Supreme Court Takes Bong Hits 4 Jesus

Decomposition of Baby Pigs

The technique of time-lapse photography is employed to illustrate the rapid removal of carrion (4 days reduced to approximately 6 minutes). The film demonstrates the sequence of tissue destruction and the role of insects in the ultimate dismemberment of the pig carcass and soil movement. The pink and purple beads were added to show the intense activities of the insects in moving the carcass and soil.

Payne writes..."My study was the first "detailed" study of succession in animal decomposition and the first with the pig as the model. The significance of the pig is that it closely approximates the human body (skin, body hair, size etc.) so the data generated could be used in modern forensic science to approximate the time of human deaths. At that time it was simply not possibly (moral/ethical/legal concerns) to perform decompositon studies with human corpses, I know because I tried and was denied. Even so there were many instances where some concerned person buried my research pigs."

The pigs used in the experiment were dead when Jerry Payne picked them up from local farmers. Mama pigs (sows) often lay down on their tiny piglets and crush them. This was very common on small farms and led to the invention and deployment of farrowing pens(birthing pens) where the sow is contained and the piglets have a heated space where they are not in danger of being crushed.

Flies have four life stages: adult (the fly), egg, larva (the maggot) and pupa. Maggots crawl into dark, secluded places to pupate (the stage where they undergo the transformation from maggot to adult). Since the maggots are white or cream colored they are easily seen and taken by predators. Going undergroundand away from the carcass offers protection from uv light and predators and allows them seclusion to pupate. This pupal stage is immobile. Maggots don't have to burrow into the soil as they could easily conceal themselves in leaf litter or any decayed organic material.

Shoulder Surfing

With new discoveries come new information! Here is an article from previously mentioned "Crime and Clues" that focuses on the phenomenon of shoulder surfing, or people gathering information from a computer user or cell phone caller by hanging from the eaves. Imagine yourself in a coffee shop using your laptop to check your bank balance. The person at the next table might be "shoulder surfing" to get valuable information including account numbers, log in information etc. Shoulder surfing can be even more invasive and can happen from co-workers, competitors, or even law enforcement or opposing counsel in litigation. An excerpt from the article (full article here)

Due to a job requiring extensive travel or simply due to a lack of office space, many companies can chose to have an individual perform their work while away on a business trip or at home. Connecting to work from an off-site location by way of 'remote access' is fairly common these days. All the employee needs to connect up to his/her home office is a computer with a modem, the proper telephone number or website to access the company's system/network, a user name and a password [5]. To an employee, off-site access may be an extremely convenient tool. However, if information about how to access a company's system/network is in plain view on an employee's computer system, this can be extremely dangerous. To a shoulder surfer glancing by, this information can be very valuable if this particular attacker wanted to gain access to information about that company.

At your place of employment you might even be at risk. Co-workers might be curious as to the activities you engage in on your computer. If their jobs require that they do different tasks then you, they may want to learn how you do your job. They may want to look at the programs you utilize to perform your job. Even worse, they may want to check your e-mail accounts. These are all possible motives of the shoulder surfer who may just be around the corner in the next cubicle.

"Crime and Clues": Cool name, informative site

Just came across "Crime and Clues", a very informative site with information on death investigation, computer forensics, digital evidence, demonstrative evidence, a training calendar, and a YouTube channel. Appears to be a good resource with many informative articles.

Good (sort of) Guantánamo News

Today, the Senate voted to table an amendment proposed by Senator James Inhofe (R-Ok). The Inhofe Amendment would have prohibited the Department of Defense from using funds under the bill to modify or construct any facilities in the United States for the holding of Guantánamo detainees, including those charged, tried or convicted in federal court. The ACLU and a number of partners wrote to the Senate urging the defeat of this amendment because if it passed, it would present additional challenges to Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute Guantánamo detainees in federal criminal courts rather than the never-land of the military tribunal. Additionally, it would have put front-line law enforcement and corrections officials at needless risk by eliminating the ability to enhance security or communications at facilities holding detainees during their trials.
For more information, click here.

Job Posting of the Week

Fantasy Job of the Week:

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ
Grateful Dead Archivist
The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position. The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA). The UCSC University Library utilizes innovative approaches to allow the discovery, use, management, and sharing of information in support of research, teaching, and learning.
Under the general direction of the Head of Special Collections and Archives, the GDA Archivist will provide managerial and curatorial oversight of the Grateful Dead Archive, plan for and oversee the physical and digital processing of Archives related material, and promote the GDA to the public and facilitate its use by scholars, fans,and students.

Report Calls Out Flaws In The Public Defender System

The American legal system guarantees "equal justice under law." Those words, carved in stone on the facade of the Supreme Court, are a constitutional promise that everyone will have the same opportunity for justice.

But a new report by the bipartisan Constitution Project says the United States has broken that promise for poor people accused of crimes. The report is the most in-depth study of indigent defense in decades.

Listen to the story here.

Eyewitness Evidence: Improving Its Probative Value

From Psychological Science in the Public Interest:

The criminal justice system relies heavily on eyewitnesses to determine the facts surrounding criminal events. Eyewitnesses may identify culprits, recall conversations, or remember other details. An eyewitness who has no motive to lie is a powerful form of evidence for jurors, especially if the eyewitness appears to be highly confident about his or her recollection. In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, the eyewitness’s account is generally accepted by police, prosecutors, judges, and juries.

However, the faith the legal system places in eyewitnesses has been shaken recently by the advent of forensic DNA testing. Given the right set of circumstances, forensic DNA testing can prove that a person who was convicted of a crime is, in fact, innocent. Analyses of DNA exoneration cases since 1992 reveal that mistaken eyewitness identification was involved in the vast majority of these convictions, accounting for more convictions of innocent people than all other factors combined. We review the latest figures on these DNA exonerations and explain why these cases can only be a small fraction of the mistaken identifications that are occurring.

