Archive for the 'Criminal Courts' Category

Apparently, if you want to threaten Superbowl viewers lives without punishment, all you need to do is address your letters to media organizations instead of actual individuals. At least that’s what worked for Kurt Havelock, whose conviction of mailing threatening messages was overturned by the ninth circuit this week.

According to the LA Times, Havelock was upset because he had been denied a liquor license for his horror-themed bar in Tempe, Arizona. So he decided to vent his frustrations at the 2008 Superbowl. Havelock gathered an assault rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition, which he planned to use to randomly kill football fans as they entered the Superbowl at the University of Phoenix stadium.

Just before he drove to the parking lot of the Superbowl, he dropped six priority mail envelopes in the mailbox, all mailed to different news organizations. These mailings included the death threats against the spectators as well as a “rambling manifesto.” Havelock continued on to the parking lot, where he waited for fans to arrive.

Thankfully, he had a change of heart and decided to leave before harming anyone. He called his father, and then he and both his parents went to the police station in Tempe to report the incident. The Tempe police could not tell if any laws had been violated, but federal agents, who came to the station to interview Havelock, filed criminal charges. He was sentenced to 366 days in prison, followed by 36 months of probation. Havelock actually served his entire jail sentence before the appeals process was through.

Keep in mind, Havelock was never charged or convicted with murder or attempted murder. He changed his mind before there was any “substantial step” towards completing the crime. (For instance, he had the weapon and ammunition, but never left his car.) He was convicted of six counts of “mailing threatening communications.” So why was the verdict overturned on appeal?

Because the letters were mailed to corporations, not people. The majority opinion said, “It makes no sense to threaten ‘to injure the person’ of a corporation.” Because the information in the mailing envelopes was not addressed to an actual individual, there was no real threat, and the ninth circuit allowed Havelock to walk free.

That’s not to say that everyone agreed with the decision. Judge Susan Graber dissented in the opinion, saying that “the majority’s interpretation produces absurd results.”

One person who is happy? Havelock’s public defender, Daniel Kaplan who said he thinks Havelock “just wants to move on with his life,” and that he hopes the appeals process is completely over.

Who killed Walter Barclay? According to a May 21 jury decision, it was not William Barnes.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in November 1966, then-police officer Barclay was responding to reports of a prowler when he found Barnes attempting to burglarize a Philadelphia beauty salon. Barnes shot Barclay, was convicted of attempted murder, served 16 years, and was released on parole. Barclay survived, but was paralyzed from the waist down.

Since serving his time, Barnes tried to make up for his criminal record. He was living in a halfway house and worked in a supermarket. He also gave lectures at Temple University and Eastern State Penitentiary about his desire to turn his life around.

But when Walter Barclay died of a urinary tract infection that medical examiners claimed was directly related to the original shooting, 41 year after the fact, Barnes was arrested and put on trial for the murder of Walter Barclay.

The prosecution argued that the death was directly due to the shooting. The urinary tract infection was due to Barclay’s paraplegia, which was in turn due to the shooting.

Defense attorney William Silvers, however, argued that the chain of causation between the original shooting and Barclay’s eventual death had been broken by several events. According to a May 20 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Silver cited to an extensive medical record that included three car crashes and two wheelchair falls post-shooting. According to a note written by Barclay before his death, one of the car crashes compounded his spinal injuries.

Barclay had also not been living in the best of conditions, as noted in a more recent Philadelphia Inquirer article. He had hired live-in caretakers who so neglected and malnourished him that he developed scurvy and drug-resistant bedsores. Barclay lived in unacceptable conditions and was repeatedly hospitalized until 2003 when he died of sepsis from a urinary tract infection in a Bucks County nursing home.

The prosecution noted that these events would not have happened had Barclay not been paraplegic, and therefore Barnes was still the cause of Barclay’s death.

The most notable event of the trial itself was Silvers’ sense of timing. He opened and closed the defense’s case in ten minutes, and Barnes himself never took the stand. The judge asked Barnes if Silvers had discussed this particular strategy with him. Barnes replied in the affirmative, and said that he was fine with it. Silvers believed that he had done enough damage to the prosecution’s case by relying on the medical record of Barclay.

The jury agreed. William Barnes was acquitted of murder charges for the death of Walter Barclay. However, it could be up to four years before Barnes is released because he violated his parole agreement.

Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford, awaiting his trial for fraud charges, has filed a request to be transferred from the Joe Corley Detention Facility, citing its “oppressive” conditions.

According to the motion filed by Stanford’s defense attorney, Stanford says the facility has no air conditioning, is often without power, and that he shares a windowless cell with up to 10 other inmates, according to a KHOU news story.

Stanford is requesting to be transferred to the Federal Detention Center in downtown Houston, in order to have better access to his defense attorney in preparation for his trial. Corley Detention Facility, located in Conroe, Texas, about 40 miles north of Houston, does not allow visitors to use electronic devices, which his lawyer needs to share evidence.

