Catholic Info
Traditional Catholic Faith => The Catholic Bunker => Topic started by: poche on December 04, 2013, 12:16:20 AM
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A teenage Oklahoma hip hop dancer is still shaken after her dream trip to a Texas dance studio ended up with her in handcuffs and taken to Child Protective Services and her guardians in police custody.
"They had nothing on us," dance instructor Emmanuel Hurd told ABCNews.com. "Instead of going the route they should have went, they took her to CPS. The only reason someone gave me was we were black and Landry was white."
Landry Thompson, 13, has been dancing since she was 7. For the past few years, she has dreamed of traveling to Houston to dance with well-known hip hop dancer Chachi Gonzales at Planet Funk Academy.
Over the weekend, Thompson's parents, instructor and dance partner made her dream come true. Landry flew to Houston from her Tulsa, Okla., home on Saturday and met up with Hurd, 29, and her dance partner Josiah Kelly, 22.
The three spent the day at the dance academy and taking part in a video shoot. After wrapping and dinner, the exhausted trio stopped at a gas station around 3 a.m. to program their GPS to find their hotel, according to Hurd. He dozed off and awoke to find their car surrounded by police.
"Everything was going amazing. It was a beautiful day .... and then everything went bad," Hurd told ABCNews.com today.
Hurd and Kelly were pulled out of the car and police told them not to worry, they weren't be arrested, just detained, Hurd said.
Hurd had forms from Landry's mother making him her guardian for the duration of the trip, her birth certificate and her insurance card, among other forms, which he said he tried to tell the officers.
"[The officer] puts the handcuffs on very, very tight [and] throws me in the back and does the same to Josiah," Hurd said. "All the while I'm looking at Landry. She's terrified."
Landry, still in the car, said she called her mother.
"I was crying. I tried to put the police on the phone with my mom and they said they didn't want to," she told ABCNews.com.
The teen said she was terrified and that the cops didn't believe she was giving them her real name, since she wasn't on the runaway list.
Landry's mom, Destiny Thompson, said she wasn't surprised by the late-night call because rehearsals often go late into the night, but could tell something was wrong when she heard the commotion in the background and her daughter's upset voice.
A police officer eventually took Landry's phone and spoke to her mother.
"He got on the phone and he said, 'Are you aware your daughter is in Houston, Texas, with two black men?' And I said, 'Yes, I am aware of that,'" Destiny Thompson told ABCNews.com. "Then he started mumbling stuff about my parenting, why I would let her do that and then he proceeded to tell me the people she was with were intoxicated or on something."
"There's no possible way these men were intoxicated, that's not how they live," the mom said. "I knew right then I had some trouble."
"[Hurd] is somebody we know well," she said. "His wife and kids spent the night at my house last night. These are not people that we kind of know. These are close family friends that we trust explicitly with our children. They just happen to be black."
Hurd said he begged officers from the back of the police car to listen to him. He said one officer said to him, "Sir, you've got to understand, you two men are black and she's white."
Hurd said he understood the caution, but thought the officers' actions were unnecessary after speaking to Landry's mother and seeing the docuмentation they had with them.
Landry was handcuffed and put in the back of a car. Police eventually let Hurd and Kelly go, but put Landry in Child Protective Services custody.
Landry was released back to them at around 11:30 a.m. after Thompson said she contacted Tulsa police for help.
The Houston Police Department said in a statement that patrol officers spotted the car in front of the gas station at about 3:20 a.m. on Sunday and that the two adult men and the juvenile female were sleeping in the car.
"Given the age discrepancies between all involved, the fact that all three were from out of state, and the child had no relatives in the area, officers, in an abundance of caution, did their utmost to ensure her safety," the statement said. "In this instance, that involved further investigation by CPS."
The police department declined to answer additional questions about the incident.
Thompson and Hurd both believe race played a part in the situation.
"Racial profiling right now is really bad in America," Hurd said.
He mentioned Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager shot and killed in Florida, but didn't want to talk specifically about that case since he said it's hard to know what really happened.
"What I do know is that he is not alive to speak out about it. He's not alive to say his side, but we are so we are definitely speaking out. We're definitely going to continue to speaking out about this situation because it hasn't stopped and it needs to."
