Law & Crime

July 3, 2008

New York magnate leaves billions to the dogs

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York hotelier and real estate magnate Leona Helmsley left millions to her beloved dog, Trouble, but she has left billions for the care of dogs in general, The New York Times said on Tuesday.

Helmsley left instructions that an entire charitable trust valued at $5 billion to $8 billion (2.5 billion to 4 billion pounds) and amounting to virtually all of her estate, be used for the care and welfare of dogs, the newspaper said, citing two people who had seen the document and described it on condition of anonymity.

The two people who had seen the document said Helmsley signed it in 2003 to establish goals for the trust that would disburse assets after her death. The first goal was to help indigent people and the second to provide for the care and welfare of dogs, the newspaper said. But a year later, she deleted the first goal.

But all the money may not go to the dogs, the article said. It said the mission statement also has a provision that Helmsley's trustees may use their discretion in distributing the funds, and some lawyers say the statement may not mean much, given that it was not incorporated into her will or the trust documents.

Helmsley, who was known as "the Queen of Mean" because of the way she dealt with her employees, had a soft spot for her dog. But a New York court last month lowered the dog's inheritance to $2 million from $12 million on grounds that Helmsley was mentally unfit when she made her will.

A spokesman for the executors of Helmsley's estate told the Times they did not want to comment on the statement because they were still working to determine the trust's direction.

Helmsley died in August 2007 at age 87. She amassed a fortune in real estate and hotels with her husband, Harry Helmsley, who died in 1997.

Famously quoted as having said "only the little people pay taxes," Helmsley spent 18 months in federal prison for evading $1.7 million in taxes in 1989.

(Writing by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Eric Walsh)

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Patricia Zengerle - Reuters | Thursday, July 3, 2008

 

June 18, 2008

Obama rebukes McCain camp on terrorism criticism

WASHINGTON (AP) - A defiant Barack Obama said Tuesday he would take no lectures from Republicans on which candidate would keep the U.S. safer, a sharp rebuke to John McCain's aides who said the Democrat had a naive, Sept. 10 mind-set toward terrorism.

"These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11," the presumed nominee told reporters aboard his campaign plane. "This is the same kind of fear-mongering that got us into Iraq ... and it's exactly that failed foreign policy I want to reverse."

The debate between the rival camps echoed the 2004 presidential campaign in which President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other Republicans argued that Democratic nominee John Kerry was soft on terror, a claim that resonated with voters and helped propel Bush to re-election. Democrats complained that the GOP was using the politics of fear.

The Republican argument proved less effective in 2006 when then Bush adviser Karl Rove said the Democrats had a pre-Sept. 11 view of the world and Republicans had a post-Sept. 11 terror attacks perspective. In November of that year, Democrats captured enough congressional seats to seize control of the House and Senate.

On his campaign plane, Obama told reporters that Osama bin Laden is still at large in part because Bush's strategy toward fighting terror has not succeeded.

At issue were comments Obama made in an interview with ABC News Monday in which he spoke approvingly of the successful prosecution and imprisonment of those responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Obama was asked how he could be sure the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies are not crucial to protecting U.S. citizens.

Obama said the government can crack down on terrorists "within the constraints of our Constitution." He mentioned the indefinite detention of Guantanamo Bay detainees, contrasting their treatment with the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.

"And, you know, let's take the example of Guantanamo," Obama said. "What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks - for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center - we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.

"And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, 'Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims. ...

"We could have done the exact same thing, but done it in a way that was consistent with our laws," Obama said.

Obama agreed with the Supreme Court ruling last week that detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a constitutional right to challenge their indefinite imprisonment in U.S. civilian courts. McCain derided the ruling as "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."

McCain aides criticized Obama for talking about using the criminal justice system to prosecute terrorists.

"Senator Obama is a perfect manifestation a September 10th mind-set ... He does not understand the nature of the enemies we face," McCain national security director Randy Scheunemann told reporters on a conference call.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey, who is advising the McCain campaign, concurred, saying Obama has "an extremely dangerous and extremely naive approach toward terrorism ... and toward dealing with prisoners captured overseas who have been engaged in terrorist attacks against the United States."

The Obama campaign countered with its own conference call in which Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism official in Republican and Democratic administrations, argued the McCain campaign was emulating Rove.

"I'm a little disgusted by the attempts of some of my friends on the McCain campaign to use the same old, tired tactics ... to drive a wedge between Americans for partisan advantage and to frankly frighten Americans," Clarke said.

