History > 2011 > USA > Justice > States (I)

Randall Adams, 61, Dies;

Freed With Help of Film

June 25, 2011
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Randall Dale Adams, who spent 12 years in prison before his conviction in the murder of a Dallas police officer was thrown out largely on the basis of evidence uncovered by a filmmaker, died in obscurity in October in Washington Court House, Ohio. He was 61.

Mr. Adams had chosen to live a quiet life divorced from his past, and when he died on Oct. 30, 2010, of a brain tumor, the death was reported only locally, said his lawyer, Randy Schaffer. The death was first widely reported on Friday.

The film that proved so crucial to Mr. Adams was “The Thin Blue Line,” directed by Errol Morris and released in 1988. It told a harrowing story, and it had the effect of helping to bring about Mr. Adams’s release the following year.

“We’re not talking about a cop killer who’s getting out on a technicality,” Mr. Morris said when Mr. Adams was set free. “We’re talking about an unbelievable nightmare.”

The story began on Nov. 27, 1976. Mr. Adams was walking along a Dallas street after his car had run out of gas when a teenager, David Ray Harris, came by in a stolen car and offered him a ride. The two spent the day drinking, smoking marijuana and going to a drive-in movie.

Shortly after midnight, a Dallas police officer, Robert Wood, stopped a car for a traffic violation and was shot and killed. The investigation led to Mr. Harris, who accused Mr. Adams of the murder. Other witnesses corroborated his testimony, and Mr. Adams was convicted in 1977.

Sentenced to die by lethal injection, Mr. Adams appealed the verdict, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to overturn it. His execution was scheduled for May 8, 1979.

Three days before the execution, the United States Supreme Court ordered a stay on the grounds that prospective jurors who had been uneasy about the death penalty were excluded during jury selection even though they had clearly said they would follow Texas law.

Gov. Bill Clements went on to commute Mr. Adams’s sentence to life in prison. With the death penalty no longer an issue, the Texas appeals court ruled there was “now no error in the case.”

In March 1985, Mr. Morris arrived in Dallas to work on a documentary about a psychiatrist whose testimony in death penalty cases was controversial. The psychiatrist contended that he could predict future criminal behavior, something the American Psychiatric Association had said was impossible.

In Dallas, Mr. Morris met Mr. Schaffer, who had been working on the case since 1982. The two began piecing together a puzzle that pointed to Mr. Harris’s guilt in the police shooting. Mr. Harris had by then accumulated a long criminal record and was on death row for an unrelated murder.

Mr. Morris and Mr. Schaffer knew from the records that Mr. Harris had bragged about killing a police officer after the shooting but had then recanted and blamed Mr. Adams, and that the pistol used in the killing had been stolen from his father.

Their own investigation revealed that three witnesses had been improperly sprung on the defense and that they had committed perjury in their testimony. Moreover, a statement that Mr. Adams signed during an interrogation was misconstrued as an admission that he had been at the scene of the crime.

With so much evidence seeming to suggest Mr. Harris’s guilt, many Texans believed prosecutors had gone after Mr. Adams and not Mr. Harris because Mr. Harris, who was 16, was too young to be executed under Texas law. In the murder of a police officer, the theory went, prosecutors almost always seek the most severe punishment.

Mr. Schaffer said Mr. Morris gained access to witnesses and others related to the case. “They forgot the script they learned for the trial,” he said. “They told the truth.”

After the movie came out in 1988, the resulting outcry prompted a judge to grant another hearing, something Mr. Schaffer had not been able to accomplish. Mr. Harris recanted his previous testimony, without confessing. In 2004, Mr. Harris was executed for the other murder.

In March 1989, the Texas appeals court ruled Mr. Adams was entitled to a new trial because of the perjured testimony. Three weeks later, he was released on his own recognizance, and two days after that the Dallas district attorney dropped all charges.

Mr. Adams lived a peripatetic life afterward, first returning to his native Ohio, then moving to upstate New York, later returning to Texas, in the Houston area, and finally settling again in Ohio. Mr. Schaffer said Mr. Adams gave speeches against the death penalty and married the sister of a man on death row. He did not know if they were still married at his death.

Mr. Adams’s mother died in December, and he is survived by at least one sister, Mr. Schaffer said.

Mr. Morris went on to make, among other films, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara” (2003), which won an Academy Award.

Mr. Schaffer said that if Mr. Adams were found to be wrongly convicted under today’s law in Texas, he would get $80,000 for each year of incarceration. At the time his conviction was thrown out, wrongly convicted prisoners could get a lump sum payment of $25,000 if pardoned by the governor. But Mr. Adams was ineligible for the money. He had not been pardoned; his case had been dismissed.

He also did not receive the $200 given to prisoners when they are released on parole or on the completion of their sentences, Mr. Schaffer said. Again, Mr. Adams did not qualify.

    Randall Adams, 61, Dies; Freed With Help of Film, R, 25.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/us/26adams.html

A Murder Trial as Tourist Draw in Central Florida

June 25, 2011
The New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

ORLANDO, Fla. — By the time Casey Anthony stepped into the courtroom here last week, her hair in a loose bun, the line of people outside determined to get a coveted ringside seat, with its close-up view of her, had swelled to 60.

Heather Spaniol overcame her dread of planes and flew here from Las Vegas, driving straight from the airport to the courthouse to stand in line. Missing Ms. Anthony’s trial was not an option. The killing of 2-year-old Caylee Marie Anthony had touched Ms. Spaniol, 33, so deeply that she applied to law school and hopes to fight for children’s rights.

Marcia Frye of Texas, another fly-in who decided to spend her vacation at the trial, rattled off the latest courtroom goings-on like a seasoned legal expert, bouncing from an assessment of the power of chloroform to the durability of duct tape — evidence that prosecutors say is linked to the murder.

“I feel like I know these people,” said Ms. Frye, 47, who works at an energy company in San Antonio and said she had read 95 percent of all the released depositions in the case and every available hearing transcript. “I see them all the time.”

Never mind Walt Disney World or the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Ms. Anthony’s trial at the Orange County Courthouse here, which began in early May, is this year’s hot attraction, with courtroom passes going to the first 50 people hardy enough to withstand Florida’s humidity for 10 hours at a time.

Initial demand for seats led to overnight lines, which led to scuffles, which led to a few visits by the police. Then nine days ago, after two men tried to cut in line, a brawl erupted and court administrators were forced to make changes. Now passes are handed out at 4 p.m. for the next day’s session.

But for the trial denizens who have stuck with the Anthony drama for three years, the wait is well worth the payoff: seeing Ms. Anthony wipe away the occasional tear, peering into the eyes of stone-faced jurors, experiencing firsthand the emotional intensity in the courtroom.

The women in line (and they are mostly women) say they have been particularly moved by the sordid death of the adorable Caylee and the apparent callousness of Ms. Anthony, who prosecutors say killed her child because she grew tired of motherhood and then failed to report the child missing for a month. And when she did contact the police, she blamed a never-to-be-located babysitter for kidnapping Caylee.

Like an extended clan of grieving relatives, the women in line want to see Caylee get her due.

“I’ve watched it for three years and have cried many, many tears for this little girl,” Ms. Spaniol said. “All of us are here for Caylee.”

Nearby, Ms. Frye chimed in: “It’s not so much a soap opera we are interested in. People want to know what happened. They want justice.” If Ms. Anthony is acquitted, “the crowd will form a riot,” she added. “I believe she is the most hated person in America.”

The narrative of the case, about which reporters in the courtroom instantaneously post updates on Twitter and blogs, is familiar to many. Ms. Anthony, who could face the death penalty if convicted, is accused of murdering her daughter in June 2008. Prosecutors say she killed Caylee by knocking her out with chloroform and wrapping her mouth and nose with duct tape. She kept the body in the trunk of her car for a while and then dumped it in the woods near her mother’s house, they say, where the decomposed remains were found six months later.

Prosecutors also assert that Ms. Anthony, 25, did all of this because Caylee was keeping her from a carefree life of boyfriends, cocktails and clubs. After Caylee’s disappearance, they add, she lied repeatedly to her parents and the police, went to bars and happily hung out with friends.

But prosecutors are hamstrung by the fact that they have no airtight physical evidence tying Ms. Anthony to Caylee’s death. An autopsy could not pinpoint the cause of death.

The defense, meanwhile, laid out a surprise counteroffensive during its opening statement: Caylee died after accidentally drowning in the family swimming pool and was found by her grandfather, George Anthony, a retired homicide detective. He and Ms. Anthony panicked and covered up the drowning, the defense said. The reason Ms. Anthony lied to the police is that as a child she had been sexually abused by her father and was accustomed to living a life of secrecy and dishonesty, said her defense lawyer, José Baez.

Mr. Anthony denied all of the defense’s claims on the witness stand.

So far, Mr. Baez, who began presenting his case over a week ago, has scarcely elaborated on the alleged drowning and sexual abuse. Instead, he has hammered away at the forensic evidence presented by prosecutors, bringing on an assortment of expert witnesses.