Destiny Thompson said she has an attorney and Hurd said they are exploring taking legal action.
Landry said she was very scared and said she "definitely" thinks race played a role in what happened.
"I don't think that should have mattered at all," she said.
http://gma.yahoo.com/teen-dancer-taken-legal-guardian-alleges-racial-profiling-201703626--abc-news-topstories.html
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The mayor and police department of a predominantly black Miami suburb have been hit with a federal civil rights lawsuit over allegations of aggressive police tactics, including stop-and-frisk searches and arbitrary arrests, targeting African Americans.
The lawsuit against the city of Miami Gardens, filed on Friday in U.S. District Court, alleges a long history of police abuse and racial profiling in the crime-plagued suburb on the northern outskirts of Miami.
The 11 plaintiffs named in the lawsuit are led by Ali Amin Saleh, a Latin American man of Middle Eastern descent who is identified as having been the owner since 1999 of a convenience store in Miami Gardens that was subjected to frequent police searches.
"Over the course of approximately five years, spanning from 2008 to 2013, Mr. Saleh's Quick Stop was unlawfully searched without reasonable suspicion or arguable probable cause, numerous times by MGPD (Miami Gardens Police Department) officers," the complaint says.
"In addition, MGPD officers have engaged in a policy, practice and/or custom of stopping-and-frisking, searching, seizing, and arresting patrons of his Quick Stop while they are on the premises for loitering or trespassing," it added.
Miami Gardens, a city of 105,000 residents that sits on the northwest edge of Miami, is 80 percent black, and was home to Trayvon Martin, the teenager shot dead near Orlando in 2012 by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who was later acquitted of murder on the grounds of self-defense.
The complaint said the arrests and searches at the convenience store came despite repeated protests from Saleh, who told police the "suspects" targeted on his property had his full permission and authority to be there.
The complaint seeks unspecified punitive and compensatory damages for what it describes as "deliberate, wanton, malicious, reckless, and oppressive" police tactics in the city.
It adds that the tactics had spawned numerous rights abuses since 2008, when police adopted a policy offering benefits and promotions for officers who met strict monthly quotas for the number of arrests and citations they issued.
Saleh's business suffered severely as sales fell and customers began shunning the store as a result of the police tactics, the complaint says.
Miami Gardens Mayor Oliver Gilbert III, lead defendant in the lawsuit, did not immediately return phone calls or an email from Reuters seeking comment.
Another plaintiff in the lawsuit is identified as Earl Sampson, 28, an African-American and employee of the Quick Stop who was repeatedly stopped once a week for four years, or about 288 times, the suit says.
On numerous occasions, it said Sampson had been arrested for trespassing while at work stocking the shelves or taking out the trash at the Quick Stop store.
The case is Earl Sampson et al v. City of Miami Gardens et al, U.S. District Court Souther District of Florida, No. 1:13-CV-24312-DLG
http://news.yahoo.com/miami-suburb-sued-aggressive-police-tactics-racial-profiling-013404530.html
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A man who used $20,000 in cash to charter a private plane from Nashville to California was arrested on money laundering charges after an airport police dog smelled narcotics on $153,000 stuffed into his suitcase, according to a police affidavit released Tuesday.
Conor Guckian, 33, was arrested in Nashville on Monday after airport police were alerted to a "suspicious individual" using the large sum of cash to charter the plane to California, according to the affidavit.
A K-9 unit detected the drug odor on the bundles of money in Guckian's bag, the docuмent said.
The officer then waited for Guckian to arrive to board the plane, where Guckian told officers he was transporting the large sum in order to buy gold in California, according to the affidavit.
He consented to a second search and the second dog detected the narcotic odor on the cash, which was divided into 32 bundles secured with rubber bands, according to the affidavit.
"The manner in which the U.S. currency was wrapped is consistent with that of drug proceeds," the affidavit says.
Authorities said Guckian told police he was chartering the plane because he thought it would be a safer way to transport the cash, although he had flown commercial jets to Nashville from New York and Chicago. It was unclear where Guckian lives.
He told police he came to Nashville to see a friend, but later said he was only there because the flights were cheaper, police said.
