What’s the matter with the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
In the last year, the residents of Atlanta stood up and declared that they do not want their city to be a place known for crime, where murders and muggings are taken in stride. They declared that one murder, one home invasion, is one too many. They partnered with the police — ignoring the headline-grabbing anti-cop types who perennially try to sow divisiveness. ...
From the always-informative CourtWatchFlorida, a heads-up on the Department of Justice’s new report on domestic violence.
As I was reading through the report, a few facts jumped out: ...
The terrific website DeKalb Officers raises questions about DeKalb D.A. Gwen Keyes:
It appears the District Attorney has taken a page from terminated police chief Terrell Bolton. Ms. Keyes now has a driver permanently assigned to her. Some of the driver’s duties include getting her children to and from daycare. ...
http://www.safe-atlanta.org/www.novictims-atlanta…
Tina, thank you for this post and encouraging people to consider how to react to something BEFORE it happens. I wanted to share with you two free, non-commercial resources located in the very neighborhood where those incidents take place that can help people take constructive steps to secure their homes, protect their families and live their lives: ...
There were 39,000 property crimes reported to the police in Atlanta last year. Think about that. That’s more than 100 a day.
Now think about how many more crimes there would be if people weren’t constructing armed compounds around themselves, at enormous financial and psychological expense. ...
Let’s see. According the the silence of the “experts” in the face of Walter E. Ellis’ crimes, apparently it’s some number higher than seven. And counting.
So what constitutes a hate crime against women? Nothing, in practice. Not selecting and slaughtering woman after woman after woman. Not scrawling hate words across a murdered woman’s body. Not ritualistically destroying a woman’s breasts or sex organs. Not spreading fear among other women through your attacks. Not inflicting “excessive” violence, “overkill,” whatever that means. ...
I received the following e-mail last week from a woman named Jessica Brantley. This is yet another outrageous story of judicial leniency — involving Jack Bailey, the man who killed Jessica’s father while high on drugs. Judge Carl Overstreet gave the killer probation for vehicular homicide despite his previous record of DUIs. Then he let him go on an out-of-state hunting trip (!) before the probation started. Then he let him out of the probation early. Then Bailey got nailed for DUI again.
What can we do to hold judges responsible when they act in this manner? ...
The Walter Ellis case is still unfolding, but there are already lessons to be learned.
One of those lessons is that police agencies around the country are on the verge of connecting serial rapists and killers to many unsolved crimes, thanks to DNA and re-opening cold cases. The picture that is emerging of these men will change what we know about serial offenders. ...
On September 4, the jury in the Denise Lee murder trial returned a verdict of death for the man who kidnapped, raped, and murdered her, Michael King. The next day the Sarasota Herald Tribune ran a story detailing the travails King would face on death row, such as limited access to exercise and no air conditioning:
Air conditioning is forbidden on death row, so inmates mostly keep still. “It’s awful,” said the Rev. Larry Reimer, who has visited for 27 years to minister to a death row inmate. “It is hotter there than you permit animals to be kept.” ...
On August 28, jurors in the Michael King trial in Sarasota, Florida found King guilty of raping and killing 21-year old mother, Denise Amber Lee. Here is a photo of Lee’s father, Rick Goff, listening to the last 911 call Denise managed to make, in which she was recorded begging for her life. It’s worth remembering that the families were forced to sit through all the courtroom games the defense played while trying to get King off on a technicality. Which technicality? Any and all of them, of course.
Immediately following the jury’s conviction, the sentencing hearings began. King’s lawyers set out to argue that a childhood sledding accident rendered him incompetent, a mitigating factor the jurors would have to weight against his crimes — if it was true. ...
See my article on leniency in Atlanta’s courts here.
With so many opportunities to exclude evidence, and so few ways to get it admitted, it is only the most unlucky offenders who ever see the inside of a courtroom. This terrible reality is what many journalists and defense attorneys call the genius of our system, though, of course, it doesn’t feel that way when it is your daughter or wife begging for her life.
~~~ ...
This is what Michael King looked like when he was caught in 2008 after abducting, raping and murdering 21-year old mother Denise Amber Lee:
Normal looking guy, right? King was a husband and father, a home-owner, a businessman who worked as a plumber. But he’s recently gotten a make-over: ...
For me, the high imprisonment rate in the United States is a sign of social health, not of social disease. . . societies such as several western European ones that cannot summon the confidence to set apart those who have persistently shown themselves unwilling to abide by the most elementary rules, and which prevaricate and beat their breast wondering how they and not the law-breakers are really to blame, may truly be described as decadent.
Read here. ...
I was going to write about good kids getting killed in the crossfire when I got up this morning. Then I read the Atlanta Journal Constitution and realized there was nothing to add:
One person was in custody Thursday in connection with the early morning shooting death of a Spelman College student hit by a stray bullet on the campus of nearby Clark Atlanta University. . . The victim, Jasmine Lynn, of Kansas City, Mo., was “walking southbound on James P. Brawley when she was struck in the chest by a stray round from a group of individuals involved in a physical altercation on Mitchell Street,” Atlanta police Lt. Keith Meadows said. . . ...
