Bloody Lawyers – Page 14

Church News: Black Teenager Hanged At White Ohio Evangelical Youth Retreat. Suicide or Lynching?

Published on May 6, 20072 Comments

Murder or suicide: Black youth’s death newly probed
Racially motivated foul play alleged in mother’s suit
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Julie Carr Smyth
Associated Press

Bellefontaine, Ohio — Investigators explored whether a black teenager found hanging at a church youth retreat might have been murdered rather than have committed suicide, according to investigative reports from the days following James McCoy III’s death.

Yet the boy’s mother, who has filed a lawsuit alleging racially motivated foul play, said Friday she still does not believe authorities did enough to determine what happened the day McCoy died.

“I don’t feel that if this was a reverse situation, if a Caucasian boy had died at an all-black church event, that it would have been handled in the same way,” Tonya Amoako-Okyere said.
McCoy was found hanging from a tree on April 22, 2006, his 18th birthday, in a remote area of Camp Cotubic, a Christian camp east of Bellefontaine, about 60 miles northwest of Columbus.

Amoako-Okyere filed a wrongful death suit against Church of the Messiah in Westerville near Columbus, which sponsored the camp; four unnamed youths who attended the event; and four unnamed Logan County authorities. The suit was moved last week to U.S. District Court.

Bishop Bruce Ough, who leads the Methodist region to which McCoy’s church belongs, issued a statement saying his administration “is supportive of the staff and leadership of Messiah as they seek truth and justice in this matter.” His office said he was traveling Friday and unable to discuss specifics of the suit.

McCoy’s mother said in a telephone interview that she had heard friends chastising her son for having a white girlfriend. He told his mother just before the retreat that he planned to buy her an engagement ring, she said.

Yet Amoako-Okyere said she was barely questioned by authorities about what she knew, which included the fact that some of her son’s friends had previously experimented with a “choking game” and that her son rarely wore belts like the one wrapped around his neck when he died. She said she was never asked to identify the belt.

Still, Logan County sheriff’s records reveal that deputies did not ignore race as an issue in the incident. At least one key witness was asked whether she thought McCoy’s death might have been intentional and race-related. Another was asked whether anyone wanted to hurt McCoy for any reason. The answer to both questions was no.

Deputies also accumulated a number of documents, including statements McCoy made in a prayer journal from the camp and on a personal Web page on Xanga.com, a social networking site similar to MySpace.

“I am in a world of trouble . . .,” he wrote on the site. “No matter what I do, something will happen . . . it is times like these that i wish i wasnt alive . . .”

McCoy’s prayer journal read: “I’m going to hell. I [expletive] hate myself. But I don’t care. I will keep doing it until I get the nerve to end it.”

Amoako-Okyere said the journal writings didn’t appear to her to be in her son’s handwriting, use his vocabulary, or reflect his thoughts.

I don’t know what’s going on here, but it looks like an awful lot more than meets the eye. The Columbus Dispatch has more detail:

The U.S. Department of Justice investigated the family’s complaint that this was a hate crime and closed the case.

Amoako-Okyere is represented by Clifford Arnebeck Jr. and Robert Fitrakis of Columbus. Arnebeck said yesterday that McCoy died because the other teens choked or hanged him as part of a birthday prank. Then, the kids wrote papers full of despondent and suicidal thoughts, attributed the writings to McCoy and gave them to authorities, Arnebeck said.

McCoy, who had been a popular, well-liked senior at Westerville South High School, had a bull’s-eye on his back at the conservative church because he was dating a white girl, Arnebeck said.

A woman who answered the phone at the Church of the Messiah yesterday afternoon said the church had no comment.

The Logan County sheriff’s office investigated McCoy’s death, and Sheriff Michael Henry had no comment yesterday. But in the days after the incident, he said he was confident that his deputies acted appropriately and that race played no role in their conclusion that the young man had killed himself.

The sheriff’s case files include a written statement from a friend who wrote that McCoy had been having trouble at home and was upset about illnesses and a recent death in the family. The friend wrote that McCoy previously had tried to kill himself.

Also in the file are writings that the church’s assistant youth pastor said he found two days after McCoy’s death and turned over to authorities. They include a prayer journal said to be McCoy’s that says: “I hate myself. I want to do die.”

Arnebeck said the notes are not in McCoy’s handwriting and are evidence of a cover-up.

I have no idea what the truth of this tragedy is, but even a casual perusal of US history (and particularly that of Ohio) tells me that a black male teenager + white girlfriend + a fatal hanging does not generally turn out to be the result of suicide.

