DNA Links LA Serial Killer to Four More Victims: Chester Dewayne Turner, former pizza deliveryman, was charged Tuesday with strangling four more women in South Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, after DNA tests linked him to the victims. Another inmate was convicted of two of the murders and spent 11 years in prison before he was released in 2004 after DNA testing cleared him. Turner is currently on death row for killing ten women, including one who was six and a half months pregnant. The AP has this story.
Mental Hospital Administrator Allegedly Lured Boys for Sex: Amy Taxin of the AP reports on the case against former Napa State Hospital director Claude Foulk, charged with molesting his adopted son for nearly a decade. Prosecutors say 11 other men have accused Foulk of sexually abusing them over a period of four decades, after he lured them as boys with pizza and trips to a mountain cabin. Because of the applicable statute of limitations, only the case involving Foulk's son can proceed. If convicted of all counts, Foulk could face up to 280 years in prison.
"Europe's dangerous death penalty gesture": Charles Lane has this editorial in The Washington Post on the decision of some European countries to restrict the export of sodium thiopental to the U.S. in protest to its use in lethal injections. Lane points out the drug "has long been a mainstay of anesthesia; the World Health Organization lists is as an 'essential medicine' for any health-care system," and that refusal to export the drug will likely not deter states from proceeding with executions given the availability of substitute drugs. Lane opines: "What we have here is not a serious, effective protest, but an exercise in feel-good politics that puts innocent people at risk. You would have thought our friends in the Old World would know by now: In morality, as in economics, there is no free lunch."
Exaggerated Border Crime?: During a speech in El Paso earlier this week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asked officials to stop exaggerating the violence in U.S. border towns, reports Brian Bennett of Los Angeles Times. Napolitano cited dropping crime stats in southwest border counties despite the increasing violence over the border. Representative Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) responded that the drug and human smuggling efforts in the area was "far more impacting" on Arizona's cattle ranchers than Napolitano's comments suggested, and a spokesman for Arizona Governor Jan Brewer reiterated the state's concern that "the violence by the cartels will begin spilling across the border."
Mental Hospital Administrator Allegedly Lured Boys for Sex: Amy Taxin of the AP reports on the case against former Napa State Hospital director Claude Foulk, charged with molesting his adopted son for nearly a decade. Prosecutors say 11 other men have accused Foulk of sexually abusing them over a period of four decades, after he lured them as boys with pizza and trips to a mountain cabin. Because of the applicable statute of limitations, only the case involving Foulk's son can proceed. If convicted of all counts, Foulk could face up to 280 years in prison.
"Europe's dangerous death penalty gesture": Charles Lane has this editorial in The Washington Post on the decision of some European countries to restrict the export of sodium thiopental to the U.S. in protest to its use in lethal injections. Lane points out the drug "has long been a mainstay of anesthesia; the World Health Organization lists is as an 'essential medicine' for any health-care system," and that refusal to export the drug will likely not deter states from proceeding with executions given the availability of substitute drugs. Lane opines: "What we have here is not a serious, effective protest, but an exercise in feel-good politics that puts innocent people at risk. You would have thought our friends in the Old World would know by now: In morality, as in economics, there is no free lunch."
Exaggerated Border Crime?: During a speech in El Paso earlier this week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asked officials to stop exaggerating the violence in U.S. border towns, reports Brian Bennett of Los Angeles Times. Napolitano cited dropping crime stats in southwest border counties despite the increasing violence over the border. Representative Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) responded that the drug and human smuggling efforts in the area was "far more impacting" on Arizona's cattle ranchers than Napolitano's comments suggested, and a spokesman for Arizona Governor Jan Brewer reiterated the state's concern that "the violence by the cartels will begin spilling across the border."
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