HEAL is an
egalitarian network of activists self-empowered to plan events, create
change, and make the world a better place for all life. Our goals
include the liberation of humans, nonhuman animals, and the earth! We
work in cooperation with like-minded organizations that put compassion
in action!
This site is dedicated to passing on and reporting the real news.The real news is
that which is
often neglected by
mainstream media and that
which you must know to be an informed
citizen.We have organized the news by subject.Links
to complete reports are in blue.
Please scroll down to view the stories or choose from the menu
below:
In June 2009, police received information that Garry Prokopishin, a director for the Calgary and District Foster Parents Association, was allegedly offering troubled teens in his care money for sexual acts.
This has prompted an immediate review by Alberta Children and Youth Services. For complete story, click here.
Home
for
troubled
teens
slated
to
close--February
2nd,
2010--BENNINGTON
– A
local
long-term
residential
educational
facility
for
at-risk
youth,
204
Depot
Street,
will
be
closing
this
week
and
leaving
10
people
without
jobs,
according
to
William
Bryan,
president
of
the
Board
of
Directors
of
SEALL
Inc.
"The
decision
was
made
to
cease
making
referrals.
Statewide
(the
Department
of
Children
and
Families,)
told
us,
they
have
to
cut
between
12
and
18
beds.
We
were
only
filling
roughly
10
of
those
beds
so
that
their
other
programs
will
have
to
feel
our
pain
as
well,"
Bryan
said.
204
Depot
Street,
which
will
close
on
Feb.
6,
serves
older
adolescent
boys,
between
the
ages
of
15
and
17,
through
a
residential
educational
program
that
lasts
at
least
a
year.
It
is
run
by
SEALL
Inc.,
a
local
nonprofit
organization
with
a
board
of
eight
people.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Troubled
Teen
Hospital
Closing--January
26th,
2010--Tuesday,
Newschannel
9
confirmed
that
Cumberland
Hall
is
shutting
it
doors
at
the
end
of
this
month.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
The relationship came to an end in July 2006, when her mother called Integrity House, a home in Utah for troubled teens. Counselors from Integrity House "abducted" Moore with her parents' consent, shoving her into a car and driving her to their facility, where she lived for the next year.
During her stay, Moore wrote a "come clean letter" — a sort of confession to her parents — in which she listed the men she'd had sex with.
In a deposition, a counselor at Integrity House said that after Moore lost her virginity, she had a "mind-set that she was damaged goods, so it didn't matter what she did."
Moore "thought she loved" Horton, counselor Carol Williams testified. She thought she could "be with him for the rest of her life," Williams said.
Moore's family has sued Starbucks in federal court, claiming the company failed to protect the minor. They asked for $16.8 million in damages, including $10 million in punitive damages, and $200,000 in loss of earnings to date. For complete story, click here.
The
three
women
worked
at
Parmadale,
a
local
treatment
center
for
troubled
teens
in
Parma.
Prosecutors
said
they
caused
the
death
of
17-year-old
Faith
Finley,
who
suffocated
while
being
restrained
on
the
floor
at
the
facility.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Landmark
Federal
Class-Action
Lawsuit
Charges
Los
Angeles
County
With Failure
To
Educate
Youth
In
Probation
Camps--January
12th,
2010--
LOS
ANGELES
– An
alliance
of
legal
groups
including
the
American Civil
Liberties
Union
and
the
ACLU
of
Southern
California
today
filed a
ground-breaking
class-action
lawsuit
against
the
Los
Angeles
County
Probation
Department
and
top
county
education
officials
for
their total
failure
to
provide
youth
in
the
county's
largest
juvenile probation
facility
with
basic
and
appropriate
education.
The
failure has
resulted
in
children
not
being
adequately
prepared
to
re-enter society
and
the
workforce.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Four
Years
Later:
Martin
Lee
Anderson
Boot
Camp
Death--January
6th,
2010--By
now,
the
story
of
Martin
Lee
Anderson's
death
has
been
well-documented.
During
his
first
day
at
the
Bay
County
Juvenile
Boot
Camp,
Anderson
collapsed
during
a
fitness
run.
Boot
camp
drill
instructors
thought
he
was
faking
to
get
out
of
the
exercise,
so
they
pushed
Anderson
to
complete
the
run.
The
camp's
cameras
recorded
an
agonizing
twenty-minute
confrontation,
which
thrust
the
case
into
the
worldwide
spotlight.
Once
the
guards
realized
Anderson
was
truly
in
distress,
they
called
for
help.
But,
it
was
too
late.
The
teen
died
early
the
next
morning,
January
6,
2006,
in a
Pensacola
hospital.
The
Medical
Examiner's
initial
autopsy
found
Anderson
died
as a
result
of
complications
from
sickle
cell
trait.
Those
results,
and
the
results
of a
second
autopsy
conducted
several
months
later,
became
the
central
evidence
in
the
criminal
trial
of
seven
of
the
drill
instructors
and
the
camp
nurse.
A
year
and
a
half
after
Anderson's
death,
they
were
all
acquitted
of
aggravated
manslaughter
charges.
Since
the
trial,
Anderson
family
supporters,
including
the
local
NAACP
chapter,
have
continued
to
push
for
federal
civil
rights
violation
charges
against
the
defendants.
Bay
County
NAACP
president
Rev.
Rufus
Wood
said,
"I
want
it
to
be
clear
that
this
is
not
as
much
about
black
and
white
as
it
is
about
right
and
wrong.
This
is
about
right
and
wrong,
and
it's
about
wrong.
What
happened
to
Martin
was
wrong."
For
complete
story,
click
here.
For
more
on
this
story,
click
here.
U.S.
says
sex
abuse
high
at
13
juvenile
centers--January
7th,
2010--WASHINGTON
(AP)
— A
government
study
issued
Thursday
finds
13 juvenile
detention
facilities
around
the
country
have
high
rates
of sex
abuse
and
victimization,
where
nearly
1
out
of
every
3
inmates reported
some
type
of
victimization.
A
Justice
Department
study
has
found
that
nationwide,
about
12%
of youths
held
in
state-run,
privately-run,
or
local
facilities
reported
some
type
of
sexual
victimization
—
but
those
rates
varied
widely
from
place
to
place.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Schools
face
accreditation
issues--January
5th,
2010--...Smith
said
the
school
is
applying
for
accreditation
from
another
body,
the
Pacific
Northwest
Association
of
Independent
Schools.
And
if
that
body
accredits
the
school,
it
will
satisfy
the
state's
accreditation
requirement.
Several
other
private
schools
also
face
advised
or
warned
status.
Utah
Helicopter
Inc.,
a
postsecondary
school
in
Spanish
Fork,
is
being
recommended
for
advised
status;
Cross
Creek
Academy,
a
private
residential
school
in
La
Verkin
for
troubled
teens,
for
advised
status;
Top
Flight
Academy,
also
a
private
residential
school
in
Mt.
Pleasant,
for
warned
status;
private
school
Dorius
Academy
in
Layton
for
warned
status.
Attempts
to
reach
Utah
Helicopter,
Dorius
and
Top
Flight
Academy
this
week
for
comment
were
unsuccessful.
Karr
Farnsworth,
administrator
at
Cross
Creek,
said
he
was
unaware
of
the
school's
recommended
advised
status
and
said
he
doesn't
know
how
it
got
that
status.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
For
more
information
on
Utah,
click
here.
NY
Accused
of
Abusing
Troubled
Teens--January
6th,
2010--(CN)
-
The
New
York
State
Office
of
Children
and
Family
Services
subjected
500
troubled
youths
in
state
detention
to
violent
physical
restraint,
and
routinely
denied
them
legally
required
mental
health
care
services,
nine
children
and
their
parents
claim
in a
federal
class
action.
Among
other
wanton
acts,
state
employees
regularly
employ
a
dangerous
form
of
control
known
as
prone
restraint
-
having
two
adults
hold
the
youth
face-down
on
the
floor
while
his
hands
are
held
or
cuffed
behind
him.
Prone
restraint
exposes
the
victim
to
risk
of
cardiac
and
respiratory
arrest,
back,
arm
and
neck
injuries,
abrasions,
strained
muscles
and
head
injuries,
according
to
the
complaint.
Such
treatment
led
to
the
2006
death
of a
Bronx
teen
at
the
Tryon
Boys'
Residential
Center
in
Johnston,
and
serious
mental
and
physical
injuries
to
scores
of
others,
the
complaint
states.
The
families
claim
that
OCFS
Commissioner
Gladys
Carrion
allowed
the
behavior
to
continue
despite
red
flags
raised
by
the
U.S.
Justice
Department
and
a
blue-ribbon
panel
appointed
by
Gov.
David
Patterson.
The
nine
named
plaintiffs,
all
of
whom
are
identified
by
only
their
initials,
said
their
treatment
violated
the
14th
Amendment,
Title
II
of
the
Americans
with
Disabilities
Act,
and
Section
504
of
the
Rehabilitation
Act.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Trapped
in a
Mormon
Gulag--January
5th,
2009
(Rec'd
January
5th,
2010)--This
story
is
about
Eric
Norwood's
personal
experiences
at a
place
called
The
Utah
Boys
Ranch,
which
models
itself
as a
"tough-love"
prep-school,
but
while
Eric
was
there,
he
witnessed
some
unbelievable
atrocities.
It
is a
Mormon-funded
and
staffed
facility,
and
religious
indoctrination
is a
fundamental
aspect
of
the
school.
There
was
sexual,
physical,
and
emotional
abuse,
suicide,
staff
corruption,
and
escape.
A
major
Utah
political
figure,
Senator
Chris
Buttars,
was
the
executive
director
while
Eric
was
there.
See
Video
below
or
click
here
for
more
on
this
story.
Former
Whittell
dean
indicted
in
Georgia--December
6th,
2009
(Rec'd
January
2nd,
2010)--A
grand
jury
in
Georgia
has
indicted
a
former
Whittell
High
School
administrator
on
felony
charges
of
aggravated
battery,
invasion
of
privacy,
and
four
counts
of
first
degree
cruelty
to
children.
Richard
Darrington,
37,
was
hired
as
Whittell's
dean
of
students
at
the
beginning
of
the
school
year,
but
lost
the
position
when
the
Nevada
Department
of
Education
revoked
his
substitute
teaching
license
after
learning
of
outstanding
battery
charges
facing
him
in
Georgia.
The
charges
stem
from
Darrington's
time
in
the
southern
state,
where
he
operated
a
private
school
for
teens
called
Darrington
Academy
for
five
years.
The
bill
of
indictment,
which
lists
23
grand
jurors
of
the
Superior
Court
of
Fannin
County,
alleges
that
Darrington
“did
maliciously
cause
bodily
harm”
to
one
of
his
students
“by
seriously
disfiguring
his
tooth,”
resulting
in
the
aggravated
battery
charge.
The
invasion
of
privacy
charge
alleges
that
Darrington
placed
a
recording
device
in a
girls'
room
and
observed
and
recorded
their
activities
without
consent.
The
four
counts
of
cruelty
to
children
allege
that
Darrington
forced
students
to
stand
outside
in
freezing
weather
with
no
shirts,
shoes
or
socks
on
two
separate
occasions,
that
he
slammed
a
girl's
head
into
a
wall,
and
that
he
stood
on a
boy's
ankles
while
in a
“tripod”
position
and
also
slammed
his
head
into
a
wall.
In
addition
to
Darrington,
three
other
teachers
at
the
school
were
included
in
the
indictment;
one
for
invasion
of
privacy
and
six
counts
of
cruelty
to
children,
and
the
other
two
for
two
counts
each
of
cruelty
to
children.
(For
complete
story,
click
here.)
Treatment
of
Youths
in
New
York
Prisons
Spurs
Suit--December
30th,
2009--Youths
detained
in
some
of
New
York’s
juvenile
prisons
have
suffered
bruises,
cuts
and
a
host
of
other
injuries
from
aggressive
physical
restraining
practices
that
violate
their
legal
and
constitutional
rights,
according
to a
federal
lawsuit
filed
on
Wednesday.
The
class-action
suit,
filed
in
federal
court
in
Manhattan
on
behalf
of
roughly
500
youths
in
10
of
the
prisons,
also
accuses
the
Office
of
Children
and
Family
Services,
the
state
agency
that
runs
the
facilities,
of
failing
to
provide
adequate
mental
health
services
The
legal
claim
follows
two
withering
reports
from
the
United
States
Department
of
Justice
and
a
state
task
force
that
portrayed
the
state’s
juvenile
justice
system
as
so
riddled
with
problems
that
it
needed
a
complete
overhaul.
The
suit
seeks
an
injunction
that
would
sharply
limit
the
use
of
force
by
youth
counselors
and
require
the
state
to
provide
the
youths
with
more
treatment
for
mental
health
problems,
which
affect
a
vast
majority
of
those
in
custody.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Md.
official
would
like
to
'blow
up'
girls'
detention
center--December
28th,
2009--LAUREL
— -
As
you
approach
Thomas
J.S.
Waxter
Children's
Center,
a
sign
cautions
that
you
are
under
camera
surveillance.
Notices
warn
against
bringing
in
contraband
-
glass
bottles,
cigarettes,
weapons.
A
metal
detector
sits
in
the
front
hall.
You
pass
through
a
locked
metal
door
to
reach
the
residential
wings.
Down
the
hallway,
the
staff
supervision
room
is
separated
from
the
children
by a
thick
metal
cage.
On a
Wednesday
in
September,
a
girl
stands
shackled
in
the
hall,
the
cuffs
around
her
hands
and
ankles
connected
by a
metal
chain.
This
is
Waxter,
the
only
long-term,
secure
treatment
facility
for
female
juvenile
offenders
run
by
the
state.
"Nothing's
worse
than
Waxter,
dead
serious,
nothing's
worse,"
said
Britney
McCoy,
19,
who
has
been
in
and
out
of
Waxter
and
other
facilities
since
she
was
12.
She
was
most
recently
in
Waxter
in
2008.
McCoy
is
not
Waxter's
only
critic.
The
Juvenile
Justice
Monitoring
Unit
of
the
attorney
general's
office
has
noted
a
litany
of
problems
at
Waxter,
including:
allegations
by
girls
that
they
are
physically
abused
by
staff
members;
mingling
of
girls
convicted
of
serious
crimes
with
girls
held
for
minor
offenses;
inadequate
physical
facilities;
and
overcrowding
and
understaffing,
which
lead
to
violence.
"No
one
should
have
to
live
there.
No
one
should
have
to
work
there,"
said
Claudia
Wright,
who
monitors
the
facility
for
the
Juvenile
Justice
Monitoring
Unit.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
ACLU
says
youth
tortured
at
state
prison--December
17th,
2009--A
17-year-old
boy
suffering
from
mental
illnesses
was
so
traumatized by
his
deplorable
treatment
in
the
Montana
State
Prison
that
he
twice attempted
to
kill
himself
by
biting
through
the
skin
on
his
wrist
to puncture
a
vein,
a
lawsuit
filed
Wednesday
by
the
American
Civil Liberties
Union
of
Montana
alleges.
The
lawsuit
filed
in
Lewis
and
Clark
County
District
Court
claims that
the
boy,
“Robert
Doe,”
has
been
treated
illegally
and
inhumanely and
has
been
detained
for
about
10
months
in
solitary
confinement.
Doe
was
Tasered
as
part
of a
“behavior
modification
plan,”
pepper-sprayed
and
stripped
naked
in
view
of
other
inmates,
the
complaint states.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Poor
Children
Likelier
to
Get
Antipsychotics--December
12th,
2009--New
federally
financed
drug
research
reveals
a
stark
disparity:
children
covered
by
Medicaid
are
given
powerful
antipsychotic
medicines
at a
rate
four
times
higher
than
children
whose
parents
have
private
insurance.
And
the
Medicaid
children
are
more
likely
to
receive
the
drugs
for
less
severe
conditions
than
their
middle-class
counterparts,
the
data
shows.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Saving
Troubled
Teens:
A
Greedy
Industry?--December
10th,
2009--..."If
you're
going
to
do
it
right,
it's
going
to
be
costly,"
said
Behar.
The
biggest
expense
for
these
programs
is
staffing
well-trained,
qualified
people
who
can
make
good
decisions
in
an
emergency
situation.
In
Behar's
32
years
of
experience
overseeing
state-run
facilities,
she
knows
it's
very
difficult
to
turn
a
profit.
Yet
many
of
these
private
facilities
are
making
money,
hand
over
fist.
"In
order
to
make
a
profit,
they
have
to
cut
in
some
way,
and
since
manpower
is
the
biggest
expense,
that's
where
the
cuts
come,"
Behar
said.
The
companies
are
saving
money
by
hiring
younger,
less
experienced
people
and
are
providing
less
expert
supervision.
Critics
argue
this
cost-cutting
measure
puts
the
children
at
risk.
Dana Blum believes the staff's negligence is to blame for her son's death. "They killed my child when they didn't attend to him. I feel like he was murdered." The Salt Lake City District Attorney took Aspen to court. But ruling there was no "intent" to kill Brendan, a Utah judge dropped the criminal charges filed against the two employees. The state put Youth Care on probation, requiring it to retool its employee training. The facility never faced any fines, and remained open for business.
Devastated and distraught, Dana began looking online into Aspen's public financial statements. She learned that the Cupertino-based company is actually owned by a health care corporate giant, CRC Health. And Bain Capital, a multibillion dollar private equity firm, owns CRC.
Dana has filed a civil suit against the financial goliath, which could settle out of court. Critics believe this is why so few stories of abuse, neglect, and death at these facilities are made public. Aspen has enough money in its war chest to make these allegations go away. "If you look at their daily profit numbers compared to what they charge, it's obscene," Dana said. "It made me very angry that they couldn't provide better emergency services for my son."... For complete story, click here.
Governor
Pat
Quinn
Refusing
to
Shine
Light
on
Juvenile
Prisons--December
10th,
2009--Illinois
Governor
Pat
Quinn
is
not
allowing
WBEZ
to
examine
the
state's
juvenile
prisons.
For
four
months
WBEZ
has
been
trying
to
negotiate
some
access
to
the
prisons.
Last
week,
Quinn's
staff
told
us
there
would
be
none.
We
said
we
would
report
that
denial.
Later
that
day,
we
were
offered
a
single
tour
of
one
of
the
better
facilities,
an
offer
WBEZ
accepted,
but
an
offer
which
would
not
allow
the
public
meaningful
insight
into
the
hundred
million
dollar
department
that
has
care
of
some
of
the
most
troubled
and
troubling
kids
in
Illinois.
Bob
Reed
is
the
governor's
spokesman.
He
says
they're
working
on
their
own
review
of
the
facilities.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
14-Year-Old
Accuses
Officer
Of
Assault--December
9th,
2009--MURFREESBORO,
Tenn.
--
A
school
resource
officer
in
Rutherford
County
who
helps
keep
at-risk
youth
on
the
right
track
is
accused
of
assaulting
one
of
the
troubled
teens.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
For
more
on
this
story,
click
here.
Duchesne
nurse
charged
with
sex
abuse
of
teens--December
8th,
2009--(Cedar
Ridge
Academy
in
Utah)--ROOSEVELT
— A
man
who
worked
as a
nurse
at a
boarding
school
for
troubled
teens
has
been
charged
with
sexually
abusing
two
of
the
school's
teenage
residents.
Geary David Oakes, 57, of Cedarview, Duchesne County, is charged in 8th District Court with two counts of forcible sodomy, a first-degree felony, and two counts of forcible sexual abuse, a second-degree felony.
A nurse at Cedar Ridge Academy, Oakes engaged in sex acts with two 15-year-old students from the school, the charges state.
One of the teens told deputies that Oakes gave him pain medication, according to the Duchesne County Sheriff's Office, and that he "provides pain and sleeping medications for the kids at Cedar Ridge and tells them to keep it a secret." Oakes denied that he had supplied anyone with medication that was not prescribed, authorities said.
Cedar Ridge Academy, located north of Roosevelt, is billed as a therapeutic boarding school. Investigators believe Oakes' alleged activities with the teens occurred at the school and at his home during November. For complete story, click here. For more on this story, click here and here.
Kin sue Harvard over
son’s suicide--December
4th, 2009--Harvard
sophomore John
Edwards was studying
to become a doctor
and training for the
Boston Marathon in
June 2007 when he
sought help at the
university’s Health
Services because he
could not study for
as many hours as
some of his friends.
A nurse practitioner prescribed a drug to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a condition the overachieving Edwards had never been diagnosed with. Later, she prescribed two powerful antidepressants, Prozac and Wellbutrin, when he began complaining of anxiety, depression, and other side effects. Meanwhile, he was taking a fourth drug for acne, Accutane, that has been linked to suicidal thoughts.
“The Wellbutrin is having the effect that we were seeking . . . but unfortunately I feel like it has canceled out the anxiety-reducing effects of the fluoxetine [Prozac], as recently I’ve been pretty nervous,’’ Edwards wrote in a Nov. 27, 2007, e-mail to the nurse practitioner, Marianne Cannon. “Let me know if I should schedule to come in and meet with you soon, or if I should change the med plan.’’
Cannon replied that she was concerned and told Edwards to schedule an appointment with her. Two days later, Edwards, 19, of Wellesley committed suicide in a bathroom at Harvard Medical School by suffocating himself with a plastic bag.
His father, John B. Edwards II of Wellesley, filed a suit Wednesday in Middlesex Superior Court alleging gross negligence by Cannon; Dr. Georgia Ede, who was the doctor who supervised her; and Harvard College, for causing his son’s wrongful death. For complete story, click here.
Outdoor Therapeutic
Program to close
Dec. 31--December
3rd, 2009--Camp
Appalachian
Wilderness, a
state-subsidized
facility north of
Cleveland that helps
troubled teens, is
set to close Dec.
31.
The Georgia
Department of
Behavioral Health
and Developmental
Disabilities
announced last week
that the White
County program was
no longer
financially
sustainable.
For complete story,
click here.
Truancy Officer
Preyed on Girls--November
27th, 2009--A
Hamilton truancy
officer convicted of
sexually abusing
four female students
used a school pilot
scheme to identify
and groom troubled
teens, a court has
been told.
Mark
Pene,
54, was
sentenced
yesterday
in the
Hamilton
District
Court to
six
years
and
three
months'
jail
after
pleading
guilty
to
indecent
assault,
having
sexual
connection
with a
girl
under
16,
doing an
indecent
act with
a girl
under 16
and
doing an
indecent
act on a
girl
under
12.
The
charges
related
to
offending
against
four
girls,
aged 11
to 17,
between
2005 and
2008.
At the
time,
Pene was
employed
as a
truancy
officer
in
Hamilton,
working
with
troubled
teenagers
and
their
families.
Pene
gained
access
to two
of his
victims
by
inviting
them to
take
part in
a school
pilot
scheme.
The
programme
included
such
benefits
as free
lunches,
payment
of
school
fees and
money
for
clothing.
Pene
yesterday
sat
impassively
in the
dock as
details
of his
offending
were
revealed,
moving
only to
shield
his face
from a
Waikato
Times
photographer.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
G4S
Youth
Services,
which
contracts
with
the
Florida
Department
of
Juvenile
Justice
to
run
the
boys
program,
is
accused
in
one
of
the
suits
of
negligence
on
behalf
of a
teen
whose
shoulder
was
shattered
by
an
employee
in
February
2008.
That
suit,
filed
this
month,
claims
G4S
and
the
department
ignored
past
problems
and
didn't
properly
protect
Anthony
Vessels,
16.
The
boy's
attorney
said
surveillance
video
shows
the
employee
throwing
the
youth
to
the
ground,
then
sitting
on
him
as
he
writhed
in
pain.
Vessels,
now
18,
lives
in
Orlando
and
is
pursuing
his
GED,
his
attorney
said,
but
continues
to
suffer
physically
and
psychologically
from
the
injury.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Court upholds ruling
against home for
troubled teens--November
21st, 2009--YOUNGSTOWN
— The 7th District
Court of Appeals has
upheld a township
zoning appeals board
ruling that a group
home for emotionally
and behaviorally
troubled teenage
boys doesn’t belong
in a single-family
residential
neighborhood.
A
three-judge panel of
the appeals court
unanimously ruled
Friday in support of
the Ellsworth
Township board’s
decision that the
Redemption House
group home, 11780 W.
Western Reserve
Road, does not
constitute a
single-family
housekeeping unit as
defined in the
township zoning
code.
In
making its ruling,
the appeals court
backed an August
2008 ruling by Judge
Timothy E. Franken
of Mahoning County
Common Pleas Court
that affirmed the
December 2006 ruling
of the Ellsworth
Township board.
“This is not the
proper location for
them to do this type
of activity,” said
Atty. Scott Cochran,
who represented
neighbors opposed to
the group home’s
location.
“There was nothing
to indicate to us
that this was, in
any way, a family
environment,” he
added. For
complete story,
click here.
American Youth in
the 21st Century:
Pathologized,
Criminalized
and Disposable--November
16th, 2009--Punishment
and fear have
replaced compassion
and social
responsibility as
the most important
modalities mediating
the relationship of
youth to the larger
social order. Youth
within the last two
decades have come to
be seen as a source
of trouble rather
than as a resource
for investing in the
future, and in the
case of poor black
and Hispanic youth
are increasingly
treated as either a
disposable
population, cannon
fodder for barbaric
wars abroad, or the
source of most of
society’s problems.
Hence, young people
now constitute a
crisis that has less
to do with improving
the future than with
denying it. As Larry
Grossberg points
out, “It has become
common to think of
kids as a threat to
the existing social
order and for kids
to be blamed for the
problems they
experience. We slide
from kids in
trouble, kids have
problems, and kids
are threatened, to
kids as trouble,
kids as problems,
and kids as
threatening.” This
was exemplified when
the columnist Bob
Herbert reported in
the New York
Times that
“parts of New York
City are like a
police state for
young men, women,
and children who
happen to be black
or Hispanic. They
are routinely
stopped, searched,
harassed,
intimidated,
humiliated and, in
many cases, arrested
for no good reason.”
No longer “viewed as
a privileged sign
and embodiment of
the future,” youth
are now increasingly
demonized by the
popular media and
derided by
politicians looking
for quick-fix
solutions to crime
and other social
ills. While youth
have always had to
bear the misplaced
fear and distrust of
adults, how youth
are represented,
talked about, and
treated has changed
dramatically in the
last two
decades. For
complete story,
click here.
DEATH ROW SERIAL
MOLESTER CONNECTED
TO CEDU--November
12th, 2009--California
Department of
Justice (DOJ)
investigators are
researching the
possibility that
serial child
molester and child
murderer, James Lee
Crummel, 65 of San
Quentin State
Prison, had years of
free, unsupervised
access to the
students at the now
defunct CEDU School
in Running Springs.
The CEDU schools
in Running Springs
were founded by Mel
Wasserman in 1967
and promoted itself
as an emotional
growth-boarding
school for troubled
youths. Monthly
costs to board a
student reportedly
ran as high as
$3,500 dollar a
month. The school
closed its doors in
2005 amidst
allegations of
financial
improprieties,
allegations of
sexual and physical
abuse of the
students, by other
students and staff
members and
citations issued by
the State of
California for
various violations.
At a non-compliance
conference, CEDU
officials reportedly
admitted that the
rights of students
under their care
were systematically
violated. For
complete story,
click here.
Superjail for youth
raises troubling
questions--November
9th, 2009--Troubled
teens promised
cutting-edge
treatment at
Ontario's new $93
million superjail
for youth have
instead been
deprived of food,
denied programming
and subjected to
questionable body
cavity searches,
according to a
review by a senior
provincial official.
Irwin Elman,
Ontario's advocate
for children and
youth, is
investigating cases
of excessive force
used by some staff
at Roy McMurtry
Youth Centre in
Brampton, which
holds 102 male and
female youths, 90 of
whom are still
awaiting trial.
Police are looking
into at least one of
these incidents, he
said. What's more,
despite the centre's
much-publicized
commitment to
"state-of-the-art"
programming – a
proven tool in
preventing young
people from becoming
repeat offenders –
it simply doesn't
exist, he said.
For complete story,
click here.
State finds child
abuse and neglect at
school--November
4th, 2009--The
state of Oregon has
shut down a boarding
school for troubled
teens in Central
Oregon after
allegedly finding a
pattern of child
abuse and neglect of
its students,
forcing parents
around the country
to scramble to bring
home their children.
"Our first priority
is to ensure the
safety of the
students at Mt.
Bachelor Academy,"
Erinn Kelley-Siel,
Director of the
Children, Adults and
Families division of
the Department of
Human Services, said
Wednesday in a
statement.
"Ultimately, the
investigations
revealed such
serious abuse and
widespread
violations of
Oregon's licensing
rules that we
decided we needed to
take immediate
action."
The results of the
Oregon Department of
Human Services
seven-month
investigation of the
Mount Bachelor
Academy outside
Prineville, Ore.,
were given to Crook
County authorities
to decide whether to
pursue criminal
charges.
Triggered by a
complaint, the
investigation found
nine cases of
alleged abuse and
neglect involving
five students since
2007.
Most came out of a
mandatory treatment
program called
Lifesteps. At least
two students were
forced to act out
sexual roles in
front of staff and
other kids during
treatment sessions,
one had to act out
past physical abuse,
one was not properly
supervised on a trip
to Europe, and
others were
subjected to obscene
and degrading
comments from staff,
the investigators
alleged. For
complete story,
click here.
For more on this
story,
click here
,
here,
here,
here,
and
here.
State suspends
license from central
Oregon school for
troubled teens--November
4th, 2009--State
officials have told
parents to remove
their children from
a central Oregon
boarding school
after investigators
found students were
subject to
inappropriate sexual
role-play, public
humiliation and
physical
deprivation.
Following a
seven-month
investigation, the
Oregon Department of
Human Services has
temporarily
suspended
Mount Bachelor
Academy's
license.
Investigators found
nine substantiated
allegations of child
abuse and neglect as
well as numerous
licensing
violations.
For complete story,
click here.
For more on this
story,
click here
and
here.
Group sues Idaho
county over teen
treatment center--BOISE,
Idaho (AP) - A
company that pushed
to build a
residential
treatment center for
troubled teens in
rural western Idaho
is suing Boise
County in federal
court, saying
commissioners
violated the Fair
Housing Act when
they scuttled the
center's proposal
amid staunch local
opposition.
Development firm
Oaas-Laney sought
approval in 2007 to
build Alamar Ranch,
a 72-bed facility
that would have
treated teens with
behavioral problems
or addictions.
But neighbors fought
to keep the ranch
from being built,
citing traffic, fire
and safety concerns
and even holding a
fundraising event
featuring a local
folk singer,
according to the
lawsuit.
Boise County
eventually approved
the project, but
under conditions
that Alamar Ranch
officials said were
arbitrary,
discriminatory and
made the project
financially
impossible.
Boise County
maintains the
decision was based
on legitimate
government
interests. For
complete story,
click here.
A study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association says second-generation anti-psychotics like Risperdal, Ablify, Zyprexa and Seroquel are being given to teens with common conditions like ADHD, leading to obesity in just 11 weeks.
The side-effects common to these drugs may be worse in kids and teens than adults, the study concludes. For complete story, click here.
Teen’s parents
settle abuse case--October
26th, 2009--GONZALES
— The parents of a
Prairieville
teenager who allege
he suffered abuse
and related
temporary kidney
failure at a
Louisiana National
Guard Youth
Challenge facility
last year have
reached a $95,000
out-of-court
settlement with the
state of Louisiana,
the teen’s attorney
said. For
complete story,
click here.
Autopsy: Teen had
heat stroke at
summer camp, killing
him--October
21st, 2009--BEND,
Ore. – Preliminary
autopsy findings in
a summer camp death
may lead to criminal
charges for staff
members. [HEAL Note:
This occurred at an
Aspen Education
Group program called
SageWalk.] For
complete story,
click here.
For more on this
story,
click here.
Troubled teens
buckle under weight
of jibes--October
20th, 2009--Teenagers
who are told they
are too thin or too
fat by their parents
- even if the
comments are well-
intentioned - suffer
headaches, feel
stress or get
depressed more than
those who are not, a
study has found.
For complete story,
click here.
ROSWELL, N.M. (KRQE/KBIM) - A Roswell teacher accused of making sexual advances to a teen he was mentoring is out of jail but not back at work.
James Ogas, 38, faced a judge for the first time Wednesday charged with two counts of criminal sexual contact of a minor. The charges are 3rd-degree felonies.
Investigators say the alleged contact happened inside the automotive shop at Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell where Ogas is a part-time automotive-technician teacher.
According to court documents, twice last month Ogas inappropriately touched the 17-year-old who was part of a program for troubled teens sponsored by the New Mexico National Guard.
Investigators said along with the touching, Ogas frequently wrote the teen letters, which were described as sexually suggestive. For complete story, click here.
Our authorities may
not be able to track
down Osama bin
laden, but never
fear, they’re
keeping us safe from
budding little
terrorists such as
first grader Zachary
Christie. Caught
red-handed, the
Newark, Delaware,
six-year-old was
suspended from his
school and may face
45 days in reform
school for violating
the Christina School
District’s “zero
tolerance” policy on
weapons. His
offense?
Bringing a
camping utensil
set to school.
The “weapon” in
question is a “hobo
tool” the first
grader had received
after recently
joining the Cub
Scouts; it contains
a fork, spoon, and
knife. Zachary was
so excited about his
new acquisition — as
any normal boy would
be — that he brought
it to school to use
during lunch period.
School officials
then suspended him,
saying they have no
choice because the
district’s code of
conduct prohibits
the possession of
knives “regardless
of the possessor’s
intent.”
Unfortunately,
little Zachary’s
story is a common
one today, with
well-meaning
students being
subjected to
disproportionate
punishment across
the nation in the
name of zero
tolerance. Writing
about Zachary’s case
in the New York
Times, Ian
Urbina
provides one of
these other
examples, that of a
third-grade girl who
“was expelled for a
year because her
grandmother had sent
a birthday cake to
school, along with a
knife to cut it. The
teacher called the
principal — but not
before using the
knife to cut and
serve the cake.”
For complete story,
click here.
A
judge
sentenced
Jonathan
Carver
to
serve
1 to
15
years
for
each
of
five
counts
of
forcible
sexual
abuse
of a
17-year-old
girl.
Carver
pleaded
guilty
to
the
charges
in
August.
He
had
worked
as a
house
parent
at
Alpine
Academy
in
Erda,
where
the
girl
was
being
treated.
He
admitted
to a
long
relationship
with
her.
The
relationship
was
discovered
when
the
girl
left
the
school
and
her
parents
became
concerned
that
Carver
was
still
contacting
her.
They
contacted
police.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Teenage girl left
brain-damaged after
receiving cervical
cancer jab
05 Oct 2009 A
teenage girl has
been left
brain-damaged after
suffering epileptic
seizures just days
after being given
the controversial
cervical cancer jab.
Stacey Jones, 18,
suffered her first
seizure in March
when she was 17,
days after she had
the Cervarix
injection. In the
following weeks she
had several more
fits, causing such
severe brain injury
that she had to be
admitted to a
rehabilitation unit,
where she is
relearning simple
tasks. For
complete story,
click here.
TELEVISION
programs
claiming
to
tame
toddlers
and
troubled
teens
may
do
more
harm
than
good,
parenting
experts
have
warned.
