Quotulatiousness

November 9, 2011

Penn State’s problem

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Football, Law — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:55

Russ from Winterset loses his temper over the truly disturbing way Penn State is handling their child rape issues allegations:

So Joe Paterno is going to retire at the end of the season?

Whiskey? Tango? Foxtrot? Does Joe think he is going to be carried off the MISS PIGGY field to the BEAKER cheers of the DR. BUNSEN HONEYDEW crowd after leading Penn STADLER State to another GONZO bowl game? FOZZIE BEAR that noise. He should have the common DR. TEETH & THE ELECTRIC MAYHEM decency to slink out the back door of the coaching offices in shame like John SAM THE EAGLE Edwards leaving a session of a Federal RIZZO THE RAT Grand Jury.

That moderation expressed in my first update? KERMIT that. If Joe JANIS THE BASS PLAYER Paterno is allowed to coach another ANIMAL football game at Penn RALPH THE DOG State University, every WALDORF fan in the stadium who so much as smiles when their BERT team scores their first ERNIE touchdown can go Suck The Barbed Cock of Satan as far as I’m concerned.

BIG BIRD! Now I’m pissed.

And when you come back with the “look at all he’s done for the community” card, tell me this. How many other kids have been raped since 2002 because JoePa and the other jackasses at Penn State didn’t think it was necessary to get the police involved in this situation? Ten? Five? Even one? Is that a fair trade for all that Joe Paterno has done for his community?

If it’s not quite clear from context, he “replace[d] all but one of my f-bombs in the original draft of the post with the names of Muppet Characters”

November 4, 2011

The Kangaroo Family Court

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:15

The headline says it all: “Sexual Assault Victim Must Pay Her Attacker Spousal Support”

A San Diego judge ordered Crystal Harris to pay $1,000 a month in spousal support to her ex-husband — just as soon as he finishes up his six year prison sentence for sexually assaulting her. As 10News reports, “The entire assault was caught on tape and what it captured was enough to convict Shawn Harris of a felony — forced oral copulation.”

So why is a victim being forced to pay her attacker? According to Judge Gregory Pollock, it’s because Crystal Harris brought home six figures worth of bacon while Shawn Harris was unemployed.

    “I can’t look at a 12-year marriage where one side is making $400 a month, the other side is making over $11,000 and say no spousal support,” Pollock said in court. “That would be an abuse of discretion.”

It sounds like a miscarriage of justice, but the law is written so that it only excludes attempted murderers from the right to receive spousal support. Another case of a bad law forcing a bad judgement (or a judge unwilling to exercise his discretion in a case that cries out for it).

October 25, 2011

Another example of a manual transmission being a good anti-theft device

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:04

This is one of those crime stories that tends to provoke laughter:

RCMP Cpl. Craig Douglass said Monday that Morgan allegedly jumped into the idling Corvette just as the owner was putting away a charger used to revive the sports car’s dead battery.

The owner watched in disbelief as the suspect rolled up the power windows, locked the power doors and promptly stalled the vehicle.

“Unfortunately for the (suspect), he was not good with a standard transmission and stalled the Corvette when he attempted to reverse out of the driveway,” Douglass said.

[. . .]

As police arrived, Morgan was attempting to exit the vehicle after allegedly smashing the driver side window with his screw driver — apparently for no good reason.

“As it turns out, all the suspect would have had to do was manually slide the door lock to the side and the door would have opened,” Douglass said.

October 21, 2011

Incentives matter, police edition

Filed under: Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

Jonathan Blanks explains that the incentives provided to police officers clearly do influence their behaviour:

Last week, former undercover police officer Stephen Anderson told the New York State Supreme Court that planting drugs on innocent people was so common that it didn’t even register emotionally to him. The story is starting to get traction in the media as an egregious example of police corruption, but it’s notable only because of the admission to the practice in open court. Each year, there are hundreds of cases in which police officers are caught stealing, using, selling, or planting drugs or pocketing the proceeds from drug busts. Despite the obligatory PR protestations that any given instance of corruption is an isolated case, the systemic, legal, social, and economic incentives in every law enforcement agency in America combine to make police corruption virtually inevitable. And with no other category of crimes are these incentives stronger than with drug crimes.