On Thursday, he scored a victory when Cindy Anthony, Ms. Anthony’s mother, testified that she was the one who had searched for “chloroform” on Google on the family computer.

Legal experts say that the prosecution has the upper hand at the moment, despite its largely circumstantial case.

“The state has an extremely strong case, and it’s going to be very difficult to explain to the jury why she waited so long to report this to the authorities,” said David Edelstein, a Florida criminal defense lawyer. “The thing about opening statements, he is delivering a promise to the jury. If he doesn’t deliver on that promise, the first one to point that out is the prosecutor.”

To deliver on the promise, legal experts say, Mr. Baez will have to put Ms. Anthony on the stand, since it appears she is the only other one who can testify about the alleged sexual abuse — a risky move at best. Prosecutors would delight in questioning Ms. Anthony about Caylee’s death and the month that followed.

“It would be unwise, because she would have to answer or clarify too many of her lies,” said Bruce Lehr, a criminal defense lawyer in Florida. “She lied to the police, her parents, her boyfriend. Hearing her on the stand between tears, saying ‘Yes, I lied about this and that’ has a powerful impact on the jury.”

But the possibility that Ms. Anthony will testify has the crowds outside wondering each day if it might be the one when she does take the stand.

For now, they parse the action inside — Caylee’s grandmother’s grief-stricken display on the witness stand as she talked about the child, the way Ms. Anthony looks down at the floor when a photo of her daughter’s skull is shown, the judge’s frequent displeasure with the lawyers and the obvious animosity between the two camps.

And the jurors?

“I did watch the jurors,” Ms. Frye said. “There wasn’t a lot of note taking. It’s as if they had their minds made up.”

    A Murder Trial as Tourist Draw in Central Florida, NYT, 25.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/us/26casey.html

Can Justice Be Bought?

June 15, 2011
The New York Times

Two years ago, the Supreme Court tried to bolster public trust in the nation’s justice system by disqualifying a state judge in West Virginia from a case that involved a coal company executive who had spent more than $3 million to help get the judge elected.

At a time when torrents of special interest campaign spending is threatening the appearance and reality of judicial impartiality, the ruling in Caperton v. Massey drove home the need for states to adopt more rigorous rules for recusal. The message has largely gone unheeded.

For the most part, state courts set their own recusal rules. According to New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and Justice at Stake Campaign, so far, courts in nine states — Arizona, California, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, Utah and Washington State — have made recusal mandatory when contributions by a party or attorney exceed a certain threshold amount or create a question about the judge’s impartiality.

Courts in two other states are considering similar proposals. But several other states have rejected stronger rules — or have actually weakened them.

In 2009, Nevada’s top court rejected a reform commission’s modest proposal to make recusal mandatory when a judge received contributions totaling $50,000 or more from a party or lawyer over the previous six years.

Last year, in Wisconsin — home to some of the nastiest big-money judicial races — the State Supreme Court rejected proposals to trigger recusal at $1,000 or $10,000 contribution levels. Then the court weakened the recusal standard, adopting a new rule that campaign donations or expenditures can never be the sole basis for a judge’s disqualification.

The remaining states, including epicenters of special-interest-dominated contests like Illinois and Pennsylvania, have done nothing to keep campaign cash from tainting the courtroom. The Supreme Court has ensured the money problem will get worse with its 2010 ruling allowing unlimited special interest spending in all campaigns.

Many judges wrongly view mandatory disqualification rules involving election money as a personal insult and a threat to judicial independence. The real threat to independence lies in doing nothing to protect judicial integrity in the face of obvious conflicts.

The American Bar Association should be leading the way here. In an encouraging step, the group’s president, Stephen Zack, has seen to it that the issue will be taken up at the August meeting of the association’s House of Delegates. By adding a strong recusal provision to its influential model code of judicial conduct, the bar association would provide needed guidance to state judiciaries and help goad them to do the right thing.

A good rule would have four basic elements. It should explicitly recognize that recusal may be necessary because of campaign spending by litigants or their lawyers. It should specify that the final decision about whether a judge’s impartiality can reasonably be questioned not be left to the challenged judge. It should require that decisions on recusal requests be in writing. Finally, litigants and attorneys must be required to disclose any campaign spending relating to a judge or judges hearing their case.

    Can Justice Be Bought?, NYT, 15.6.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/opinion/16thu1.html

Obama administration to appeal healthcare ruling

ATLANTA | Wed Jun 8, 2011
1:24am EDT
Reuters
By Matthew Bigg

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Lawyers for President Barack Obama will on Wednesday seek to stave off the biggest legal challenge yet to healthcare reform, his signature domestic policy achievement.

The administration will present oral arguments as it appeals a ruling by a Florida judge who declared the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, backing claims by 26 U.S. states that are seeking repeal.

A three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta will hear oral arguments by both sides. While a Virginia appeals court heard a similar case in May, this case is significant because of the number of states backing it.

No ruling is expected for months and legal experts expect an appeal to the Supreme Court, regardless of which side wins.

The law aims to increase access to healthcare and slow the growth in costs. The White House views it as a cornerstone of Obama's presidency. Republicans say it will send costs soaring and represents intrusive government power especially because it mandates all individuals to buy health insurance.

They plan to make their campaign for repeal a pillar of efforts to defeat Obama at presidential elections in 2012.

"Opponents of reform claim that the law's individual responsibility provision exceeds Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce because it penalizes 'inactivity.' They are wrong," the White House said on its blog on Tuesday.

"Individuals who choose to go without health insurance are actively making an economic decision that affects all of us," it said of the provision to fine Americans who do not buy insurance, which comes into effect in 2014.

The 2010 law also allows young people to remain on their parents' health insurance into their twenties and prevents insurers from denying coverage for preexisting medical conditions.

Florida District Judge Roger Vinson ruled in January the entire law "must be declared void" because its requirement to buy insurance is unconstitutional, but put the ruling on hold pending appeal.

"The nation needs healthcare reform that's pursued constitutionally and in a way that does not harm our economy and our taxpayers," Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.

Chief Judge Joel Dubina, Judge Frank Hull and Judge Stanley Marcus will hear the appeal. Analysts will watch their questions closely for clues as to how they might rule.

Dubina was appointed by President George H. W. Bush, a Republican, while the other two were appointed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

Senior administration lawyer Neal Katyal will argue for the government, while former Solicitor General Paul Clement will present Florida's case.

The case is State of Florida et al v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services et al. Its number is 11-11021.

 

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

    Obama administration to appeal healthcare ruling, R, 8.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/us-usa-healthcare-idUSTRE7570UI20110608

When States Punish Women

June 2, 2011
The New York Times

The Obama administration has rightly decided to reject a mean-spirited and dangerous Indiana law banning the use of Medicaid funds at Planned Parenthood clinics, which provide vital health services to low-income women.

The law, signed by Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana in May, is just one effort by Republican-led state legislatures around the country to end public financing for Planned Parenthood — a goal the House Republicans failed to achieve in the budget deal in April. The organization is a favorite target because a small percentage of its work involves providing abortion care even though no government money is used for that purpose.

Governor Daniels and Republican lawmakers, by depriving Planned Parenthood of about $3 million in government funds, would punish thousands of low-income women on Medicaid, who stand to lose access to affordable contraception, life-saving breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing and treatment for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. Making it harder for women to obtain birth control is certainly a poor strategy for reducing the number of abortions.

On Wednesday, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Donald Berwick, said the Indiana law, which is already in effect, violates federal Medicaid law by imposing impermissible restrictions on the freedom of Medicaid beneficiaries to choose health care providers.

Although Mr. Berwick’s letter to Indiana officials did not say it explicitly, Indiana could lose millions of dollars in Medicaid financing unless it changes its law. In a bulletin to state officials around the country, the Medicaid office warned that states may not exclude doctors, clinics or other providers from Medicaid “because they separately provide abortion services.”

So far, Indiana isn’t budging. The issue will be taken up on Monday in federal court in Indiana where Planned Parenthood has filed a suit challenging the state’s action on statutory and constitutional grounds. The organization properly argues that it may not be penalized for engaging in constitutionally protected activities, like providing abortion services with its own money.

The Obama administration’s opposition to the Indiana law could help deter other states — including North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and Tennessee — from moving forward with similar measures to restrict payments to Planned Parenthood, either under Medicaid or Title X, the main federal family planning program. Kansas, for example, has enacted provisions to block Planned Parenthood from receiving any Title X money.

The measures against Planned Parenthood come amid further efforts to limit access to abortion. Just since April, six states — Indiana, Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Oklahoma and Kansas — have enacted laws banning insurance coverage of abortion in the health insurance exchanges created as part of federal health care reform, bringing the total to 14 states. Two states — Arizona and Texas — joined three others in making ultrasounds mandatory for women seeking to terminate pregnancies. Bills expected to be signed soon by Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, contain both types of provisions.