Kerry accused McCain of "defending a policy that is indefensible" by siding with Bush's policies, particularly with respect to the Iraq war.

Obama said Republicans could be counted on to do "what they've done every election cycle, which is to use terrorism as club to make the American people afraid to win elections." He said he didn't think it would work this time.

Republicans criticized Obama last year when he said the United States should act on intelligence about top terrorist targets in Pakistan even if President Pervez Musharraf refuses.

---

Beth Fouhy reported from New York.

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NEDRA PICKLER and BETH FOUHY - AP | Wednesday, June 18, 2008

 

June 13, 2008

President Kennedy

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy isn't known for his judicial modesty. But for sheer willfulness, yesterday's 5-4 majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush may earn him a historic place among the likes of Harry Blackmun. In a stroke, he and four other unelected Justices have declared their war-making supremacy over both Congress and the White House.

Boumediene concerns habeas corpus – the right of Americans to challenge detention by the government. Justice Kennedy has now extended that right to non-American enemy combatants captured abroad trying to kill Americans in the war on terror. We can say with confident horror that more Americans are likely to die as a result.

An Algerian native, Lakhdar Boumediene was detained by U.S. troops in Bosnia in January 2002 and is currently held at Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. military heard the case for Boumediene's detention in 2004, and in the years since he has never appealed the finding that he is an enemy combatant, although he could under federal law. Instead, his lawyers asserted his "right" – as an alien held outside the United States – to a habeas hearing before a U.S. federal judge.

Justice Kennedy's opinion is remarkable in its sweeping disregard for the decisions of both political branches. In a pair of 2006 laws – the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act – Congress and the President had worked out painstaking and good-faith rules for handling enemy combatants during wartime. These rules came in response to previous Supreme Court decisions demanding such procedural care, and they are the most extensive ever granted to prisoners of war.

Yet as Justice Antonin Scalia notes in dissent, "Turns out" the same Justices "were just kidding." Mr. Kennedy now deems those efforts inadequate, based on only the most cursory analysis. As Chief Justice John Roberts makes clear in his dissent, the majority seems to dislike these procedures merely because a judge did not sanctify them. In their place, Justice Kennedy decrees that district court judges should derive their own ad hoc standards for judging habeas petitions. Make it up as you go!

Justice Kennedy declines even to consider what those standards should be, or how they would protect national security over classified information or the sources and methods that led to the detentions. Eventually, as the lower courts work their will amid endless litigation, perhaps President Kennedy will vouchsafe more details in some future case. In the meantime, the likelihood grows that our soldiers will prematurely release combatants who will kill more Americans.

To reach yesterday's decision, Justice Kennedy also had to dissemble about Justice Robert Jackson's famous 1950 decision in Johnson v. Eisentrager. In that case, German nationals had been tried and convicted by military commissions for providing aid to the Japanese after Germany's surrender in World War II. Justice Jackson ruled that non-Americans held in a prison in the American occupation zone in Germany did not warrant habeas corpus. But rather than overrule Eisentrager, Mr. Kennedy misinterprets it to pretend that it was based on mere "procedural" concerns. This is plainly dishonest.

By the logic of Boumediene, members of al Qaeda will now be able to challenge their status in court in a way that uniformed military officers of a legitimate army cannot. And Justice Scalia points out that this was not a right afforded even to the 400,000 prisoners of war detained on American soil during World War II. It is difficult to understand why any terrorist held anywhere in the world – whether at Camp Cropper in Iraq or Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan – won't now have the same right to have their appeals heard in an American court.

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution contains the so-called Suspension Clause, which says: "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." Justice Kennedy makes much of the fact that we are not currently under "invasion or rebellion." But he ignores that these exceptions don't include war abroad because the Framers never contemplated that a non-citizen, captured overseas and held outside the U.S., could claim the same right.

Justice Kennedy's opinion is full of self-applause about his defense of the "great Writ," and no doubt it will be widely praised as a triumph for civil liberties. But we hope it is not a tragedy for civil liberties in the long run. If there is another attack on U.S. soil – perhaps one enabled by a terrorist released under the Kennedy rules – the public demand for security will trample the Constitutional delicacies of Boumediene. Just last month, a former Gitmo detainee killed a group of Iraqi soldiers when he blew himself up in Mosul. And he was someone the military thought it was safe to release.

Justice Jackson once famously observed that the Constitution is "not a suicide pact." About Anthony Kennedy's Constitution, we're not so sure.

