 2010 arrest that stood in sharp contrast to the sworn police report describing the incident. (more here)

In that case, police arrested 49-year-old Jesus Inastrilla in front of a Tenderloin bar for drug sales. In a sworn police report, Officer Peter Richardson wrote that officers Jacob Fegan, Ricardo Guerrero, Robert Sanchez, who were working undercover, arrested Inastrilla after Inastrilla spit a crack rock into his hand to sell it to Guerrero. However, the video shows no exchange between the two men. One of Inastrilla’s hands remains on his cell phone throughout the video, while his other hand is in his pocket.

Charges were dropped against Inastrilla May 7, 2010 after Guerrero claimed he could not find the alleged seized drugs in evidence, according to Inastrilla’s attorney, Erica Franklin. Franklin later lodged a complaint with the Office of Citizen Complaints on behalf of her client. The OCC also found that the video was inconsistent with the police report.

In a second case of possible misconduct revealed Friday, Mission District residents Javier and Mariette Tenorio produced a sworn declaration against Sgt. Kevin Healy, Sanchez, Guerrero, Fegan and Richardson, alleging police illegally searched their residence and left with their valuables.

Jose Guerena Killed: Arizona Cops Shoot Former Marine In Botched Pot Raid

2011-05-27T08:50:00.000-07:00

From the Huffington Post:

On May 5 at around 9:30 a.m., several teams of Pima County, Ariz., police officers from at least four different police agencies armed with SWAT gear and an armored personnel carrier raided at least four homes as part of what at the time was described as an investigation into alleged marijuana trafficking. One of those homes belonged to 26-year-old Jose Guerena and his wife, Vanessa Guerena. The couple's 4-year-old son was also in the house at the time. Their 6-year-old son was at school.

As the SWAT team forced its way into his home, Guerena, a former Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq, armed himself with his AR-15 rifle and told his wife and son to hide in a closet. As the officers entered, Guerena confronted them from the far end of a long, dark hallway. The police opened fire, releasing more than 70 rounds in about 7 seconds, at least 60 of which struck Guerena. He was pronounced dead a little over an hour later.

The Pima County Sheriff's Department initially claimed (PDF) Guerena fired his weapon at the SWAT team. They now acknowledge that not only did he not fire, the safety on his gun was still activated when he was killed. Guerena had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home. After ushering out his wife and son, the police refused to allow paramedics to access Guerena for more than hour, leaving the young father to bleed to death, alone, in his own home.

I can now report a number of new details that further call into question the police account of what happened that morning. But first some context:

The Pima County Sheriff's Office has now changed its story several times over the last few weeks. They have issued a press release (PDF) scolding the media and critics for questioning the legality of the raid, the department's account of what happened, and the department's ability to fairly investigate its own officers. They have obtained a court order sealing the search warrants and police affidavits that led to the raids, and they're now refusing any further comment on the case at all. When I contacted Public Information Officer Jason Ogan with some questions, he replied via email that the department won't be releasing any more information. On Saturday, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik told Arizona Daily Star columnist Josh Brodesky that he may never release the search warrants and police affidavits. Dupnik rose to national prominence earlier this year after claiming combative political rhetoric contributed to Jared Loughner killing six people and wounding 19 others, including Rep. Gabielle Giffords, last January.

Jose Guerena

The department's excuses for keeping all of this information under wraps make little sense. In his May 18 press release (PDF), for example, Ogan wrote, "The investigation that lead to the service of the search warrants on May 5 is a complicated one involving multiple people suspected of very serious crimes. Sometimes, law enforcement agencies must choose between the desire of the public to quickly know details, and the very real threat to innocent lives if those details are released prematurely." Dupnik used the same line of reasoning with Brodesky. "Those are the real sensitive parts of why we are having difficulty with trying to put information out publicly--because we don't want somebody getting killed," Dupnik said.

The problem with that explanation is that the search warrants and affidavits weren't sealed until four days after the raids were executed, right at about the time the troubling questions about Jose Guerena's death began to make national headlines. If revealing the details of this investigation -- which remember, was initially described by the Sheriff's Department as a marijuana investigation -- could endanger lives, why weren't the warrants and affidavits sealed from the start? It isn't difficult to understand why some would suspect a cover-up, or at least an attempt to suppress details until the department can come up with a narrative that mitigates the damage. In any case, it's awfully audacious for a police agency to scold the media for not trusting them and for "spreading misinformation" just days after revealing they themselves released bad information.