Many of these fresh attacks on reproductive rights, not surprisingly, have come in states where the midterm elections left Republicans in charge of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion.

    When States Punish Women, NT, 2.6.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/opinion/03fri1.html

Strauss-Kahn granted $1 million bail

NEW YORK | Thu May 19, 2011
4:32pm EDT
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dominique Strauss-Kahn was granted bail by a New York judge on Thursday, and the former IMF chief has vowed to fight charges that he tried to rape a hotel maid in Manhattan.

New York State Supreme Court Judge Michael Obus said that Strauss-Kahn, 62, can be released on $1 million cash bail, and placed under 24-hour home detention with electronic monitoring -- conditions that had been proposed by his lawyers.

The judge also said Strauss-Kahn must have one armed guard at all times at his own expense and have a $5 million insurance bond.

His wife, French television journalist Anne Sinclair, and his daughter Camille Strauss-Kahn had arrived at the court arm in arm. Strauss-Kahn arrived in court looking tired and was wearing a blue shirt, no tie, and a grey jacket.

Strauss-Kahn, a man accustomed to luxury hotel suites and first-class plane travel, had been denied bail in Manhattan Criminal Court on Monday and has spent the past three nights in New York City's notorious Rikers Island jail.

He strongly denied charges of a criminal sexual act, attempted rape, sexual abuse, unlawful imprisonment and forcible touching, in a letter released on Wednesday by the IMF announcing his resignation.

"I want to devote all my strength, all my time, and all my energy to proving my innocence," Strauss-Kahn wrote.

The former International Monetary Fund managing director faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

He was detained by New York police on Saturday aboard an Air France flight minutes before it was to depart for Paris.

Prosecutors said that about 12 p.m. (1600 GMT) on Saturday, Strauss-Kahn had sexually assaulted the a maid at the Sofitel hotel in midtown Manhattan, attempted to rape her and then, when unsuccessful, forced her to perform oral sex on him.

 

(Reporting by Basil Katz, writing by Michelle Nichols, editing by Stella Dawson)

    Strauss-Kahn granted $1 million bail, R, 19.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/19/us-strausskahn-indictment-idUSTRE74I6L020110519

IMF chief denied bail in sex assault case

NEW YORK | Mon May 16, 2011
7:42pm EDT
Reuters
By Basil Katz and Edith Honan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was denied bail on Monday on charges he attempted to rape a hotel maid, a crushing blow for the man until recently seen as a front-runner for the French presidency and who oversaw world finance.

Looking tired, with a light stubble, Strauss-Kahn listened as prosecutors described in graphic detail to a Manhattan Criminal Court judge what they said was his sexual attack on the maid and a subsequent attempt to flee the country.

"The charges and the underlying conduct here are severe," said prosecutor John McConnell.

He called the IMF chief a flight risk to France and urged the judge to keep Strauss-Kahn behind bars. "They do not extradite their nationals," he said.

Defense lawyers failed to win $1 million bail for Strauss-Kahn. They denied the charges against their client, whose arrest has thrown the IMF into turmoil just as it is trying to help fix the euro zone's deep debt crisis.

Strauss-Kahn faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted, prosecutors said.

Police have said the maid had described how the naked IMF chief sprang on her from a bathroom in his hotel suite, chased her down a hall, pulled her into a bedroom and assaulted her.

She told police she broke free but that he dragged her into the bathroom where he forced himself on her again.

Prosecutors told the judge Strauss-Kahn shut the door of his hotel room to prevent the maid from leaving.

"He grabbed the victim's chest without consent, attempted to remove her pantyhose and forcibly grabbed the victim's vaginal area," the prosecutors' office said in a statement. "His penis made contact with the victim's mouth twice through the use of force."

FORENSIC EVIDENCE

It was Strauss-Kahn's first appearance in court since he allegedly sexually assaulted the maid in his room at the Sofitel in Times Square.

He did not speak to the judge during the proceeding and was then taken to a New York detention center known as The Tombs.

Strauss-Kahn was pulled off an Air France jet on Saturday, minutes before it was to leave for Paris. The case has altered France's political landscape and left the IMF leadership in turmoil.

Defense attorney Ben Brafman said in court that forensic evidence taken by police from Strauss-Kahn "will not be consistent with a forcible encounter. We believe this a very, very defensible case and he should be entitled to bail."

Brafman told reporters, "I think it's important that you all understand that this battle has just begun."

Brafman was part of the team that successfully defended pop singer Michael Jackson in 2005.

The judge set May 20 as the next date for the case when the defense has suggested it will appeal the bail ruling.

A defense lawyer said Strauss-Kahn did not flee the hotel and that a person he was having lunch with on Saturday, the day of the incident, will testify on his behalf.

French radio reported that Strauss-Kahn's lawyers have proof that he was having lunch with his daughter at the time of the alleged attack.

The judge's order to Strauss-Kahn in custody raises further questions about his future as the globe-trotting managing director of the IMF.

The IMF board was due to meet on Monday. The fund's second in command, John Lipsky, has been put in charge.

The White House said the United States, the single biggest member of the fund, remained confident in the IMF's ability to do its job.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom Strauss-Kahn had been due to meet on Sunday, said finding a successor for the Frenchman was "not a question for today," but there were good grounds to have a European candidate ready.

European sources said French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde had been picking up support before the Strauss-Kahn news broke. Former Turkish Economy Minister Kemal Dervis is considered a favorite among the non-European possibilities.

Strauss-Kahn led the IMF through the 2007-09 global financial meltdown, pressing for stimulus measures and interest rate cuts to avoid a depression. He has been central in galvanizing Europe to tackle its debt woes.

Strauss-Kahn had been in New York on private business. The IMF said in a statement he pays out of his own pocket for private trips, and that it understands he paid less than the reported $3,000 a night for the luxury suite.

MORE ALLEGATIONS

French Socialist party leader Martine Aubry called the pictures of the IMF chief's arrest "profoundly humiliating" and told reporters: "Fortunately in France we have a law on the presumption of innocence which means that at this stage of proceedings, people cannot be shown like this."

More allegations involving Strauss-Kahn surfaced in Paris, where a lawyer said a woman writer was considering filing a legal complaint against the IMF chief over an alleged sexual incident dating back to 2002.

In New York, prosecutors said he may have engaged in the past in conduct similar to the alleged attack on Saturday and they were investigating.

Defense lawyers said they understood the case was the one about the woman writer in France.

Strauss-Kahn's wife, French television personality Anne Sinclair, said she did not believe the accusations against her husband "for a single second."

Police say Strauss-Kahn left his suite in such a rush that he left his mobile phone behind but a French tourist who said she saw him check out told France 2 television he had appeared calm and in no hurry.

After he called the hotel from John F. Kennedy Airport asking about his phone, police pulled him off an Air France flight bound for Paris.

Police say the IMF chief does not have diplomatic immunity from the charges.

In France, Strauss-Kahn had not yet declared his candidacy but was widely expected to seek the Socialist Party nomination. Early opinion polls gave him a big lead over conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, who is likely to seek a second term at the election next April.

France's government as well as Strauss-Kahn's allies and rivals called for caution and respect for the presumption of innocence. But unless the case against him collapses rapidly, it is hard to see how he could enter the Socialist primary.

French voters are famously tolerant of political leaders' extramarital affairs, but the allegations against Strauss-Kahn are much more serious.

His character had been questioned before. In 2008, he apologized for "an error of judgment after an affair with a female IMF economist who was his subordinate.

The fund's board warned him against improper conduct, but cleared him of harassment and abuse of power and kept him in his job. It will now face new scrutiny over whether that response was too weak, especially as there have been persistent rumors about Strauss-Kahn making sexual advances to women.

 

(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols, Lesley Wroughton, Noeleen Walder, Christine Kearney, Andrew Longstreth, Brian Love, Catherine Bremer, John Irish, Gernot Heller, Evren Ballim and Matt Daily; Writing by William Schomberg, Peter Millership and Paul Taylor, editing by Stella Dawson and Christopher Wilson)

    IMF chief denied bail in sex assault case, R, 16.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/16/us-strausskahn-arrest-idUSTRE74D29F20110516

Arizona 'Baseline Killer' trial starts Tuesday

19 April 2011
Associated Press
Associated Press Amanda Lee Myers

PHOENIX – Carmen Miranda was vacuuming her car and talking on her cell phone when a man dubbed the Baseline Killer attacked her and shot her in the head, shoved her body in the back seat and lodged her legs over her head with her pants pulled down.

The Phoenix woman would be the last victim connected to a string of eight other killings in 2005 and 2006, and now, the man accused of being the Baseline Killer is set to go on trial for murder.

Jury selection is set to begin Tuesday in the case against Mark Goudeau, whose trial is expected to last about nine months.

The crimes started in August 2005 and ended with Miranda's death on June 29, 2006, in what police described as a "blitz attack" of the mother of two at a Phoenix car wash. The dead, eight of them women, ranged in ages from 19 to 39. They were killed going about their daily activities, such as leaving work, waiting at a bus stop or, like Miranda, washing a car.

