Morgan Stanley sold worthless bonds, and made a lot of money doing so, and when they got caught, they made what appears to be another “No Declaration of Wrongdoing (DOJ press release) settlement over this, the New York Times described it as Morgan Stanley to Pay $3.2 Billion Over Flawed Mortgage Bonds.
As former S&L crisis investigator notes, these bonds were not flawed, they were fraud.
Throw some banksters in gaol, please.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died at age 79.
I have noted over the past few years (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) excessive levels of bile have appeared to produce neurological complications.
The Republicans are already saying that the next SCOTUS nomination should be put off until after the elections, which is no surprise.
I really do not think that they have anything to worry about though: I cannot see the Obama administration selecting someone in less than 3 months, at which point there will not be time.
While I do understand that the friends and family of Antonin Scalia, including Justice Ruth Bader “Notorious RBG” Ginsburg, are mourning their loss, the fact that a partisan hack who had stopped caring has left the court is a net plus for the people of the United States.
In a move that would make many capitalists’ head explode if it ever happened here, Iceland just sentenced their 26th banker to prison for their part in the 2008 financial collapse.
In two separate Icelandic Supreme Court and Reykjavik District Court rulings, five top bankers from Landsbankinn and Kaupping — the two largest banks in the country — were found guilty of market manipulation, embezzlement, and breach of fiduciary duties. Most of those convicted have been sentenced to prison for two to five years. The maximum penalty for financial crimes in Iceland is six years, although their Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments to consider expanding sentences beyond the six year maximum.
………
Almost eight years later, the government of Iceland is still prosecuting and jailing those responsible for the market manipulation that crippled their economy. Even now, Iceland is still paying back loans to the IMF and other countries which were needed just to keep the country operating.
And how many big banksters have been prosecuted in the United States?
Crickets.
It’s more generally referred to as “The Blue Book”, and a group of law students at NYU are publishing a similar set of instructions, which they have referred to as the “Baby Blue”.
The response from the HLRS? A cease and desist letter to the students from their lawyer:
War is brewing over the most boring piece of intellectual property imaginable: the “Bluebook,” the 580-page quasi-authoritative source of proper legal citation formats published by the Harvard Law Review, described by Adam Liptak of the New York Times a few months ago as “a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like [that] is both grotesque and indispensable.”
Students at NYU Law School have prepared a new, streamlined, open-access citation system and gotten it ready for publication; but Chris Sprigman, a law prof at NYU, posted this open letter to his “law professor friends” yesterday:I am writing to ask you to help me with something important. You may know that for the last year, I’ve been working on a public domain implementation of the Bluebook’s Uniform System of Citation.
The work, which I’ve named #BabyBlue, is now done, but we’re holding it, because the Harvard Law Review Association has hired counsel and is threatening to sue (me, and Carl Malamud of PublicResource.org, the publisher).………
The conflict has been brewing for a few months — starting with a letter from Harvard Law Review’s lawyers to publisher Carl Malamud of PublicResource.org:I write concerning . . . your imminent release of an “implementation of the Bluebook’s Uniform System of Citation” called “BabyBlue,” possibly as soon as December 31, 2015. Based on the description of “BabyBlue” … we believe that “BabyBlue” may include content identical or substantially similar to content or other aspects of The Bluebook that constitute original works of authorship protected by copyright, and which are covered by various United States copyright registrations.
………
It’s copyright nonsense, and Harvard should be ashamed of itself for loosing its legal hounds to dispense it in order to protect its (apparently fairly lucrative) publication monopoly.
Here’s a bit of free legal advice: If you want to assert copyright protection over something, don’t call it “A Uniform System of Citation” — because systems are, by definition, unprotected by copyright. Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act couldn’t be clearer:In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, [or] method of operation, … regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
It gets even better.
It appears the Harvard Law Review Society is not the creator of this document:
Among the low points in an American legal education is the law student’s first encounter with The Bluebook, a 582-page style manual formally known as “A Uniform System of Citation.” It is a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like. It is both grotesque and indispensable.
The Harvard Law Review has long claimed credit for creating The Bluebook. But a new article from two librarians at Yale Law School says its rival’s account is “wildly erroneous.” The librarians, Fred R. Shapiro and Julie Graves Krishnaswami, have done impressive archival research and make a persuasive case that their own institution is the guilty party.
“It’s clear that the idea of a uniform citation manual came from Yale, and a lot of the specifics of the early rules came from Yale,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview. “Harvard entered into the picture later.”
………
The new article ends on a sheepish note.
“Some readers may question whether originating the hyper-complicated Bluebook should be a source of pride for Yale,” it says. “Our response is that, although the Bluebook version that subsequently developed under the leadership of Harvard Law Review currently consists of 582 fairly large pages, the two earliest Yale precursors of the Bluebook were, respectively, one page and fifteen pages long.”
