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From the Los Angeles Times

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It's a bad time for job seekers with criminal records

Inmates are being released more quickly from jails and prisons in California, but in this economy, fewer employment opportunities await them.

by Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times

November 30, 2010

Eddie Lemon has an associate's degree from Taft College near Bakersfield. He's certified to work as a sheet metal operator and to drive a forklift. He has experience as a dishwasher and a cabinetmaker.

He also has a criminal record.

The 47-year-old Lemon believes that has made it all but impossible for him to find a job in one of the worst economies in decades. And as prisons are forced to reduce their inmate populations because of overcrowding and budget shortages, some economists fear that could lead many of them back to a life of crime.

"In a bad economy, there are fewer jobs, and when people don't have jobs, they're more likely to commit another crime and get sent back to prison," said John Schmitt, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank.

It's never been easy to get a job after getting out of prison. Most employers are hesitant to hire ex-offenders. They typically have limited education and spotty work experience, and they may have seen their skills atrophy during their time in lockup.

But what's different now, experts say, are two trends that have dimmed employment prospects even more.

One is a severe contraction in industries such as manufacturing and construction that have traditionally been more open to hiring people with checkered pasts. The other is a rise in the number of former inmates looking for work, as state prisons and county jails try to reduce their inmate populations to save money.

"We have a record high number of people coming out of prison each year into the highest rate of unemployment since the Great Depression," said Marc Mauer of the nonprofit Sentencing Project. "As difficult as the recession has been on people, it's twice as difficult for people with a felony to make it in this economy."

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the state's challenge to a court order requiring California to reduce its prison population — now at 154,000 — by 25% over two years, which officials say could mean releasing or transferring about 40,000 inmates.

Even without that court action, however, a state law that took effect this year (also to reduce overcrowding) could cut the prison population by about 10,000 a year, largely by reducing the number of people who are returned to prison for parole violations, according to Joan Petersilia, co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center.

"More people will in fact be coming home from prison in the next two to three years as a result of legislation to reverse overcrowding," Petersilia said. "But people are being released less prepared and are getting less help when they hit the streets."

County jails are under similar pressure. Currently, nonviolent offenders in Los Angeles County are serving only 20% of their sentences, down from 80% in April, when the budget cuts began, said Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Hard data on joblessness among ex-convicts are hard to come by. Neither the U.S. Labor Department nor the California Employment Development Department track this information. Still, experts say studies and anecdotal evidence indicate that people have difficulty getting jobs after serving time.

"When the economy is doing well, former inmates will be the last ones hired," said Stephen Raphael, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. "When the economy slows down, they're the first ones fired and they have the hardest time finding work."

Along with the stigma of a criminal record, ex-offenders struggle with a lack of education. Few have college degrees, and more than one-third don't have a high school diploma, according to a recent study by the Center for Economic Policy Research.

That's led many to seek work in factories or on building sites, but those jobs are now scarce. In California, the construction industry has lost 323,100 jobs since the beginning of the recession; manufacturing has lost 209,700.

"There are an incredible number of folks seeking employment at the low end of the labor market," said Mark Loranger, chief executive of Chrysalis, a Los Angeles nonprofit that helps the economically disadvantaged find work. About 70% of Chrysalis clients have been in jail or prison.

While in prison, inmates also have fewer opportunities to learn trades. Vocational education programs in the state's prisons now serve 4,800 inmates, down from 9,400 in 2009, because of a $250-million budget cut, according to Peggy Bengs, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections.

Lemon, the former inmate, is staying with family in South Los Angeles until he can get on his feet, but he has trouble supporting himself. People with drug convictions can't get food stamps in California. Now he's applying for the bottom-rung jobs that he hopes no one else will want.

"Money got scarce. I took a chance and got caught," he said, about his 13 years behind bars for selling drugs. "Now I need something to keep me busy so I won't have to go out there and take another chance."

Adding to Lemon's plight are trades and professions that flat-out won't hire some types of ex-cons.

In California, various trade groups and laws limit people with certain felony convictions from working as real estate appraisers, medical billers, speech therapists, locksmiths, barbers, security guards, pest controllers, auto dealers, tobacco retailers, public school employees, home health aides, chiropractors and dentists, according to a Stanford University study.