Police said they have forensic evidence, including DNA and ballistics, tying Goudeau to the killings.

The 46-year-old former construction worker is the last of three suspects to go on trial for a rash of attacks that terrorized the Phoenix area for more than a year and made headlines across the globe.

Dale Hausner and Samuel Dieteman were arrested in the so-called Serial Shooter case in August 2006. Hausner was convicted in March of killing six people and attacking 19 others in dozens of random nighttime shootings and was given six death sentences; Dieteman testified against Hausner and was sentenced to life in prison.

Goudeau already is serving a 438-year prison sentence. In September, he was convicted of 19 counts in a brutal 2005 attack in which he raped a woman while pointing a pistol at her sister's belly as they walked home from a park. That crime was part of the Baseline Killer case.

But this year's trial will be the first time Goudeau is tried on nine first-degree murder counts and 65 other charges, including attempted murder, sexual assault, child molestation, kidnapping and armed robbery.

"There's no question it's a big case," said Jerry Cobb, a spokesman for the Maricopa County attorney's office, which is prosecuting the case. "A case this big with this many victims just took a long time to get to the point where it could be tried."

Goudeau's attorney, Randall Craig, has not returned repeated calls for comment.

Goudeau's wife, Wendy Carr, is standing by her husband and goes to almost every hearing.

"I don't mean to oversimplify it, but Mark is innocent, and I think it's important that I show my support for him," she said. "If even a teeny bit of me thought he could be guilty, I would just go away."

She said it's scary to be on the cusp of the murder trial.

"Juries just scare me because people feel like they have a civic duty to convict, but hopefully people will be selected who can really listen to the case and understand there's not a shred of evidence that links Mark to any of these crimes," she said. "DNA is not what they say it is, not even close."

Carr referred to the DNA that connected Goudeau to the 2005 sexual assault of the two sisters.

Lorraine Heath, who worked as a forensic specialist with the Department of Public Safety, told a Maricopa County Superior Court that Goudeau was almost undoubtedly the source of male DNA found on the left breast of one of the sisters. It was 360 trillion times more likely that DNA collected from the crime scene came from Goudeau rather than an unrelated African-American man, Heath said.

Corwin Townsend, Goudeau's defense attorney at the time, pointed out that Heath's analysis showed only a partial match. Under cross-examination, Heath agreed that Goudeau's DNA was consistent with only three of 13 genetic markers.

Goudeau maintained that he was innocent.

"What happened to those two girls was indeed horrible," he told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Andrew Klein at his sentencing, "but I had nothing to do with it."

Before handing down the sentence, Klein said Goudeau must have two "diametrically opposed" personalities: one calm and respectful in court and the other sociopathic and brutal.

Goudeau, who grew up in Phoenix, already has spent much of his life behind bars.

He was imprisoned for 13 years after being convicted of crimes that included beating a woman's head against a barbell. The Arizona Board of Executive Clemency paroled him eight years early in 2004. About a year later, police said, Goudeau started attacking again.

In August 2005, police said Goudeau accosted three teens — two girls and a boy — near Baseline Road in south Phoenix, forced them behind a church, and molested the girls. In the months that followed, prosecutors say Goudeau killed nine people and committed many other crimes.

Police named the crimes after Baseline Road in south Phoenix where many of the earliest attacks happened. Goudeau lived only a few miles from many of the attack sites, and Miranda was killed just around the corner from his house.

Goudeau previously acknowledged being a recovering drug addict and once blamed his history of violence on a weakness for crack cocaine.

    Arizona 'Baseline Killer' trial starts Tuesday, NYT, 19.4.2011,
    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110419/ap_on_re_us/us_baseline_killer_trial

Defense, Treading Carefully,

Questions Accuser in Trial of 2 Officers

April 15, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN ELIGON

She had been on the witness stand for some eight hours spanning two days, recounting gruesome, emotional details of an evening in which she said a police officer raped her, when a moment of levity interrupted.

The defense lawyer questioning her, Joseph Tacopina, was asking her on Friday if she had “falsely” accused his client, Officer Kenneth Moreno, of contacting her mother and brother.

The prosecution objected, and the judge suggested that “mistakenly” might be a better characterization. The woman, staring pointedly at Mr. Tacopina, told him with the aplomb of a seasoned jurist, “Sorry, rephrase.”

Laughter broke out through the courtroom, and the woman cracked her first discernible smile from the witness box.

Friday was the first full day of the much anticipated cross-examination of the prosecution’s star witness — the 29-year-old accuser — in the rape trial of Officer Moreno and his partner, Officer Franklin Mata.

Typically, the cross-examination of the central witness in a prosecution is an opportunity for defense lawyers to smear the witness’s credibility, ruffle the witness and be combative. It is often a time for courtroom theatrics.

But not on Friday. The woman remained calm and confident, flexed her intellect and even went on the attack in a few instances.

Mr. Tacopina, for his part, appeared to make a strategic decision to be gentle — the notion being that hostility toward a sympathetic figure might not play well with the jury. When he began his questioning on Thursday, Mr. Tacopina even told the woman to let him know if she needed a break at any time.

Edward Mandery, the lawyer representing Officer Mata, said the same thing when he began his cross-examination late Friday afternoon. Mr. Mandery will resume his questioning on Monday.

Despite their approach, the defense lawyers were still aggressive in trying to portray the woman, who has testified to having been very drunk the night she said she was raped, as someone who could not remember details of what happened and who had an ulterior motive. She has a $57 million lawsuit pending against the city and the officers.

Mr. Tacopina read from e-mail and Facebook messages the woman exchanged with friends in the days after the officers escorted her up to her fifth-floor apartment in December 2008 and she says she was raped, pointing out minor inconsistencies between what she said then and what she was saying now.

Of an e-mail to her roommate, who was in London, the woman testified that she wrote that she was “O.K.” and that the episode was not “violent or aggressive.”

She also testified that she had told a nurse at the hospital she went to that she was not physically hurt. But, she explained, she thought the nurse meant from an act like being punched. And she said she had tried to play down the episode to her roommate so as not to worry her.

“When something like this happens to you, the shock is so surreal,” she said, her lips quivering in her most visibly emotional moment of the day.

“When you are just trying to figure out what you need to do afterwards,” she added, “you tell people you’re O.K., even though you’re not, because you’re trying to get through it.”

Mr. Tacopina got the woman to concede that she had told hospital staff members that she believed the assault was between midnight and 1 a.m., even though she testified during the trial that she had no recollection of time.

Officer Moreno and Officer Mata had been sent to the woman’s East Village address after a cabdriver reported she was too drunk to get out of the taxi.

The woman acknowledged on Friday that in a surveillance video of her walking into her apartment building with the officers, it appeared that she was moving her lips, perhaps bolstering the defense argument that she was coherent enough to have a conversation with them. (Mr. Tacopina has said Officer Moreno was counseling the woman that night about her drinking.)

Mr. Tacopina tried to show that the woman was less certain about what happened that night than she had let on in court. He introduced several statements she supposedly made to friends, memorialized in e-mails or investigators’ notes.

In one of the statements, the woman supposedly told a friend that “I think I was just raped” and that she was “pretty sure it was by a cop.”

But the woman insisted she had never expressed uncertainty about what had happened that night.

“I never said I believe I was raped,” she testified. “I knew I was raped.”

She added that several of those statements were notes written by an investigator, not her.

“Honestly,” she said, “everybody was so shocked that it was the cops, it seemed unbelievable.”


Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.

    Defense, Treading Carefully, Questions Accuser in Trial of 2 Officers, NYT, 15.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/nyregion/defense-takes-on-accuser-in-rape-trial-of-2-officers.html

At Trial, Accuser Recalls, in Pieces, Night of Rape

April 14, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN ELIGON

There were certain things that she remembered from that night, and some things that she did not.

She recalled dancing and drinking at a bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn, celebrating a job promotion with friends, but even that was a bit hazy. Her next recollection, she testified in the rape trial of two New York City police officers, was waking up in the back of a taxicab outside her apartment building in the East Village, lying on her side and vomiting.

Then she remembered tugging herself up the red handrail of her apartment building’s staircase, escorted by two men in navy blue suits with radios crackling.

Over the next few minutes, or perhaps hours, she drifted in and out of consciousness, she said. But she did remember waking up, lying face down on her bed, suddenly aware that someone was removing clothing from her legs.

Prosecutors in Manhattan have accused Officer, Kenneth Moreno of raping the woman while his partner, Officer Franklin Mata, stood guard in the woman’s apartment in the early hours of Dec. 7, 2008. At the time that the charges were announced, the accusation that two police officers called to help a drunken woman would assist or participate in her rape was so extraordinary that the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, characterized it as a “shocking aberration.”

On Thursday, the woman took the witness stand in State Supreme Court to recount what she could.