Anderson testified that drugs would be seized from suspects at a given bust, divided, and then used again as evidence against other people on site (or at a time later) who had nothing to do with the initial arrest. This was, in part, due to established drug arrest quotas the officers needed to meet. As public servants, police departments face the same budgetary pressures as any other government entity and thus their officers are required to meet certain benchmarks set by the powers that be. Added to the normal budgetary justification, however, many police officers are in the position to confiscate cash and property that can be sold at auction thanks to civil asset forfeiture laws. Many departments across the country keep a percentage or the entirety of forfeiture proceeds, so pressure to maintain a certain level of drug arrests is something straight out of Public Choice: 101.

October 19, 2011

Selley: Milewski is right on Tories’ “tough on crime” policies

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Chris Selley can’t be accused of being a Terry Milewski fan, but he does agree with Milewski’s message:

The CBC recently sent Terry Milewski to Texas, the blood and guts state, where he asked conservative politicians and various experts what they thought of building more prisons, and filling them up, as a means of driving down crime. “Don’t,” was the basic answer. “It doesn’t work. That’s why we’re doing the opposite.”

It was a nice piece on a serious policy issue. It reminded us that the federal government seems to consider crime legislation inside a hermetically sealed chamber. But for that very reason, nothing any journalist says is likely to make any difference. If contrary evidence carried any weight in Cabinet, the omnibus tough-on-crime bill, C-10, wouldn’t be before Parliament. The fact that elites recoil at its provisions and spew champagne out of their noses is a feature, not a bug.

And, if I may briefly adopt the voice of a partisan blogger, the mainstream media would denounce the law of gravity if it somehow helped the Liberals (or the NDP, depending what day it is). The CBC, in the memorable words of Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, “lies all the time.” And Mr. Milewski, as we all know, chairs the left-wing media conspiracy.

This is not an ideal policy-making environment. But I’m going to try to change minds on a single, narrow, easily fixable issue: Mandatory minimum sentences for non-serious crimes. I can’t see any level on which they are supportable.

Four year sentence for . . . posting an idiotic suggestion to Facebook

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

Patrick Hayes attempts to point out that the sentence imposed on Facebook idiot Jordan Blackshaw is both disproportional and a clear and present danger to free speech rights in Britain:

Did you know that all it took for people to trash their own neighbourhoods this summer, such was the ‘collective insanity’ then gripping the UK, was for someone to suggest they do so on Facebook? A few words saying something like ‘let’s have a riot’ and, hey presto, off people went to have a riot.

This didn’t happen, of course. But it is a view of last August’s riots that seems to provide the rationale behind the sentencing of 20-year-old Jordan Blackshaw. This was the man, lest we forget, who on 9 August set up a Facebook ‘event’ entitled ‘Smash Down in Northwich town’. This hardly inspiring suggestion involved would-be rioters meeting up for said ‘smash down’ outside a local McDonald’s.

In explaining why Blackshaw was to receive a four-year jail sentence for doing nothing more than publishing words online, the judge claimed that ‘this happened at a time when collective insanity gripped the nation’. Blackshaw’s conduct, he continued, ‘was quite disgraceful and the title of the message you posted on Facebook chills the blood’. Yesterday, Blackshaw’s appeal against the harsh sentencing, alongside that of another ‘Facebook rioter’, was rejected by the Crown Court.

So, how many people responded to Blackshaw’s online suggestion during this period of ‘collective insanity’? The answer is one: Blackshaw himself. (He was immediately arrested). In fact, only nine of his 147 Facebook friends even responded online. Yet the reason for this collective no-show, at least as far as the judge was concerned, was ‘the prompt and efficient actions of police’ who eventually took Blackshaw’s Facebook page offline.

