Crime and Consequences

An Arsonist Turns to Stalking. Today on sfgate.com Gene Johnson, from Associated Press, writes that Allen Parmelee is spending the remainder of his 24-year sentence digging up information on the judges, lawyers and police officers that put him behind bars. Under Washington’s state Public Records Act, anyone has the right to petition records that are public. However, King County Prosecutor, Dan Satterberg is not only trying to deny him access to the records, but have a judge bar him for petitioning any more records.
Parmelee was convicted at his second trial for first-degree arson. His first trial ended in a mistrial because Parmelee had personal information about the jurors. Since his conviction, Parmelee has been gathering more information such as schedules, pay, photos and even addresses about deputies and other criminal justice officials.

Death Penalty: Tom Fahey writes on unionleader.com that Senator Joseph Kenney, R-Wakefield, sponsored SB 344 to expand New Hampshire's death penalty. Current law allows a death penalty for murder during a rape or kidnapping, killing a police officer or judge, murder for hire, a murder during a drug deal or by someone already serving life without parole. Kenney wants to expand the law to apply to multiple murders and attempted multiple killings.
Michel Woodbury shot and killed three men in a robbery July 2007. Jennifer Walker Blake, sister of one of the victims, supports the bill because under current law, her brother's killer cannot be sentenced to death. She says “Victims were murdered because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

No Guns for the Mentally Ill. According to the Psychiatric News, the federal government may fund the tracking of those who have been to a psychiatric hospital to prevent them from purchasing guns. The sponsor of the new law Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) has also been the victim of the mentally ill gunman who killed her husband on a commute train 14 years ago. Advocates believe that the new law could have prevented the 32 deaths last year at Virginia Tech if it was passed sooner. However, the bill will not require background checks at private sales and at gun shows. In the article, Paul Appelbaum, M.D, chair of the APA states that people with mental illness only contribute to 3-5 percent of gun crimes. Also, mental health advocates are concerned about the privacy rights of patients. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) Improvement Amendment Act of 2007 is also related to the new gun law.

PornoCop: The Ninth Circuit today denied rehearing in the case of Dible v. City of Chandler, No. 05-16577. The court held that the city of Chandler, Arizona can decide that operating a hard-core pornographic web site is incompatible with being a police officer.

The public expects officers to behave with a high level of propriety, and, unsurprisingly, is outraged when they do not do so. The law and their own safety demands that they be given a degree of respect, and the sleazy activities of Ronald and Megan Dible could not help but undermine that respect. Nor is this mere speculation. Almost as soon as Ronald Dible’s indecent public activities became widely known, officers in the department began suffering denigration from members of the public, and potential recruits questioned officers about the Dibles’ website.

Posted by CJLF Staff at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The sun set on three murderers in the Land of the Rising Sun today, the AP reports. What kind of crime gets one executed in Japan? Pretty much the same as here: (1) murder of a prior rape victim in retaliation for reporting the crime; (2) rape and murder in two separate cases; and (3) murder of two people and attempted murder of a third.

The anti side likes to say that having the death penalty places the United States "in the same category" as dictatorial regimes such as China and Iran. That fatuous argument creates the categories for the purpose of the desired result by focusing on whether a country has the death penalty and ignoring far more important variables, including whether the justice system provides basic due process of law and whether it punishes criminally political dissent and exercise of religion. If we wanted to place countries into categories, we would begin with the most important variable, due process, and then create further subdivisions with lesser variables down the line.

As a country that provides due process and has the death penalty but only for murder (and theoretically major crimes against national security and possibly rape of children), the United States would be in the same category as Japan. I'm okay with that.

Europe criticizes the fact that the Japanese don't tell the inmate's family until after the execution. Yes, they should change that, but Europe will criticize them regardless.

Posted by Kent Scheidegger at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Update Jan. 31 at 3:55PST: The Supreme Court has granted a stay pending filing and disposition of a certiorari petition. AP story is here. SCOTUSblog post here.
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The Eleventh Circuit vacated a stay of execution granted on an injection claim in McNair v. Allen. The court found that the § 1983 claim was barred by the statute of limitations. There are two plaintiffs in the case. The one with an imminent execution date (tomorrow) is James Callahan.

The full details of Callahan’s crime are set forth in Callahan v. Campbell, 427 F.3d 897, 903-10 (11th Cir. 2005). In short, on February 3, 1982, Callahan abducted 26-year-old Rebecca Suzanne Howell from a laundromat in Jacksonville, Alabama. He murdered her, then dumped her body in a creek, where it was discovered two weeks later.

Footnote 1: Although Callahan was not charged with rape, forensic evidence suggested Howell was sexually assaulted prior to her death.

The decision is correct based on pre-Baze precedent on a ground not at issue in Baze. There would seem to be no reason for the Supreme Court to grant a stay. However, after the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Baze, which does not involve a default issue, it did grant stays in other cases involving defaulted claims. At this point, the justices probably know what their decision is going to be in Baze, and it will be interesting to see if they grant a stay in this case. If I had to bet, I'd put my money on a grant. AP story is here. Lyle Denniston has this post at SCOTUSblog, and Doug Berman has this one at SL&P.

Next door, the inmates in the Florida injection cases, Ian Lightbourne and Mark Schwab, have asked Justice Thomas for an extra two months to file their cert. petitions here and here. Extension requests are typically decided by the circuit justice (unlike stays of execution, which the circuit justice almost always refers to the full court), so it matters that Florida is in Thomas Country.