After her tights were removed, she said, she heard “the rustling of clothing and very loud Velcro ripping,” alluding to a sound that prosecutors have said matched that of a bullet-resistant vest being removed.

“I was so intoxicated I couldn’t say or do anything,” the woman testified. “My body was complete dead weight.”

The woman, 29, told the jury that she had blacked out, waking later as she was being raped, the man positioned behind her. Most jurors looked down as the woman told her story.

Prosecutors have revealed no physical evidence linking either officer to a rape, although the officers were caught by a surveillance camera entering her apartment four times. Still, the prosecution’s case may rely heavily on the credibility of a woman who was admittedly drunk at the time she says she was sexually assaulted, and cannot recall large portions of the evening.

The prosecution’s case is also focused on a tape recording she had made — part of a sting set up by prosecutors — of her confronting Officer Moreno days after the attack is alleged to have taken place.

Her testimony, which was graphic at times, came in fits and starts, interrupted as she sought to gain her composure. Clad in a gray blazer and charcoal slacks, she sat upright at first, speaking with poise and confidence into the microphone, though she said she was nervous. She answered questions without hesitation. But in other moments, her lips curled and face reddened, though her straight, dark hair remained unruffled as it sat below her shoulders.

As Coleen Balbert, an assistant district attorney, began asking the woman about the moment she said she had been raped, the woman’s voice began to sink and her body slumped.

After the woman testified to hearing the sound of Velcro, Ms. Balbert asked what happened next. She then sighed heavily.

“Um ... I remember ... sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. She broke down and Justice Gregory Carro, who is presiding over the case, ordered a five-minute recess.

When she resumed her testimony, she said she had passed out while being raped.

When she woke up, still face down, she felt a man’s presence, “and he’s actually in my bed to my left,” she said.

“He was talking to me,” she said. “He said something to the effect of, ‘Do you want me to stay?’ ”

She did not respond, she said, and the man kissed her on her shoulder.

She passed out again, she said. She woke up in her dark bedroom to the sound of two men speaking at the foot of her bed, she said.

“There’s a lot of commotion, and there’s the sound of rustling of clothing,” she said.

She felt hands pressing down on the mattress all around her, as though they were looking for something, she said.

“Out of the corner of my eye there’s a flashlight being flashed all over the bed,” she said.

She woke up the next morning with nothing on but a bra, she said, and immediately sensed that she had been raped. She got in the shower, began crying and scrubbing herself, “just tried to basically take my skin off.”

She noticed that the curtain in her living room was drawn and the blinds in the kitchen were down, although she always kept them open. She said she also noticed that her passport and the pillows on her couch were out of place.

Pressed by Ms. Balbert about how she felt that morning, the woman huffed as she spoke, stopped midsentence and put her hand over her mouth. Tears flowed, she sobbed and Justice Carro called for another break.

Later the woman said, “I couldn’t believe that two police officers who had been called there to help me had instead raped me and left me face down in a pool of vomit in my bed to die.”

Officer Moreno and Officer Mata had initially been sent to her address that night after a cabdriver called the police, asking for assistance to get the woman to her fifth-floor apartment. After escorting her upstairs and leaving, prosecutors said, the officers returned three times. Prosecutors have not specified during which visit they believe the woman was raped.

Although prosecutors on Thursday did not ask the woman if she could identify the officers who led her up to her apartment, she described them both as short with short, dark hair. They appeared to be either Italian or Latino and had New York accents, she testified.

Defense lawyers, who briefly cross-examined the woman in the afternoon and will resume on Friday, have argued that no sex took place and that the officers had returned to the apartment at the woman’s request. The lawyers said Officer Moreno, himself a recovering alcoholic, had been counseling the woman about what they said was her drinking problem. He kissed her on the shoulder, but nothing else, his lawyers have said.

During the secretly recorded confrontation days later, the woman pressed Officer Moreno, whom she described in court as “shifty eyed,” to tell her what had happened. On the recording, he can be heard denying several times that anything had occurred, then admitting to having worn a condom — a false admission, the defense has said, made only to appease the woman.

But the woman, who has since moved to California, had a different interpretation.

“This is going to sound kind of weird,” she testified, “but when he said it, he kind of relaxed and, actually, so did I, because he finally admitted what he did to me.”

    At Trial, Accuser Recalls, in Pieces, Night of Rape, NYT, 14.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/nyregion/at-rape-trial-of-officers-woman-tells-of-hazy-violent-night.html

Seeking Execution Drug, States Cut Legal Corners

April 13, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

A shortage of one of the three drugs used in most lethal injections has caused disarray as states pursue a desperate and sometimes furtive search that might run afoul of federal drug laws.

At the same time, it has given death-penalty opponents fresh arguments for suing to block executions.

Until recently, states that use the drug, the barbiturate sodium thiopental, got it from a domestic supplier, Hospira Inc. But that company stopped making the drug in 2009 because of manufacturing problems and announced this year that it would stop selling the drug altogether. International pressure on suppliers by groups opposed to the death penalty has further restricted access to the drug. States had to find a new source, but importation of sodium thiopental is highly restricted under federal law.

Recently released documents emerging from lawsuits in many states reveal the intense communication among prison systems to help one another obtain sodium thiopental, and what amounts to a legally questionable swap club among prisons to ensure that each has the drug when it is needed for an execution.

In depositions from Arkansas officials, Wendy Kelley, a deputy director of the Department of Correction, said she obtained sodium thiopental from a company in England after hearing about it from corrections officers in Georgia. Her state, she said, at various times had given the drug to Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee free of charge, and obtained the drug from Texas — she traveled to Huntsville herself — and from Tennessee.

“I went wherever they had them,” Ms. Kelley said. “As best as I’m aware, the agreement my director had with other directors, any time there was an exchange, was that there would be a payback when needed.”

When Kentucky went searching for execution drugs this year, the state’s corrections commissioner, LaDonna H. Thompson, wrote in a memo that she had contacted departments in Georgia, Nebraska, South Dakota and Tennessee. A Georgia official “referred me to a distributor in Georgia that he thought might have a supply,” she wrote, adding that she had gotten information on “an organization in India,” Kayem Pharmaceuticals. (That company halted shipments to the United States last week under international pressure.)

Bradford A. Berenson, a Washington lawyer who on behalf of death row inmates has urged the Food and Drug Administration and the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to block the importation of unapproved execution drugs into the United States, said the states had been “pretty heedless of the legal lines” regarding the purchase and importation of powerful drugs like sodium thiopental. It was as if “because this was death-penalty related, it was somehow exempt from all the normal rules,” Mr. Berenson said. “As a legal matter that was not true.”

States sometimes took remarkable measures to obtain the drugs, the documents suggest.

Georgia prison officials were clearly growing anxious last summer as their supply of sodium thiopental neared expiration and a shipment from England lay stalled for weeks in Memphis. Customs agents had detained the package pending inspection by the Food and Drug Administration. By July 6, a corrections official sent a terse e-mail to a colleague asking, “Any word?”

The response: “We got word but not the ‘good’ word.” The shipment was still held up. “I continue to track the package several times each day.”

So officials explored a new tactic, the documents show: instead of going through the usual channels of ordering the drug through a Georgia health care company and a local pharmacy, might the British company simply send the drug directly to the department?

The owner of Dream Pharma, a wholesaler run out of the back room of a driving academy’s offices in London, replied, “I am more than happy to assist.” Matt Alavi, the owner, also warned that a certain carrier was “very stringent with U.S. customs.” A Georgia corrections official approved the deal — “Yes. Make it happen” — with instructions to seek a supply with long expiration dates, and the drugs were soon on their way to the United States.

This approach may well have broken federal drug laws, said John T. Bentivoglio, a former associate deputy attorney general, in a February letter to Mr. Holder on behalf of a Georgia death row prisoner, Andrew Grant DeYoung. The Drug Enforcement Administration seized Georgia’s drugs last month, and this month Kentucky and Tennessee turned over theirs as well.

“I think it’s quite reasonable to expect a state criminal justice agency like a department of corrections to abide by federal law,” Mr. Bentivoglio said in an interview.

Other documents show close cooperation among the states. A California road trip that transported sodium thiopental from Arizona to San Quentin emerged in nearly 1,000 pages of documents released by the A.C.L.U. of Northern California late last year. They showed e-mails from Scott Kernan, under secretary for operations for California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, telling aides of a “secret and important mission,” and warning that it was “very political and media sensitive.”

Mr. Kernan sent a thank-you note to Charles Flanagan, the deputy director of Arizona’s Department of Corrections, that read, “You guys in AZ are life savers,” adding, “by you a beer next time I get that way.”

When Arizona ordered its own shipment in September, documents show, the state worked closely with Customs and Food and Drug Administration officials to prevent the kind of delays that plagued Georgia, and made sure that the port of entry was Phoenix, where its own broker could help. The shipments were labeled as being for veterinary use, which lawyers for the prisoners argue was intended to get the drugs lighter regulatory scrutiny.