October 14, 2011

Jonathan Turley: “President Obama is a perfect nightmare when it comes to civil liberties”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

In an interview at NPR, Jonathan Turley explains that while President Bush was bad news for civil liberties, President Obama has been even worse:

It is a strong language, but I think civil libertarians are coming to grips with what is really a building disaster for our movement, and it’s been a rather difficult process. You know, I have a large civil liberties blog, and there’s a lot of soul-searching among civil libertarians about what exactly happened. But we are engaging in a sense of collective denial when we deal with President Obama.

[. . .]

And I think that’s part of the purpose of this column, is to address the fact that President Obama is a perfect nightmare when it comes to civil liberties. He not only adopted most of President Bush’s policies in the civil liberties areas when it comes to terrorism, but he actually expanded on them. He outdid George Bush.

And they range. His position on torture and refusing to have people investigated or prosecuted for torture, on privacy lawsuits. He pushed aggressively for the dismissal of dozens of lawsuits brought by private interest organizations. He’s for immunity for people who engaged in warrantless surveillance. He has fought standing for people even to be able to get courts to review his programs, much like George Bush. He kept military tribunals and the authority to make the discretionary choice of sending some people to a real court, some people to a military tribunal. He has asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens based solely on his own discretion, that he believes them to be a threat to the country.

His administration has, once again, as with the Bush administration, cited secret law, that — and including a case of assassinating citizens — a law that we’re not allowed to see, but we have to trust them.

[. . .]

They just have a very difficult time opposing a man who’s an icon and has made history — the first black president, but also the guy that replaced George Bush. And the result is something akin to the Stockholm syndrome, where you’ve got this identification with your captor. I mean, the Democratic Party is split, civil libertarians are split, and the Democratic Party itself is now viewed by most of libertarians as very hostile toward civil liberties.

Senators and members of the House, it turns out, were aware of many of these abuses and never informed people.

October 12, 2011

“There is no off-the-shelf exam [that can] detect sociopathic killers”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:55

Michael Friscolanti explains how former Colonel Russell Williams managed to avoid coming to the attention of the police for so long:

An elite officer who piloted prime ministers and the Queen—and oversaw the country’s largest air force base—was doubling as a depraved sexual predator who somehow managed to ascend the ranks without a whiff of suspicion. Grasping for an explanation, the Canadian Forces launched an “immediate review” of the way candidates are selected for senior command positions—and whether enhanced psychological testing might have revealed the real Russ Williams.

The answer, sadly, is no. Among hundreds of pages of internal military documents, obtained by Maclean’s under the Access to Information Act, is a draft version of that review. It confirms what leading experts have long maintained: there is no off-the-shelf exam that employers, armed forces or otherwise, can use to detect sociopathic killers. “Given the recent events in CFB Trenton, it is natural for the CF to question whether or not the organization could have identified a sexual sadist or predicted that an individual would become a serial sexual murderer,” the report says. But that “would be unrealistic to expect.”

Every recruit is subject to various levels of screening, including a criminal records check and an aptitude test. Members also undergo an annual evaluation that assesses past performance and potential for promotion. To be considered for senior command (colonels in the army and air force; captains in the navy), an officer’s file must be “thoroughly reviewed” and endorsed by a board of superiors who examine “personal characteristics, demonstrated leadership ability, education and professional development.” Nothing in Williams’s file, an impeccable 23-year career, offered the slightest hint of his alter ego.

October 3, 2011

Ban violent video games? Expect more crime as a result

Filed under: Gaming, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:11

Caleb Cox explains why:

While there’s no end of detractors claiming that violent videogames cause aggressive, often criminal behaviour, some refreshing research has now insisted that the opposite is true.

The report, entitled Understanding the Effects of Violent Video Games on Violent Crime, says while “there is evidence that violent videogames cause aggression in a laboratory setting, there is no evidence that [they] cause violence or crime [in society]”.