The Census Bureau had more temporary jobs than almost any employer this year, but it too barred the hiring of people with certain felony convictions, including murder, robbery, theft and vandalism.

David Patterson, 44, got out of prison in April after serving 32 months for grand theft auto. He knows he's competing against thousands of other men as he applies for low-end jobs in restaurants and factories, even though the South Los Angeles resident would love to return to driving a truck, which he did before he went to prison.

But he also knows his record is stopping potential employers from calling. That doesn't seem right: He served his sentence, he said.

"They use your record against you," he said. "But if you already did the time, it shouldn't be an issue."

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-felon-jobs-20101130,0,79420,print.story

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Plastic surgery centers that fail state standards still allowed to accept patients

Patchwork rules permit facilities to operate without a state license. Private accreditation agencies don't have to release records of complaints and offices that lose accreditation can quickly be certified by another agency.

by Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times

November 30, 2010

Two years ago Marcia Garcia, a 39-year-old mother of five, came to a suburban office park in Anaheim Hills for outpatient plastic surgery. By day's end, she had bled to death from a puncture wound.

Garcia did not know that the widely advertised Hills Surgical Institute Inc., recommended by a friend, had opened only 90 days earlier. Family members said she had no idea that one of her doctors was under investigation by the California Medical Board.

She also did not know that Hills Surgical Institute failed to meet the state's requirements for surgical centers that use general anesthesia, according to her family's attorney, Jin Lew. It was not state-licensed, Medicare certified or privately accredited. The center instead fell into a gap in the patchwork of rules that loosely govern the state's billion-dollar cosmetic surgery industry.

In 2007, California stopped licensing surgery centers owned at least partly by a licensed doctor. The move came after a doctor successfully challenged the state's regulatory authority in court. According to the state Department of Public Health, only 45 surgical centers are now state-licensed, compared with about 480 before the law changed. An additional 715 are certified to bill Medicare for treatments such as orthopedic care, eye surgeries and weight-loss related procedures. Hundreds more operate as cash-only businesses that specialize in elective cosmetic procedures, many without accreditation, experts say.

"There are a lot of facilities that completely ignore the law and are not accredited or licensed or anything," said Dr. Michael F. McGuire, chief of plastic surgery at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica and past president of one of the four private accrediting agencies, the American Assn. for Accreditation of Ambulatory Surgery Facilities.

Unlike state regulators, accrediting groups do not fine surgery center owners or doctors who violate rules on patient safety, although they can pull a center's accreditation. By law, the state medical board can pursue fines against surgery centers without accreditation $1,000 a day, but rarely do, McGuire said. The state lacks an accurate list of facilities with current accreditation.

The accrediting groups can keep confidential their records of complaints against surgery centers and investigations. They have been criticized by lawmakers for allowing clinic owners who have lost accreditation with one agency to immediately reapply and become accredited by another.

"They would shop around and go someplace else and get somebody else to accredit them," said state Sen. Gloria Negrete McLeod (D-Chino). "What we would like to see is for those clinics to be overseen by the Department of Public Health."

Negrete McLeod proposed legislation this year that would have required all doctor-owned surgical centers to be state-licensed. The legislation passed the state Senate and won support from the governor, but doctors' groups balked and lawmakers in the Assembly blocked a vote. Negrete McLeod said she plans to propose similar legislation again next year, and is hopeful that Gov.-elect Jerry Brown will support it.

Doctors who oppose mandatory state licensing say the process can take years and requires surgery centers to meet building standards designed for much larger hospitals.

"A majority of them would have to close down without any benefit to patient safety," said McGuire, who instead advocates better state enforcement of accreditation requirements.

In the meantime, patients like Garcia, a Verizon sales rep, may be undergoing procedures without knowledge of how their doctors and surgical centers are being regulated.

Garcia came to Hills Surgical Institute on March 13, 2008, for a vaginal reconstruction, liposuction and a "Brazilian butt lift," according to her medical records, which are part of public record in a lawsuit filed by her family against her surgeons, nurse and surgery center. The individuals named have all denied wrongdoing in Garcia's death. The case is scheduled for trial in April.

Garcia had scheduled the procedures, as well as a breast augmentation and a tummy tuck to be done later, weeks before her death and agreed to pay $19,500 with her credit card and a financing plan.

