By Lisa Riordan Seville
The Crime Report and the Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice launch a collaboration examining the history of crime and punishment.
Read full entry »“This appears to be the end of a long and sad day in the annals of white-collar enforcement,” said U.S. District Judge Richard Leon after prosecutors asked him to drop the case.
Read full entry »The Wall Street Journal reports that sparks flew Wednesday at a New York University Law School panel about white-collar crime. The paper says, "You’d think Lanny Breuer, head of the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, would want to avoid a panel discussion called 'Crooks on the Loose? Did Felons Get a Free Pass in the Financial Crisis?' Apparently not. Breuer walked into a brawl Wednesday..with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, an outspoken critic of the Justice Department’s lack of criminal prosecutions in the wake of the subprime mortgage collapse."
The Journal continued, "Shots were fired almost immediately when the moderator Neil Barofsky, a former special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, asked Breuer why he hasn’t done more to go after those responsible for one of the country’s biggest financial meltdowns in history. Elliott Spitzer chimed in, offering tips on how Breuer’s office should go after alleged perpetrators of the financial crimes. Breuer stood his ground. 'I just don’t accept the fact that we haven’t done anything,' he said, pointing to a myriad of recent insider trading convictions and Ponzi scheme busts. Breuer said he finds the excessive greed risk and risk-taking that led to the 2008 global financial crisis 'abhorrent,' but said not all of it was criminal."
Read full entry »The federal government has spent nearly $1.8 million defending prosecutors from allegations they broke the law in the botched corruption case against former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, reports USA Today. The case fell apart three years ago when the Justice Department admitted its attorneys had improperly concealed evidence that could have helped his defense. A court-ordered investigation concluded that prosecutors had engaged in "significant, widespread, and at times intentional misconduct," but that they should not face criminal contempt-of-court charges.
Records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that Justice has paid about $1.6 million since 2009 to private lawyers representing the six prosecutors targeted by that court investigation. It also paid $208,000 to defend three prosecutors from a finding hey had committed civil contempt of court. "Unfortunately, it's the taxpayers who are losing twice," said Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, top Republican on the Judiciary Committee. "First, the Justice Department committed serious legal errors and ethical missteps in its taxpayer-funded investigation and trial against Sen. Stevens. And second, this is an unseemly high amount of money being spent by the taxpayers to defend what appears to be egregious misconduct." Stevens died in 2010.
Read full entry »By Lisa Riordan Seville
Civil liberties activists say the Department of Homeland Security is undermining Congress’ efforts to apply the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) to immigrant detainees.
Read full entry »By Lisa Riordan Seville
What did the DEA learn from its battle with the Medellin and Cali cartels?
Read full entry »Longtime Pasadena, Calif., Police Chief Bernard Melekian will leave the job he has held since 1996 to head the U.S. Department of Justice's COPS program in Washington, reports the Pasadena Star-News. The appointment was announced by Attorney General Eric Holder at the International Association of Chiefs of Police convention in Denver.
The Community Oriented Police Services program funds community policing projects across the country. Founded by President Bill Clinton, its original purpose was to put 100,000 new cops on the street. That will be his priority, Melekian said. "The real work of policing is going to be done by men and women on the street. Our role will be to support them," he said.
Read full entry »The U.S. Secret Service is investigating an online survey that asked whether people thought President Barack Obama should be assassinated, the Associated Press reports. The poll, posted Saturday on Facebook, was taken off the popular social networking site after company officials were alerted to its existence.
The poll asked, "Should Obama be killed?" The choices: No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care. The survey was not created by Facebook but by an independent person using an add-on application that has been suspended from the site.
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Respect for civil liberties and stepped up cybersecurity are key elements of the 2009 National Intelligence Strategy, released Tuesday by Dennis C. Blair, the Director of National Intelligence. The new NIS, the first since 2005, maintains previous goals such as countering WMD proliferation and violent extremism, but focuses new energy on information sharing and accountability within the intelligence community.
Click here to read the NIS announcement.
Use The Crime Report for more information on Homeland Security Issues and Cyber Crime.
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After years of inter-agency tension, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Drug Enforcement Administration announced Thursday they would share electronic records and occasionally personnel. DEA and ICE officials said the agreement was aimed at helping the agencies better combat drug trafficking.
Click here for more information.
Use The Crime Report for information on the DEA, Immigration, and Trans-national Crime.
Read full entry »Utah citizens and authorities are questioning the harsh tactics used last week in a federal raid last week in Blanding, Utah, reports the Los Angeles Times. They were roused at dawn, then Interior Secretary Ken Salazar flew in to announce the indictments of 23 citizens in what he called the biggest bust ever of thieves who take ancient Native American artifacts from public lands, often from sacred burial sites. The next day, one of the suspects, Dr. James Redd, killed himself.
