By his own admission, Daniel Chong planned to spend April 20 like so many other college students: smoking marijuana with friends to celebrate an unofficial holiday devoted to the drug.
But for Mr. Chong, the celebration ended in a Kafkaesque nightmare inside a San Diego Drug Enforcement Administration holding cell, where he said he was forgotten for four days, without food or water.
To survive, Mr. Chong said he drank his own urine, hallucinated and, at one point, considered how to take his own life. By the time agents found him on the fifth day and called paramedics, he said he thought he could be dead within five minutes. [...]
A spokeswoman for the D.E.A. said the case was under investigation, but confirmed that Mr. Chong had been “accidentally left in one of the cells” from April 21 until April 25, and that he had not been charged with a crime.
For the last two years, ProPublica and PBS “Frontline,” in concert with other news organizations, have looked in-depth at death investigation in America, finding a pervasive lack of national standards that begins in the autopsy room and ends in court.
Expert witnesses routinely sway trial verdicts with testimony about fingerprints, ballistics, hair and fiber analysis and more, but there are no national standards to measure their competency or ensure that what they say is valid. A landmark 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences called this lack of standards one of the most pressing problems facing the criminal justice system.
Over the last two decades, ACFEI has emerged as one of the largest forensic credentialing organizations in the country.
Among its members are top names in science and law, from Henry Lee, the renowned criminalist, to John Douglas, the former FBI profiler and bestselling author. Dr. Cyril Wecht, a prominent forensic pathologist and frequent TV commentator on high-profile crimes, chairs the group’s executive advisory board.
But ACFEI also has given its stamp of approval to far less celebrated characters. It welcomed Seymour Schlager, whose credentials were mailed to the prison where he was incarcerated for attempted murder. Zoe D. Katz – the name of a house cat enrolled by her owner in 2002 to show how easy it was to become certified by ACFEI — was issued credentials, too. More recently, Dr. Steven Hayne, a Mississippi pathologist whose testimony helped to convict two innocent men of murder, has used his ACFEI credential to bolster his status as an expert witness.
Long piece from Foreign Policy about the FBI’s attempted infiltration of the “Patriot Movement” during the 90s:
Despite the fact that PATCON was set up as an intelligence-gathering operation, no evidence has emerged to date that information from the operation came into play during the bombing investigation, despite the links between some of McVeigh’s contacts and the organizations targeted.
The dilemmas of PATCON point toward current debates over the use of infiltration, particularly in cases such as the NYPD’s monitoring of Muslim communities in New York, investigations predicated on the need to collect intelligence rather than build prosecutions on specific criminal activities. The value of the intelligence collected by PATCON is unclear in the final analysis. The only PATCON targets ever prosecuted were already under investigation by the Army, and none of the specific terrorist plots alleged in the FBI’s records ever came to fruition. Meanwhile, the perpetrator of the worst act of right-wing violence in U.S. history was in contact with several targets of the FBI’s investigation but apparently flew under the radar.
The New Yorks Times ran a story on the psychology of false confessions. Here’s an excerpt, but the whole thing is worth reading:
If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions. What on earth could be the motive? To stop the abuse? To curry favor with the interrogator? To follow some fragile thread of imaginary hope that cooperation will bring freedom?
Yes, all of the above. Psychological studies of confessions that have proved false show an overrepresentation of children, the mentally ill and mentally retarded, and suspects who are drunk or high. They are susceptible to suggestion, eager to please authority figures, disconnected from reality or unable to defer gratification. Children often think, as Felix did, that they will be jailed if they keep up their denials and will get to go home if they go along with interrogators. Mature adults of normal intelligence have also confessed falsely after being manipulated. [...]
In experiments and in interrogation rooms, adults who are told convincing fictions have become susceptible to memories of things that never happened. Rejecting their own recollections through what psychologists call “memory distrust syndrome,” they are tricked by phony evidence into accepting their own fabrications of guilt — an “internalized false confession.”