The
families
of
Australian
teenagers
who
appeared
in
World's
Strictest
Parents
on
Channel
Seven
– in
which
the
teens
were
sent
overseas
for
a
week
to
learn
discipline
from
strict
parents
–
said
the
program
helped
turn
their
lives
around.
But
the
methods
used
have
been
questioned
since
the
final
episode,
aired
last
week,
revealed
how
the
teens
have
fared
since
going
home.
Serial
runaway
Jono
Denny,
16,
was
sent
to
South
Africa
to
live
with
Portia
Bethe
and
her
family.
After
returning
to
his
home
at
Ballina
on
the
North
Coast
he
re-enrolled
in
high
school
and
behaved
himself
for
six
weeks.
Then
he
was
arrested
after
a
night
of
heavy
drinking.
He
was
released
after
being
cautioned.
Psychologist
Michael
Carr-Gregg
said
World's
Strictest
Parents,
Brat
Camp
and
Supernanny
offered
unrealistic
solutions
to
behavioural
problems.
"I
would
prefer
to
see
programs
which
are
more
instructive,"
he
said.
"Obviously,
no
one
is
going
to
send
their
teenager
off
to a
different
country
for
a
week
to
teach
them
a
few
life
lessons.
It's
just
not
practical
or
realistic."
Mr
Carr-Gregg
said
his
research
showed
80
per
cent
of
parents
lack
confidence
in
their
ability
to
raise
their
children.
World's
Strictest
Parents
drew
more
than
1
million
viewers
a
week.
He
said
most
child
psychologists
would
not
recommend
the
strict
discipline
promoted
on
the
show.
"What
I
would
like
to
see
from
these
shows
is a
focus
on
authoritative
parenting
rather
than
authoritarian
parenting,"
he
said.
"The
problem
is
that
authoritative
parenting
–
which
teaches
parents
about
creating
boundaries,
negotiating
skills
and
so
on –
does
not
make
very
exciting
television.
"Authoritarian
parenting,
with
a
focus
on
strict
discipline
and
punishment,
is
more
likely
to
create
fireworks."
A
parenting
guide
author
and
chairwoman
of
Early
Childhood
Australia's
publications
committee,
Pam
Linke,
said
the
programs
provided
a
simplistic
view
of
managing
behavioural
problems.
"The
families
being
filmed
would
have
to
be
influenced
by
the
fact
that
there
is a
camera
on
them.
"It's
not
a
realistic
approach
to
solving
behavioural
problems
with
children.
There
is
no
instruction
about
how
these
parenting
models
would
work
in
real
life."
For
complete
story,
click
here.
(Webmaster
Note:
Abusive
programs
have
regularly
been
featured
and
promoted
by
US
television
programs.
Including
the
deadly
SageWalk,
an
Aspen
Education
Group
program
that
recently
voluntarily
relinquished
their
license
to
Oregon
authorities
after
another
death
at
the
program,
was
used
as a
setting
for
"Brat
Camp"
on
ABC.
Dr.
Phil
McGraw
has
repeatedly
placed
children
in
Aspen
Education
Group
programs
as
well
as
Provo
Canyon
School.
Other
talk
show
icons
have
placed
children
in
the
notoriously
abusive
and
internationally
criminalized
WWASPS
programs.
Turn
off
your
TV
and
think
for
yourself,
please.)
Unless
it's
the
teens
telling
the
jokes.
And
the
material
is
coming
from
their
own
experiences.
San
Diego
County
high
school
students
who
struggle
to
cope
with
these
issues
are
confronting
them
head-on
in
an
unlikely
stand-up-comedy
class
that
also
serves
as
therapy
of
sorts.
Paid
for
with
$6,500
in
federal
stimulus
money,
this
new
course
was
designed
for
students
who
are
interested
in
the
entertainment
industry.
But
it
has
also
helped
teenagers
face
their
demons
and
relate
to
classmates
at
the
county
Office
of
Education
community
school
in
National
City.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Residents in a Hanover County neighborhood are concerned about a home for troubled teens in their subdivision.
A community meeting is scheduled for tonight to address issues raised by those who live near Healthy Solutions, a foster home for four at-risk males ages 12 to 17 that opened this summer on Cudlipp Avenue in the Craney Island Farms community off U.S. 301. The meeting will start at 7 p.m. at Cool Spring Baptist Church.
Craney Island Farms resident David Liggan, who lives off Cudlipp Avenue, said he's concerned about a business operating in a residential area.
"We were never notified . . . or asked our opinion about the facility going into our area," Liggan said, referring to the home that provides 24-hour adult supervision and counseling services to teens who have behavioral issues.
Peggy Nicholls, who lives on Cudlipp Avenue, said the county should have alerted homeowners if a business was going in on their street. "I feel like the wool was pulled over our eyes," she said. For complete story, click here.
Former Boys Ranch
resident sues
Sedgwick County--September
23rd, 2009--A
former Boys Ranch
resident has sued
Sedgwick County,
alleging it failed
to protect him from
being raped while he
lived at the home
for troubled teens
in late 2004.
The
plaintiff
—
who
is
19
now
and
was
14
at
the
time
he
says
he
was
raped
—
filed
a
lawsuit
in
June
in
state
district
court
that
has
been
moved
to
federal
court
in
Wichita.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Don't forget
detainees at home--September
21st, 2009--Torture
is wrong. Our nation
believes this, and
we are concerned
about torture
tactics used on
detainees, as we
should be. Shouldn't
we also be concerned
about abusive
tactics used on our
own population,
particularly our
children?
The Aug. 25 Ithaca
Journal article
headlined, "Staff
severely injured
youths," describes a
U.S. Justice
Department report
that found staff at
two
juvenile-detention
facilities in
Tompkins County used
excessive force in
controlling some of
their residents.
Some might argue
that the staff
behavior is not
torture, but if the
results are injuries
and even death, what
name should we give
it? We put them in
detention centers in
the hopes that they
will reform
themselves and
become positive,
productive citizens.
How can they learn
to behave in a
peaceful manner when
they are treated
with violence?
Get-tough, boot-camp
programs purport to
help troubled teens,
but they don't work.
A review of the
scientific evidence
by the National
Institutes of Health
found that programs
using fear and tough
treatment are
ineffective and may
make teen criminal
behavior even worse.
For complete story,
click here.
Redmond wilderness
school
[SageWalk--Aspen
Education Group]
suspends operations--September
15th, 2009--A
Redmond-based
wilderness school
said Tuesday it has
agreed to suspend
operations amid
state and Lake
County
investigations into
the death of a
16-year-old Portland
boy on his first
hike with the
school, in a remote
area east of Bend
late last month.
Word of the halt to
operations came one
day after Lake
County sheriff's
deputies traveled
from Lakeview and
executed a search
warrant at the
Redmond office of
SageWalk Wilderness
School, as part of
its continuing
investigation into
the death of Sergey
Blashchishen.
For complete story,
click here.
For more on this
story,
click here.
I'm OK, but you're
not.--September
16th, 2009--So
you have a troubled
or problem teen. Let
me guess, they come
home from school and
virtually lock
themselves away in
their bedroom. If
they do come and
join the family,
they are plugged
into their MP3
player or PSP. You
actually have to
demand putting the
electronics away
when at the dinner
table; that is if
they even join you
for dinner. It’s a
pretty common
problem; I’d venture
to say across
Western society.
Let’s think back –
when I was a teen,
I’d plug into the
cassette player with
earphones on (I’m
old enough that CD’s
were not around).
Once I was driving,
I’d not even come
home – I’d go
driving. I was
usually busy enough
after school with
work and theatre
that there were some
weeks I’d barely see
my parents. Was I a
problem or troubled
child? My parents
probably thought so,
but guess who I
thought had the
problem? It’s
not any different
today. Oh, the
script may have
changed some, the
technology and
access to
information has
drastically changed,
but how we
communicate (or lack
of communication)
remains the same.
I’m curious though,
have you ever asked
your teen why they
stay away from the
family so much? Some
of this is natural
child development
for certain, but
choosing to stay
home to study
instead of joining
the family for a
‘night out bowling’
is something else.
Yes, our teen can be
defiant; sometimes
it’s what they do
best. But every now
and then, we must
remember to turn
that magnifying
glass away from them
and onto ourselves.
What are we doing to
drive wedges into
that gap? If we
don’t know then we
need to ask. So many
teens feel they
cannot talk to their
parents, when in
reality that is what
everyone, both teens
and parents, really
want! For
complete story,
click here.
Real life horrors
revealed in
Boot Camp--September
5th, 2009--The
most disturbing
aspect of Christian
Duguay's Boot Camp
is the fact that
places such as that
depicted actually
exist. Places that
promise
rehabilitation for
troubled youths that
are nothing more
than entities of
torture that do more
damage than good.
For complete story,
click here.
3 charged in Ohio in
teen's restraint
death--September
2nd, 2009--COLUMBUS,
Ohio — Three former
employees of a
Cleveland
residential center
for troubled
teenagers were
indicted Wednesday
in the death of a
17-year-old girl who
choked on vomit and
suffocated after she
was restrained face
down, a control
technique the
governor has since
banned.
Cynthia King, 32, of
Warrensville
Heights, Lazarita
Menendez, 28, of
Bedford Heights and
Ebony Ray, 33, of
Broadview Heights
were indicted in
Cuyahoga County on
involuntary
manslaughter and
child-endangering
charges in the death
of Faith Finley at
the Parmadale Family
Services center in
Parma. For
complete story,
click here.
The Lake
County Sheriff's Office is
investigating the death of a
Portland teen who collapsed during a
hike as part of a wilderness camp
exercise, a spokesman said today.
Sergey
Blashchishen, 16, died Friday after
collapsing about 2:30 p.m., said
Deputy Chuck Pore. An autopsy was
performed on Sunday but the results
are incomplete and a cause of death
has not been determined, Pore said.
Investigators are trying to find out
if Blashchishen, who lived in
Northeast Portland, had any medical
problems that might have contributed
to his death, Pore said. He had
passed a physical the day before he
died.
Blashchishen
was attending the SageWalk
wilderness school, a program for
troubled teens based in Redmond. He
was hiking with a group in northern
Lake County between Burns and Bend
when he got sick.
"He said he
didn't feel good and shortly after
that collapsed," Pore said.
The Bureau
of Land Management has suspended the
permit for SageWalk to operate on
BLM land, pending the outcome of the
investigation. It could not be
confirmed if Blashchishen was on BLM
property when he collapsed.
For complete story,
click here.
(For more on this story,
click here,
here,
here,
and
here.
Gay
reparative therapy isn't advisable,
says APA--August
31, 2009--The
American Psychological Association
has finally confirmed what MySpace
Zach and his supporters knew back in
2005 – gay reparative therapies
don’t work.
In an update to a 1997
resolution "Appropriate
Therapeutic Responses to
Sexual Orientation," the
APA now advises that
mental health
professionals should
avoid telling clients
that they can change
their sexual orientation
through therapy or other
treatments.
"Contrary to claims of
sexual orientation
change advocates and
practitioners, there is
insufficient evidence to
support the use of
psychological
interventions to change
sexual orientation,"
said Judith M. Glassgold,
PsyD, chair of the task
force which examined the
efficacy of so-called
reparative therapy.”
APA appointed the
six-member Task Force on
Appropriate Therapeutic
Responses to Sexual
Orientation in 2007 to
review and update APA's
1997 resolution,
"Appropriate Therapeutic
Responses to Sexual
Orientation," and to
generate a report. APA
was concerned about
ongoing efforts to
promote the notion that
sexual orientation can
be changed through
psychotherapy or
approaches that
mischaracterize
homosexuality as a
mental disorder.
The task force examined
the peer-reviewed
journal articles in
English from 1960 to
2007, which included 83
studies. Most of the
studies were conducted
before 1978, and only a
few had been conducted
in the last 10 years.
The group also reviewed
the recent literature on
the psychology of sexual
orientation.
"Unfortunately, much of
the research in the area
of sexual orientation
change contains serious
design flaws," Glassgold
said. "Few studies could
be considered
methodologically sound
and none systematically
evaluated potential
harms."
Looking back at
Zach
Zach Stark was for many
the face of the
vulnerable, oppressed
gay teen.
Stark, then 16 and
living in Bartlett,
Tenn., chronicled his
coming-out story in his
MySpace blog.
He
detailed his parents
unfavorable reaction and
wrote, “Today, my
mother, father and I had
a very long 'talk' in my
room, where they let me
know I am to apply for a
fundamentalist Christian
program for gays."
It would take place at
Refuge, a youth program
of Love in Action
International, a Memphis
group that runs a
religion-based program
intended to change the
sexual orientation of
gay men and women.
As mandated by Refuge,
Stark's blog posts
stopped the day he
entered the facility,
but debate and outrage
over such programs did
not.
A
New York Times
story published July
17, 2005, shortly after
Stark entered Refuge,
brought the matter to
the forefront of the
mainstream media with
the headline “Gay
Teenager Stirs a Storm.”
In that story, former
teacher and GLSEN
Executive Director Kevin
Jennings told the New
York Times, “All
reputable health and
education professional
organizations have
clearly and
unequivocally denounced
this ‘treatment’ as
quackery.”
Closer to home, young
people from the area
organized a protest
outside the Love In
Action facility soon
after the Stark was
admitted to the program.
As days passed, the
group's numbers swelled
as the teens were joined
by a wide range of
people from the
community forming what
they called the Queer
Action Coalition (QAC),
concerned about Stark’s
mental health after
reading his ominous blog
posts.
"It's like boot camp,"
Stark wrote before
entering the facility.
"If I do come out
straight, I'll be so
mentally unstable and
depressed it won't
matter." For
complete story,
click here.
Caging
Children--August
28th, 2009--Children under the
age of 18 can't vote, serve as
jurors, or join Blockbuster, but in
the U.S. – the only developed nation
with such a policy – they can be
tried in adult courts and
imprisoned in facilities designed
for adults. A groundbreaking study
from the University of Texas' LBJ
School of Public Affairs could
kick-start a national discussion
about the foolishness of that
policy.
The report,
"From Time Out to Hard Time: Young
Children in the Adult Criminal
Justice System," was compiled by
Michele Deitch, an adjunct
professor at the LBJ School, and her
students. Its roots were tragic:
Deitch and her group worked with the
UT Law School Supreme Court Clinic
on the case of Christopher
Pittman, who, at age 12, was
charged with killing his
grandparents. He received a 30-year
sentence – the mandatory minimum in
South Carolina. After the Supreme
Court rejected his appeal, Deitch
explained, "we were sitting on a ton
of research that we had done, so we
thought it was vital to get it out
there." For complete story,
click here.
Jeff Deerr does not want a group
home for troubled teens in his
neighborhood.
"I am definitely opposed to the
idea," he said. "I go to work and I
come home after working an
eight-hour day and I have a peaceful
neighborhood. I don't believe that
doing something like this is right."
Deerr was among more than 25
residents from the Vinton Heights
subdivision who sat in an Area Board
of Zoning Appeals meeting Wednesday
night for nearly four hours to speak
out against proposed home.
The group home, proposed by Seeds
of Hope Community Ministries, was
slated to operate out of a residence
at 2012 Valdez Drive in Lafayette if
approved.
But the Board of Zoning Appeals
voted 6-1 against the proposal,
which led to a sea of cheers from
residents in attendance. For
complete story,
click here.
For eight years, in
the remote, isolated
school, she says,
she was emotionally
and spiritually
abused. At times,
she was also
physically and
sexually abused — in
some cases by a man
who served as a dorm
parent there, she
said.
It wasn't until
decades later that
she realized she
hadn't been the only
abused child at
Mamou Alliance
Academy, a
now-closed boarding
school run by the
Christian and
Missionary Alliance
(C&MA), an
evangelical
Protestant
denomination.
For complete story,
click here.
NY
detention system faulted in
juveniles' injuries--August
24th, 2009--ALBANY, N.Y. —
Workers at four youth detention
centers in New York caused dozens of
serious injuries, including broken
bones and teeth, when they routinely
used force as a primary way to
restrain juveniles and not just as a
last resort, according to federal
investigators.
The Justice
Department's Civil Rights Division
also reported that youths in the
state system failed to get needed
counseling and mental health
treatment, though most have
psychological problems. The findings
released Monday were the result of a
nearly two-year probe.
Gladys
Carrion, commissioner of the state
Office of Children and Family
Services, said they have begun
overhauling the troubled system she
took over 18 months ago, including a
new restraint policy and hiring more
mental health workers. "Much more
still needs to be done," she said.
Investigators said conditions they
found last year at the Lansing and
Louis Gossett Jr. residential
centers outside Ithaca and the Tryon
residential centers for boys and
girls in Johnstown violated the
teens' constitutional rights as well
as department policy. For
complete story,
click here.
Payout over
teen's boot camp tragedy--August
24th, 2009--The
parents of a teenager beaten to
death by staff at a boot camp in
Hubei Province this month have been
awarded 350,000 yuan (US$51,000) in
compensation.
The money,
which will be paid by a local
education bureau, comes less than
three weeks after Yao Jian, 14, died
on an outward-bound training program
intended to boost his confidence.
"The money will
not ease the agony of losing our
son," his father Yao Jun, 37, told
China Daily yesterday. "We
can only hope this tragedy will ring
alarm for parents and the government
to avoid such incidents." For
complete story,
click here.
(Webmaster Note: Really?
China is better at swift action than
the US? What's up with that?!
Strengthen
and Pass HR 911
already.)
NEA Attacks Administration's
Education Reform Plan21
Aug 2009 The nation's largest
teachers union sharply attacked
President Obama's most significant
school improvement initiative on
Friday evening, saying that it puts
too much emphasis on a "narrow
agenda" centered on charter schools
and echoes the Bush administration's
"top-down approach" to reform. The
National Education Association's
criticism of Obama's $4.35 billion
"Race
to the Top" initiative
came nearly a month after the
president unveiled the
competitive grant program...
For complete story,
click here.
(No charter schools. Improve
Public Education!!!)
Woman sues
state over sexual assault--August
18th, 2009--A
19-year-old who was sexually
assaulted by a guard at a state
juvenile-detention center last year
has filed a lawsuit claiming the
state failed to properly supervise
the guard or protect her from his
advances.
In a lawsuit filed
in King County
Superior Court last
month, the young
woman's attorneys
claim the state
failed to properly
train and supervise
the on-call
temporary guard at
Echo Glen Children's
Center or to fully
investigate previous
complaints about
him.
The guard,
39-year-old Robert
H. Fox, pleaded
guilty in February
to first-degree
custodial sexual
misconduct in
connection with the
assault, according
to court documents.
He now is serving an
eight-month sentence
in the King County
Jail. For
complete story,
click here.
One third
of all children in jails are
'wrongly imprisoned'13
Aug 2009 More than a third of
children sent to prison last year
were wrongly jailed, a report into
child custody rates says. The study
by Barnardo's found that the
Government had breached its own
guidance on child custody by
allowing so many 12-, 13- and
14-year-olds to be imprisoned for a
non-serious offences. For
complete story,
click here.
DNA
database has 300 children added a
day11
Aug 2009 More than 300 children a
day are being put on to the DNA
database fuelling fresh fears over
the growth of the "Big Brother"
state. Almost 1.1 million youngsters
aged between ten and 17 have had
their profiles recorded by the
police since 2000, with a large
proportion aged under 15, the Daily
Telegraph can disclose. And around
one in six are likely to have never
been convicted of any crime.
For complete story,
click here.
Teen sent
to PEC home--August
10th, 2009--The
grandmother of a teenaged boy being
housed at a youth residential
treatment facility in Prince Edward
County. wants to know why he can't
be treated closer to home. The
14-year-old Cole Harbour boy, who
was the subject of a recent Supreme
Court of Nova Scotia case regarding
his care, suffers from attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder, and
related behavioural problems.
He was recently enrolled at the
Bayfield Treatment Centre in
Consecon by the Nova Scotia
Department of Community Services.
His grandmother -- who cannot be
named in order to protect the boy's
identity -- told The Intelligencer
she wanted the boy to get help, but
did not expect him to be moved out
of the province. "All we did
was ask for help, not for him to be
shipped away," she said. She
said she and her husband asked
Community Services for help with the
boy, whom she admits suffers from
considerable behavioural issues,
last year. As reported by the
Halifax Chronicle-Herald, Community
Services originally made
arrangements for the boy's treatment
at a facility in Utah after the Nova
Scotia Supreme Court ruled it was
permissible to send him there for
treatment unavailable in his home
province.
However, after arrangements at both
Cinnamon Hills Youth Crisis Centre
and Provo Canyon School fell
through, the boy was moved to
Bayfield - a decision Patrick Eagan,
the family's lawyer, says shows a
definite motive. "It's just
somewhere to shove this kid," he
said. For complete story,
click here.
Former
employee admits sex with teen at
school for troubled girls
(Alpine Academy in UT)--August 5th,
2009--An
employee at a live-in treatment
school for troubled girls in Tooele
County admitted Wednesday to having
a sexual relationship with a
17-year-old female student.
Jonathan
R. Carver, 29, of Kaysville, pleaded
guilty in 3rd District Court to five
counts of second-degree felony
forcible sexual abuse.
He
faces up to 15 years in prison on
each count when he is sentenced Oct.
6 by 3rd District Judge Stephen
Henriod. Court documents
detailing the original charges --
four counts of rape, two counts of
forcible sodomy and one count of
witness tampering -- indicate Carver
had sex with the girl at least 20
times between October and December
of 2008. Carver and his wife
were "house parents," responsible
for taking care of eight girls every
day as they underwent treatment for
emotional and behavioral problems at
Alpine Academy in Erda, according to
the school's program director Janet
Mulitalo. For complete
story,
click here.
Chinese
Youth Beaten to Death at "net
addiction" "boot camp"--August
4th, 2009--
China's anti-internet addiction
industry has claimed another victim,
after supervisors at a
rehabilitation camp allegedly beat a
16 year old inmate to death.
Deng Senshan had been sent to
Guangxi Qihuang Survival Training
Camp to "cure" him of his internet
addiction, the AFP reports. His
parents were paying $1000 for the
treatment. However,
the youth ended up in solitary
confinement shortly after arriving
at the establishment, and was
subsequently beaten to death by
supervisors for "running too
slowly", according to the news
agency. For complete story,
click here.
Controversial Treatment Center Shuts
Down--July
31st, 2009--Some Tri-State
teens undergoing drug and alcohol
rehabilitation at a controversial
treatment facility may be home
tonight after the last of the
centers closed this week in
Indianapolis.
Pathway Family Center had vacated
its building earlier but was still
housing teens in various homes.
Sources tell the I-Team that ended
this week with calls to parents to
pick up their children. No one from
Pathway returned the I-Team’s calls
today, and the longtime emergency
number for the center has been
disconnected.
In the Cincinnati area, the program
in Milford originally was called
Kids Helping Kids. It used
controversial methods that removed
teens from their homes for months
and sometimes more than a year.
Teens spent entire days in classes
that included hand motions,
toddler's songs and other means some
likened to a cult, but others said
saved their lives.
After the I-Team’s original report,
the program changed names and then
shut down in Milford. Those teens
were transported to the Indianapolis
site instead.
(Pathway
Family Center is
CLOSED!!!!) For complete
story,
click here.
(Story does not include the fact
that
HEAL,
ISAC,
and other
youth
advocates fought
diligently to expose and close
Pathway.)
AHCA report
cites kicking, spitting on teens,
other reported abuses at Devereux
House--July
29th, 2009--A
Tallahassee group home for troubled
teens currently under criminal
investigation by law-enforcement
officials was shut down by state
health-care regulators in May
following troubling reports of
physical and verbal abuse of
residents by center employees.
For
complete story,
click here.
ADHD Drugs
Linked to Sudden Death in Kids--Received
July 25th, 2009 (Article: June 15th,
2009)--MONDAY, June 15
(HealthDay News) -- Stimulant
medications commonly prescribed to
treat attention-deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are
associated with an increased risk of
sudden death, but those deaths are
still rare, new research finds.
For complete story,
click here.
Report
alleges multiple problems at Hinds
juvenile facility--July
24th, 2009--Unreported
suicide attempts, poor staff
relations and failure to provide
timely mental health evaluations
continue at Hinds
County's Henley-Young Juvenile
Detention Center, according to a
state inspection report.
The state Juvenile Facilities
Monitoring Unit inspected the
detention center on June 23
and gave its report to the county
July 22.
Juvenile Facilities Monitoring Unit
Director Donald Beard and Henley-
Young's detention director Darren
Farr did not return calls.
The report, obtained by The
Clarion-Ledger, makes 14
recommendations. It's unclear
what could happen to the center if
it doesn't follow them, but
county officials say they plan to.
"A crucial step in recognizing
problems associated with a
juvenile's behavior is a
mental health evaluation," the
report states.
The inspection came after Hinds
supervisors learned that seven
juveniles have attempted suicide at
the center since January.
In one case, a girl was found with
several socks tied around her
neck. In another, a boy repeatedly
hit his head on the door of his
cell.
Detention center staff never
reported the cases to the county or
state, which must be done
immediately, according to the most
recent report. For complete
story,
click here.
(Webmaster note: This is what
happens at a "regulated" and
state-run facility that has
safeguards in place to prevent
violations and harm to youth.
Now, take away the "regulation" and
government oversight and what kind
of abuses and violations do you
think are probable? The
unimaginable happens to youth every
day in behavior modification
programs throughout the United
States. Keep your children at
home.)
Court: Keep
cleared juveniles' files--July
23rd, 2009--ALLENTOWN -
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court
yesterday ordered the preservation
of court records of juveniles who
are suing a corrupt Luzerne County
Court judge.
Previously,
when it
overturned
the
convictions
of
youths
who
appeared
in
former
Judge
Mark
Ciavarella's
courtroom,
the
court
said the
records
should
be
destroyed,
prompting
complaints
from
attorneys
for the
juveniles.
The
attorneys
said
loss of
the
records
could
imperil
the
youths'
ability
to
recover
damages
from the
judge
and
others
implicated
in the
corruption
scandal.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
(For an
update
on this
story,
click
here,here
or
here.)
The APA's Nuremberg Defense
By Scott Horton 20 Jul 2009 ...[T]he
disclosures surrounding the
waterboarding of Abu Zubaida give
further proof that beginning in
2002, healthcare professionals,
specifically psychologists, played
an essential role at every stage in
the development and application of
torture techniques. The failure of
professional organizations, and
specifically the American
Psychological Association, to
acknowledge this and take
appropriate countermeasures is
disturbing...Professional oversight
bodies have engaged in consistent
evasion, and now the APA is focused
on the relaxation of its ethics
standards to provide defenses for
psychologists who joined in the Bush
Administration’s torture program.
For complete story,
click here.
(Webmaster Note: Behavior
Modification Programs for Teens Are
Experiments
In Torture.)
Detroit Public Schools moves
closer to bankruptcy and
privatization
By Walter Gilberti 16 July 2009
Detroit teachers and schools
employees are in danger of having
their jobs, wages and benefits
sacrificed in the interest of an
anti-public schools agenda driven by
Emergency Financial Manager Robert
Bobb and the Obama administration.
In a two-pronged attack on the
continued existence of public
schools in Detroit, Bobb has hired
four private professional education
management firms to oversee
instruction at 17 Detroit high
schools, while, at the same time,
ratcheting up his earlier threat to
institute bankruptcy proceedings.
For complete story,
click here.
LDS
seminary principal in court, hands
over evidence--July
13th, 2009--PROVO —
Officers came to court Monday
morning prepared to re-arrest a
former LDS seminary principal
accused of sexual misconduct with a
16-year-old student.
Michael J. Pratt,
37, the former
principal at Lone
Peak High School's
LDS seminary
program, was
arrested Thursday on
numerous
allegations, but was
bailed out on
$20,000 cash-only
bail at 3:37 a.m.
Saturday.
"Look,"
an emotional Pratt
told the media upon
exiting the
courtroom. "I am
hopeful that the
truth will be fully
presented at the
appropriate time."
Officers from the
Utah County Special
Victims Task Force
came to 4th District
Court Monday for
Pratt's review of
bail hearing to
express concern that
Pratt may have been
tampering with
evidence on his
laptop computer.
Prosecutor Guy
Probert told Judge
Steven Hansen that
there were some
"evidentiary
questions" relating
to the laptop, which
had been sent out of
the area with
Pratt's family after
the allegations
surfaced. It is
believed that the
computer belongs to
The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day
Saints, but Probert
could not officially
confirm that.
"The laptop is
being returned by
mail. A copy of the
hard drive is being
produced today,"
Probert said.
For complete story,
click here.
For story update,
click
here.
(Webmaster note:
Don't send your kid
to Utah!)
One teen runaway found, two
missing--July
9th, 2009--Update on three runaways who escaped
abusive wilderness program...A national
organization is pleading for information about a
15-year-old girl missing from McDowell for more than
a year. In separate cases, sheriff's deputies
have located one of two teenage runaways for whom
they've been searching. The other one hasn't been
spotted. As part of its ongoing search, the
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is
again asking for the public's help in locating Diana
Hernandez Yanez, 15, of Yancey Street in Marion. She
was 14 when she left her home on July 21, 2008.
Neighbors told police that they saw her get into a
red pickup truck that morning. Friends say the
truck, a red 2000 Chevrolet S-10 low-rider pickup,
belonged to 19-year-old Andres Velasquez Tinoco of
Coxes Creek Road, whom Diana reportedly met just a
couple of weeks prior to her disappearance.
For complete story,
click here.
Miss. juvenile detention
case near end--June
26th, 2009--A preliminary agreement has been reached
in a federal lawsuit that claims youth were abused
at a south Mississippi juvenile detention center and
forced to live in squalid conditions. For
complete story,
click here.
Supreme Court Says Child's
Rights Violated by Strip Search--But if
the student had been suspected of having illegal
drugs that could have posed a far greater danger to
herself and other students, the strip search might
have been justified, the majority said. 26 Jun 2009
In a ruling of interest to educators, parents and
students across the country, the Supreme Court
ruled, 8 to 1, on Thursday that the strip search of
a 13-year-old Arizona girl by school officials who
were looking for prescription-strength drugs
violated her constitutional rights. The officials in
Safford, Ariz., would have been justified in 2003
had they limited their search to the backpack and
outer clothing of Savana Redding, who was in the
eighth grade at the time, the court ruled. [Needless
to say, GOPedophile Clarence Thomas thinks it's a
good idea to strip thirteen-year-olds.]
For complete story,
click here.
Can Wilderness Camps Kill
Your Kid?--June
22nd, 2009--It's
an industry that preys on desperation. If
your teenager has emotional issues, abuses drugs, or
is promiscuous, help is just a phone call away.
Wilderness intervention programs promise to "fix"
bad behavior by teaching your child life skills and
building self-esteem. These facilities offer a
beacon of hope for
parents
like Crystal Manganaro, who sent her son, Matthew,
to a wilderness camp outside of Houston. But what
Crystal didn't realize was that the camp she
entrusted with her son's life would so carelessly
take it away. For complete story,
click here.
Are Troubled Teens
Tortured?--June
23rd, 2009--Yesterday,
we brought you the story of
Matthew Meyer, a troubled teen who died at a
wilderness camp. Today, we bring you the story of
Nick Gaglia.
Gina
Kaysen Fernandes:
Imagine a world where your
child is locked away for
years, spending days at a
time in a windowless room.
Communication is shut off
and you have no way of
knowing about their
treatment, which may include
being physically restrained
for hours on end. This
horrifying scenario isn't
prison -- it's a voluntary
program aimed at treating
troubled teenagers.
It's a
place where Nick Gaglia
spent two and a half years,
because "my life was
spinning out of control."
The residential
treatment program
known as "Kids of North
Jersey" in Secaucus, New
Jersey, "seemed like a great
fit," says Nick, who was
abusing drugs and alcohol at
the age of 13. Nick's
parents saw
advertisements for the
program on television and
soon enrolled their son.
They hoped professionals
would get Nick clean and
sober so he could put his
life back on track. But
instead of giving Nick the
coping skills he'd need in
the outside world, he became
a prisoner subjected to
verbal abuse, psychological
torment, and physical
restraint. "I would call it
torture and abuse," says
Nick, who shared his
harrowing ordeal with
momlogic. For complete
story,
click here.
ADHD Drugs Linked to Sudden
Death--June
15th, 2009--On
that morning, the 54-year-old mother of two living
in McAllen, Texas, was preparing to take her eldest
son to school. She had an early appointment, so her
husband, Rick Hohmann, would be dropping off younger
son, 14-year-old Matthew, at his school that day.
It was Ann Hohmann who
gave Matthew his
Adderall XR pill that morning with a glass
of water. But it was her husband who later found
him after he had collapsed on the bathroom
floor.
"To me, he seemed fine,"
she recalled. "My husband had seen him walking
around, brushing his teeth. Then he walked in
and found him flat down on the floor in the
bathroom.
"When he turned him
over, his lips were blue," Hohmann said.
She said that her
husband called her first, and then he called
911. He performed CPR until the ambulance
arrived. But it was too late.
"They worked on him for
a while, but he was dead," she said. For
complete story,
click here.
If anything, the Obama administration seems to be
pushing the radical pharmacological envelope even
further than the Bush administration----at the very
least, nothing has changed for the better in the
government-assisted determined push to control /
engineer America's children.
On Wednesday, an FDA advisory committee gave the FDA
a green light to expand the marketing license of
three toxic antipsychotic drugs--Seroquel, Geodon,
and Zyprexa--for use in children. Such approval
gives manufacturers a shield
from liability--for illegally promoting the drugs
for off-label use. And such approval ensures
increased use of these drugs. Manufacturers
and mental health providers will profit while
children's physical and mental health will be
sacrificed. These drugs pose severely disabling,
potentially lethal hazards--including diabetes,
metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease.
The body of evidence showing these drugs to be
harmful is irrefutable: it is documented in FDA's
postmarketing database, and in secret internal
company documents uncovered during litigation.
Did the FDA provide the advisory panel members with
the evidence ? And if not, why not?
The report, "Preventing Mental, Emotional, and
Behavioral Disorders Among Young People: Progress
and Possibilities" (2009) re-iterates the earlier
national mental health policy directive under
President Bush: The President's New Freedom
Commission on Mental Health (2002)--which promoted
universal mental screening and the expanded use of
patented psychoactive drugs (those listed in
industry-initiated, TMAP algorithm prescription
guides).
The NAS report also recommends aggressive screening
and pharmacologic intervention with toxic
psychoactive drugs for children. The provocative,
unsubstantiated premise is that mental illness can
be detected through genetic screening--a la eugenics
rationale--and that they can be prevented.
"Hundreds of studies that have appeared in just the
past decade collectively suggest that the brain
isn't so different from, say, the arm: it doesn't
simply break on its own. In fact, many mental
illnesses - even those like schizophrenia that have
demonstrable genetic origins - can be stopped or at
least contained before they start."
"This isn't wishful thinking but hard science."
If the consequences of psychiatry's delusions
weren't so serious, that statement is laughable. As
every real medical scientist knows, psychiatry lacks
even the rudimentary objective, scientifically
verifiable tools of science, much less, "hard
science."
The TIME reporter is impressed with NAS report
weight in pagination: "a 500-page report, nearly two
years in the making, on how to prevent mental,
emotional and behavioral disorders."