Full article can be found here.

California Creating Mortgage Fraud Task Force

2011-05-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

From the Los Angeles Times:

California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris, saying that years of unscrupulous lending still haunts the state, is creating a 25-person task force to target mortgage fraud of any size — from small operations that preyed on troubled borrowers to corporations that sold risky loans as safe investments.

The team of 17 lawyers and eight special agents from the state Department of Justice will pursue three major areas, Harris said in an interview:

•Corporate fraud, including instances in which bundled mortgages were sold as securities to the state or its pension funds under false pretenses. Harris said her office plans to prosecute some cases under California's False Claims Act, which she described as "one of those very powerful tools that California uniquely has … to pursue, in essence, what are false claims that are submitted to the state."

•Scams, including instances in which consultants, lawyers and others took fees from people in foreclosure, saying they would help the homeowners get loan modifications or other remedies, but delivered nothing.

•Fraudulent lending practices, including deceptive marketing, failure to fully disclose loan terms and qualifying people for loans who couldn't afford the terms.

Harris said the mortgage fraud that ultimately led to the housing crash continues to be a drag on the state, causing huge losses in jobs, property values and state revenues.

"We are looking at a situation of up to $640 billion in wealth having been lost because of this wave of foreclosures that has hit the state," Harris said, referring to the decline in homeowner equity. "There is a direct connection" between mortgage fraud "and the issue that we are challenged with in terms of our state budget crisis."

Creation of the state's Mortgage Fraud Strike Force, which Harris will announce at a news conference Monday in Los Angeles with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, comes as other states turn up the heat on the lending industry.

New York Atty. Gen. Eric Schneiderman is seeking records from three major Wall Street banks as part of a broad investigation into the mortgage crisis. Also, a months-long investigation by all 50 state attorneys general into the foreclosure practices of the nation's five largest mortgage servicers is continuing.

Harris said her initiative was distinct from the multistate investigation because it would go after all aspects of the mortgage-lending business. Harris, formerly San Francisco's district attorney, made a campaign promise last year when running for attorney general that she would crack down on mortgage fraud.

Many Wall Street financial institutions — private equity firms, hedge funds and banks — bundled often poor-quality mortgage loans into securities during the boom years and sold them to major investors, including pension funds. That resulted in billions of dollars in losses when borrowers defaulted on the loans, triggering the financial crisis.

Harris said that although successful prosecutions of major players in the mortgage meltdown have been difficult, the severity of the crisis called for a tough-minded approach to mortgage fraud, one that could target executives of major financial institutions.

"If the evidence leads us there, no case will be too big or too small to pursue," Harris said. "There remain millions of people affected by the mortgage crisis."

Angelo R. Mozilo, whose Calabasas-based Countrywide Financial Corp. was a major underwriter of risky subprime loans, agreed to a $67.5-million civil settlement with federal regulators but was not prosecuted criminally, despite a nearly three-year investigation by the Justice Department. Countrywide was acquired by Bank of America Corp. in 2008.

Harris' office reached a $6.5-million settlement this year with Mozilo and another former executive of Countrywide who the state had accused of predatory lending. Consumer advocates decried that settlement as far too small to be meaningful.

Full article at the LA Times can be found here.

DNA Evidence Clears Dallas Man After 27 Years

2011-05-19T05:14:00.000-07:00

He said he didn’t commit the crime, and DNA proof set him free.

Johnny Pinchback was released from prison after 27 years. He’s the 22nd person cleared by DNA in Dallas County.

With a roar of applause from friends and family, Johnny Pinchback is a free man. But his story starts 27 years ago, on Illinois Street in Oak Cliff.

Two girls were adbucted and raped. Because the girls picked Pinchback out of a photo line-up, he was put away for 99 years.

But Pinchback won’t complete that sentence. Thanks to DNA evidence, he was cleared of the crime, and with the simple words from the judge he can start to get his life back to normal.

“Mr. Pinchback, you’re free to go,” said Judge Don Adams.

“I’m feeling love. I feel good,” said Pinchback.

In 2007, the Innocence Project of Texas received a letter from Pinchback claiming he didn’t do the crime.

“He went on our waiting list, just like every other individual that applies to our organization,” said Natalie Roetzel, Chief Staff Attorney.

There were over 1,000 people on that waiting list ahead of him, and two years later, the project launched a formal investigation.

“We finally got to it, we realized it was perfect for DNA testing,” said Roetzel.