“And these were,” the article says, “very small pages.”
Shades of the song, Happy Birthday to You, where the evidence is fairly clear that the copyright holders never actually wrote the song.
Our IP system is broken, and needs to be fixed.
Actually, it needs to be burned to the ground, because the system has engendered attitudes that lead to this crap.
The Virginia AG has set up an task force specifically to go after patent trolls:
Suing a company for patent infringement just got a lot tougher in the state of Virginia.
The state (technically a commonwealth) has created a new legal office focused entirely on patent litigation. Specifically, the state’s Patent Troll Unit will look to extract penalties and legal fees from companies who make unjust patent infringement claims against businesses operating in the state.
The task force will seek out companies who file infringement claims on dubious or vague patents, seeking a quick payout. The legal team, reporting to the Attorney General, will file for injunctions against companies it deems acting in “bad faith” with infringement claims.
………
“Virginia businesses of all sizes can be targets, from a small, local business up to a large, high-tech firm,” Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring told the local Augusta Free Press.
“Under the bipartisan legislation we were able to help craft last year, my office has strong new enforcement powers and we’re going to use them to protect Virginia businesses from these bad actors.”
………
Those who believe they are being targeted by a patent troll are being advised to contact the Attorney General’s office with details including the demands of the patent troll, contact information and patent details.
This is an excellent idea.
Defending against a patent troll is frequently expensive, and so companies frequently settle.
Having the Attorney General’s office on your makes it far less ruinous to fight patent extortion.
I am not referring to the tuchas. I am referring to the archery practice, which for many centuries was mandatory for English yeomen.
And now an English vicar has invoked this ancient law:
A vicar has revived an ancient law to call members of her parish together for archery practice.
The Reverend Mary Edwards, of Collingbourne Ducis, near Marlborough, called residents to the village recreation ground on Friday.
Residents were rewarded for complying with the law with a bar, a barbecue and live music.
Church warden Mike Cox said: “It seems she’s still entitled to do that.”
“I’ve been checking on the web and most archery experts and clergy seem to agree she is,” Mr Cox added.
………
“We are celebrating the building of a new loo [bathroom] in the church. After all these years we have at long last brought running water to the church.”
It’s a wonderful story, but it appears that their understanding of the law is not accurate:
……… And, in fact, it appears that the archery requirement was repealed quite a while ago.
While I would have preferred to fly to England and go rummaging through the Parliamentary Archives to confirm this personally, I had a deadline to meet, plus I am not especially welcome there anymore because of what I see as a simple misunderstanding as to whether their reading rooms are clothing-optional. So I have relied on the Internet, which is less authoritative but also less judgmental.
It is clear that there were laws requiring archery practice dating back to at least the 13th century. The motive was to make sure England had enough men trained to use the longbow, which for centuries was a crucial weapon for the English. (The most famous example is Agincourt, a battle that Henry V won in 1415 and is still going on about.)
The training requirement was usually combined with prohibitions on other kinds of games and sports so that people would focus on archery instead of, for example, “tennis, football, [quoits], dice” and other “games inappropriate.” The point was not so much to condemn games as to make sure they did not get in the way of longbow training. In other words, they saw nothing morally wrong with tennis, it’s just that it is hard to kill a French knight with a tennis ball, no matter how good your serve is.
In 1511 the requirement was expanded by “An Act concerning Shooting in Long Bows,” even though by then the importance of the bow was declining. This law provided that “All sorts of men under the age of 40 Years shall have bows and arrows” and practice using them. The playing of games continued, however, and in 1541 the law was expanded yet again by “An Act for the Maintenance of Artillery, and debarring unlawful Games,” the preamble to which declares that said games were believed to be the “Cause of the Decay of Archery” skills in England (There was another very important cause by then, namely guns–or, more specifically, bullets–but games always seem to get blamed for social problems.)
The archery requirement was extended to all men under age 60, and the list of banned games was expanded. As before, though, these restrictions did not apply to the aristocracy. They tended to become knights, not archers, plus they had the God-given right to play games if they liked. According to them, that is, not God.
At least some of this was still on the books well into the 19th century, but was probably repealed during the reign of Queen Victoria. In 1845, “An Act to Amend the Law concerning Games and Wagers” repealed any part of King Henry’s 1541 law making any “Game of Skill” unlawful or “which enacts any penalty for lacking bows or arrows … or which regulates the making, selling or using of bows and arrows.” If any of the older stuff survived, it was most likely repealed by more recent acts intended to get some of the ancient stuff off the books.
Seeing as how the good vicar did not threaten any sanctions against those who declined to practice archery, I won’t spoil her fun, but it appears that she does not have the law on her side.
H/t Jill Junkala on Facebook.
Global Witness, a not-for profit anti-money laundering organization, and ran a sting on lawyers who aid people in getting their ill gotten gains into the US:
With attention growing on the use of shell companies in high-end real estate, an activist organization released a report Sunday night that said several New York real estate lawyers had been caught on camera providing advice on how to move suspect money into the United States.