Guckian also told police he structured his bank accounts to show balances under $10,000 to avoid government detection and said he was previously arrested in New York for possession for resale of cocaine.
He remained in jail Tuesday in lieu of $10,000 bond.
http://news.yahoo.com/man-arrested-153-000-nashville-airport-204953710.html;_ylt=A0oG7mR.IdZSxDEA9pZXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTB0ZWl2YXByBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2FjMgR2dGlkA1ZJUDMyN18x
I think this arrest is unfair because the possesion of American currency is not a crime under any statute that I am aware of. Virtually all cash has some kind of drug residue on it. Not only are they confiscating this cash but they are holding this man for a crime about which I believe they have no probable cause.
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Unfair robbery, unfair burglary, unfair rape, unfair kidnapping, unfair parking ticket, unfair c- on report card, unfair detention hall, unfair jail, unfair prison... unfair murder, unfair blackmail,l unfair check fraud, unfair child abuse, unfair etc, unfair ect, unfair etc,
unfair unfair unfair unfair unfair unfair unfair unfairl unfair unfair unfair unfair unfair unfair unfair unfair
damn unfair
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:dancing-banana:You're joking, poche, right?
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FREE OJ :furtive:
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Free Madoff! :dancing-banana:
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Free Madoff! :dancing-banana:
Free us all from the slavery of capitalism and give us vodka !
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Free Madoff! :dancing-banana:
Free us all from the slavery of capitalism and give us vodka !
:alcohol: :alcohol: :alcohol: :alcohol: :alcohol: :alcohol: :alcohol:
:cheers: :cheers: :cheers: :cheers: :cheers: :cheers: :cheers:
:alcohol: :alcohol: :alcohol: :alcohol: :alcohol: :alcohol: :alcohol:
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A Frisco, Texas, man now faces trial following an arrest last October for holding up a sign warning drivers they were about to enter a speed trap, KHOU.com reports.
Police say they spotted Ron Martin standing on the center median of a six-lane roadway, holding a sign that read "Police ahead," according to MyFoxDFW.com.
In the arrest report, police officer Thomas Mrozinski wrote that he became wise to Martin's ruse when he saw drivers "waving at us." This wasn't the first time Martin had held up a sign to warn drivers about the fuzz's presence.
Martin, who made his first court appearance on Wednesday, told WFAA he was trying to do the same thing as the police by "reminding people that there is a limit here" and that people should slow down.
So what exactly was he arrested for? The Dallas Observer reports that police cited him for holding a sign on public property.
Martin is a Frisco homeowner with a family. He paints signs for a living. He says he just wants to help make the roads safer, and he argues that his homemade signs are more effective at doing that than speed traps.
Martin has reported the police for what he sees as unsafe practices, including hiding behind signs and not using their lights. "I just feel like it was a little bit unsafe, not only for citizens, but for police officers having to do their job," he told MyFoxDFW.com.
The Dallas Observer reports that "most states, Texas included, don't have laws that specifically prohibit people from giving other motorists the heads-up that a cop with a radar gun is hiding behind the bushes."
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/on-trial-over-speed-trap-warnings-161025708.html
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Back in 2013, Texas resident Larry Davis ran either a red light or stop sign (reports vary) in his Buick in the city of Austin. Despite his insistence that he had had only one drink, he was put in handcuffs and arrested for driving while intoxicated. Then, when he was given a Breathalyzer test by the AustinPolice Department, he blew a 0.00. Nonetheless, as KVUE reports, Mr. Davis spent the night in jail.
While at the station, Mr. Davis agreed to give a blood sample as well, to prove he was not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol. The results would later come back 100% negative. Davis’ attorney, Daniel Betts, told KVUE, “My reaction was just shock that this happened."
The Austin Police Department stands by the arrest, saying they believed Davis showed signs of impairment, that while standing on one leg, he “swayed,” and “needed his arms for balance.” They also suggested that he could have been on marijuana, a drug that wouldn’t necessarily show up in a test. The APD said they’re going by a “take-no-chances” policy. That being said, they did acknowledge how unusual it is that Davis was arrested despite registering a zero on his breath test.