An accusation filed by the state medical board against her surgeon, Dr. Lawrence Hansen, and her autopsy lay out what officials say happened next:

The day of Garcia's surgery, Hansen arrived at the office in a suburban office park less than half an hour before the procedure, his first operation at the surgical center. Hansen, then 82, had not performed the vaginoplasty procedure in five years, had never met Garcia and, according to the medical board accusation, did not record her patient history or perform a physical exam.

After Hansen finished the surgery, he left the room and Dr. Harrell Robinson, arrived. As Robinson, then 55, finished the liposuction and butt lift, Garcia's blood pressure dropped and her heart stopped.

Paramedics took Garcia to Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Anaheim where she died about an hour later, according to the medical board accusation and coroner's notes. The area behind Garcia's uterus had been punctured by a needle and she was bleeding internally.

A coroner's investigator later determined that Garcia's death was caused by "intra abdominal hemorrhage" due to the vaginoplasty and ruled it accidental. Hansen failed to report her death within 15 days as required by law.

Last year, medical board officials investigating the case accused Hansen of negligence, incompetence, failure to report a patient death, performing surgery in an unaccredited facility and unprofessional conduct.

Hansen's lawyer, Richard Carroll, said Garcia's puncture wound was caused by Robinson and declined further comment on the case. In his deposition for the lawsuit, Hansen disputed the medical board's accusation that he had failed to examine Garcia or take her medical history, among other allegations made against him.

The medical board may suspend a doctor's license temporarily if they are concerned about public safety. Hansen's license remains active.

Robinson said in a deposition that one of the center's owners, Gustavo Gutierrez, a registered nurse, had pressured him to work with Hansen and never told him about Hansen's lack of recent experience. Had he known, Robinson said, he would have insisted on working with another doctor or cancelling the surgery.

"That's tantamount to a resident not having any experience in it. I mean, even though you have done a few, five years is a long time," Robinson said in a deposition.

Robinson surrendered his medical license in 2009 under an agreement that settled a number of accusations made against him by the state medical board. The board filed an accusation finding that Robinson had botched four patients' procedures, including breast and nose implants. He was accused of sexually harassing and pressuring a patient to loan him money after performing unwanted liposuction on her during a tummy tuck operation at his Encino office in 2007. He also had been a target of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration investigation that found he had been selling hydrocodone, a powerful narcotic, in bulk in 2007 and 2008.

Robinson declined comment for this story through his lawyer, John MacRill. He was never charged in connection with the DEA investigation, although DEA officials said they revoked his registration to dispense controlled substances.

Gutierrez called Garcia's death an isolated incident at a facility where doctors perform between 10 and 20 procedures each month.

"Let's look at the track record of any hospital — things happen," said Gutierrez, who also said that although Garcia's informed consent listed Hills Surgical Institute, Robinson operated an accredited facility out of the same office.

Gutierrez now co-owns the center with Dr. Mark Knight, who took over a penile enhancement business at the Anaheim office after another doctor at the facility surrendered his license earlier this year to resolve medical board accusations of negligence and incompetence.

Knight, a surgeon, currently faces a California Medical Board accusation involving sexual contact with two female patients. In the last three years, two of Knight's patients died of blood clots following cosmetic surgeries performed by him at other Orange County facilities, according to lawsuits filed by their families. One suit is in arbitration, the other was dismissed. Knight, who has denied the allegations in the pending suit, and his attorney did not return calls from The Times.

Although Hills Surgical Institute was neither state-licensed nor privately accredited at the time of Garcia's procedures, Gutierrez and his original co-owner, who has since died, were not penalized by the medical board, the accrediting agency or the California attorney general's office after her death.

Ralph Montano, a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health, said his office "does not have the authority to sanction a surgical center for being unaccredited when the facility is physician-owned."

The attorney general's office, which prosecutes doctors on behalf of the medical board, worked with the surgery center's owners to have them become accredited rather than prosecute them, said Jennifer Simoes, the medical board's chief of legislation.

A month after Garcia's death, accreditation inspectors from the Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based Joint Commission surveyed Hills Surgical Institute. Four months later, they accredited it. The gold-stamped accreditation certificate hangs in the lobby.