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Wall Street Journal | Friday, June 13, 2008

 

May 13, 2008

Women 'should have abortion on demand'

Women will be able to terminate their pregnancy without having to obtain the signatures of two doctors in an overhaul of abortion laws. Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, told MPs on Monday he would seek to make it easier for women to have an abortion at an early stage, while lowering the time limit for late procedures.

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Rosa Prince - Daily Telegraph | Tuesday, May 13, 2008

 

April 29, 2008

Family In Austrian Incest Case United

The family of an Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children with her have been united for the first time in what doctors described as an "astonishing" gathering.

Josef Fritzl's daughter Elisabeth emerged from the windowless basement where he had locked her up with three of her children and was reunited on Sunday with three other children from whom she had been separated shortly after birth. A seventh baby died in the cellar after it was born.

"They met each other on Sunday morning and it is astonishing how easily it worked that the children came together," Berthold Kepplinger, medical director of the Provincial Clinic of Lower Austria, told a news conference on Tuesday.

"The children are quite well," Kepplinger said.

Around 200 residents of Amstetten, the town where Fritzl constructed his "house of horrors," held a rainy candle-lit vigil in support of the family in the town square.

"The outside world seems to think Amstetten is a terrible town, and that people in the community do not care for one another. We want to show this is not true," said organizer Elisabeth Anderson.

Austria's justice minister presented a bill on Tuesday to strengthen the country's "victim protection law," particularly in matters of sexual abuse.

In a case that has shocked Austria and the world, Elisabeth, now 42, spent nearly a quarter of a century without seeing sunlight with her daughter aged 19 and two sons aged 18 and 5.

The three other children -- two girls and one boy -- lived in the house above the cellar with Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie, who also had seven children of their own.

Kepplinger said his clinic had a school where Elisabeth's children could be educated as part of their recovery process, and the three who had been locked up in the cellar could read and write, although not very well.

The reunion between Elisabeth and her mother Rosemarie had also been "astonishing," Kepplinger said.

DNA tests confirmed that Fritzl, a 73-year-old retired electrical engineer, was the father of all six surviving children his daughter had born, police said.

Prosecutors were now investigating him over the death of the seventh child, whose remains he had burnt in a furnace, and said he could be charged in connection with the child's death.

"Josef F. is being investigated for murder by failing to render assistance," prosecutor Peter Ficenc told Reuters, adding that the pensioner was also being investigated for rape, incest and coercion.

'JUST CHAOS'

Detectives were still combing the 60 square meter (645 sq ft) cellar beneath Fritzl's home, Franz Prucher, head of security in Lower Austria, said.

"Down there it is just chaos at the moment. We have to go over every detail very carefully," Prucher told Reuters.

Fritzl appeared before a judge in St Poelten, the provincial capital of Lower Austria, on Tuesday, and was ordered to be held in detention while police inquiries continued.

Officials said Fritzl said nothing on the advice of his lawyer. He was calm and had been put in a cell where he can be monitored in case he tries to commit suicide.

Elisabeth Fritzl says her father lured her into the cellar in 1984 and drugged and handcuffed her before imprisoning her.

Her fate came to light when the 19-year-old daughter became ill and was taken to hospital. Doctors appealed for her mother to come forward to give details of her medical history.

She was stable but critical on Tuesday, in an artificially induced coma and breathing with a ventilator.

"Our patient is in a severely life-threatening condition which resulted from a lack of oxygen caused sometime between Wednesday and Friday when she was admitted," Doctor Albert Reiter said.

The case has shocked Austrians less than two years after teenager Natascha Kampusch escaped from the basement near Vienna where she had been locked up by an abductor for eight years.

"There are a million unanswered questions," investigator Polzer told Reuters. "How could he manage to live with what he had done? How did he fool everyone?"

He said he did not blame authorities for missing the case.

"Fritzl was a very cunning man. He not only fooled his wife, but officials, the police, everyone."

Fritzl brought Elisabeth and her remaining two children out of the cellar after the young woman was hospitalized, telling his wife their "missing" daughter had chosen to return home.

Elisabeth and three of the children were kept in a complex which was in some places no more than 1.7 meters (5 ft 6 in) high and contained a padded cell, according to authorities.

Photographs show a narrow passage leading to rooms that included a cooking area, with children's drawings on the walls, a sleeping area and a small bathroom with a shower.