Written by Benjamin Engelstätter from the Centre for European Economic Research, Scott Cunningham from Baylor University in Texas, and Michael Ward from the University of Texas, the paper essentially asserts that because gamers are too busy gaming, they’re unable to cause much trouble in the real world. No shizzle, Sherlocks.

September 25, 2011

Police “told her she had to stay tied up until they could document the scene, which she said took five hours”

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

A new lawsuit has been filed in the Russell Williams case:

Laurie Massicotte was a neighbour of Williams in Tweed, Ontario, and was bound, stripped and sexually assaulted in September 2009.

The Toronto Star reported, the more than $7-million law suit filed on Friday claims police failed to provide her with any information about the identity of her assailant while he remained her neighbour for five months following the assault.

Massicottee told the Star, it was only after her assault that she heard another woman who lived on the street had been sexually assaulted twelve days before she was attacked.

She also said after she called the police, they told her she had to stay tied up until they could document the scene, which she said took five hours.

The police left a rape victim tied up for five hours? No wonder she’s suing the Ontario Provincial Police!

September 19, 2011

HMS Astute seaman convicted for murder of officer

Filed under: Britain, Law, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Able Seaman Ryan Samuel Donovan has been sentenced to life in prison for his shooting rampage on board HMS Astute earlier this year:

Able Seaman Ryan Samuel Donovan, admitted murdering Lt Cdr Ian Molyneux, 36, of Wigan, Greater Manchester, on board the nuclear submarine HMS Astute.

He also injured a second crewman, Lt Cdr Christopher Hodge, while the sub was docked in Southampton on 8 April.

Donovan, 22, of Dartford, Kent, was told he must serve at least 25 years by the judge at Winchester Crown Court.

Donavon of Hillside Road, also admitted the attempted murders of Lt Cdr Hodge, 45, Petty Officer Christopher Brown, 36, and Chief Petty Officer David McCoy, 37

Donovan, who was put on sentry duty despite being drunk, fired six shots from an SA80 rifle in the control room as local dignitaries, including Southampton City Council’s mayor, chief executive and leader, were being given a tour of HMS Astute, the court heard.

After reading about the attack, I posted an entry calling for Royston Smith’s heroism to be recognized in the next honours list.

That’s a civilian, charging a gunman armed with a battle rifle, and disarming him before the trained military personnel could intervene. There are very few people who could have reacted so quickly — and correctly — in that situation. That’s heroism.

September 3, 2011

QotD: The American judicial system

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:26

Whatever one thinks about Conrad Black’s guilt or innocence, there is no doubt that he has proven his claim that America’s legal deck is stacked in prosecutors’ favour: Even before his conviction, he had to endure a genuinely Kafkaesque ordeal of assets being frozen and seized by the FBI, email and phone lines hacked, backroom deals with sleazy witnesses (David Radler, please call your office), and outrageous leveraging of blunderbuss statutes to generate dozens of charges on the basis of tangential procedural indiscretions. The very institution meant to protect innocent people from this machinery of state — the private legal sector — is an old-boys’ club whose members often seem just as concerned with seven-figure paydays as with keeping clients out of jail. The fact that Mr. Black happens to be a famous person makes the claims more credible because, as the author writes, if all this could happen to Conrad Black, it “could happen to anyone, and often does.”

Jonathan Kay, “Conrad Black and his new book: A man in full pay-back mode”, National Post, 2011-09-03

Do celebrities get better treatment from the police?

Filed under: Football, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

It was interesting to read in this story about the wife of former Viking tight end Joe Senser, that the police waited for a warrant before searching the vehicle, even though the family had given permission:

Phanthavong, 38, was killed as he was putting gas in his car after it ran out of fuel on the ramp leading from westbound Interstate 94 to Riverside Avenue about 11 p.m. He was head cook at True Thai, a restaurant on nearby Franklin Avenue.

