A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.

Tag Archives: rule of law

Aug 12 2012
Mark Twain, probably

China’s wealthy and influential sometimes hire body doubles to serve their prison sentences

China’s wealthy and influential sometimes hire body doubles to serve their prison sentences

Geoffrey Sant for Slate:

The practice of hiring “body doubles” or “stand-ins” is well-documented by official Chinese media. In 2009, a hospital president who caused a deadly traffic accident hired an employee’s father to “confess” and serve as his stand-in. A company chairman is currently charged with allegedly arranging criminal substitutes for the executives of two other companies. In another case, after hitting and killing a motorcyclist, a man driving without a license hired a substitute for roughly $8,000. The owner of a demolition company that illegally demolished a home earlier this year hired a destitute man, who made his living scavenging in the rubble of razed homes, and promised him $31 for each day the “body double” spent in jail. In China, the practice is so common that there is even a term for it: ding zui. Ding means “substitute,” and zui means “crime”; in other words, “substitute criminal.”

W-w-w-w-what?

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Jun 24 2012
Mark Twain, probably

When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind

When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind

Jeneen Interlandi, writing in the New York Times Magazine:

We were on something like the 15th round of rummy, and my father was winning decisively. He cracked a wide, toothy grin as he laid his cards on the table. “That’s 321 for BaBa, and 227 for String Bean,” he said, tallying the ledger we were keeping on a piece of scrap paper.

Before he finished writing the numbers, he began a rapid succession of anecdotes about his first car. And his second. And his third. He reached for a magazine to show me the vintage Mustang he said he was planning to buy my mother for their 45th wedding anniversary, which, he reminded me, was just six months away. Then he began speaking Sicilian, instructing me to repeat after him: “Napeladan mangia pane!” (“People from Naples eat bread.”) “Calabrese testa dura!” (“People from Calabria have thick heads.”) My father has the most amazing blue eyes, and right then they were wide and eager, like an overexcited child’s. He was rambling, and the inflections of his voice betrayed sheer manic joy. It was a mood completely incongruous with our setting.

We were playing our card game at the Psychiatric Emergency Screening Services, or PESS, a small locked-down unit in the community hospital near my parents’ apartment in Somerville, N.J. Harsh fluorescent lighting fell on cracked and faded yellow walls. A disheveled, rail-thin woman paced and wept in the room across the way. Down the hall, a police officer guarded locked double doors.

Absolutely gripping article. Weaves together the story of her father’s harrowing battle with bipolar disorder, the story of her and her family trying to navigate the health care and court system for the mentally ill, and the history of health care for the seriously mentally ill in the US. Really can’t stop gushing about this piece, you guys.

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Apr 02 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Supreme Court Ruling Allows Strip-Searches for Any Offense

Supreme Court Ruling Allows Strip-Searches for Any Offense

Adam Liptak, The New York Times:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband.

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Jan 13 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Obama administration says Constitution protects cell phone recordings

Obama administration says Constitution protects cell phone recordings

Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica:

The Obama administration has told a federal judge that Baltimore police officers violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments by seizing a man’s cell phone and deleting its contents. The deletions were allegedly in retaliation for the man’s use of the phone to record the officers’ arrest of his friend. According to the Maryland ACLU, this is the first time the Obama Justice Department has weighed in on whether the Constitution protects citizens’ right to record the actions of police with their cell phones.

This is a huge deal. Not just in Baltimore but all over the country police have been seizing cameras and phones of people recording misconduct or even just regular arrests. Here’s one such example from Miami. Extremely encouraging to see the Obama administration1 weighing in on the side of common sense and sanity.

  1. And other judges too, as linked in the Ars piece. ↩

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Aug 12 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Prison for Ex-Judge in Corruption Case

Prison for Ex-Judge in Corruption Case

I hope you’re paid up on your rage bill, because you’re about to use a good portion of your monthly allotment after reading this article by Ashby Jones for The Wall Street Journal:

A former Pennsylvania county judge was sentenced to 28 years in prison Thursday following a corruption scandal in which he was convicted of illegally taking nearly $1 million from a builder of juvenile-detention facilities.