That is what happened to a shaken Martin Tankleff, and although he quickly recanted, as if coming out of a spell, he was convicted and drew 50 years to life. He spent 17 years in prison before winning an appeal based on new evidence that pointed to three ex-convicts. But they have never been tried. Whoever killed the Tankleffs remains at large.
In every statement about allowing LulzSec to use their free service, CloudFlare has been pointed about mentioning that while they had received queries from law enforcement—they had never been asked by any authority to terminate service. Of course, the company had very little information to provide about their free client because all that’s needed to sign up is an e-mail address, a username, and a password.
Prince describes the experience as causing several existential crises for his colleagues, after all, who wants to be described as the person who provided anonymity to a group of hackers? Still, in the end, they decided that it was not their job to act as censors when housing information on hacking subjects itself is not illegal.
Last year in three high schools in Florida, several undercover police officers posed as students. The undercover cops went to classes, became Facebook friends and flirted with the other students. One 18-year-old honor student named Justin fell in love with an attractive 25-year-old undercover cop after spending weeks sharing stories about their lives, texting and flirting with each other.
One day she asked Justin if he smoked pot. Even though he didn’t smoke marijuana, the love-struck teen promised to help find some for her. Every couple of days she would text him asking if he had the marijuana. Finally, Justin was able to get it to her. She tried to give him $25 for the marijuana and he said he didn’t want the money — he got it for her as a present.
A short while later, the police did a big sweep and arrest 31 students — including Justin. Almost all were charged with selling a small amount of marijuana to the undercover cops. Now Justin has a felony hanging over his head.
Not mentioned in the article is that not only does Justin have a felony hanging over his head, if he’s found guilty of a drug related crime he won’t be eligible for federally subsidized financial aid. So he’ll come out of prison at a remarkably young age with fewer job prospects, thanks to a felony record, and have a hard (perhaps impossible) time going to college or trade school to actually get any sort of degree or skills to help him get a job, increasing the chances that he’ll turn to a life of crime. The system if effectively turning otherwise bright kids into lifelong criminals.
Health experts in Portugal said Friday that Portugal’s decision 10 years ago to decriminalise drug use and treat addicts rather than punishing them is an experiment that has worked.
“There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,” said Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, a press conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the law.
The number of addicts considered “problematic” — those who repeatedly use “hard” drugs and intravenous users — had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said.
U.S. District Judge Richard A. Jones’ sentence runs concurrently with an earlier 7 1/2-year sentence imposed by a state court in Washington for his crimes under state law. Those offenses included a series of burglaries and thefts that terrorized citizens in several states as the brazen fugitive kept two steps ahead of the law. [...]
Prompted by the judge to share his advice to the thousands of admirers around the world who followed his exploits while on the lam, Harris-Moore downplayed the emails he has written from jail in which he described his aviation exploits as “amazing.”
“I would say that the things I did some, I think, thought was perhaps cool, we’re extremely dangerous and terrifying,” he said. “It wasn’t as if I just jumped in a plane barefoot and started flying around. I feared for my life in those situations.”
On Monday, Danny Chaoflux and Nova had their home invaded by a man on the run from the cops. Nova escaped with his son but Danny and the other housemates were taken hostage and had to fight their way free. Now their home is in shambles thanks to the attacker’s gun fire and the police’s tear gas canisters.
A neck hold wasn’t working. Not knowing what else to do, Rafatpanah bit the man’s ear.
“Let go of the gun, let go of the gun!” he yelled through clamped teeth.
“Let go of my ear!” the gunman responded.
The two tore apart, and Rafatpanah spat out a bean-sized piece of ear.
“I tasted the blood of my enemy in my mouth,” he said. “And so at that point you realize the stakes have gone so much higher because blood is being drawn — my blood, his blood.”
Rafatpanah lunged toward the gun and wrestled it away.
He bolted out the front door into a sea of police, his arms reaching skyward with the gun, their guns pointed at him. Unsure of whether he was the suspect, officers tackled and handcuffed him.
