[S]he took his knife, stripped him naked and paraded him in front of other prostitutes, after asking how many of them had ever been forced into sex at knifepoint.Then she hauled him on down to the police station.
Justice Paul Pfeifer, writing for the court, said it is irrelevant even if Betty Lucas had violated the protective order by inviting her ex-husband into her home, as the lower court found.If someone is so dangerous to you that you have to get a protective order against them, it behooves you to stay the hell away from them, or face the consequences. If you appeal to the government for protection, deliberately circumventing the government's attempts to protect you should either a) be illegal, or b) nullify the government's responsibility towards you. In a just world, a protective order would work both ways.
"To find appellant guilty of complicity would be to criminalize an irrelevancy," Pfeifer wrote. "We hold that an individual who is the protected subject of a temporary protection order may not be prosecuted for aiding and abetting the restrainee under the protection order."
The panel's decision appears to divert dramatically from past practice, according to a law professor who is a former Iran-contra prosecutor and an expert on the independent counsel law. John Q. Barrett, who was an associate counsel for independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, said federal courts have been generous in reimbursing legal bills and have avoided drawing conclusions about whether the subject otherwise would have been investigated.And the Clintons are complaining about it too:
"Before today, the court was generally generous and, for whatever reason, today took a dramatically different approach," Barrett said. "Many suspect a political motivation in this case. I don't necessarily subscribe to that, but it is very different."
The Clintons complained through their attorney yesterday that two former Republican presidents fared much better in securing repayment of their legal bills in the Iran-contra investigation. George H.W. Bush was awarded $272,000, or 59 percent of the reimbursement he sought, and Ronald Reagan was awarded $562,000, or 72 percent of his request.Okay, so the former presidents you're referring to received a combined $834,000 in repayments from the government. Since you're stressing the percentage of their legal bills that were repaid, here's a figure you could bring up as well: $834,000 is 23% of $3,580,000, which is the amount the Clintons are requesting from the government. The Clintons may be only getting 2% of what they asked for, but they're asking for more than four times the amount of money that was distributed to Reagan and Bush. Perhaps that has a lot more to do with the denial of their request than any shadowy political conspiracy.
Michael Ballou, a part-time lecturer who teaches an "Introduction to U.S. Government" course at the college's Petaluma campus, intended the assignment to be an "experiential exercise that would instill a sense of fear so they would have a better sense of why more people don't participate in the political process," said Doug Garrison, the vice president and executive dean of the Petaluma campus. ...It is appropriate to fear participation in the political process, if your participation is limited to making death threats against the president. That isn't the reason 'more people don't participate in the political process', and saying that just makes Garrison look like a dumbass. Does he think that a good 'experiential exercise' that would instill a better understanding of why women don't like to walk alone at night would be to rape his students?
Most of the 30 students in the class dismissed the June 25 assignment as a joke, but after it was repeated at a subsequent class, one student did send the e-mail to U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Napa Valley) on July 5. ...People like this are why I would never teach my (hypothetical) children to blindly obey their superiors.
Making a threat against the president is against the law and subject to up to five years in prison.
Mallard told police that her Chevrolet Cavalier hit Biggs with such force that his head and shoulders jammed into the windshield and his legs were bent over the roof, his pants tearing almost completely off his body.At some point after Chante quit apologizing, Gregory Biggs died from the injuries she inflicted, and then she and two accomplices dumped the body.
Instead of stopping, police say, Mallard drove about a mile down a divided six-lane highway, the man still lodged and bleeding in the jagged windshield, then continued through town to her small yellow house in a working-class neighborhood.
She pulled into her garage, lowered the door, then sat in the car and cried, repeatedly apologizing to the man who was moaning, she later told detectives.
"Chante kept going in and out of the garage telling the man she was sorry," the police report states. "She does not know how long it took the man to die; she quit going out into the garage."
... Tarrant County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani later said Biggs, whose left leg was nearly amputated, probably lived only a few hours after he was hit the morning of Oct. 26, 2001. He could have survived if he had received medical attention, Peerwani has said.That is far more than merely failing to 'stop and render aid.' I can't think of any punishment currently in use in the american justice system that is harsh enough to address such a complete lack of humanity. I'm of the opinion that the only way to make this one right, is to have someone do unto Chante what she so callously did to Gregory Biggs.
Crane was convicted in 1994 in Johnson County, Kan., for an attack on a video store clerk in suburban Leawood the previous year. Earlier, he got probation in 1987 for attempted forcible rape and two counts of sex abuse in Missouri.Sounds to me like Crane simply started saying what the doctors wanted to hear. They decided this predatory animal was safe enough to be released into the wild, and sure enough, he went right back to his raping ways.
In the 1994 case, he was sentenced to 35 years to life on his convictions for kidnapping, attempted rape and attempted sodomy. ...
As he was approaching release, the state sought to have him kept in confinement, and a jury determined him to be a violent sexual predator. The Kansas Supreme Court overturned that finding, but Crane remained in confinement while the state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Last year, the court ruled in a 7-2 decision that states must prove that convicted sex offenders can't control themselves if they are to be confined after they finish their prison terms. ...
Crane, who remained in custody for more than three years after finishing his sentence, was released in January last year after doctors concluded his mental condition had changed and that he was no longer a threat.