"The [NAS] report concludes that pre-empting such
disorders requires two kinds of interventions:
first, because genes play so important a role in
mental illness, we need to ensure that close
relatives (particularly children) of those with
mental disorders have access to rigorous screening
programs. Second, we must offer treatment to people
who have already shown symptoms of illness (say, a
tendency to brood and see the world without
optimism) but don't meet the
diagnostic criteria for a full-scale mental illness
(in this case, depression)....."
According to TIME, the authors of the NAS report
recognize but rationalize the reality that mental
screens will mislabel healthy individuals as
mentally ill:
"Early-detection programs will identify as
candidates for mental illness some people who
are merely persnickety or shy or eccentric."
Indeed, a responsible reason NOT to screen is the
high false-positive rate of mental screens.
For example, the false-positive rate of TeenScreen,
the mental health dragnet of school children, is as
high as 84%.
TIME reports that that the invalid screening tools
did not deter the NAS authors from recommending
mental screening--even acknowledging that those
mislabeled may be prescribed toxic
antidepressants and/ or antipsychotics:
"Some prevention programs even prescribe psychiatric
medications, including antipsychotics and
antidepressants, to people who aren't technically
psychotic or depressed....But those who contributed
to the National Academies report say preventing the
suffering of people with mental illness is worth the
risk of some false positives, partly because of the
enormous cost of treating mental illness after it's
struck."
Former teen counselor gets
jail time--June
9th, 2009--A
former counselor for troubled teens who was accused
of having sex with one of her students has accepted
a plea negotiation with prosecutors after turning
down a similar deal last year.
Cathleen Crowley, 30, of Rye was sent to the
Cheshire County jail in Westmoreland for a month as
part of the deal that was finalized last week.
Crowley withdrew her first guilty plea connected to
the student’s accusations during a hearing last
November in Cheshire County Superior Court.
The plea Crowley and her attorney, Gary S. Lenehan
of Manchester, first negotiated with prosecutors
would have kept her out of jail.
Judge Brian T. Tucker was expected to hand down
suspended, one-year jail sentences on misdemeanor
charges of sexual assault and giving alcohol to a
minor.
But after hearing the case against Crowley — she was
accused of giving the student alcohol and engaging
in sex acts with him in her van and a hotel in Keene
in 2007 — Tucker said he would reject the deal she
made with prosecutors and hand down a six-month jail
sentence....The state Division for Children, Youth
and Families has substantiated an abuse finding tied
to the student’s allegations against Crowley,
Assistant Cheshire County Attorney John S. Webb
said.
The finding appears on Crowley’s permanent state
record and should
[but, probably won't] prevent her from working again
as a youth counselor or in a similar position, he
said. For complete story,
click here.
'Orwellian
language' in schools turns pupils into 'customers',
finds damning report09 Jun 2009 Schools
using the 'Orwellian language of performance
management' are undermining teenagers' education by
turning them into 'customers' rather than students,
a landmark report says today. Teachers who are
forced to use phrases such as 'performance
indicator' and 'curriculum delivery' lack enthusiasm
for the job, the six-year investigation found.
For complete story,
click here.
Police recruits to be
trained at Tranquility Bay--June
4th, 2009--The
Tranquility Bay facility at Treasure Beach which was
previously used as an offshore reform school for
rebellious children, mostly from the United States,
will now be used to train police recruits for at
least the next two years.
At a meeting
Tuesday with Treasure Beach residents and in
subsequent response to journalists' questions,
Deputy Commissioner of Police in charge of
administration, Jevene Bent said training
"operations" would begin "somewhere in the middle of
the month".
The complex
sited on two and a half acres of beach front land,
referred to by locals as Old Whard, was
controversially used for 12 years by the United
States group, World Wide Association of Speciality
Programmes and Schools (WWASP) as a 'boot camp' for
teenagers. It was closed in January.
The Jamaica
Constabulary Force's two-year lease on the
privately-owned facility begun on June 1. For
complete story,
click here.
Juvenile safety feared--June
2nd, 2009--Seven juveniles have attempted
suicide at Hinds County's youth detention center
since January, according to a report obtained by The
Clarion-Ledger. For complete story,
click here.
"He’s gonna come back, we’re
all (going to be) distant, we’re all (going to be)
strangers here," his grandmother said. "We know we
love each other. He knows we’re mom and dad, . . .
but it ain’t gonna be the same. There’s a distance
there."
The 14-year-old boy, raised
by his maternal grandparents since he was four, is
at a short-term treatment centre in the temporary
care of the Community Services Department. If the
family isn’t successful, he will be sent to Cinnamon
Hills Youth Crisis Center for an undetermined time.
For complete story,
click here.
(To learn more about Cinnamon Hills and abuse,
click here.)
Brianna Turnbull Pleads No
Contest--June
1st, 2009--A
North Platte woman pled no contest to charges she
helped a teenage boy escape from state custody and
hide for three months. Two felonies were reduced to
misdemeanors against Brianna Turnbull. The
23-year-old pled no contest to charges of attempted
violation of custody order; attempted juvenile
escape, and contributing to the delinquency of a
child. Turnbull is the daughter of a Lincoln County
Judge. The case is behind handled by a special
prosecutor Charles Brewster of...Turnbull worked at
the Salvation Army's Quinn Wilcox house in North
Platte when she met Kaden Clark-Guthrie of Trenton.
For complete story,
click here.
For an update on this story,
click here.
Congressional
Hearing on Death/Abuse in Schools and Programs Using
Physical Restraint--May
19th, 2009--
Click here
for the online video from C-Span.
Teacher's aide in Maryland
Heights convicted in sex case--May
21st, 2009--A
teacher's aide at a school for troubled teens in
Maryland Heights was convicted late Wednesday of
having sexual contact with two students. Bruce
Germany, 55, was convicted on 14 felony counts of
sexual contact with a student by a teacher between
September 2006 and April 2007. The charges
involve two 15-year-old girls who attended Lakeside
Center for Troubled Youth at 13044 Marine Drive.
For complete story,
click here.
Thousands beaten, raped in
Irish reform schools--May
20th, 2009--DUBLIN – A fiercely debated,
long-delayed investigation into
Ireland's Roman Catholic-run institutions
says priests and nuns terrorized thousands of boys
and girls in workhouse-style schools for decades —
and government inspectors failed to stop the chronic
beatings, rapes and humiliation.
Nine years in the making, Wednesday's 2,600-page
report sides almost completely with the horrific
reports of abuse from former students sent to more
than 250 church-run, mostly residential
institutions. But victims' leaders said it didn't go
far enough — particularly because none of their
abusers were identified by name.
The report concluded that church officials always
shielded their orders' pedophiles from arrest to
protect their own reputations and, according to
documents uncovered in the Vatican, knew that many
pedophiles were serial attackers.
The investigators said overwhelming, consistent
testimony from still-traumatized men and women, now
in their 50s to 80s, had demonstrated beyond a doubt
that the entire system treated children more like
prison
inmates and slaves than people with legal
rights and human potential. For complete
story,
click here.
(Webmaster note: Switch out Irish for American
and you will understand America's teen "help"
industry.)
Feds end 11-year oversight
of Ga. juvenile facilities--May
18th, 2009--Georgia’s juvenile justice
system has been released from federal oversight, 11
years after the U.S. Justice Department investigated
reports of overcrowding and abuse at the state’s
youth detention facilities, the governor said
Monday. For complete story,
click here.
Counselor accused of sex
with teen--May
15th, 2009--A man accused of carrying on
a monthslong sexual relationship last fall with a
teenager in a school for troubled girls is in Tooele
County jail facing seven felony charges.
Kaysville
resident Jonathan Carver, 29, and
his wife were both working as
live-in counselors at the Alpine
Academy in Erda during the man's
alleged relationship with a
17-year-old female student starting
in October 2008. For complete
story,
click here.
State investigating ab slapping of teen
boys--May
12th, 2009--A controversial video
appears to show a juvenile justice official in Seminole County
striking adolescent detainees in their abdomens.
But although physical contact between officials and detainees is
mostly prohibited, the state Department of Juvenile Justice says the
boys may have volunteered for the military-style treatment at the
Seminole County Juvenile Detention Center.
"There has been speculation that it was used for training purposes,"
said Frank Penela, a spokesman for the department, who has not yet
seen the video.
Nonetheless, the department, which has been stung in recent years by
the death of one detainee at a boot-camp-style facility and as well
as the discovery of a graveyard containing unidentified graves near
another, is investigating the incident. For complete story,
click here.
Group Home Employee Accused Of Molesting
Teens--May
8th, 2009--A Sacramento man who helped troubled teens at a
group home is under arrest and accused of molesting girls while on
the job.
In
a place where people are watching your every move, Sacramento County
authorities say Jeffrey Caldwell was able to make major
inappropriate moves this past February while working at the
Sacramento County Assessment Center. For complete story,
click here.
Government wants the military to run state schools -- Right then, fall into line you 'orrible little pupils! 08 May 2009 The Armed Forces will be drafted in to run state schools under plans to drive up discipline and respect in classrooms. Ministers are in talks with defence chiefs about taking over a handful of schools and turning them into military academies. Alongside daily lessons, pupils would be expected to take part in activities such as drills, uniformed parades, weapons handling and adventure training. For complete story, click here.
Gardasil Linked to Nerve Disorder--Cervical Cancer Vaccine May Raise Risk of Guillain-Barre Syndrome 30 Apr 2009 Girls and women who receive the Gardasil [Gardakill] vaccine to prevent cervical cancer may be at increased risk of a rare but serious disorder of the nervous system [Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS)] in the first few weeks after getting their shots, researchers report. For complete story, click here.
America's Tough Love Habit--May, 2009--We are, famously, blasé about our acts of torture overseas. But why? The laser-like focus on fixing the economy, wanting to avoid more political divisiveness, the diminishment of watchdog journalism—are all part of the explanation. But there's another overlooked reason as well.
Americans tend to valorize tough love—at times, even tough love that verges on torture—in prisons, mental hospitals, drug rehabs, and teen boot camps. We aren't squeamish about the psychological aspects of torture. We might even admire them.
Thousands of troubled children, for instance, now attend tough "wilderness programs" "emotional growth boarding schools" and other "tough love" camps where they face conditions like total isolation, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, and daily emotional attacks. For complete story, click here.
Director at youth camp fired--May 2nd, 2009--SILVER SPRINGS - A program director accused of using older boys to threaten younger ones at a camp for troubled youth was fired Thursday, state officials said Friday.
Frank Penela, a spokesman with the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, said the state agency received a letter from Eckerd Youth Alternatives confirming that Eckerd fired Emeka Virgo, a program director at Camp E-Ke-Etu in the Ocala National Forest off East State Road 40. Eckerd, a private company, runs the camp under a contract with the state.
Eckerd officials did not return phone calls Friday.
Virgo joins two camp counselors - Roscoe Watts, 30, and Dana Valentino, 32 - who were also fired Thursday for unspecified violations of company policies. For complete story, click here.
Weeks before his death, Gabriel Myers, the 7-year-old Broward boy who hanged himself in the shower of his foster home, had been prescribed a powerful mind-altering drug linked by federal regulators to an increased risk of suicide in children.
In all, Gabriel had been prescribed four psychiatric drugs, two or three of which he was taking at the time of his death, said Jack Moss, Broward chief of the state Department of Children & Families. Moss said he is not sure which medications the boy was taking because Margate police took the foster home's medication log as part of an investigation into Gabriel's death last week.
Three of the psychotropic drugs carry U.S. Food and Drug Administration ''black box'' label warnings for children's safety, the strongest advisory the federal agency issues. Three of the medications are not approved for use with young children, though they are widely prescribed to youngsters ''off label'' -- meaning doctors can prescribe the drug even if not formally approved for that use.
In 2005 -- reacting to a series of stories in The Miami Herald that as many as one in four foster children were prescribed potentially dangerous mind-altering drugs -- state lawmakers approved a law aimed at curbing their use. Children's advocates now question whether the law is being ignored. For complete story, click here.
CNN) -- Juveniles held in a Mississippi detention center are subject to "horrific physical and mental abuse" at an insect-ridden, filthy facility, alleges a federal lawsuit filed Monday.
The suit, filed by the Mississippi Youth Justice Project and Mississippi Protection and Advocacy Inc., accuses staff at the privately-managed Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center of "punitive shackling, staff-on-youth assaults, 23-hour-a-day lock-down in filthy jail cells, unsanitary conditions resulting in widespread contraction of scabies and staph infections, dangerous overcrowding that forces many youth to sleep on the concrete floor, and inadequate mental health care."
The facility is is operated by Mississippi Security Police, a private security corporation based in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The company is paid $1.6 million yearly by Harrison County to manage the juvenile center, according to the lawsuit, which names the county as a defendant. For complete story, click here.
Mount Bachelor is part of Aspen Education -- believed to be the largest chain of teen residential programs in the U.S. Aspen, as part of CRC Health, which is owned by Bain Capital, was seen by advocates as much more sedate and less given to wacky practices than clearly "out there" programs like those associated with the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASP or WWASPS). At one WWASP school, for example, teens were kept in outdoor dog cages.
The stories of psychological abuse coming out of Mount Bachelor -- a few of which are included in my Time piece -- are every bit as bad as I have heard from teens and parents at chains of programs that have far worse reputations. For complete story, click here.
An Oregon School for Troubled Teens Is Under Scrutiny--April 17th, 2009--...A spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Human Services (DHS) declined to discuss the details of the ongoing investigations, which include a second inquiry based on possible licensing violations. But according to 10 students, two separate parents and a part-time employee interviewed by TIME — some of whom are involved in the inquiry — Mount Bachelor Academy regularly uses intensely humiliating tactics as treatment. For instance, in required seminars that the school calls Lifesteps, students say staff members of the residential program have instructed girls, some of whom say they have been victims of rape or sexual abuse, to dress in provocative clothing — fishnet stockings, high heels and miniskirts — and perform lap dances for male students as therapy. For complete story, click here.
Mount Bachelor Academy near Prineville takes in students from around the
country. The academy is licensed by the Oregon Department of Human Services,
which confirmed it has launched two concurrent investigations.
The first investigation centers on reported abuse and the second on possible licensing violations. State officials would not discuss details of either investigation Monday.
"We cannot comment on the details or timeline of the assessments while they are ongoing. When they are concluded, there may be information that can be shared," Gene Evans, a department spokesman, said in a written statement.
Former students have posted on MySpace and Facebook numerous complaints about the school, ranging from what they characterized as humiliating group therapy sessions to sleep deprivation. Judson DeVries, who left the school in 2007, told The Oregonian he was forced into "very embarrassing" role-playing games. For complete story, click here.
Barbara Deiotte, a social worker at Munster's Wilbur Wright Middle School, has seen an uptick in teenage depression.
"My personal thoughts are that today's lifestyle is more stressful -- everything is kind of fast," Deiotte said, referring to possible reasons for the increase.
"Or maybe we're more aware (of depression)."
With teens, "depression can be a very temporary response" to stress associated with hormones or conflict with parents, she said. "That will come and go. It's normal adolescent angst. Please read complete story, click here.
Two 17-year-old boys were arrested and charged with harassment after allegedly showing up at a Penn Hills house and threatening another 17-year-old boy. The mother of the threatened boy said she believes that her son was threatened because he blew the whistle on alleged extortion going on in the Homewood Community Intervention Supervision Program.
The boy and his mother were not being identified by police with an ongoing investigation into the program. For complete story, click here.
Clean Slates for Youths Sentenced Fraudulently--March 26th, 2009--The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania on Thursday ordered the slate cleaned for hundreds of youths who had been sentenced by a corrupt judge. For complete story, click here.
BAY CITY, Mich. – Police in Michigan say a 15-year-old boy has died after being Tasered by officers who were trying to break up a fight.
Police didn't release his name and say state police are investigating.
A Bay City police news release says officers answered a report of an early morning fight on Sunday. The statement says two males were arguing in an apartment, and one of them "attempted to fight the officers."
Police say officers Tasered him, and his reaction led them to immediately call for emergency medical help. He was pronounced dead at Bay Regional Medical Center.
Deputy Chief Thomas Pletzke tells WNEM-TV police placed one officer on administrative leave. For complete story, click here.
Hawthorne Cedar Knolls teen accused of sexually abusing another boy on campus--March 16th,2009--HAWTHORNE - A 17-year-old boy at Hawthorne Cedar Knolls was accused of sexually abusing a 15-year-boy in his residence Saturday night, three days after five teens there were accused of assaulting a fellow resident, police said.
Efrain Castillo, who lives at the residential treatment center for troubled youngsters, was charged with sexual misconduct, unlawful imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a child, misdemeanors, Mount Pleasant Police Chief Louis Alagno said. He is being held on $10,000 bail at the Westchester County jail in Valhalla. The victim was treated at the Westchester Medical Center. For complete story, click here.
Darrington closes doors--March 2nd, 2009--Darrington Academy, a private school for troubled teens in Blue Ridge, closed its doors Friday, a move that owner and headmaster Richard Darrington says is due to the current state of the economy. For complete story, click here.
The troubled Academy at Ivy Ridge is reportedly closing its doors for good this weekend.
The Ogdensburg private academy, which was geared toward troubled teens will close this weekend and transfer the remaining students to a facility in South Carolina, according to the Daily Courier-Observer this morning. For complete story, click here.
Camp E-Tu-Nake falls victim to state budget cuts--March 10th, 2009--BLAKELY, GA (WALB) - A youth alternative camp in Blakely is closing because of state budget cuts. Camp E-Tu-Nake will close March 27th. For complete story, click here.
Group Home Operates Without License--March 10th, 2009--LaVERGNE, Tenn. -- A group home for foster children in LaVergne is known around town as a hot spot for trouble, and the home has been operating for almost a year without a business license...Police said 43 percent of the trouble calls from LaVergne High School was associated with kids at the Rock of Refuge.
"We did have some pretty rough kids over at LaVergne High," said Usinger.
The LaVergne Records Department said the home's business license expired in June 2008. Usinger denies the home is trying to expand, but issues with the business branching out have been raised.
"A lot of questions have been raised," said Boyd.
In the large neighborhood, it's hard to tell which houses the Rock of Refuge call home, but neighbors have complained since almost the start of the business... For complete story, click here.
70 Youths Sue Former Judges in Detention Kickback Case--February 27th, 2009--More than 70 juveniles and their families filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday against two former judges who
pleaded guilty this month in a scheme that involved their taking kickbacks to put young offenders in privately run detention centers. For complete story, click here.
Luzerne County Courthouse Corruption Probe Expands--March 2nd, 2009--WILKES-BARRE, LUZERNE COUNTY- The federal probe into corruption at the Luzerne County courthouse is widening. The I-Team has learned that federal investigators are expanding their investigation.
Sources close to the case tell the I-Team that "target letters" have been sent to several lawyers in Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties. Those letters reportedly say they will be questioned about information they may have about corruption within the Luzerne County legal system.
The I-Team has also learned that at least one district justice from Luzerne County has been questioned by federal agents.
All of this comes in the aftermath of the arrest of four high ranking Luzerne County officials. Suspended Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan pled guilty to taking millions in kickbacks in connection with a juvenile detention center in Pittston Township.
Also busted was former Court Administrator William Sharkey, Sr. He admits to stealing $70,000 in seized gambling money. And Sandy Brulo, a Probation Supervisor, is accused of tampering with public records.
The U.S. Attorney's Office will not comment on our information. For complete story, click here.
Youth boot camps proven to fail--March 3rd, 2009--Clinical psychologists have joined the chorus of disapproval of the Government's planned `boot camps', saying punishment as a deterrent does not work.
The Government is planning to widen the powers of the Youth Court with a range of new sentencing options including sending the worst repeat offenders to military-style camps run by the army.
Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft has already put the boot in to boot camps for young offenders.
He said last week that sentencing youthful offenders to boot camp was "arguably the least successful sentence in the Western world". For complete story, click here.
What We Lost When We Lost Rocky -- Paper First Exposed Teen Torture--March 3rd, 2009--When people talk in the abstract about what we lose when we lose newspapers, it's often hard to drum up much concern. Yeah, people are losing their jobs--that's what happened to the buggy makers when the car took over. Yeah, news is important--but hey, we've got the web now. And the MSM blew it on Iraq, so who needs them anyway? We've got twitter.
Just last week, Denver lost the Rocky Mountain News and before its website disappears, I wanted to share an example of just how much newspapers matter.
This series--Desperate Measures--was the first to comprehensively take on the multi-million teen abuse empire variously known as WWASP, WWASPS and Teen Help. Please take the time to read it--once you start, it's hard to turn away. (And sadly, though WWASP has lost a few rounds lately, it's still operating).
Expensive to conduct, extensive, well-written and well-reported, this journalism helped inspire a generation of activists, as well as my book, Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, which is the first book length investigation of the billion dollar business.
In the series, Pulitzer-prize winner Lou Kilzer and photographer Dennis Schroeder make abundantly clear that the programs affiliated with WWASP are harsh, abusive and wildly popular--and they get a top WWASP official to admit that their staff is untrained and its methods completely untested:
"These people are basically a bunch of untrained people who work for this organization," Ken Kay told the Denver Rocky Mountain News in an interview before he rejoined Teen Help as a vice president. "So they don't have credentials of any kind. ...
"We could be leading these kids to long-term problems that we don't have a clue about because we're not going about it in the proper way. ...
"How in the hell can you call yourself a behavior modification program -- and that's one of the ways it's marketed -- when nobody has the expertise to determine: Is this good, is this bad?"
Kilzer shows that WWASP's contract with parents allows the programs to "use handcuffs, mechanical restraints, electrical disabler, Mace or pepper spray in order to restrain the student." Parents could not sue the program for "liability or damages resulting from restraint procedures." for complete story, click here.
At age 14, the Wilkes-Barre youth had been declared a juvenile delinquent and sent away for treatment, first to a wilderness-style juvenile detention camp and later to a reformatory school.
His crime? He and a friend entered several open cars in Ashley and stole some change, a pre-paid cell phone and a portable music player, he and his mother, Amy, said.
Suddenly the once carefree, basketball-playing teen found himself locked up for 10 months. Each day he struggled to control the rage that was building inside as he worked to earn his release.
What he could not control, he and his mother said, is the sense of helplessness and anger that still haunts him today as he tries to comprehend why he was put away for a misdemeanor crime that, if committed by an adult, likely would have resulted in probation and a fine.
It’s a question thousands of other juveniles and their parents asked during the 12 years now-disgraced Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. presided over Luzerne County’s juvenile court.
People such as Kimberly Bryk of Exeter Township and her daughter, Jamie, who spent more than a year lodged in juvenile detention facilities for a fist fight with another girl, and Sandy Fonzo of Wilkes-Barre and her son, Ed, who bounced in and out of several detention facilities after he violated probation on an initial charge of possession of drug paraphernalia.
Today those parents and their children think they may have an answer:
Ciavarella and Judge Michael Conahan pleaded guilty on Feb. 12 to accepting more than $2.6 million in kickbacks in exchange for rulings that favored the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care juvenile detention centers formerly co-owned by Butler Township attorney Robert Powell. For complete story, click here.
U.S. House passes wilderness camp restrictions--February 24th, 2009--Washington »The U.S. House signed off on legislation Monday that seeks to end abuse in programs for troubled teens, such as the wilderness camps operating throughout Utah.
The bill passed on a vote of 295 to 102. Utah Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson voted for the bill. Republican Reps. Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz voted against it.
Proponents of the legislation say it will help keep kids safe as they participate in boot-camp style activities. The bill prohibits any punishment that denies food, water, clothing, shelter or medical care. It would limit forcible restraints and allow the children access to a telephone.
The legislation also would set up a Web site allowing parents to see which programs have faced substantiated abuse claims. The bill follows a government audit that found more than 1,000 cases of abuse in such programs since the early 1990s, including cases where a child has died in Utah. For complete story, click here.
'Boot camp' closed--February 22nd, 2009--TREASURE BEACH, St Elizabeth - Tranquility Bay, the controversial offshore reform school for rebellious children, mostly from the United States, closed its doors last month as a result of a fallout in business. The last 'inmate' reportedly left the island on January 5. For complete story, click here.
Pennsylvania rocked by 'jailing kids for cash' scandal--February 23rd, 2009--CNN) -- At a friend's sleepover more than a year ago, 14-year-old Phillip Swartley pocketed change from unlocked vehicles in the neighborhood to buy chips and soft drinks. The cops caught him.
There was no need for an attorney, said Phillip's mother, Amy Swartley, who thought at most, the judge would slap her son with a fine or community service.
But she was shocked to find her eighth-grader handcuffed and shackled in the courtroom and sentenced to a youth detention center. Then, he was shipped to a boarding school for troubled teens for nine months.
"Yes, my son made a mistake, but I didn't think he was going to be taken away from me," said Swartley, a 41-year-old single mother raising two boys in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
CNN does not usually identify minors accused of crimes. But Swartley and others agreed to be named to bring public attention to the issue.
As scandals from Wall Street to Washington roil the public trust, the justice system in Luzerne County, in the heart of Pennsylvania's struggling coal country, has also fallen prey to corruption. The county has been rocked by a kickback scandal involving two elected judges who essentially jailed kids for cash. Many of the children had appeared before judges without a lawyer.
The nonprofit Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia said Phillip is one of at least 5,000 children over the past five years who appeared before former Luzerne County President Judge Mark Ciavarella.
Ciavarella pleaded guilty earlier this month to federal criminal charges of fraud and other tax charges, according to the U.S. attorney's office. Former Luzerne County Senior Judge Michael Conahan also pleaded guilty to the same charges. The two secretly received more than $2.6 million, prosecutors said. For complete story, click here.
Kansas shuts down center for troubled teens--February 20th, 2009--ESBON, Kan. | The state is shutting down a northern Kansas treatment center for troubled adolescents after inspectors found emergency exit doors locked on three occasions.
The White Rock Academy in Esbon on Thursday was ordered closed after state officials twice told operators to remove the locks, which violate the state fire and safety code. The academy has until Monday to make other arrangements for its 24 residents.
The state suspended the center's license, citing a need to protect youths at the facility from physical abuse or threats to their safety. For complete story, click here.
Facility For Troubled Teens In Ephrata To Close--February 19th, 2009--EPHRATA, Pa. -- Summit Quest, a facility for troubled teens in Ephrata, is in the process of closing.
They still have a small group of teens to place in alternative treatment before they can shut their doors. For complete story, click here.
NYPD okays Velcro handcuffs for use on unruly children 14 Feb 2009 Cops trying to restrain children will have a softer alternative than metal handcuffs under a new program the NYPD is testing in nearly two dozen schools. Starting next month, officers will use Velcro handcuffs instead of the tougher steel model to subdue disturbed or unruly children in 22 schools in northern Queens, according to a draft NYPD operations order obtained by the Daily News. For complete story, click here.
Vision for Youth had multiple problems, managed teen felons--February 15th, 2009--Springfield, Ohio — Vision for Youth, Inc. maintained four facilities in Springfield and at one time had teens from the foster care system and juvenile felons, ages 13 to 18, from as many as ten counties enrolled in its boot-camp-style program.
Vision had a history of problems, according to state records, but by all accounts the home's child-care staff managed a difficult population — children that were hard to place anywhere else because of criminal records and emotional problems, said Brian Harter, a spokesman for Ohio's Department of Job and Family Services.
"You look at these kids' backgrounds...(they) have a lot of issues, and they have situations that require special attention," Harter said. "It's not an easy situation for the staff to deal with on a day-to-day basis. But that's not to condone anything."
Harter said that while state law allows staff at group homes to physically restrain minors, staff are prohibited from administering physical discipline. Punching a juvenile, for instance — which happened at a Vision facility — is grounds for revocation of the home's license.
On at least three occasions, licensing specialists investigating complaints about Vision recommended its license be revoked, but the home was allowed to continue operating. For complete story, click here.
House panel wants to crack down on wilderness camps--February 11th, 2009--Washington »A House panel approved a bill Wednesday that would boost federal regulations on residential programs for troubled teens, including the wilderness therapy camps that have thrived in Utah's deserts.
The bill is in reaction to a two-year federal audit that found thousands of cases of abuse in residential treatment programs nationwide since the early 1990s, along with misleading marketing practices and uneven state oversight.
"It is past time to bring these programs to a level of basic safety," said Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., one of the sponsors of the legislation. The House Education and Labor Committee approved the bill on a vote of 32 to 10.
The proposal is almost identical to a bill pushed last year. That version passed the full House by a wide margin, but did not come up for a vote in the Senate. With a new Congress, the legislation had to be reintroduced. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, a member of the committee, opposed it last year and opposed it again Wednesday. For complete story, click here. (The problems with HR 911 are the same as with HR 6358, learn more.)
Pa. judges accused of jailing kids for cash--February 11th, 2009--WILKES-BARRE, Pa. -- For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses.
The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench.
In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers. For complete story, click here.
SJC: Juvenile offenders cannot be held beyond 18--February 10th, 2009--The state's highest court today struck down a law that allowed the state to keep juvenile offenders in custody for three years after they turned 18, if officials believed they would be "physically dangerous to the public."
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the law, which was challenged by three juvenile offenders who had been ordered held until they were 21, "does not comport with substantive due process requirements and is constitutionally infirm." For complete story, click here.
Juvenile Justice System Failing Ohio's Children, Investigation Finds--February 10th, 2009--COLUMBUS, OH – The Ohio juvenile justice system is failing the state's children by permitting children to be routinely shackled, mandating that children accused of certain crimes be charged as adults and by not ensuring that all children accused of crimes get lawyers. The findings, detailed in a report card released today, are the result of an investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Ohio, the Children's Law Center, Inc. and the Office of the Ohio Public Defender. The investigation has also revealed that Ohio detains and incarcerates a greater percentage of its children than
most other states in the nation and that a disproportionate number of those incarcerated are children of color.
"Rushing to criminalize and unnecessarily incarcerate kids is just bad policy," said Robin Dahlberg, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program. "It has a scarring impact on our children and only serves to push them deeper into the criminal justice system and inhibit their ability to become healthy, productive adults." For complete story, click here.
3 fired from Parmadale in teen's death--February 7th, 2009--Tom Mullen, the president of the Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Cleveland, says the three were fired Friday following the release of a state agency report that said the workers didn't follow the center's own policies on how to restrain unruly youngsters.
Faith Finley, 17, of Barberton, died Dec. 13 at Parmadale Family Services in suburban Cleveland while being restrained in a face-down position.
The Cuyahoga County coroner's office ruled Finley's death a homicide last month, saying she choked on vomit and suffocated. For complete story, click here.
Father: Son mistreated at rehab center--February 6th, 2009--INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - I-Team 8 has learned a formal complaint has been filed with the state attorney general against an Indianapolis teen rehab center. At issue: a father who claims his son is being mistreated inside Pathway Family Center in Castleton.
In his complaint, Mark West states what happened to his 17-year-old son inside Pathway has him "gravely concerned for his son's welfare both physically and emotionally."
What West calls isolation, other parents call lifesaving for their drug-addicted teenagers. Pathway allowed 24-Hour News 8 inside the facility and provided a group of parents for I-Team 8 to speak with.
The complaint, filed late Friday afternoon with the Indiana Attorney General?s Office, alleges "substandard housing and care" including kids sleeping in locked rooms with windows bolted shut and no lights. One allegation is that at least one 17-year-old missed a complete year of school.
The complaint goes on to allege continual sleep deprivation and isolation. It alleges kids are not allowed privacy at any time and that other kids who've been in the program longer are then assigned to go with them while bathing or using the bathroom.
The complaint also says kids are cut off from family, no phone calls or letters allowed, so there is no way to address grievances or mistreatment.
Two other Pathway facilities have closed in recent months in Detroit and Cincinnati, Ohio amid protests from parents and former students. But director Terri Nissley said they closed due to the bad economy and that the Pathway program is being confused with another program that was shut down two years ago in Ohio. For complete story, click here.
Outcry Over Drug Center Closing--February 5th, 2009--When Kids Helping Kids, also known as Pathway Family Center, closed its doors in suburban Milford in Clermont County, a group of parents and former clients cheered, saying the program's controversial methods scarred them for life. For complete story, click here.
NICK GAGLIA STANDS UP FOR TROUBLED TEENS--February 5th, 2009--Independent filmmaker Nick Gaglia is a man on a mission: using the power of cinema to expose those who prey on troubled young adults. His critically-acclaimed 2007 feature film debut, “Over the GW,” was based on his own experiences as a drug-addicted teen who underwent physical and psychological abuse at a cult-like, tough love rehab center. His next film, currently in post-production, is the biopic “Aaron Bacon,” which details the tragic 1994 death of a troubled 16-year-old who died as a result of blatant malpractice in a tough love drug rehab camp.
Film Threat caught up with Gaglia at his New York office to talk about his cinematic crusade to expose the exploiters of troubled teenagers. For complete story, click here.
Covenant House folding its operation here--February 5th, 2009--STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Covenant House thrived from humble beginnings and later rose from the ashes of scandal, but it's no match for the putrid economy.
The charity that specifically serves at-risk youth and had been scouting new quarters after it was priced out of its longtime home at 70 Bay St. in St. George, has elected to abandon the borough altogether amid a decrease in donations and worries about future revenue, a spokesman confirmed yesterday. For complete story, click here.
The court, on Jan. 8, denied a petition by the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center to look at more than 250 cases in which juvenile offenders were allegedly adjudicated and sent to detention centers without lawyers.
On Monday, the justices issued a one-line order vacating their previous denial of that petition, pending further action by the court.
"We see this as a very positive sign that the court is going to take a fresh look at our application for relief," said Bob Schwartz, JLC's executive director. "Beyond that, it's hard to read into this. It's pretty clear that they want to go deeper. There's no reason to do this if they're not going to grant relief down the line or at least figure out a way to provide relief to the kids of Luzerne County."
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced Jan. 22 that former President Judge Mark A. Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael T. Conahan had conditionally agreed to plead guilty to honest service wire fraud charges. For complete story, click here.
There is a silver lining to this bleak economy: Abusive and ineffective "tough love" programs for teens are failing right and left.
In just the last few weeks, the notorious Tranquility Bay program in Jamaica, Spring Creek Lodge in Montana, and Pathway Family Center in Detroit and Ohio have all been shuttered.
Tranquility Bay was known for making kids kneel on concrete for days and using "restraint" so harsh that it broke bones. Both Tranquility Bay and Spring Creek Lodge were part of a network called the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASP or WWASPS)--and the group's philosophy involves constant use of emotional attacks and humiliation in a rigid, structured day in order to break teens' spirits.
Spring Creek was notorious for a frigid, small isolation room called "the Hobbit"--sometimes teens were left there for months.
From Pathway--which was descended from the infamously abusive Straight Inc.--I received two separate accounts of suicide attempts by girls which were not reported to their parents, and many stories of the usual attack therapy and humiliation. Unfortunately, neither WWASP nor Pathway is completely dead yet: WWASP still has centers operating in the US and abroad, and Pathway has sites in Indiana: Porter and Indianapolis.
The media tends to present these closures as sad examples of needed services being cut--but in fact, teens are better off with no treatment than with treatment that often divides families and has characteristics known to produce post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Family support tends to be crucial to long term recovery--and PTSD doubles the odds that a drug problem will become a lasting addiction.