Stanford was arrested June 18 on multiple fraud counts stemming from his Stanford Financial Group. Federal authorities allege that Stanford defrauded investors of up to $8 billion by inflating the profits of the company.

Upon his arrest, Stanford, who has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Antigua and Barbuda — where he is a Knight Commander — was forced to submit his passport, KHOU reported.

He was originally granted a $500,000 bond, District Judge David Hittner later revoked it, calling Stanford a serious flight risk. This decision is currently being appealed.

Stanford drew the suspicion of the FBI, SEC, and other financial regulatory groups in late 2008, when a letter to investors quoted a loss of just 1.3% — at a time similar institutions were seeing losses of 50% or more.

One former partner alleged Stanford presented purely hypothetical gains as real data to investors, in order to increase investor contributions, according to Bloomberg news.

Stanford has retained defense attorney Dick DeGuerin, famous for defending Oliver North in the criminal case following the Iran-Contra scandal.

A convicted murderer in Ohio is being released from prison pending a new trial after his defense attorneys successfully argued that juror curiosity violated his right to a fair trial, according to WLWT news.

Ryan Widmer of Lebanon, Ohio, was serving 15 years to life for the murder of his wife, Sarah. Prosecutors say he drowned her in the bathtub, while the defense maintained that her drowning was accident. Widmer allegedly found his wife, called paramedics, drained the tub and attempted CPR.

A key point the prosecution made was that when paramedics arrived, Sarah Widmer’s body was dry, and her hair was damp, a finding that they maintained did not support Ryan Widmer’s timeline.

The defense countered that argument by calling forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Balko, who testified that a body can dry completely in such a short period of time, and that he himself had air dried that morning in only seven minutes.

This is where jurors took matters into there own hands.

According to an appeal motion filed by the defense, two jurors attempted similar experiments at home, and shared those findings with other jurors, which in turn influenced their verdict, WLWT reports.

Widmer’s defense team says that this qualifies as testimony, which was not available for cross-examination — a glaring violation of Widmer’s due process rights.

Presiding Judge Neal Bronson agreed, and granted Widmer a new trial. Widmer is currently released on a $1 million bond, and will be monitored by GPS following his release.

A teen in Washington state who killed a woman in a hunting accident was sentenced to 30 days in a juvenile intentional center, according to NBC affiliate KHQ.

Tyler Kales, who was 14 at the time, was bear hunting with his brother on Sauk Mountain north of Seattle. According to his own testimony, in the fog that covered the mountains, Kales mistook 54-year-old Pamela Almil for a bear. He fired a shot that struck Almil in the head and killed her.

Kales was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter on June 2. However, at his sentencing, Judge Susan Cook acquitted Kales of the more serious first-degree manslaughter charge, finding did not act recklessly in the shooting.

Washington statute defines Second-Degree Manslaughter, a class-B felony, as:

A person is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree when, with criminal negligence, he causes the death of another person.

Cook sentenced Kales to 30 days in a juvenile detention center, 12 months under supervision with counseling, and 120 hours of community service — 40 of which must be teaching others about hunting safety.

Kales had taken hunting safety classes since the age of 9, and was legally permitted to hunt without adult supervision in the state of Washington, according to a Seattle Time article from last year.

California’s Supreme Court upheld a provision that allows crimes committed while a minor to affect sentencing under the state’s controversial Three-Strikes law, according to the San Francisco Gate.

Under the three-strikes law, any second felony conviction receives twice the normal sentence; any third felony conviction receives an automatic life sentence. The court’s decision means that even if one or both previous felony was committed while the offender was under 18, it still counts as a strike.

The provision was already part of  the California law, but had been challenged after a district court heard the case of San Jose defendant, Vince Nguyen, who was sentenced in 2005 to 32 months for being a felon in possession of a firearm — twice the normal sentence.

Nguyen received a previous felony in 1999 for aggravated assault when he was 16, according to the S.F. Gate article.

In his appeal, Nguyen’s defense attorney argued that because juvenile court cases are decided by a judge and not a jury, allowing a juvenile record to affect a later trial violates his client’s right to due process.

In the decision for the 6-1 ruling, Justice Marvin Baxter wrote that juveniles in California have “every substantial safeguard required in an adult criminal trial except the right to trial by jury,” including the right to be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt.

Criminal defendants can now question the validity of lab results in court, thanks to a recent ruling by the US Supreme Court.

In a 5-4 ruling, the court said that allowing prosecutors to submit forensic evidence without questioning by the defense is a violation of Sixth Amendment right to face one’s accuser, according to The New York Times.

The decision invalidates the theory of neutral scientific evidence.

“Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority.

The court heard the case Luis Melendez-Diaz of Boston, who was arrested for drug distribution & trafficking, along with two other men.

After their arrest, police found 19 plastic bags containing a white powder in the back seat of their vehicle. A lab report identified the powder as cocaine, which was entered into evidence used to convict Melendez-Diaz, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

The decision came in the wake of a wave of scandals at crime laboratories that included hundreds of tainted cases in Michigan, Texas and West Virginia.