After scuffling with the gunman for a few moments, the other two housemates also ran out. Mooney grabbed his own gun and ammo on the way so the man couldn’t use them.
On Monday, Danny Chaoflux and Nova had their home invaded by a man on the run from the cops. Nova escaped with his son but Danny and the other housemates were taken hostage and had to fight their way free. Now their home is in shambles thanks to the attacker’s gun fire and the police’s tear gas canisters.
A neck hold wasn’t working. Not knowing what else to do, Rafatpanah bit the man’s ear.
“Let go of the gun, let go of the gun!” he yelled through clamped teeth.
“Let go of my ear!” the gunman responded.
The two tore apart, and Rafatpanah spat out a bean-sized piece of ear.
“I tasted the blood of my enemy in my mouth,” he said. “And so at that point you realize the stakes have gone so much higher because blood is being drawn — my blood, his blood.”
Rafatpanah lunged toward the gun and wrestled it away.
He bolted out the front door into a sea of police, his arms reaching skyward with the gun, their guns pointed at him. Unsure of whether he was the suspect, officers tackled and handcuffed him.
After scuffling with the gunman for a few moments, the other two housemates also ran out. Mooney grabbed his own gun and ammo on the way so the man couldn’t use them.
As part of that agreement, Harris-Moore forfeited his ability to profit from the rights to his life story. He also signed a movie deal with 20th Century Fox earmarking $1.3 million in proceeds as restitution to his victims.
He still faces up to 6-1/2 years in prison when he is sentenced in January in federal court.
But that sentence is to be served concurrently with the state prison term that Superior Court Judge Vickie Churchill decides on Friday, after Harris-Moore pleads guilty to 33 charges total from Island, Snohomish and San Juan counties.
Biopic screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, writer of Milk and the forthcoming J. Edgar, is working on the Barefoot Bandit film about Colton Harris-Moore. Black told Collider:
I’m finishing up The Barefoot Bandit, which is the feature on Colton Harris-Moore. So I’ve been spending a lot of time in Seattle. That’s almost done. And what an amazing kid. There’s so much that people don’t know about him yet. It’s heartbreaking and inspiring. It’s been a very emotional journey for me.
Empire Online ran a short interview with David Cronenberg on what his next projects will be, after Dangerous Method and the film adaptation of Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis.”
There were odd rumblings some time ago of Cronenberg remaking his own version of The Fly. Not strictly true, says the director, but not exactly false either. “Yeah, that was a thing,” he says. “It’s not exactly a remake; it’s sort of a sequel, kinda. I’ve written a script of that but I don’t know if it’s going to really happen. That has to do with Fox…”
Cronenberg also says he’s considering a sequel to Eastern Promises and denies the rumor that he’s directing the English language adaptation of the Spanish movie Timecrimes.
John Robb at Global Guerillas points to a report from the FBI that finds a a rise both in the number of gang members in the military and in the number of former military members in street gangs.
There are some problems with the report. For example, listing juggalos as gang members is absurd (here’s my prior writing on the subject). But if this trend is real, it could lead to some serious problems. As described by Robb:
The big worry about gangs in the US military is a repeat of what happened in Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. When the Soviet Union collapsed economically, hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers with fresh combat experience in Afghanistan (and little to offer in terms of skills) were dumped onto the street and into the waiting arms of criminal organizations. This process quickly turned Russian economics into a shooting sport. A place where wealth and firepower became synonymous.
The US, currently running a $1.5 trillion a year deficit with the spectre of HUGE cuts in the military (reduction in force) as an absolute certainty, will dump hundreds of thousands of combat vets onto the street w/o an economy able to absorb them. This is particularly true with the US economy about to start its next contraction w/o even recovering from the last one. Guess what happens next…
ABC News reports that West Memphis Three are being released today after a special hearing in which the three men made an Alford plea. According to Wikipedia, an Alford plea is: “A guilty plea in criminal court, where the defendant does not admit the act and asserts innocence. Under the Alford plea, the defendant admits that sufficient evidence exists with which the prosecution could likely convince a judge or jury to find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
What this means is that the WM3 will not be able to sue the state for wrongful prosecution, or profit financially from book, movie or speaking deals based on the ordeal. Or, in other words, it means that those responsible for railroading these kids in 1993 and putting them in prison for nearly two decades (while the real killer(s) remained free) will never be brought to justice, and the WM3 will never be compensated in any way for the years of their lives that they lost.