That the US Justice Department investigated and dismissed this case as a potential hate crime isn’t reassuring, given that Justice’s civil rights division has been deliberately subverted by the Bush administration’s installation by the back door of unqualified, pro ‘white-rights’, fundamentalist ‘lawyers’ from bible schools and fundy diploma mills into posts that are supposed to be filled by the nation’s brightest and best legal talents. The Justice department, which should oversee everyone’s civil rights, is now a tool of the GOP used to push a racist, far right agenda.

Do we really think these people could find a white evangelical church had committed a hate crime? Oh, please.

They Don’t Like It Up ’em

Published on May 2, 2007

Censorship, it’s what the Patriot Act was made for – from Slashdot:

“Cryptome, a website concerned with encryption, privacy, and government secrecy, has received two weeks’ notice from Verio that its service will be terminated for unspecified “violation of [its] Acceptable Use Policy.” Cryptome has a history of making publicly available documents and information that governments would rather keep secret. For the notice, and a public response by Cryptome webmaster John Young, see Cryptome Shutdown by Verio/NTT.”

That terse report hides a fascinating series of emails between Cryptome’s owners and their ISP, in which the ISP stonewalls in a very peculiar way and Cryptome tries to work out the subtext of what’s happening. Eventually they get this curt termination of service letter:

This letter is to notify you that we are terminating your service for violation of our Acceptable Use Policy, effective Friday May 4, 2007. We are providing you with two week notice to locate another service provider.

Cryptome had had no previous problems with the ISP despite it’s having had alleged copyright infringement complaints made against it by disgruntled exposees. So why the shutdown now?

Might it be that they’re currently exposing a massive hole in the US military’s electronic and data security?

Not to worry for the moment though, Cryptome will survive:

This never-to-be-explained self-gagging by ISPs has become characteristic around the net due to covert and open governmental, commercial and personal aggressions to suppress information. Librarians and lawyers, among others, battling to overturn clamps on information, have learned to exhibit coded signals to the public to indicate undisclosable measures to suppress. Could be that is what Danna and Verio are signaling. We’ve received over 30 offers to host Cryptome in several countries and will accept most to disperse the collection as protection against future shutdowns.

Although Cryptome’s safe for now, what happened to them emphasises that the need for data havens is becoming ever more pressing to preserve free political speech.

A Green Unpleasant Land

Published on May 2, 2007

In the course of an impassioned post on abortion recently Digby warned women who think they can just travel to another state should abortion be banned where they live, that it’s naive to think fundie misogynists in government would not outlaw travelling to obtain an abortion elsewhere too.

Want proof? Well here it is, happening in Ireland:

Irish court battle over teenager’s abortion right

· ‘Tragic case’ reignites call for constitutional change
· Doctors say brain impaired baby would live only days

Owen Bowcott in Dublin
Wednesday May 2, 2007
The Guardian

A pregnant 17-year-old in state care in Ireland began a court battle yesterday to be allowed to travel to England for an abortion, as the country’s failure to resolve the ambiguities in its abortion laws threatened to erupt into a constitutional crisis.

The teenager, who is four months into the pregnancy, is seeking an abortion because the baby has got a rare brain condition and will not live more than three days after birth, she has been told.

Identified only as Miss D, the teenager has been in the care of Ireland’s health service executive (HSE), since February.

The government agency has overruled her wish for an abortion in Britain. The young woman’s father is absent and her mother’s behaviour had led to earlier court proceedings.

Abortion in this predominantly Catholic country, where the influence of the church has gradually weakened, remains illegal, with the ban on it written into the constitution. Abortions can only be performed if there is a substantial risk to the mother’s life, which includes the threat of suicide. The law does not permit abortion on grounds of foetal abnormality.

Most women seeking an abortion go to England for the operation. Successive complex cases have led to hearings at the European court of human rights and several divisive national referenda.

Since 2002, three teenagers in care have been allowed to go abroad for terminations.

But the republic’s abortion laws have never been fully clarified. As long ago as 1992, a supreme court judge warned that the failure to introduce proper legislation was “inexcusable”.

Last year a 45-year-old woman lost a case in Europe in which she said she had been denied her human rights because she could not have an abortion on grounds of foetal abnormality. The court dismissed her application saying the issue had not yet been dealt with by the Irish courts.

This latest case, emerging in the opening days of a general election campaign, has prompted fresh calls for constitutional reform.

[…]

The application on behalf of the young woman has been brought by her boyfriend, who is supporting her. The teenager, from the Leinster region, had not considered having an abortion until told about the foetus’s medical condition.