The Statesman reports that people, including Davis’ attorney, Mr. Betts, have characterized Austin PD’s drunken driving arrests as “overzealous.” They noted back in 2011, that Austin’s Travis County has, “dismissed a higher percentage of drunken driving cases than other major Texas counties -- in part because prosecutors said police filed weak charges or prosecutors allowed suspects plead to other crimes."
As for Larry Davis, he will now spend the next few months getting his arrest record wiped clean. In addition to that, he will file a grievance against the Austin Police Department and the officer who arrested him. KVUE notes that as they started to investigate the manner, Travis County prosecutors dismissed the case completely.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/oddnews/man-blows-0-00-on-breathalyzer--gets-arrested-for-dwi-003450614.html
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On a cold Wednesday evening in January 2009, Josh Miller was finishing his 8:00-to-5:00 shift as an automotive detailer at a garage in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. It was just like any other day; he was tired and ready to go home. But that evening, his life would change forever. In just a few hours, Miller would find himself to be one of thousands of people embroiled in an ongoing national medical debate.
After work, Miller picked up his two-month-old son, Rhys (pronounced "Reese"), from the restaurant where his fiancée worked, and headed home with the boy. The two ate dinner and relaxed, sitting together on the couch. They were watching TV — Miller doesn’t remember which show — when the boy started to cry. Miller, who was 32 at the time, tried to soothe Rhys by patting the little boy’s belly and making shushing sounds. But Rhys continued to cry. And cry. And then cry some more. Soon, the cries became uncontrollable, Rhys’ voice cracking and distorting as he filled the air with as much sound as he could muster after each pained breath.
This wasn’t exactly a new thing for Rhys. Miller and his fiancée had other children, and they knew Rhys was colicky. So, as Miller tells it, he did what he’d done in the past with Rhys: he drew a bath. But as Miller filled the tub, the boy’s screams stopped. When Miller went to see why, he found that the boy hadn’t suddenly calmed himself on his own. He’d gone unconscious. And he wouldn’t wake up.
Next: a whirlwind, a nightmare. He called 911, frantic. He called his fiancée at work. There was a frenzied trip to the closest hospital. Relatives showing up. Panic in the emergency room. Then an ambulance ride over dangerously snow-covered roads to the closest Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, two hours away. Days of waiting. Doctors and doctors and more doctors poking and prodding the infant.
It looked like Rhys would pull through — he regained consciousness two days after Miller called 911 — but one of his doctors became suspicious about why Rhys had gone unconscious in the first place. Miller claims the doctor — Dr. Janet Squires, chief of the Child Advocacy Center at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh — asked if he had a criminal record. He did — two minor drug charges and a harassment charge. After that conversation, Miller remembers telling his fiancée, "Be prepared, they're gonna point this at me."
They did. Based on a brain scan and conversations with other doctors at Children’s, Dr. Squires determined that Miller’s story was a lie: Rhys had not lost consciousness because he had been crying uncontrollably; he lost consciousness after being shaken so violently that his brain began to bleed. Miller was the only possible culprit. Within a week, he was in jail. Within 16 months, he was on trial. And by March 2011, Miller was in prison, serving a maximum of 10 years. The charges: aggravated assault, endangering the welfare of a child, recklessly endangering another person, and simple assault resulting in shaken baby syndrome (SBS).
The Triad
As many as 1,400 children each year are harmed as a result of violent shaking, according to numbers compiled by the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome. More than 300 of those kids die. So whenever there’s seemingly clear evidence that someone like Josh Miller became frustrated and shook a child — as a stupid, last-ditch attempt to stop the child from crying — prosecutors are often inclined to file child abuse charges. And these charges have become a relative commonplace. At least nine separate pretrial shaken baby syndrome cases have made news across the country since the beginning of April.
For many years, the seemingly clear evidence in SBS cases came from brain scans.
In 1971, Dr. Norman Guthkelch published an influential paper called "Infantile Subdural Hematoma and its Relationship to Whiplash Injuries." Doctors at the UK hospital where Guthkelch worked had seen a growing number of children arrive with subdural hematomas — blood on the brain’s surface — but no visible physical injuries. The paper was written to attempt an explanation: according to Guthkelch’s theory, the babies had been shaken. As he explained to NPR in 2011, there wasn’t stigma against it at the time, "so the parents told me the truth," he told NPR. They’d say, "'Yes, I shook him.'"
