18 posts tagged “crime”
All firearms investigations temporarily suspended
BY ERIC D. LAWRENCE and BEN SCHMITT
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS
April 26, 2008
The Wayne County Prosecutor's Office plans to review a year's worth of Detroit criminal cases involving firearms amid concerns raised about the accuracy of police ballistics testing.
The case that caused the review is the May 27 shooting deaths of two men sitting in a car on Detroit's east side.
The Detroit Police Department's crime lab tests showed 42 shell casings were fired by the same weapon, while two other tests showed that the casings came from at least two weapons, Chief Ella Bully-Cummings said at a Friday news conference.
Now, Detroit attorney Marvin Barnett, who first discovered the error, said thousands of appeals could be forthcoming in criminal cases.
"This is a very serious matter," Maria Miller, a spokeswoman for Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, said Friday. "That's why Prosecutor Worthy took immediate action."
A source told the Free Press Friday that federal authorities would be called in if any evidence of criminality is turned up. At the moment, however, the problem appears to have resulted from sloppy work performed by a former employee, the source said.
Miller said the results from the office's review will be made available to every defense attorney involved.
At the news conference, Bully-Cummings announced she was suspending all firearms testing through the department's crime lab pending an audit from the Michigan State Police.
While it has not been determined which agencies will handle firearms testing for Detroit police during the suspension, State Police and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will be assisting, said George Krappmann, a spokesman for the ATF.
Barnett said he initially asked Detroit police to retest the casings, and they refused. He then tested the equipment with his own investigator. Barnett said he has found discrepancies in three other cases involving firearms and one drug case.
The State Police crime lab's findings confirmed Barnett's tests, Miller said.
"It's devastating, because if you have one bad lab, it just spoils the whole bunch," Barnett said.
By ADAM LIPTAK
The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2008
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)
San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.
The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)
The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.
The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.
There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.
Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice.
Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.
It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.
“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”
No more.
“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”
Prison sentences here have become “vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,” Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in “The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.”
Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”
The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)
The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.
“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher.”
Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.
But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.
People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.
Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.
Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.
Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them “are among the most serious and violent offenders.”
Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.
Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mr. Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.
Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation’s prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.
Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.
“Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year in “Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective.”
“It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,” Mr. Tonry wrote. “Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.”
The American character — self-reliant, independent, judgmental — also plays a role.
“America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility,” Mr. Whitman of Yale wrote. “That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years.”
French-speaking countries, by contrast, have “comparatively mild penal policies,” Mr. Tonry wrote.
Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.
“Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas,” said Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)
Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America’s exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.
“As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized” thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.
From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.
“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”
Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”
There is a counterexample, however, to the north. “Rises and falls in Canada’s crime rate have closely paralleled America’s for 40 years,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year. “But its imprisonment rate has remained stable.”
Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.
Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.
Mr. Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville’s work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America’s booming prison population.
“Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about,” he said. “We have a highly politicized criminal justice system.”
Saturday, March 15, 2008
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) -- An 83-year-old great-grandmother thwarted a would-be purse snatcher with a gas nozzle and an iron grip.
Bernie Garcia said a young man approached her at a gas station as she was buying fuel for her van and asked for money. When she told him she had spent all her spare change on gas, he tried to grab her purse.
"But I had it wrapped around my wrist twice," Garcia said, and he was unable to pull it away.
She fought back, spraying his shirt with some gasoline. Both of them kept hold of the purse, and he pulled her to the ground and dragged her a short distance until another man confronted him.
The second man demanded, "Turn her loose, you something something," Garcia said.
The would-be mugger jumped into a nearby vehicle and fled. But a witness got the license plate number, and minutes later, police stopped the car. It had been reported stolen from Espanola, said Santa Fe Deputy Police Chief Aric Wheeler.
Garcia and a witness identified one of the men inside as the attacker. He and two other men in the car were charged with robbery and conspiracy.
"They got caught and I'm so glad," Garcia said.
She said she felt fine after the attack, and police say she declined medical attention at the scene. But when she got home, she said, she felt faint and went to bed and woke up Thursday very sore. Her son, a former firefighter, checked her out and found no broken bones.
"My son said, `Why didn't you just give (the purse) up?'" Garcia said. "`Hell no,' I told him. That was my purse. I was fighting for what was mine."
By MAGGIE MICHAEL
The Associated Press
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Egyptian police confiscated four ancient mummies on Wednesday and arrested three antiquities smugglers who had stolen them from an ancient graveyard, a security official said.
Wrapped in layers of linen and decorated with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, the mummies were found in the southern province of Minya, 135 miles south of Cairo, the official said on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press.
The three smugglers also were found with 10 small ancient statues. They confessed that they had planned to sell the objects to antiquities brokers, the official said.
The mummies are of a child and three men, but no further details were available, the official said. Archeologists were summoned to check the mummies, he added.
Egypt has drastically stepped up efforts in recent years to stop the trafficking of its antiquities. It has warned foreign museums that it will not help them mount exhibitions on ancient Egypt unless they return smuggled artifacts.