In February, a federal jury in Scranton, Pa., found the former judge, Mark Ciavarella, 61, guilty on 12 charges related to an alleged scheme in which prosecutors said he sentenced juveniles to private detention facilities in exchange for payments. He was convicted of racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy, but acquitted on 27 charges, including bribery and extortion.

Another judge, Michael Conahan, pleaded guilty last year to a racketeering charge in connection with the alleged scheme. He is awaiting sentencing.

About two years after the allegations emerged in 2007, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered all of Mr. Ciavarella’s adjudications involving children over a five-year period to be vacated. That wiped clean the records of about 4,000 juveniles, ranging from 10 to 18 years old.

…

At the trial, prosecutors alleged that in 2000, Mr. Ciavarella approached Robert Powell, a Luzerne County, Pa., lawyer and developer, and encouraged him to facilitate the building of two new private juvenile-detention centers, claiming that he didn’t like the existing county-run facility.

The centers were built. Between June 2000 and the end of April 2007, Messrs. Ciavarella and Conahan collected about $2.8 million from Mr. Powell and others in exchange for decisions from the bench that kept juveniles flowing into the detention centers, prosecutors alleged.

In that time, Mr. Ciavarella sentenced thousands of young people to the detention centers, often for lengthy stays for relatively minor infractions.

Michael Rubinkam’s piece for the Associated Press has a wonderful little quote from Ciavarella’s attorneys:

His attorneys had asked for a “reasonable” sentence in court papers, saying, in effect, that he’d already been punished enough.

“The media attention to this matter has exceeded coverage given to many and almost all capital murders, and despite protestation, he will forever be unjustly branded as the ‘Kids for Cash’ judge,” their sentencing memo said.

Well, if you didn’t want that appellation, then maybe you shouldn’t have sent thousands of kids to jail for cash.

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Aug 08 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Rebekah Brooks still on News International payroll

Rebekah Brooks still on News International payroll

Tim Walker, writing in The Telegraph:

A big song and dance was made of Rebekah Brooks’s belated decision to resign as the chief executive of News International as the phone-hacking scandal engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s empire, but it has not had any great effect upon her standard of living. I am reliably informed that she remains on the company payroll.

“My understanding is that Rupert has told her to travel the world on him for a year and then he will find a job for her when the scandal has died down,” whispers my informant.

Good gravy.

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Aug 07 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Current, ex-cops convicted in Katrina shootings

Current, ex-cops convicted in Katrina shootings

Mary Foster for the AP:

A federal jury on Friday convicted five current or former New Orleans police officers of civil rights violations in one of the lowest moments for city police in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: the shooting deaths of a teenager and a mentally disabled man as they crossed a bridge in search of food and help.

Three officers and one former officer were convicted of civil rights violations in the shootings that killed two people and wounded four others on the Danziger Bridge less than a week after the storm. All four and a retired police sergeant were convicted of engaging in a brazen cover-up that included a planted gun, fabricated witnesses and falsified reports. The five men were convicted of all 25 counts they faced.

The case was a high-stakes test of the Justice Department’s effort to rid the police department of corruption and brutality. A total of 20 current or former New Orleans police officers were charged last year in a series of federal probes. Most of the cases center on actions during the aftermath of the Aug. 29, 2005, storm, which plunged the flooded city into a state of lawlessness and desperation.

“The officers convicted today abused their power and violated the public’s trust during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – exacerbating one of the most devastating times for the people of New Orleans,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday in a statement. “I am hopeful today’s verdict brings justice for the victims and their family members, helps to heal the community and contributes to the restoration of public trust in the New Orleans Police Department.”

It’s about time.