The report is the result of an undercover investigation carried out in 2014 by Global Witness, a nonprofit activist organization that has been pushing for stricter money-laundering rules.
The lawyers featured in the report include a recent president of the American Bar Association.
“It wasn’t hard to find lawyers to suggest ways to move suspect funds into the United States,” said Stefanie Ostfeld, a spokeswoman for Global Witness. “We went undercover because it is the only way we could show what really happens behind closed doors. The findings speak for themselves — something urgently needs to change.”
The real estate industry has been under growing scrutiny as evidence has emerged that suspect money is flowing into luxury real estate. Global Witness cited an investigation last year in The New York Times that documented numerous foreign officials and their family members buying multimillion-dollar properties in Manhattan and quantified the rising use of shell companies in real estate transactions.
This is not a surprise.
There is whole industry of unethical but (barely) legal money laundering, on Wall Street in New York, and in The City of London.
Hopefully a this additional attention will make doing this harder.
Our financial sector is aggressively complicit in the looting of the poorest societies on earth.
.
A criminal case examining the Fourth Amendment implications of cell-site simulators, also known as stingrays, has finally reached the 7th Circuit for the first time. Now one step below the Supreme Court, this case also likely marks the first time that warrantless use of stingrays has reached any federal appellate court.
Stingrays determine a phone’s location by spoofing a cell tower. In some cases, they can intercept calls and text messages. Once deployed, the devices intercept data from a target phone along with information from other phones within the vicinity. At times, police have falsely claimed the use of a confidential informant while in fact deploying this particularly sweeping and intrusive surveillance tool.
The 7th Circuit will now consider a 2013 case known as United States v. Patrick. It involves a Milwaukee man wanted on a probation violation who was suddenly located and arrested by local police with help from the FBI. There is very strong evidence to suggest that he was apprehended through the warrantless use of a stingray.
Patrick’s attorney, Chris Donovan, filed his opening brief in the appeal earlier this month. The case is so notable that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) also filed an amicus brief earlier this week. The organizations note that the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution requires that search warrants demonstrate probable cause of a crime. And, they note, Wisconsin passed a 2014 state law mandating warrants for stingray deployment.
It’s about f%$#ing time.
Law enforcement has been trying to conceal their warrantless use of this devices, because they are afraid that the courts will require warrants for this.
I hope that their concerns are justified.
It’s not that big deal to get a warrant, but lazy incompetent cops want short cuts.
In the latest episode of “Welcome to a Police State”, prosecutors are arguing that they don’t need a warrant to use a Stingray to track people by their cell phone data because ……… Google Maps:
Up in Baltimore, where law enforcement Stingray device use hit critical mass faster and more furiously than anywhere else in the country (to date…) with the exposure of 4,300 deployments in seven years, the government is still arguing there’s no reason to bring search warrants into this.
The state’s Attorney General apparently would like the Baltimore PD’s use of pen register orders to remain standard operating procedure. According to a brief filed in a criminal case relying on the warrantless deployment of an IMSI catcher (in this case a Hailstorm), the state believes there’s no reason for police to seek a warrant because everyone “knows” cell phones generate data when they’re turned on or in use. (h/t Brad Heath of USA Today)The whereabouts of a cellular telephone are not “withdrawn from public view” until it is turned off, or its SIM card removed. Anyone who has ever used a smartphone is aware that the phone broadcasts its position on the map, leading to, for example, search results and advertising tailored for the user’s location, or to a “ride-sharing” car appearing at one’s address. And certainly anyone who has ever used any sort of cellular telephone knows that it must be in contact with an outside cell tower to function.
The state’s brief folds in parts of the Third Party Doctrine and the Supreme Court’s 1979 Smith v. Maryland decision to make a truly terrible argument that because certain aspects of cell phones involuntarily create location data, the Fourth Amendment never comes into play.
Matt Blaze rephrases the state’s argument slightly, exposing the ridiculousness of this assertion.“People let people into their houses sometimes, therefore no warrant is needed to search houses”. Or something. https://t.co/XncuaZvdwW— matt blaze (@mattblaze) January 14, 2016
The state follows this up by arguing that, because the use of a pen register order to deploy an IMSI catcher is not expressly forbidden by local statutes, the evidence shouldn’t be suppressed.
………
All well and good, except that the only reason there was no statute in place is because local law enforcement spent years keeping its cell phone tracking devices hidden from judges and defendants, obscuring the technology through parallel construction and misleading pen register order requests. This case is no different than the hundreds preceding it. The magistrate judge signing the pen register order had no idea what the Baltimore PD was actually doing. The presiding judge in this prosecution declared the Baltimore PD’s pen register request contained “material misrepresentations” on his way towards granting the suppression of evidence.