Local authorities called the raids overkill. The county sheriff, whose brother was among those charged, launched his own investigation into how suspects were treated. Blanding has about 3,000 residents, and on Tuesday nearly 1,000 people gathered in a Mormon community center to mourn the doctor as anger at the federal government continued to grow. Armed guards were spotted outside the Bureau of Land Management office in nearby Monticello. "Eighteen vehicles surrounded the Redds' house," San Juan County Supervisor Bruce Adams said in an interview. "Do we do that with child molesters? With murderers?"
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Each year journalists from around the world gather at the Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference. The Crime Report's Julia Dahl reports live from Baltimore on the panels sponsored by the Criminal Justice Journalists.
4:40 p.m.
The day’s final panel, Can Repeat Criminals be Stopped, focused on parole and probation.
“Although we talk a lot about the prison population being at two million plus, there are more than five million people on probation or parole at any given time,” said Ted Gest. “So the general theme is, how do you manage these people?”
Joe Neff, a reporter for North Carolina’s Raleigh News & Observer, discussed the series of stories his paper did in the wake of the murder of Eve Carson, who had been student body president at UNC, Chapel Hill.
“It turned out that the two people who were charged with the crime were on probation,” said Neff. “Their cases were handled terribly, so the Department of Corrections tried to get out in front of the issue, saying that, yes, these two had basically had no supervision at all, but that these were just two cases out of 117,000. That these were anomalies.”
Neff’s paper asked, is that true? Or were these cases more representative?
“We found that there were major failings in the probation system. People – even those on intensive supervision – would go a year or more without seeing a probation officer.”
Neff and his colleagues discovered a huge vacancy rate in the probation office, as well as a sorely outdated (pre-Windows) computer system. They also identified numerous instances of warrants being obtained on probationers but never filed. In some cases, the probationer went on to commit murder. Despite these issues, according to Neff, the probation office never went to the legislature to ask for more funding.
“If you think the system’s bad in North Carolina, all you have to do is drive south to South Carolina,” said Doug Pardue of the Charleston Post and Courier, which published a series about South Carolina’s “broken” parole and probation system in August 2008.
“We went to our morgue and looked up about 25 cases and we had our story like that,” said Pardue. “The criminal justice in our state, it’s basically a sinking ship…the system is broken at every single turn.”
Pardue said that when they finished their story, state legislators promised more funding for the parole and probation systems, but then “the recession hit, and today the same probation officers that had 170 cases each, now have 240.”
According to Judy Sachwald, former parole and probation director in Maryland, the American Probation and Parole Association recommends a caseload of 1-50 for moderate to high-risk offenders.
Sachwald said that the National Institute of Justice is currently studying proper probation caseload size and that their report – which she said “will provide a target for policy makers to aim for” – should be out in late fall.
12:30 p.m.
Panel two, The Flaws in Forensic Science, unpacked the recent, scathing report by the National Academy of Sciences which called the nation's forensic science system "badly fragmented."
Penn State's Robert Shaler, who was on the committee that prepared the NAS report, pointed to several aspects of the report that he hadn't seen reported in the media, including the fact that forensic testing may or may not be conducted by scientists, and that opinions given in court were based on experience and training that may be shallow and incomplete. He also pointed to the report's finding that many forensic experts testify without making statements about the probabilities involved.
The Baltimore Sun's Melissa Harris picked up on Shaler's point, discussing the ongoing case of the murder of Kenneth Harris, a former Baltimore city councilman. "The whole case is based on DNA," said Harris. "They get on TV and say that the suspects' DNA is all over the crime scene" but, in the case of one suspect, "the chance that the DNA could be someone else's is 1 in 164."
Shaler puzzled over the fact that, despite the report's recommendation that a National Institute of Forensic Sciences (separate from the Department of Justice) be created, the majority of forensic scientists -- as well as the International Association of Chiefs of Police -- do not support the creation of such an institute. "Why don't they want it?" he asked. "Somebody should be looking into that."
"Forensic science is not a law enforcement tool," said Shaler, who believes crime labs should be separate from police departments. "It's a criminal justice tool."
Patrick Kent, of the Forensics Division of the Maryland Public Defenders office, says that the national forensics community has taken a "cynical but pragmatic route" saying they agree with the report, "but are they going to change anything? No. The report is damning, the report is scary, but nothing is going to change unless there is more [media] reporting."
He continued: "Call any lab in the country and ask them if they agree with the report. They do. Then ask if they've adopted one single recommendation. Ask them. They have not."
"Science is about doing research with objective standards, none of which exist in [forensic] communities," said Kent. "It’s sad we needed an entire commission to say you need to get your ducks in a row before you come into the courtroom."
Thomas Mauriello, an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, College Park and a federal forensic investigator, ended the session by handing the power to the reporters in the room: "We can’t forget that the jury’s education, knowledge and training comes from you. Forty percent of the science on CSI doesn't even exist. The only thing they understand about forensics comes from what they read in the paper and what they see on TV."
11:15 a.m.
The first panel of the day, Understanding Crime Statistics, focused on the problems with data included in the Uniform Crime Report, Supplemental Homicide Report, and other national crime measurements.