Now, a defense attorney will be able to call the lab technician for cross-examination and potentially raise question to the legitimacy of the analysis.

As the world continues to grapple with the death of Michael Jackson, questions to the legitimacy of the allegations against Michael Jackson arose throughout the proceedings and remained relevant up to—and may remain well after—his recent death.

The most common and unanswered question is, if the allegations were true, why did only one of the alleged victims testify?

The judge presiding over the 2005 case, Judge Rodney Melville, said he would allow prosecutors to present to the jury testimony concerning the five boys whom they allege Jackson molested when the boys were between the ages of 10 and 13.

However, of the alleged victims, only one testified.

The remainder of those who testified for the prosecution were individuals who avowed they observed the molestation.

If these alleged victims were still minors at the time of the trial, then there is obvious reasoning for the avoidance of any public trial, which would conjure up latent emotions or memories. But this was not necessarily the case.

In point of fact, some—such as actor Macaulay Caulkin—were in their mid-twenties at the time of the trial. Underscoring this point is the fact that Caulkin testified for the defense that he was never molested.

The Extent of the Jackson Case

The 2005 trial of Michael Jackson began as a trial of Did Michael Jackson molest the sole accuser? but became more of a case of Is Michael Jackson a child molester?

Speculators to this paradigm shift comment that this was a sly maneuver by the prosecution in the case to evade the more arduous burden of proof ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ needed for a just and constitutional trial.

Moreover, none of the other allegations ever led to a criminal trial—let alone a criminal conviction—for Jackson.

The most apparent and protruding irony in this case is the claim by prosecutors that Jackson was so covert in his alleged acts that he actually had a bell in his bedroom to make sure no one entering the room would happen upon an alleged act of molestation.

They also make claims that his molestation was so blatant that eight people ‘witnessed’ these events, and they left such a strong impression on them that they could remember the details a decade or more later at the time of the trial.

The basic tenants of logic should prove these two allegations erroneous and mutually exclusive.

The jury in the case, for its part, should be commended for upholding Jackson’s trial rights and judging only the evidence in the case, and not allowing hearsay and speculation to be enough for a conviction.

Because the waters of the Michael Jackson case were so murky, we may never know the truth. Even in hindsight, all that can be ascertained is a timeline of events, which seem to provide the summary for this period in the King of Pop’s life.

Michael Jackson’s Criminal Defense Timeline

12/04: Michael Jackson voluntarily submits a DNA sample to authorities.

01/05: Jackson is charged by a Santa Barbara County grand jury, and pleads innocent to, molesting a 13-year old boy, conspiring to commit extortion, false imprisonment, and child abduction.

2/24/05: After a brief delay, jury is selected: eight women, four men, ranging in age from 20 to 79. It is widely reported, the racial/ethnic diversity is seven whites, four Hispanics and one Asian. The jurors occupations range from head cashier, army widow, computer programmer, civil engineer, and a horse trainer.

4/25/05: Michael Jackson’s former wife, Debbie Rowe, is set to be testified against him. She is expected to speak about being pressured into giving a scripted videotaped interview. Doing so, she is alleged promised she would then have visits with her two children.

4/27/05: Debbie Rowe testified at the Michael Jackson trial.

4/28/05: Debbie Rowe defended Michael Jackson as a “good father” who was “great with kids.” She also described him as a victim of aides who were “vultures” who exploited Michael.

6/13/05: After a four-month trial, and about 30 hours of deliberations over a seven day period, jurors acquitted Michael Jackson of all charges.

Ponzi mastermind Bernie Madoff’s day of
reckoning has come. A federal judge sentenced Madoff to 150 years, the maximum sought by the prosecution, according to CNN.

Following the sentence, Madoff offered an apology to his victims.

I live in a tormented state for all the pain and suffering I created, Madoff said. “I left a legacy of shame. It is something I will live with for the rest of my life.

Madoff orchestrated a massive securities fraud that swindled investors out of billions of dollars. Much of that money is still unaccounted for, and Madoff is expected to be forced to pay back his victims.

Madoff’s defense attorney had asked the judge for a 12 year sentence, arguing that at age 71, his client’s life expectancy would make even that sentence a life sentence.

The Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled conspiracy charges against brokerage firm Cohmad Securities and four individuals with securities fraud in association with Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the Washington Post reports.

Cohmad is being charged as providing “feeder funds” into Madoff’s decades-long scam that defrauded thousands of investors out of billions of dollars.

Madoff, who faces sentencing today in a Manhattan court, claims to have acted alone. However, authorities doubt that claim, and are attempting to file charges against all members of the monumental conspiracy.

Madoff, who pleaded guilty to 11 charges on March 12, could face 150 years in prison for his role in the securities fraud, and may have to pay back as much as $171 billion, according to CNN.

Madoff’s defense attorney has asked the judge for a 12 year sentence.