This is why we need the exclusionary rule.
Lazy cops and lazy prosecutors are a threat to our civil liberties.
It takes very little to get a warrant from a judge, and for these guys, it’s too much.
They came back with indictments ……… of the antiabortion Taliban that created the video:
A grand jury here that was investigating accusations of misconduct against Planned Parenthood has instead indicted two abortion opponents who made undercover videos of the organization.
Prosecutors in Harris County said one of the leaders of the Center for Medical Progress — an anti-abortion group that made secretly recorded videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale of fetal tissue — had been indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record, a felony, and on a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human organs.
That leader, David Daleiden, 26, the director of the center, had posed as a biotechnology representative to infiltrate Planned Parenthood affiliates and surreptitiously record his efforts to procure tissue for research. Another center employee, Sandra Merritt, was indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record.
………
On Monday, the Harris County district attorney, Devon Anderson, said in a statement that grand jurors had cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing.
………
The case here started in August, when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican and an outspoken opponent of abortion and Planned Parenthood, asked Ms. Anderson to open a criminal investigation into the organization. His request came after the release of an undercover video recorded at a Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast office in Houston with a research official for the organization. Mr. Patrick said the video showed the group “discussing the gruesome and barbaric work of Planned Parenthood and what appears to be its profiteering from selling body parts from aborted babies.”
………
This month in federal court in San Francisco, Planned Parenthood sued the center, Mr. Daleiden and other abortion opponents involved in the videos. The suit accused them of engaging in a three-year criminal enterprise to target the group.
“These people broke the law to spread malicious lies about Planned Parenthood in order to advance their extreme anti-abortion political agenda,” Eric Ferrero, a spokesman for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement Monday. “As the dust settles and the truth comes out, it’s become totally clear that the only people who engaged in wrongdoing are the criminals behind this fraud, and we’re glad they’re being held accountable.”
In making the videos, Mr. Daleiden and others have been accused of setting up a fake company called Biomax Procurement Services, creating fake identities and claiming to be part of a legitimate provider of fetal tissue to researchers. The charge of tampering with a governmental record appeared to be related to Mr. Daleiden’s and Ms. Merritt’s use of fake ID cards.
“We know that they used fake IDs that had their real photographs but fake names and fake addresses purported to be issued by the state of California,” said Josh Schaffer, a Houston lawyer who represents Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast in the Harris County criminal investigation. Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt presented those IDs to security at the Planned Planned office to gain entry to the building. “They never denied that they presented a fake ID,” Mr. Schaffer said.
Mr. Schaffer said he believed the misdemeanor charge stemmed from laws prohibiting offers to buy fetal tissue. He said that following the meeting with Planned Parenthood officials in Houston, Mr. Daleiden sent an email to them offering to buy fetal tissue for $1,600 per sample.
“It does not surprise me that a grand jury that chose to correctly apply the law to the evidence that was presented would return this result,” Mr. Schaffer said. “The written charges have not been released publicly yet, so at this point I am working on my knowledge of the investigation.”
I am so amused by all of this.
Considering the nature of their actions, I’m thinking that Homeland Security should put Daleiden and his co-conspirators on the no fly list, but that is probably a pipe dream.
After a patent troll realized that they had sued Newegg, a company that is known for going to the mat against patent trolls, they dropped their case like it was plutonium:
A shell company that sued dozens of computer peripheral makers has quickly dropped Newegg house brand Rosewill from its list of defendants. The motion to dismiss, filed yesterday, comes just days after Newegg’s lawyers filed notices of their appearance in the case.
Minero Digital LLC dismissed its case against Rosewill one day after Newegg Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng authorized his outside lawyer to try to settle the case in exchange for a “nominal donation to charity.” During that conversation (the attorneys’ first discussion about the case), Newegg’s outside counsel said that although the proposed agreement wouldn’t pay Minero anything, it was likely to be Newegg’s best and final offer. He suggested Minero search the Internet for news articles about Newegg’s policies on settling “patent troll” type cases. (The short version: Newegg doesn’t pay patent trolls.)
The next day, Minero dismissed the lawsuit against Rosewill. The dismissal is without prejudice, which means it could be re-filed in the future.
It appears that Newegg Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng is kind of bummed, because no one wants to dance with him any more, “I never get invited to parties anymore. Now I keep getting kicked out.”
BTW, while there are a concerns about how one reigns in patent trolls while continuing to incentivize creativity, adding transparency to the process, to prevent obscure shell companies from obscuring who owns, and who benefits from, their behavior.
I think that naming and shaming the likes Nathan Myhrvold, who tries to pretend that he’s a scientist and philanthropist, and not an extortionist, would make the world a better place.