Posted by Kent Scheidegger at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The name says it all according to Kevin Johnson in this story in USA Today. The Caston Brothers aka “James Gang” from Lake Providence, LA had their lives planned for them at birth. Their father named all three sons, Jesse, Frank and Sonny after the outlaw James Gang. Jesse James Caston who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted in 2000 believes neither he nor his brothers ever had chance. All three brothers are serving life sentences in a Louisiana State Prison. According to Johnson, social scientists and law enforcement believe many people are becoming criminals because of family members and this is seen as a persistent problem.

Rape in the U.S. Military is becoming an unpunished crime, claims Lucinda Marshall of the Feminist Peace Network in this L.A. Times blowback piece. She is reacting to Anne K. Ream’s recent Op-Ed, noted in Monday’s News Scan, regarding whether a man convicted of rape as a civilian still deserved a traditional military burial. Ream pointed out that allowing a traditional burial sends a message to victims: sexual violence does not measure up to prior military service. Marshall notes that charges were dropped against an Army Reserve Sergeant in Lebanon, Pennsylvania after fellow soldiers refused to cooperate with the police. His lawyer said all charges should have been dropped anyway, “After all, he did serve his country”.

Lawyer Receives a Slap on the Wrist for aiding in Terrorism:
Larry Neumeister has this AP story on the sentencing appeal in the case of civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart. She was "convicted of conspiracy to defraud the United States, two counts of making false statements, providing and concealing material support to terrorist activity in 2005." She was sentenced to only two years and four months in prison for her role in helping her client, blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, communicate with fellow terrorists from behind bars. Assistant U.S. Attorney Anthony Barkow asked the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday to re-sentence the civil rights attorney on the grounds that the trial judge was excessively lenient on her punishment by not adding a terrorism enhancement to her conviction. The Appeals Court has to consider if the judge failed in sentencing Ms. Stewart correctly.

New York’s bill will regulate sex offenders’ use on the Internet: A bill written by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office was announced Tuesday by Cuomo and the leaders of both houses, according to this AP story. "State corrections law already requires offenders to provide Internet screen names, but the new legislation would clarify and expand the information they must supply and permit sharing it with social networking sites and other online services. That would allow the sites to screen or remove offenders from their sites and notify authorities about any illegal behavior." If passed, proponents say, the law will help sites to protect children and teens better from Internet predators by screening, removing, and notifying authorities about any illegal behavior from sex offenders on online sites. New York is getting harder on sex offenders' use of the Internet.

Posted by CJLF Staff at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

DNA evidence has led to the arrest of a Chilean man for the 1997 murder of University of Colorado co-ed Susannah Chase according to this Associated Press story by Ivan Moreno. Diego Olmos-Alcalde was in the Boulder County Jail for a parole violation when he was arrested for the Chase killing. He served time in prison for kidnapping in 2000 and had three other arrests on sex-related charges. Thousands of cold cases in virtually every part of the country have been solved through DNA as the number of samples in state and federal databases has increased. This report from the San Antonio Police Department provides one example.

The Murder Conviction of a New Jersey man who admitted shooting his girlfriend, beheading her, and boiling her head in a pot, was overturned yesterday in a 5-2 per curiam ruling by the state Supreme Court. The defendant, George Jenewicz, claimed that he killed the woman in self defense as reported in this Associated Press story by Jeffery Gold. The Court's five-judge majority concluded that three relatively minor trial errors may have influenced the jury's guilty verdict. The Chief Judge's dissent found this to be a stretch.

Posted by CJLF Staff at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Religion and the Death Penalty: Walter Berns of American Enterprise Institute has this article on Europe's obsession with the death penalty. "What explains this obsession with the death penalty? Hard to say, but probably the fact that abolishing it is one of the few things Europeans can do that make them feel righteous; in fact, very few."

Does A Serial Rapist Deserve a Military Burial?
Yes, according to this story written by Anne K. Ream in the Los Angeles Times. James A. Selby was accused of armed robbery, rape, kidnapping and attempted murder. He had at least 10 victims, one including a 9-year-old girl. Selby was a Persian Gulf veteran who committed suicide before receiving his sentence in Arizona. In the past, Congress has barred veterans convicted of capital murder from burial with military honors as in the case of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. On behalf of Steve Bush, father of one of the victim’s, Arizona Representative John Shadegg will introduce "Jenny's Law" in the coming weeks. Senator Barbara Boxer of California will introduce a companion bill in the Senate. The measure would prevent those convicted of the most serious sex crimes from receiving military honors at burial.

Timothy Masters, who was sentenced to life in 1999 for the sexual mutilation and stabbing death of Peggy Hettrick outside Fort Collins, was released from a Colorado prison last week due to DNA testing. District Judge Joseph Weatherby will decide next week if all charges against Masters will be dropped. Larimer County District Attorney Larry Abrahamson stated in this Associated Press story that the DNA evidence does not completely exonerate Masters, but did suggest others were involved in the murder.

Posted by CJLF Staff at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here is an interesting blog dedicated to news about pardons. The blogger is P. S. Ruckman, Jr., Associate Professor of Political Science at Rock Valley College, Illinois.

Posted by CJLF Staff at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)