11/20/08   $13 million settlement for LAPD’s 2007 May Day melee at MacArthur Park
11/20/08   Judge appointed by Bush calls evidence nil, orders five Gitmo detainees freed
11/20/08   Harassed LAPD officer walks away with $2.25 million; third in three months
11/19/08   Fourth Philadelphia officer killed in seven months; his partner was murdered in May
11/17/08   Chaos reigns at LAPD’s overburdened, underfunded fingerprint unit
11/16/08   Mexican drug wars come to the U.S.

 2007 Awards             The Ten Deadly Sins         The Craft of Policing

 11/16/08                                 LONG LIVE GUN CONTROL

     “He’s a gun snatcher. He wants to take our guns from us and create a socialist society policed by his own police force.”  Standing in front of a wall bristling with assault weapons, that’s how Texas gun-store owner Jim Pruett described the reign of terror that President-elect Obama intends to unleash on unsuspecting Americans. What he didn’t explain, perhaps because the reporter forgot to ask, was exactly how the new Prez and his liberal posse would...More

     One hates to say so, but perhaps the silliest reaction to the outcome of the Presidential election came from the gun control community. In a breathless communiqué, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence characterized Obama’s slim margin in the popular vote (52.5 to 46.2 percent for McCain, with the balance for third party candidates)...More

     In many areas the prolonged downtrend in crime and violence has come to an end. At this writing Pittsburgh is well on its way to posting its worst murder record in a decade, with the number of homicides already equaling all of 2007.  In Chicago, a city stunned by the recent brutal murders of actress Jennifer Hudson’s mother, brother and nephew...More

     Do cops really matter?  Just ask Pontiac (Mich.) resident Larry Trammell, who says that with choppers hovering and bullets flying living in the besieged city is like being in Iraq.  Or ask police chief Valard Gross, who’s trying to protect 66,000 citizens with a grand total of sixty-five officers. That comes out to 0.98 officers per 1,000 population... More

     On February 17, 2004 Texas inmate Cameron Todd Willingham was strapped to a gurney and given a lethal injection. He had been convicted of arson and murder in a 1991 house fire that killed his three daughters.  Evidence against him included the statement of a jailhouse informer who said that Willingham confessed and scientific.. More

     “Of the 33 adjudicated cases from the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office that were reanalyzed, 3 exhibited Class I inconsistencies. In total, this equates to approximately 10% of the completed firearms cases having significant errors....” These words aren’t from do-gooders wringing their hands about possible miscarriages of justice.  They’re from...More

     Hey, Dick Tracy: don’t knock yourself out pounding the pavement!  There’s a far easier way to solve a whodunit. Have a suspect put on a helmet full of electrodes. Then show him a series of photos, including some neutral pictures and some of the crime scene. Looking at the photos will stimulate brain activity, sending electrical signals through...More

     Pity poor Chicago PD Chief Jody Weis.  Hired seven months ago to take control of an agency beset by allegations of corruption and brutality, the former head of the FBI’s Philadelphia office vastly expanded the unit that investigates officer misconduct.  Weis now faces a work slowdown by officers who complain that his penchant for severe discipline...More

     In a busy hospital emergency room in August 2005, a 60-year old stabbing victim sat in a wheelchair, yelling and cursing. Maybe he didn’t think that he was being treated quickly enough.  Nurses asked police to intervene. A uniformed officer obliged, handcuffing the man to his wheelchair and then whaling on him with a sap. More

     In his second year as Alaska’s public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan thought that his meeting with Governor Sarah Palin’s chief of staff would be about security for her forthcoming picnics.  Instead he was asked to take over the Alcoholic Beverage Control board.  When he politely declined -- after all, he already had his dream job... More

     Smarting from its first-ever loss in court, Taser International was assessed damages in excess of $6 million by Federal jurors who ruled that the company “failed to warn police that its stun guns could be dangerous when used on people under the influence of drugs or in conjunction with chest compressions.” More

     “The system worked exactly like it’s supposed to....The Government doesn’t owe an apology to anyone about that....This is just one of those horrible, horrible things.”  Those were the unforgettable remarks of Caddo Parish (LA) Assistant District Attorney Hugo Holland when interviewed about the conviction of Calvin Willis, cleared in... More

     How do we address the problem of wrongful conviction? We could analyze cases where things went astray, draw up lists of poor law enforcement practices, then tackle them one by one. The problem with that approach is that it’s like swatting flies: it makes a mess and you’ll never kill them all.  Why not see what’s attracting them in the first place? More

     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...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 fingered him for 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 us 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, we 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