That theory grew far beyond Guthkelch’s grasp. In time, mainstream medicine came to understand that SBS could be identified by a triad of symptoms: subdural hematomas, bleeding behind the eyes, and a swollen brain. If a child shows up in an emergency room with those injuries, doctors are going to ask some very serious questions.
There’s no indication that Guthkelch — or doctors more broadly — intended SBS to inspire prosecutorial charges en masse against parents and caregivers who’d allegedly shaken their children into unconsciousness. But that’s what prosecutors have done. Enlisting doctors as expert witnesses, SBS criminal cases are not uncommon. Students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University found last year that there’ve been as many as 3,000 criminal cases in the United States related to shaken baby syndrome.
That’s arguably a good thing — people should indeed face the criminal justice system for shaking children. But much has evolved in the medical community since 1971 to question SBS as indicative of a crime. Which means many of those cases and criminal convictions are questionable.
A 2001 postmortem study of children allegedly killed by violent shaking, for example, pointed to alternative causes of death beyond SBS. Studies of biomechanics have suggested that it’s impossible for an adult to shake a child violently enough to cause brain bleeding. And a 2004 study showed that a child can fall, sustain fatal injuries, have a "lucid interval" where they seem fine, and then die later on from brain injuries that look like the SBS triad.
A 2012 paper published in the Houston Journal of Health Law & Policy summarizes these points and others. It concludes: "For decades, the SBS hypothesis provided a clear and simple explanation for the collapse or death of children who presented with subdural hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage, and brain swelling," it states. "We now know, however, that its premises were wrong."
A major magazine piece about a Seattle-area SBS case was published this month, along with a followup to an ongoing newspaper investigation about a separate case in Rochester, NY. There's been a lot of major media attention, in fact, brought to the debate over SBS. Not the least of that attention comes from a New York Times Magazine feature and a Frontline investigation that lead to the release of a man convicted on dubious SBS charges.
But that attention has by no means inspired consensus about SBS. Questions about SBS’s validity have deeply divided segments of the medical community. That uncertainty is then dissected in criminal trials and translated to juries, who are then asked to make a decision about whether to throw someone into prison.
Josh Miller’s case was a particularly confusing example of that scenario.
In covering Miller’s direct appeal for Pittsburgh City Paper two years ago, his case struck me as unusual. For one, Amy McCullough, who’s Miller’s fiancée and Rhys’ mom, told me she doesn’t think Miller shook Rhys. (She and Miller plan to finally get married once Miller gets out of prison.) And Rhys seemed like a perfectly normal kid when I met him and McCullough: he was three years old at the time, and was talkative and boisterous. Unlike many kids who’ve suffered from SBS, Rhys didn’t have eye patches to correct his vision or tubes jutting from his body.
Plus: in a nearly identical case from the summer of 2012, Dr. Janet Squires — the expert witness who helped convict Miller — made essentially the same argument as she did in Miller’s case: She argued that a man taking care of an infant had shaken that child into a brain injury-caused coma. In that case, too, she claimed that the man had lied about not shaking the boy. In both cases, expert medical witnesses were brought to court by the defense team to refute her testimony. In Miller’s case, her testimony was strong enough to overcome the defense and convict him. But in this next case in Erie, her testimony fell on deaf ears. The accused man was acquitted.
Meanwhile, Miller remains in prison, and still steadfastly denies that he shook Rhys. Nonetheless, in 2012, a Pennsylvania appeals court denied his direct appeal. In January of this year, his court-appointed attorney filed a second appeal, arguing that Miller’s two previous attorneys had provided "ineffective assistance." Last week, the state responded, denying those claims. The case is now in the hands of a panel of judges who’ll decide whether Miller’s second appeal holds merit — but they’ll be considering the assistance offered by his earlier lawyers, not the science behind SBS.
Surprisingly, Dr. Norman Guthkelch, the man credited with discovering SBS in the first place, has done quite a bit to analyze potentially faulty shaking cases. And in his interview with NPR, he said there’s plenty of reason to do so. "In a case of measles, if you get the diagnosis wrong, in seven days' time it really doesn't matter because it's cleared up anyhow," he said. "If you get the diagnosis of fatal shaken baby syndrome wrong, potentially someone's life will be terminated."
http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/15/5604886/shaken-baby-syndrome-criminal-cases-controversy
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People who told police they were not that drunk while driving may have been right in one Pennsylvania county.