Kenneth Powers, a Joint Commission spokesman, said his group does not take into account a facility's history during accreditation and does not have the authority to sanction or fine facilities. He said other complaints have since been substantiated against the clinic and resolved by his group. He declined to provide details of the problems, calling the findings confidential.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-surgery-center-20101130,0,6540032,print.story

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EDITORIAL

Protecting California's prisoners

The Supreme Court should uphold a judicial panel's order that the state reduce its prison population.

November 30, 2010

Ordinarily, states rely on courts and prisons to protect the citizenry from criminals, but California seems determined to turn that convention on its head: Here, we need courts to protect criminals from the state's voters.

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Tuesday whether to overturn an order by a panel of three federal judges that the state reduce its prison population to 137.5% of capacity within two years, which would mean trimming the inmate count by about 25% from its current average of 165,000. The judges determined that medical care for inmates was so bad that it violated the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and cited overcrowding as a primary cause. California has appealed the order and is being joined by 18 other states, which are worried that their own prison systems might not pass federal muster.

To understand how California found itself in a position in which it must build more prisons, release 40,000 inmates or transfer them to other states, or some combination, it's helpful to examine the results of a recent Times/USC poll. Asked how they would close the state's $25-billion budget gap, voters strongly rejected tax hikes yet offered few suggestions on what spending programs to cut — with one exception. More than 70% wanted to cut the prison system's budget. Meanwhile, voters here have a long history of supporting tough-on-crime measures, which helped boost the prison population to unsustainable numbers.

It's unrealistic to expect politicians to fix the system, because the measures suggested by experts to reduce the prison population — enhancing job training and rehabilitation programs, revising mandatory sentencing rules, coming up with alternatives to prison for nonviolent convicts — would anger voters, who don't want to pay for new programs or new prisons but also don't want to let anyone out early. Progress has been made on one front: Lawmakers have revised parole rules that cycled nonviolent drug offenders back to prison, and are now concentrating scarce oversight resources on more dangerous parolees. But this needed reform occurred only after pressure from the federal bench.

If the Supreme Court removes that pressure by overturning the three-judge panel's order, it wouldn't just be bad for prisoners, who are dying from inadequate medical care at the rate of one every eight days. It would be bad for public safety. Warehousing inmates in overcrowded spaces devoid of job or drug programs but packed with hardened gangsters makes them more likely to reoffend when they're released.

It would be better if lawmakers could repair this system on their own, but their record suggests they need judicial supervision. We hope the justices of the Supreme Court keep that in mind.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-prisons-20101130,0,1778901,print.story

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From the New York Times

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In U.S. Sting Operations, Questions of Entrapment

WASHINGTON — The arrest on Friday of a Somali-born teenager who is accused of trying to detonate a car bomb at a crowded Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore., has again thrown a spotlight on the government's use of sting operations to capture terrorism suspects.

Some defense lawyers and civil rights advocates said the government's tactics, particularly since the Sept. 11 attacks, have raised questions about the possible entrapment of people who pose no real danger but are enticed into pretend plots at the government's urging.

But law enforcement officials said on Monday that agents and prosecutors had carefully planned the tactics used in the undercover operation that led to the arrest of the Somali-born teenager, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a naturalized United States citizen. They said that Mr. Mohamud was given several opportunities to vent his anger in ways that would not be deadly, but that he refused each time.

“I am confident that there is no entrapment here, and no entrapment claim will be found to be successful,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Monday. “There were, as I said, a number of opportunities that the subject in this matter, the defendant in this matter, was given to retreat, to take a different path. He chose at every step to continue.”

Mr. Holder called the sting operation, in which Mr. Mohamud was under the scrutiny of federal agents for nearly six months, “part of a forward-leaning way in which the Justice Department, the F.B.I., our law enforcement partners at the state and local level are trying to find people who are bound and determined to harm Americans and American interests around the world.”

A study this year by the Center on Law and Security at New York University, which tracks terrorism cases, found that of 156 prosecutions in what it identified as the most significant 50 cases since 2001, informers were relied on in 97 of them, or 62 percent. The entrapment defense has often been raised, but as of September, it had never been successful in producing an acquittal in a post-Sept. 11 terrorism trial, the study found.

The Portland case resembles several others in which American residents, inspired by militant Web sites, have tried to carry out attacks in the name of the militant Islamic movement only to be captured in a sting operation, with undercover F.B.I. agents or informers playing the role of terrorists and, as in this case, supplying a fake bomb.

