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Police quash nude pumpkin run
Something to keep in mind the next time you hear about the shocking number of "sex offenders" living around you.
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Each year, dozens have run down the city's streets wearing only shoes and a hollowed-out pumpkin on their heads.
Police said "full" participants this year faced indecent exposure charges.
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A charge of indecent exposure could have led to participants being registered as sexual offenders.
Obama Administration Invokes State Secrets Privilege…Again
Yet again, Barack Obama = George W. Bush.
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The Obama administration invoked the controversial "state secrets" privilege again on Friday, arguing that if U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker were to permit a legal case against the government to proceed, he would be putting national security at risk.
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The case is a class action suit brought by four Brooklynites alleging that the Bush administration engaged in wholesale dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans in which they were unjustly caught because they regularly made phone calls and sent emails to individuals outside the U.S., specifically in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Egypt, the Netherlands, and Norway.
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No Accountability: Why are bad prosecutors so rarely punished?
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It may well be true that the prosecutors
noted above represent a tiny minority of those who serve or have
served in the position. But whatever the number of "bad apples,"
our criminal justice and political systems seem unconcerned about
weeding them out. Instead, they're often rewarded and promoted,
despite long records of incompetence and misconduct. In fact, in
the sense that misconduct can help win convictions, such
prosecutors are often rewarded because of it.
Learning to Love Insider Trading
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Far from being so injurious to the economy that its practice must be criminalized, insiders buying and selling stocks based on their knowledge play a critical role in keeping asset prices honest—in keeping prices from lying to the public about corporate realities.
Prohibitions on insider trading prevent the market from adjusting as quickly as possible to changes in the demand for, and supply of, corporate assets. The result is prices that lie.
And when prices lie, market participants are misled into behaving in ways that harm not only themselves but also the economy writ large.
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These prohibitions are meant to prevent all insiders with non-public information from profiting from the use of such information before it becomes public. It follows that unbiased application of these prohibitions should target not only traders whose inside information prompts them to actively buy or sell assets, but also traders whose inside information prompts them not to make asset purchases or sales that they would have made were it not for their inside information.
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Bigot Bonus: Under a new federal law, the wrong beliefs can trigger a second trial and extra prison time.
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In more than a decade of lobbying for this law, its supporters
have never shown that state officials are letting people get away
with murder, or lesser crimes of violence, when the victims
belong to historically oppressed groups. Instead they have
presented the legislation as a litmus test of antipathy toward
violent bigots and sympathy for their victims. Given this
framing, it’s surprising the law’s opponents managed to resist it
for so long, when all they had on their side was the Constitution
and basic principles of justice. -
The idea, as then-Attorney General
Janet Reno explained
when the law was first proposed, is to “give people the
opportunity to have a forum in which justice can be done if it is
not done in the state court.”Although such serial prosecutions are permitted under the
doctrine of “dual sovereignty,” they look an awful lot like
double jeopardy, prohibited by the Fifth Amendment.
House of Blues security guard assaults woman for taking his picture (updated)
Not that it matters, but she says she didn't take his picture. A (second?) guard also takes away the videographer's camera, and asks her what right she has to videotape the scene.
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Once he pries the camera from her hands, the woman tries to take the camera back, but the guard, who is twice her size, knocks her down where she lies motionless for several seconds.
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Then it appears the guard snags the video camera from the second woman where the audio remains on but the video is blacked out.
The guard can be heard saying he will return her camera once police arrive.
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Why Skydivers Would Be Better Off Without Parachutes
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In Philadelphia, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania
find, possessing a gun is strongly associated with getting shot.
Since "guns did not protect those who possessed them," they
conclude,
"people should rethink their possession of guns." -
The one explanation the researchers don't mention is the one
that will occur first to defenders of the right to armed
self-defense: Maybe people who anticipate violent
confrontations—such as drug dealers, frequently robbed bodega
owners, and women with angry ex-boyfriends—are especially
likely to possess guns, just as people who jump out of
airplanes are especially likely to possess parachutes.
Dogs sniff out wrong suspect; scent lineups questioned
I see in the article that the performance of individual dogs isn't tracked. But has anyone tested scent lineups in a controlled environment? That would be the place to start.
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Despite repeated denials, Buchanek lived under a cloud of suspicion for five months. His former Sheriff's Office colleagues believed the dogs over him and his pleas of innocence. But the dogs were wrong.
DNA evidence implicated another man, who pleaded guilty to the murder.
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Critics of dog-scent lineups say the problem is that dog handlers aren't certified or regulated and that there isn't a system in place to check a bloodhound's track record.