Troubled teen programs were yet another sign of the bubble economy. Many were financed by mortgage and home equity loans because they cost thousands of dollars a month and because insurers, quite correctly, don't usually pay for programs that aren't proven to help.
Since there are proven alternatives for teens with drug and other problems that do not carry the risks of "tough love," we should greet the closings of these centers with glee. For complete story, click here.
Three Rivers Montana to close--January 31st, 2009--Three Rivers Montana, a Belgrade-based wilderness program for troubled teens, plans to close Feb. 28, laying off its 37 employees, executive director Marylis Filipovich said Thursday.
“Normally, January is a very big admissions month for us and we didn’t get any admissions,” she said.
Three Rivers opened five years ago and has served more than 400 kids from across the nation. Teens experiencing difficulties at home or school could stay at the mental-health facility for a few weeks or months, earning high-school credits and receive treatment.
The nonprofit depended on admission fees, often funded by health-insurance reimbursements, donations and fundraising. Discounts were offered for low-income families.
“In this economy, many of our potential families cannot afford the cost of outdoor behavioral healthcare,” Mark Parlett, director of programs and development for Three Rivers, wrote in an e-mail to the Chronicle.
Families often took out loans to send their kids to Three Rivers and the tightened credit market has hurt enrollment, Filipovich said.
“Our families tended to be middle-class, and with the economy like it is, they can’t get loans,” she said. For complete story, click here.
On Friday, 107 teachers, counselors, and support staff were told they will not have a job when the campus, except for the administration building, shuts down April 2.
The nonprofit organization, founded with a 1904 bequest from landowner Mary Buel but funded primarily by taxpayers, has suffered in recent years from changes in how the state treats juveniles in trouble. Over the past decade, CJR expanded and updated its campus, with a $5 million education center in 1997 and a $1.4 million family and student services center that opened in 2003.
But in 2008, CJR's number of beds was cut from 84 to 60 in response to shrinking demand; only 38 teenage boys, most referred from the court system, live on campus today.
"That does provide a sense of how quickly things have changed," said Director of Development Hedy L. Barton.
Increasingly, the state refers troubled teens to community and home-based programs rather than residential facilities now reserved only for those teens who demonstrate the highest risk behavior. For complete story, click here.
Dyller eyes potential lawsuits--January 28th, 2009--WILKES-BARRE – A local attorney who specializes in civil rights cases said he believes some of the juveniles who were incarcerated under juvenile Judge Mark Ciavarella’s tenure have a strong basis to file a lawsuit seeking compensation for emotional and financial harm.
I’m looking at this and see so many civil claims based on so many potential civil rights violations, it’s shocking,” said Barry Dyller of Wilkes-Barre. For complete story, click here.
Kids Helping Kids presented itself as the treatment of last resort when the I-Team got an unprecedented look inside four years ago. No cameras had been allowed before. The treatment the I-Team saw called for complete isolation of newcomers, who don't go to their home or to school for months, sometimes longer. They aren't allowed to listen to music or TV. They can't talk to each other, and must get permission to speak at all.
The executive director of the facility in Milford, Ohio told us in 2005, there's a reason for this tough love. Penny Walker said, "We deal with difficult kids and sometimes difficult families, and we're not going to please everybody." Walker no longer works for Kids Helping Kids.
The I-Team investigated the program after former clients and some parents called it a brainwashing cult. They cited day-long rap sessions in which teens were forced to repeating gestures and words in order to advance in the program and win a chance to go to their homes at night.
But some parents of clients in treatment at the time strongly supported the tactics. Parent Martha Logan told the I-Team she believes the program saved her son's life. She said, "There was no place else to turn."
After our report, protesters picketed regularly outside the center in Milford. This continued even after the center became affiliated with a chain called Pathway Family Center.
Now the Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services confirms that Pathway has turned in its state certificate allowing it to operate.
A property search shows Pathway still owns the building. It still lists its address on Branch Hill Guinea Road on its paperwork, and the local phone number still leads to voice mail. But a visit to the building found no one there in the middle of business hours. The facility looks deserted, but files and keys still sit on desks. Inside, the rooms once full of troubled teens sit empty and silent.
Mark West says he knows what happened to the roughly two dozen kids who were here when the place shut its doors to treatment. He says they were moved to other Pathway facilities, including Indianapolis, where his son is enrolled. He opposes the program, but his ex-wife, who has custody, supports it.
West says the Milford location closed because of, "Bad publicity, not just bad publicity but actually the truth started getting out. I think community pressure closed it down."
The I-Team tried to reach Pathway through calls and e-mails not only to its Milford location, but also its other treatment centers in Michigan and Indianapolis. The day of this report, a spokeswoman finally called back. She said it wasn't community pressure, but economic realities that shut the center in Ohio. As of Thursday, January 29, 2009, she says the Michigan facility in the Detroit suburb of Southfield also has shut its doors. For complete story, click here.
Troubled Miami-Dade reform school may be forced to close main campus--January 24th, 2009--A Miami-Dade reform school for troubled teens, once considered a national model, could be forced to shut its 16-year-old main campus. State administrators have yanked the school's contract, citing escapes, allegations of abuse and neglect, and other chronic problems.
In a letter dated Jan. 7, the Department of Juvenile Justice's South Florida chief said Bay Point Schools in South Dade will lose state funding March 1, and that admissions to the 157-bed campus have been frozen. Youths already are being transferred to similar programs or being released.
Budget problems triggered the decision -- the department has to cut $5 million this year and will save $2 million by closing Bay Point's Kennedy campus -- but the school has been beset by critical lapses, said agency Assistant Secretary Darryl Olson.
''They have consistently failed to comply with DJJ standards,'' Olson said. ``We haven't been getting the kind of return on investment we would like.''
Added DJJ spokesman Frank Penela: ``In the budget times we're in, we can't afford to do that anymore.'' For complete story, click here.
Civil suit filed in camp death--January 23rd, 2009--SALT LAKE CITY — The mother of Utah teen Caleb Jensen filed suit Thursday against those she believes were responsible for his untimely death at 15.
Caleb was attending an Alternative Youth Adventures outing for at-risk youth in rural Montrose County in 2007. He died of a staph infection May 2 of that year.
The state acted quickly, suspending AYA’s license for residential and therapeutical childcare. AYA later surrendered the license, which it had originally hoped to renew.
In July 2007 came the indictments against AYA, its former parent company Community Education Centers of New Jersey; camp director James Omer; camp EMT Ben Askins and Utah physician Keith Hooker.
The criminal complaints alleged the infection that claimed Jensen’s life produced visible signs, which the defendants failed to act on. Charges included manslaughter and child abuse resulting in death, but by last December, only CEC remained as a criminal defendant. For complete story, click here. For more info, click here.
Trainer charged with abusing teen girls--January 23rd, 2009--A Colorado horse trainer has been charged with sexually abusing teenage girls, including one that he took to Alabama for marriage.
Donald Lane Betts, 33, was arrested in December when he returned to Kiowa with his 16-year-old bride, the Rocky Mountain News reported. Investigators say he lied about her age in Alabama because minors must have parental permission to marry.
Mark Wilson, an investigator with the Elbert County Sheriff's Office, said Betts may have victimized other teens. Wilson charged that Betts targeted troubled girls, including three runaways.
We have a strong belief that there are other victims out there, Wilson said. We stand ready to get them the help that they need.
Betts faces a long list of charges, including second-degree kidnapping, sexual assault on a child, harboring a minor and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He is also charged with obstruction of a peace officer for locking himself in his house when police arrived to arrest him. For complete story, click here.
Teachers in Martinique sentenced for abusing teens--January 22nd, 2009--A judge in Martinique has prohibited seven teachers from working with minors again after they were found guilty of physically abusing juvenile delinquents.
The teachers also have received suspended sentences ranging from 14 to 24 months.
Prosecutors had alleged that eight teachers made 16- and 17-year-old students kneel on rocks and hold cinder blocks in outstretched arms during work trips to Haiti and Brazil. The juveniles were part of a program funded by the Paris-based Groupe SOS that works with troubled teens, drug addicts and homeless people.
The nine victims will receive between $2,000 to $9,000 in damages, along with $1,300 each for attorney fees.
The teachers were sentenced late Wednesday. For complete story, click here.
DEA, Florida 'Honor' Abusive Rehab Founder, Wife of Republican Financier--January 16th, 2009--Imagine if Wall Street were to honor Bernie Madoff for his skills as an investor ten years from now. The equivalent just happened in Florida, where Betty Sembler--co-founder of the abusive Straight, Inc. rehab chain--has been named by Governor Charlie Crist to its "Women's Hall of Fame" for her work fighting drugs. Last year, the DEA gave her a lifetime achievement award.
You may know Betty Sembler as wife of mall magnate Mel Sembler (another co-founder of Straight). He's the guy who headed the Scooter Libby Defense Fund, chaired finances for the Republicans during the first election of the second Bush, and served as ambassador to Italy, naming a building he acquired for the embassy for himself, in the process.
Straight--which at its peak had centers in seven states and claims to have treated 50,000 teens--has long been discredited for not only being ineffective, but harmful. Its policy of using confrontation, humiliation and physical punishment led to dozens of lawsuits, with plaintiffs winning hundreds of thousands of dollars for kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment and emotional abuse.
Some of the more notorious cases involved kids being gagged with Kotex, being restrained by fellow students until they wet or even soiled themselves, and frequent use of sexually degrading and homophobic slurs. Many survivors have since been diagnosed with PTSD; there have also been numerous suicides.
Research conducted on confrontation has found that the more it is used, the more likely patients are to drink or take drugs and drop out of treatment.
"With all the available evidence-based treatments with proven effects, it's hard to understand a desire to support things that fly in the face of evidence," says addiction expert Tom McLellan, PhD, who is CEO of the Treatment Research Institute and a professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.
Regarding Straight's tactics, McLellan says, "They're counterproductive. It's hard to even conceive of a therapeutic relationship based on confrontation, bullying and frankly, meanness." For complete story, click here.
Report Reveals Severe Cases of Abuse and Neglect of Schoolchildren--January 13th, 2009--WASHINGTON, D.C. – Schoolchildren around the country have been subject to abusive – and in some cases fatal – uses of seclusion and restraint by school administrators, teachers and staff, according to a new report released today by the National Disability Rights Network. The report, the first national effort to examine these practices in both public and private schools identified hundreds of cases where the abusive and negligent use of seclusion and restraint injured or traumatized students, many of whom were disabled. In several cases, students died.
In light of this report, U.S. Rep. George Miller, the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, announced the committee will hold a hearing on these abuses.
“These abuses are a shocking and disturbing betrayal of the trust that families and communities place in our schools. School administrators and teachers are tasked with providing not just productive and encouraging learning environments for students, but with keeping them safe. It is wholly unacceptable for children to be locked up in closets or for any staff member to use overwhelming – and in some cases deadly – force against their students.
“This report raises serious questions about the treatment of schoolchildren, the qualifications and training of staff, and what actions have been taken to address these unconscionable practices. No child should be at risk or in danger while at school, no matter what the circumstances. Our committee will hold a hearing to look at how we can address and hopefully end these horrific acts."
The report, “School is not supposed to hurt: An investigative report on abusive seclusion and restraint in schools,” provides an unprecedented look at the tactics used to isolate or restrain students. In one case, a seven-year old girl was killed in a special day program when four adult staff pinned her small body face down. The student had been blowing bubbles in her milk and would not follow directions to sit still. In another example, a thirteen year old boy committed suicide in a locked concrete seclusion room, hanging himself with a cord provided by staff to hold up his pants, after pleading with his teachers that he could not withstand the isolation in the small room for hours at a time. For complete story, click here.
Senator Chris Dodd Reports on Restraint and Seclusion , See Video:
Eugene, Ore., high-school students' good intentions misunderstood--December 20th, 2008--EUGENE, Ore. — All they wanted to do was change the world, one random act of kindness at a time. Instead, they were met with furrowed brows, questioned by Eugene police and ousted by Valley River Center security officers.
"People can't accept the fact that there are other people who just want to be nice," says Sheldon High School senior Kelsey Hertel, who founded the school's new Random Acts of Kindness Club. "People don't trust each other. They think everyone's out to get them."
Ironically, that's exactly why Hertel founded the club in the first place. "Our community isn't giving enough," she says. "So we thought by doing random acts of kindness, we could totally change someone's day or life. And they could pay it forward to someone else. And one person at a time, we could make the world better." For complete story, click here.
Gay kids' health: Family role cited--December 29th, 2008--SAN FRANCISCO — Young gay people whose parents or guardians responded negatively when they revealed their sexual orientation were more likely to attempt suicide, experience severe depression and use drugs than those whose families accepted the news, according to a new study.
The way in which parents or guardians respond to a youth's sexual orientation profoundly influences the child's mental health as an adult, say researchers at San Francisco State University, whose findings appear in today's journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
"Parents love their children and want the best for them," said lead researcher Caitlin Ryan, a social worker who directs the university's Family Acceptance Project. "Now that we have measured all these behaviors, we can see that some of them put youth at extremely high risk and others are wellness-promoting."
Among other findings, the study showed that teens who experienced negative feedback were more than eight times as likely to have attempted suicide, nearly six times as vulnerable to severe depression and more than three times at risk of drug use.
More significantly, Ryan said, ongoing work at San Francisco State suggests parents who take even baby steps to respond with equanimity instead of rejection can dramatically improve a gay youth's mental-health outlook.
One of the most startling findings was that being forbidden to associate with gay peers was as damaging as being physically beaten or verbally abused by their parents in terms of negative feedback, Ryan said. For complete story, click here.
Ruling expands legal rights of truant students--January 13th, 2009--Juveniles accused of chronically cutting class in public schools are entitled to a lawyer in their first court hearing, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Washington Court of Appeals has ruled.
Reversing a King County Superior Court ruling and an earlier Court of Appeals finding on different issues, the panel found Monday that denying a juvenile the right to a lawyer from the outset violated constitutional requirements.
In her opinion, Judge Anne Ellington wrote the decision was the first to consider due-process rights of juveniles in initial proceedings under the truancy law enacted in 1995. For complete story, click here.
Three years ago Monday marks the death of Martin Lee Anderson.
The 14-year-old Bay County Teenager was admitted to Bay Medical Center, and then transferred to the ICU in Pensacola Hospital where he died.
That death set off a chain of events that in no way has come to an end.
Some civil rights groups will mark the third anniversary of Martin Lee Anderson’s death Monday, in a graveside ceremony.
The case is still a divisive issue in the community and the nation.
If you remember-- the teen collapsed during a physical assessment in his first day at the old Bay County Juvenile Boot Camp.
Drill instructors initially believe Anderson was faking an illness and used what some considered to be physical abuse to make him complete the work-out.
In the first autopsy, then-medical examiner Dr. Charles Siebert found Anderson died as a result of sickle cell trait.
A second autopsy found the drill instructors suffocated the teen.
Two state entities settled with Anderson’s family for a combined 7-million dollars.
But when the 7-drill instructors and the camp nurse were acquitted of aggravated manslaughter during the criminal trial, Anderson supporters called for a u-s justice department investigation.
More than a year later that investigation is still underway. For complete story, click here.
Teen's death in Parma is ruled homicide-- January 6th, 2009--The death of a Barberton teenager at a Parma treatment facility last month has been ruled a homicide, the Cuyahoga County coroner said Monday.
Faith Finley, 17, suffocated and choked to death on her own vomit while being restrained by staff members, the coroner determined.
Finley died Dec. 13 at Parmadale Family Services, a Catholic Charities-run facility that treats youths with severe behavioral health and developmental problems. She was in the custody of Summit County Children Services at the time and had been placed there by the agency.
''For this kind of an outcome to occur is deeply, deeply concerning and frankly painful,'' Children Services Executive Director John Saros said after learning about the ruling. ''This was a beautiful young woman who was sent there to receive treatment services. For complete story, click here. Click here for more info.
Defender, prosecutor in
feud over evidence--January
15th, 2010--Broward's public defender has leveled a
broadside against State Attorney Mike Satz's office,
saying his prosecutors systematically sit on
evidence favorable to defendants, cover up for bad
cops and use a double standard of justice that
favors the wealthy and influential. For
complete story,
click here.
Fake DNA prompts change
in criminal forensics--January
13th, 2010--America’s fascination with the use of
forensic science to solve crimes is best proven by
the explosion of TV shows dealing with the topic,
from dramas like CSI and Cold Case to reality shows
like Forensic Files and The Bureau.
During the past two decades, advances in forensics —
the use of
science and technology to investigate and establish
facts in courts
of law — have led to a seismic change in how police
work is conducted
and what jurors expect when hearing a case.
Although forensic evidence is available only in 10
to 20 percent of
all criminal cases, the public places great weight
on its inclusion,
a fact that’s keenly aware to prosecutors and
defense attorneys.
Perhaps the main reason is improvements made in DNA
profiling, or the
analysis of human material like blood, semen, skin
tissue or hair
that can be used to precisely identify an
individual.
The best-known example of DNA profiling’s impact is
the Innocence
Project, a nationwide non-profit group that uses
testing to determine
if a prisoner has been wrongfully convicted. Since
the group began in
1992, more than 240 people in the United States have
been exonerated,
including 17 who were waiting to be executed on
Death Row.
Just last month, the longest-incarcerated victim of
a wrongful
conviction was freed due to the Innocence Project’s
work. James Bain
— who had been imprisoned for 35 years for
kidnapping, rape and
burglary — was exonerated by DNA testing. Before the
project’s
involvement, his appeal was denied four times by the
courts.
But forensics came under fire last summer when
scientists in Israel
were able to create DNA evidence capable of
identifying the wrong
person, causing profiling’s supposed infallibility
to become suspect.
The same bio-tech firm that did the research,
however, has developed
a system to detect the difference between natural
and manufactured
DNA, based on the lack of methylation — a chemical
reaction — in the
artificial sample. For complete story,
click here.
JUDGING THE JUDGES--December
30th, 2009--Just 12 chief federal judges wield
almost exclusive power over secret
misconduct investigations of more than 2,000 fellow
jurists — though some have themselves been accused
of botching reviews or committing ethical blunders,
according to a Houston Chronicle review.
At least four current or former chief circuit judges
have been the subject of recent high-profile
complaints about their behavior; one posted photos
of naked women painted to look like cows and other
graphic images on his publicly accessible Web site;
another manipulated the outcome of a vote in a
death penalty case.
Not one faced formal discipline.
Nationwide, the integrity of the federal judicial
misconduct system relies heavily on chief judges.
Each oversees complaints — more than 6,000 in the
last 10 years — against all circuit, district,
senior, bankruptcy and magistrate judges in
multi-state regions called circuits. Third
Circuit Chief Judge Anthony Scirica, who is also
chairman of
the executive committee of the Judicial Conference
of the United States, told the Chronicle, “The
federal judiciary takes its ethical
responsibilities with the utmost seriousness. Every
misconduct complaint is carefully reviewed.”
He was the only chief circuit judge who directly
responded to Chronicle requests for comment, though
other circuits' staff replied. In seven
circuits, according to the Chronicle analysis,
supervising judges took no public disciplinary
action at all in the last decade, meaning not a
single federal judge faced any sanctions in 29
states with more than 875 full-time federal judges,
despite thousands of complaints. For complete
story,
click here.
Dallas County jail guard
quits after inmate's 'lap dance'--December
30th, 2009--A Dallas County jail guard has resigned
while under investigation for allowing a
20-year-old male inmate to perform a sexually
suggestive
dance for her to music earlier this month, according
to Sheriff’s Department reports.
The “lap dance” occurred in the county’s new direct
supervision jail, where guards supervise inmates
from inside the housing pods — a growing trend in
corrections. For complete story,
click here.
Jails to limit inmate
mail to postcards only--December
29th, 2009--Heidi Boghosian receives hundreds of
letters each week from inmates across the country.
Most are looking for someone to help them or just to
hear their stories.
"The quality of the letters are so touching because
they're looking to establish relationships with
anyone who will listen to them," said Boghosian, the
executive director of the New York-based National
Lawyer's Guild, which publishes the Jailhouse
Lawyers Handbook.
Boghosian, and other civil rights advocates, are
concerned about a policy that 12 Oregon counties,
including Washington and Clackamas, will implement
next month restricting inmates' outgoing social mail
to postcards. By spring, incoming mail will also be
limited to postcards. For complete story,
click here.
Inquiry
Condemns Oversight at State Police Crime Lab
--Analyst, undetected for 15
years, falsified test results and compromised nearly
one-third of his 322 cases
18 Dec 2009 The New York State Police’s supervision
of a crime laboratory was so poor that it overlooked
evidence of pervasively shoddy forensics work,
allowing an analyst to go undetected for 15 years as
he falsified test results and compromised nearly
one-third of his 322 cases, an investigation by the
state’s inspector general has found. The analyst’s
training was so substandard that at one point last
year, investigators discovered he did not know how
to operate a microscope essential to performing his
job, a report released Thursday by the inspector
general said. For complete story,
click here.
Former guard at halfway
house sentenced--December
15th, 2009--A former contract guard at a Houston
halfway house has been sentenced to five months in
federal prison for sexual abuse of a person in
detention. U.S. Attorney Tim Johnson said
30-year-old Nathan Jones of Houston was sentenced to
prison on Tuesday. He will serve five months in home
confinement after completing the prison sentence.
Jones was convicted over the summer of the federal
felony offense. He admitted that in 2007, while
employed at Leidel Comprehensive Sanction Center, he
engaged in a sexual act with a female federal
prisoner in his office. For complete story,
click here.
TALLAHASSEE - Advocates for the
separation of church and state
scored a victory today when the
1st District Court of Appeal
reversed the dismissal of their
claim that state-funded,
"faith-based" rehabilitation of
ex-prisoners is
unconstitutional.
The Council
for Secular Humanism, a New
York-based organization with
membership in Florida, had
appealed a Leon County circuit
court judge's 2008 dismissal of
the group's complaint that the
state's contract with Prisoners
of Christ and Lamb of God
Ministries is unconstitutional.
Specifically, the appellant
complained that the contracts
violate the "no-aid" provision
of the Florida Constitution,
which bars the state from
spending taxpayer money
"directly or indirectly in aid
of any church, sect, or
religious denomination or in aid
of any sectarian institution."
For complete story,
click
here.
Problems at fingerprint labs have often been traced
back to common themes such as inadequate
supervision or training and a lack of standards for
analyzing fingerprints. Houston, in fact, didn't
even have a manual outlining standard procedures
for analyzing prints, according to an audit that
was released last week.
But some experts say the situation in Houston is
just an example of fingerprinting's deep-rooted
woes, which extend across the country.
“Everything needs to change,” said Jennifer Mnookin,
a law professor at UCLA who has studied fingerprint
issues.
In fact, large fingerprint units have been
repeatedly accused of botching their work over the
last few years.
Examples include:
Last year the Los Angeles Police Department
acknowledged that its fingerprint analysis unit was
a sloppy operation where files were left lying
around, prints sometimes lost and at least two
people had been wrongly identified as criminal
suspects because of botched fingerprint analysis.
In 2007, the Seminole County Sheriff's Office in
Florida disciplined multiple employees after it
discovered analysts cutting corners and pegging
fingerprints to the wrong suspects.
Experts say fingerprinting is far from an exact
science. Unlike many other forensic disciplines,
there are few standards for confirming
fingerprints.
That means an analyst in Houston could conceivably
come to different conclusions from an analyst in
Dallas about whether prints are usable, or even
whether they belong to the same person. Lack
of regulation... For complete story,
click here.
Six more inmate sex
abuse suits filed in Oregon--December
7th, 2009--SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Six more
current or former inmates at Oregon's prison for
women have sued the state claiming they were
sexually abused and harassed by male prison
employees.
That makes a total of 11
such suits alleging sexual abuse at the Coffee Creek
Correctional Facility in Wilsonville. It houses
about 1,100 inmates.
The Salem
Statesman Journal reports that among the
allegations in the latest suits is that a
corrections officer forced inmates to perform sex
acts, and and that he demanded sex in exchange for
letting women out of their cells or letting them off
the hook for violating rules. For complete
story,
click here.
Illinois inmates fight soy
sentence in lawsuit--November
19th, 2009--Some Illinois inmates filed a
suit against the soy diet they are served in prison,
but the debate on soy originated outside prison
walls. The argument is centered on the fact that
most soy in America is genetically modified.
Genetically modified organisms are plants, animals,
or bacteria, in which the genetic material, or DNA,
has been altered in such a way that does not occur
naturally, according to the World Health
Organization. The genetic makeup of these organisms
is altered using a special set of technologies.
“Genetically engineered soy now constitutes 90
percent of all soy growing in the United States,”
said Jeffrey Smith, executive director of the
Institute for Responsible Technology, Fairfield,
Iowa. The organization’s purpose is to educate
people about the health risks of genetically
modified organisms.
Immune system problems, gastrointestinal
problems, organ damage, deregulation of insulin, and
accelerated aging have been linked to genetically
modified feed in animal feeding studies, according
to the American Academy of Environmental Medicine in
Wichita, Kan. In May, the academy issued a statement
calling on all doctors to prescribe a
non-genetically modified diet to all patients.
For complete story,
click here.
For more on this story,
click here.
Lawsuit: Inmate died after water
denied--November
17th, 2009--A federal
lawsuit claims an inmate who died while on a work detail in
Quitman County in June was denied water while picking up trash
in the summer heat. For complete story,
click here.
Auditors found instances in which the lab failed to handle
criminal evidence according to standards set by the American
Society of Crime Laboratory Directors. For complete story,
click here.
Hartford Police Investigating Three
Of Their Own In Beating Of Prisoner--November
8th, 2009--HARTFORD - Police are investigating three of
their own after a prisoner was beaten Nov. 1. Police Chief
Daryl K. Roberts said that the investigation began Thursday,
shortly after police commanders learned of the assault, which
was captured on the department's video monitoring system.
For complete story,
click here.
Prison worker: Riot started over
food quality--November
6th, 2009--FRANKFORT,
Ky. — A Northpoint Training Center corrections officer testified
Friday that inmates rioted at the prison in August because they
weren’t being fed enough and the food they did receive was of
poor quality. For
complete story,
click here.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has
ordered a review of a little-known Bush
administration policy requiring some
defendants to waive their right to DNA
testing even though that right is guaranteed
in a landmark federal law, officials said.
The practice of using DNA waivers began
several years ago as a response to the
Innocence Protection Act of 2004, which
allowed federal inmates to seek
post-conviction DNA tests to prove their
innocence. More than 240 wrongly
convicted people have been exonerated by
such tests, including 17 on death row.
For complete story,
click here.
Federal Appeals Court Condemns
Shackling Of Pregnant Prisoners In Labor
--October 2nd, 2009--NEW YORK – Ruling in the case of an
Arkansas woman who was shackled to her hospital bed while in
labor in 2003, a federal appeals court today said that
constitutional protections against shackling pregnant women
during labor had been clearly established by decisions of the
Supreme Court and the lower courts. This is the first time a
circuit court has made such a determination. The full Eighth
Circuit Court of Appeals made the ruling today in the case of
ACLU client Shawanna Nelson.
"This is a historic decision by a U.S. Court of Appeals that
affirms the dignity of all women and mothers in America," said
Elizabeth Alexander, Director of the American Civil Liberties
Union"s National Prison Project. "Correctional officials across
the country are now on notice that they can no longer engage in
this widespread practice." For complete story,
click here.
NSW Health has given its full backing to its
criminal DNA testing, despite it leading to the
wrongful conviction of a man for break and enter in
2008.
NSW Health commenced an exhaustive review of its
DNA "cold links", where DNA evidence is matched to a
person on a state DNA database. For complete
story,
click here.
The man almost took the dirty secret
of his death to his grave. The
Tarrant County medical examiner’s
office said injuries from a pickup
wreck killed him. But after a
funeral director hundreds of miles
away found a bullet in the man’s
head, authorities realized a killer
was on the loose.
Worse has happened in the autopsy
suites of Texas medical examiners.
A child molester faked his own
death and almost got away with it
after the Travis County medical
examiner mistook the burned body of
an 81-year-old woman for the
23-year-old man. For complete
story,
click here.
In 1996, Congress passed a law that made it
much harder for inmates to challenge abusive
treatment. It has contributed significantly
to the bad conditions — including the
desperate overcrowding — that prevail today.
The law must be fixed. For complete
story,
click here.
Making Forensic Science Scientific--September
21st, 2009--With the busiest death chamber in the nation, it
was only a matter of time before Texas positioned itself to
become the first state to admit that it executed a person who
was wrongfully convicted. And now that day is at hand.
According to a nationally respected fire engineer, the so-called
scientific evidence used to convict Cameron Todd Willingham of
setting a blaze that killed his three daughters in 1995 was not
scientific at all. In his scathing report to the Texas Forensic
Science Commission, Craig Beyler found that the arson
investigators on the case had a poor understanding of fire
dynamics and based their conclusions on erroneous assumptions,
sloppy research and a dash of mysticism. For example, one
investigator determined that, because the house fire burned "hot
and fast," an accelerant such as gasoline had been used to set
it. But that theory -- still given credence in some
investigatory circles -- is not factual. Gasoline fires are not
significantly hotter than those started with wood, Beyler
reported. For complete story,
click here.
Forensics Under Fire--September
18th, 2009--There has been much nail-biting in
courthouse crowds across the country since the February release
of the National Academy of Sciences report on the state
of forensic science. The report, to put it mildly, was not
flattering. Forensic labs are underfunded, and many of the areas
in which forensic scientists toil – including handwriting,
ballistics, and fingerprint analysis, just to name a few – are
unsupported by rigorous empirical scientific testing, the report
concluded. Of existing "forensic methods, only nuclear DNA
analysis has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to
consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a
connection between an evidentiary sample and a specific
individual or source," reads the report.That
conclusion has, frankly, freaked out a lot of folks – including
many prosecutors who are often the "end consumers" of forensic
science, as Matthew Redle, Wyoming state director of the
National District Attorneys Association, recently put
it. In an effort to figure out what should be done, now that the
forensic cat has been let out of the bag, Vermont Sen.
Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chair of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, convened a hearing Sept. 9 to discuss with experts
how to proceed. "Much important work is done through forensics,"
but that is certainly not always so, Leahy noted, singling out
Texas' execution of Cameron Todd Willingham for an
arson-murder based on junk fire science as a disturbing recent
example. For complete story,
click here.
Ohio
ACLU against Strickland-endorsed reform bill--September
8th, 2009--A justice reform bill endorsed by Gov. Ted
Strickland and passed by the Senate designed to prevent
wrongful convictions also includes a controversial measure to
expand the collection of DNA samples to those arrested on
felony charges. Currently, Ohio takes DNA only from people
convicted of felonies and violent misdemeanors. Law
enforcement groups support the expansion, saying it gets
violent offenders off the street quicker and prevents future
crimes. But others say DNA collection before conviction
crosses the line, especially because the bill does not address
what happens if a person isn't convicted.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio opposes the measure,
saying it poses a "myriad of civil liberty risks" including
violating a person's constitutional protections against illegal
search and seizure, is ripe for abuse and is an invasion of
privacy. For complete story,
click here.
Officers allegedly used inmate as
prison fighter--September
16th, 2009--A prison sergeant and two former officers
used an inmate known as `Monster' to beat up troublesome inmates
at Dade Correctional Institution, a federal indictment alleges.
For complete story,
click here.
Harris County criminal court judge
indicted--August
27th, 2009--A Harris County Criminal Court-at-Law
judge was indicted this morning for misdemeanor official
oppression, officials said. Few details were
immediately available regarding the charge against Don Jackson,
a 17-year judge, said Joe Stinebaker, spokesman for Harris
County Judge Ed Emmett. For complete story,
click here.
Prisoners moved after riot
controlled, officials brief media--August
22nd, 2009--BURGIN,
Ky. — Rioting inmates started several fires at a central Ky.
prison, and damage to several buildings was so extensive that
officials have to bus some of the facility's 1,200 prisoners
elsewhere, police said Saturday.
For complete story,
click here.
Drug-test suit alleges false
imprisonment--August
21st, 2009--Five former probationers allege in a lawsuit
filed Thursday that they were falsely charged and imprisoned in
2008 after drug tests that Treatment Associates conducted showed
false-positive results.
The plaintiffs are suing Treatment Associates owner Jeff
Warner, as well as two Bexar County supervisors, for unspecified
damages. The Bexar supervisors named in the suit are Bill
Fitzgerald, chief of the county's Community Supervision and
Corrections Department, and Kathleen Cline, the probation
department's director of operations. According
to the suit, filed in the county's 408th District Court, former
probationers Michelle Archer, Rosa M. Rocha, Frank Viesca,
Raymond Anthony and Jimmie Martinez were jailed after faulty
drug tests showed their urine was positive for illegal
substances.
“Jailing these individuals who had been successfully
serving probation ... was devastating to the integrity of the
criminal justice system and destructive to the ability of the
system to protect the safety of the public,” said their
attorney, David Van Os. For complete story,
click here.
Inmates grow, gather veggies, make soup
for hungry--August
18th, 2009--COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The nation's food banks,
struggling to meet demand in hard times, are turning to prison
inmates for free labor to help feed the hungry.
Several states are sending inmates into already harvested fields
to scavenge millions of pounds of leftover potatoes, berries and
other crops that otherwise would go to waste. Others are using
prisoners to plant and harvest vegetables.
"We're in a situation where, without their help, the food banks
absolutely could not accomplish all that they do," said Ross
Fraser, a spokesman for Feeding America, a national association
of food banks. For complete story,
click here.
(Webmaster Note: Isn't it wonderful that when financial
times get tough, we can always return to slave labor? And,
with indefinite detentions and no criminal convictions as the
current standard minimum for being held prisoner in the US, you
too may get to be a slave. Where do you draw the line?
If you do not stand up for others now, there will be no one left
to take a stand.)
DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated,
Scientists Show--August
17th, 2009--Scientists in Israel have demonstrated
that it is possible to fabricate
DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been
considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.
For complete story,
click here.
Scalia says there's
nothing unconstitutional about executing the innocent.
By Ian Millhiser 17 Aug 2009 In light of the very real evidence
that Davis could be innocent of the crime that placed him on
death row, the Supreme Court today invoked a rarely used
procedure giving [Troy Anthony] Davis an
opportunity to challenge his conviction.
Joined by Justice Clarence Thomas in dissent, however, Justice
Antonin Scalia
criticized his colleagues
for thinking that mere innocence is grounds to overturn a
conviction: This Court has never held that the Constitution
forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a
full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court
that he is "actually" innocent. Quite to the contrary, we
have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing
considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged "actual
innocence" is constitutionally cognizable. For complete
story,
click here.
A federal judge on Thursday
issued a stern rebuke to state corrections officials for
the way they classify some parolees as sex offenders
even though the defendants have never been convicted of
sex crimes.
U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks also voiced
frustration with state parole officials for ignoring
earlier court decisions and a previous directive by him
and ordered the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to
review whether to leave parolee Ray Curtis Graham on sex
offender restrictions.
"It's time for the parole division and the Board of
Pardons and Paroles to stop being defensive and start
trying not to use technical defenses," Sparks said, in
ruling that the restrictions were not imposed on Graham
legally and that parole officials ignored a subsequent
court warning about the deficiency.
"The undisputed evidence established no official
involved in the ... process has ever made the necessary
finding that Mr. Graham constituted a threat to society
by his lack of sexual control."