What do you say to the judge in Athens, Georgia to justify kidnapping somebody, stabbing them repeatedly with a screwdriver, and leaving them for dead?
Well, your honor, she’s mine, and she deserved it: ...
I read this Charlie LeDuff column last week in the Detroit News, and I just can’t get it out of my mind. Think back to when you rode a bus to school. Did you have to worry about not getting home?
Stand at Detroit’s most notorious bus stop at the northeastern intersection of the Southfield Freeway and Warren. This is the corner where seven children waiting for a bus were shot in an after-school rampage. There was a school beef on Monday, the kids told investigators. Tuesday was the shooting. School starts in 10 days and still no one has been charged. ...
Will Atlanta be the next Chicago or L.A.? Those cities have been shelling out big bucks to “ex-gang members” and holding summits and negotiating with gangsters rather than prosecuting them.
Imagine the impact this must have in communities where these thugs live, where they now draw paychecks because they are/were thugs, and walk the streets empowered by their special relationships to certain politicians. How does that not teach children the value of going bad? ...
The subject of middle-class youths joining gangs was raised in both the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the New York Times last weekend, but in very different ways.
The Times, predictably, describes such youths as “swept up” by forces beyond their control, like their poor counterparts, as if they have no responsibility for choosing to commit armed robbery: ...
Dominick Dunne died today at 83. Dunne became a vocal critic of the justice system after his daughter’s killer was sentenced to a mere six and a half years for her murder — and served less than five. Dunne’s daughter, Dominique, was only 22 years old when she was killed.
After burying his only daughter, Dunne lived another 26 years. He used those years to expose the ways crime victims are denied justice in America. In doing so, he was considered a traitor or hysteric by many in the elite circles he moved in, where killers are showered with PEN grants and praise, and victims are considered bourgeois, vengeful, and, worst of all, déclassé. ...
When are judges who let murderers out on bond and release other violent offenders going to stop hiding from the public and start answering some questions? From today’s (on-line only?) AJC:
District Attorney Paul Howard . . . wants to determine why indicted murder defendants in Fulton County are being released on bond and why non-elected magistrate judges have been the ones granting bond. Howard said 43 indicted murder defendants are out on bond. . . Fulton County magistrate Judge Karen Woodson granted [Antoine] Wimes $250,000 bond in March, even though the District Attorney’s Office and Pretrial Services officers opposed it. Wimes was charged with murder in the July 2008 shooting death of a convenience store clerk. ...
Really Shocking Story. See it here, at the blog Dekalb Officers, which includes all the background.
Pleading down, failure to build a murder case (need more prosecutors?), recidivism, and just not putting the b******s away, all in one case. ...
Remember this?
Well, according to the data that we have, there are some neighborhoods where the data don’t go along with what has actually transpired in their community. We’ve had reductions [in crime] in a lot of those neighborhoods. And then, some of the neighborhoods that we’ve had an increase in burglary and property crimes, those neighborhoods haven’t had a large outcry. . . I think they just respond to what they hear. And a lot of times, perception to them is reality. ...
Paul Howard recently scolded those who assert the prosecutor’s office needs more money to fight crime, saying:
“As prosecutors we’re not on some campaign to add more prosecutors.” ...
One day after the on-duty murder of Tampa Police Cpl. Mike Roberts, the St. Petersburg Times actually published a story bemoaning the killer’s hard life.
We learn that Humberto Delgado Jr. had insomnia, was good at fixing things, was a dad just like Roberts — well, not exactly, because he didn’t support his children and he murdered a police officer, but the Times is nothing if not relentless in its efforts to assert that offenders are as much the victims of the crimes they commit as the people they choose to victimize: ...
Atlanta Fox 5’s Mark Teichner is reporting that it was Fulton Magistrate Judge Karen Smith Woodson who released Antoine Wimes on bond instead of holding him in the 2008 murder of Nigerian immigrant Etus Obi Onyemaechi. Wimes shot a young mother and either beat or “used her infant as a bat” during a home invasion Monday night.
Atlanta reader Paul Kersey has this to say: ...
Interesting post on Wimes’ February victim by Mista Jay, a Nigerian-based blogger:
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Whose gun killed him? ...
Beat a one-year old infant. Shot the baby’s mother. Endangered a bunch of other innocent people, including neighbors and cops, while being taken into custody.
Fulton County jail authorities said Wimes was out of jail on $250,000 bond for February murder and assault charges. His family said he had cut off his ankle monitor. ...
Do they have no shame, or just no standards?
DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show ...
Hat tip to Lou: an article that examines the New Orleans Police Department’s strategy for cutting the official number of rapes they report to the FBI: they do not investigate 60% of reported rapes:
More than half the time New Orleans police receive reports of rape or other sexual assaults against women, officers classify the matter as a noncriminal “complaint.” ...