There was little evidence in the case and there was a possibility the DNA testing wouldn’t even clear his name. But Pinchback never gave up, especially when he witnessed other prisoners being released for crimes they didn’t commit.

Full article at KDAF can be found here.

2011 NDIA Regional Conference

2011-05-18T17:13:00.000-07:00

2011 NDIA Regional Conference

September 15-16, 2011

The Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel

1550 Court Place

Denver, Colorado 80202

Telephone: 303-893-3333

Toll Free: 1-800-325-3535

www.sheratondenverdowntown.com

Guide to Tracing Your American Indian Ancestry

2011-05-18T02:26:00.000-07:00

From the U.S. Department of the Interior

Establishing Your American Indian Ancestry

Some people want to become enrolled members of a federally recognized tribe. Others want to verify a family tradition (belief, fact or fiction, passed from generation to generation) that they descended from an American Indian, either in their distant or near past. While others might want just to learn more about the people they descend from and where they lived.

When establishing descent from an American Indian tribe for membership and enrollment purposes, the individual must provide genealogical documentation. The documentation must prove that the individual lineally descends from an ancestor who was a member of the federally recognized tribe from which the individual claims descent.

When people believe they may be of American Indian ancestry, they immediately write or telephone the nearest Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) office for information. That is not the best place to start. Many people think that the BIA retrieves genealogical information from a massive national Indian registry or comprehensive computer database. This is not true. Most BIA offices, particularly the central (headquarters, Washington, DC) and area (field) offices do not keep individual Indian records and the BIA does not maintain a national registry. The BIA does not conduct genealogical research for the public.

White House Wants To Extend FBI Director

2011-05-17T06:02:00.000-07:00

President Obama has asked Congress to extend the term of current FBI director Robert Mueller for two years.

Listen to the story at NPR here.

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

To Washington now, where the White House is asking Congress to extend the tenure of FBI Director Robert Mueller.

As NPR's Carrie Johnson reports, Mueller's term had been set to expire in September, but President Obama wants him to stick around until 2013.

CARRIE JOHNSON: Robert Mueller became FBI director only a week before the September 11th attacks. Since then, he's labored to get agents to gather intelligence and anticipate terrorist threats in advance. It's one of the hardest jobs in government: sleepless nights with few public rewards. The White House says it's grateful Mueller has agreed to stay at a time of rapid change in the national security ranks.

Here's spokesman Jay Carney talking to reporters today.

Mr. JAY CARNEY (White House Press Secretary): Remember we have a change at CIA. We have a change at the Defense Department. This willingness of Director Mueller to continue to serve for two more years helps provide continuity which is important.

JOHNSON: The decision requires approval from Congress, but lawmakers from both political parties are already expressing support, so is the Justice Department. In a recent interview with NPR, Attorney General Eric Holder said nobody does it better.

Mr. ERIC HOLDER (Attorney General): Bob Mueller, I think, has been a great director in that he's understood both what his responsibilities are and what the limits are to that job.

JOHNSON: Holder and Vice President Joe Biden had been leading the search for Mueller's replacement. It hasn't been easy. A couple of high-profile candidates, Judge Merrick Garland and former Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey, said they weren't interested.

Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.

Military Crime Lab's Problems Widen

2011-05-16T15:34:00.000-07:00

By Marisa Taylor and Michael Doyle | McClatchy Newspapers

The military's premier crime lab has botched more of its evidence testing than has been previously known, raising broader questions about the quality of the forensic work relied on to convict soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

Now, the Supreme Court could weigh in, while two senators want the Pentagon to open a full-blown investigation. If they start looking, Pentagon officials will find that the crime lab's problems extend beyond one discredited analyst.

The scrutiny comes after McClatchy published a series of stories detailing how a former long-time forensics analyst at the Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory made false statements and mishandled dozens of tests.

A follow-up McClatchy investigation reveals that a second lab analyst, responsible for firearms, was quietly fired for making a false statement and destroying evidence. The lab subsequently had to review 541 firearms cases to make sure they were thorough, properly conducted and met legal requirements. Ultimately, officials determined that none of them needed full retesting.

More recently, a third lab analyst, who handles fingerprints, was found to have erred in at least three cases, one involving murder.