Sparks also declared a mistrial in the case after a
week of testimony when attorneys for the state objected
to comments he made to the jury about a witness'
testimony.
Graham filed suit against parole officials after they
officially listed him as a sex offender in December 2007
— without allowing him to see the results of a
psychiatric evaluation they ordered him to undergo or to
appear with his attorneys at a hearing at which the
decision was made. Graham, who served time in prison for
burglary and attempted murder, was never convicted of a
sex crime. He was arrested for aggravated rape in 1982,
but was never convicted. (Web Assistant Note: Sex
offender status without a conviction in secretive parole
officer circles? Titles given without proof,
sounds like troubled teen diagnosis. Who needs science
or due process when we have (so-called) professionals
making shit up? (Sarcasm)) For complete
story,
click here.
MOBILE, Ala. -- Herman Thomas' attorney, Bob
Clark, said Thursday that he was "reasonably
certain" that more indictments against the
ex-judge soon would emerge from a special Mobile
County grand jury.
The 48-year-old Thomas, who
left the
Circuit Court bench in October 2007 under
pressure,
was indicted in March on charges that
included kidnapping, extortion and sodomy in
connection with criminal court defendants.
For complete story,
click here.
CSI Myths: The Shaky Science Behind
Forensics--August,
2009--Forensic
science was not developed by scientists. It was mostly created
by cops, who were guided by little more than common sense. And
as hundreds of criminal cases begin to unravel, many established
forensic practices are coming under fire. PM takes an in-depth
look at the shaky science that has put innocent people behind
bars. For complete story,
click here.
MIAMI -- In
her online profile, Paula Jones says she is
42, "nonjudgmental" and likes fishing,
gardening and cuddling. There's a catch,
though. Jones' picture shows her in her blue
Florida prison uniform. She won't be out
until at least 2010.
Her listing is posted
on a Web site called WriteAPrisoner.com.
She's looking for a pen pal.
"If you're looking for someone genuine
and true, I'm looking for you," her profile
says. "I'm just a stamp away."
By posting her profile, however, Jones is
breaking a rule. Florida officials have
banned inmates from having the
Match.com-style listings, saying prisoners
just create problems for their
outside-the-pen pals.
Other states - Missouri, Montana, Indiana
and Pennsylvania - have similar
restrictions. Now lawsuits in Florida and
elsewhere say the bans are unfair and
violate First Amendment rights.
"The public knows when they're writing to
these people that they're prisoners," said
Randall Berg Jr., a lawyer representing two
pen pal groups - including Florida-based
WriteAPrisoner.com - that have sued in the
state. "Nobody is being duped here."
WriteAPrisoner.com president and owner
Adam Lovell says the bulk of the people who
use his site to write to inmates are from
religious groups, military people stationed
overseas and others affected by the prison.
Fraud isn't as widespread as Florida
corrections officials suggest, he said.
For complete story,
click here.
Losing The Moral High Ground--July
23rd, 2009--The US military has, understandably and
correctly, condemned the
coerced video of a US soldier taken hostage by Taliban in
Afghanistan. But I fear that the argument that the public
humiliation of prisoners is against international law won't take
the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney.
After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those
humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail
them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of
support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met
with, well, let us say substantial skepticism.
In fact, as I was reminded by a former ambassador, the
Bush-Cheney-Yoo-Addison gutting of US conformance with the
Geneva Conventions really makes it difficult for Washington
credibly to complain about the treatment of any of our captured
soldiers. The Taliban could hold the soldier hostage forever if
they follow the principle put forward by Sen. Lindsey Graham.
They could (God forbid) put him in stress positions naked and
threaten to release the pictures to his family, and they would
have done nothing that Rumsfeld's Pentagon had not done
routinely and on a vast scale. For complete story,
click here.
"When I was 15, my friends started going to jail," says
Victoria Law, a native New Yorker. "Chinatown's gangs
were recruiting in the high schools in Queens and, faced
with the choice of stultifying days learning nothing in
overcrowded classrooms or easy money, many of my friends
had dropped out to join a gang."
"One by one," Law recalls, "they landed in Rikers Island, an entire
island in New York City devoted to pretrial detainment
for those who can not afford bail."
Law shares this and other recollections in her new
book,
Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated
Women(PM Press). At 16, she herself decided to
join a gang, but was arrested for the armed robbery that
she committed for her initiation into the gang. "Because
it was my first arrest -- and probably because
16-year-old Chinese girls who get straight As in school
did not seem particularly menacing -- I was eventually
let off with probation," she writes.
Before her release from jail, Law was held in the
"Tombs" awaiting arraignment. While the adult women she
met there had all been arrested for prostitution, she
also met three teenagers arrested for unarmed assault.
"Two of the girls were black lesbian lovers. In a
scenario that would be repeated 13 years later in the
case of the New Jersey Four, they had been out with
friends when they encountered a cab driver who had tried
to grab one of them. Her friends intervened, the cab
driver called the police and the girls were arrested for
assault." Law notes that "both of my cellmates were
subsequently sent to Rikers Island." For complete
story,
click here.
PUEBLO, Colo.—Documents and videotapes made by an opponent of the
federal Supermax prison are being archived at Colorado State
University-Pueblo.
Archivists at the university's Southern Colorado Ethnic Heritage
and Diversity collection are reviewing the papers of Mitchell
Kaufman, who died in 1998.
Kaufman's brother Joel says Mitchell Kaufman initially opposed
Supermax because he believed the prison system was inherently
racist, citing its disproportionate numbers of Hispanic and black
inmates.
Joel Kaufman says his brother also opposed Supermax for its small
cells where inmates might be confined for all but a half-hour each
day.
Supermax, built in 1994, houses the nation's most dangerous
prisoners.
Mitchell Kaufman died at age 54 from a reaction to medication.
For complete story,
click here.
State investigating abuse reports at
private prison--July
16th, 2009--FRANKFORT, Ky. — The state Department of
Corrections is investigating allegations of sexual abuse against
as many as 16 Kentucky women housed at the privately run Otter
Creek Correctional Center in Wheelwright. For complete
story,
click here.
Legal experts and prosecutors are concerned about the results of
last month's U.S. Supreme Court ruling that requires lab
analysts to be in court to testify about their tests. Lab sheets
that identify a substance as a narcotic or breath-test printouts
describing a suspect's blood-alcohol level are no longer
sufficient evidence, the court ruled. A person must be in court
to talk about the test results.
The opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, has prosecutors
and judges shaking their heads in disgust and defense lawyers
nodding with satisfaction at the notion that the Constitution's
Sixth Amendment guarantee that defendants "shall enjoy the right
. . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him" is not
satisfied by a sheet of paper.
"This is the biggest case for the defense since Miranda," said
Fairfax defense lawyer Paul L. McGlone, referring to the Supreme
Court ruling that required police to inform defendants of their
Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. He said judges
"are no longer going to assume certain facts are true without
requiring the prosecution to actually put on their evidence."
For complete story,
click here.
Supermax prison blocked Obama books
requested by detainee --Officials at the
Florence, Colorado supermax prison deemed the bestsellers
'potentially detrimental to national security' 10 Jul 2009
He has been president of the United States for 172 days, yet it
appears that Barack Obama is still deemed capable of producing
writing that is "potentially detrimental to national security".
That peculiar judgement was made following a request by a
high-security prisoner to read Obama's two bestselling books,
Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. The plea was
made by Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who is being held at a supermax
prison in Florence, Colorado. Abu Ali, a US citizen, was found
guilty on 25 November of helping al-Qaida and plotting to
assassinate the then US president [sic] George Bush. For
complete story,
click here.
ACLU Seeks End To Censorship Of
Religious Material By Virginia Jail--July
9th, 2009--STAFFORD, VA – The American Civil Liberties
Union and the ACLU of Virginia today demanded that
officials at the Rappahannock Regional
Jail immediately end their illegal practice of censoring
religious material sent to detainees.
In a letter sent today to the jail's superintendent, Joseph
Higgs, Jr., the ACLU asks for jail officials to guarantee
in writing that the jail will no longer censor biblical
passages from letters written to detainees and to revise
the jail's written inmate mail policy to state that
letters will not be censored simply because they contain
religious material.
"It is nothing short of stunning that a jail would think it okay
to censor the Bible and other religious material for no
reason other than its religious nature," said David
Shapiro, staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison
Project. "Such censorship violates both the rights of
detainees to practice religion freely and the free speech
rights of those wanting to communicate with detainees."
For complete story,
click here.
Since March, the city's Adult Probation
and Parole Department has been using the
system to reshuffle the way it assigns
cases. Each time someone new comes
through intake, a clerk enters his or
her name and the computer takes just
seconds to fish through a database for
relevant information and deliver a
verdict of high, medium, or low risk.
"It's a complete paradigm shift for the
department," said chief probation and
parole officer Robert Malvestuto.
"Science has made this available to us.
We'd be foolish not to use it."
Criminologists say the system works -
it can identify those most likely to
commit violent crimes. But whether
Philadelphia can use that to intervene
and change people's behavior is still
not known. A full evaluation won't be
done until the end of the year.
For complete story,
click here.
Ex-guard attests to alleged inmate
abuse at Westmoreland County Prison--July
4th, 2009--A Westmoreland County Prison inmate was taken out of
his cell, punched, choked, kicked and threatened with death as
punishment for talking back to a guard, according to a statement
given by a corrections officer who said he witnessed the
incident. For complete story,
click here.
Innocents Lost--June
21st, 2009--A MAJORITY OF the Supreme Court ruled last week
that prisoners do not have a constitutional right to
post-conviction DNA testing. The decision was based in large
part on the assertion that federal judicial intervention was
unnecessary because the great majority of state legislatures
already had passed laws to give prisoners adequate access to the
revolutionary technology. The majority's argument has merit, but
the decision in District Attorney's Office v. Osborne was
nonetheless wrong.
The decision sprang from the case of
William G. Osborne, who was convicted of
the brutal 1993 kidnapping, rape and
assault of an Alaska woman. A
rudimentary DNA test performed on semen
found at the crime scene excluded two
suspects but not Mr. Osborne. Mr.
Osborne's trial lawyer declined a more
advanced DNA test for fear that the
results could definitively implicate her
client.
On appeal, Alaskan courts denied Mr.
Osborne's request for further DNA
testing, concluding that eyewitness
accounts and other evidence against him
were so strong that DNA tests would
likely not be dispositive. A federal
appeals court ultimately ruled that Mr.
Osborne was entitled to further testing;
the Supreme Court by a 5 to 4 majority
overturned this decision last week.
For complete story,
click here.
Keystone Cops at the Police Lab--June
18th, 2009--When CSI became the most popular drama on
television earlier this decade, forensic scientists
employed by police departments emerged from anonymity.
Discerning viewers seemed to understand that real- life police
laboratory personnel (filling a job description officially
known as "criminalist") do not solve murders and rapes
within an hour. Still, the glamorization generated by television
drama had begun, increasing exponentially with the spinoff shows
CSI: Miami and CSI: New York.
Many criminalists indeed serve justice well, conscientiously
analyzing evidence found at crime scenes, including blood,
fingerprints, scrapings from beneath fingernails, hair, dirt,
shoe impressions, tire tracks, hard copy documents,
computer messages and more. The good ones keep up with new
forensic techniques, write objective reports, consult
openly with defense attorneys as well as prosecutors,
testify truthfully in court and never lose sight of the
ultimate goal — convicting the guilty while excluding the
innocent from the pool of suspects.
But as it becomes increasingly evident that wrongful convictions
constitute a cancer within the criminal justice system, it
becomes simultaneously obvious that numerous criminalists
are part of the problem. One incompetent or dishonest
criminalist can infect hundreds of cases in a crime
laboratory, with some of those cases mutating
into wrongful convictions. For complete story,
click here.
Elusive Justice Overdue In the Case
of Political Prisoner Paul Minor--June
18th, 2009--It is time for the Obama Justice Department
to reverse one of the most egregiously political persecutions of
the Bush era - Paul Minor's bogus conviction on trumped up
charges of public corruption "bribery" despite a total lack of
evidence that his role as the top
funder of Democratic candidates in Mississippi netted him
anything other than misery and a harsh prison sentence.
Attorney General Eric Holder stated recently that "elections
have consequences." That premise should apply not just to
President Obama's pick for the Supreme Court and appointment of
new U.S. Attorneys, as Holder mentioned. It should compel a
swift review of the unjust prosecutions of prominent Democrats
targeted by the Bush Justice Department.
Paul Minor's case is Exhibit A.
Paul Minor's attorneys recently filed a straightforward,
compelling brief with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals
outlining the multiple errors the prosecution made in convicting
Minor for bribery despite the government not being required to
prove a quid pro quo. In such cases, crystal clear case law
requires the presiding judge to instruct the jury that they can
only convict a campaign fundraiser of bribing public officials
if clear "this for that" evidence exists of a quid pro quo
agreement leading to a specific official act by the recipient in
exchange for the campaign contributions. For complete
story,
click here.
ACLU suit to challenge isolation
prisons--June
18th, 2009--Civil rights activists plan to file a lawsuit
today contesting the transfer of a Tunisian American prisoner to
a federal prison facility that some inmates have dubbed "Little
Guantanamo." The suit by the American Civil Liberties
Union on behalf of Sabri Benkahla could be the first of many
challenging the secretive units, which drastically restrict
outside contact. For complete story,
click here.
In Light Of New Report, ACLU Calls
On Congress To Restore Courts As Check On Prisoner Abuse-June
17th, 2009--WASHINGTON – In light of a new report showing
that a law intended to reduce so-called “frivolous lawsuits” by
prisoners has resulted in barring serious prison abuse cases
from reaching the courts, the American Civil Liberties Union
today called on Congress to amend parts of the Prison Litigation
Reform Act of 1996 (PLRA). The law
requires prisoners to exhaust the internal grievance process of
their facilities and allege a physical injury due to
mistreatment in order to seek redress in the courts. The
troubling consequences of the PLRA are made clear in a
Human Rights Watch report released today which finds that the
exhaustion and physical injury requirements of the law have been
particularly problematic for juveniles who are at higher risk of
sexual assault and other violence. The American Civil Liberties
Union has long fought to amend parts of the PLRA known as the
exhaustion provision,
the physical injury provision and the Act’s application to
juveniles. For complete story,
click here.
ATLANTA (AP) — The recession
is hitting home for inmates,
too: Some cash-strapped
states are taking aim at
prison menus.
Georgia prisoners already
didn't get lunch on the
weekends, and the Department
of Corrections recently
eliminated the midday meal
on Fridays, too. Ohio may
drop weekend breakfasts and
offer brunch instead. Other
states are cutting back on
milk and fresh fruit.
Officials say prisoners are
still getting enough calories,
but family members and critics
say the changes could make
prisoners irritable and food a
valuable commodity, increasing
the possibility of violence.
For complete story,
click
here.
Prosecutors, judge accused of
misconduct--June
2nd, 2009--Attorneys
with the Louisville public defender's office are accusing two
prosecutors of withholding crucial information and then lying in
court about making a deal with a jailhouse informant in a
capital murder case. For
complete story,
click here.
Arizona: Halt to a Detention
Practice--May
30th, 2009--The director of Arizona state prisons
suspended the use of unshaded outdoor holding cells after an
inmate’s death. The inmate, Marcia Powell, 48, was left in an
unshaded enclosure for nearly four hours on May 19 as
temperatures topped 100. The corrections director, Charles L.
Ryan, said Ms. Powell, serving a sentence for prostitution,
should not have been left in the cell for so long. Mr. Ryan
placed three officers on administrative leave pending a criminal
investigation. The outdoor cells hold inmates when they are
being transferred from one area in a prison to another.
For complete story,
click here.
Guard charged in hospital beating in
Lancaster--May
28th, 2009--A Lancaster County Prison guard last August
severely beat a prison inmate who had been shackled to a
hospital bed, according to criminal
and civil complaints. Silvestre Villarreal, a longtime
prison guard who weighs about 200 pounds, climbed on a bed at
Lancaster General Hospital and straddled the inmate, according
to the complaint of a civil lawsuit filed a
week ago. The correctional officer repeatedly hit the
inmate, Vance Laughman, until nurses intervened. He struck him
so hard that he broke his own hand, according to the complaint.
For complete story,
click here.
The Wyandotte County jail is following Johnson
County’s example and preventing inmates from
sending personal letters in envelopes.
The Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Office
announced Wednesday that inmates would have to
limit all of their personal correspondence to
postcards no larger than 5 by 7 inches. The new
policy does not apply to “official”
correspondence — privileged or governmental
mail.
A release from the office said the move was
made to reduce the workload of the jail’s
mail-handling services and to reduce contraband.
For complete story,
click here.
A Standard for Fair Trials--May
17th, 2009--When dismissing the charges against former
Alaska senator Ted Stevens recently, the trial judge noted that
the prosecutorial failures to turn over exculpatory evidence in
that case were symptomatic of a larger problem within the
Justice Department. Indeed, such failures are happening across
our criminal justice system. Three weeks ago, the Supreme Court
reversed the death sentence of a Vietnam veteran because a
Tennessee prosecutor withheld witness statements that directly
contradicted the state's version of the case. For complete
story,
click here.
Cell phone nets TDCJ inmate 60 more
years--May
14th, 2009--A Coffield Unit inmate was sentenced to 60
years in prison Tuesday after an Anderson County jury found him
guilty of possessing a cell phone in a correctional facility.
A seven woman, five man jury found Derrick Ross, 38, of the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Coffield Unit guilty of
having a prohibited item in a correctional facility. For
complete story,
click here.
A report in February by a committee of the
National Academy of Sciences found
“serious problems” with much of the work
performed by crime laboratories in the
United States. Recent incidents of faulty
evidence analysis — including the case of an
Oregon lawyer who was arrested by the
F.B.I. after the 2004 Madrid terrorist
bombings based on fingerprint identification
that turned out to be wrong — were just
high-profile examples of wider deficiencies,
the committee said. Crime labs were
overworked, there were few certification
programs for investigators and technicians,
and the entire field suffered from a lack of
oversight.
But perhaps the most damning conclusion
was that many forensic disciplines —
including analysis of fingerprints, bite
marks and the striations and indentations
left by a pry bar or a gun’s firing
mechanism — were not grounded in the kind of
rigorous, peer-reviewed research that is the
hallmark of classic science. DNA analysis
was an exception, the report noted, in that
it had been studied extensively. But many
other investigative tests, the report said,
“have never been exposed to stringent
scientific scrutiny.” For complete
story,
click here.
PALM BEACH, Fla., May 11 (UPI) -- Advocates for
the separation of church and state say they're
closely watching Florida's expansion of
non-denominational faith-based prisons.
While 21 other states have faith-based
dormitories, Florida is the only one with entire
prisons focused on faith and character, the
South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported Monday.
Glade Correctional in Palm Beach County this
week becomes the fifth faith-based prison in
Florida under a program begun in 2003, said
Kathy Connor, a state corrections spokeswoman.
Constitutional issues arise, however, when
prisons start linking where inmates live to
religious programs, said Alex Luchenitser, a
lawyer with Americans United for Separation of
Church and State. For complete story,
click here.
Ritter gets bill requiring DNA tests on
arrest--May
7th, 2009--A bill that supporters say will save "our
daughters' and our wives' " lives is on the way to Gov. Bill
Ritter's desk after lawmakers approved taking DNA samples upon
arrest.
Senate Bill 241 has been dubbed "Katie's Law" and is named for
the New Mexico college student whose murder spurred her parents
to push for DNA testing upon arrest.
The bill was amended to allow police to take DNA tests upon
arrest but for the sample not to be processed unless a person is
charged. The sample will be destroyed if no charges are filed.
For complete story,
click here.
Lawsuit filed over Florida prisons'
pen pal ban--May
6th, 2009--The Fort Lauderdale owner of a Christian pen
pal service filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday charging the Florida
Department of Corrections with violating the First Amendment by
blocking her from putting churches in touch with Florida
inmates.
Joy Perry runs Prison Pen Pals and the Freedom Through Christ
Ministry, which gives prisoners' contact information to churches
that want to send them Bibles and other religious materials. She
filed suit in U.S. District Court in Jacksonville along with
Adam Lovell of Edgewater, president of
WriteAPrisoner.Com.
For complete story,
click here.
Judge OKs inmate suit over routine strip
searches--March
31st, 2009--PHILADELPHIA—Prisons
cannot routinely strip search drunk drivers and other non-drug,
non-violent arrestees without reason to think they are hiding
contraband, a federal judge ruled in a potential class-action
suit.
The ruling in Pennsylvania follows those in nine other federal
circuits, although the 11th U.S. Circuit recently disagreed in a
case involving a prison in Fulton County, Ga.
Senior U.S. District Judge Jan E. DuBois, though, rejected that
court's reasoning and said in a 49-page opinion that plaintiffs
strip searched at the Delaware County Prison can proceed with their
suit against the Geo Group.
The Boca Raton, Fla.-based company, which operates dozens of
prisons around the country, ran the nearly 1,900-bed Delaware County
Prison until ending the contract last year. For complete
story,
click here.
Former Alabama judge indicted on
inmate sex charges--March
31st, 2009--CNN) -- A former south Alabama
judge is accused of checking male inmates out of jail and
forcing them to engage in sexual activity including paddling,
according to officials and court documents.
Former
Mobile County Circuit Judge Herman Thomas was arrested Friday after
a grand jury returned the indictments against him. He was released
on $287,500 bond later Friday.
The indictments total 57 counts, and the charges range from
ethics violations to kidnapping, extortion, sex abuse and sodomy. If
convicted on the most serious charge -- kidnapping, a Class A felony
-- Thomas faces a prison sentence of 10 to 99 years in prison,
Mobile County District Attorney John Tyson Jr. said Monday.
For complete story,
click here.
Prison officials said the two should not have been placed in the
same cell together, and there will be an investigation.
Corrections officers found 23-year-old Paul Duran unresponsive in
the cell Wednesday night, the McAlester News-Capital reported.
This was less than an hour after he was placed in the cell that
was already housing 32-year-old Jesse James Dalton, who is serving a
sentence of life in prison without parole, in part because of
testimony given by Duran about a 2003 murder. For complete
story,
click here.
Lawsuit claims abuse in La. jail;
attorney likens prison to Abu Ghraib--March
6th, 2009--ST. TAMMANY, La. — A contractor and
former law enforcement officer has filed a federal lawsuit
accusing St. Tammany Parish deputies of holding him in jail for
four months in conditions his attorney likened to Abu Ghraib,
the notorious prison in Iraq.
Norman J. Manton Jr.
of Covington was arrested in January 2008 during an investigation
into the disappearance of Albert Bloch, 61, of Jefferson Parish.
Charges against Manton, a former Covington police officer and
deputy, were later dropped.
Bloch has not been found.
Manton's suit, which seeks $3.25 million in compensatory and
punitive damages, alleges that deputies coerced a witness into
connecting Manton to the case. In jail, he was denied medical
treatment, held in isolation and beaten by other inmates, according
to the suit. For complete story,
click here.
His wife, Kitty, beat a highly publicized,
years-long addiction to diet pills and
anti-depressants.
As governor of
Massachusetts in the 1980s, Dukakis
championed cutting-edge treatment programs
for imprisoned drunk drivers in his state,
which were among the first in the nation. He
launched programs to curb teenage drinking
and drug abuse.
As the Democratic nominee for president
in 1988, he challenged Americans to kick
their habit of drink and drugs.
On Tuesday, Dukakis, 75, brought his
rehab message to Austin, in meetings with
state leaders to urge them to grow Texas’
treatment programs — even expand some to
cover Medicaid recipients.
And he brought congratulations: Texas is
a national model, by greatly expanding its
prison treatment and rehabilitation programs
two years ago in a move that was criticized.
(Please see the other articles on our site
exposing the Texas model as torture.
For complete story,
click here. For more
info,
click here.)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - One in every 31 U.S. adults is in
the corrections system, which includes jail, prison,
probation and supervision, more than double the rate of
a quarter century ago, according to a report released on
Monday by the Pew Center on the States.
The study,
which said the current rate compares to one in 77 in
1982, concluded that with declining resources, more
emphasis should be put on community supervision, not
jail or prison.
"Violent and career criminals need to be locked up,
and for a long time. But our research shows that prisons
are housing too many people who can be managed safely
and held accountable in the community at far lower
cost," said Adam Gelb, director of the Center's Public
Safety Performance Project, which produced the report.
For complete story,
click here.
Orange County sheriff lets jail
gangs control bail bond referrals, claim alleges--February
28th, 2009--Three veteran bail bond agents have
filed a legal claim against Orange County alleging that the
Sheriff's Department allows gangs inside the jails to steer
inmates to certain bail companies in exchange for kickbacks to
the gangs.
In their claim, typically a
first step to a lawsuit, the
agents estimate that their
businesses are losing $100
million a year because of
the scheme, which is known
in law enforcement circles
as "capping."
"It's impacting my business and
there's illegal activities going
on inside the jails . . . to the
detriment to the people who are
playing by the rules," Bob
Drake, one of the bondsmen who
filed the claim, said Friday.
"We suspect several companies. I
don't know the exact number.
That's not as important as the
Sheriff's Department not going
after and stopping the activity
from occurring in the jails."
According to the bondsmen's
attorney, Richard P. Herman,
former Sheriff Michael S. Carona
allowed his top lieutenant,
former Assistant Sheriff George
Jaramillo, to initiate the
scheme, and current Sheriff
Sandra Hutchens has allowed it
to continue. For complete
story,
click
here.
Texas: Ex-Sheriff and Jailers
Indicted--February
27th, 2009--Seventeen people, including a former sheriff,
are accused in a 106-count indictment of sex and drug crimes at
a jail in Montague County. The former sheriff, Bill Keating, was
charged with official oppression and having sex with inmates.
Mr. Keating was defeated in a primary election last spring, and
has pleaded guilty to a federal civil rights violation in an
unrelated case involving the sexual assault of a woman. In the
new case, several female jailers were charged with having sex
with inmates and bringing them drugs, cellphones and cigarettes,
while several male jailers were charged with drug possession and
bringing inmates banned items. Several inmates were also charged
with drug possession. The jail, northwest of Fort Worth, has
been closed. For complete story,
click here.
A LOOK INSIDE ILLINOIS' ONLY
SUPER-MAX PRISON--February
27th, 2009--TAMMS, Ill. — Every once in a while, Joseph
Dole stands in a back corner of the walled-in outdoor recreation
area at Tamms Correctional Center straining to catch a ray of
sunlight.
"About 4 square feet gets sun," said Dole, a rail-thin convicted
murderer who is serving a life sentence. "You can stand there.
... You feel refreshed. But you can only get it if they call
yard between 11 and 1."
Another murderer, Adolfo Rosario, said he hasn't shaken anyone's
hand since he was transferred to Tamms 11 years ago. "There is
no contact at all, none," he said.
Tyrone Dorn, serving time for carjacking, hasn't had a visitor
or made a phone call in five years at Tamms. "The hardest part
is the isolation," he said. "It's like being buried alive."
For complete story,
click here.
America's Outsourced Immigration Prisons a
Booming Business--February
25th, 2009--Imprisoned immigrants in the large
prison complex outside the small West Texas town of Pecos have
rioted twice over the past few months complaining about
inadequate medical care. Their complaints, sparked by the death
of a sick inmate in solitary confinement, echo a chorus of
similar complaints around the country about medical care in
immigrant prisons.
Medical care, like most aspects of imprisonment in
America, is outsourced at the Reeves County Detention
Center. As a result, imprisoned immigrants don't know
who exactly is imprisoning them, who is responsible for
their medical care, and who they should petition when
they have grievances. For complete story,
click here.
Wrongfully convicted--February
24th, 2009--"I always believed in the system but the
system failed me," Steve
Barnes told a panel of New York State Bar Association members.
For nineteen years he sat in New York prisons for a rape and
murder that he did not commit. Barnes' case is one of dozens of
defendants in New York who were convicted and later exonerated.
On Tuesday, the New York State Bar Association held a hearing to
explore wrongful convictions, what causes them and what can be
done to prevent them. For complete story,
click here.
Santa Clara County public defender to
launch massive search for the wrongfully convicted--February
24th, 2009--As part of a criminal justice review unprecedented
in county history, the Santa Clara County public defender's has
launched a massive project to revisit 1,500 or more sexual
assault convictions dating back two decades to determine whether
innocent people may have been put behind bars. A Mercury
News report disclosed late last year that members of Valley
Medical Center's Sexual Assault Response Team have been
videotaping examinations of patients since 1991, but prosecutors
failed to inform defense attorneys in cases involving those
patients that such critical evidence existed. Under pressure to
answer for the failure, District Attorney Dolores Carr has since
revealed there are 3,300 such tapes in existence, and this week
she vowed to inform defense attorneys of each case involving a
medical-exam videotape where a defendant was convicted.
(Unable to locate at time of archiving. Source: Mercury
News.
www.mercurynews.com )
Your Valentine, Made in Prison--February
12th, 2009--With Valentine's Day approaching,
perhaps you're planning a trip to Victoria's Secret. If you're a
conscientious shopper, chances are you want to know about the
origins of the clothes you buy: whether they're sweatshop free
or fairly traded or made in the USA. One label you won't find
attached to your lingerie, however, is "Made in the USA: By
Prisoners." For complete story,
click here.
Inmate raped by cellmates can sue
prison guards--February
11th, 2009--The state Supreme Court allowed a
transgender former prison inmate on Wednesday to proceed with a
lawsuit accusing prison guards of failing to protect her from
being raped and beaten by her cellmates.
In her suit, Alexis Giraldo said she was
being held at Folsom State Prison for
shoplifting and a parole violation in
January 2006 when a cellmate began
assaulting and raping her on a daily
basis. She said prison staff ignored her
complaints until March 2006, when she
was transferred to segregated housing
after a second cellmate attacked her
with a box-cutter. She was paroled in
July 2007.
Prison officials denied failing to
protect Giraldo, who was housed at the
all-male prison because she had not
undergone surgery. A San Francisco jury
rejected her emotional-distress claim
against six prison employees in August
2007 after the trial judge dismissed her
claim of negligence, ruling that guards
have no legal duty to protect inmates
from harm.
The First District Court of
Appeal in San Francisco overturned the
judge's ruling last November, saying a
jailer who takes a prisoner into custody
must take reasonable steps to protect
that prisoner from foreseeable injuries.
California's high court denied review of
the state's appeal Wednesday, allowing
Giraldo to pursue her claim that
negligence by prison employees was a
cause of the assaults. For
complete story,
click here.
Crime lab deficiencies noted by
audit--February
7th, 2009--Baltimore's crime lab suffers from inadequate
funding, spotty recordkeeping and broken equipment, according to
an independent audit of the embattled facility released by the
Police Department yesterday.
The report, which the Police Department initially refused to
release to the public, found that the lab was inadequately
staffed, equipment to analyze narcotics had long been out of
order, faulty paperwork sometimes made it difficult to establish
a chain of custody for evidence, and evidence was stored in
rooms that were too warm, which could cause it to degrade.
In an interview, the lab's new director, Francis Chiafari, said
the audit is guiding a host of reforms and upgrades, including
repairs to equipment and a door that wouldn't close. He said he
made a request yesterday for 12 more employees to collect
evidence at crime scenes.
Patrick Kent, chief of the public defender's forensics unit,
said the audit exposes serious deficiencies in the lab's
resources and procedures. For complete story,
click here.
Although the ACLU strongly supports anyone's efforts
to encourage prisoners to look forward toward
changing their lives for the better, we also expect
those efforts to be done in a way that will not
endorse one religion over another, or religion over
nonreligion.
Unfortunately, that is not happening at Angola.
Just under two years ago we had to file a lawsuit
on behalf of a Norman Sanders, a Mormon prisoner who
simply wanted access to publications from sellers of
Mormon materials, including the bookstore at Brigham
Young University. Unfortunately Warden Cain
repeatedly denied Norman's requests, so we had to
file a lawsuit. We eventually
settled, allowing Norman access to simple
religious materials.
Today we filed lawsuits on behalf of a Catholic
and a Muslim prisoner, each being denied the right
to practice his religion freely. As Yogi Berra would
say, it's déjà vu all over again.
Donald Leger is a practicing Catholic on
Louisiana's death row. He's devout, often praying
the novenas. Starting in April 2007, the prison
began locking the televisions on death row to a
particular station on Sunday mornings. The
televisions, located directly outside death row
prisoners' cells, are locked to predominately
Baptist programming on Sunday mornings. The images
of the religious programming pour into the
prisoners' cells and can't be escaped. In some
tiers, the televisions blare.
From April 2007 until December 31, 2007 and from
mid-2008 until December 31, 2008, Donald didn't have
the opportunity to watch a single Catholic Mass,
although scores of Baptist services were shown.
Donald and the other death row prisoners are told
that they will be written up and tossed in lockdown
if they try to have anyone change the television
station.
Donald has no problem with religion, it's just
that he is a Catholic, and he simply wants the
ability to turn from the mandated Baptist
programming to a Catholic Mass that also airs on
Sunday morning. Donald's written the Warden for
almost two years now, and has filed complaint forms
with the prison. His requests have gone unanswered.
Worse yet, he's suffered retaliation because he's
complained, and he fears for his safety. For
complete story,
click here.
Science Found Wanting in Nation’s
Crime Labs--February
4th, 2009--Forensic evidence that has helped convict
thousands of defendants for nearly a century is often the
product of shoddy scientific practices that should be upgraded
and standardized, according to accounts of a draft report by the
nation’s pre-eminent scientific research group.
The report by the
National Academy of Sciences is to be released this month.
People who have seen it say it is a sweeping critique of many
forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on,
including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis
of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting.
The report says such analyses are often handled by poorly
trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their
methods in court. It concludes that Congress should create a
federal agency to guarantee the independence of the field, which
has been dominated by law enforcement agencies, say forensic
professionals, scholars and scientists who have seen review
copies of the study. Early reviewers said the report was still
subject to change. For complete story,
click here.
Those cleared by DNA tests struggle to
be free--January
27th, 2009--ST. LOUIS — Johnny Briscoe
thought his nightmare was over in the summer of 2006 when, after
23 years of proclaiming his innocence, he finally walked out of
a Missouri prison.
DNA evidence
lifted from a cigarette butt should have stripped away any doubt
that another man — not Briscoe — had raped and robbed a woman in her
suburban St. Louis apartment on Oct. 21, 1982. Yet Briscoe's
exoneration, featured by national news organizations, did notfully
free him from the persistent doubts of acquaintances and family
members about his innocence, or from the emotional scars seared by
more than two decades in prison.
"Rape," says Briscoe, 54. "Now, that's a
provocative word. When I try to explain it, it's a bitter pill."
Nearly 90% of the 227 people cleared by DNA
evidence since 1989 were convicted of some of the most heinous sex
crimes, according to the Innocence Project, which helps inmates
prove their innocence through DNA testing. DNA — present in blood,
semen and body cells — can be particularly useful in solving sex
crimes and often is the most definitive way of determining
innocence.
Yet not even DNA washes away the lasting
stigma that shadows once-convicted sex offenders who are cleared by
genetic testing, and the criminal justice system that wrongly jailed
them offers little help. Briscoe's plight is part of a silent
struggle for a rising number of exonerees. After high-profile
releases from prison, they often fend for themselves. For
complete story, click here.