Somerset County District Attorney Lisa Lazzari-Strasiser said her office has not been performing a mathematical calculation needed to convert hospital tests on drivers' blood, which enable the results to be used as evidence in court, the Daily American (http://bit.ly/1v5IN9x) reported.
"It was an unfortunate oversight," the prosecutor said.
She explained that the hospital began testing drivers' blood serum — or plasma — not whole blood, in June 2010. As a result, the blood-alcohol content has been overestimated by as much as 15 percent on DUI cases using hospital blood samples since then.
The blood-alcohol level is used to determine whether someone is legally drunk and, in some cases, whether they deserve more severe punishment. Under Pennsylvania law, drivers are considered drunk if their blood-alcohol content is 0.08 percent or higher.
Tests using blood serum can be used as evidence, but only if a calculation is done to convert the percentage of alcohol found in the serum as though it were taken from a whole blood sample.
Lazzari-Strasiser said her office has reviewed more than 570 cases and eliminated them as being affected by the discrepancy. The remaining 180-plus that could have been affected will be reviewed by next week.
Defense attorney Steve Miller expects no more than 2 percent of all cases might have to be retried or dismissed.
"I believe the perception of this problem will be significantly greater than the actual problem," Miller said.
An assistant district attorney discovered the blood-alcohol percentages weren't being converted when he was preparing for a recent case.
Lazzari-Strasiser said the hospital and police have done nothing wrong.
"It's the prosecution's responsibility to make sure that the levels are correct," she said.
http://news.yahoo.com/oops-county-wrongly-figured-blood-alcohol-levels-160009539.html
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I live in Houston! And :applause: yippee! the police do somethings right sometimes. The vast number of black men preying on young white girls is epidemic, all aided and abetted by the idiot liberal filth. Unfortunately, the mother of this poor girl would probably be "honored" by having her daughter abused by black men. Any "mother" who would let her daughter #1 participate in and perform that vile ghetto rap crap, and #2 allow her child to travel a thousand miles away in the company of two probable predators, should be locked up. Publicly shamed and then locked up.
Anyway, :jumping2: hooray for Houston's finest. Unfortunately the girl has to go back to her whore of a mother but at least somebody is making an effort to make sure our children are safe.
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I live in Houston! And :applause: yippee! the police do somethings right sometimes. The vast number of black men preying on young white girls is epidemic, all aided and abetted by the idiot liberal filth. Unfortunately, the mother of this poor girl would probably be "honored" by having her daughter abused by black men. Any "mother" who would let her daughter #1 participate in and perform that vile ghetto rap crap, and #2 allow her child to travel a thousand miles away in the company of two probable predators, should be locked up. Publicly shamed and then locked up.
Anyway, :jumping2: hooray for Houston's finest. Unfortunately the girl has to go back to her whore of a mother but at least somebody is making an effort to make sure our children are safe.
I also live in Houston. The city has a lesbian mayor, and she and
the city council voted to have all bathrooms unisex.
I live in a almost all Mexican part of town, and the men protect
their women. black men does not dare harass Mexican Girls,
and women.
This place is the only place to except the rap music and the
indecent dressed and foul mouth blacks.
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Two North Carolina men were declared innocent and ordered freed on Tuesday after spending more than 30 years in prison for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl that recent DNA tests linked to another man.
Henry McCollum, 50, and his half brother Leon Brown, 46, were teenagers when they were arrested for the 1983 rape and killing of Sabrina Buie, whose body was left in a field in the small town of Red Springs.
McCollum is North Carolina's longest-serving death row inmate. Brown's sentence was reduced at a second trial to life in prison for rape.
At a court hearing, North Carolina Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser ordered both brothers to be freed. Local prosecutors did not contest their release.
"This is a tragedy," said Ken Rose, an attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation representing McCollum. "He's thankful to God that this day has come."
Brown and McCollum, 15 and 19 at the time, each signed a detailed confession to the crime written by police. They later claimed they had been coerced to do so with promises of release during intense interrogations.
