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08/06/08   FBI trots out strong circumstantial evidence linking dead scientist to anthrax attacks
08/06/08   Another day in Guantanamo: Bin Laden’s driver convicted on lesser charge
08/05/08   Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel-prize winning chronicler of Soviet injustices, dead at 89
08/02/08   L.A. story:  Three cousins from different generations shot dead in two weeks
08/01/08   A month after the FBI’s former anthrax suspect gets $5.8 million, its new one kills himself
07/31/08   In an unprecedented move, Government psychologist, attorney testify in secret at first Gitmo trial

 2007 Awards       Controlling Undercover Work       The Pistol That Killed Officer Heim

  8/3/08                                                     NEAR MISSES

     Had the FBI not tried for six years to pin the 2001 anthrax attacks on an innocent man, recent revelations that maybe -- just maybe -- they’ve identified the real killer might have been better received. Only two months after the Justice Department agreed to pay Stephen Hatfill $5.8 million for recklessly invading his privacy (a judge commented that there was “not a scintilla of evidence” of his guilt) the Federal leak machine was already cranking out rumors...More

     Here are the words that lit up Ohio: “Cleveland police officer Jim Simone has an alarming record of killing people. If anyone else gunned down five people, we'd call him a serial killer.” That’s how Plain Dealer columnist Regina Brett kicked off her July 16 piece about a 60-year old street cop who’s shot at twelve people in his 35-year career...More

     In 2003 a sixteen-year old girl was shot in the face by a gang member. Five years later it’s revealed that a few months before her killing an LAPD homicide detective told another member of the same gang that she had identified him in a murder. Except that she hadn’t.  More

     When Patsy Ramsey told officers that she found a ransom note on the stairs that morning, claiming that her daughter had been kidnapped and demanding $118,000 for her release, eyes rolled.  It was the day after Christmas 1996 in Boulder, Colorado. Instead of enjoying the holidays John and Patsy Ramsey were dealing with the abduction...More

     During the early morning hours of December 9, 1981, Philadelphia police officer Danny Faulkner, who was white, got into a tussle with a black man named William Cook during a traffic stop. Cook’s brother, a taxi driver who had taken on the name Mumia Abu-Jamal, happened to be parked across the street.  Shots rang out. More

     Twenty-one years as a prosecutor in the Manhattan D.A.’s office had left Daniel Bibb with little patience for law school abstractions. He was there for one reason, and one only: to serve the citizens of New York.  And until this particular day in 2005 he had never questioned his purpose, nor that of his colleagues. More

     Once upon a time (actually, May 2001) Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was terribly angry. Federal court employees around the country had been downloading large, naughty files from porn sites, so to stop them the pinheads in Washington installed filters and remote monitoring devices. This enraged... More

     “...There will continue to be crimes of passion and anger. And it is important to note that crime in Los Angeles has dropped precipitously in the last decade. Even with the increase in homicides, management of violent crime is moving in the right direction...”  Continuing its love-fest with LAPD Chief “Hollywood” Bill Bratton, that’s how... More

     When’s the last time that someone in authority encouraged you to drink? For LiberalPig that happy occasion took place on June 4, 2008 at the Beckman Center of the National Academy of Sciences, when Dr. Francisco Ayala, Bren Professor of Biological Sciences at U.C. Irvine lectured on “Elixir of Life: Wine and Health.” More

     How many terrorist attacks have we had in the U.S. since September 11, 2001? None, of course. How many attempts?  Hint: You can count them on the fingers of one hand, even if you bite four digits off. That’s right, one.  It was Richard Reid, aka Abdul Raheem, a British-born Jihadist who tried to blow himself up aboard an... More

     This much is known.  During the early morning hours of May 11, 2008 someone opened fire outside a fast-food restaurant in Inglewood, California, a working class community adjoining the L.A. Airport. Patrol officers who happened to be nearby saw a man jump into the back of a car. More

     Imagine that you’re a defense attorney. What do you do if your client, who is facing murder charges, tells you that he did it and that his alleged accomplice, who has a different lawyer, wasn’t involved? More

     Looking for a growth industry?  Think genetics. With one million profiles, California’s DNA databank is the third largest in the world, trailing only those of the FBI and Great Britain.  At its 1990 debut the Golden State’s database only kept track of sex offenders, but it has since expanded to include everyone convicted of a felony. More

     “The Emerald City.” Sounds enticing, doesn’t it? But don’t let that fool you. Neither software giant Microsoft nor coffee king Starbucks got where they did by being nice to competitors. Why should the community that hosts their world headquarters, Seattle, be any different? It’s not.  That huge billboard isn’t in Seattle or, indeed, anywhere...More