Doctors say the baby suffers from anencephaly, a condition where the front part of the brain is missing. The condition is detected through blood screening. Such children are normally blind, deaf, and unconscious. The high court in Dublin has been told that life expectancy would be somewhere between several hours and, at the maximum, three days.

Miss D’s lawyers are seeking the removal of the restrictions on her right to leave Ireland and the rescinding of a request sent to the Gardai to prevent her travelling abroad.

The legal challenge will be heard at Dublin’s Four Courts tomorrow. Lawyers for the teenager said it was a matter of “great importance” that the case be heard as speedily as possible.

The court heard that the young woman was not suicidal but had not wanted to have an abortion before hearing about her baby’s condition.

[..]

They want to force a teenager to carry to term and give birth to a baby that’s deformed and bound to die. This on the same day that priests and employees of the very Catholic church which is behind this cruel law are found to have been wallowing in even more filth and child abuse than had been previously thought.

That’s the culture of life?

The Catholic church has no moral right to tell any woman anywhere what she can and can’t do with her body, so far as to be able to place restrictions even on her right to movement, over-populated as it is with the emotionally disturbed and criminal perverts.

I cannot think of any other situation in which an organisation proven to have harboured sexual criminals and to have colluded in evading the law to protect its rapists and child molestors from justice is given the legal right to impose its twisted morality on women’s private medical decisions .

Secure Your Router, There’s Activist Judges About

Published on April 26, 20072 Comments

Are you reading this on wireless broadband? Is your router security on? Do you have a firewall? If not you may wish to go and do that after reading this.

This post is about injustice in a US child porn case, but the subject matter’s not really the point. You have to disregard the nature of the alleged crime in considering the principles involved, distasteful as the subject matter may be and inclined as many of us are to assume guilt where there is only unproven accusation.

If this case creates precedent (and I presume it does, being an appeal court, though IANAUSL) then any wifi subscriber could be convicted of any illegal activity taking place on their open wifi network whether it’s actually them or not. Yes, it’s dumb to leave your network open, but does that make you responsible for any and all crimes committed via the connection? The defendant in this case was convicted on evidence that seems hardly evidence at all. The Register:

A man has been found guilty of possessing child pornography despite arguing that his open wireless internet network meant the case against him could not be proved.

The case was triggered by an explicit image of a child which was sent over Yahoo!’s instant messaging network. The internet protocol (IP) address was traced to Javier Perez.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched Perez’s residence under warrant and discovered several CDs in his room that carried images of child porn. It was the only room of the house that was searched.

It soon transpired that the Yahoo! account used to send the original image belonged to someone listed as Rob Ram. Perez shared his residence with Robert Ramos and operated an open wireless internet (Wi-Fi) connection.

Perez argued that his open connection meant that anybody within 200 feet could have used his internet connection, meaning that it could not be conclusively proved that the original instant message came from him.

This in turn meant that the search warrant was issued in error and the evidence on the CDs gathered illegally. That evidence should be disregarded and the conviction based on it quashed, Perez argued.

The US Court of Appeal for the Fifth Circuit has rejected Perez’s case, saying that the evidence should not be disregarded.

“In this case it is clear that there was a substantial basis to conclude that evidence of criminal activity would be found at [the address],” the judge wrote. “[T]hough it was possible that the transmissions originated outside of the residence to which the IP address was assigned, it remained likely that the source of the transmissions was inside that residence.”

[…]

Copyright © 2007, OUT-LAW.com

Well maybe so, and that probably constituted enough probable cause for a search of the building, but it was a multi-resident building with an open wifi connection and they don’t seem to have proved any real connection between the defendant and the download.

The court that heard this appeal, the US Court of Appeal for the Fifth Circuit, is one of the most conservative courts in a Bushie-dominated court and justice system, so much so that 5 members of the court were considered by Bush for appointment to the Supreme Court.

It also seems to consider itself independent from settled law and precedent:

“It really is quite unusual for a lower federal court to thumb its nose at the Supreme Court so explicitly,” said Peter B. Edelman, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University law school. “If you look at some of the other courts, I doubt you’ll find the same kind of flaunting defiance.”