(Additional reporting by Ayhan Uyanik in St Poelten)

(Writing by Karin Strohecker and Paul Bolding, editing by Giles Elgood)

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Reuters | Tuesday, April 29, 2008

 

March 22, 2008

Dozens of children in U.S. face life in prison

ALABASTER, Alabama (Reuters) - Underage criminals cannot face the death penalty in the United States but dozens of offenders imprisoned for crimes committed when they were young teenagers will still die behind bars.

The U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for minors in 2005 but 19 states permit "life-means-life" sentences for those under 18, according to a study by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI).

In all, 2,225 people are sentenced to die in U.S. prisons for crimes they committed as minors and 73 of them were aged 13 and 14 at the time of the crime, according to the group, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama.

Elsewhere in the world, life sentences with no chance of parole are rare for underage offenders. Human Rights Watch estimates that only 12 people outside the United States face such sentences.

Judicial reform advocates say the U.S. provision is an example of how harsh sentences have helped cause a jump in incarceration rates since the 1970s. The United States jails a higher percentage of its population than anywhere else in the industrialized world, these advocates say.

"These kids have been swept up in this tide of carceral control that is unparalleled in American history," said Bryan Stevenson, director of the EJI. "We have become quite comfortable about throwing people away," he said.

Others defend the statute, arguing it is popular with voters and gives comfort to victims to know that perpetrators of serious crimes against them will not one day walk free.

They also use an "adult crime, adult time" argument -- minors who commit adult crimes should be punished as adults.

"I SAW HER IN FLAMES"

The case of Ashley Jones, who was 14 when she killed, illustrates the seriousness of many crimes that result in for-life sentences.

One night in August 1999, Jones and her 16-year-old boyfriend, Geramie Hart, angered by her family's disapproval of their relationship, went to her home in Birmingham, Alabama. They set her grandfather on fire with lighter fluid, stabbed him and shot him dead.

They also stabbed and shot dead Jones' aunt in her bedroom and set her grandmother on fire.

Jones' 10-year-old sister, Mary, was asleep in bed but they dragged her to the kitchen to see the attack on her family.

"I had to sit there and watch her (Ashley) torture my grandmother. I saw her in flames," said Mary Jones, recounting her ordeal in an interview in Alabaster, Alabama.

"Geramie ... picked me up by my neck and pointed a gun at me and said: 'This is how you are going to die.' Ashley said: 'No, wait. I'll do her.'"

They stabbed Mary Jones repeatedly, puncturing a lung, and drove off leaving her and her grandmother, whose injuries included burns, stab and gunshot wounds, to stagger outside.

The questions raised by criminal cases involving teenagers are difficult to answer.

Is a young teenager responsible for crimes in the same way as an adult and to what extent, if at all, should courts consider a minor's family situation and background?

"It goes against human inclinations to give up completely on a young teenager. It's impossible for a court to say that any 14-year-old never has the possibility to live in society," said Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights.

"LOST ALL HOPE"

The Equal Justice Initiative has filed suits in six states challenging the life-without-parole sentences and has brought a case in federal court in northern Alabama over the Jones case, arguing it represents cruel and unusual punishment.

Hart is also serving the same sentence.

The group says a disproportionate number of the minors serving the sentence are black or Hispanic and many were tried as adults with inadequate legal counsel. Also, it says up to 70 percent were given mandatory sentences.

Not all those serving life-means-life sentences for crimes committed as minors are convicted killers.

Antonio Nunez was convicted of multiple counts of attempted murder and also aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to life without parole for his role in a kidnap, police chase and shootout in April, 2001, in which nobody was injured.

Nunez, aged 14 at the time of the crime, grew up in a part of Los Angeles where gang activity was common. In 2000, he was wounded and his brother killed in a gang-related shooting.

His sister Cindy Nunez said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles the life sentence devastated her family.

"He has lost all hope .... We try to keep his spirits up by saying something will change in the law," she said.

Mary Jones, now 19, is attempting to reconstruct her life. She testified against her sister in court but has visited her in jail. She blames Hart for changing her sister from "the sweetest girl" into a murderer.

"She should have a chance to have a life. Her life shouldn't just be taken away from her like that. Sometimes I'm kind of mad and then I'm sad," she said. "I practically lost her too because she is in prison."