When it was revealed that a Brooklyn school run by the Success Academy charter network was systematically pushing out struggling and disabled students identified on a “Got to Go” list, the company’s head Eva Moskowitz said the list was the work of a rogue principal, unrepresentative of any broader policy. Critics of the lucrative, influential 36-school network have long alleged that it maintains high test scores by pressuring parents of students with disabilities to pull them from its schools. A federal civil rights complaint filed yesterday by 13 parents along with politicians and advocacy groups bolsters the case, alleging that difficulties faced by special-needs kids are actually the result of a company-wide policy that has been in effect for years.
“Success Academy operates schools in some of the most distressed neighborhoods of this city and receives considerable public funding but fails to serve students with disabilities in accordance with the law,” Legal Services NYC direct Raun Rasmussen said in a statement. “These children deserve better.”
………
When it was revealed that a Brooklyn school run by the Success Academy charter network was systematically pushing out struggling and disabled students identified on a “Got to Go” list, the company’s head Eva Moskowitz said the list was the work of a rogue principal, unrepresentative of any broader policy. Critics of the lucrative, influential 36-school network have long alleged that it maintains high test scores by pressuring parents of students with disabilities to pull them from its schools. A federal civil rights complaint filed yesterday by 13 parents along with politicians and advocacy groups bolsters the case, alleging that difficulties faced by special-needs kids are actually the result of a company-wide policy that has been in effect for years.
“Success Academy operates schools in some of the most distressed neighborhoods of this city and receives considerable public funding but fails to serve students with disabilities in accordance with the law,” Legal Services NYC direct Raun Rasmussen said in a statement. “These children deserve better.”
………
The other cases all echo this one, with some variations—some parents have already withdrawn their child, one was expelled in his fourth year, and some parents, like Jackson, are still fighting to receive special education within Success schools.
Each set of allegations involves school administrators ignoring or downplaying disability diagnoses, and when confronted with them, failing to provide such support measures as small classes or paraprofessionals. When behavioral problems arise with the inadequately accommodated special-needs child, rather than reassessing, the schools allegedly suspend the kids, force parents to pick them up early, and in some cases, call paramedics to take them to emergency rooms.
………
Meanwhile, the State University of New York, which licenses charter schools, is planning to investigate Success’s alleged pressure tactics, according to a New York Post report.
This is how charter schools work, because this is what we pay them for.
Essentially, they get paid for high test scores, and the easiest way to do this is to make sure that under-performing or difficult students never enroll, and to make sure that those who do enroll leave.
The Supreme Court has just ruled that defendants cannot shut down a class action suits by paying off the lead plaintiff:
An effort to gut one of the most important mechanisms the law uses to deter businesses against widespread violations of the law failed on Wednesday, when the Supreme Court handed down its 6-3 decision in Campbell-Ewald v. Gomez. Had the defendants, who were backed by powerful business interest groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, prevailed in this lawsuit, it would have significantly altered the balance of power between large corporations and their customers and workers.
Campbell-Ewald involved a company that allegedly sent many unsolicited text messages to various cell phone users. Under federal law, someone who receives such a message may recover $500 for each violation of the law. The named plaintiff in this case, Jose Gomez, is a man who received one of the unwanted messages.
This tiny case about an annoying message took on far greater importance, however, because Gomez also sought to bring a class action on behalf of others who also received the unsolicited messages. As ThinkProgress previously explained, class actions are often the only mechanism available against defendants who commit small-scale violations of the law against many different individuals:
Suppose that a company cheats you out of a few hundred dollars. While you’ll probably be angry and may make some irate phone calls to the company’s customer service line, chances are you’re not going to sue if the company refuses to back down. The cost of bringing a lawsuit will greatly exceed any amount you are likely to recover from the company, and you are unlikely to find a lawyer willing to take such a small-dollar case unless you agree to pay that lawyer expensive hourly fees.
Class action lawsuits are often the solution to this problem. If the company cheats you and you alone out of a few hundred dollars, you’re probably out of luck. But if the same company illegally cheats thousands of people out of a few hundred dollars as part of the same scheme, class actions allow those thousands of people to join together in one grand lawsuit. Because their combined suit is now worth a lot of money, they are suddenly likely to be able to recruit excellent legal counsel to represent the class.
Campbell-Ewald, however, sought to allow class action defendants to sabotage these lawsuits. Typically, such lawsuits begin when a single plaintiff or small group of plaintiffs file a complaint laying out their allegations. Though Gomez’s complaint indicated his intention to bring this case as a class action, the question of whether the case can proceed as class litigation is not decided until later in the proceedings. That created an interim period when the defendants knew that a class action was coming, but the only plaintiff properly before the court was Gomez.
During that interim period, the defendant company offered Gomez $1,500 per unwanted text message that he received — an offer that would effectively buy off Gomez but leave the other class members with nothing. They then claimed that, even if Gomez did not agree to this offer, the lawsuit had to cease. Under Article III of the Constitution, the company argued, a lawsuit must not proceed unless there is an active “case” or “controversy” between two parties. So when the defendant company offered to give Gomez everything he personally could expect to collect under the law, that offer allegedly rendered the case moot because there was no longer a real dispute between the two sides.