“Based upon our review of documents released by federal agencies, it appears that there was a culture of premeditated deception,” said Dale Baich of the federal public defender’s office in Arizona. “Someone came up with a plan to bypass the process that would have stopped the drugs at the border.”

Kent E. Cattani, chief counsel for capital litigation in the Arizona attorney general’s office, called the accusation “absurd,” and cited correspondence going back as far as December with the Food and Drug Administration explicitly stating that the drugs were necessary “for carrying out an execution warrant.”

Representatives of the Food and Drug Administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Justice said agencies’ policies did not allow comment on pending litigation.

Until the drug shortage, the routine for lethal injections had been a fairly settled process. States allowed little change for fear of deviating too far from practices that have been declared constitutional. The three-drug protocol widely used for a quarter-century involves sodium thiopental or a similar sedative, pentobarbital, to render the prisoner unconscious. A second drug, pancuronium bromide, brings on paralysis and a third, potassium chloride, stops the heart.

Supporters of the death penalty criticize the recent challenges as yet another delaying tactic in a long history of try-anything challenges. Kent S. Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in California, said the conflicts “seem to be accelerating the switch to pentobarbital,” which is more readily available, but also show vulnerabilities inherent in lethal injection. He recently called for a return to the gas chamber, using nontoxic gases that would displace oxygen in the chamber.

Douglas A. Berman of Ohio State University, an expert on sentencing and punishment, says the recent legal challenges concerning death penalty drugs are more than a mere inconvenience to the process. “This mess is a speed bump,” he said, “but one that does raise serious issues about the death penalty.” The bigger issue beyond what he called the “Keystone Kops” fumbling of state officials, Professor Berman said, is what the disruption to the process says about the temperamental nature of what death-penalty abolitionists call the “machinery of death.”

    Seeking Execution Drug, States Cut Legal Corners, NYT, 13.4.2011,     http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/us/14lethal.html

States Prosecute Fewer Teenagers in Adult Courts

March 5, 2011
The New York Times
By MOSI SECRET

A generation after record levels of youth crime spurred a nationwide movement to prosecute more teenagers as adults, a consensus is emerging that many young delinquents have been mishandled by the adult court system.

Last year, Connecticut stopped treating all 16-year-old defendants as adults, and next year will do the same for 17-year-olds. Illinois recently transferred certain low-level offenders younger than 18 into its juvenile system. And in January, lawmakers in Massachusetts introduced a bill to raise the age of adulthood in matters of crime, and their counterparts in Wisconsin and North Carolina intend to do the same.

By year’s end, New York might be the only state where adulthood, in criminal matters, begins on the 16th birthday.

The changes followed studies that concluded that older adolescents differed significantly from adults in their capacity to make sound decisions, and benefited more from systems focused on treatment rather than on incarceration.

A 2010 report by Wisconsin’s juvenile justice commission to the governor, James E. Doyle, and the Legislature found that “for many, if not most, youthful offenders, the juvenile justice system is better able to redirect their behavior,” in large part because of the greater availability of social services.

Most of the studies pointed to a 2005 decision by the United States Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons that outlawed the death penalty for defendants who were younger than 18 when their crimes were committed, because of the “general differences” distinguishing them from adults — a lack of maturity, greater susceptibility to peer pressure and undeveloped character.

It is more expensive to prosecute a defendant in juvenile court, and opponents of the changes are questioning the costs at a time when states are facing deep budget deficits. In New Hampshire’s House of Representatives, members voted overwhelmingly in 2008 to raise the age at which defendants are considered adults, to 18 from 17, but the bill died in the finance committee because of the projected cost.

In North Carolina, where proposals have failed in the last two legislative sessions, the issue has also largely been about money. “It does not make sense to take a system that all the experts agree does not have the resources to care for the children, and then add two more age groups,” said Edmond W. Caldwell Jr., vice president and general counsel of the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association, which opposed legislation to send 16- and 17-year-olds to the juvenile courts.

An analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice, a criminal justice research group that has advocated alternatives to prison, found that transferring about 31,000 16- and 17-year-olds to North Carolina’s juvenile system would cost approximately $71 million annually, but generate $123 million in benefits each year, assuming there were fewer arrests over the long term and fewer people in jails and prisons.

Every state maintains one court and correctional system for juveniles and another for adults. The juvenile system generally has a higher staff-to-offender ratio and programming that focuses on treatment and rehabilitation. Juvenile court records are sealed, making it easier for young people who do not commit crimes as adults to find jobs, apply for public housing and receive financial aid for college.

Thirty-seven states, the District of Columbia and the federal government have already set the age of adult criminal responsibility at 18. Eleven states have set the age at 17. New York and North Carolina are the only two states that set the age at 16.

In 2008, the year of the most recent national estimate from the Justice Department, law enforcement agencies made about 2.1 million arrests of teenagers younger than 18, and most of those cases involved 16- and 17-year-olds. The data also showed a drastic decrease in arrest levels since the mid-1990s: there were an estimated 2.9 million such arrests in 1996, when the population of those under 18 was smaller than it is today.

Despite a long history of liberal politics in New York’s justice system, many facets of the system remain from the days when crime sent people to the suburbs and beyond.

New York led the charge to crack down on juvenile crime after a 15-year-old named Willie Bosket shot and killed two people in the New York City subway in 1978. Mr. Bosket received a five-year sentence, the maximum for a juvenile, inciting outrage. Legislators quickly passed the Juvenile Offender Act, which lowered the age of adulthood to 13 in all murder cases, and 14 for other major felonies; the age was left at 16 for other crimes.

Over the next two decades, nearly every state and the District of Columbia passed laws that increased the number of young offenders who could be sent to adult criminal court, either by lowering the age of criminal responsibility or increasing the number of offenses for which juveniles could be prosecuted as adults, with most of the changes happening in the 1990s.

Even as that trend is being reversed, all states retain the ability to prosecute especially violent youths as adults, in some cases with no minimum age limit. But those cases make up a tiny portion of the total juvenile caseload nationwide. In 2007, there were fewer than 9,000 juvenile cases waived to adult court, out of nearly one million juvenile prosecutions, according to the most recent national estimate from the Justice Department.

In New York, where 45,873 youths ages 16 and 17 were arrested last year, proponents of raising the age of adult criminal responsibility have attempted to push the issue in the past two months. Aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo did not immediately respond to questions about his position on the issue.

In January, an advisory board to the Governor’s Children’s Cabinet, a group of state officials with oversight over youth issues, released a report calling for a task force to examine raising the age.

Around that time, members of the New York State Bar Association children’s committee drafted legislation to establish such a task force, and they are looking for support from legislators and the governor’s office. Michael A. Corriero, a retired judge who presided over Manhattan’s special court for 13-, 14- and 15-year-old offenders who were tried as adults, testified at a City Council committee hearing in January that the current system was ineffective.

Any efforts to raise the age would contend with questions about whether the state’s juvenile justice system, already under strain, can handle an even bigger load. Four youth prisons were placed under federal oversight last year because of complaints of physical abuse of inmates and a lack of mental health counseling. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has proposed that the city be allowed to handle its own juvenile cases.

In interviews, New York City judges asserted that the juvenile court system as it was currently financed would be overwhelmed by adding 16- and 17-year-old offenders. “We would need a big infusion of funding and staff to make it happen with that age group,” said Fran Lubow, a judge in Queens Family Court. “I don’t see that happening in our current budget circumstances.”

Some judges said teenagers in adult court were well served with a host of special rehabilitation programs, and noted that young defendants in adult court automatically had their first misdemeanor conviction sealed, and that judges had the discretion to seal later convictions.

But others called on the state to get in step with the rest of the country. “People across the nation who have rethought this issue have come to the conclusion that it’s time for a change, and I think it’s time in New York for that same kind of assessment,” said Monica Drinane, the supervising Family Court judge in the Bronx. “The age of 16 is not a good cutoff for juveniles.”

One case last month in Manhattan’s adult criminal court, which involved a 17-year-old admitted shoplifter, illustrates the quandary and the costs involved. The judge offered the teenager a choice: a residential drug-treatment program or a one-to-three-year prison sentence. The judge had reviewed a social worker’s assessment of the defendant that detailed a history of misdemeanor thefts, mental health hospitalizations, substance abuse and beatings by his mother’s boyfriend, but no convictions involving violence.

The defendant, who was 16 when he stole clothing from a Filene’s Basement store and cold medicine from Duane Reade, weighed his options. He knew that his mother’s insurance would not cover the $600 monthly payments for the program. But if he were in juvenile court, a judge could have ordered him into a program, with taxpayers picking up the entire cost.

He chose prison. “Because I didn’t have Medicaid, the city wasn’t going to pay for the program,” said the teenager from a video-conferencing room at Rikers Island. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because the judge agreed to seal his conviction.

“This is a painful example of the problem with the current law, which literally puts handcuffs on 16- and 17-year-olds as well as the judges in criminal court,” said Steven Banks, chief lawyer at the Legal Aid Society, which represented the teenager.