It’s a surprise move to those of us following the case. In 2007 new DNA evidence placed two men, including one of the victim’s stepfathers, at the scene of the crime, but provided no evidence that the WM3 were at the scene. I should emphasize that this doesn’t in and of itself exonerate the WM3, nor does it necessarily implicate the stepfather in the case. However, it was widely believed this DNA evidence would be enough to get the WM3 a new trial, and, given the lack of evidence in the first trial, would likely result in the three being exonerated.
I don’t know why the WM3 decided to take this plea, and I don’t blame them for taking an opportunity to go free after 18 years in prison. If they and their counsel believed this was the best option, then it probably was. But it’s extremely disappointing that the individuals – including David Burnett, Brent Davis and Dale Griffis – who railroaded the WM3 to advance their own careers will never be held accountable for their crimes.
Bad news. Remember that uncontacted South American tribe? (Covered here and here.) They’ve gone missing after narco traffickers wiped out the guard post protecting the tribe. Observers fear the worst.
The Brazilian guard post protecting the uncontacted Indians who were filmed from the air earlier this year has been over-run by heavily-armed men, suspected to be drug-traffickers. It has been ransacked and vital equipment destroyed.
Fears are now mounting for the welfare of the Indians after workers from FUNAI (the government’s Indian Affairs Department) found one of the traffickers’ rucksacks with a broken arrow inside. A rapid survey by government officials has shown no trace of the Indians, who made worldwide headlines in February.
This is an amazing treatment of The Wire a Victorian novel instead of an HBO t-series:
There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough and at times lurid nature of his material, been dismissed as a hack, despite significant endorsements of literary critics of the nineteenth century. Unlike the corpus of Dickens, The Wire failed to reach the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain interest over time, and thus runs the risk of falling into the obscurity of academia. We come to you today to right that gross literary injustice.
Also included in the round-table is this essay on women in The Wire, which claims, quite rightly, that “The Wire is singularly unconcerned with how women fare in these institutions, the fates they face, the options open to them.”
The U.S. government now owns the story of Colton Harris-Moore, the gawky delinquent thief and burglar who will cool his heels in prison while a movie about his exploits as the “Barefoot Bandit” appears headed for a theater near you.
The 20-year-old Harris-Moore pleaded guilty to seven federal felony charges Friday in a plea agreement that recommends he serve between 5 ¼ and 6 ½ years in prison to resolve the federal aspects of his two-year crime spree, including the thefts of two airplanes and a boat and being a fugitive in possession of a firearm.
Mark of Cain, a documentary by Alix Lambert about the culture of Russian criminal tattoos, is now available for free online under a creative commons license. This documentary served as a reference for the David Cronenberg film Eastern Promises.
Come April, the full story of the “Barefoot Bandit” will be laid bare.
Colton Harris-Moore, the Camano Island man indicted after an international crime spree, is the focus of a new book, “Fly, Colton, Fly: The True Story of the Barefoot Bandit.”
The book was written by Herald reporter Jackson Holtz, who has covered the case from its inception.
Harris-Moore, 19, is scheduled to stand trial in federal court July 11. He was arrested in the Bahamas a year before.
The book took Holtz about a month to write, he said. He wanted the opportunity to tell the full story from beginning to end — beyond the constraints of a daily newspaper.
The story of the Barefoot Bandit begged to be told in the context of the Pacific Northwest, he said. He sees Harris-Moore as an original Northwest criminal.
Harris-Moore is pleading not guilty to federal charges:
“Barefoot bandit” suspect Colton Harris-Moore, the teen accused in a two-year spree of sometimes-shoeless burglaries and thefts, pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges of interstate transportation of a stolen plane, boat and gun.