Torture at a Louisiana Prison--January
27th, 2009--The
torture of prisoners in US custody is not only found in military
prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. If President Obama
is serious about ending US support for torture, he can start
here in Louisiana.
The
Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is already notorious for a
range of offenses, including keeping former Black Panthers Herman
Wallace and Albert Woodfox, in solitary for over 36 years. Now a
death penalty trial in St. Francisville, Louisiana has exposed
widespread and systemic abuse at the prison. Even in the context of
eight years of the Bush administration, the behavior documented at
the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola stands out both for its
brutality and for the significant evidence that it was condoned and
encouraged from the very top of the chain of command.
In a
remarkable hearing that explored torture practices at Angola,
twenty-five inmates testified last summer to facing overwhelming
violence in the aftermath of an escape attempt at the prison nearly
a decade ago. These twenty-five inmates - who were not involved in
the escape attempt - testified to being kicked, punched, beaten with
batons and with fists, stepped on, left naked in a freezing cell,
and threatened that they would be killed. They were threatened by
guards that they would be sexually assaulted with batons. They were
forced to urinate and defecate on themselves. They were bloodied,
had teeth knocked out, were beaten until they lost control of bodily
functions, and beaten until they signed statements or confessions
presented to them by prison officials. One inmate had a broken jaw,
and another was placed in solitary confinement for eight years.
While prison officials deny the policy of abuse, the range of
prisoners who gave statements, in addition to medical records and
other evidence introduced at the trial, present a powerful argument
that abuse is a standard policy at the prison. Several of the
prisoners received $7,000 when the state agreed to settle, without
admitting liability, two civil rights lawsuits filed by 13 inmates.
The inmates will have to spend that money behind bars –more than 90%
of Angola's prisoners are expected to die behind its walls.
For complete story,
click here.
Prison guard guilty of pouring
scalding water on inmate--January
21st, 2009--A Jacksonville jury found a former Florida
State Prison guard guilty of pouring scalding water on an inmate
to discipline him for feigning an injury.
Paul Tillis of Lake Butler faces up to 10 years in federal prison and a
$250,000 fine for violating the inmate’s civil rights in August 2005.
Prosecutors said he also failed to arrange medical treatment for the inmate, who
suffered second-degree burns on his chest.
A sentencing date hasn’t been scheduled.
For complete story,
click here.
Report: Calif. keeps inmates isolated too
long--January
15th, 2009--SACRAMENTO—The
inspector general of the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation says the department could save nearly $11
million annually if it followed its own rules.
Inspector General David Shaw said in a report released Thursday the
department keeps some inmates in disciplinary segregation units
longer than required under prison policies. He estimates the lengthy
stays, on average, cost taxpayers an extra $14,600 annually for each
inmate kept in segregation instead of the general prison population.
That's mostly because extra guards are needed.
The state can be sued if it violates the inmate's rights or keeps
the inmate isolated too long. For complete story,
click here.
Mistakes in fingerprint analysis
trigger review of nearly 1,000 LAPD cases--January
15th, 2009--Los Angeles Police Department fingerprint
examiners who falsely implicated at least two people in crimes
have been linked to nearly 1,000 other criminal cases that
authorities say must now be reviewed to ensure that similar
errors weren't made.
Nearly two dozen of those cases are awaiting trial in the Los
Angeles court system, said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for
Dist. Atty Steve Cooley. For complete story,
click here.
Double Victory for Criminal
Defendants at the Supreme Court--January
14th, 2009--The Supreme Court issued two opinions
Tuesday morning, both of them striking down lower court opinions
that had favored prosecutors. Over at the
Sentencing Law and Policy blog, professor Doug Berman is
already proclaiming that the decisions offer further proof that
the Court is the "most pro-defendant appellate court in the
nation on sentencing issues."
In Chambers v. United States, with Justice Stephen
Breyer writing for a unanimous Court, the justices agreed that a conviction on
the charge of "failure to report" to prison is not the kind of prior "violent
felony" conviction that triggers a 15-year mandatory prison sentence for someone
found guilty of illegal possession of a firearm.
"Conceptually speaking, the crime amounts to a form of
inaction, a far cry from the purposeful, violent and
aggressive conduct" associated with violent crimes under the
Armed Career Criminal Act, Breyer wrote. The Justice
Department had argued that "failure to report" should be
treated the same way a prison escape would be.
Justice Samuel Alito Jr., joined by Justice Clarence
Thomas, wrote a concurrence urging Congress to reduce
confusion about the law by amending it with addition of a
list of specific crimes that trigger an enhanced sentence.
The other decision,
Jimenez v. Quarterman, is a Texas case authored
by Justice Thomas for a unanimous Court. Thomas ruled that
because Texas allows defendants to file untimely appeals of
state convictions, the clock for the one-year deadline for
filing a federal habeas appeal under the Antiterrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act should not start ticking until
after that out-of-time appeal is completed. For
complete story,
click here.
Gassing mentally ill inmates is out--January
14th, 2009--Two mentally ill inmates suffered
unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of
Florida State Prison officials who disciplined them with pepper
spray, tear gas and other chemical agents, a judge has ruled.
But the same punishment was appropriate for four other prisoners who
sued the Department of Corrections on similar grounds, U.S. District Judge
Timothy Corrigan of Jacksonville wrote in a lengthy order finalized Monday after
a five-day bench trial in September.
Corrigan made the distinction based on the mental
condition of the individual inmates at the time they
were disciplined. The order means the department can
no longer use chemical agents on prisoners who lack
the capacity to follow orders or control their
behavior, said Jacksonville attorney Buddy Schulz,
who represented the inmates.
"It's significant because it's the first time a
federal judge has found this type of use of force
unconstitutional as it relates to seriously mentally
ill inmates who are incapable of conforming to the
rules of the prisons," Schulz said. For
complete story,
click here.
Va. cases shed light on false
convictions--January
12, 2009---- No one ever
claimed the criminal-justice system was perfect. But until 20
years ago, it was difficult to prove otherwise.
Since then,
225 innocent people -- 10 in Virginia --
have been exonerated of crimes by DNA
testing. However, DNA is not a factor in
most cases, and the rate of wrongful
convictions remains unclear.
That could change, in part, because of a
large, groundbreaking and sometimes hotly
contested review of old cases under way in
Virginia.
The U.S. Justice Department recently
awarded $300,000 to the Urban Institute to
use the results of the Virginia effort and a
smaller one in Arizona to try to determine
the rate of error in convictions for such
crimes as murder, rape and robbery. The
Urban Institute plans to report its results
in the summer of 2010.
The ultimate goal is to minimize the
future risk of convicting innocent people.
"It's certainly time for this study to
happen," said John Roman, a senior
researcher for the Urban Institute, a
40-year-old organization that studies social
and economic issues to promote sound public
policy and effective government.
"We [may] be able to answer the question:
[In] what percentage of cases from 1973
through 1988 were people wrongfully
convicted?" he said.
The hope then is to answer another
question: "What is it about cases that made
them more likely to have somebody wrongfully
convicted?"
However, Brandon L. Garrett, an expert on
DNA exoneration who teaches at the
University of Virginia law school, is
cautious.
"Careful researchers always have to be
very cautious about generalizing beyond the
sample that they are studying," he said.
The criminal-justice system keeps spotty
case data, loses or destroys data, and
selects and treats cases differently. "And
those are general challenges --
wrongful-conviction cases are harder to
study, much less generalize about," he said.
For complete story,
click here.
As His Inmates Grew Thinner, a
Sheriff’s Wallet Grew Fatter--January
8th, 2008--DECATUR, Ala. — The prisoners in the Morgan
County jail here were always hungry. The sheriff, meanwhile, was
getting a little richer.
Alabama law allowed it: the chief lawman could go light on
prisoners’ meals and pocket the leftover change.
And that is just what the sheriff, Greg Bartlett, did, to the tune of
$212,000 over the last three years, despite a state food allowance of only $1.75
per prisoner per day.
In the view of a federal judge, who heard testimony from the
hungry inmates, the sheriff was in “blatant” violation of past
agreements that his prisoners be properly cared for.
“There was undisputed evidence that most of the inmates had
lost significant weight,” the judge, U. W. Clemon of Federal
District Court in Birmingham, said Thursday in an interview. “I
could not ignore them.”
So this week, Judge Clemon ordered Sheriff Bartlett himself
jailed until he came up with a plan to adequately feed prisoners
more, anyway, than a few spoonfuls of grits, part of an egg and
a piece of toast at breakfast, and bits of undercooked, bloody
chicken at supper. For complete story,
click here.
US waves white flag in
disastrous 'war on drugs'--After 40 years,
Washington is quietly giving up on a futile
battle that has spread corruption and destroyed
thousands of lives--January
17th, 2010-- After 40 years of defeat and
failure, America's "war on drugs" is being
buried in the same fashion as it was born – amid
bloodshed, confusion, corruption and scandal.
US agents are being pulled from South America;
Washington is putting its narcotics policy
under review, and a newly confident region is
no longer prepared to swallow its fatal
Prohibition error. Indeed, after the expenditure
of billions of dollars and the violent deaths
of tens of thousands of people, a suitable
epitaph for America's longest "war" may well be
the plan, in Bolivia, for every family to be
given the right to grow
coca in its own backyard.
The "war", declared unilaterally throughout the
world by Richard Nixon in 1969, is expiring as
its strategists start discarding plans that
have proved futile over four decades: they are
preparing to withdraw their agents from
narcotics battlefields from Colombia to
Afghanistan and beginning to coach them in the
art of trumpeting victory and melting away into
anonymous defeat. Not surprisingly, the new
strategy is being gingerly aired in the media of
the US
establishment, from The Wall Street Journal to
the Miami Herald. For complete story,
click here.
Supreme Court drops key
case on limits of immunity for prosecutors--January
4th, 2010--The US Supreme Court on Monday
dismissed a case over whether prosecutors who
knowingly procure false testimony that leads to
a
wrongful conviction can later be sued for
damages.
Lawyers announced that the parties in the
underlying lawsuit had agreed to end the case in
a $12 million settlement.
The two innocent men, Terry Harrington and
Curtis McGhee, had spent nearly 26 years in
prison for a murder they didn’t commit. After
the truth was discovered and they were
released, they sued the prosecutors in
Pottawattamie County, Iowa.
An investigation revealed that the prosecutors
helped assemble and present false testimony
that led to their convictions. Messrs.
Harrington and McGhee had been sentenced to life
in prison at hard labor with no possibility of
parole. For complete story,
click here.
Drug giant General Electric uses libel law to
gag doctor
20 Dec 2009 General Electric, one of the world’s
biggest corporations, is using the London libel
courts to gag a senior radiologist after he
raised the alarm over the potentially fatal
risks of one of its drugs. The multinational [GE
Healthcare, a British subsidiary of General
Electric] is suing Henrik Thomsen, a Danish
academic, after he described his experiences of
one of the company’s drugs as a medical
"nightmare". He said some kidney patients at his
hospital contracted a potentially deadly
condition after being administered the drug
Omniscan. For complete story,
click here.
Black leaders urge
census to change how it counts inmates--December
17th, 2009--A coalition of African American
leaders concerned about minorities being
undercounted in the 2010 Census called Wednesday
for inmates at
federal and state prisons to be tallied in their
home communities instead of the towns where they
are incarcerated.
Marc H. Morial, president of the National Urban
League and chairman of a census advisory
committee, said the practice now shortchanges
communities in money and democratic
representation. Census statistics are used to
calculate the allocation of more than $478
billion in federal funds and to draw political
boundaries.
Noting that about 1.2 million of the nation's 40
million African Americans are in prison, Morial
said, "What we have in the prison population
issue is a built-in undercount."
Morial and about a dozen other black leaders
brought up the prison count during a meeting
with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to discuss
how to make the census more accurate, a
perennial problem. In 2000, about 1.3 million
people were overcounted, mostly because of
duplicate counts of whites with multiple homes.
In contrast, about 4.5 million people, mostly
black and Hispanic, were not counted. For
complete story,
click here.
Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy
Capabilities Would 'Shock', 'Confuse' Consumers
By Kim Zetter 01 Dec 2009 Want to know how much
phone companies and internet service providers
charge to funnel your private communications or
records to U.S. law enforcement and spy
agencies? That’s the question muckraker and
Indiana University graduate student Christopher
Soghoian asked all agencies within the
Department of Justice, under a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few
months ago. But before the agencies could
provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened
and filed an objection on grounds that, among
other things, they would be ridiculed and
publicly shamed were their surveillance price
sheets made public. Yahoo writes in its
12-page objection
letter,
that if its pricing information were disclosed
to Soghoian, he would use it "to 'shame' Yahoo!
and other companies -- and to 'shock' their
customers." For complete story,
click here.
Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) --
Prosecutor
Michael Loucks remembers clearly when
lawyers for
Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest drug
company, looked across the table and promised it
wouldn’t break the law again.
It was January 2004, and the attorneys were
negotiating in a conference room on the ninth
floor of the
federal courthouse in Boston, where Loucks
was head of the health-care fraud unit of the
U.S. Attorney’s
Office. One of Pfizer’s units had been
pushing doctors to prescribe an epilepsy drug
called
Neurontin for uses the
Food and Drug Administration had never
approved.
In the
agreement the lawyers eventually hammered
out, the Pfizer unit, Warner-Lambert, pleaded
guilty to two felony counts of marketing a drug
for unapproved uses. For complete story,
click here.
New US vaccine production techniques:
Genetically modified insect cells, E. coli,
caterpillar ovaries24 Nov
2009 Spurred by $487 million in federal
funding, a sprawling new vaccine factory is
opening in North Carolina Tuesday that will
produce shots using dog
cells instead of chicken eggs. A
Connecticut biotech company has also applied to
sell a vaccine employing a radically different
approach involving a
genetically engineered virus infecting insect
cells...
Baxter
International
won approval last month to sell an H1N1 vaccine
in Europe that uses a decades-old line of
African green monkey
kidney cells, and it is working on a
vaccine for the United States. Protein Sciences
of Meriden, Conn., has applied to the FDA for
approval to sell a vaccine made by
genetically engineering
flu genes into a worm virus, which
then infects cells from
caterpillar ovaries to produce the
necessary proteins to make vaccine. VaxInnate of
Cranbury, N.J., for example, produced an
experimental H1N1 vaccine using
genetically engineered
E.coli bacteria, and Vical of
San Diego just won a $1.25 million contract from
the Navy to develop an H1N1 vaccine that
involves injecting DNA sequences from the
virus directly into people. For
complete story,
click here.
(CNN)
-- It was
two-and-a-half days before
Illinois Gov. George Ryan
was to leave office in 2003.
I sat in a crowded
auditorium in Northwestern
University's Law School in
Chicago, where Ryan was
expected to make a major
announcement on capital
punishment.
"Half, if
you will, of the nearly 300
capital cases in Illinois
have been reversed for a new
trial or for some
re-sentencing." he said, his
voice tired but clear.
Wrongful
convictions had been all
over the papers around that
time -- the Anthony Porter
case, the Ford Heights Four,
Rolando Cruz.
"How in
God's name does that happen?
In America, how does it
happen?"
Ryan continued. "How
many more cases of wrongful
conviction have to occur
before we can all agree that
this system in Illinois is
broken?"
On that day,
the governor commuted the
sentences of all death row
inmates in the state and
credited an unlikely source
for helping him make his
decision: Professor David
Protess' undergraduate
Investigative Journalism
class at Northwestern
University's Medill School.
In the
previous decade, Medill
students had uncovered some
of the most high-profile
wrongful convictions in the
city. The class had worked
to secure the release of 11
innocent prisoners, five of
whom were scheduled to be
executed.
As a
wide-eyed journalism student
at Northwestern, I remember
feeling proud of my
classmates, proud of my
school and proud of the
profession I was entering.
Today, six
years later, Protess' class
is far from the center of
the same praise. Presented
with evidence in a new case,
the state attorney's office
is questioning the
motivations of the messenger
-- the class itself. For
complete story,
click here.
Can Prosecutors Be Sued
By People They Framed?--November
4th, 2009--Do
prosecutors have total immunity from lawsuits
for anything they do, including framing someone
for murder? That is the question the justices of
the Supreme Court face Wednesday.
On one side of the case
being argued are Iowa
prosecutors who contend
"there is no
freestanding right not
to be framed." They are
backed by the Obama
administration, 28
states and every major
prosecutors organization
in the country.
On the
other side are two black
men — Terry Harrington
and Curtis McGhee — men
who served 25 years in
prison before evidence
long hidden in police
files resulted in them
being freed. For
complete story,
click here.
9yr-old boy tortured,
says former Guantanamo detainee
--'I was interrogated hundreds of times by the
FBI, CIA and even MI5, beaten, and subjected to
continuous torture, sexual degradation, forced
drugging and religious persecution.'
30 Oct 2009 A British Muslim detained for three
years at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison
manned by the United States, revealed that the
youngest detainee he knew of was a
nine-year-old boy who
was also tortured like the rest.
Ruhal Ahmed’s story was among more accounts of
atrocities committed against the detainees at
Guantanamo, told before an open commission
hearing which began Friday on the sidelines of
an international conference to criminalise war.
The testimonies before the Kuala Lumpur War
Crimes Commission Hearings will be submitted to
a tribunal in conjunction with the Criminalise
War Conference and War Crimes Tribunal 2009
spearheaded by former Malaysian prime minister
Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. Dr Mahathir said that
the tribunal’s decision would be forwarded to
the United Nations for further action.
For complete story,
click here.
California gives the
poor a new legal right--October
17th, 2009--California is embarking on an
unprecedented civil court experiment to pay for
attorneys to represent poor litigants who find
themselves battling powerful adversaries in
vital matters affecting their livelihoods and
families.
The program is the first in the nation to
recognize a right to representation in key civil
cases and provide it for people fighting
eviction, loss of child custody, domestic abuse
or neglect of the elderly or disabled.
Advocates for the poor say the law, which Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger signed this week, levels
the legal playing field and gives
underprivileged litigants a better shot at
attaining justice against unscrupulous
landlords, abusive spouses, predatory lenders
and other foes.
Although some analysts worry that it could swell
state court dockets or eat up resources better
spent on other needs of the poor, the pilot
project that won bipartisan endorsement in the
state Assembly will be financed by a $10
increase in court fees for prevailing parties.
Anybody confronted with criminal charges has a
constitutional right to an attorney, as set out
in the landmark Supreme Court decision in Gideon
vs. Wainwright in 1963. But such a right does
not apply in civil court, and the majority of
citizens fighting what can be life- altering
civil actions now attempt to handle their cases
without professional guidance.
An estimated 4 million people seek to represent
themselves in California in civil matters each
year, the state Judicial Council estimates, not
because they want to but because they can't
afford to hire a lawyer. For complete
story,
click here.
Mystery 'Police' Force
Has Small Montana City on Edge--October
8th, 2009--When
two brand new, shiny black Mercedes SUVs bearing
a "Hardin Police Department" logo drove through
the main thoroughfare of Hardin, Mont., last
week, people took notice.
“How many police forces have Mercedes?” said
Charlene Warren, a local business owner who has
lived in Hardin for more than half a century.
“That threw up a red flag.”
And speaking of flags, it did not go
unnoticed that the emblem on the sides of the
SUVs bore a strong resemblance to the Serbian
national flag.
Furthermore, those "police department" cars
were rolling through Hardin, a small
southeastern Montana town of 3,600 that just
happens not to have a police department.
The luxury vehicles that rolled through town
belonged to the American Police Force (APF), a
California-based security firm that is drafting
a contract that will give it control over a $27
million medium-security prison that was built in
Hardin more than two years ago, but has never
held any prisoners.
But that contract is now on hold as the
Montana State Attorney General’s Office
investigates APF and the Big Horn County
Sheriff's Department enters preliminary talks
about incorporating a real police department in
Hardin so a similar episode doesn’t occur in the
future. For complete story,
click here.
Schoolgirl dies after GlaxoSmithKline HPV
vaccination
--HPV vaccine batch quarantined as
'precautionary measure' --Vaccination part of
[insane] national immunisation programme
29 Sep 2009 An urgent investigation has been
launched after a 14-year-old girl died shortly
after receiving a cervical cancer vaccination at
her school. Natalie Morton was a pupil at the
Blue Coat Church of England School in Coventry,
where she was given the human papilloma virus (HPV)
jab yesterday. She was taken to Coventry
University hospital, where she died at
lunchtime. Three other girls from the school are
reported to have experienced possible side
effects of dizziness and nausea after receiving
the Cervarix jab, which was given to female
pupils as part of a national immunisation
programme against HPV. For complete story,
click here.
American Police Force
Corporation Takes Over Small Town Police Force
and Prisoner-Less Jail
29 Sep 2009 (MT) This is the strange story of
how
American Police
Force,
a little known company which claims to
specialize in training military and security
forces overseas, has seemingly taken control of
a $27 million, never-used jail, and a rural
Montana town's nonexistent police force. After
arriving in this tiny city with three Mercedes
SUVs marked with the logo of a police department
that has never existed, representatives of the
obscure California security company said
preparations were under way to take over
Hardin's jail, which has no prisoners. For
complete story,
click here.
Sean
Conway was steamed at a
Fort Lauderdale judge,
so he did what millions
of angry people do these
days: he blogged about
her, saying she was an
“Evil, Unfair Witch.”
Scott
Dalton
for The
New York
Times
Judge Susan
Criss said a
Facebook
page said a
lawyer was
drinking,
not
grieving,
after a
funeral.
“When you
become an
officer of
the court,
you lose the
full ability
to criticize
the court,”
said
Michael
Downey,
who teaches
legal ethics
at the
Washington
University
law
For complete
story,
click here.
Military
Develops Arsenal of Non-Lethal Weapons
08 Sep 2009 Over the past 20 years, the U.S.
military, as well NATO and UN troops, have had
to defend a variety of locations, stop
approaching vehicles, or disperse crowds without
using deadly force or endangering themselves.
But the weapons at their disposal have
historically been designed to maim or kill. To
give military leaders more options, the U.S.
Defense Dept. established the Joint Non-Lethal
Weapons Program (JNLWP) in 1996. Based at the
Marine Corps Base Quantico and under the
direction of the Commandant of the Marine Corps,
the program develops, evaluates, and deploys
nonlethal devices. Here are some of the weapons
coming out of their laboratories and field
testing... For complete story,
click here.
White House Backs
Controversial Domestic Surveillance Provisions
16 Sep 2009 The Obama administration is urging
lawmakers to extend three provisions of the
controversial domestic surveillance law known as
the USA Patriot Act. The U.S. Justice Department
issued a letter Tuesday asking Congress to renew
provisions of the law that allow authorities to
conduct roving electronic eavesdropping, or
wiretaps, access business records and track
so-called "lone wolf" suspects with no known
links to foreign powers or terrorist groups. The
roving wiretaps would let agents track the
communications of suspects who change their cell
phones or other devices. The provisions are due
to expire on December 31. For complete
story,
click here.
"Capitalism is evil," says new Michael Moore
film Capitalism is evil.
06 Sep 2009 That is the conclusion U.S.
documentary maker Michael Moore comes to in his
latest movie "Capitalism: A Love Story," which
premieres at the Venice film festival Sunday.
Blending his trademark humor with tragic
individual stories, archive footage and
publicity stunts, Moore launches an all out
attack on the capitalist system, arguing that it
benefits the rich and condemns millions to
poverty. For complete story,
click here.
Pfizer to pay record
$2.3B penalty for drug promos--September
2nd, 2009--WASHINGTON
–
Federal prosecutors hit
Pfizer Inc. with a record-breaking $2.3
billion in fines Wednesday and called the
world's largest drugmaker a repeating corporate
cheat for illegal drug promotions that plied
doctors with free golf, massages, and resort
junkets.
Announcing the
penalty as a warning
to all drug
manufacturers,
Justice Department
officials
said the overall
settlement is the
largest ever paid by
a drug company for
alleged violations
of federal drug
rules, and the $1.2
billion criminal
fine is the largest
ever in any U.S.
criminal case. The
total includes $1
billion in
civil penalties
and a $100 million
criminal forfeiture.
Authorities called
Pfizer a
repeat offender,
noting it is the
company's fourth
such settlement of
government charges
in the last decade.
The allegations
surround the
marketing of 13
different drugs,
including big
sellers such as
Viagra, Zoloft, and
Lipitor.
As part of its
illegal marketing,
Pfizer invited
doctors to
consultant meetings
at resort locations,
paying their
expenses and
providing perks,
prosecutors said.
For complete story,
click here.
Proposed bill would allow state authorities
to forcefully quarantine people during pandemic
04 Sep 2009 (MA) A new proposed bill designed to
combat the threat of the H1N1 virus would allow
the state to forcefully quarantine people in the
event of a pandemic. Anyone who refuses to
comply with the quarantine order could face jail
time or a $1000 per day fine. The "Pandemic
Response Bill" would also force health providers
to vaccinate people, authorize forcible entry
into private homes, and impose fines or prison
sentences on anyone not complying with isolation
or quarantine orders. For complete story,
click here.
Aiding Torture: Health Professionals' Ethics
and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the
May 2004 CIA Inspector General's Report
(PHR) 31 Aug 2009 This 6-page white paper,
published August 31, 2009, after the new release
of the May 2004 CIA Inspector General's report,
shows that the extent to which American doctors
and psychologists violated human rights and
betrayed the ethical standards of their
professions by designing, implementing, and
legitimizing a worldwide torture program is
worse than previously known. A team of PHR
doctors authored the white paper, which details
how the CIA relied on medical expertise to
rationalize and carry out abusive and unlawful
interrogations. It also refers to aggregate
collection of data on detainees’ reaction to
interrogation methods. Physicians for Human
Rights is concerned that this data collection
and analysis may amount to human experimentation
and calls for more investigation on this point.
If confirmed, the development of a research
protocol to assess and refine the use of the
waterboard or other techniques would likely
constitute a new, previously unknown category of
ethical violations committed by CIA physicians
and psychologists. For complete story,
click here.
CIA in human experimentation row--Watchdog says US interrogation
doctors may have committed unlawful
experimentation
02 Sep 2009 Doctors and psychologists the CIA
employed to monitor its "enhanced interrogation"
of terror suspects came close to, and may even
have committed, unlawful human experimentation,
a medical ethics watchdog has alleged.
Physicians for
Human Rights
(PHR), a not-for-profit group that has
investigated the role of medical personnel in
alleged incidents of torture at Guantánamo, Abu
Ghraib, Bagram and other US detention sites,
accuses doctors of being far more involved than
hitherto understood. PHR says health
professionals participated at every stage in the
development, implementation and legal
justification of what it calls the CIA's
secret "torture programme". For
complete story,
click here.
Doctors' role in
CIA abuse 'approaches unlawful human
experimentation' - rights group
--Doctors had 'central role' in CIA abuse 31
Aug 2009 A US-based medical rights advocacy
group on Monday blasted health experts for
playing a "central role" in advising and
implementing the CIA's abusive interrogation
techniques used on terrorism suspects.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) issued its
six-page white paper after shocking details
about the range of techniques used by
interrogators, including waterboarding, came to
light one week ago with release of a 2004 CIA
inspector general's report. "Health
professionals played a central role in
developing, implementing and providing
justification for torture," PHR said in its
report... PHR warned that such spy agency
techniques -- and monitoring by doctors to gauge
their effectiveness -- "approaches unlawful
experimentation" on human subjects. The report's
lead author, PHR medical advisor Scott Allen,
said in a statement on the organization's
website, "medical doctors and psychologists
colluded with the CIA to keep observational
records about waterboarding, which approaches
unethical and unlawful human experimentation."
For complete story,
click here.
The Secret History of Hurricane Katrina
By James Ridgeway 28 Aug 2009 The Blackwater
operators described their mission in New Orleans
as "securing neighborhoods," as if they were
talking about Sadr City. When National Guard
troops descended on the city, the Army Times
described their role as fighting "the insurgency
in the city." Brigadier Gen. Gary Jones, who
commanded the Louisiana National Guard's Joint
Task Force, told the paper, "This place is going
to look like Little Somalia. We're going to go
out and take this city back. This will be a
combat operation to get this city under
control." ...And while the government couldn't
seem to keep people from dying on rooftops or
abandoned highways, it wasted no time building a
temporary jail in New Orleans. For
complete story,
click here.
Health-care workers steer clear of swine flu
vaccine
--Many health-care workers have made it obvious
that they are unwilling to be vaccinated.
26 Aug 2009 A new study finds that the majority
of health-care workers refuse to take the swine
flu vaccine due to its possible side effects.
According to a study published in British
Medical Journal, more than half of
health-care workers around the world are worried
about the side effects of the new vaccine.
Doubts about the effectiveness of the vaccine
are also reported as another main reason for
them declining the vaccine. For complete
story,
click here.
Exposed: The Swine Flu Hoax
By Andrew
Bosworth, Ph.D. 24 Aug 2009 If the current H1N1
swine flu virus does become abnormally lethal,
there would be three leading explanations:
first, that the virus was accidentally released,
or escaped, from a laboratory; second, that a
disgruntled lab employee unleashed the virus (as
happened, according to the official version of
events, with the 2001 anthrax attack); or third,
that a group, corporation or government agency
intentionally released the virus in the
interests of profit and power. Each of the three
scenarios represents a plausible explanation
should the swine virus become lethal. The 1918
flu virus was dead and buried -- until, that is,
scientists unearthed a lead coffin to obtain a
biopsy of the corpse it contained. For complete
story,
click here.
Rendition of Terror
Suspects Will Continue Under Obama
25 Aug 2009 The Obama administration will
continue the Bush regime’s practice of sending
terror suspects to third countries for detention
and interrogation, but will monitor their
treatment to insure they are not tortured,
administration officials said on Monday. The
administration officials, who announced the
changes on condition that they not be
identified, said that unlike the Bush
administration, they would give the State
Department a larger role in assuring that
transferred detainees prisoners would not
be abused. [See: Barack Obama: Change We
Can Deceive In --A critique from
the Left By Lori Price 19 Aug 2009.]
For complete story,
click here.
Common Sense 2009By Larry Flynt 20 Aug 2009 The
American government -- which we once called our
government -- has been taken over by Wall
Street, the mega-corporations and the
super-rich. They are the ones who decide our
fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the
people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called
"economic royalists," who choose our elected
officials -- indeed, our very form of
government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance
to the tune of their corporate masters. In
America, corporations do not control the
government. In America, corporations are the
government. This was never more obvious than
with the Wall Street bailout, whereby the very
corporations that caused the collapse of our
economy were rewarded with taxpayer dollars.
For complete story,
click here.
'The guard called
a Homeland Security
Officer who asked Thomas what he was
filming.' Homeland Security cop
arrests man for filming FBI building in NYC
By Carlos Miller 20 Aug 2009 A 43-year-old man
was jailed for six hours – and had his camera
and memory card confiscated by a judge - after
filming an FBI building from across the street
in New York City Monday. Randall Thomas, a
professional photographer, said he was
standing on the corner of Duane Street and
Broadway in downtown Manhattan when he used his
video camera to pan up and down on the 42-story
building at 26 Federal Plaza. He was immediately
accosted by a security guard in a brown uniform
who told him he was not allowed to film the
building. For complete story, click here.
Police
Taser use 'up nearly a third'
17 Aug 2009 Police use of Taser stun guns has
increased by nearly a third, figures revealed
today. Officers fired the electro-shock weapons
226 times in the first three months of this year
- up from 174 in the last three months of 2008.
For complete story,
click here.
Second 9/11
Investigation Petition Moves Toward NYC November
Ballot By Barbara G.
Ellis for Portland 9/11 Legislative Alliance 20
Aug 2009 A second 9/11 investigation about the
destruction of the World Trade Center and attack
on the Pentagon--this one independent of the
U.S. government--may start late this year if
legal debris is cleared away for approval as a
referendum issue on November 3 in New York
City.
Government's Tamiflu advice is wrong, says WHO
22 Aug 2009 Only seriously ill and vulnerable
patients should be prescribed antiviral drugs to
help them to get over swine flu, the World
Health Organisation said yesterday, in advice
which conflicts with the decision taken by the
British Government to prescribe Tamiflu to
everyone with swine flu. Most people will
recover from swine flu within a week, just as
they would from seasonal forms of influenza, the
WHO said. For complete story,
click here.
Joseph
Thurura, 32, was arrested in June
2008 and charged with the rape of a
44-year-old patient at Integrated
Living Services, where he was a
caregiver.
The
woman was impregnated but had a
miscarriage. For complete
story,
click here.
Mexico Legalizes Drug
Possession--August
21st, 2009--MEXICO
CITY (AP) —
Mexico enacted a controversial law on Thursday
decriminalizing possession of small amounts of
marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs while
encouraging government-financed treatment for drug
dependency free of charge.
The law sets out
maximum “personal use” amounts for drugs, also
including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained
with those quantities will no longer face criminal
prosecution; the law goes into effect on Friday.
For complete story,
click here.
Swine flu jab link to
killer nerve disease: Leaked letter reveals concern
of neurologists over 25 deaths in America
15 Aug 2009 A warning that the new swine flu jab is
linked to a deadly nerve disease has been sent by
the Government to senior neurologists in a
confidential letter. The letter from the Health
Protection Agency, the official body that oversees
public health, has been leaked to The Mail on
Sunday, leading to demands
to know why the information has not been given to
the public before the vaccination of millions of
people, including children, begins. It
tells the neurologists that they must be alert for
an increase in a brain disorder called
Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), which could be
triggered by the vaccine. The letter, sent to about
600 neurologists on July 29, is the first sign that
there is concern at the highest levels that the
vaccine itself could cause serious complications.
For complete story,
click here.
Sheriff's Office defies
judge on order for system password--August
15th, 2009--A Maricopa County Superior Court
judge on Friday ordered that the Sheriff's Office
divulge the password it forcefully installed on a
county computer system linked to sensitive state and
federal criminal- justice data.
But Chief Deputy David Hendershott later said he
will refuse to share the password - even if it means
he goes to jail.
During the Friday hearing, Judge Joseph Heilman said
that if the Sheriff's Office doesn't divulge the
password by Wednesday, he will "hold someone in
contempt of court."
"I assume it's going to be someone seated at this
table," he added, referring to Hendershott.
Hendershott said he could not reveal the password
under federal law. And if he goes to jail: "I bet I
get a pretty decent place. Something with a view of
the dump."
Heilman would not comment on the remark.
(Webmaster Note: Hiding something, are we?)
For complete story,
click here.
Antidepressant use doubles
in U.S., study finds--August
3rd, 2009--WASHINGTON
(Reuters) – Use of
antidepressant drugs in the United States
doubled between 1996 and 2005, probably because of a
mix of factors, researchers reported on Monday.
About 6 percent of
people were prescribed
an antidepressant in
1996 -- 13 million
people. This rose to
more than 10 percent or
27 million people by
2005, the researchers
found.
"Significant increases
in antidepressant use
were evident across all
sociodemographic groups
examined, except
African Americans,"
Dr. Mark Olfson of
Columbia University
in New York and Steven
Marcus of the
University of
Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia wrote in
the Archives of General
Psychiatry. For
complete story,
click here.
(Webmaster Note:
Drugs are not the
answer!)