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Jul 25 2011
Mark Twain, probably

A pound of flesh: how Cisco’s “unmitigated gall” derailed one man’s life

A pound of flesh: how Cisco’s “unmitigated gall” derailed one man’s life

Horrifying story reported by Ian Mulgrew for Ars Technica about legal intimidation and abuse of power:

A week after his arrest and imprisonment, [Peter] Adekeye appeared before British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Arne Silverman, a six-year veteran of the province’s highest trial bench. Adekeye was described as a “sinister” figure of uncertain citizenship on the run from 97 charges of illegal computer hacking that carried a penalty of almost half-a-millennium in prison.

Canadian prosecutors said that, according to US Homeland Security, Adekeye slipped in and out of the US surreptitiously—and they could match up the dates of the offenses with dates he had unlawfully entered the country over a two-year period.

They made it sound like the crime of the century; in fact, throughout the specified time, Adekeye was living in America on a valid visa. And the heinous crime was accessing Cisco’s internal systems on several occasions with a Cisco employee’s permission.

As he stood in court for his first appearance, Adekeye couldn’t believe what he heard—his citizenship was disparaged, his achievements derided. Prosecutors portrayed him not as a successful computer executive and innovator but rather as a Nigerian scofflaw who was a serious flight risk with a checkered, fugitive’s past.

…

By then, he understood only too well how he had been pursued by Cisco. The Canadian authorities, however, and the judges who issued the arrest warrant and denied Adekeye bail, remained in the dark. They were unaware Adekeye’s alleged crimes were part of a bigger legal battle he was waging against the $7 billion computer firm.

As part of its response to his litigation, Cisco had accused Adekeye in a civil countersuit of using his former colleague’s computer credentials to obtain services worth “more than $14,000.” No one ever explained the “magic” of that number—whether it meant $15,000 or $1 million—even the judges couldn’t figure it out.

Cisco had pushed for Adekeye’s arrest, apparently as part of its litigation strategy to derail the damaging antitrust suit that Adekeye launched in December 2008. They allegedly wanted him kept in custody to pressure him into settling or withdrawing his suit; they succeeded in keeping him locked up for a month. Normally, on a case like this, a non-violent defendant without a criminal record who wasn’t considered a flight risk would have been out on bail in a day.

Mulgrew reported on this last month for The Vancouver Sun, but for some reason I neglected to post anything about this then. I am now fixing this.

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Jul 17 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Rebekah Brooks arrested

Rebekah Brooks arrested

Jill Lawless, writing for the AP:

Brooks’ arrest came only 48 hours before she, Rupert Murdoch and his son James were to be grilled by U.K. lawmakers investigating widespread lawbreaking at Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World tabloid. It also raises the possibility that Murdoch’s old friend Les Hinton, who resigned Friday as publisher of The Wall Street Journal, or his 38-year-old son and heir apparent, James, could be next.

What about arresting Murdoch himself?

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Jul 13 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Rupert Murdoch gives up BSkyB takeover bid

Rupert Murdoch gives up BSkyB takeover bid

Patrick Wintour, Dan Sabbagh, and Nicholas Watt for The Guardian:

Rupert Murdoch capitulated to parliament and abandoned News Corporation’s £8bn bid for BSkyB, as he faced the prospect of appearing in front of a judicial public inquiry to salvage his personal reputation and the right for his company to continue to broadcast in the UK.

After 10 days of sustained public outcry over phone hacking, and facing the prospect of a unanimous call by MPs to withdraw his bid for total ownership of the satellite broadcaster, Murdoch succumbed at a morning board meeting at his London HQ in Wapping.

Company insiders indicated Murdoch was not making a tactical retreat and that a future bid for total control of BSkyB was now unlikely. The media giant said it was likely to “deploy our capital elsewhere” to avoid any more damaging battles in the UK. The News Corp deputy chairman, Chase Carey, said the bid had become “too difficult to progress in this climate”.

People had been speculating that the shuttering of the News of the World was a move designed to help the British Sky Broadcasting deal go through, so if that was really the case, it appears it didn’t work.

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