Considering the relentlessly pro business bent of this court, I am surprised, but pleased.
Circuit Court Judge Barry Williams has rejected a request for a subpoena to compell Officer William Porter to testify against his co-conspirators on the Baltimore Police Force:
A Baltimore judge on Wednesday rejected prosecutors’ request to force an officer whose trial ended in a hung jury to testify against three of his fellow officers facing charges in the death of Freddie Gray.
Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry Williams refused the state’s motion to force William Porter to testify against Edward Nero, Garrett Miller and Lt. Brian Rice, who were the officers who initially arrested and detained Gray last April.
It was not until this month that prosecutors indicated that they wanted Porter to testify against the three officers. Previously, they identified him as a material witness only in the trials of two other officers, Caesar Goodson and Sgt. Alicia White.
………
Judge Williams ruled in December that Porter must testify against Goodson, despite Porter’s own pending retrial. Porter’s attorneys appealed to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, which postponed Goodson’s trial until it decides whether to uphold or overturn the order. A hearing is scheduled for March 4.
Williams said he rejected the state’s request to compel Porter to testify against Nero, Miller and Rice because it would result in all of the officers’ trials being pushed back while the appeals court mulled whatever decision he made. Lawyers for the three officers had objected to pushing back their clients’ trials.
I really hope that the fix isn’t in.
Pharma bro Martin Shkreli hasw taken the 5th in response to a Congressional inquiry into price gouging in drugs:
The founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination on Wednesday, and he won’t comply with a subpoena for documents issued from a Senate panel investigating pharma drug pricing tactics.
The 32-year-old Shkreli was also subpoenaed to appear before a different panel, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to testify about the price of a life-saving drug he increased by more than 5,000 percent.
Shkreli became the poster child for greed last year after he raised the price of Daraprim—used to treat parasitic infections—from $13.50 a pill to $750. A single pill once sold for $1. Now facing criminal charges that he allegedly defrauded investors, Shkreli has said he should have boosted prices for the drug even more.
Let’s be clear: He has a right not to testify against himself, but generally it doesn’t apply to, you know, physical proof.
And yes, he is a ratf%$# who deserves to spend the rest of his life in gaol.
A left wing Israeli activist, Ezra Nawi, was caught on tape boasting that he turned information about Arabs who were looking to sell land to Jews over to the Palestinian security services, and boasted that these people were tortured and killed:
A prominent Israeli campaigner for Palestinian rights was recorded saying that he helps Palestinian authorities find and kill Palestinians who sell land to Jews.
The recording was aired Thursday by the television program Uvda of Israel’s Channel 2. In it, Ezra Nawi, a Jewish far-left activist from the Ta’ayush group, is heard speaking about four Palestinian real-estate sellers, whom Nawi said mistook him for a Jew interested in buying their property.
“Straight away I give their pictures and phone numbers to the Preventive Security Force,” Nawi is heard saying in reference to the Palestinian Authority’s counterintelligence arm. “The Palestinian Authority catches them and kills them. But before it kills them, they get beat up a lot.”
In the Palestinian Authority, the penal code reserves capital punishment for anyone convicted of selling land to Jews. This law, which Palestinian officials defended as designed to prevent takeovers by settlers, has not been implemented in Palestinian courts, where sellers of land to Jews are usually sentenced to several years in prison. However, in recent years several Palestinian have been murdered for selling land. Their murders have remained unsolved.
He has since been arrested on evidence that he was attempting to lure an Israeli Arab realtor to a village near Hebrone where he would be taken into custody by PA state security forces:
Many in Israel’s left have been trying to disassociate themselves from Ezra Nawi, the activist who was secretly taped on a Channel 2 news program Uvda bragging about sending Arab land brokers to certain torture if not death in the hands of the Palestinian Authority’s Preventive Security service (selling land to Jews is an act of treason under PA law). Those who defended him quickly became the new pariahs of Israel’s mass and social media. Then came a follow-up report Monday night showing Nawi was on the payroll of Breaking the Silence and Rabbis for Human Rights.
………
Meanwhile, right-wing journalist Shai Glick, who filed a police complaint regarding Ezra Nawi’s activities, reported a conversation with an investigating police officer who told him the Arab land broker Nawi was conspiring to hand over to the PA is an Israeli citizen. Nawi and several other activists were attempting to invite this Israeli citizen to the Arab village of Yatta, south of Hebron, where PA police would be waiting to arrest him.
This last revelation probably explains why Nawi hightailed it to Ben Gurion International, to catch a flight to anywhere else, when police caught him and took him in for questioning. It’s starting to sound like conspiracy to commit murder, which Israel frowns on, regardless of one’s political conviction.