Gulags we can
believe in:
AP
sources: Military-civilian terror prison eyed--The facility would operate as a
hybrid prison
system jointly operated by the Justice Department,
the military and the Department of Homeland
Security. 02 Aug 2009 The Obama administration
is looking at creating a courtroom-within-a-prison
complex in the U.S. to house suspected terrorists,
combining military and civilian detention facilities
at a single maximum-security prison. Several senior
U.S. officials said the administration is eyeing a
soon-to-be-shuttered state maximum security prison
in Michigan and the 134-year-old military
penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., as possible
locations for a heavily guarded site to hold the 229
prisoners now jailed at the Guantanamo Bay detention
camp in Cuba. The administration's plan, according
to three government officials, calls for:
long-term holding cells for undetermined number of
prisoners who will never face trial;
building detention cells for
prisoners ordered released by courts but still held
behind bars. For complete story,
click here.
How about this for a New
Rule: Not everything in
America has to make a
profit. It used to be that
there were some services and
institutions so vital to our
nation that they were exempt
from market pressures. Some
things we just didn't do for
money. The United States
always defined capitalism,
but it didn't used to define
us. But now it's becoming
all that we are.
Did you know, for example,
that there was a time when
being called a "war
profiteer" was a bad thing?
But now our war zones are
dominated by private
contractors and mercenaries
who work for corporations.
There are more private
contractors in Iraq than
American troops, and we pay
them generous salaries to do
jobs the troops used to do
for themselves -- like
laundry. War is not supposed
to turn a profit, but our
wars have become boondoggles
for weapons manufacturers
and connected civilian
contractors.
Prisons used to be a
non-profit business, too.
And for good reason -- who
the hell wants to own a
prison? By definition you're
going to have trouble with
the tenants. But now prisons
are big business. A company
called the Corrections
Corporation of America is on
the New York Stock Exchange,
which is convenient since
that's where all the real
crime is happening anyway.
The CCA and similar
corporations actually lobby
Congress for stiffer
sentencing laws so they can
lock more people up and make
more money. That's why
America has the world;s
largest prison population
-- because actually
rehabilitating people would
have a negative impact on
the bottom line.
Television news is another
area that used to be roped
off from the profit motive.
When Walter Cronkite died
last week, it was odd to see
news anchor after news
anchor talking about how
much better the news
coverage was back in
Cronkite's day. I thought,
"Gee, if only you were in a
position to do something
about it."
But maybe they aren't.
Because unlike in Cronkite's
day, today's news has to
make a profit like all the
other divisions in a media
conglomerate. That's why it
wasn't surprising to see the
CBS Evening News broadcast
live from the Staples Center
for two nights this month,
just in case Michael Jackson
came back to life and sold
Iran nuclear weapons. In
Uncle Walter's time, the
news division was a loss
leader. Making money was the
job of The Beverly
Hillbillies. And now
that we have reporters
moving to Alaska to hang out
with the Palin family, the
news is The Beverly
Hillbillies.
And finally, there's health
care. It wasn't that long
ago that when a kid broke
his leg playing stickball,
his parents took him to the
local Catholic hospital, the
nun put a thermometer in his
mouth, the doctor slapped
some plaster on his ankle
and you were done. The bill
was $1.50, plus you got to
keep the thermometer.
But like everything else
that's good and noble in
life, some Wall Street
wizard decided that
hospitals could be big
business, so now they're run
by some bean counters in a
corporate plaza in
Charlotte. In the U.S.
today, three giant
for-profit conglomerates own
close to 600 hospitals and
other health care
facilities. They're not
hospitals anymore; they're
Jiffy Lubes with bedpans.
America's largest hospital
chain, HCA, was founded by
the family of Bill Frist,
who perfectly represents the
Republican attitude toward
health care: it's not a
right, it's a racket. The
more people who get sick and
need medicine, the higher
their profit margins. Which
is why they're always
pushing the Jell-O.
Because medicine is now
for-profit we have things
like "recision," where
insurance companies hire
people to figure out ways to
deny you coverage when you
get sick, even though you've
been paying into your plan
for years. For complete
story,
click here.
Whistleblower tells of America's hidden nightmare
for its sick poor--When an insurance firm boss saw a field
hospital for the poor in Virginia, he knew he had to
speak out. By Paul Harris 26 Jul 2009 Wendell
Potter can remember exactly when he took the first
steps on his journey to becoming a whistleblower and
turning against one of the most powerful industries
in America. It was July 2007 and Potter, a senior
executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was
visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain
districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert
in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic
at a fairground just across the state border in Wise
County, Virginia. Potter, who had worked at Cigna
for 15 years, decided to check it out. What he saw
appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most
without any medical insurance, descended on the
clinic from out of the hills... Potter took pictures
of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked
pavements. For complete story,
click here.
Jimmy Carter Leaves
Church Over Treatment of Women--July
20th, 2009--After
more than 60 years together, Jimmy Carter has
announced himself at odds with the Southern Baptist
Church -- and he's decided it's time they go their
separate ways. Via
Feministing, the former president called the
decision "unavoidable" after church leaders
prohibited women from being ordained and insisted
women be "subservient to their husbands." Said
Carter in an essay in
The Age:
At its most repugnant,
the belief that women
must be subjugated to
the wishes of men
excuses slavery,
violence, forced
prostitution, genital
mutilation and national
laws that omit rape as a
crime. But it also costs
many millions of girls
and women control over
their own bodies and
lives, and continues to
deny them fair access to
education, health,
employment and influence
within their own
communities.
More bodies go unclaimed as
families can't afford funeral costs21 Jul 2009 The poor economy is taking a toll
even on the dead, with an increasing number of bodies in
Los Angeles County going unclaimed by families who
cannot afford to bury or cremate their loved ones. At
the county coroner's office -- which handles homicides
and other suspicious deaths -- 36% more cremations were
done at taxpayers' expense in the last fiscal year over
the previous year, from 525 to 712. For complete
story,
click here.
Executives,
other highly compensated employees receive more than
one-third of all pay in U.S.
21 Jul 2009 The nation's wealth gap is widening amid an
uproar about lofty pay packages in the financial world.
Executives and other highly compensated employees now
receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S.,
according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Social
Security Administration data -- without counting
billions of dollars more in pay that remains off federal
radar screens that measure wages and salaries. Highly
paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4
trillion in total U.S. pay in 2007, the latest figures
available. The compensation numbers don't include
incentive stock options, unexercised stock options,
unvested restricted stock units and certain benefits.
For complete story,
click here.
CIA
Supervisor Claimed He Used Fire Ants On Detainee
By Aram Roston 16 Jul 2009 A recently released legal
memo describing interrogation techniques showed that
Bush Administration lawyers had approved the use of
"insects" in interrogations. "You would like to place
[Abu] Zubaydeh in a cramped confinement box with an
insect," Jay Bybee, then a Justice Department lawyer and
now a federal judge, wrote in 2002... A CIA supervisor
involved in the "enhanced interrogation" program bragged
to other CIA employees about using fire ants while
during questioning of a top terror suspect, according to
several sources formerly with the Agency. The official
claimed to other Agency employees, the sources say, to
have put the stinging ants on a detainee's head to help
break him. The CIA insists, however, that no matter what
the man said, it never took place. For complete
story,
click here.
317 cars burned
ahead of Bastille Day
--Disaffected youths frustrated with high unemployment
rates and their view of France's failure to integrate
ethnic minorities 14 Jul
2009 French youths burned 317 cars and wounded 13 police
officers overnight on the eve of the Bastille Day
national holiday, police said Tuesday. By 6:00 am (0400
GMT), police headquarters in Paris had recorded 317
burnt out cars -- up 6.7 percent on 2008 -- and 240
arrests, almost double the total for the same period
last year. These numbers were expected to increase as
fresh reports came in. For details,
click here.
Some Guantanamo
Bay Prisoners May Be Held Indefinitely
--DoD lawyer: Any detainee, even
if acquitted, could be held indefinitely
10 Jul 2009 An Obama administration official told
Senators Tuesday that some detainees at the Guantanamo
Bay detention facility will most likely be held
indefinitely if they pose a threat. The official spoke
at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing... At a
Senate hearing, Defense Department lawyer Jeh Johnson
described one group of prisoners that will remain behind
bars. "There will be at the end of the review a
category of people that we in the administration believe
must be retained for reasons of public safety and
national security, and they're not necessarily
people that we'll prosecute," Johnson said. Johnson also
said any detainee, even if acquitted, could be held
indefinitely. "And we've gone through our review
period and we've made through the assessment the person
is a security threat....I think it's our view that we
would have the ability to detain that person,"
Johnson said. For complete story,
click here.
That muttered curse word that
reflexively comes out when you stub your
toe could actually make it easier to
bear the throbbing pain, a new study
suggests.
Swearing is a common response to
pain, but no previous research has
connected the uttering of an expletive
to the actual physical
experience of pain.
"Swearing has been around for
centuries and is an almost universal
human linguistic phenomenon," said
Richard Stephens of Keele University in
England and one of the authors of the
new study. "It taps into emotional brain
centers and appears to arise in the
right brain, whereas most
language production occurs in the
left cerebral hemisphere of the brain."
Stephens and his fellow Keele
researchers John Atkins and Andrew
Kingston sought to test how swearing
would affect an individual's
tolerance to pain. Because swearing
often has an exaggerating effect that
can overstate the severity of pain, the
team thought that swearing would lessen
a person's tolerance.
As it turned out, the opposite seems
to be true.
The researchers enlisted 64
undergraduate volunteers and had them
submerge their hand in a tub of ice
water for as long as possible while
repeating a swear word of their choice.
The experiment was then repeated with
the volunteer repeating a more common
word that they would use to describe a
table.
Contrary to what the researcher
expected, the volunteers kept their
hands submerged longer while repeating
the swear word. For complete story,
click here.
(Webmaster note: Swearing is good
for you.)
The Truth about the Flu Shot
By Infowars 10 Jul 2009 If the government mandates a
series of flu shots this fall -- so far they are only
"recommending” the shots -- you can expect to get a dose
of thimerosal (mercury), formaldehyde, detergent, MF-59
(an oil-based adjuvant), and other toxins. Incidentally,
if you believe the government will not kidnap you at
gunpoint and lock you in a concentration camp and
possibly force you to take these toxins, check out
Executive Order 13295
of April 4, 2003. It states that the government has the
authority to establish "regulations providing for the
apprehension, detention, or conditional release of
individuals to prevent the introduction, transmission,
or spread of suspected communicable diseases," including
diseases at that time "not yet isolated or named." Of
course, the government will decide if you have a deadly
disease or not. For complete story,
click here.
When Philadelphia police
shot and killed a homeless
man brandishing a utility
knife Friday in the
concourse near City Hall, it
had special meaning for
state Supreme Court Justice
Seamus P. McCaffery.
Twenty years ago,
McCaffery told an audience
of Philadelphia court and
municipal officials, he was
a police sergeant with the
subway unit.
"I know what those
officers are going through
down there dealing with the
homeless," McCaffery said.
"That's the kind of tragedy
that we don't want to
happen. These are human
beings that we as a society
need to step up to the plate
and help."
Yesterday McCaffery got
that chance, joining
Philadelphia court officials
to announce the creation of
the city's first Mental
Health Court.
The court, which begins
today with a pilot group of
15 individuals, is to take a
group of nonviolent inmates
about to complete their jail
terms and make sure they
have the necessary therapy
and supervision lined up to
successfully live in the
community. For
complete story,
click here.
(Webmaster Note: The
"therapy" utilized to modify
behavior in and out of
prison is not based on
science and actually causes
severe psychological
distress and trauma.
Let's not jump from the
frying pan (current
prison/sentencing system)
into the fire
(pseudo-science and
cult-like brainwashing of
"offenders" aka our fellow
citizens.)
Abu Ghraib Crucifixion Death
Demonstrates Need for Independent Criminal Investigation
into U.S. Torture Program--June
29th, 2009--Washington, DC -- A report
published in the June 22nd issue of The New Yorker
magazine that a prisoner had been crucified by the CIA
at the Abu Ghraib prison highlighted the need to apply
the rule of law to the U.S. torture program. This issue
will be discussed at a press conference at 9:30 on
Monday morning at the National Press Club in Washington,
DC.
Kevin Zeese, who is filing complaints on Monday
against three CIA lawyers who facilitated torture
said: "The United States must face the reality of
the extent of the torture program under the
Bush-Cheney administration. War crimes were
committed. The toxic poison of torture will not be
removed from the body politic unless the rule of law
is applied." Zeese said "the filing of complaints
against CIA torture lawyers is a first step in
ensuring an independent legal review of the U.S.
torture program."
According to the New Yorker
report authored by Jane Mayer "A forensic examiner
found that he (the prisoner) had essentially been
crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having
been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering
broken ribs. Military pathologists classified the
case a homicide." Mayer further reports "No criminal
charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A.
officer involved in the torture program, despite the
fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by
agency personnel died as a result of mistreatment."
For complete story,
click here.
Lawsuit accuses Xe contractors
of murder, kidnapping, child prostitution02 Jul 2009 A just-amended lawsuit alleges six
additional instances of unprovoked attacks on Iraqi
civilians by Blackwater mercenaries. Three people,
including a 9-year-old boy, are said to have died. Also
added to the suit is a racketeering count accusing
Blackwater founder Erik Prince of running an ongoing
criminal enterprise involved in, among other things,
kidnapping and child prostitution.
The latest charges, filed this week in U.S. District
Court in Alexandria, bring to more than 60 the number of
Iraqis allegedly killed or wounded since 2005 by armed
Blackwater mercenaries guarding U.S. diplomatic
personnel in Iraq. The Moyock, N.C.-based security
company, since renamed Xe, earned more than $1 billion
under that contract before the State Department, under
pressure from the Iraqi government, let it lapse in May.
For complete story,
click here.
08 May 2007 (Received July 2nd, 2009) Clermont County,
OH) Target 5 has discovered that an alarming number of U.S.
troops are having severe reactions to some of the vaccines
they receive in preparation for going overseas. "This is the
worst cover-up in the history of the military," said an
unidentified military health officer who fears for his job.
A shot from a syringe is leaving some U.S. servicemen and
women on the brink of death. "When the issue, I believe, of
the use of the vaccine comes out, I believe it will make the
Walter Reed scandal pale in comparison," said the health
officer.
For complete story,
click here.
ACLU Says Government
Used False Confessions
02 Jul 2009 The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday accused
the Obama administration of using statements elicited through
torture to justify the confinement of a detainee it represents
at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The ACLU is
asking a federal judge to throw out those statements and others
made by Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who
may have been as young as 12 when he was captured.
His attorney argued that Jawad was abused in U.S. custody,
threatened and subjected to intense sleep deprivation. "The
government's continued reliance on evidence gained by torture
and other abuse violates centuries of U.S. law and suggests the
current administration is not really serious about breaking with
the past," said ACLU lawyer Jonathan Hafetz, who is
representing Jawad in a lawsuit challenging his detention.
For complete story,
click here.
White House Drafts Executive Order to
Allow Indefinite Detention of Terror Suspects --Friday
26 Jun 2009 5:18 PM The Obama administration, fearing a battle
with Congress that could stall plans to close Guantanamo, has
drafted an executive order that would reassert presidential
authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely,
according to three senior government officials with knowledge of
White House deliberations. Such an order would embrace claims
by former president [sic] George W. Bush that certain people can
be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of
war. Under one White House draft that was being discussed
earlier this month, according to administration officials,
detainees would be imprisoned at a military facility on U.S.
soil but their ongoing detention would be subject to annual
presidential review. U.S. citizens would not be held in the
system. For complete story,
click here.
Agents say DEA is forcing them
illegally to work in Afghanistan 21 Jun 2009
As the Obama administration ramps up the Drug Enforcement
Administration's presence in Afghanistan, some special-agent
pilots contend that they're being illegally forced to go to a
combat zone, while others who've volunteered say they're not
being properly equipped. In interviews with McClatchy, more
than a dozen DEA agents describe a badly managed system in which
some pilots have been sent to Afghanistan under duress or as
punishment for bucking their superiors. For complete
story,
click here.
Lilly Sold Drug for Dementia Knowing It
Didn't Help, Files Show 12 Jun 2009 Eli Lilly
& Co. urged doctors to prescribe Zyprexa for elderly patients
with dementia, an unapproved use for the antipsychotic, even
though the drugmaker had evidence the medicine didn’t work for
such patients, according to unsealed internal company documents.
For complete story,
click here.
Neo-Nazis are in the Army now
--Why the U.S. military is ignoring its own regulations and
permitting white supremacists to join its ranks. By Matt
Kennard 14 Jun 2009 As the conflicts have dragged on, the
military has loosened regulations, issuing "moral waivers" in
many cases, allowing even those with criminal records to join
up... The lax regulations have also opened the military's doors
to neo-Nazis, white supremacists and gang members -- with
drastic consequences. Some neo-Nazis have been charged with
crimes inside the military, and others have been linked to
recruitment efforts for the white right... Many white
supremacists join the Army to secure training for, as they see
it, a future domestic race war.
Others claim to be shooting Iraqis not to pursue the military's
strategic goals but because killing "hajjis" is their duty as
white militants... Tom Metzger is the former grand
wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and current leader of the White Aryan
Resistance. He tells me the military has never been more
tolerant of racial extremists. "Now they are letting everybody
in," he says. (Unable to locate story at time of
archiving.)
Shooting Highlights
Growth of [Rightwing] Hate Groups
--Suspect James Von Brunn Railed Against Blacks, Jews, Found
Allies On White Supremacist Web Sites
10 Jun 2009 Federal investigators in Washington, D.C. are
scouring the troubled history of 88 year-old shooting suspect
James Von Brunn - an anti-Semite with a lifelong grievance
against the government who found allies on white supremacist Web
sites. The Holocaust Museum shootings came 11 days after another
hate crime, the murder of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller.
The suspect in that shooting, Scott Roeder, is described as an
anti-abortion rights radical terrorist. For
complete story,
click here.
Readying Americans for
Dangerous, Mandatory Vaccinations
--Around $6 billion or more will be spent to develop, produce,
and stockpile vaccines and other drugs to counteract claimed
bioterror agents. By Stephen
Lendman 10 Jun 2009 At least three US federal laws should
concern all Americans and suggest what may be coming - mandatory
vaccinations for hyped, non-existent threats, like H1N1 (Swine
Flu). Vaccines and drugs like Tamiflu endanger human health but
are hugely profitable to drug company manufacturers. The Project
BioShield Act of 2004 (S. 15) became law on July 21, 2004...The
Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act slipped
under the radar when George Bush signed it into law as part of
the 2006 Defense Appropriations Act (HR 2863). It lets the HHS
Secretary declare any disease an epidemic or national emergency
requiring mandatory vaccinations. [See:
DoD to carry out 'military missions' during
pandemic, WMD attack and
DoD to 'augment civilian law' during
pandemic or bioterror attack.]
For complete story,
click here.
Ruling allowing Taser
use to get DNA may be nation's first
04 Jun 2009 It is legally permissible
for police to zap a suspect with a Taser to obtain a DNA sample,
as long as it’s not done "maliciously, or to an excessive
extent, or with resulting injury," a county judge has ruled in
the first case of its kind in New York State, and possibly the
nation. Niagara County Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza decided that
the DNA sample obtained Sept. 29 from Ryan S. Smith of Niagara
Falls is legally valid and can be used at his trial. For
complete story,
click here.
Marines Train
"Civilians" to Accept Coming Martial Law
(Infowars) 01 Jun 2009 On May 23, the Staten Island Real-Time
News
reported on
"mock raids at the public park to give civilians a feel for how
soldiers operate in battle." Or maybe that should be "mock
raids" to give civilians a taste of things to come and, of
course, get them acclimated to the presence of uniformed and
armed soldiers in their midst. It is interesting the Marines
characterized Flushing Meadows Park as "enemy territory." In
fact, according to our rulers and their military functionaries,
the entire United States is "enemy territory" in need of martial
law. For complete story,
click here.
Abu Ghraib abuse photos 'show rape'
--Photographs of alleged prisoner abuse which Barack Obama is
attempting to censor include images of apparent rape and sexual
abuse, it has emerged. 28 May 2009 At least one picture
shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner
while another is said to show a male translator raping a male
detainee. Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults
on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a
phosphorescent tube... Detail of the content emerged from Major
General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an
inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. Allegations of rape
and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there
were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their
existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. [See:
'I saw ___ fucking a kid...' Source: The "Taguba Report" On
Treatment Of Abu Ghraib Prisoners In Iraq, statement by Kasim
Mehaddi Hilas, Detainee #151108, 1300/18 Jan 2004.]
For complete story,
click here.
Court: Suspects Can Be Interrogated Without
Lawyer--May
26th, 2009--WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on
Tuesday overturned a long-standing ruling that stopped police from
initiating questions unless a defendant's lawyer was present, a move
that will make it easier for prosecutors to interrogate suspects.
The high court, in a 5-4 ruling, overturned the 1986 Michigan v.
Jackson ruling, which said police may not initiate questioning
of a defendant who has a lawyer or has asked for one unless the
attorney is present. The Michigan ruling applied even to
defendants who agreed to talk to the authorities without their
lawyers. For complete story,
click here.
Obama Is Said to Consider Preventive
Detention For Suspects Deemed 'National Security Threat'
--'The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama
administration over these powers is really stunning.' 21 May
2009 President Bush Obama told human rights advocates at the
White House on Wednesday that he was mulling the need for a
"preventive detention" system that would establish a legal basis for
the United States to incarcerate terrorism suspects who are deemed a
threat to national security but cannot be tried, two participants in
the private session said. One participant said Mr. Obama did not
seem to be thinking about preventive detention for terrorism
suspects now held at Guantánamo Bay, but rather for those captured
in the future, in settings other than a legitimate [?] battlefield
like Afghanistan. For complete story,
click here.
"Minnesota mental health patient
Ray Sandford forced into electro-shock
therapy"--May
20th, 2009--Ray Sandford doesn't want to do
this. On a sunny yet cool mid-April morning, the
pear-shaped 54-year-old emerges from the front door of his
ranch-style group home in Columbia Heights. Wearing a
black windbreaker and gray sweatpants, he grips the handle
of his four-pronged cane and plods begrudgingly toward the
street. One of Sandford's caretakers, a large woman wearing all
purple, follows perfunctorily behind to see him to his
destination. He's told them repeatedly he doesn't want to
do this. He ambles forward. There's nothing he can do now.
No sense in fighting it. Not now. A 20-passenger
Anoka transit bus idles along the curb awaiting his
arrival. A short, swarthy driver assists Sandford. The bus
slowly pulls away and embarks on the 12-mile ride to Mercy
Medical Clinic in
Coon Rapids. Upon arrival, Sandford walks through the
automatic sliding doors and assumes his position in a
wheelchair. He's whisked to a room on the
fifth floor where nurses poke an IV through his fleshy forearm.
He's given a muscle relaxant and general anesthesia.
Within 30 seconds, the room dissolves. He's out cold.
Assistants lay him out on his back. A doctor places electrodes
on either side of Sandford's cranium. Cords extend from
the electrodes, connecting to what appears to be an
antiquated stereo set. A couple of dials protrude from the
machine's display. A physician flips an unassuming switch.
A three-second burst of 140 volts blasts through Sandford's
brain. While he's totally unconscious, Sandford's torso
jerks up and down. His arms and legs writhe only slightly,
steadied by muscle relaxants coursing through his veins.
Sandford's toes curl downward, as if his feet were trying
ball up into fists. He's experiencing a grand mal seizure.
Two minutes later, it's over. Sandford will feel a bit woozy the
rest of the day, but there'll be no lasting pain. His
short-term memory is the only thing that will suffer.
But he'll still remember quite clearly that he never wanted to
do this. "They can literally tie me up, put me in
ambulance, and bring me in to get shock treatments," he
says. "I don't fight it, because there's nothing I can do
by that time. You want to know how I feel? I don't like it
at all." For complete story,
click here.
KBR, Halliburton Accused in Investor
Suit of 'Reign of Terror'
15 Mar 2009 KBR Inc. and Halliburton Co., two of the largest
contractors to the U.S. military, were accused by a pension-fund
shareholder of paying bribes, making false claims and operating
as criminal enterprises. Executives of both companies engaged in
a "reign of terror" that involved paying bribes in Nigeria,
overcharging the U.S. government for services, accepting
kickbacks, engaging in human
trafficking and concealing a rape of an employee,
according to the complaint filed yesterday by a pension fund. [Let
us not forget what US troops had to endure from Cheney's KBR
terrorists: Poisonings, electrocutions, spoiled food and
pathogen-laden water.] For complete story,
click here.
Wisconsin court upholds GPS tracking by police 07 May 2009 Wisconsin police can attach GPS to cars to secretly track anybody's movements without obtaining search warrants, an appeals court ruled Thursday. However, the District 4 Court of Appeals said it was "more than a little troubled" by that conclusion and asked Wisconsin lawmakers to regulate GPS use to protect against abuse by police and private individuals. For complete story, click here.
'A prisoner who started to drift off to sleep would tilt over and be caught by his chains. At one point, the agency was allowed to keep prisoners awake for as long as 11 days.' Memos shed light on CIA use of sleep deprivation --Though widely perceived as more effective and less objectionable than other torture methods, memos show it's harsher and more controversial than most realize. And it could be brought back. 10 May 2009 From the beginning, sleep deprivation had been one of the most important elements in the CIA's interrogation torture program, used to help break dozens of suspected terrorists, far more than the most violent approaches. And it is among the methods the agency fought hardest to keep. The technique is now prohibited by President Obama's ban in January on torture methods, although a task force is reviewing its use along with other interrogation methods the agency might employ in the future. For complete story, click here.
An MP who was involved in last month's G20 protests in London is to call for an investigation into whether the police used agents provocateurs to incite the crowds.
Liberal Democrat Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards.
Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon.
Brake, a member of the influential home affairs select committee, will raise the allegations when he gives evidence before parliament's joint committee on human rights on Tuesday.
"When I was in the middle of the crowd, two people came over to me and said, 'There are people over there who we believe are policemen and who have been encouraging the crowd to throw things at the police,'" Brake said. But when the crowd became suspicious of the men and accused them of being police officers, the pair approached the police line and passed through after showing some form of identification.
Brake has produced a draft report of his experiences for the human rights committee, having received written statements from people in the crowd. These include Tony Amos, a photographer who was standing with protesters in the Royal Exchange between 5pm and 6pm. "He [one of the alleged officers] was egging protesters on. It was very noticeable," Amos said. "Then suddenly a protester seemed to identify him as a policeman and turned on him. He legged it towards the police line, flashed some ID and they just let him through, no questions asked."
Amos added: "He was pretty much inciting the crowd. He could not be called an observer. I don't believe in conspiracy theories but this really struck me. Hopefully, a review of video evidence will clear this up."
The Independent Police Complaints Commission has received 256 complaints relating to the G20 protests. Of these, 121 have been made about the use of force by police officers, while 75 relate to police tactics. The IPCC said it had no record of complaints involving the use of police agents provocateurs. A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: "We would never deploy officers in this way or condone such behaviour."
The use of plain-clothes officers in crowd situations is considered a vital tactic for gathering evidence. It has been used effectively to combat football hooliganism in the UK and was employed during the May Day protests in 2001.
Brake said he intends to raise the allegations with the Met's commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, when he next appears before the home affairs select committee. "There is a logic having plain-clothes officers in the crowd, but no logic if the officers are actively encouraging violence, which would be a source of great concern," Brake said.
The MP said that given only a few people were allowed out of the corralled crowd for the five hours he was held inside it, there should be no problem in investigating the allegation by examining video footage. For complete story, click here.
Dole sued over links to Colombian death squads 07 May 2009 Dole Food Company is being sued by the families of 57 people allegedly murdered by paramilitaries hired by the US firm at its banana plantations in Colombia. A lawsuit filed in Los Angeles alleges that Dole hired the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) despite the fact that the group had been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department. For complete story, click here.
Prison Awaiting Hostile Bloggers --The methods of communication where hostile speech is banned include e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones and text messages. --15 lawmakers signed on to H.R. 1966. By David Kravets 05 May 2009 Proposed congressional legislation would demand up to two years in prison for those whose electronic speech is meant to "coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person." Instead of prison, perhaps we should say gulag. The proposal by Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Los Angeles, would never pass First Amendment muster, unless the U.S. Constitution was altered without us knowing. Sanchez’s bill goes way beyond cyberbullying and comes close to making it a federal offense to log onto the internet or use the telephone. [We are so screwed that the *light* from screwed is going to take ten billion years to reach the earth.] For complete story, click here.
Obama administration spearheads wage cuts for American workers --Chrysler, GM set the pace By Patrick Martin 05 May 2009 The wage cuts imposed on auto workers at Chrysler and General Motors at the insistence of the Obama administration demonstrate the class strategy that American big business as a whole is carrying out: to impose a reduction in the living standards of American workers on a scale unprecedented since the Great Depression. The White House has given the green light for nationwide wage-cutting with its demands on Chrysler and GM workers, who have seen wages for new-hires slashed by 50 percent, along with the abolition of cost-of-living raises and cuts in vacation pay. For complete story, click here.
Thought police muscle up in Britain Hal G. P. Colebatch 21 April 2009 Britain appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely. There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent... In the past 10 years I have collected reports of many instances of draconian punishments, including the arrest and criminal prosecution of children, for thought-crimes and offences against political correctness. For complete story, click here.
Report: Two Psychologists Responsible for Devising CIA Torture Methods --Former military officers were paid by the CIA to oversee the waterboarding techniques used against high-profile prisoners 30 Apr 2009 Two psychologists are responsible for designing the CIA's program of waterboarding suspected terrorists and for assuring the government the program was safe, according to an ABC News report. Former military officers Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell had an "important role in developing what became the CIA's torture program," Jameel Jaffer, an attorney with the ACLU, told ABC News... Associates say Jessen and Mitchell were paid up to $1,000 a day by the CIA to oversee the techniques used against high-profile prisoners to extract information in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. For complete story, click here.
'Israel treated its soldiers as guinea pigs' --Experiments carried out in light of what was defined as 'strategic threat of a surprise biological attack facing Israel' 25 Mar 2009 Israel has admitted to developing an anthrax vaccine through a secret research project involving tests on unaware army soldiers. The Israeli Defense Ministry revealed on Wednesday that the vaccine was tested on 716 soldiers while they had not been fully informed about the study, Ynet reported. For complete story, click here.
Pentagon exploring robot killers that can fire on their own --DoD financing studies of self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own 25 Mar 2009 The unmanned bombers that frequently cause unintended civilian casualties in Pakistan are a step toward an even more lethal generation of robotic hunters-killers that operate with limited, if any, human control. The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons. [Yeah, but one good hack and they could be re-programmed to fire upon themselves.] For complete story, click here.
Ex-Bush admin official: Many at Gitmo are innocent 19 Mar 2009 Many prisoners locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush regime official said Thursday. "There are still innocent people there," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years." Wilkerson told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo prisoners were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a "mosaic" of intelligence. For complete story, click here.
Obama quietly gave Blackwater (Xe) $70M in February: Blackwater still works for U.S. in Iraq 17 Mar 2009 The U.S. State Department re-signed the security mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater despite Iraq saying it didn't want the company there, records show. The State Department said $22.2 million deal signed with Blackwater, since renamed Xe, in February was a contract modification concerning aviation work, The Washington Times first reported. The contract expires in September, months after its contract for work in Baghdad was to have run out. For complete story, click here.
Ten Wasted Years: UN Drug Strategy A Failure, Reveals Damning Report--March 11th, 2009--The UN strategy on drugs over the past decade has been a failure, a European commission report claimed yesterday on the eve of the international conference in Vienna that will set future policy for the next 10 years.
The report came amid growing dissent among delegates arriving at the meeting to finalise a UN declaration of intent.
Referring to the UN's existing strategy, the authors declared that they had found "no evidence that the global drug problem was reduced". They wrote: "Broadly speaking, the situation has improved a little in some of the richer countries while for others it worsened, and for some it worsened sharply and substantially, among them a few large developing or transitional countries."
The policy had merely shifted the problem geographically, they said. "Production and trafficking controls only redistributed activities. Enforcement against local markets failed in most countries." For complete story, click here.
Some wounded soldiers 'punished for injuries' --Authorities hold sick, disabled troops to same standards as the able-bodied 10 Mar 2009 About 10,000 soldiers have been assigned to the Army's Warrior Transition units, created for troops recovering from injuries. Instead of gingerly nursing them back to health, however, commanders at Fort Bragg's transition unit readily acknowledge holding them to the same standards as able-bodied soldiers in combat units, often assigning chores as punishment for minor infractions. For complete story, click here.
It's a staggering case; more staggering still that it has scarcely been mentioned on this side of the ocean. Last week two judges in Pennsylvania were convicted of jailing some 2,000 children in exchange for bribes from private prison companies.
Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan sent children to jail for offences so trivial that some of them weren't even crimes. A 15-year-old called Hillary Transue got three months for creating a spoof web page ridiculing her school's assistant principal. Ciavarella sent Shane Bly, then 13, to boot camp for trespassing in a vacant building. He gave a 14-year-old, Jamie Quinn, 11 months in prison for slapping a friend during an argument, after the friend slapped her. The judges were paid $2.6m by companies belonging to the Mid-Atlantic Youth Services Corp for helping to fill its jails. This is what happens when public services are run for profit.
It's an extreme example, but it hints at the wider consequences of the trade in human lives created by private prisons. In the US and the UK they have a powerful incentive to ensure that the number of prisoners keeps rising. For complete story, click here.
'Theory of presidential dictatorship' Bush administration memos on presidential powers stun legal experts --Congress had prohibited the use of torture by U.S. agents, and said "no citizen shall be imprisoned" in this country without legal charges. The memos said neither law could stand in the way of the president's power as commander in chief. 03 Mar 2009 Legal experts said Tuesday that they were taken aback by the claim in the latest batch of secret Bush-era memos that the president alone had the power to set the rules during the war on of terrorism. Yale law professor Jack Balkin called this a "theory of presidential dictatorship. They say the battlefield is everywhere. And the president can do anything he wants, so long as it involves the military and the enemy." For complete story, click here.
FDA ignored debris in syringes--Complaints of filth came in 2005; plant's microbiologist was a teenage dropout 25 Feb 2009 (NC) Months before an Angier company shipped deadly bacteria-tainted drugs, the federal Food and Drug Administration received numerous complaints about sediment and debris in the medicine. The FDA received reports about AM2PAT as early as 2005, but not until December 2007 did the agency issue recall notices to pull the drugs off the market. AM2PAT, which is now the subject of a criminal investigation, sold tainted syringes of heparin and saline that have been linked to five deaths. For complete story, click here.
Lawyer says Guantanamo abuse worse since Obama 25 Feb 2009 Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office as prison guards "get their kicks in" before the camp is closed, according to a lawyer who represents prisoners. Abuses began to pick up in December after Obama was elected, human rights lawyer Ahmed Ghappour told Reuters. He cited beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-forcefeeding detainees who are on hunger strike. For complete story, click here.
AP: Army charity hoards millions 22 Feb 2009 The biggest charity inside the U.S. military has been hoarding tens of millions of dollars meant to help put fighters returning from Iraq and Afghanistan back on their feet. An Associated Press investigation shows that between 2003 and 2007, the Army Emergency Relief grew into a $345 million behemoth. During those years, the charity packed away $117 million into its own reserves while spending just $64 million on direct aid. For complete story, click here.