Theodore M. Shaw, the director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said it is “extraordinary” how many times the Supreme Court felt it necessary to chastise the 5th Circuit. “We are not talking about a liberal Supreme Court,” he noted. “We’re talking about a conservative Supreme Court that apparently became frustrated with the 5th Circuit’s failure to meaningfully review criminal convictions for constitutional infirmities . . . cases involving prosecutorial misconduct, police misconduct, racial discrimination. Those problems were not being addressed by the 5th Circuit, so the Supreme Court had to step in”

And more than once. Chief Judge of the 5th circuit is Edith Hollan Jones:

Jones has been mentioned frequently as being on the list of potential nominees to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Chicago Sun-Times and several other newspapers reported on July 1, 2005 that she had also been considered for nomination to the Supreme Court during the presidency of George H. W. Bush.

Jones was named one of the five worst judges in Texas (and was the only federal judge on the list) by the liberal leaning newsmagazine The Texas Observer, which cited polls of Texas attorneys.[2]

Oh, and guess what: she’s a big fan of the Federalist Society, that training ground for GOP placemen and women in the Justice department. From a speech she gave there:

Supreme Court Has Been Contributing to Social Decay, Jones Argues

Since the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court has been issuing decisions contrary to the generally held values of Americans, imposing a “modish, untested philosophical notions and extreme libertarianism that would have left the [Constitution’s] Framers aghast,” Edith Jones, a judge on the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, told a packed room Jan. 28 in a speech sponsored by The Federalist Society.

Surveys show that “95 percent of Americans say they believe in God. People everywhere subscribe to the values of the Ten Commandments—don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t covet—however they are phrased,” she said.

The Court “got out in front of the self-governing society, overturning local authorities and self-governing groups and imposed these values on society,” Jones declared. “I love this country. I love the heritage on which it was built. I want my children to have that heritage. Once people lose self-control it results in the growth of repressive government. When you don’t have internal control, you have to have external ones.”

Jones outlined five areas in which decisions have had what she considers socially damaging consequences: crime and punishment, pornography, family relations, public order and youth and education. The Warren Court, she contended, “extravagantly assumed the power to dictate new ‘rights’ not expressly stated in the Constitution and in so doing foisted its philosophical vision on the United States with consequences far beyond the Court’s imagining.”

It’s a court dominated by right wing zealots and dangerous to the public and the rule of law:

Last year, even conservative lawyers paused when a three-member panel of the court ruled 2 to 1 that a death penalty defendant was not entitled to a new trial even though his attorney had slept through part of his trial. “It would seem to anyone in support of the death penalty that a defense attorney ought not sleep through a trial,” Shaw said.

The majority, which included Jones, wrote that it “cannot determine whether [the defense attorney] slept during a ‘critical stage’ ” of the trial. When the full 5th Circuit reviewed the decision, the court reversed itself.

“It is not a happy place for civil rights lawyers to be,” said Mary Howell, a lawyer in New Orleans who has argued before the court. “For many of us, practicing before the court means avoidance. What’s unfortunate is that lawyers are becoming very selective about which cases they chose to take to the court, and many cases that have merit don’t make the cut. It has had a chilling effect.”

Ah the classic Bushie combination of apparent ineptitude and ignorance of the law masking the cold-blooded application of rightwing social policy via the sunversion of the justice system. Now why does it not surprise me that such loyal Bushies would make a decision like this?

Just think how very convenient it could be: all you’d have to do is idly drive by, use open wifi to google ‘al-qaeda’, or ‘bomb designs’ and drive off again, your target user nicely implicated. With the powers Bushco’s justice department has to look at ISP records and snoop on private emails and phonecalls, think how very tempting it would be to pick out and swoop on individual liberals, Patriot Act in hand.

A commenter at ZDnet puts it better than I can:

The whole point of disallowing evidence gathered from illegal searches is to discourage illegal searches. If a simple record of a download from an open Wi-Fi point can trigger a search, then all any law official would have to do in order to get permission to search your home and seize your computers would be to download child porn through your open Wi-Fi point from their car out in front of your home. Once that door has been openned, even if they don’t find child porn, other evidence of other crimes such as misstating your taxes can become the basis of other charges. Even if they don’t find anything, the RICO laws make it so that in order to get your computer and other property back you have to sue the government. Just the fact that they couldn’t prove their case is NOT enough for you to have your property returned.

Think that’s paranoid? Tell that to Grandma.

This decision also has a chilling effect on the freedom to communicate, which is just fine and dandy with the government. The Register gives the story that law enforcement is pushing:

Some people involved in unlawful activity such as music and film file sharing have reportedly begun opening up their wireless networks as a pre-emptive court defence. They argue that it could not be subsequently proved that they were behind the file sharing if their network was open and, theoretically, anyone in the vicinity could have used their network for any purpose they liked.