Moderator Ted Gest reported that on June 1 the FBI released preliminary UCR figures for 2008 but that “those crime figures are very incomplete. Really, it’s a report of crimes that were brought to the attention of local law enforcement – that’s a huge caveat. Some local law enforcement doesn’t even report them to the FBI.”
Michael Rand, chief of victimization statistics at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, discussed the limits of the UCR, saying that "only half of all violent crimes are reported to the police" and that the survey does not break down crime by city or state, though he said the bureau is currently redesigning the survey to reflect more local statistics.
James Lynch of John Jay College of Criminal Justice's Center on Media, Crime and Justice also lamented BJS's lack of local data but said "efforts are underway to bridge that gap." He said that a National Academy of Sciences Committee will be releasing a report which looks closely at BJS and other national crime statistics in three weeks. Lynch recommended reporters look at the National Incident Based Reporting Program, which he said is more detailed and easier to use than UCR. He also said that while BJS gets complaints from reporters what they need is "push back" telling the agency what journalists would like to see.
Brant Houston agreed that BJS data is "deeply flawed." He asked Rand, "How flawed is the Supplemental Homicide Report?" After a short pause, Rand answered, "It's incomplete."
Gest then alluded to the recent revelation that the Detroit Police Department had failed to report more than a hundred homicides, saying, "What's a couple hundred murders between friends?"
Mark Fazlollah of The Philadelphia Inquirer pointed to a series his paper did looking at the falsification of crime statistics in Philadelphia, which led to revelations of similar mis-reporting in Atlanta, Baltimore and New York. "The phony stats were known for many years," said Fazlollah. "Aggravated assaults were easily changed to simple assaults...Precinct commanders used to joke about this, but behind those statistics are real victims."
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A new report from the Department of Justice examines how the DOJ's five law enforcement arms (the ATF, FBI, DEA, Bureau of Prisons and US Marshall Service) use different types of less-lethal weaponry, including Tasers and rubber projectiles.
Click here to view the report.
Use The Crime Report for resources on the FBI, DEA and other federal law enforcement issues.
Read full entry »Rep. Adam B. Schiff, a California congressman and former federal prosecutor, is pressing for legislation that would set up a national system for tracking convicted arsonists, a program similar to the sex offenders registry, reports the Los Angeles Times. Schiff advocates passage of the Managing Arson Through Criminal History (MATCH) Act. The bill is one of a spate of measures aimed at reducing the threat of wildfires.
The economic stimulus bill included $515 million to reduce wildfire risks, much of it going to provide jobs clearing brush and thinning forests. The House recently approved -- and the Senate is soon expected to take up -- the Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement (FLAME) Act to create a special fund to cover the escalating cost of fighting wildfires. And Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is renewing her effort to pass bills that would increase federal assistance to disaster victims and offer federal grants for fire-prone communities to take preventive measures. The flurry of legislation comes as federal firefighting costs have grown and concerns about wildfires have increased because of drought and global warming.
Read full entry »Early in my career, we investigated the Washington State Bar Association and among the results was easier public access to lawyer misconduct records.
When we exposed troubles at nuclear weapons plants, the U.S. Department of Energy provided to public libraries reports on dangerous radiation incidents once classified.
Law enforcement hasn’t responded quite that way, despite the history-making work of reporters like Bill Marimow in Philadelphia, Bob Greene on Long Island and Gene Miller in Miami.
Police officer disciplinary documents are guarded more closely in most jurisdictions than safety and environmental accident reports at top-secret nuclear weapons plants, lawyer punishments and paper trails in Pentagon transactions. Aside from notable exceptions, opacity is an entrenched tradition.
Two of the nation’s top academic experts on police misconduct – law professor Roger Goldman at Saint Louis University and criminal justice professor Samuel Walker at the University of Nebraska at Omaha – suggest simple steps for Congress and the Obama Administration to improve policing.
Goldman would require every law enforcement agency and state to report to a federal registry extensive details on serious disciplinary action taken against any commissioned officer, including terminations, resignations under suspicion and disqualifications, as well as any civil court judgments involving police work. Finally, require every department to make use of that registry when hiring officers and retooling disciplinary procedures-Walker agrees with that, and would also like the FBI to keep statistics by jurisdiction on police shootings, the way they keep statistics on crime, and make those public.
“For a data bank to be effective in the long run, it must be mandated by federal law,” said Goldman. “All law enforcement agencies must report any significant disciplinary actions they take, any court judgments or settlements against the agencies because of actions taken by an officer must be reported, and all law enforcement agencies must query the data bank.”
Credit the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training for a voluntary shoestring effort to keep track of police officer decertifications, but only half the states provide it with information. Good police officers are precious to all of us, but a miscreant with a badge is a public enemy, and a gathering of three or more is a gang.
The professors and others believe our best officers will be protected, along with our citizenry, if we track the rogues the way we do bad doctors, lawyers, real estate agents and other professionals. That information is frequently available to the general public.
“They have an affect on our safety. Our rights,” said Walker. “We have our rights to that information.”
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