     This isn’t just another story about a wrongful conviction.  No, it’s much worse than that: it’s about a D.A.’s office that doesn’t care whether they have the right guy as long as they have someone.  Who pays the tab for their fecklessness?  Read on. More

     Who’s steering the ship?  That’s what inquiring minds want to know. After an exhaustive investigation prompted by the death of a 41-year old inmate, the Orange County District Attorney issued a report calling vigilance at the Theo Lacy jail, a large complex that houses more than 3,000 prisoners, “the exception as opposed to the rule.” More

     Now that our hometown paper has joined Controller Laura Chick’s campaign to transfer control of gang programs from the self-dealing City Council to the self-serving Mayor, it seemed a good idea to turn on the ol’ time machine and check out the gains we’ve made during the last century and a quarter of anti-gang crusading... More

     “Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” Known to first-year law students as the “Blackstone ratio”, these words by legal scholar William Blackstone were intended to frame critical legal decisions within a moral context and remind prosecutors of the need to exercise restraint when invoking an admittedly imperfect...More

     If you correctly guessed “Solicitor General of the United States” it’s probably because you’ve read about District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court case that will conclusively decide whether the Second Amendment really does guarantee an individual right to possess firearms...More

     When a bad boy gets his due we hardly notice.  It’s far more interesting when someone who pretends to be trustworthy gets caught with his hands in the cookie jar.  And if it’s a celebrated do-gooder, a real-life Dudley Do-Right, it’s positively newsworthy...More

     On February 5, 2008 a 20-year old San Fernando Valley man with mental problems and a history of violence shot and killed his father and two brothers at the home they shared, called 911 to let the police know, then killed a SWAT officer and seriously wounded his partner when officers, thinking there were others to rescue...More

     No one’s surprised anymore when some poor soul is let out from prison after serving a decade or more for a crime they didn’t commit.  When news broke last November of the release of Lynn DeJac, 44, what seemed most noteworthy wasn’t that she spent nearly fourteen years behind bars wrongfully convicted of murdering her daughter...More

     “The drug economy is the economy.”  So said New Jersey prosecutor Joshua Ottenberg as he bemoaned the sad state of affairs in Camden, where stretches of its once-thriving downtown resemble the hollowed, bombed-out cities of World War II...More

     On Saturday, February 16, only two days after a psycho youth murdered five students at Northern Illinois University, Presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton responded to a question about the tragedy with a general comment about the need to keep guns from the hands of the mentally ill...More

     “The actions of those officers were appropriate, and they're not to be criticized in any way.”  That’s how LAPD Chief Bill Bratton laid down the law to the Los Angeles Times when a reporter asked whether the shooting death of a SWAT officer and the grievous wounding of another might have been averted had the team not acted so hastily...More

     “Jury acquits Wesley Snipes of tax fraud.”  That was the headline splashed across U.S. dailies after a Federal jury acquitted the action-movie star of felony tax evasion, instead finding him guilty on three misdemeanor counts of failing to file tax returns.  Since 1997 the star of “White Men Can’t Jump” has avoided paying millions of dollars in taxes ...More

     Two-hundred thirty-six murders.  That’s six months’ worth of killings in the not-so-angelic City of Los Angeles, three months’ worth in Los Angeles County, and, according to an academic who spends his time keeping track of such things, one and one-half hours’ worth in “Rambo.”...More

     “...it is perverse to condemn a minor to prison for life [without the possibility of parole] for committing a crime that he or she might find unthinkable on reaching adulthood.”...More

     “Bad people are going to get away with murder.”  That’s what a Missouri prosecutor said after changes in State law reluctantly led him to accept a plea for involuntary manslaughter from a defendant he was certain was guilty of murder.  Under pressure from the NRA and a newly energized, gun-toting public more than a dozen States have enacted “stand your ground” laws in the last two years...More

     ...acquit! It’s been twelve years since the late Johnnie Cochran urged a Los Angeles Superior Court jury to find O.J. Simpson not guilty of murdering ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman. Knowing full well that the blood-soaked leather glove recovered at the scene had shrunk...More

As the season of red carpets descends upon us, LiberalPig cannot help but offer its own illustrious awards recognizing the year’s most distinguished accomplishments in criminal justice.  Here are the top ten, in no particular order:

“Just say YES to drugs” trophy goes to...Major League Baseball, for its inspired, long-running and highly profitable alliance with the illegal pharmaceuticals industry.  Inject, then play ball!...More

     There is no question that hefty, localized increases in police coverage can dampen violent crime.  That’s why N.Y.P.D. recently decided to assign an entire academy graduating class of 914 recruits to its mobile field force, doubling it to nearly 2,000 so that it can start flooding troubled areas in Brooklyn...More