But the previously undisclosed problems go beyond discredited or flawed individual analysts. Some lab employees "do not like...(the) leadership style" of a top lab manager, an Army official conceded in a court deposition in March. Six formal discrimination or retaliation complaints have been filed against lab management in the past three years. One was filed by the lab's former chief attorney, who had helped oversee prior internal investigations into the lab's mistakes.

"The problem is not with just one person, but systemic," said David Sheldon, an attorney for a former Navy man who's challenging the lab's work in an appeal to the Supreme Court. "It's as if (the lab) has had no oversight, and one has to seriously question whether or not it can effectively police itself."

The Atlanta-based lab, commonly known as USACIL, serves all the military branches, handling evidence in more than 3,000 cases annually. The director, Larry Chelko, has been in charge since 1993.

On May 12, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, a Democrat, joined a Republican member of the committee in asking the Defense Department's inspector general to investigate the alleged misconduct of one analyst, Phillip Mills.

"Falsified lab tests could have contributed to criminals remaining free and innocent people being wrongfully convicted," wrote Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa. "The failure to address these issues in a timely manner could damage the nation's trust in the military justice system."

Lab officials have vigorously defended their oversight and the handling of mistakes and misconduct.

"As with all crime labs across the county, human error does occur from time to time," the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, which oversees the lab, said in a statement. "The control mechanisms designed to identify and correct those issues have proven very effective."

The Army added that the lab's leadership, including Chelko, handled the problems appropriately.

Still, lab officials have been close-mouthed with the news media and slow to inform defense attorneys about mistakes.

The lab never publicly acknowledged the extent of the problem with Mills' work. Many defense attorneys never learned of the massive retesting effort. When McClatchy asked whether other analysts had made mistakes, the military initially refused to say, acknowledging problems only when confronted with details obtained from outside sources.

The military also turned down or responded narrowly to numerous open records requests McClatchy filed that sought more information about Mills' cases, citing privacy rights.

Military officials say they can't comment in detail about the most recent mistakes for fear of tainting jurors. They also can't discuss the discrimination allegations because of privacy laws.

McClatchy pieced together a fuller picture after independently obtaining military documents and conducting dozens of interviews.

In March, McClatchy revealed the military's three-year, $1.4 million internal review of Mills' work. The reviewers disagreed with Mills' DNA results 55 percent of the time. More broadly, they found that Mills neglected tests and overlooked evidence. Making matters worse, officials found that evidence had been routinely destroyed by investigators in hundreds of other cases and therefore couldn't be retested. The investigators had been following policy at the time.

"The result," forensics analyst Robert Shaler noted in an independent review of the lab, "might have led to a miscarriage of justice."

While investigating Mills, lab officials learned of firearms analyst Michael Brooks' mistake.

Brooks had said he'd examined a hat for gunshot residue and concluded that the weapon had been fired at close range. His supervisor, however, later discovered the hat hadn't been tested. The victim allegedly had shot himself in the right temple, but the hole in the hat was on the left side.

Brooks, who could not be reached for comment, later destroyed evidence from the case file and lied about his actions, investigators concluded.

The lab fired him in 2006.

More recently, a latent fingerprint examiner has been found to have missed several fingerprints. The examiner isn't accused of misconduct, but her mistakes could cast doubt on the overall quality of the lab's work.

The examiner's mistakes came up earlier this year in a pre-indictment hearing of Army Spc. Neftaly Platero. He's accused of killing two of his 3rd Infantry Division roommates and wounding a third in Iraq last year.

The forensic evidence is especially important in Platero's case because the victim who survived doesn't remember the events, said Platero's attorney Guy Womack.

Womack received two separate fingerprint reports with troubling differences prepared by lab examiner Shauna Steffan. In the second report, she identified Platero's prints where she hadn't noticed them before. The lab wasn't required to directly inform Womack of the reasons for the disparity, but he uncovered it during cross-examination.

"I asked why it was retested," Womack said, "and she started squirming."

A review of Steffan's other work found that she'd made similar mistakes in two other cases, Womack said.

When contacted by McClatchy, Steffan said she was instructed not to talk to the media. The Army later said that Steffan didn't wish to be interviewed.

Full article can be found here.