Not guilty pleas on behalf of Harris-Moore, 19, also were entered in federal court by his lawyer to charges of being a fugitive in possession of a firearm and of flying a plane without a pilot’s license.
The five charges, collectively punishable by up to 43 years in prison, were brought in an indictment returned by a grand jury last week, adding to the prosecutions mounting against the youth in his home state of Washington and elsewhere.
It wasn’t clear to me from this article whether he’s pleading no guilty to *all* charges against him, or if there may be other charges that he will plead guilty to. Previous coverage suggested his lawyers were trying to reach a plea-bargain. The story does note that charges from Washington and various states are piling up.
A police bulletin has been sent to all officers this week, requesting they look at the Real Life Super Hero national website to get an idea of what they are dealing with.
The Rain City Superhero Movement includes the likes of Thorn, Buster Doe, Green Reaper, Gemini, No Name, Catastrophe, Thunder 88, Penelope and Phoenix Jones the Guardian of Seattle. All masked, they carry Tasers, nightsticks, pepper spray, but no firearms. [...]
The police will be interviewing more member of the Rain City Superhero Movement this week, to be identified. Basically, the plot of Civil War is being carried out on the streets of Seattle – just without any dead giant black men.
My childhood self would be glad to know that I would live long enough to see the day when the real-life superhero problem would be “hard news.” My adult-self, however, disapproves of vigilantism and thinks this whole thing will only end badly.
After analyzing new DNA evidence, the Arkansas Supreme Court has ordered a new hearing for the “West Memphis 3,” three men convicted as teens in the 1993 murders of three West Memphis Cub Scouts.
The justices also said a lower court must examine claims of misconduct by jurors who sentenced Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin.
There’s little doubt among legal experts that Colton Harris-Moore’s best bet to avoid a lengthy prison term is to mount a defense that highlights his troubled upbringing and plays down the bravado of his two years on the run.
That’s already started.
His defense attorney, John Henry Browne, said on national television that the “Barefoot Bandit” isn’t interested in making money from his story. Harris-Moore didn’t have fun on the run, his lawyer said. He was lonely and scared.
Now, at 19, Harris-Moore could be facing years, if not decades, behind bars. Experts believe a trial — if no plea agreement is reached — is months away, at best.
Legal experts suggest that a successful defense likely will focus more on arguing for a reduced sentence than on challenging the facts in the dozens of crimes Harris-Moore is linked to.
He said Harris-Moore had a message for the public.
“He’s concerned that kids will think this is fun, and he wanted us to say publicly that it was not fun. He was scared to death most of the time he was on his ‘lark’,” said Browne. “It was not enjoyable … he was living in port-a-potties at times.”
perhaps his most benign nickname is the most telling. Long before stealing boats and planes made him a marvel of elusiveness, an Internet antihero, Mr. Harris-Moore, 19, was suspected of stealing cookies and frozen pizza from the Kostelyk family, a few gravel roads from the squalor that was his home, a trailer on a dead end here, barely an hour from Seattle. The Kostelyks had waterfront property and a freezer full of food. He lived inland and had nothing.
“We called him ‘Island Boy,’ ” recalled Linda Johnson, whose mother, Maxine Kostelyk, was among Mr. Harris-Moore’s first suspected victims. “He came back over and over again — frozen pizza, cookies, ice cream. He was a tall boy, and he was growing.” [...]
An examination of his early life and troubles suggests a picture far less cinematic. According to court and public documents and dozens of interviews, Mr. Harris-Moore was nobody’s hero, not even his own. On the contrary, whether he was hiding in the Kostelyks’ tree house, watching for delivery of the high-powered flashlight the police believe he ordered with a stolen credit card, or flying solo to the Bahamas in a stolen Cessna this month, isolated in the tiny cockpit for more than a thousand miles — Colton Harris-Moore, for much of his life, was alone and hungry.
