St. Louis CofCC Blog

AP:

FORT WORTH, Texas - Fed up with deadly drive-by shootings, incessant drug dealing and graffiti, cities nationwide are trying a different tactic to combat gangs: They’re suing them.

Swift idea there — if criminal law didn’t stop them, then a civil lawsuit won’t do any better.

The injunctions prohibit gang members from associating with each other, carrying weapons, possessing drugs, committing crimes and displaying gang symbols in a safety zone — neighborhoods where suspected gang members live and are most active. Some injunctions set curfews for members and ban them from possessing alcohol in public areas — even if they’re of legal drinking age.

I thought the law prohibited gang members or anyone else from “carrying weapons” (notwithstanding CCW permits), “possessing drugs” and “committing crimes.” Usually, civil injunctions are designed to keep a person from doing what he legally could anyway to fit a particular purpose; it is illogical to get a civil injunction to order a person not to do what he legally can’t do anyway.

Those who disobey the order face a misdemeanor charge and up to a year in jail. Prosecutors say the possibility of a jail stay — however short — is a strong deterrent, even for gang members who’ve already served hard time for other crimes.

“Seven months in jail is a big penalty for sitting on the front porch or riding in the car with your gang buddies,” said Kinley Hegglund, senior assistant city attorney for Wichita Falls.

It seems contradictory that those who violate the terms of a civil lawsuit face jail time, but the angle here is that the violations of the injunctions is engaging in contempt of court.

But critics say such lawsuits go too far, limiting otherwise lawful activities and unfairly targeting minority youth.

“If you’re barring people from talking in the streets, it’s difficult to tell if they’re gang members or if they’re people discussing issues,” said Peter Bibring, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “And it’s all the more troubling because it doesn’t seem to be effective.”

As stupid as I think lawsuits are as a tool to stop black and Hispanic drug gangs, the ACLU’s opposition is even more stupid. Any civil or criminal motions made against gangs will have the effect of “targeting minority youth,” because America’s drug gangs are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. Also, I highly doubt that there is much in the way of public policy debate going on in the middle of the streets in gangland.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Headline:

Inmate numbers are down in Missouri

The reason is, according to the article, halfway house-like institutions are being used to confine those who violated their probation or parole terms that they agreed to upon the disposition of criminal charges for non-violent felonies.

In other words, Missouri is reducing the number of prison inmates by housing those who would be inmates in places other than prison.

From the article:

He could use it. Goesmann, 54, served 15 months for a drug offense and said he’d been an addict for years. He was released from the prison in St. Joseph, Mo., in March and wasn’t ready for the outside world.

(snip)

Crawford said the state also provides a special “re-entry” program for inmates leaving prison. They live in transitional housing units, learn how to write a résumé and get a state-issued nondrivers identification card needed for everything from applying for jobs to renting a movie.

“It’s all about making people successful,” Crawford said.

A 54-year old man who doesn’t know how to write a résumé, or doesn’t have a drivers’ license or state ID card, or doesn’t know how to get one, isn’t going to be much more of a success with those things than without them. If you don’t know these things by the time you’re old enough to be sent to any of the state’s adult correctional institutions, prison or otherwise, odds are you won’t amount to much of anything.

“With All Deliberate Sloth” update, from KSDK:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A judge on Friday turned down a lawyer’s request that school officials be held in contempt and jailed for allegedly violating a U.S. Supreme Court order prohibiting them from assigning students to Louisville schools by race.

The Supreme Court made its ruling in June, and the school district has since dropped race in making individual assignments. The district is trying to come up with another system.

But Attorney Teddy B. Gordon, who represented parent Crystal Meredith in challenging the student assignment plan, said students already assigned for the 2007-08 school year should be given options to attend different schools and that failing to do so violated the ruling. Classes are scheduled to begin Aug. 13.

(snip)

Byron Leet, a lawyer for the school district, said the order showed that “the business of educating school children and assigning student is serious — it’s too important to leave to games and motions that were clearly without any merit.”