Justice Department Asks Appeals Court To Reconsider Ruling Allowing Challenge To Warrantless Wiretapping Law

2011-05-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

From the ACLU:

The Justice Department late Thursday petitioned a federal appeals court to rehear a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the executive branch virtually unchecked power to collect Americans' international emails and telephone calls. In March, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously ruled the plaintiffs have the right to challenge the constitutionality of the law. Now the government wants all 11 judges of the appeals court to reconsider that ruling.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit in July 2008 on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights, labor, legal and media organizations whose work requires them to engage in sensitive and sometimes privileged telephone and email communications with colleagues, clients, journalistic sources, witnesses, experts, foreign government officials and victims of human rights abuses located outside the U.S. The Justice Department is arguing that the plaintiffs should not be able to sue without first showing that they have, in fact, been monitored under the program – information that the government refuses to provide.

"The Obama administration's effort to shield government surveillance programs from judicial review is disappointing and dangerous," said Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU, who argued the case before the appeals court. "If the administration's argument were to prevail, Americans' privacy rights would be left entirely to the mercy of the political branches. The appeals court should reject the administration's petition for rehearing and instead allow the trial court to evaluate the constitutionality of the surveillance statute our clients have challenged."

The government's latest request comes just after the FBI provided a surprising explanation for withholding information about its surveillance activities under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Despite a lawsuit by the ACLU, the government has refused to identify which telecommunications companies are facilitating the warrantless wiretapping program because, the FBI's court filing said, "The stigma of working with the FBI would cause customers to cancel the companies' services and file civil actions to prevent further disclosure of subscriber information." The filing added that such consequences would also prompt the companies themselves to resist taking part by filing lawsuits of their own.

"The government doesn't want Americans to know whether their internet or phone companies are cooperating with the government's dragnet surveillance program because people and businesses might file lawsuits asserting their constitutional rights," said Alexander Abdo, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "The government should not be withholding information simply to insulate its surveillance activities from judicial review. The courts have an important role to play in ensuring that government surveillance is consistent with the Constitution."

More information about the ACLU lawsuit challenging the FAA is available at: www.aclu.org/national-security/amnesty-et-al-v-clapper

More information about the FOIA lawsuit for records about the FAA, including the FBI's response, is available at: www.aclu.org/faa

Texas Man Exonerated by DNA

2011-05-13T14:28:00.000-07:00

A Texas man was freed Thursday after DNA exoneration in the latest Innocence Project victory and highlights the dangers of eyewitness misidentification. In 1984, two girls under the age of sixteen were on their way home from a store in their Dallas neighborhood when they were approached by a man wielding a gun. He took the girls to a nearby field and said he would shoot them if they did not comply and proceeded to tie them up and rape them. After the rape, the girls went to a nearby house where they called police. They were taken to the hospital and were later shown photo montages where they picked Johnny Pinchback out of the photos. Mr. Pinchback insisted he was innocent, however he was convicted in trial and was sentenced to 99 years imprisonment.

Mr. Pinchback never gave up and thanks to DNA evidence and the Innocence Project of Texas, he was determined to be innocent and will be released. Dallas County District Attorney had this to say:

"Thanks to the thorough investigation by our Conviction Integrity Unit and the continuous advances in DNA technology, Johnny Pinchback will regain his freedom as we have concluded that he did not commit this crime," Watkins says in a prepared statement. "As always, we seek justice on legitimate post-conviction claims of innocence to ensure we get to the truth, and when the truth reveals that an individual was wrongfully convicted, we take action to correct that injustice."

Pinchback, who is now 55, will become the 26th wrongfully imprisoned Dallas County man given his freedom in the past decade -- and the 22nd cleared by DNA evidence since 2001.

Full story here

Eyewitness Identification - Getting it Right

2011-05-09T23:28:00.000-07:00

False Confession Information

2011-05-05T18:17:00.000-07:00

Wondering whether you have a false confession on a case? Worried about a coerced confession? Need a false confession expert? Look no further than False Confessions.org. The website is an information gem that includes sections about how false confessions happen, case notes from actual false confession cases, information on experts, and information on confession reform. The site further has a blog with updates on false confession cases including media links to current cases and information. Of particular use is the research section which includes briefing on cases. Additionally, the expert section has a detailed list of experts that includes contact information, links to articles the experts have published, and cases of note the experts have worked on.

Scene Preservation for Court using I-Pad

2011-05-05T18:03:00.000-07:00

Have an I-Pad, I-Phone, or other smart device? You can use Google Maps with street view and the Screenshot feature when you are talking to a witness in order to look at the "scene" if you are interviewing the witness away from the scene. While it is not a substitute for actually visiting the scene, this can be a handy device for showing a witness a layout. With the I-Pad, you could even have the witness write or "sign" their statement or a photograph of a scene using one of the many note apps that are available. Two blogs in particular have really good examples of these techniques: I-Phone J.D. and Walking Office. Each of these sites have numerous tips for the savvy I-Pad/I-Phone equipped investigator or attorney.