     Governor Schwarzenegger’s in a fix. A $14.5 billion fix. Thanks to weak tax collections caused by a soft economy and crashing home values, that’s how much the California budget is in the hole. Trouble is, some departments spend money like drunken sailors...More

     Inspiring stories don’t come around often, so when the Orange County (CA) Register published the first installment of a two-part series on the exploits of a Santa Ana police detective, LiberalPig curled up for a good read. Then he recoiled in horror. No, the Pig wasn’t horrified by the crime, terrible as it was...More

     The word on the Sears Tower “terrorist conspiracy” is in, and it’s not good for the Government.  One defendant was acquitted outright and the jury hung on the others (reportedly an even split). As many predicted, the FBI’s active promotion of the crime left a few fact-finders cold...More

     This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the AK-47, the weapon designed by the famous General Mikhail T. Kalashnikov to help Communists win the struggle against Western imperialism.  From the jungles of Southeast Asia to the killing fields of America’s inner cities, the simple, reliable weapon became an instant hit...More

     New York State’s Inspector General recently recommended that criminal charges be considered against the retired director of the New York Police Department’s crime lab and three former analysts for botching thousands of drug tests in 2002...More

     Jim Amormino was stunned.  "In 28 years in law enforcement, I have never had a 4-year-old make up a story like this." The Orange County (Calif.) Sheriff’s Department spokesman was referring to an incident last month where a “spiky-haired man with a dragon tattoo” reportedly tried to snatch a kid playing in a park...More

     “These costs are likely to be in the several tens of millions of dollars annually within a few years [and] would grow to about $100 million annually after ten years, with costs continuing to increase significantly in subsequent years.” These observations are lifted word-by-word from Jessica’s Law, which California voters approved in 1996...More

     “That really ordinary guy living next door could be a serial killer.”  Dave Shiflett of the Bloomberg News says that’s the lesson we can draw from “Inside the Mind of BTK,” John Douglas’s new book about the infamous serial killer Dennis Rader, who tortured and murdered ten Wichita women between 1973 and 1991...More

     Brushing aside concerns by the retiring police commissioner, Philadelphia’s mayor-elect Michael Nutter announced that officers in the City of Brotherly Love would be implementing a “stop, question and frisk” campaign to combat a soaring murder rate, in 2006 nearly four times that of New York City (27.7/100,000 v. 7.3/100,000)...More

     Exposing a stunning breach of national security, Nada Prouty, 37, a former FBI and CIA agent, pled guilty this month in D.C. Federal court to nationalization fraud, illegal computer access and conspiracy.  Admitted in 1989 on a student visa, the Lebanese immigrant gained permanent residency through a sham marriage...More  

     Four nights ago, after menacing family members with knives, an 18-year old New York City psychiatric outpatient with a violent past confronted officers responding to his mother’s frantic 9-1-1 call. In the dark, the youth drew an object from his clothing, pointed it in the cops’ direction and demanded to be killed...More

     With his indictment for secretly pocketing more than a half-million dollars from a mob-tainted waste disposal firm and a New York City developer, former Big Apple police commissioner Bernard Kerik has bumped our very own Sheriff Mike Carona from the #1 spot in this year’s allegedly-crooked-top-cop sweepstakes...More  

     Determined to make good on his pledge to add a thousand cops post haste, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio V. ridiculed Councilman Bernie Parks’ call to limit this fiscal year’s hiring to no more than 226.  But Parks, a member of the Council’s budget committee, insisted that his number is all the budget allows...More

     Upstaging our spineless Board of Supervisors, which decided 3-2 against forcing him to take as much as a temporary powder, Orange County Sheriff-under-Federal-indictment Mike Carona placed himself on sixty-day hiatus, leaving Undersheriff Jo Ann Galisky in charge of the anxious and demoralized agency...More

     Bowing to heavy pressure from prosecutors, police and victims’ rights organizations, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the entire work product of the obscure California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, an organization created by the State Senate in 2004 to address concerns about wrongful convictions...More

Q: “Is waterboarding Constitutional?”
A: “I don’t know what’s involved in the technique.  If waterboarding is torture, torture is not Constitutional.”
Q: “‘If waterboarding [is torture]’, that’s a massive hedge. I mean it either is or isn’t...More

     Considering the many scandals that have rocked his administration, news that Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona faces Federal corruption charges comes as no great surprise. Perhaps the best known faux pas during his watch was the arrest of his former pal, Assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo for taking bribes to promote an auto immobilizer...More

     Within hours of the May Day melee at MacArthur Park, Chief Bratton warmed the cockles of every plaintiff’s
attorney in town when he spanked L.A.’s finest, publicly refusing to “defend the indefensible.” More

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