It’s very hard not to see this as another front in the war on free speech. Fully open and integrated public wifi networks and completely anonymous or pseudonymous communication have been the holy grail of the libertarian wing of wired-world idealists since forever but I gently suggest that it really is a little naive to think that any government, let alone one as corrupt as Bush’s, would countenance it. Completely unfettered free speech is not in the governmental interest.

The extreme cynic in me can’t help but think how very useful it is for the Right that this legal issue has come to appeal in the context of a child porn case. The subject matter is so toxic that any mainstream legal media commentator or reporter could, and undoubtedly would be accused of being objectively pro-molestation by a baying mob of pitcforked wingnut bloggers and columnists if they champion the case. Handy,that.

Ve Haff Ways Of Hearing You Talk

Published on April 20, 2007

The shadow of fascism is creeping up on us again in Europe.

Blah3:

The further US-ification of Germany… …appears to be firmly in place.

From German News:

Telephone surveillance expanded

In Germany, all telephone and internet connection data will be stored for half a year in the future. The federal Cabinet approved a resolution to that effect today. The information to be filed will be who called whom when. In the case of cellular-phone calls, the location at which the call was made will also be kept. The contents of telephone conversations will not be saved. The bill also introduces other changes to the regulations governing telephone surveillance. It is a subject of controversy because the data will be filed regardless of any concrete suspicion of a crime. Privacy advocates have already announced that they will challenge the changes on constitutional grounds. The bill represents the implementation by the federal government of a directive from the EU.

There is also this:

Schaeuble opposed to presumption of innocence

Federal Internal Affairs Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble wants to abolish the presumption of innocence when it comes to preventing terrorism. “The principle cannot apply for self-defence against threats”, he told the magazine ‘Stern’. Schaeuble also defended plans to allow police automatic access to digital records of passport photos. Karl-Dieter Moeller, a legal expert for ARD television criticized Schaeuble’s comments. He told the news website ‘tagesschau.de’ that “that would call a fundamental principle of the rule of law into question”.

Martin had a letter from some government quango yesterday inviting him to register the details of all our phone accounts.

To which my own response is “make me”.

This is all part of a quiet sea change in controls on the freedom to of Europeans to communicate with one another. The NYT, February 17:

PARIS, Feb. 19 — European governments are preparing legislation to require companies to keep detailed data about people’s Internet and phone use that goes beyond what the countries will be required to do under a European Union directive.

In Germany, a proposal from the Ministry of Justice would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.

A draft law in the Netherlands would likewise go further than the European Union requires, in this case by requiring phone companies to save records of a caller’s precise location during an entire mobile phone conversation.

Even now, Internet service providers in Europe divulge customer information — which they normally keep on hand for about three months, for billing purposes — to police officials with legally valid orders on a routine basis, said Peter Fleischer, the Paris-based European privacy counsel for Google. The data concerns how the communication was sent and by whom but not its content.

But law enforcement officials argued after the terrorist bombings in Spain and Britain that they needed better and longer data storage from companies handling Europe’s communications networks.

European Union countries have until 2009 to put the Data Retention Directive into law, so the proposals seen now are early interpretations. But some people involved in the issue are concerned about a shift in policy in Europe, which has long been a defender of individuals’ privacy rights.

Under the proposals in Germany, consumers theoretically could not create fictitious e-mail accounts, to disguise themselves in online auctions, for example. Nor could they use a made-up account to use for receiving commercial junk mail. While e-mail aliases would not be banned, they would have to be traceable to the actual account holder.

“This is an incredibly bad thing in terms of privacy, since people have grown up with the idea that you ought to be able to have an anonymous e-mail account,” Mr. Fleischer said. “Moreover, it’s totally unenforceable and would never work.”

Mr. Fleischer said the law would have to require some kind of identity verification, “like you may have to register for an e-mail address with your national ID card.”

Jörg Hladjk, a privacy lawyer at Hunton & Williams, a Brussels law firm, said that might also mean that it could become illegal to pay cash for prepaid cellphone accounts. The billing information for regular cellphone subscriptions is already verified.

[…]

In the Netherlands, the proposed extension of the law on phone company records to all mobile location data “implies surveillance of the movement of large amounts of innocent citizens,” the Dutch Data Protection Agency has said.

More…

It’s all very well us Eurobloggers sitting here taking potshots at Bushco – and heaven know there’s cause enough – but meanwhile, quietly our own governments are drawing the net tighter on the expression of dissenting views and as individuals we’re doing bugger-all to fight it.

10 years down the line when your children ask you “What did you do in the information war, Mummy/Daddy?” what will you be able to say?

“Nothing really, but I moaned a lot?”