Protect Your Rights: Learn the Rules for Dealing with the Police

2011-04-29T11:05:00.000-07:00

From the ACLU:

Do you have to allow a police officer to search your car when you are stopped for a traffic violation? Are you required to identify yourself to a police officer if you are not driving a car? Can you videotape a police officer arresting someone in public?

Encounters with the police can be stressful experiences - even for people who have done nothing wrong. Take this short quiz and learn to protect your rights in dealing with the police.

Take the Quiz

iPhone, iPad Tracking Causes Alarm

2011-04-21T15:05:00.000-07:00

By Jordan Roberston from Forbes:

Privacy watchdogs are demanding answers from Apple about why iPhones and iPads are collecting location data about their users.

Full article can be found here.

The most recent dust-up, prompted by a report at a technology conference in Santa Clara, Calif., raises questions about how much privacy consumers surrender by carrying around a smartphone and the responsibility of the smartphone makers to protect sensitive data that flows through their devices.

Researchers emphasize that there's no evidence that Apple Inc. itself has access to this data - it apparently stays on the device itself and the computers the data is backed up to. Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment by The Associated Press.

Full article can be found here.

Gadget Gives Cops Quick Access to Cell Phone Data

2011-04-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

By Bob Sullivan

The "Universal Forensic Extraction Device" sounds like the perfect cell phone snooping gadget.

Its maker, Israel-based Cellbrite, says it can copy all the content in a cell phone -- including contacts, text messages, call history, and pictures -- within a few minutes. Even deleted texts and other data can be restored by UFED 2.0, the latest version of the product, it says.

And it really is a universal tool. The firm says UFED works with 3,000 cell phone models, representing 95 percent of the handset market. Coming soon, the firm says UFED works with 3,000 cell phone models, representing 95 percent of the handset market. Coming soon, the firm says on its website: "Additional major breakthroughs, including comprehensive iPhone physical solution; Android physical support – allowing bypassing of user lock code, (Windows Phone) support, and much more." For good measure, UFEC can extract information from GPS units in most cars.

The gadget isn't a stalker's dream; it's an evidence-gathering tool for law enforcement. Cellbrite claims it’s already in use in 60 countries.

That apparently includes the U.S. The American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan says it has learned that state police there have purchased some of the gadgets. What is it doing with them? So far, Michigan authorities aren't telling. A public records request for information by the ACLU was met with a prohibitive $500,000 bill to cover the supposed cost of making the documents available.

"They did produce documents which confirmed that they have them," said Mark Fancher, a staff attorney at the ACLU office. "We have no idea what they are doing with them."

Technology and the Fourth Amendment have had a rocky relationship. When The Founding Fathers created protections against unlimited search and seizure, they never imagined the kind of tools that would be available to 21st century police officers.

Cell phone data is an indispensible tool in both investigations and prosecutions. A drug dealer's contact list is an obvious treasure trove. Location information stored in the phone can prove (or disprove) an alibi. Texts are at least as valuable as emails. Increasingly, smartphone s are used as mini-laptops, placing even more ready-made evidence in one small package -- as long as law enforcement can get to it before it's destroyed.

Because handsets are nearly always with suspects, it's easy for a would-be criminal to delete information during a traffic stop. Remote wiping programs exist that mean critical evidence could be destroyed even after a police officer takes possession of a suspect's phone. That means law enforcement official s have great interest in slurping up all the secrets that a handset might contain as quickly as possible. Enter Cellbrite.

But how fast is too fast? Fancher and the ACLU argue that most cell phone searches are an invasion of privacy that requires law enforcement officials to get a court order before rummaging through a suspect's handset data. While UFED could be used after an order is obtained, its obvious focus is on time-critical searches -- those that would occur, for example, right after a "routine traffic stop."

Full article can be found here.

2011 NDIA National Conference

2011-04-21T14:58:00.000-07:00

This year the 2011 NDIA National Conference will be held April 28-29, 2011 at:

The Huntington Beach Hyatt Regency
21500 Pacific Coast Highway
Huntington Beach, California 92648
Telephone: 714/698-1234
Fax: 714/845-4990
www.huntingtonbeach.hyatt.com

Introduction to the 2011 National Conference by Sean Broderick
Current 2011 National Conference Agenda
2011 National Conference Registration Form
Conference At-A-Glance

Room Rate: $123 per diem OR prevailing Government per diem rate
Room Reservations Telephone: 714/698-1234
(Refer to NDIA Group Meeting when making reservations)

Check-In: 4:00 p.m.
Check-Out: 11:00 a.m.