By Ruben Castaneda
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Former Prince George's County homeland security official Keith A. Washington, jailed awaiting sentencing for fatally shooting a furniture deliveryman and wounding another, was found last week with a handcuff key and had a "clear intention of escaping," according to court papers filed by prosecutors.
A Prince George's jail spokeswoman said yesterday that officials were investigating how Washington, who is also a former police officer, obtained the key. Law enforcement officials said that handcuff keys are generally universal and that the key probably could have opened any handcuffs.
According to the court papers, correctional officers discovered the key in the pocket of Washington's jail shirt Thursday, three days after he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and other crimes. Washington, 46, resisted being strip-searched before being taken to the Calvert County jail, where he was being transferred for his safety, according to the papers.
"The shirt was 'pulled' from the defendant's grip and the handcuff key was found in the pocket of the defendant's jail shirt," prosecutors wrote. "Defendant stated that he found the handcuff key approximately two hours earlier and placed same in his pocket."
The papers were filed in opposition to a request by Washington's attorneys that he be released on home detention pending sentencing, which is scheduled for April 23.
In the filing, Assistant State's Attorneys William D. Moomau, Joseph Wright and Raemarie Zanzucchi wrote that the possession of the handcuff key shows Washington is a flight risk. "Defendant's actions further show his danger to the community as the possession of a handcuff key reflects a clear intention of escaping his current circumstances," they wrote.
Yesterday, in a brief written order, Circuit Court Judge Michael P. Whalen denied the defense request.
Whalen revoked Washington's bond and ordered him taken into custody Feb. 25, the day a Prince George's jury convicted him of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of first-degree assault and two counts of using a handgun in the commission of a felony. The jury acquitted Washington of second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder.
State's Attorney Glenn F. Ivey said yesterday he was "shocked" to learn that Washington had a key. "I thought this kind of thing only happened on shows like 'Prison Break' -- evidently not."
Washington's attorneys did not return phone calls yesterday.
An investigation is underway to try to determine how Washington obtained the key, said Vicki D. Duncan, a spokeswoman for the county Department of Corrections. Duncan said she could not comment further because of the investigation.
Police Chief Melvin C. High suspended Washington's police powers and ordered him to turn in his police gun last April. High took the action after Washington was accused of brandishing his handgun at a home appraiser who said he mistakenly knocked on the door of the officer's home in Accokeek.
At the time he surrendered his service weapon, Washington was also required to turn in whatever police equipment he had, said Officer Henry Tippett, a police spokesman. If Washington had police handcuffs and a key, he would have been required to turn those in, Tippett said.
On Jan. 24, 2007, Washington shot the deliverymen at his home in what he said was self-defense.
Deliveryman Brandon Clark, 22, died nine days later. Robert White, now 37, was severely wounded but recovered. He was a key prosecution witness at Washington's trial last month.
After the shooting, Washington left the homeland security department, where he was a deputy director. Several months ago, he was granted medical disability and retired from the police department, where he was a corporal.
22 arrests, more than 400,000 pieces of porn seized
By LARA JAKES JORDAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 5, 2008
WASHINGTON — After James Freeman was vetted and approved for membership in what police describe as a highly sophisticated child porn network, he expressed his appreciation by posting two folders online: one labeled "mild," the other "wild."
"All I can say is that they are worth the download," wrote Freeman, 47, known in the global porn ring as “Mystikal," according to court documents. "My thanks to you and all the others that together make this the greatest group of pedos ever to gather in one place."
Freeman, of Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., was one of 12 Americans indicted last week in a worldwide investigation that ultimately charged 22 people with participating in the porn ring — and intentionally blocking police from investigating it.
In all, more than 400,000 pictures, video files and other images showing children engaged in sexual behavior were produced, advertised, traded and distributed globally in the online pornography ring, according to U.S. and international authorities. The sting, which started in Australia, also netted accused pornographers in England, Canada and Germany.
Some victims were as young as five years old. Others were preyed upon for innocent characteristics such as wearing their hair in pigtails.
Authorities won’t say how they eventually broke through several layers of encryption, background checks and other security measures the pornographers used to protect their online user group from being accessed. The porn ring was run like a business, FBI executive assistant director J. Stephen Tidwell said today, with the lewd images used as currency instead of cash.
"This is beyond a quantum exponential leap for us to see folks that have gone to this much trouble to produce this kind of volume of horrific exploitation of children," Tidwell said in an interview.
So far, authorities have identified and rescued 20 of the children who were exploited, he said, adding: "But with 400,000 (images) we’re going to be at this for years, trying to find the victims."
Australian investigators first discovered the ring and infiltrated it undercover in January 2006, said Ross Barnett, detective chief superintendent with the Queensland Police Service. Those who gained access to the online forum could only after passing a series of what Tidwell called "various benchmarks and bars to get over to get into their group."
"From our perspective, it’s definitely the largest and most sophisticated and disciplined group that we have ever seen operating in this environment," Barnett said.
A 35-count indictment unsealed Friday in U.S. District Court in Pensacola, Fla., details conversations among the 12 men accused of trading and advertising the pornography. Two other Americans were also arrested in connection with the ring but not included in the indictment.
The men were charged in 11 states: California, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington. They all used aliases, such as "Box of Rocks," "Crazy Horse," "Lizzard" and "Pickleman."