Court records show both men are intellectually disabled with limited abilities to read or write.
None of the DNA collected at the scene was linked to Brown or McCollum.
Among the evidence presented in court on Tuesday was a DNA match linking a cigarette butt found near the victim's body to another man, Roscoe Artis, who was later sentenced to death for a similar rape and murder in the same town.
Now 74, Artis was living with this sister at the time of the murder in a home adjacent to the field where Buie was found.
He had a long history of assaulting women and was convicted of raping and murdering an 18-year-old girl a month later. He is serving a life sentence.
The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, an independent state agency, started investigating the case in 2010.
In an interview with the News & Observer in Raleigh while he was in prison, McCollum said he never gave up hope.
"Me and my brother lost 30 years for no reason at all," he said. "I have never stopped believing that one day I would be able to walk out of that door."
http://news.yahoo.com/north-carolina-brothers-declared-innocent-freed-30-years-231230088.html
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New York City police are investigating an altercation between officers and a pregnant woman that was captured on amateur video, officials said Wednesday.
The video shows an officer struggling with a woman who police say tried to intervene in the arrest of her 17-year-old son early Saturday morning in Brooklyn. The woman is taken to the ground on her stomach by an officer.
Sandra Amezquita was asking police to "stop using excessive force" on her teenage son when the altercation happened around 2:15 a.m., said her attorney, Sanford Rubenstein.
A man can be heard on the video yelling, "Oh my God, she's pregnant."
"I'm afraid of what is going to happen to my baby. I pray to God nothing happens to him," Amezquita, who is about 5 months pregnant, said through an interpreter at a press conference.
Rubenstein said the family plans to meet Monday with prosecutors. The Brooklyn district attorney's office said it could not immediately confirm that, but spokeswoman Helen Peterson did say "all aspects" of the case were being reviewed.
Rubenstein said Amezquita had a mark on her stomach and he wants the DA to look into whether she was hit with an object.
"It's clear to me when an incident like this occurs you understand why police community relations are at an all-time low," the attorney said earlier Wednesday.
Internal affairs investigators are looking into the matter, said chief police spokesman Steve Davis.
Rubenstein said another woman who walked over to see what was happening also was thrown to the ground by police; Amezquita's husband was also hurt.
The lawyer said doctors told Amezquita "there's no way to tell" if the fetus was harmed.
Police identified the teen as Jhohan Lemos. He was charged with weapon possession, resisting arrest and harassment. Police said he was carrying an illegal knife and has been arrested five times, including for gang assault and robbery.
Amezquita received a summons for disorderly conduct. Two other men were charged with assault, resisting arrest and other charges.
A neighbor, Mercedes Hidalgo, said at the press conference that she was pushed when she tried to tell officers that Amezquita was pregnant.
Last week, another officer from the same precinct was suspended after a video appeared to show him kicking a street fair vendor and walking away.
http://news.yahoo.com/nypd-probes-officers-push-pregnant-woman-134747459.html
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A federal lawsuit filed Monday accuses Indiana police of excessive force after officers smashed a woman's car window with children inside, tasered an unarmed passenger and dragged him out of the vehicle during a routine traffic stop last month.
Police, though, say they feared the passenger might have a weapon after he refused to step out the vehicle and reached toward the rear seats.
The incident was captured on video by both police and the alleged victims. At approximately 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 24, Hammond police pulled over Lisa Mahone as she drove with a friend, Jamal Jones, and her two children, to visit her mother in the hospital.
According to the lawsuit filed Monday in Indiana, an officer told Mahone she was being pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt and asked to see both her driver's license and Jones' identification. Mahone produced her license, but Jones told the officer he did not have his license because he had been ticketed for not paying his insurance, and offered to show them the ticket. The officer refused, according to Jones, and ordered him to step out of the car. According to the suit, Jones refused, fearing "the officers would harm him."
But Hammond police say Jones "refused to lower the window more than a small amount" and refused to provide his name. The officer then called for backup, requesting a video-equipped squad car.
It was around this time, police say, that Mahone shifted the car into drive. When officers warned her they had placed a "stop strip" that would puncture her tires in front of the vehicle, she pleaded with them to let her go.