Deadline for Hotel Reservations: April 8, 2011!

Justice Department challenges ruling on GPS use - Washington Times

2011-04-17T23:26:00.000-07:00

The debate over warrantless GPS monitoring continues. (See previous posts here). The latest news? The Department of Justice has filed a Petition of Certiorari asking the United States Supreme Court to review the ruling of the Court of Appeals in Maynard v. United States. The U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. in the Tenth Circuit held police can’t use global positioning satellite (GPS) technology to track a suspect’s car without getting a warrant. The full court, in a 5-4 decision last fall, refused to reconsider the decision. Now, the Justice Department is requesting that the Supreme Court accept Certiorari. The Court of Appeals expressed a distinction between a person "exposing" themselves in public on roadways, and police tracking that reveals all the places a person may travel over the course of a month:

In the August 6, 2010 decision, Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote, "It is one thing for a passerby to observe or even follow someone during a single journey, . . . it is another thing for a stranger to [dog] his prey until he has identified all the places, people, amusements, and chores
that make up that person‘s hitherto private routine.”

The Justice Department now requests that this be considered by the Supreme Court:

“Prompt resolution of this conflict is critically important to law enforcement efforts throughout the United States,” government attorneys argued in their petition. “The court of appeals’ decision seriously impedes the governments’ use of GPS devices at the beginning stages of an investigation when officers are gathering evidence …”

Attorneys for Jones, who remains in prison, argued that federal authorities violated Jones‘ reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment when they used a GPS device to track his movements.

“This is an issue over which a philosophically diverse appellate panel and a majority of the full court agreed,” Stephen C. Leckar, Jones‘ appeals attorney, said after the Justice Department filing.

“The public has a constitutional right that a neutral magistrate will decide in advance whether the police can secretly install in your car an extraordinarily intrusive device that will record relentlessly every seven to 10 seconds where you’ve traveled for over a month,” Mr. Leckar said. “To allow anything less would encourage further erosion of the Fourth Amendment, whose purpose was to curb such abuses of power.”

The issue is heating up elsewhere in the Supreme Court where a Petition was filed by the defendant challenging a Ninth Circuit ruling in United States v. Pineda-Moreno where the Ninth Circuit held that such a GPS tracking did not violate the Fourth Amendment. The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that such a track was not a search. The Ninth Circuit was asked to consider the case en banc and Judge Kozinski wrote an eloquent dissent, available here Circuit Court order denying en banc review, together with a vigorous dissent, is here.. The Supreme Court case, is filed under Pineda-Moreno v. United States, docket 10-7515. [petition available here].
Additional reporting available at Washington Post here or Inside GNSS here.
Stay tuned and keep preserving the issue of the GPS tracking in motions and investigation work.

Sometimes We Need a Little Boost

2011-04-13T23:14:00.000-07:00

AT&T Subpoena Compliance

2011-04-05T12:52:00.000-07:00

Mobility subpoenas should be addressed to AT&T and submitted to:

AT&T Subpoena Center

208 S. Akard St., 10th Floor M

Dallas, Texas 75202

Contact Number: (800) 291-4952

Fax: (877) 971-6093

Hours of Operation: Monday – Friday 8:00 am – 5:00 pm CT

Additional AT&T Contact Information

The website below provides general information related to the landline subpoena process and also facilitates an online process whereby landline subpoenas can be submitted. Please do not use the website below for Mobility subpoenas, this will delay the return of records requested.

www.att.com/subpoena

Subpoena requests for AT&T Internet Services, Inc. should be directed to:

AT&T Internet Services

Legal Compliance Group

1010 N. St. Mary’s Street

Room 315-A2

San Antonio, TX 78215

Contact : (210) 351-5219

Fax: (707) 435-6409

The AT&T National Compliance Center in North Palm Beach, Florida, will retain responsibility for all Mobility Court Orders, 911, and other legal process compliance work functions.

AT&T National Compliance Center

11760 US Highway One

Mailstop: Suite 600

North Palm Beach, FL 33408

Contact : 800‐635‐6840

Fax #: 888‐938‐4715