Quick, what’s more bathetic than a sack of drowned kittens?
Why, it’s the Sex-Offenders-Under-the-Bridge in Miami. Again. In Time this time. Apparently, it’s just not possible to guilt the fourth estate into covering this issue factually (see here, here, and here for my prior posts). Is some defense attorney running a tour bus for gullible reporters to guarantee a steady supply of this melodrama? If so, I wish they’d take a side trip to go shopping for new adjectives: ...
Defense attorneys in Tampa Bay are attempting to derail the trial of accused two-time rapist Kendrick Morris. They are demanding that DNA evidence identifying Morris as the rapist in two extremely violent sexual assaults be thrown out because, they allege, police collected it improperly.
Of course, there is no other way for them to defend their client: his DNA matches the two rapes. So Morris’ lawyers are treating the courtroom like a casino craps table, not a serious truth-finding forum, a sadly reasonable presumption on their part, in fact. Warped rules of evidence, piled one upon the other, create countless opportunities for keeping important facts from being considered by judges and juries. ...
Most people, even those generally opposed to incarceration, would agree that raping and killing the 15-year old girl who lives next door is the type of crime that ought to land a perpetrator behind bars for life. Add to that crime the complications of torture, and a demonstrable lack of remorse, and the best outcome would seem to be literal banishment from the public mind.
But Marcus Wellons was all over the news this week. The killer is “elated” that the Supreme Court agreed with him that the behavior of jurors after the trial merits even more scrutiny — that is, scrutiny yet again, for Wellons has levied accusations against them many times in the past, and other courts already rejected those other claims. ...
Last week, after writing about this strange article that attempted to depict the flight of nearly 250 Fulton County (GA/Atlanta) sex offenders as “no big deal” because the offenders mostly targeted family members or their girlfriends’ kids (!), I was barraged with abusive and threatening e-mails apparently originating from a pro-sex offenders website.
But I also received some thoughtful commentary from other people who disagreed with my view that registries protect the public and are one factor in the decline in the sex offense crime rate. I’ve been meaning to write more about the registry issue because I think the media reflexively reports on it in bad faith. I also think academicians with anti-registration biases are crafting advocacy research and making claims that do not stand up to scrutiny. ...
A convicted child rapist is suing the state of Georgia to keep his name off the sex offender registry. I wonder who’s paying his legal fees for this foolishness? Jim Phillip Hollie was actually convicted of three separate sex offenses in Gwinnett County: one count of child molestation (5 yrs.), one count of aggravated sexual battery (10yrs.), and one count of aggravated child molestation (10yrs.).
He’s already being given the concurrent-sentencing free-pass: his 25-year sentence is already reduced to 15 to serve, ten on probation. But apparently that’s not lenient enough: he wants more leniency. Hollie is claiming that being placed on a registry is like extending his “sentence” beyond the maximum allowable 30 years. ...
Crime Victims Media Report will return in its new format Dec. 28 (sorry, January 4). Merry Christmas and happy holidays.
(Hat tip to Pat)
In 2007, I stood by the mailbox of the house I once briefly rented in Sarasota, Florida, contemplating the short distance between my house and the house where my rapist grew up, less than a mile, and a strikingly direct path over a well-worn shortcut across the train tracks. ...
Yesterday, I linked to one section of an interesting Philadelphia Inquirer series on chaos in the courts. The entire series is worth reading, but you have to download a flash player to view it all (pathetically, that’s onerous for me): here’s the link.
Anyone who believes the problems described by the Inquirer are limited to the City of Brotherly Love has not visited a courtroom in their own jurisdiction lately. ...
Disorder in the courts. It is the main reason violent offenders and repeat offenders are still on the streets. Why is our court system falling apart?
The Philadelphia Inquirer has some of the best crime journalism in the country. They understand that covering the justice system doesn’t just mean hounding the cops and covering big trials: it means investigating the courts, particularly courts’ systematic failures to enforce the law. Why this fact continues to elude nearly every other big-city newspaper eludes me. If you read nothing else this week, take a look at this: ...
Hat tip to Dan, who passed along the following must-read editorial from the Rome News-Tribune on funding criminal defense.
I found this editorial in today’s paper and thought you would like to read it. I do not know anything about the judge but it sounds like an interesting proposal and a fair assessment of the anti-capital lawyers. — Dan ...
- Martez McKibben
21-year-old Kavader [Martez] McKibben was murdered Friday night while working at the Moreland Package store. He was killed while two men committed an armed robbery – they shot him even though he’d already given them the money they asked for. It all sounds too similar to the way John Henderson was murdered not even one year ago.McKibben was known by many in our community and has been described as the guy who was never in a bad mood and was always nice to everyone; was a pleasure to talk – had a good heart and a warm smile. ...
Regardless of who wins, they will have to address the betrayal of the public that marked Shirley Franklin and Richard Pennington’s last years.
Choosing a new police chief will be part of that. But there are deeper problems. Most, if not all of the people pictured below would be alive today if not for the radical leniency shown to repeat offenders in Atlanta’s courts. ...
Doc Washburn and I talked about Mike Huckabee’s record of commuting the sentences of violent felons this morning at Fox News Radio Panama City, 94.5 WFLA.
I don’t know if there is a way to catch a re-play of the show on-line. Luddite, I am. ...
Mike Huckabee made a troubling appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show yesterday, where O’Reilly praised him for his forthcomingness.
Only . . . he wasn’t. ...
In March, four police officers in Oakland California were gunned down while trying to bring child rapist Lovelle Mixon to justice. On Sunday, four police officers in Parkland, Washington were gunned down by another child rapist eluding the law.
Here are the officers killed by Maurice Clemmons in Parkland, Washington on Sunday: ...