"Just give me a ticket for no seatbelt so I can go to the hospital because the doctor called me to tell me to come in because my mom is about to pass away," Mahone can be heard telling officers who were continuing to ask Jones to get out of the car.
After police warned Jones if he didn't step out of the car they would have to do it for him, an officer broke the passenger window with a club. According to the lawsuit, the club struck Jones in the shoulder and caused shards of glass to hit the four passengers.
The officers then tasered Jones and forcibly removed him from car, placing him under arrest. He was charged with resisting arrest, according to the suit. "At no point during this entire encounter did Jamal physically resist the officers in any way," the lawsuit states.
But in a statement, Hammond Police Lt. Richard Hoyda said the officers were "at all times acting in the interest of officer safety and in accordance with Indiana law."
"In general, police officers who make legal traffic stops are allowed to ask passengers inside of a stopped vehicle for identification and to request that they exit a stopped vehicle for the officer’s safety without a requirement of reasonable suspicion," Hoyda said. "When the passenger displayed movements inside of the stopped vehicle that included placing his hand in places where the officer could not see, officers’ concerns for their safety were heightened."
The case is the latest in a series involving officers accused of using excessive force. Last month, a South Carolina Highway Patrol officer was charged with armed aggravated assault after he shot an unarmed driver who had reached into his car to retrieve his license. The shooting was captured on the officer's dash cam.
The shooting death of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in August sparked nightly demonstrations that included heavily armed militarized police clashing with protesters in the St. Louis suburb. That shooting, which was not captured on video, led to calls from lawmakers for police to wear video cameras on their uniforms.
One of the officers named in the Mahone's suit, Patrick Vicari, "has been named as a defendant in at least three previous lawsuits involving excessive use of force against citizens."
http://news.yahoo.com/taser-cops-hammond-traffic-stop-video-171046612.html
If he was charged with resisting arrerst then what was the original charge? I thought that for an arrest to be made there had to be probable cause. Where is the habeus corpus?
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A California man who spent 36 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder could be free after a court hearing next week, prosecutors said.
Back in 1980, Michael Ray Hanline was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the 1978 shooting death of a biker named J.T. McGarry.
But new DNA testing of evidence collected from the scene does not match the now 68-year-old man’s or that of his alleged partner in crime, according to prosecutors.
“The DNA testing performed this year was not available at the time of the trial,” Alex Simpson, associate director of the California Innocence Project (CIP) told Yahoo News.
“It probably would not have been available as recently as five years ago, but in recent years the technology has gotten so sophisticated.”
The Ventura County district attorney’s office said that investigations by its Conviction Integrity Unit and Bureau of Investigation — as well as CIP — cast doubt on the jury’s decision
Simpson, who has been working on the case for a decade, explained that the jury’s verdict was reversed on Nov. 13 based on the testing and the discovery of police reports that had been covered up.
The district attorney’s office said in a statement that these docuмents “would have been helpful to the defense and should have been disclosed to defense counsel at the time of trail.”
But they were concealed “under the guise of protecting an anonymous informant,” according to CIP.
These docuмents reportedly implicated others in the murder — notably the prosecution’s key witnesses.
At the time, defense attorney Bruce Robertson, who has since died, had represented many of his witnesses in other cases and directed the investigation toward Hanline, according to the nonprofit dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted inmates.
Hanline has maintained his innocence ever since McGarry’s body with several bullet wounds was found on the side of a road roughly 25 miles from his home in Ventura County. He contacted CIP when it started reviewing cases, over two decades after his conviction.
Now he's processing the thought of walking free after a court hearing on Monday.
“This has been a long time coming,” Simpson said. “For Mr. Hanline, I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. He’s still in shock.”
The organization estimates that Hanline’s incarceration has cost taxpayers about $1.8 million.
Simpson says wrongfully convicted people in California are generally entitled to some compensation for their time behind bars — typically $100 a day.
But he thinks it is premature to start asking whether recompense is on the horizon.
“Right now, we are just working on getting him released so he can go home to his family," he said.
http://news.yahoo.com/michael-hanline-may-walk-free-after-36-years-in-prison-for-1978-murder-182154735.html