Nawi’s lawyer is claiming that he was leaving the country to visit friends in Europe, and that he had checked with law enforcement before booking the flight, and given the sh%$ storm that has blown up around him, I could see he wants to get out.
I understand that Ezra Nawi he feels passionately about Palestinians and their demands for a homeland, but this is a classic case for quoting Freidrich Nietsche, “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
If you want to lead a consistently ethical life, it’s generally a good idea to avoid behavior that might invoke a Nietsche quote.
It’s pretty much an indicator that you have lost your way.
Everyone’s favorite oil spill pipeline company is suing the United States for stopping the pipeline:
TransCanada said on Wednesday that it would seek $15 billion in damages over the Obama administration’s decision to cancel the company’s Keystone XL pipeline project.
The company is taking the unusual step of suing through the North American Free Trade Agreement, calling the decision “arbitrary and unjustified.” The Canadian business also filed a lawsuit in Houston asking that the decision be overturned.
“TransCanada has been unjustly deprived of the value of its multibillion-dollar investment by the U.S. administration’s action,” the company said in a statement. “Rather, the denial was a symbolic gesture based on speculation about the (false) perceptions of the international community regarding the administration’s leadership on climate change.”
Seriously, just stop whining.
Christofascist and home schooling leader Bill Gothard has been accused of rape and covering up rape by his staff:
Ten women on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Bill Gothard, who for decades was a major force in the conservative Christian homeschooling movement, charging him and leaders in his ministry with sexual abuse, harassment and cover-up.
Gothard, who urged Christians to shun things like short skirts and rock music, is accused of raping a woman. The same woman says she was raped by one of the ministry’s “biblical counselors.”
The lawsuit is part of a battle between dozens of women and the Institute in Basic Life Principles, which was until recently an influential homeschooling ministry, and its charismatic leader Gothard, who urged Christians to focus on their “biblical character” and have large families. Gothard has never been married.
Gothard, 81, resigned from the ministry in 2014 after more than 30 women had alleged that he had molested and sexually harassed women he worked with, including some who were minors.
Reached by phone on Wednesday, Gothard said he has not seen the lawsuit and denied allegations that he had raped one woman. “Oh no. Never never. Oh! That’s horrible,” he said. “Never in my life have I touched a girl sexually. I’m shocked to even hear that.”
Gothard denied sexually harassing women. “That really is not true,” he said. “I’d rather hold off to comment until I see what’s in the lawsuit.”
………
Gothard’s ministry was once a popular gathering spot for thousands of conservative Christian families, including the Duggar family from TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting.” Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute conferences, where families would learn from Gothard’s teaching, were popular among homeschooling families. He has also rubbed shoulders with Republican luminaries like former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
Wednesday’s lawsuit includes an undated letter in which Gothard allegedly wrote to the women who were accusing him. “I was very wrong in holding hands, giving hugs, and touching their hair and feet. I was also wrong in making statements that caused emotional turmoil and confusion,” the letter reads, describing what he did as “sin.”
In Wednesday’s interview, Gothard declined to confirm or deny whether he had written the letter. “I need to get more facts here, okay?”
………
Although Gothard resigned, his affidavit makes clear he intends to return to the ministry he started in 1961.
The specifics are pretty horrific:
The lawsuit in DuPage County Circuit Court in Illinois, where IBLP’s headquarters is located, charges that IBLP, its employees and board members received reports of sexual abuse, sexual harassment and “inappropriate/unauthorized touching” from women and girls. But, the women allege, the defendants never reported the “potentially criminal allegations” to law enforcement authorities or the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services as required by state law.
One of the Jane Doe plaintiffs in the lawsuit alleges that she was raped by her father and other relatives and says she was sold by her father through human trafficking when she was a minor. She said she reported the abuse and trafficking to IBLP staff, which failed to report to authorities.
When people believe that God is on their side, as opposed to worrying if they are on God’s side, corruption is the most common result.
Still, this is kind of shocking.
It makes the Borgia Pope look like an amateur,
First, we have former (Yay!) Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia, who went postal on Sandra Band, has been indicted for perjury and fired by the Texas DPS:
The state trooper who arrested Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old African-American woman who was found dead three days later in her Waller County jail cell, has been indicted on perjury charges, a special prosecutor said.
Hours after the decision was announced, the Texas Department of Public Safety said it was initiating termination proceedings against Brian Encinia, the 30-year-old trooper who last July stopped Bland for failing to signal a lane change and arrested her.
The announcement came late Wednesday afternoon at the courthouse in Hempstead, about 50 miles northwest of Houston, during the grand jury’s fourth meeting since it was convened this fall to deliberate the circumstances around Bland’s arrest and incarceration.
Darrell Jordan, one of five special prosecutors, said the grand jury’s indictment stemmed from a statement the trooper made in a one-page affidavit he filed in Bland’s arrest, in which he said he pulled her out of her Hyundai Azera to “further conduct a safe traffic investigation.”