“People may not like his style” begins the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s denouement of the Chief Pennington years.
As if the crime-weary public has been complaining all along about the cut of Chief Pennington’s jib, not the fact that he poo-poohed the rising crime wave, turned on his own officers, and stopped doing his job. ...
Chief Pennington is leaving, but Al Sharpton has set up camp. Atlanta can’t catch a break. From an Atlanta Journal Constitution article:
Sharpton Decries Black on Black Violence ...
I wrote this a few weeks back and never posted it: I was waiting for a confirmation of some details. In December, Crime Victims Media Report will be re-launching with more emphasis on The Guilty Project, an effort to document the ways prolific and violent offenders avoid justice.
I have been hearing recently from crime victims, their families, and other people who personally knew offenders before they were caught: their stories are compelling, and they have a lot to say about the justice system that needs to be heard by wider audiences. ...
So suddenly the Fulton County Courts cannot function, thanks to a huge planned budget cut. But how were they functioning before, with violent felons and repeat offenders getting a free stroll out the door for a variety of reasons? This is a scene playing out across the country:
Georgia’s biggest court system warned Wednesday that a 2010 Fulton County proposal that cuts $53 million from the judicial budget could force them to shut down the courthouse, jeopardize death penalty cases and slash as many as 1,000 jobs. ...
Imagine if reporters actually behaved neutrally when approaching subjects like the government’s efforts to stop child predators. Imagine if they sat themselves down and said: I am going to suspend my natural tendency to side with the accused and control my adolescent rebelliousness towards all authority. I am going to behave as if I am the blank slate I am supposed to be, suspending judgment as I gather and report facts.
No? I didn’t think so. ...
Graydon Carter has a problem. How do you pose as a moralist while excusing your own history of peddling young flesh — and justifying the child-rape committed by your friend?
It’s a tall order. Under Carter’s tutelage, Vanity Fair has acquired a strange fixation on certain types of photos of nude young women. It’s simply weird how often the editor feels compelled to litter his pages with shot after shot of extremely youthful actresses in the buff surrounded by other people in clothes — also weird how vehemently and frequently he defends this basement-porn aesthetic in the magazine’s pages. This tightrope act occasionally threatens to unravel beneath the weight of one too many coy verbal gestures toward the breasts of girls who could be one’s daughter, or rather grand-daughter. But Carter just can’t seem to help himself. ...
What happens when you strip away consequences for holding a gun to somebody’s head, or kicking in somebody’s back door? What happens when you tell a 16-year old that the worst thing that will happen to him if he commits a serious crime is a few months behind bars, hardly a threat to a child who views incarceration as a sign of street cred? And what happens when you prevent police from even detaining the kids who just broke into your neighbor’s house?
This is what happens to the offender: ...
Pardon the brief hiatus from journalistic ethics week, which I’ll just roll over into journalist ethics fortnight, Jane Austen style.
Everybody was behaving so ethically out there, I just lost steam. Nobody ran headlines falsely accusing the families of the D.C. sniper victims of being “vengeful” for saying things like: “It helped to see the completion. It helped to a degree,” upon witnessing John Muhammad’s execution. Nobody made utterly false allegations of prosecutorial malfeasance, claiming, “[t]here are several documented cases where DNA testing showed that innocent people were put to death by the government,” then refused to correct the record when it was brought to his attention that there are actually no documented cases where DNA testing showed that innocent people were put to death by the government (and that’s according to death penalty opponents). ...
When the A.C.L.U. manufactures an utterly frivolous legal issue that costs the state millions of dollars to litigate, the St. Petersburg Times views that as money well-spent in the interest of “ensuring the health of our democracy.” When A.C.L.U.-associated lawyers profit from lawsuits arising from the group’s activism, the St. Petersburg Times doesn’t complain. It’s all in the interest of ensuring the health of our democracy, you see, and if lawyers turn a few million dimes “keeping the system honest,” well, power to the people.
When health-care non-profits accept funding from hospitals and medical and drug companies that stand to profit from their activism, the St. Petersburg Times doesn’t smell a rat: they smell roses. As they should. Actually, they usually don’t even notice such transactions, since this is the way non-profits simply do business. ...
Stop the presses! It’s journalistic ethics week, and so perhaps it’s fitting that this first story plopped down in a big steaming mess on the pages of every newspaper that carries the AP.
Anthony Sowell, who was recently found knee-deep in the decaying bodies of his victims, doesn’t deserve to be labeled a rapist, according to the AP. ...
Over the years, I’ve noticed that Saturdays seem to be the day when NPR reporters take a deep breath from the toils of the week, settle down with a steaming cup o’ joe, and recharge their batteries by indulging in a little calisthenic empathy for the pointedly unsympathetic: child killers on death row, for example, or gang members terrorizing neighborhoods full of innocent people they don’t bother to interview (because it would just be perplexing to listen to the grandmas explain that what they really need is more police protection from gangs).
There is a frisson of self-righteousness in such behavior, and a bonus frisson of danger, imagined, not real, of course, because no child killer or gang member worth his salt would bother to shank the PR machine. So, through their empathetic identification with vicious sociopaths, the reporters get to feel simultaneously superior to everyone else and victimized by society. ...
From the Valdosta Daily Times:
Inmates out of control
Former officers share tales of terror at Valdosta State Prison
...
From reader Chris Murphy, who attended the Jonathan Redding hearing to determine if Redding will be required to provide information to a Grand Jury about his partners in the murder of John Henderson:
I was at that last hearing. The judge, Kimberly Esmond Adams, was looking for any excuse to allow his attorney into the grand jury, which goes against the rules. She delayed the decision, and it never was publicized what she ruled. That’s the kind of s**t that passes for justice: make a ruling, but do it when no one is around, if possible. ...