(Reporting by Matthew Bigg; Editing by Michael Christie and Eddie Evans)

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Matthew Bigg - Reuters | Saturday, March 22, 2008

 

March 21, 2008

Guns and Legal Ammo

District of Columbia v. Heller has become the test case for a question that has animated legal scholars, politicians and lower courts for much of our modern history: Is the Second Amendment guarantee a collective right, which is to say it is reserved only for state militias, or is it an individual right?

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Wall Street Journal | Friday, March 21, 2008

 

March 3, 2008

Gun incident near President Bush's ranch

A Danish journalist came this close to getting shot Saturday by an elderly woman packing a pistol near President Bush's ranch here in what was easily the strangest incident I've ever witnessed covering the White House.

It all started so innocently as I sat with a group of Danish journalists just down the street from Bush's ranch during a visit by Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The two leaders were having lunch on the ranch, so I was waiting at a nearby historic one-room schoolhouse with White House staff to interview Rasmussen after the meal. Then the prime minister was going to do a brief press conference with the Danish press corps.

Terkel Svensson, a writer for the Danish News Agency, could not get wireless Internet access at the schoolhouse to file a story. But Svensson could get his cell phone working so he called his editor in
Copenhagen and started wandering across a quiet country road as he chatted away.

"I was just so occupied dictating my story that I didn't really see where I went," Svensson told me later. "I was just walking and talking."

What Svensson didn't realize was that he had stopped walking a couple hundred feet away, on the front lawn of an elderly woman. An elderly woman who looked through her window and didn't like that a strange man was standing outside her house. An elderly woman who had, um, a gun.

Next thing you know the woman is outside, no more than a few dozen feet from the journalist, demanding that he leave. "Suddenly she comes out and she says, 'Get off my property. You're trespassing,'" recalled Svensson.

Svensson was too preoccupied to notice the pistol, and was not aware that Texas law gives homeowners leeway on using a weapon when someone is trespassing on your property. All of us journalists across the street were too far away to see the pistol at first, until a Danish photographer with a telephoto lens announced to a bunch of us that there was indeed a weapon in the elderly woman's right hand.

As word spread that the lady had a gun - which she did not use - I can tell you it's a severe understatement to say White House and Secret Service officials were a bit concerned about the fact that they had just dodged an international incident. Ditto for Svensson, who was alarmed when he safely crossed the street and was shown dramatic still photos of the lady holding the gun.

"I will show the photos to my wife and children," Svensson told me. "They thought I was on a safe trip."

CNN was not able to reach the woman for comment.

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CNN | Monday, March 3, 2008

 

December 26, 2007

Six Killed In Christmas Eve Shooting Near Seattle

Authorities arrested a man and a woman on Wednesday after discovering six people, including two children, slain on Christmas Eve in a small town near Seattle.

"We still don't have a motive, as such, but the suspects are known to the victims," John Urquhart, spokesman for the King County Sheriff's Department, told reporters.

He said the suspects, a man and woman in their late 20s or early 30s, were arrested on suspicion of homicide but did not disclose their names. The suspects are expected to be charged later this week.

The six victims were killed by "homicidal violence," most likely from gunshot wounds, Urquhart said. Investigators are working on the assumption that the victims, found in the rural home in Carnation, Washington, were three generations of the same family.

The dead included a 6-year-old girl and a 3-year-old boy. Also found dead were a man and a woman appearing to be in their 50s and a man and woman appearing to be in their 30s.

Based on speaking with neighbors and friends, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer identified the two oldest victims as Wayne Scott Anderson, 60, an aerospace engineer, and his wife, Judy Anderson, a postal worker.

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Reuters | Wednesday, December 26, 2007

 

December 19, 2007

Arrest in Student-Porn Actress' Death

A man suspected in the slaying of a college student who led a secret life as an Internet porn performer was arrested Wednesday in Mexico, authorities said.

Israel Mireles, 24, was arrested in Melchor Muzquiz, Mexico, and was being held there pending extradition, U.S. Deputy Marshal Logan Kline said.

Emily Sander, 18, was last seen alive on Nov. 23 when she left an El Dorado bar with a man police identified as Mireles.

The disappearance of the Butler Community College student drew nationwide attention after the discovery that she also led a secret life as an Internet pornography model named Zoey Zane.

Her body was found six days later, about 50 miles east of El Dorado, as police traced the route they believed Mireles took to pick up his 16-year-old girlfriend, Victoria Martens, in Baxter Springs.

Kline declined to provide details about the arrest. A news conference was scheduled for later Wednesday in El Dorado.

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Associated Press | Wednesday, December 19, 2007