He was hit directly by Senser’s vehicle and propelled into the air, Schwebel said. Blood was found on the parts of the Mercedes left at the scene, according to a search warrant.

Investigators received a call at 10:30 p.m. on Aug. 24 from Nelson indicating he was calling on behalf of the registered owner of the suspected vehicle and the owner’s family.

At their Edina home, the Sensers gave investigators the keys to their 2009 Mercedes ML350 and it was towed to the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office crime lab.

The family gave investigators permission to search the vehicle, but authorities waited until they obtained a search warrant, Nelson said.

August 30, 2011

Trivializing rape

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:23

Wendy McElroy points out how the underlying messages of the SlutWalkers have overwhelmed the original intent:

One message: It is fabulous for women to publicly flaunt their sexuality but an intolerable offense if men respond nonviolently. Wolf-whistles are taken as an attack. Disapproving or overly approving comments from men are an assault. But isn’t provoking a response the entire purpose of wearing fishnet stockings topped by a leather bustier?

Another message, as pointed out by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail: “Slutwalks are what you get when graduate students in feminist studies run out of things to do.” In other words, SlutWalks are an expression of privileged women who mistake a costume party for a political cause. While Iranian women fight for the right to pursue an education, North American feminists fight to reclaim pride in the word “slut.” SlutWalk is an extreme expression of mainstream feminism’s political impoverishment.

Yet SlutWalkers proclaim they are performing a political service by protesting the trivialization of rape. Nonsense. They are using the ill-considered words of one ignorant policeman as a reason to throw a street party.

I do not begrudge anyone having a good time but as a woman who has experienced rape, I object to the political agenda being attached to a costume party. I object to the posters and attitudes that vilify men as predators. I do so because I was attacked by one man, not by mankind, and when I was helped, it was by men. I object to the notion that women do not bear any responsibility for controlling their circumstances, such as attire. I object to rape being trivialized by associating it with sluttiness and making it part of a celebration.

August 24, 2011

The origins of the “perp walk”

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Tim Black outlines the Dominique Strauss-Kahn media drama, and explains the origin of the “perp walk”:

The whole tawdry affair looks to be petering out to a rather murky conclusion. Still, whatever else DSK might or might not have done, he has undoubtedly performed one vital function. That of the scapegoat. Historically, scapegoating referred to the ritual of investing an animal, a goat say, with the sins of the village, and then casting the burdened animal out. DSK, so-called, seems to have served a similar function. Strauss-Kahn was to be symbolically sent out of the community, taking the sins of men, especially French political ones, with him.

Nowhere was this strangely modern ritual more apparent than in the so-called perp walk. Introduced by FBI director Edgar Hoover in the 1920s to bolster public support for prosecutions, and used most famously with mobsters Alvin Karpis and Harry Campbell, it involves tipping off the press that the accused is about to be moved from one location to another. So as the ‘perp’ is walking between, for example, the jail and the police station, photographers appear to snap the accused in all their humiliation and shame. Yet although the perp walk has a long, ignoble, not to mention justice-thwarting history, it only really came into its own under then US attorney Rudolph Giuliani (a future mayor of New York) who, during the 1980s Wall Street-insider trading scandals, transformed it into a deliberately unceremonious ceremony. For example, in February 1987, handcuffed trader Richard Wigton was photographed weeping as he was marched from the trading floor of Kidder, Peabody & Co.

The purpose of the perp walk is worryingly clear. From the handcuffs to the embarrassment induced in the accused, we are encouraged to see the guilt before it has been proved. It is a spectacle designed to elicit condemnation — regardless of whether that condemnation is deserved or not. Strauss-Kahn’s perp walk was no exception. Snapped in all his handcuffed, unshaven and fallen-faced infamy as he was taken to a police station to be charged, the watching world was invited to see him as guilty, his sullen shame writ large in every defensive stride.

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