    States Prosecute Fewer Teenagers in Adult Courts, NYT, 5.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/nyregion/06juvenile.html

After Decades, Charges in 2 Manhattan Murders

January 26, 2011
The New York Times
By MOSI SECRET

One victim, Cornelia Michel Crilley, was a Trans World Airlines flight attendant who was raped and strangled in her Upper East Side apartment in 1971; the other, Ellen Jane Hover, an aspiring orchestra conductor who disappeared one summer day in 1977 — and whose remains were found nearly a year later on the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County.

The two women, both 23 at the time of their deaths, most likely did not know each other. But according to law enforcement officials, they had at least one connection: both were killed by Rodney Alcala, a photographer and one-time contestant on “The Dating Game” who is on death row in California for killing a 12-year-old girl and four women in the late 1970s. He has been in prison there since 1980.

A grand jury in Manhattan has indicted Mr. Alcala, 67, on charges that he murdered Ms. Crilley and Ms. Hover, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the case. The Manhattan district attorney’s office would not comment on the indictment. Mr. Alcala may also have been involved in other killings, officials say.

One of Ms. Hover’s relatives said she was gratified at the expected indictment.

“For the longest time, it was a foregone conclusion that he would never be charged for her murder,” said Sheila Weller, a cousin of Ms. Hover. “This is a terrific surprise.”

But Leon Borstein, who was Ms. Crilley’s boyfriend and said he was with the police when they discovered her body in her apartment, said he did not see the point of prosecuting a serial killer already on death row.

“All it does is entertain him, and it doesn’t do anything for us,” Mr. Borstein said. “He gets to fly out to New York, meet with his lawyers, sit in a courtroom for days on end. It certainly alleviates the boredom of sitting in a jail cell.”

For more than three decades, the killings of Ms. Crilley and Ms. Hover remained unsolved. It is unclear when detectives in New York became interested in Mr. Alcala — who lived in New York in the early 1970s, attended New York University under an alias and worked as a photographer — as a possible suspect. Law enforcement officials would not say. But a former boyfriend of Ms. Hover’s said in an interview that the police told him two weeks after her 1977 disappearance that a man with California connections might be involved.

In 2003, New York police detectives investigating the Crilley murder went to California with a warrant to interview Mr. Alcala and get a dental impression from him, said Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman. Mr. Alcala, who was in prison for the murders in California, initially denied that he had ever visited New York. But after the police presented him with the warrant, he responded, “What took you so long?” Mr. Browne said.

A forensic dentist later issued an opinion that a bite mark on Ms. Crilley’s body was consistent with Mr. Alcala’s impression, a law enforcement official said.

While investigating Ms. Crilley’s murder, detectives with the Police Department’s Cold Case Squad learned that Mr. Alcala had used an alias, John Berger, when he was living in New York, Mr. Browne said. They later found that name in the file folder for Ms. Hover’s case, he said.

Ms. Weller said her cousin had an appointment with the man to take pictures before she disappeared.

Last year, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., opened a cold case unit to review thousands of unsolved murders, and the cases of Ms. Crilley and Ms. Hover were among those the office reviewed. The district attorney’s office would not discuss its role in the investigation, but, speaking generally, Mr. Vance said in a statement, “Cold cases are not forgotten cases.”

Later in 2010, after the police released dozens of photographs of young women that were found in a storage locker that Mr. Alcala kept in Seattle in 1979 to see if there were other victims, several women came forward claiming that a photographer named John Berger had taken their picture in New York in the 1970s.

The trove also included items from the victims in the California cases, who were killed from 1977 to 1979. They were all sexually assaulted and strangled or beaten to death. Their cases were solved largely with DNA evidence, and, after a lengthy legal process in which murder convictions against Mr. Alcala were overturned twice, he was convicted there on a retrial in February 2010. Prosecutors presented evidence that Mr. Alcala would approach young women and ask to take their picture as a way to lure them.

Mr. Alcala’s violent offenses date back more than four decades, the authorities said. In 1968, he kidnapped, beat and molested an 8-year-old girl in Los Angeles County, and was on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most-wanted list, the authorities said. He became a camp counselor in New Hampshire but was arrested after someone noticed his picture on a flier at the post office. He was turned over to the police in Los Angeles, and was convicted in 1972. He was paroled after 34 months.

When not incarcerated, Mr. Alcala, whom the authorities have described as highly intelligent, assumed the life of a freewheeling bachelor. In 1978, he was “Bachelor No. 1” on an episode of “The Dating Game,” and the host described him as “a successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of 13, fully developed,” according to a YouTube video of the show. “Between takes, you might find him sky-diving or motorcycling.”

Wearing a brown bell-bottom suit and a shirt with a butterfly collar, the long-haired Mr. Alcala won the contest, charming the bachelorette with sexual innuendo. The woman later decided not to go on the date with him because she found him disturbing, according to several news reports.

Mr. Borstein, Ms. Crilley’s boyfriend, said she was “funny and full of life,” with long brown hair and an infectious smile. The details of her murder are still fresh in his memory. He was working as a Brooklyn homicide prosecutor at the time, and he spent most nights with the police interviewing witnesses for his cases.

When Ms. Crilley’s mother called to tell him her daughter was missing, he went with the police to her apartment. “They found her dead body inside,” he said. “They asked if I would identify the body, and I said no. I didn’t want to see her like that.”

He said he did not know why the investigation had stalled for so many years; as Ms. Crilley’s boyfriend, he said, he became a suspect, and his friends in the Police Department did not share information with him.

Ms. Hover’s disappearance drew the attention of the national press, in part because her father, once a Hollywood nightclub owner, rubbed elbows with celebrities. Her godfathers were Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin. Her mother and stepfather hired a private detective to work on the case.

Bruce Ditnes, who had dated Ms. Hover, recalled hanging up posters with her picture near her Midtown apartment in 101-degree weather after she was reported missing. He said she had long black hair down to her waist and “gorgeous brown eyes.” He said he was not surprised that she had caught Mr. Alcala’s eye.

“Ellen would literally cause traffic accidents,” he said. “We would walk into restaurants, and people would spill things on themselves.”

John Eligon and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

    After Decades, Charges in 2 Manhattan Murders, NYT, 26.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/nyregion/27unsolved.html

Differences in Federal and State Systems Could Complicate Prosecution

January 14, 2011
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON and CHARLIE SAVAGE

TUCSON — The investigation into the bloody attack here last weekend is virtually certain to rank among the highest-profile criminal cases of the year, with as many as 250 federal law enforcement officials and dozens of sheriff’s deputies and detectives operating under blanket news media scrutiny. But the paradox is that it has also turned out to be among the simplest of cases to investigate, with the answers to most questions clear within hours.

Now, however, as the prosecution phase nears and both federal and state courts pursue the case, complications will inevitably appear — beginning with the vast number of potential witnesses, and further magnified by the sometimes sharply different requirements of the two court systems.

The complications extend to the rules of evidence. Arizona state and federal rules differ significantly on what defense attorneys are entitled to hear before trial, and the federal and state teams could also head toward very different outcomes as well if — as many legal experts expect — Jared L. Loughner’s lawyers mount an insanity defense. Arizona, unlike federal law, does not allow a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity. A defendant can only be found guilty, not guilty or guilty but insane.

“This is not a whodunit — it’s pretty straightforward,” said the Pima County attorney, Barbara LaWall, whose office is expected to file a state criminal case in the coming weeks against Mr. Loughner, 22, on top of the federal charges already filed. “It’s also very complicated.”

While the systems differ, the facts are clear-cut: Mr. Loughner, the accused gunman, was caught in the act in front of many witnesses; after a brief search for a man who turned out to be an innocent taxi driver, it became clear that there was no conspiracy; records showed that Mr. Loughner bought the gun legally; there were no interstate connections to explore, nor fugitives to hunt down; the suspect’s Internet postings and papers at his home provided a roadmap to his mental state and fixation on his apparent target, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was having an event in the shopping center parking lot where the shooting occurred.

There are human entanglements too. Ms. LaWall, in preparing to counter an insanity defense on the state side, said in an interview that she may get help, in a way, from one of the murder victims: John M. Roll, the chief federal judge in Arizona, who had been a supervising prosecutor in the Pima County attorney’s office decades ago, when she joined it as a young prosecutor.

“I learned to defend against the insanity defense from John Roll,” she said.

The disconnect between the relative simplicity of the investigation and its extraordinary importance is also manifested in appearances.

After the attack, President Obama asked the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, to fly out to Tucson and personally oversee the effort. He did, and the news conference he gave on Sunday sent a calming message to the public that the government was in control of the matter.

But Mr. Mueller’s role was not to run the investigation. He flew back to Washington on Monday, then returned briefly to Tucson later in the week. And while he attended some briefings in Arizona as the inquiry unfolded, he also spent time visiting victims in the hospital.