Decades before the advent of forensic DNA testing, psychologists were questioning the validity of eyewitness reports. Hugo Mu¨nsterberg’s writings in the early part of the 20th century made a strong case for the involvement of psychological science in helping the legal system understand the vagaries of eyewitness testimony. But it was not until the mid- to late 1970s that psychologists began to conduct programmatic experiments aimed at understanding the extent of error and the variables that govern error when eyewitnesses give accounts of crimes they have witnessed. Many of the experiments conducted in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s resulted in articles by psychologists that contained strong warnings to the legal system that eyewitness evidence was being overvalued by the justice system in the sense that its impact on triers of fact (e.g., juries) exceeded its probative (legal-proof) value. Another message of the research was that the validity of eyewitness reports depends a great deal on the procedures that are used to obtain those reports and that the legal system was not using the best procedures.

Full paper by Gary L. Wells, Amina Memon, and Steven D. Penrod can be found here.

A Sonic Silver Bullet for Fighting Crime

Gunshot monitoring technology scores big with local police.

From CNN.com:

Police surveillance cameras can make civil libertarians queasy. But what if cops could listen for dangerous crime instead of watching?

Enter ShotSpotter, a Mountain View, Calif., company that has installed microphones on telephone poles in 45 cities and counties across the U.S. with few complaints from local citizens.

ShotSpotter monitors only one thing: gunshots. Its microphones can detect a gunshot from a mile or more away. The system determines the exact location of each shot using triangulation and wirelessly transmits a recording of the sound to police dispatchers. Today ShotSpotter monitors about 125 square miles with 900,000 inhabitants and charges $25,000 per square mile of coverage. The company is expanding, with 50 employees and counting.

The system was installed in San Francisco late last year as part of a crime-fighting initiative. Since the beginning of the year, the city's homicide rate has dropped 50%.

According to the San Francisco Police Department, the microphones have already had a deterrent effect. "There's an understanding within the criminal element of the technology, and I think that's causing incidents to decrease," says Lt. Mikail Ali, who oversees monitoring of the two-square-mile area covered.

CEO James Beldock, 34, who took over the company from scientist founder Robert Showen in 2004, was struggling with anemic growth until he acquired a small wireless company in 2005. That let ShotSpotter lose the cumbersome telephone wiring required by earlier versions of the technology.

ShotSpotter's clients include the U.S. Army, which has been testing the system in Iraq. As a result, the Commerce Department classified the microphones as military munitions, which meant that they couldn't be exported. But Beldock fought back, spending roughly $500,000 on lawyers and consultants. "Night-vision goggles went through the same thing 15 years ago," he shrugs.

It paid off: ShotSpotter won the right to pitch its product to police chiefs around the world. Its first target: Brazil, another country with a history of major gun violence.

Full article here.

Court Deputy Lifts Papers From Defense Attorney’s File

Talk about egregious abuses. A Maricopa County, AZ court deputy blithely wanders over to the defense attorney’s table and takes documents from her files - on camera.

This is pretty egregious. The guy is throwing out a lot of excuses, but it’s hard to imagine any justification for this (the bizarre stuff starts about 1:30 in):



From The Victorious Opposition:

Cuccia was justifiably upset, and requested a hearing. That hearing was last week. According to freelance journalist Nick Martin, who writes at the Heat City blog, Stoddard’s story changed several times over the course of the hearing. His main defense was apparently that he spotted “keywords” on the document that made him think it contained threats to the courtroom. The problem with that story is that if you watch the video, he swiped the document from the middle of the file. It wasn’t lying in open view. Which leaves open the question of why, in open court, he went snooping through a defense attorney’s file in the first place.

...

It gets weirder. According to Heat City, the purpose of Friday’s hearing was to determine if Stoddard had violated the attorney-client privilege of Cuccia’s client, Antonio Lozano, and/or if Stoddard should be held in contempt of court. But Judge Gary Donahoe ruled that because the swiped document itself is protected by attorney-client privilege Stoddard wouldn’t be able to mount his “keyword” defense, because the contents of the document can’t be divulged. According to Heat City, Donahoe said Lozano would have to wave attorney-client privilege if he wanted to proceed with the hearing on whether Stoddard violated his rights.

If this is an accurate portrayal of the hearing, stand back and admire the absurdity: Judge Donahoe is refusing to punish Stoddard for possibly violating Lozano’s attorney-client privilege unless Lozano waives his attorney-client privilege.

“I think you can be a law-and-order leader and still understand that the criminal justice system as we understand it today is broken.”

From The Atlantic: After squeaking into his seat in 2006, Webb became an activist for prison reform—an issue almost universally unpopular among voters, especially in a tough-on-crime state like Virginia. He introduced a bill in March that would establish a commission to review the nation’s prison system. A small step, certainly. But he’s taking on public apathy and a thriving privatized-prison industry that houses nearly 10 percent of federal and state prisoners and lobbies politicians with vigor. Webb has called our prison system a “national disgrace,” and he’s right: the U.S. incarcerates 2.3 million people (25 percent of the planet’s prisoners), and monitors another 5 million on probation or parole (more than 60 percent of whom will end up back in the clink). Huge numbers of inmates are mentally ill and more than 20 percent have been sexually abused while locked up; meanwhile the number of drug offenders behind bars (where they take up scarce space and resources) has increased by 1,200 percent since 1980. By tackling prison reform as a freshman senator, Webb has shown he possesses two things vanishingly rare in Congress: a conscience and a spine.

Jim Webb: He’s Taking on the Nation’s Neglected Prison System.