The Kansas law, similar to those in about 20 states, allows indefinite confinement of violent sex offenders beyond their prison term if they suffer from mental abnormalities making them likely to commit similar crimes in the future. (emphasis mine)Isn't it a given that a rapist is mentally abnormal? And considering this was not his first offense, I'd say it's also a given that he's likely to commit similar crimes in the future. This animal should never have been released.
PALOMINO VALLEY, Nev. - Swarms of Mormon crickets are marching across the West, destroying rangeland and crops, slickening highways with their carcasses and leaving disgusted residents in their wake.
"It's yucky," said Amy Nisbet of Elko in northeast Nevada, where this year crickets made their first appearance in recent memory. "You drive down the street and they pop like bubble wrap."
The state parole board's decision to release David Ortell Kingston on Tuesday rather than parole him means the prison has no responsibility to follow up on him.Great. So Mr. Kingston has vowed to wait until they're 18 years old now. I'd be more reassured if he also vowed not to force his female relatives to marry him any more.
Todd Utzinger, one of Kingston's former attorneys, said the parole board's decision recognizes "he has taken full responsibility and is prepared to go on and live a crime-free life." ...
Kingston's 16-year-old wife was the daughter of his brother John Daniel Kingston, who was sentenced to seven months in jail for beating the girl after she attempted to flee the marriage. Another Kingston brother, Paul, is the church leader.
David Kingston had denied having had sex with his niece until a parole hearing last August. He vowed never again to have sex with an underage girl.
"I recognize the hurt and sorrow I have caused (the victim) and my family," he said.
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Even though she had an order of protection filed against her ex-husband, Betty Lucas invited him to a birthday party for one of their children.Seems fair enough to me. If you get a protective order against a guy, you're hardly deserving of sympathy if you invite him to violate it.
The party soon disintegrated into fighting and police were called. But in an unexpected twist, both adults were charged with violating the protection order - her ex-husband for attending and Lucas for inviting him.
Now Lucas' appeal has landed on the docket of the Ohio Supreme Court, which must decide if people who seek a court's protection can be charged with violating their own request.
Domestic violence groups have sided with Lucas and say abusive people - not their victims - must be held responsible for violating protective orders. Prosecutors say Lucas should be held as accountable as anyone else who helped her husband violate a court order.Because poor abused women should never have to take responsibility or face consequences for their actions.
Several domestic violence watchdog groups are backing Betty Lucas, saying failure to overturn her conviction sets back the justice system's role in protecting victims of abuse.Whups... I was being sarcastic, up there, but it appears that the AOCBW wasn't.
"Punishing the victim for contacting or returning to the offender does nothing to deter criminal behavior," the groups, including the Action Ohio Coalition for Battered Women and the Ohio Domestic Violence Network, argued in court papers.
"It tells the victim that she is equally responsible for the abuser's violent behavior and it reinforces the abuser's belief that his behavior is the result of factors outside his control," the groups argued.Well yes, if you deliberately violate a court order, in order to see a man that you claim is abusive, you share the responsibility for the results. I'm of the opinion that protective orders should be worded so that they apply equally to each party. If the police aren't allowed to charge you with violating protective orders you request, there's nothing to stop me from getting a protective order against an ex-boyfriend and then violating it, calling the police, and having him carted off to jail. Once he gets out, if the order is still in effect, I can repeat the process as many times as I like. Sounds unfair? It is. If you think someone is so dangerous to you that you have to get a protective order, then you have a responsibility to stay the hell away from them.
Lucas' attorney, Andrew Sanderson, argued that Ohio law is meant to protect victims of domestic violence even if they make a bad decision about the person who abused them.There's a difference there in that children under the age of consent are held to be incapable of making their own decisions - that's why its called below the age of consent. Is Sanderson implying that women are incapable of making their own decisions, and therefore shouldn't be held responsible even when they recklessly expose themselves to a known danger? How condescending.
He used the analogy of Ohio's sexual assault laws, which protect victims under 18 from prosecution no matter the circumstances. Even if a teenage girl was a seducer, "We've made a societal decision that we're not going to charge that individual," Sanderson said.
As you and your members might already know, several courts have held that cigarette manufacturers may be liable for failing to disclose that their products might be addictive, even though the general health dangers of smoking were so well known as to be regarded as common knowledge. ... By analogy, even if all courts find that the general dangers of eating fatty and calorie-rich foods at fast food restaurants are likewise common knowledge, liability for causing obesity and its related diseases may nevertheless be premised on the theory that the public is much less aware of the addictive-like effects of many fast food than they are of the widely-publicized addictive nature of nicotine in cigarettes.And he's right, you know. Food is addictive. People have to eat food, or their withdrawal symptoms - stomach cramps, wasting, headaches, mood swings, and malnutrition - will eventually grow so severe as to be fatal.
In light of these scientific studies, it may also be prudent for fast food companies to review their policies to be sure that nothing they are doing could be construed by a jury as seeking to take advantage of and/or enhance the possibly addictive properties of their foods. Changing the cooking temperature so as to increase the amount of fat absorbed during cooking, adding sugar to foods like french fries where it is not ordinarily expected, etc. might well seem to jurors like the activities of cigarette manufacturers to increase (“spike”) the addictive effects of their products.