The Right to a Guilty Verdict: Obama's empty promise of due process for terrorism suspects
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In July the Defense Department's top lawyer declared that the
president has the authority to detain people accused of belonging
to or assisting terrorist groups even after they're acquitted.
The only point of prosecuting them, it seems, is to create an
impression of due process while continuing Bush detention
policies that Obama has repeatedly condemned. -
In a
May speech the president said these prisoners "cannot be
prosecuted" because there is not enough admissible evidence
against them but cannot be released because they "pose a clear
danger to the American people."
DoJ Official Blows Cover Off PATRIOT Act
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In the debate over the PATRIOT Act, the Bush White House insisted it needed the authority to search people's homes without their permission or knowledge so that terrorists wouldn't be tipped off that they're under investigation.
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Only three of the 763 "sneak-and-peek" requests in fiscal year 2008 involved terrorism cases, according to a July 2009 report from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Sixty-five percent were drug cases.
Obama to Use Current Law to Support Detentions
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The Obama administration has decided not to seek new legislation from Congress authorizing the indefinite detention of about 50 terrorism suspects being held without charges at at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, officials said Wednesday.
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A Shake to the System: New research into "shaken baby syndrome" could put hundreds of convictions in peril.
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Whether someone can actually "free shake" an infant to death remains hotly disputed in the medical community. Where there is consensus, however, is that the triad of symptoms traditionally associated with SBS are not exclusive to it. A number of other things can produce these symptoms, including falls, head impacts, infections, birth defects, reaction to vaccinations, and surgical procedures. That's a significant departure from what prosecutors have been telling juries for the past 20 years.
More from Josh Wexler
See "Cop threatens to ‘harass’ mishap witness" for the original story.
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I spent several days on the phone, getting the run around from various PIB and NOPD members. However, at one point I got to speak with the officer who actually performed the investigation. He told me that the cop (Torres) told a different story than mine and that his recommendation was to find the complaint “false” (or some thing equivalent to “false”- he could have recommended a finding of “unsupported” which would have meant there just wasn’t enough evidence to find the claim “supported). The investigator also told me that if he were the officer in question, he might well have arrested me for interfering with investigation/arrest of the pedestrian (I want to say here that I never got closer than 7 or 8 ft from the officer when he was holding the pedestrian).
Cop threatens to ‘harass’ mishap witness
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He got out of his vehicle and told the officer he saw him run the stop sign and hit the pedestrian. Wexler told Torres he had no right to arrest the man.
At this point, Torres reportedly allowed the pedestrian to go free, directed his attention to Wexler and asked, “Do you want a ticket?”
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“You want to write down my name? I'll show you I can write too. Give me your license, insurance, and registration. I know who to harass,” Torres reportedly said.
Wexler provided Torres with the information but refused to answer further questions.
“If you don’t answer my questions, you are going to jail,” Torres reportedly threatened.
Eventually, Torres wrote Wexler a ticket for failure to wear a seat belt and left the scene.
A woman who works in the area at the time of the incident verified Wexler’s account to CityBusiness but refused to provide her name for fear of police retaliation.
The Hunt for Criminality: Why it's important that prosecutors know when not to bring charges.
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The truth is that prosecutors are praised, reelected, and promoted based on the cases they win, and on the number of people they put away.
Which means prosecutors have an incentive to see an accident as a case of criminal negligence, to find willful intent where none may exist, and to find creative new ways to criminalize what’s really no more than bad—though not necessarily criminal—behavior. -
Once the cable news channels begin saturation coverage of an incident with possible criminal ramifications, there’s a growing sense that until someone faces charges, the system hasn't done its job. As a result, every tragedy now requires a perpetrator. We don't accept that bad things happen. We need bad people to punish for them.
Learn how to protect yourself from identity theft
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People are often advised to place fraud alerts on their files with the credit bureaus after someone has stolen their information, but how often are you told to do it before? As it turns out, paranoid types do it all the time, and it's not such a bad idea either. There are two steps to this: putting a fraud alert on your credit reports, and putting a freeze on your credit. "These two mechanisms work in similar ways—someone cannot simply get your name and address and apply for credit in your name, because lenders must check with consumer first when these freezes are in place," Mitic said. "These are highly effective ways of reducing most of the most dangerous forms of identity theft."
Report shows investigators botched Madoff probes
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Disgraced financier Bernard Madoff tried by turns to bully and impress the federal examiners who looked into his business, but the investigators managed by themselves to botch the probes and enable Madoff's multibillion-dollar fraud to continue for nearly two decades, a new report shows.
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"I thought it was the end game, over," Madoff was quoted as saying when SEC investigators queried him about what account he was using to clear certain trades.
He said he felt very fortunate when there was no follow-up call to check on the account number he had given the investigators.
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