Well, that was fairly clearly a lie, and it was material, which is the basic definition of perjury.
Meanwhile, in my hometown of Baltimore, the prosecution continues apace, with Officer William Porter, whose trial ended in a hung jury, being ordered by a judge to testify at the trial of Officer Caesar Goodson, Jr.:
In an unprecedented move, Judge Barry G. Williams ordered Officer William G. Porter on Wednesday to testify at the upcoming trial of a fellow city officer charged in the death of Freddie Gray.
Porter’s attorneys immediately said they would seek an injunction to block the ruling.
Williams said he found himself in “uncharted territory” but felt the law was “clear.” He granted Porter a type of immunity that allows his charges to stand, but which precludes his testimony in the trial of Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr. from being used against him.
Legal experts — and Williams — said the ruling was unprecedented for a criminal defendant with pending charges.
Williams also warned prosecutors that calling Porter as a witness could have serious implications for their ability to retry him. Porter’s trial on manslaughter and other charges ended last month in a hung jury, and he is scheduled to be tried again in June.
“The second he testifies, that may change the game,” Williams said.
After Williams issued the ruling, defense attorney Gary Proctor leapt to his feet and told Williams he intended to appeal to the Court of Special Appeals on Thursday to block prosecutors from calling Porter to testify.
Should Williams’ ruling stand, Porter would not be able to invoke the Fifth Amendment and would have to testify or face the threat of contempt and jail time.
I think that the strategy here is to force him to testify in the hope that some of the other officers get angry enough to roll in him, and under those circumstances, the first guy to make it to the prosecutor’s office wins, and everyone else loses.
Also, the prosecution has let slip some elements of its strategy, and it appears that they will be attempting to prove that Gray was the victim was of a “Rough Ride” where officers use abrupt maneuvers to throw a detainee around a car to punish him:
The idea has long been floated that Freddie Gray might have been given a “rough ride” — a practice in which police transport vans are intentionally driven erratically to harm unbuckled, handcuffed detainees.
Now prosecutors have signaled for the first time that they may adopt the theory in the case against Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., the driver of the van in which they say Gray suffered a fatal spinal cord injury. Goodson faces second-degree depraved-heart murder charges in a trial that begins with jury selection Monday.
Prosecutors have notified Goodson’s attorneys that they intend to call expert witness Neill Franklin, a retired Baltimore police officer and Maryland state trooper who has testified in Annapolis on policing, to talk about “retaliatory prisoner transportation practices.” Legal experts said that refers to what is colloquially known in Baltimore as a “rough ride.”
“That is a retaliatory, sort of ‘teach the guy a lesson’ move,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina professor and an expert in use of force by police.
Both the defense and prosecution are barred by a gag order from discussing the case, and retained witnesses are not allowed to discuss their intended testimony.
Here is the kicker:
Gray was unbuckled, handcuffed, placed in leg shackles and driven around West Baltimore for about 45 minutes before he was found unconscious and not breathing in the back of the van when it arrived at the Western District police station.
There is no reason for it take 45 minutes to get him to booking.
I am sure that the defense will attempt to provide an alternate theory for this, but there is no justification for going on a joy ride with a detainee in the back.
I used to say that Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia would die by choking on his own bile.
It turns out that I was wrong.
It appears that bile and resentment have driven him insane:
Government support for religion is not only justified by the Constitution, it was the norm for hundreds of years and it helped the United States become a free and prosperous nation, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday in Metairie.
Speaking before a small crowd at Archbishop Rummel High School, Scalia delivered a short but provocative speech on religious freedom that saw the conservative Catholic take aim at those who confuse freedom of religion for freedom from it.
The Constitution’s First Amendment protects the free practice of religion and forbids the government from playing favorites among the various sects, Scalia said, but that doesn’t mean the government can’t favor religion over nonreligion.
That was never the case historically, he said. It didn’t become the law of the land until the 60s, Scalia said, when he said activist judges attempted to resolve the question of government support of religion by imposing their own abstract rule rather than simply observing common practice.
If people want strict prohibition against government endorsement of religion, let them vote on it, he said. “Don’t cram it down the throats of an American people that has always honored God on the pretext that the Constitution requires it.”
BTW, it appears that the first thing to go is a sense of irony, because he unironically quotes Charles de Gaulle insulting the United States:
Citing a quotation attributed to former French President Charles de Gaulle, Scalia said “‘God takes care of little children, drunkards and the United States of America.'” Scalia then added, “I think that’s true. God has been very good to us. One of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor.”
Seriously, He’s lost it.
I do understand that technically impeachment is for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, but the juxtaposition of batsh%$ insane and just does not give a flying f%$# in a rolling doughnut, particularly when he has no interest at all in recusing himself on cases where he has explicitly stated that his mind is already made up.
This ain’t the first time.