That was true even as he was being celebrated by thousands of fans on Facebook.
“He says he’s not into any of that,” said Monique Gomez, a lawyer who briefly represented Mr. Harris-Moore in the Bahamas. “He just wants to get this behind him.”
According to the AP, Colton Harris-Moore has been arrested in the Bahamas, where he continued his crime spree after crashing a stolen plane near Great Abaco Island.
Colton’s mother retained the high profile lawyer John Henry Browne this morning. Browne says Colton faces 7-15 years in prison if he’s convicted on a package-deal for his various crimes. (Assuming they can hold on to the slippery kid!)
Browne said various members of the Harris-Moore family have contributed to Colton’s defense fund, but the attorny – perhaps best known for defending Ted Bundy – said he’s not too concerned about money.
The notorious Camano Island fugitive some call the “Barefoot Bandit” was again the focus of a manhunt on a small island Tuesday after he allegedly crashed another stolen plane.
This time, though, Colton Harris-Moore, 19, was being sought on the white sand cays of the Bahamas, more than 3,500 miles away from his home.
FBI officials say he is wanted in connection with the theft of a plane from Indiana that somebody flew roughly 1,200 miles and crashed Sunday off Abaco, a small island west of Miami.
In Turkey the prized organ fetches around €2,300, an Indian or Iraqi kidney enriches its former owner by a mere €800, and the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates the going price on the black market to be about €4,000.
But when you consider that wealthy clients will later pay well over €100,000 for the kidney, this massive profit margin would appear to guarantee a lucrative future for the international trade in human organs if it continues unchecked.
In what sounds like the setup for a bad “psychological thriller” movie, neuroscientist James Fallon discovered that his brain fits the profile of a psychopath’s: low activity in the orbital cortex.
“You see that? I’m 100 percent. I have the pattern, the risky pattern,” he says, then pauses. “In a sense, I’m a born killer.”
Fallon’s being tongue-in-cheek — sort of. He doesn’t believe his fate or anyone else’s is entirely determined by genes. They merely tip you in one direction or another.
And yet: “When I put the two together, it was frankly a little disturbing,” Fallon says with a laugh. “You start to look at yourself and you say, ‘I may be a sociopath.’ I don’t think I am, but this looks exactly like [the brains of] the psychopaths, the sociopaths, that I’ve seen before.”
I asked his wife, Diane, what she thought of the result.
“I wasn’t too concerned,” she says, laughing. “I mean, I’ve known him since I was 12.”
Diane probably does not need to worry, according to scientists who study this area. They believe that brain patterns and genetic makeup are not enough to make anyone a psychopath. You need a third ingredient: abuse or violence in one’s childhood.
In recent decades, it began to seem as though America’s proud tradition of venerating great outlaws might have been lost. We’d grown to accept — and secretly admire — corporate-thievery. Our renegades and outlaws, once admired for their boldness in the face of tyrants, were recast in popular culture as degenerates. The logic went that by breaking the law — written to protect the powerful corrupt — they acted against society itself. Now we know nothing could be further from the truth. Thank God Colton Harris-Moore, the “Teenage Jesse James,” is winning back the hearts and minds of all those people who forgot the allure of a goodhearted outlaw.
The South Dakota crime spree started after Harris-Moore apparently left the Northwest, donating $100 to a Raymond animal hospital and stealing a $450,000 yacht on his way to Oregon, then reportedly stealing more cars as he made his way toward Idaho.
A few days after Harris-Moore’s trail went cold in Boise, Idaho, on June 12, authorities in South Dakota noticed an unusual series of incidents:
• A vehicle with Washington state license plates was found abandoned in South Dakota, according to a local news station.
• A vehicle was reported stolen from the Spearfish, S.D., airport and another was stolen from the Yankton airport on Tuesday.
• One or more homes were burglarized in the same area, not far from the airport.
• In one of the burglaries, police say a man who fits the description of Harris-Moore occupied a home while the family was on vacation. The family came home and surprised him in their house, and the man fled the scene.