Gordon said through a spokeswoman that he was following “normal state court procedures” to enforce a court order.

The Louisville school district is about 56 percent white and 37 percent black. The current plan allows some student choice while seeking to keep minority enrollment at 15 percent to 50 percent of the population at most schools.

Meredith got involved in the case because her son was bused 90 minutes round trip each day. She later moved, and her son, now 10, got into his school of choice.

In other words, the Federal courts are not going to enforce the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. If the Supreme Court would have ruled for the deseg programs, and the Louisville district all of a sudden decided to drop them, I bet the Federal courts would enforce the decision from the top.

World Net Daily:

A Customs and Border Protection agent who was acquitted of a charge of using excessive force during a 2004 arrest of a Chinese national on suspicion of drug smuggling is suing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for $25 million.

And in a companion lawsuit, Robert Rhodes is seeking another $25 million from three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents with the Office of Professional Responsibility.

He says the agents disregarded their oaths by pursuing a politically motivated prosecution against him to appease their superiors, who allegedly were seeking to do what communist China wanted.

There has been a lot of talk and some evidence that the prosecution of Ramos and Compean, and other similar BP agents whose patrol was at the Southern border, was done at the behest of, and under the guidance of, the Mexican government.

This essentially means that Mexico and China are extending their territorial boundaries and their sovereignty over American territory, with their citizens as they enter the USA, thanks partially to our stooge Federal government.

You know the story by now that the helicopter pilots for an non-affiliated TV station and the ABC affiliate in Phoenix accidentally crashed their helicopters into each other while following and recording a high-speed police chase in central Phoenix.

Who was the person fleeing police apprehension at high speeds that his doing so was newsworthy enough to fly helicopters out to chase? And will he be held criminally responsible in some way for the deaths of the helicopter pilots?

Answer:

Christopher Jermaine Jones, 23, of Phoenix. And yes, prosecutors are looking into charges that could be filed against him in the deaths of the pilots.

If high-speed flight from cops is a felony in Arizona, then he could be charged with second-degree murder, again depending on Arizona’s murder laws. But if they’re anything like Missouri, his felony flight (if it was a felony) was the direct cause of the pilots being in the air to follow the chase and record it, and would not have crashed into each other had they not been in the air. In other words, in Missouri, you can be charged with and convicted for Murder 2nd if, while in the commission of any and another felony crime, someone dies as a direct consequence of you committing the other felony.

AP:

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau - The fishermen who came across the bags of white powder bobbing in the ocean knew they had found something valuable, but they weren’t sure exactly what.

Back in their village, women unwrapped the layers of plastic and sprinkled the contents on their crops, thinking it might be fertilizer.

Soon entire fields were dusted with cocaine, say police who use the incident two years ago to illustrate how easily their country became the world’s newest narco-state, a way station for South American cocaine heading to Europe.

The rest of this article describes how the country of Guinea-Bissau, like many other countries on the west coast of Africa, have become narco-states that are essentially drop points in the international cocaine trafficking ring, because black African politicians and authorities are easily corruptible. Of course they would be, because their civilian populations are so stupid that they would assume that a bag of white powder floating in the ocean is fertilizer, and in earnest sprinkle it on their crops.

Or it might be a hate crime. Reverse the races, and the L.A. Times would have already hinted around hate on its front page.

L.A. Times Homicide Blog:

Melrose Hill: A 22-year-old white man was shot and killed at 801 N. Kenmore Avenue at about 1:06 a.m. this morning, Saturday, July 28. He was at a a party–a tranquil and, “square party,” involving students from local Catholic High Schools, said Rampart Sgt. Thomas Bojorquez. But around midnight, the dynamic of the party began to change. Strangers were crashing it. At some point, a Latino man or youth walked up to the victim, fired many rounds, and escaped in a car. Officers responding to a shooting call found him lying outside, dead at the scene. LAPD Rampart detectives are investigating.

This story caught my eye because it’s not often on that blog that homicides in Los Angeles County involves some racial group other than blacks or Hispanics as either the victim or the perpetrator.