Instead, the investigation has been primarily run by Nathan Thomas Gray, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Phoenix division, who has nearly three decades of law enforcement experience and a long history of important bureau positions. He is being helped by an assistant special agent in charge, Annette Bartlett, who runs the division’s branch office in Tucson.

At the F.B.I. offices here in a sixth-floor suite downtown, people are working at every available space, according to a description provided by two F.B.I. agents, all revolving around a glossy dark brown conference table that agents refer to as the main battle station, seating 18 to 20 people.

Phone lines and computer cables thread the room together, but there are also voluminous stacks of paper, neatly organized, extending to chairs along the walls. A projector illuminating the list of various leads to cover, referred to as the virtual command center, hangs overhead.

Judy Clarke, Mr. Loughner’s lawyer, did not return a phone call or e-mail requests for comment.

Even as the F.B.I. leads the investigation, however, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, five miles away in a low-rise complex hard between the County Fairgrounds and an industrial park, has become the main source of information about what has actually been uncovered. The discovery of a black bag on Thursday in a Tucson neighborhood by a man walking his dog illuminated the odd trajectory of news, evidence and turf that swirls around the case.

Investigators had been looking for the bag since being told by Mr. Loughner’s father that he had confronted his son about it on Saturday, before the shootings, and Jared Loughner ran into the desert carrying it. The recovery and detail about its contents, 9-millimeter ammunition — the caliber used in the attack — was the stuff of a sheriff’s press release. Later in the day a sheriff’s spokesman said the bag had been turned over to the F.B.I., which had not commented about it.

Federal officials say this dynamic is less the result of any culture clash than of differing rules: under Justice Department regulations, they have far less freedom to release information — even mug shots — than do local police operating under Arizona’s open-government laws.

Meanwhile, the investigative tempo and the number of agents performing tasks for it, officials say, has waxed and waned. It was a frenzy in the immediate aftermath, as agents fanned out to search Mr. Loughner’s house and car, interview witnesses at the hospital, research the gun, review surveillance tapes and find his associates.

Much of that work was completed in the first few days.

“The basic set of facts of what happened in the case, I think within 48 hours they had a really good handle on them,” said Special Agent Jason Pack, an F.B.I. spokesman. “They identified the second person they were looking for and had a pretty good idea that just one person was responsible for this particular act.”

As the week progressed, some technical work remained — notably, the laboratory reconstruction of the crime scene, and efforts to scour Mr. Loughner’s computer, using computer specialists, some of whom have been tapping in remotely from elsewhere in the country.

But a second major wave of investigative activity resulted from the other major remaining task: to speak with every person who crossed Mr. Loughner’s path, each of whom seemed to suggest several other leads to run down — a ballooning effort to make sure investigators did not miss anything important.

Already, agents have interviewed well over 100 people, with written reports then collated and compiled into the F.B.I.’s Operational Response and Investigative Online Network, or Orion, a computerized case management system that helps agents fit pieces into the larger puzzle.

But those volumes of interviews could in turn be a major wrinkle on the state side of the case because of what legal experts say are Arizona’s unusual procedural rules that allow defense attorneys to interview, before trial, every witness, except victims, that might be called to testify by the prosecution, including F.B.I. agents.

“Every single witness on the prosecution side is likely to be questioned, other than the victims,” said Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, who teaches criminal law and procedure at the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law in Tucson.

Another variable that could enter the case — given the well-documented history of odd and disruptive, if not threatening, behavior by Mr. Loughner, especially at Pima Community College — is the question of his mental competency to stand trial.

And there again the state-federal wrinkle could emerge. Arizona, Professor Chin said, has a very sophisticated system designed to restore mental competency, often through medical treatment, so that people can continue through the criminal justice system. It was conceivable, he said, that that system could come into play even if a federal court found Mr. Loughner unable or unfit to proceed.

    Differences in Federal and State Systems Could Complicate Prosecution, NYT, 14.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/us/15investigate.html

Governor Strives to Restore Arizona’s Reputation

January 11, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

TUCSON — Gov. Jan Brewer had intended to use her speech at the Convention Center here on Tuesday to talk about the severe budget shortfall that Arizona faces, after two years in which she had been identified with a series of contentious issues, particularly immigration.

But no. “Today is not a day for politics or policy,” Ms. Brewer said. For a fleet eight minutes, Ms. Brewer, looking sober and saddened, paid tribute to those who were killed and injured in a mass shooting on Saturday — and also offered something of a defense of a state whose reputation has been under a cloud.

“I want to speak to you about the Arizona I know, the place we saw again even on such an awful Saturday,” she said. “It is a place of service, a place of heroes, a place with a bruised, battered heart that I know will get past this hideous moment.”

Her remarks, a downstate reprise of the official State of the State address she gave to lawmakers in Phoenix on Monday, illustrate the challenges Ms. Brewer faces. She is eagerly trying to defend a state whose reputation has been battered in recent years, particularly since the massacre here on Saturday.

But fairly or not, Arizona’s image has been forged in part because of Ms. Brewer herself, who has been identified with the tough law aimed at illegal immigrants, budget cuts that include denying aid to people who need life-saving transplants and laws permitting people to take concealed guns into bars and banning the teaching of ethnic studies in public schools.

“She faces some real challenges where the image of Arizona is concerned,” said Nathan Sproul, a Republican consultant here. “I think this is the darkest time for Arizona, per the way the nation looks at us, since when we repealed the Martin Luther King holiday in the 1980s. That took Arizona a decade to overcome. I think this presents Arizona with the strongest challenge since then.”

Even some of Ms. Brewer’s associates said they were hopeful that the governor and her allies in the Legislature would move away from initiatives that they said could further damage the state’s image, in particular allowing guns in schools.

“I think the governor can, should — I’ve talked to her a couple of times in the last 72 hours — talk about all the positive things that we have going on in our state, and how our state should not be judged by the worst people in our state,” said Grant Woods, a former state attorney general who was the chairman of Ms. Brewer’s campaign last year and publicly broke with her on the immigration law.

Mr. Woods added: “I would hope that the governor and the Legislature would see this as an appropriate time to take a break from some of those divisive issues. Those are the sort of things that cause emotions to run high. One thing leads to another.”

Ms. Brewer’s advisers said she was aware of the challenges and had been trying to burnish her public profile since she was elected in November, after filling the vacancy created when Gov. Janet Napolitano was appointed secretary of homeland security.

Ms. Brewer’s remarks here Tuesday, including a moment of prayer the left some in the audience crying, were devoid of any mention of the divisive topics that she has been so identified with. After her remarks, she went to the hospital to visit Representative Gabrielle Giffords and other victims of the shooting.

“She has become a very popular figure in this state,” said Chuck Coughlin, Ms. Brewer’s political consultant.

Her speech was warmly received. “It was more for the unity of the state,” said Dan Miller, 44, who attended the speech. “She talked about this tragedy and pulling together whether you’re a Democrat or Republican.”

The question now is whether Ms. Brewer can be an effective advocate for Arizona at a time of a tragedy that would challenge even the most poised chief executive. At a number of points in her campaign, Ms. Brewer seemed unsteady and uncertain. In a debate, she fell silent for nearly 10 seconds, as she apparently struggled to figure out what to say.

There will be obvious contrasts with President Obama, when he appears here Wednesday night. The two have strikingly different positions on everything from immigration to gun control. She was one of the first governors to file a lawsuit seeking to invalidate Mr. Obama’s health care law.

“I’m not sure she brings the best skills to that task,” said Don Bivens, the state Democratic leader. But Mr. Bivens made clear that he was not criticizing her, adding: “How many of us bring those sort of skills to respond to a massacre?”

More of an obstacle might be some of the incendiary remarks she has made as governor, such as claiming, without foundation, that headless bodies had been found in the desert. She made that statement in signing the bill that gave the police wide authority to demand proof of citizenship from people suspected of being illegal immigrants.

“She really did get caught up in a lot of this rhetoric that we are now concerned about as it relates to Gabby,” said Bruce Merrill, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University.

Clayton Norman contributed reporting.

    Governor Strives to Restore Arizona’s Reputation, NYT, 11.1.2011,         http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/us/12brewer.html

Texas: DNA Evidence

Clears Man After 30 Years

January 3, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

Thirty years after Cornelius Dupree Jr. was imprisoned for rape and robbery, prosecutors in Dallas declared him innocent on Monday in light of new DNA evidence. Mr. Dupree, 51, has served more years in a Texas prison for a crime he did not commit than any of the other 41 people exonerated in the state in recent years. In 1980, Mr. Dupree was convicted along with a second man, Anthony Massingill, of robbing a couple and then kidnapping and raping the woman. But DNA tests completed last year on traces of semen showed that neither man committed the rape. Mr. Dupree was released on parole last summer, weeks before the DNA tests were done. Mr. Massingill, who was convicted in another sexual assault, remains in prison.

    Texas: DNA Evidence Clears Man After 30 Years, NYT, 3.1.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/us/04brfs-DNAEVIDENCEC_BRF.html