NYU Students Revoke the Property Destruction Clause By FluxRostrum 19 Feb 2009 Last night at 10 pm, NYU students barricaded themselves into a cafeteria in the student center and refused to leave until the administration met their demands. The students are seeking much more transparency, stabilized tuition and socially responsible investment among other things (details at takebacknyu.com). Although NYPD took up positions inside and outside the building, the NYU administration up until now declined to force the students to leave. For complete story, click here.
Contractors, guardsmen say KBR knew of chemical exposure in Iraq 18 Feb 2009 Ten contractors hired by Houston-based KBR to make repairs at an Iraqi water plant in early 2003 say the company knowingly allowed them and dozens of National Guardsmen to be exposed to cancer-causing chemicals. The allegations from the workers, six of whom live in or near Houston, are documented in a federal arbitration complaint pending in Houston and a related federal lawsuit filed in December by the guardsmen in Indiana, the Houston Chronicle reported Sunday. For complete story, click here.
Contractor Under Criminal Probe for Negligent Electrocution Deaths of U.S. Troops Should Be Denied Future Pentagon Contracts --McCollum (D) Urges DoD to Rescind Contract to KBR 18 Feb 2009 Amid reports that the Department of Defense has recently awarded a multimillion dollar contract to a company under investigation for the electrocution deaths of soldiers, Rep. Betty McCollum (MN-04) today joined Congressional colleagues in sending a letter to Secretary Robert Gates requesting an explanation for the latest award to Kellogg Brown and Root, Inc (KBR), in light of the existing criminal probes against them for the fatality of several U.S. soldiers in Iraq due to faulty electrical work. For complete story, click here.
Judges: Torture, Abuses Undermine Values in U.S., U.K.17 Feb 2009 An international group of judges and lawyers is warning that systemic torture and other abuses in the global "war on terror" have "undermined cherished values" of civil rights in the United States, Britain and other nations. "We have been shocked by the damage done over the past seven years by excessive or abusive counterterrorism measures in a wide range of countries around the world," said Arthur Chaskalson, a member of the International Commission of Jurists, in a statement announcing results of a three-year study of counterterrorism measures since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. For complete story, click here.
Kan. suspends income tax refunds, may miss payroll 16 Feb 2009 Kansas has suspended income tax refunds and may not be able to pay employees on time, the state's budget director said Monday. The state doesn't have enough money in its main bank account to pay its bills, prompting Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to suggest transferring $225 million from other accounts throughout state government. But the move required approval from legislative leaders, and the GOP [sociopaths] refused Monday. For complete story, click here.
Obama administration seeks to block lawsuit over illegal wiretappingBy John Burton and Marge Holland 16 Feb 2009 For the second time in less than a week, lawyers from the Justice Department headed by Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder have embraced the Bush administration's pseudo-legal argument that the "state secrets" doctrine bars civil lawsuits challenging the methods used in its so-called "war on terror..." The most recent intervention also occurred in San Francisco, with the filing of papers February 11 to block an order by United States District Judge Vaughn R. Walker reinstating the claim of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation that it was the target of government wiretapping. For complete story, click here.
Report: U.S. "war on terror" seriously damages human rights --Report illustrated consequences of notorious counter-terrorism practices such as torture, disappearances, arbitrary and secret detention as well as unfair trials. 17 Feb 2009 The so-called "war on terror" launched by the United States following the 9/11 terror attacks has resulted in serious damage to the world's respect for human rights, according to a report released on Monday. The United States "has adopted measures to counter terrorism that are inconsistent with established principles of international humanitarian law and human rights law," said the report, which was released by an independent panel of eminent jurists. It warned that excessive or abusive counter-terrorism measures adopted by the United States were having influence on other countries and causing them to follow suit. for complete story, click here.
A fraud bigger than Madoff --Senior US soldiers investigated over missing Iraq 'reconstruction' billions 16 Feb 2009 In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to 'reconstruct' Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff's notorious Ponzi scheme. In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was sent in "pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills" to the US comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money. Unable to locate at time of archiving. Source: www.independent.co.uk
VA clinic warns of possible contaminant exposure 13 Feb 2009 Thousands of patients at a Veterans Administration clinic [Alvin C. York VA Medical Center in Murfreesboro] in Tennessee may have been exposed to the infectious body fluids of other patients when they had colonoscopies in recent years, and now VA medical facilities all over the U.S. are reviewing their own procedures. For complete story, click here.
Blackwater Changes Its Name to Xe 14 Feb 2009 Blackwater Worldwide is abandoning the brand name that has been tarnished by its work terrorism in Iraq, settling on Xe (pronounced zee) as the new name for its family of two dozen businesses. Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, the subsidiary that conducts much of the company’s overseas operations and domestic training, has been renamed U.S. Training Center Inc., the company said Friday. The company’s rebranding effort grew more urgent after Blackwater guards in Baghdad were involved in a shooting episode in September 2007 that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead. For complete story, click here.
Missing civil liberties:Top Obama Aides Embrace Bush's War on Terror Rhetoric and Enemy Combatant Policy By Jonathan Turley 11 Feb 2009 This has been a uniquely bad week for civil libertarians. The Obama Administration appears to be rushing to dispel any notions that Obama will fight for civil liberties or war crimes investigations. After Eric Holder allegedly assured a senator that there would be no war crimes investigation and seemed to defend Bush policies, Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan, Obama’s Solicitor General nominee, reportedly told a Republican senator that the Administration agreed with Bush that we are "at war" and therefore can hold enemy combatants indefinitely. In the meantime, Obama himself seemed to tie himself in knots when asked about investigating war crimes and leading democrats are again pushing for a symbolic "truth commission." For complete story, click here.
Fraud 'Directly Related' to Financial Crisis Probed --FBI Agents Could be Reassigned from National Security Due to Booming Caseload 11 Feb 2009 The FBI has opened investigations into more than 500 cases of alleged corporate fraud, including 38 that involve major firms and are "directly related" to the national economic crisis, FBI Deputy Director John Pistole told Congress today. The surge in white-collar investigations is putting such a strain on the FBI that Pistole said the bureau is considering reassigning agents from national security, which has been the bureau's priority since the [Bush] 9/11 attacks. For complete story, click here.
Oops! Another (Fox) GOPedophile bites the dust. Fox Newser In Kiddie Porn Bust 10 Feb 2009 A Fox News producer who covered Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign for the cable network is facing child porn charges after federal agents discovered photos and videos on his computer depicting "children under the age of ten being sexually abused by adult men and women." Aaron Bruns, 29, was apparently nabbed after a Pennsylvania state police investigator conducting "pro-active undercover investigations" on an unnamed peer-to-peer network determined that Bruns's computer contained illicit images. For complete story, click here.
Judge deals blow to families suing Blackwater 10 Feb 2009 The survivors of four Blackwater Worldwide mercenaries killed in a grisly ambush in Iraq five years ago have suffered yet another setback in their legal battle with the company. A federal administrative law judge ruled last week the children of one of the slain contractors should receive compensation through a government insurance program known as the Defense Base Act. It prohibits those eligible for benefits from filing lawsuits against companies covered by the insurance. For complete story, click here.
"I believe that the probability that there are additional vials of BSAT [biological select agents and toxins] not captured in our … database is high." Fort Detrick Freezes Research on Dangerous Pathogens As Lab Can't Account For Them 07 Feb 2009 The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) has suspended research activities involving biological select agents and toxins. Army officials took the step on Friday after discovering apparent problems with the system of accounting for high-risk microbes and biomaterials at the Fort Detrick, Maryland, facility. The decision was announced by institute commander Col. John Skvorak in a 4 February memo to employees. The memo, which ScienceInsider has obtained, says the standard of accountability that USAMRIID had been applying to its select agents and toxins was not in line with the standard required by the Army and the Department of Defense. For complete story, click here.
Plague-Infested Mice Missing From New Jersey Research Lab07 Feb 2009 The frozen remains of two mice infected with the bubonic plague are missing from a New Jersey bioterror research facility, and the facility waited seven weeks to report the incident to federal and state authorities. This is the same facility [University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark] where three live plague-inflected mice went missing in September 2005. For complete story, click here.
KBR Gets Huge Contract Despite Electrocutions --KBR Inc., linked to soldiers' electrocutions, wins $35 million defense contract from Pentagon 07 Feb 2009 Defense contractor KBR Inc., which is under criminal investigation in the electrocution deaths of at least two U.S. soldiers in Iraq, has been awarded a $35 million contract by the Pentagon to build an electrical distribution center and other projects there. For complete story, click here.
A Hero Protects America's Children from Psychiatric Abuse--February 5th, 2009--Alaska attorney Jim Gottstein has taken the bull by the horns. It's a bull of many terrifying shapes and forms. First and foremost, it is the raging bull of the Psychopharmaceutical Complex that is goring America's children. It's also the rampaging state government bull that everywhere runs roughshod over the children in its custody and care. And then it's the "bull" handed out by drug companies and organized psychiatry to justify using drugs to suppress the behavior of children. For complete story, click here.
His latest taxpayer-financed media stunt involved the "forced march" of undocumented inmates who are serving out their criminal sentences. Sheriff Arpaio closed down the city streets so that everyone could witness their public humiliation as they walked in chain gangs from a "hard" jail to the infamous Tent City, where they will be forced to endure unsafe conditions including summer months with temperatures of upwards of 120 degrees.
Not only was this inhumane, but violated international human rights principles — not to mention American values — that require us to treat people who are incarcerated with dignity and respect. But Sheriff Arpaio has absolute contempt for the dignity of the people in his custody and demonstrates this by treating people like circus animals.
Though he claims otherwise, Arpaio wasn’t motivated by budgetary or security concerns to march shackled immigrants to the Tent City; he was motivated by the opportunity of self-aggrandizement and the promotion his anti-immigrant agenda. For those reasons, and for those reasons alone, he chose to re-route traffic and waste dwindling law enforcement resources.
Almost all of the people in the forced march were Latino and their humiliation struck one more blow to fairness and human decency in our community. And although the sheriff blatantly continues with his racial profiling practices in so-called "crime suppression sweeps" in Latino neighborhoods, the absence of significant protest from white officials in Arizona and from any federal agency allows the racial targeting to continue unabated. For complete story, click here.
Proposed legislation in Congress would set up camps for US citizensBy mcarl 31 Jan 2009 A bill proposed by Florida Democrat Alcee Hastings would set up a series of emergency centres on U. S. military installations. House Resolution 645 provides that no fewer than six such centres will be built and would give emergency aid, housing and relief services for citizens during a time of disaster or national emergency... Writing on this legislation, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) says that the bill would supplement other 'emergency powers' granted to the federal government since 9/11 and be the mechanism for imposing martial law. For complete story, click here.
Obama lets CIA keep controversial renditions tool 31 Jan 2009 Under executive orders issued by President Obama last week, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, or the secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the U.S. The rendition kidnapping program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured. For complete story, click here.
Buckling
Europe
fears
protests
may
spark
a
new
revolution
29
Jan
2009
The
French
are
revolting.
Teachers,
television
employees,
postal
workers,
students
and
masses
of
other
public-sector
workers
will
today
be
united
in a
hugely
popular
strike
with
car
workers,
supermarket
staff,
journalists
and
thousands
of
others
in
the
private
sector.
One
poll
said
that
75
per
cent
of
the
public
supported
the
action,
which
has
the
backing
of
the
large
union
groups
and
opposition
socialists.
It
will
be a
big
test
for
President
Nicolas
Sarkozy
but,
more
importantly,
the
strike
will
mark
the
biggest
protest
so
far
in
one
of
the
world's
largest
economies
against
the
grief
and
distress
being
caused
by
the
catastrophic
global
downturn.
A
depression
triggered
in
America
is
being
played
out
in
Europe
with
increasing
violence,
and
other
forms
of
social
unrest
are
spreading.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
US
Special
Forces
Unconventional
Warfare
Operations:
overthrowing
governments,
sabotage,
subversion,
intelligence
and
abduction,
FM
3-05.201,
Apr
2003
(Wikileaks)
27
Jan
2009
FM
3-05.201:
Special
Forces
Unconventional
Warfare
Operations
is
current
US
military
doctrine
(policy)
on
the
use
of
indigenous
or
surrogate
forces
to
overthrow
a
foreign
government
and
the
use
of
sabotage,
subversion,
intelligence,
extra-territorial
abductions
and
similar
activities,
the
most
well
known
example
of
which
is
the
US
involvement
in
Nicaragua.
There
is
also
a
section
on
legalities,
including
abductions
("The
United
States
reserves
the
right
to
engage
in
nonconsensual
abductions
for
three
specific
reasons...").
The
296-page
manual
was
made
doctrine
in
April
2003
by
Army
Headquarters,
Washington
DC.
For
complete
story,
click
here.
NATO
High
Commander
Issues
Illegitimate
Order
to
Kill
28
Jan
2009
A
dispute
has
emerged
among
NATO
High
Command
in
Afghanistan
regarding
the
conditions
under
which
alliance
troops
can
use
deadly
violence
against
those
identified
as
insurgents.
In a
classified
document,
which
SPIEGEL
has
obtained,
NATO's
top
commander,
US
General
John
Craddock,
has
issued
a
"guidance"
providing
NATO
troops
with
the
authority
"to
attack
directly
drug
producers
and
facilities
throughout
Afghanistan."
According
to
the
document,
deadly
force
is
to
be
used
even
in
those
cases
where
there
is
no
proof
that
suspects
are
actively
engaged
in
the
armed
resistance
against
the
Afghanistan
government
or
against
Western
troops.
The
directive
was
sent
on
Jan.
5 to
Egon
Ramms,
the
German
leader
at
NATO
Command
in
Brunssum,
Netherlands,
which
is
currently
in
charge
of
the
NATO
ISAF
mission,
as
well
as
David
McKiernan,
the
commander
of
the
ISAF
peacekeeping
force
in
Afghanistan.
Neither
want
to
follow
it.
Both
consider
the
order
to
be
illegitimate
and
believe
it
violates
both
ISAF
rules
of
engagement
and
international
law,
the
"Law
of
Armed
Conflict."
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Lax
and
corrupt
–
Indian
Dr
assesses
clinical
trials--January
21,
2009--An
Indian
doctor
has
slammed
the
nation’s
clinical
trials,
claiming
they
use
the
vulnerable,
the
system
is
corrupt
and
that
the
country
lacks
high
quality
scientists.
The criticisms were made by Dr Amar Jesani in a short-film produced by Dutch non-governmental organisation Wemos. Jesani is a founding member of journals and research centres focused on medical ethics in India and has contributed in government committees on health.
India’s clinical trials came under increasing pressure last year following reports of infant deaths and Jesani’s comments show that some are still deeply uneasy about the current system.
The view held by Jesani, which echoes many who spoke out last year about the infant deaths, is that some drug companies are “compromising science and ethics in the pursuit of profit” and that flaws in the Indian system allow this.
Jesani said: “Unfortunately in my country there are laws but they are not very well implemented so the regulation over the trials, the oversight mechanism, the functioning of the ethics committee and the Drug Controller General of India all of them are so lax that it makes India a big destination for clinical trials.
“They don’t have good scientists; they don’t have enough inspectors to go all over the county. The worst thing in every developing country is corruption. There is too much corruption.”
One consequence of this is that clinical trials use the “desperate” and “most vulnerable” members if Indian society, according to Jesani. This alleged exploitation of India’s poor is what Jesani cites as bothering him most about the current system.
Jesani is a founder member of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME), the Centre for Studies in Ethics and Rights (CSER) and the Centre for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes (CEHAT).
The short-film can be viewed here. For complete story, click here.
KBR
Awarded
Convoy
Support
Center
Contract
by
U.S.
Army
Corps
of
Engineers
28
Jan
2009
KBR
today
announced
it
has
been
awarded
a
$35.4
million
contract
by
the
U.S.
Army
Corps
of
Engineers
(USACE),
Transatlantic
Programs
Center,
Winchester,
Va.,
for
the
Phase
II
design
and
construction
of a
convoy
support
center
at
Camp
Adder
in
Iraq.
The
KBR
team
will
design
and
construct
a
power
plant,
electrical
distribution
center,
water
purification
and
distribution
system,
waste
water
collection
system,
and
associated
information
systems,
along
with
paved
roads
at
this
site.
Work
on
the
project
is
expected
to
begin
in
February
2009.
[OMG!
After
KBR
just
electrocuted
a
bunch
of
US
soldiers?
See:
KBR
must
be
accountable
for
Iraq
deaths-US
senators
27
Jan
2009
U.S.
lawmakers
on
Tuesday
raised
concerns
about
the
U.S.
military's
increased
use
of
private
contractors
mercenaries
in
Iraq
and
Afghanistan,
and
said
KBR
and
other
companies
should
be
held
accountable
for
the
electrocution
deaths
of
U.S.
soldiers
and
other
mistakes
crimes.
Investigator:
Soldier's
electrocution
'negligent
homicide'
22
Jan
2009.
Halliburton
Will
Settle
KBR
Suit
for
$559
Million
27
Jan
2009
Halliburton,
the
huge
oil
services
company
in
Houston,
said
yesterday
that
it
has
agreed
to
pay
$559
million
to
settle
corruption
charges
with
the
U.S.
government
linked
to
its
former
subsidiary
KBR.] For
complete
story,
click
here.
CIA
chief in
Algeria
accused
of
drugging
and
raping
Muslim
women
28 Jan
2009 The
CIA
station
chief in
Algiers
is under
investigation
after
claims
that he
drugged
and
raped
two
Algerian
women at
his
official
residence,
according
to a
report.
Law
enforcement
sources
told
ABC News
that the
41-year-old
officer
had been
sent
home in
October.
He could
face
charges
as early
as next
month.
Investigators
from the
Justice
Department
allegedly
found
more
than a
dozen
secretly
recorded
videotapes
of the
officer
performing
sex acts
with
other
women.
An
official
said one
woman
appeared
to be in
a
"semi-conscious
state".
For
complete
story,
click
here.
Bill Will
Establish
'National
Emergency
Centers' On
Military
Installations
--FEMA Camps
Mandated in
H.R.
645
22 Jan 2009
A Bill to
direct the
Secretary of
Homeland
Security to
establish
national
emergency
centers on
military
installations.
SECTION 1.
This Act may
be cited as
the
'National
Emergency
Centers
Establishment
Act'.
SECTION 2.
ESTABLISHMENT
OF NATIONAL
EMERGENCY
CENTERS.
(a) In
General - In
accordance
with the
requirements
of this Act,
the
Secretary of
Homeland
Security
shall
establish
not fewer
than 6
national
emergency
centers on
military
installations...
(b) Purpose
of National
Emergency
Centers...
(3) to
provide
centralized
locations to
improve the
coordination
of
preparedness,
response,
and recovery
efforts of
government,
private, and
not-for-profit
entities and
faith-based
organizations;
and (4)
to meet
other
appropriate
needs,
as
determined
by the
Secretary of
Homeland
Security.
For complete
story,
click here.
Halliburton
Will Settle
KBR Suit for
$559 Million
27 Jan 2009
Halliburton,
the huge oil
services
company in
Houston,
said
yesterday
that it has
agreed to
pay $559
million to
settle
corruption
charges with
the U.S.
government
linked to
its former
subsidiary
KBR.
Halliburton
said it will
pay $382
million on
behalf of
KBR over the
next two
years to the
Department
of Justice
and will pay
another $177
million to
the
Securities
and Exchange
Commission.
For complete
story,
click here.
A Loophole
In the Rules
--In a
national-security
crisis,
Obama could
deviate from
his own
rules.
24 Jan 2009
A day before
President
Obama signed
executive
orders
closing
Guantánamo
Bay and
banning
torture, the
White
House's top
lawyer
privately
indicated to
Congress
that the new
president
reserved the
right to
ignore his
own (and any
other
president's)
executive
orders. In a
closed-door
appearance
before the
Senate
intelligence
committee,
White House
counsel
Gregory
Craig was
asked
whether the
president
was required
by law to
follow
executive
orders.
According to
people
familiar
with his
remarks, who
asked for
anonymity
when
discussing a
private
meeting,
Craig
answered
that the
administration
did not
believe he
was.
For complete
story,
click here.
Obama CIA
choice won't
call
waterboarding
torture
22 Jan 2009
President
Barack
Obama's
choice to
head the CIA
declined on
Thursday to
call
waterboarding
"torture,"
only days
after his
attorney
general
nominee
condemned
the
interrogation
practice as
precisely
that.
Retired Adm.
Dennis Blair
replied
cautiously
when pressed
on the
waterboarding
question at
a hearing on
his
nomination
to be
director of
national
intelligence.
Torture is
banned by
U.S. and
international
laws. "There
will be no
waterboarding
on my watch.
There will
be no
torture on
my watch,"
Blair said,
refusing to
go further.
For complete
story,
click here.
Whistleblower:
NSA Targeted
Journalists,
Snooped on All
U.S.
Communications
--NSA analyzed
metadata to
determine which
communications
would be
collected
22 Jan 2009 Just
one day after
George W. Bush
left office, an
NSA
whistleblower
has revealed
that the
National
Security
Agency's
warrantless
surveillance
program targeted
U.S.
journalists, and
vacuumed in all
domestic
communications
of Americans,
including,
faxes, phone
calls and
network traffic.
Russell Tice, a
former NSA
analyst,
spoke
on Wednesday to
MSNBC host Keith
Olbermann. "The
National
Security Agency
had access to
all Americans'
communications,"
he said. "Faxes,
phone calls and
their computer
communications.
...They
monitored all
communications."
For complete
story,
click here.
Plague kills 40
al-Qaeda operatives
--Security
source: "This is the
deadliest weapon yet
in the war against
terror. Most of the
terrorists do not
have the basic
medical supplies
needed to treat the
disease." 19 Jan
2009 'Anti'-terror
bosses last night
hailed their latest
ally in the war
on of terror --
the Black Death. At
least 40 al-Qaeda
members died
horribly after being
struck down with the
disease that
devastated Europe in
the Middle Ages. The
killer bug, also
known as the plague,
swept through
insurgents training
at a forest camp in
Algeria, North
Africa. [Let's
see... who has the
technology to
develop and
disseminate plague
as a bioweapon?
See:
Three genes can turn
normal flu into a
killer, University
of Wisconsin-Madison
researchers find
30 Dec 2008 and
Killer flu recreated
in the lab 07
Oct 2004,
etc.] For
complete story,
click here.
'In some places,
Washington will look
like an occupied
city.'
High-tech security
bubble wraps
Washington
--The
military, supporting
civilian
authorities, is
using sophisticated
new surveillance
systems developed
for Iraq and
Afghanistan wars
18 Jan 2009 As the
multitudes arrive
for the historic
inauguration of
Barack Obama, the
most high-tech
security bubble ever
created is in place
to protect the
incoming president
from any foreseeable
act of God, nature
or man [or Bush]. At
least 150
multi-agency "intel
teams" will deploy
throughout the
region so that
undercover FBI
agents and other
behavior-analysis
specialists can look
for trouble. In some
places, Washington
will look like an
occupied city.
Sharpshooters will
be on virtually
every building.
Law-enforcement and
intelligence nerve
centers and mobile
command posts are
sprouting. The FBI
is deploying an
armored assault
vehicle and a
weapons-of-mass-destruction
response truck. The
military, supporting
civilian
authorities, is
using sophisticated
new surveillance
systems developed
for the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars to
monitor the mall...
For complete story,
click here.
Democratic
chairman to
reintroduce military
draft measure
14 Jan 2009 Rep.
Charles Rangel
(D-N.Y.) likely will
introduce his
controversial
legislation to
reinstate the draft
again this year, but
he will wait until
after the economic
stimulus package is
passed. Asked if he
plans to introduce
the legislation
again in 2009,
Rangel last week
said, "Probably …
yes. I don’t want to
do anything this
early to distract
from the issue of
the economic
stimulus." For
complete story,
click here.
Supreme Court
loosens law on
illegal searches--January
15, 2009--Reporting
from Washington --
The Supreme Court
pulled back on the
"exclusionary rule"
Wednesday and ruled
that evidence from
an illegal search
can be used if a
police officer made
an innocent mistake.
The 5-4 opinion
signals that the
court is ready to
rethink this key
rule in criminal law
and restrict its
reach. It will also
give prosecutors and
judges nationwide
more leeway to make
use of evidence that
may have been seen
as questionable
before. For
complete story,
click here.
'His treatment
met the legal
definition of
torture. And that's
why I did not refer
the case for
prosecution.'
Detainee Tortured,
Says U.S. Official
14 Jan 2009 The top
Bush administration
official in charge
of deciding whether
to bring Guantanamo
Bay prisoners to
trial has concluded
that the U.S.
military tortured a
Saudi national who
allegedly planned to
participate in the
Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks,
interrogating him
with techniques that
included sustained
isolation, sleep
deprivation, nudity
and prolonged
exposure to cold,
leaving him in a
"life-threatening
condition."
"We tortured
[Mohammed
al-]Qahtani,"
said Susan J.
Crawford, in her
first interview
since being named
convening authority
of military
commissions by
Defense Secretary
Robert M. Gates in
February 2007. "His
treatment met the
legal definition of
torture. And that's
why I did not refer
the case" for
prosecution.
For complete story,
click here.
A Record Year for
the Pharmaceutical
Lobby in '07--June
24, 2008 (Received
January 11th,
2009)--Washington,
June 24, 2008 –
Washington's largest
lobby, the
pharmaceutical
industry, racked up
another banner year
on Capitol Hill in
2007, backed by a
record $168 million
lobbying effort,
according to a
Center for Public
Integrity analysis
of federal lobbying
data. Among the
industry's
successes: getting
two controversial
laws extended and
thwarting
congressional
efforts to restrict
media ads for
prescription drugs.
The spending represents a 32 percent jump over 2006. Driven in part by
a busy legislative calendar dominated by issues critical to the industry, the
effort raised the amount spent by drug interests on federal lobbying in the past
decade to more than $1 billion. Pharmaceutical, medical device, and other health
product manufacturers, together, spent more than $189 million on lobbying last
year, another record and nearly three times the $67 million they spent in 1998,
the first full year for which complete records and totals are available.
More than 90 percent of the total was spent by 40 companies and three trade groups: the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the Biotechnology Industry Organization, and the Advanced Medical Technology Association. For complete story, click here.
Israel May Face
Charges for War
Crimes
07 Jan 2009 Israel
has committed war
crimes and should be
prosecuted in an
international court,
says Raji Sourani,
head of the
Palestinian Centre
for Human Rights
(PCHR) in Gaza. "The
repeated bombing of
clearly marked
civilian buildings,
where civilians were
sheltering, crosses
several red lines in
regard to
international law,"
Sourani told IPS.
Palestinian
Authority (PA)
delegate to Britain
Professor Manuel
Hassassian has said
the PA will launch
legal proceedings
against Israeli
leaders it says are
responsible for war
crimes in Gaza,
according to a
Palestinian news
report. For
complete story,
click here.
Mysterious Tubular Clouds
Defy Explanation 24 Aug 2009
These long, crazy-looking clouds can grow to be 600 miles long and
can move at up to 35 miles per hour, causing problems for aircraft
even on windless days. Known as Morning Glory clouds, they appear
every fall over Burketown, Queensland, Australia, a remote town with
fewer than 200 residents. Similar tubular shaped clouds called
roll clouds
appear in various places around the globe. For complete story,
click here.
Scientists: Global warming
has already changed oceans
09 Jun 2009 Researchers, scientists and Jacques Cousteau's
granddaughter painted a bleak picture Tuesday of the future of
oceans and the "blue economy" of the nation's coastal states. The
hearing before the oceans subcommittee of the Senate Commerce
Committee was expected to focus on how the degradation of the oceans
was affecting marine businesses and coastal communities. Instead,
much of the testimony focused on how the waters that cover 70
percent of the planet are already changing because of global
warming. For complete story,
click here.
Recycled radioactive metal
contaminates consumer products
--No federal agency is responsible for oversight. 03 Jun 2009
Thousands of everyday products and materials containing radioactive
metals are surfacing across the United States and around the world.
Common kitchen cheese graters, reclining chairs, women's handbags
and tableware manufactured with contaminated metals have been
identified, some after having been in circulation for as long as a
decade... A Scripps Howard News Service investigation has found that
-- because of haphazard screening, an absence of oversight and
substantial disincentives for businesses to report contamination --
no one knows how many tainted goods are in circulation in the United
States. For complete story,
click here.
Monsanto in Illinois: Homeland Security and USDA
Plan Attacks Against Animals By Linn Cohen-Cole 13 Feb
2009 Below is a letter to livestock producers in Illinois asking them and
others to contact the Governor’s office to ask to be allowed to be present
at a meeting between Homeland Security and the
USDA
which involves NAIS and "surge capacity" under Homeland Security to attack
and seize and destroy - "depopulate" an area of - animals. This meeting is
about what will be done TO THEM but they are shut out. Many of you already
know about
Monsanto’s "rural cleansing" in southern Illinois of 200 - 400 farmers
for
using Steve Hixon as their seed cleaner. One is being sued for $400,000.
In 2006, Monsanto made $160,000,000 in this Mafia-like extortion. For
complete story,
click here.
Blackwater founder says
he aided secret programs
--CIA asset Erik Prince carried out secret missions as recently
as two months ago 03 Dec 2009
The founder of Blackwater Worldwide acknowledged in an interview
published Wednesday that he had helped the CIA with secret
programs targeting top al-Qaeda leaders, a role he says was
intended to give the agency "unattributable capability" in
sensitive missions. Erik Prince, owner of the military
contractor now known as Xe Services, told
Vanity Fair magazine
that he performed numerous "very risky missions" for the spy
agency, some of which were improperly exposed in leaks to the
news media. The magazine... said the former Navy SEAL had served
a dual role for the CIA as both a contractor and an "asset," or
spy, who carried out secret missions as recently as two months
ago, when the Obama administration terminated his contract.
For complete story,
click here.
Link, 45, died instantly as he was crushed
under the ancient 860lb monument in the
Weinhaus Church in Vienna, Austria.
Roman
Hahslinger, a police spokesman, said: "He
was a very religious man and had been scared
when he was trapped in the lift and had
prayed for release.
"A short while later he was pulled out of
the elevator and he went straight to the
church to thank God.
"He seems to have embraced a stone pillar
on which the stone altar was perched and it
fell on him, killing him instantly.
For complete story,
click here.
Israel Makes Waves by
Simulating an Earthquake
--Experiment financed by DoD 25
Aug 2009 The Seismologic Division of the Ministry of National
Infrastructure's Geophysical Institute will attempt to simulate
an earthquake in the southern Negev on Thursday. The experiment,
financed by the U.S. Defense Department,
is a joint project with the University of Hawaii and is part of
a scientific project intended to improve seismological and
acoustic readings in Israel and its environs, up to a 1,000
km/621 mile radius. For complete story,
click here.
Records of Virginia Tech Gunman
Discovered --Criminal investigation is
underway to determine how the employee was able to take the
records and why the documents were not uncovered during state
investigations following the shooting 22 Jul 2009 Virginia
Tech gunman Seung Hui Cho had been treated at the college's
counseling center before the shooting rampage in which he killed
32 students, contradicting earlier accounts of his psychiatric
history, according to newly discovered mental health records
located in the home of the center's former director. According
to a memo written by a university lawyer and obtained by The
Washington Post, the former director,
Robert Miller, had moved the records into his home more than a
year before the April 16, 2007, massacre, during
which Cho also took his own life. Word the records had been
found first came from Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine during a
Wednesday morning news conference. [See:
Virginia Tech Shooting 'Oddities' --Seung-Hui Cho in U.S.
Marines uniform, pulled from Wikipedia By Lori Price Iraq
link to campus killer Cho 19 Apr 2007 The sister of the
gunman responsible for the deadliest shooting rampage in modern
US history works as a contractor for a State Department office
that oversees billions of dollars in American aid for Iraq.]
For complete story,
click here.
Audit Finds U.S. Overpaid Blackwater By
$55 Million 17 Jun 2009 A government audit
found that the State Department overpaid the contract-security
firm once known as Blackwater Worldwide by tens of millions of
dollars because the company failed to properly staff its teams
in Iraq. The report said the State Department should have
withheld at least $55 million in payments to the company because
of the shortfalls. For complete story,
click here.
Bats recognize
individual voices: Study
08 Jun 2009 Scientists have found that bats are able to
distinguish between different individuals by their echolocation
calls or biological sonar. According to the study published in
the journal PLoS Computational Biology, bats recognize
the voice of other bats through the ultrasonic 'echolocation'
calls that they make as they navigate. For complete story,
click here.
DARPA, Army fund 'telepathy' research
--Goals include "user-to-user communication on the
battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis
of neural signals." By Steve Hammons 17 May 2009 A research
program to develop mind-to-mind communication among U.S.
military personnel will receive $4 million from the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), according to
published reports. The "Silent Talk" project seeks to create
technologies that can read the "pre-speech" brain waves of
individuals, interpret them and communicate them to other
individuals. The new DARPA funding is in addition to a previous
$4 million the Army provided to the University of California for
what they call "computer-mediated telepathy." For
complete story,
click here.
Governor Huntsman to resign and
accept Obama appointment--May
16th, 2009--SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - Governor
Jon M. Huntsman Jr. will resign and accept an appointment as
ambassador to China, ABC 4 has confirmed. For complete
story,
click here.
(Webmaster Note: The only way this appointment makes sense
is that Gov. Huntsman being an advocate of brainwashing and
POW-style torture for America's youth can relate very well to
the Chinese authorities and their disregard for basic human
rights.)
Stanford 'was informant for US
anti-drug agents' --Authorities accused of
turning a blind eye to financier's banking business 11 May
2009 Sir Allen Stanford, the Texan billionaire who ploughed
millions of pounds into English cricket, may have been working
as an informant for American anti-drug agents in return for
official protection which gave him free rein to run his
[illegal] banking empire, it emerged yesterday. For
complete story,
click here.
The Army's Remote-Controlled Beetle--January
29, 2009--A giant flower beetle with implanted
electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly
controlled, according to research presented this week.
Scientists at the University of California developed a tiny rig
that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical
signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take
off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight. The research,
funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),
could one day be used for surveillance purposes or for
search-and-rescue missions. For complete story,
click here.
Drought 'Oddities'
By Lori Price 01 Mar 2009 Suddenly, almost inexplicably and
overnight - there's a newly discovered big water shortage in the
US! Keep your eyes on the GOP prize. Under cover of the Bush
Depression and (global warming-induced) drought,
corpora-terrorist trolls may present a 'solution:' Privatize
part of the US water supply. First, the inevitable
state of emergency is declared.
For complete story,
click here.
Fed indictments tell how H-1B visas
were used to undercut wages13 Feb
2009 Federal agents on Thursday said they arrested 11 people in
six states in a crackdown on H-1B visa fraud and unsealed
documents that detail how the visa process was used to undercut
the salaries of U.S. workers. Federal authorities allege that in
some cases, H-1B workers were paid the prevailing wages of
low-cost regions and not necessarily the higher salaries paid in
the locations where they worked. By doing this, the companies
were "displacing
qualified American workers and violating prevailing wage
laws," said federal authorities in a statement announcing the
indictments. For complete story,
click here.
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