In one example cited in the indictment, 54-year-old Raymond Roy of San Juan Capistrano, Calif., posted videos of Thai children "to give everyone something to do for an afternoon."
"This one may offend here, so a word of caution, these girls are heavily drugged," Roy, known as "Nimo," wrote on July 10, 2007, according to the court documents. "Not much action to speak of, the girls are (sic) to (expletive deleted) up to move, or resist. Three girls, the first one being the youngest, around 8 or 9 yo."
"Yo" stands for "years old."
The 12 men were charged with engaging in a child exploitation enterprise; illegally posting notices seeking to receive, exchange and distribute child porn across state lines; and obstructing of justice. Several also were charged with producing the pornography — meaning they had contact with the children who were exploited, Tidwell said.
The investigation, which is continuing, is the latest product of the FBI’s "Innocent Images" task force that stemmed from a 1993 child pornography case. The task force has arrested more than 9,400 suspects since 2004 and is made up of international investigators working in the United States from an FBI command center in suburban Maryland.
Noting the sophisticated process the porn ring used to bar police, Tidwell compared the growing number of child pornography crimes to that of cocaine dealers, terrorists and the Mafia.
"If they had good operational security, that’s a bad thing for us," Tidwell said. "When you’ve got that, you’ve got a real challenge for law enforcement."
The Yankistani bastards are:
Michael Berger, 33, of Mechanicsville, Va.
James Freeman, 47, of Santa Rosa Beach, Fla.
Ruble Keys, 55, of Medford, Ore.
Gary Lakey, 54, of Anderson, Ind.
Marvin Lambert, 33, of Indianapolis.
Neville McGarity, 40, of Medina, Texas.
John Mosman, 46, of Waterbury, Conn.
Warren Mumpower, 63, of Spokane, Wash.
Raymond Roy, 54, of San Juan Capistrano, Calif.
Erik Wayerski, 46, of Round Rock, Texas.
Warren Weber, 56, of Boise, Idaho.
Ronald White, 59, of Burlington, N.C.
3/01/2008
ROSEVILLE, Mich. (AP) - Authorities say a 13-year-old boy stabbed his 16-year-old brother in the back in Roseville.
The Detroit News reports police in the Detroit suburb were called Friday following a report of a domestic disturbance.
The 16-year-old was treated for the stab wound, which police say was not life-threatening. The 13-year-old was taken into custody.
Authorities say the boys were arguing over money.
Few places are as ineptly named as Roseville, Michigan. Anyone else remember the cockroach invasion of Roseville during the 70s or 80s? That and the above story are quite illustrative of the vibe there.
Wed Feb 27, 2008
by Dave Graham
BERLIN (Reuters) - An elderly German who hid a stolen suit under his clothes was caught because he forgot to take it off the hanger, police said Wednesday.
A sales assistant at a men's outfitter in the western city of Aachen noticed the hanger bulging out when the man told her he had decided against buying anything.
"Only a sign saying 'stop me, I'm a thief!' would have made the thief look more unprofessional," police said in a statement.
Four Deputies Suspended
February 13, 2008
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- Four sheriff's deputies have been suspended after a paralyzed man was tipped out of his wheelchair at a Florida jail.
Jail surveillance footage from Jan. 29 shows a veteran deputy dumping Brian Sterner out of his wheelchair and searching him on the floor after he was brought in on a warrant after a traffic violation.
Sterner said that when he was taken into a booking room and told to stand up, the deputy grew agitated when he told her he could not.
Sterner can drive a car but has not been able to walk since a 1994 wrestling accident. He has partial use of his arms.
The deputy seen tipping the wheelchair has been suspended without pay. Three others are on administrative leave.
The chief deputy said the officers' actions were "indefensible" and "anything short of dismissal would be inappropriate."
Sterner's lawyer hopes there's a criminal investigation.
by Guo Shipeng and Benjamin Kang Lim
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
BEIJING (Reuters) - A police chief in north China shot dead a senior local Communist Party official and a woman before killing himself, fanning speculation of a seamy corruption scandal that has drawn huge interest and is likely to alarm Beijing.
Wang Zhiping, deputy Party chief of Hohhot, capital of the northern region of Inner Mongolia, and a female tax official were found dead in his office on February 5, Caijing magazine said.
Wang, 54, a former soldier, was gunned down by Guan Liuru, police chief of Hohhot's economic development zone, Caijing said in a report on its Web site (www.caijing.com.cn) on Wednesday.
"An investigation team from the Ministry of Public Security has been sent to Hohhot," said the report, which was republished by major news portals, including state news agency www.xinhuanet.com.
A Hong Kong-based rights watchdog, the Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, also reported the scandal which is likely to alarm officials in Beijing obsessed with stability and their own clean image.
Guan's motive was not immediately known.
China has seen a series of violent crimes involving senior officials in recent years as corruption becomes a rampant problem, one that the Party says will threaten its own survival if not curbed.
In September 2007, Duan Yihe, former head of the local legislature in Jinan, capital city of the eastern Shandong province, was executed for blowing up his mistress with a car bomb.