In September 2009, Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year old Jordanian citizen, was arrested and charged with placing a fake bomb at a Dallas skyscraper. In October, Farooque Ahmed, a 34-year-old naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan, was arrested and charged with plotting to bomb the Washington Metro after meeting with undercover agents and discussing his plans and surveillance activities, the authorities said.

Some Muslim leaders in Oregon questioned how the sting operation there was carried out.

Imtiaz Khan, the president of the Islamic Center of Portland and Masjed As-Saber, a mosque where Mr. Mohamud worshiped, said several people at the mosque had questioned why law enforcement helped orchestrate such an elaborate plan for a terrorist act.

“They're saying, ‘Why allow it to get to this public stunt? To put the community on edge?' ” Mr. Khan said.

Mr. Khan said he and other Muslim leaders met regularly with the F.B.I. and other federal officials. In May, he was among a group of Muslim leaders in the Portland area who issued a statement condemning an attempted bombing in Times Square and thanking law enforcement for its “outstanding work” in the case.

Jesse Day, a spokesman for the mosque and Islamic center, said the circumstances of Mr. Mohamud's arrest had stirred “some distrust, a little bit, in the tactics” of law enforcement.

The government's 36-page affidavit filed in the Oregon case lays out a crucial conversation between Mr. Mohamud and an F.B.I. informer at their first meeting, on July 30, 2010. According to the affidavit, the informer suggested five ways that Mr. Mohamud could help the cause of Islam, some of which were peaceful, like proselytizing, and some of which were violent and illegal.

Mr. Mohamud, the affidavit said, immediately picked a violent crime: becoming “operational,” by which he said he meant putting together a car bomb. The informer then offered to put Mr. Mohamud in touch with an explosives expert, setting off the chain of events that led to his eventual arrest.

Defense lawyers may have an opportunity to challenge the government's account of that conversation. According to the affidavit, while most of the conversations between the informer and Mr. Mohamud were recorded, that one was not “due to technical problems.”

Still, in subsequent recorded conversations, the affidavit said, Mr. Mohamud picked the target, said he had wanted to commit such an attack for several years, and repeatedly demurred when told he could walk away if he did not have it “in his heart” to go through with it.

The question of how far the police may go in inducing the subject of an investigation to commit a crime turns on whether the facts show that the defendant was already predisposed to carry out a crime should the occasion arise.

Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia University professor of criminal law and former federal prosecutor, said it was largely up to juries to decide whether to accept a defense of entrapment, which in practice is often hard to win. “These are jury questions that by and large go against the defendant, although every case is different,” Mr. Richman said.

The Justice Department also has rules on how far investigators may go in facilitating a subject's criminal activity. The F.B.I.'s domestic operations guide, which was overhauled in 2008, notes that courts have found it to be “legally objectionable” when government agents lead a political or religious group “into criminal activity that otherwise probably would not have occurred.”

The guide also has a long section of rules on what undercover agents and confidential informers can and cannot do, but it is almost entirely redacted from a publicly released version of the document.

F.B.I. officials have said the bureau requires legal reviews and higher-level approval of activities involving undercover agents and confidential informers to avoid putting convictions at risk with entrapment accusations. But they have made clear that once someone voices an intent to commit a violent act, undercover agents and informers are allowed to respond by offering to help the subject of the investigation obtain weapons.

“It doesn't matter whether it's a would-be terrorist who has expressed his desire to launch an attack, or a would-be drug dealer who has indicated an interest in moving a kilo of crack cocaine,” said Kenneth L. Wainstein, a former assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's national security division. “So long as that person has expressed an interest in committing a crime, it's appropriate for the government to respond by providing the purported means of carrying out that crime so as to make a criminal case against him.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/us/politics/30fbi.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Judge Blocks Oklahoma's Ban on Using Shariah Law in Court

HOUSTON — An Oklahoma constitutional amendment aimed at stopping the use of Islamic law in its courts was dealt a serious blow on Monday when a federal judge temporarily blocked the state from putting it into effect.

The amendment would forbid state judges from considering Islamic or international law in their decisions. Known as State Question 755, the measure passed with 70 percent of the vote during the Republican landslide on Nov. 2, and has generated bitter debate.

Muslims claim the state is discriminating against their religion, while supporters — many of them Christian conservatives — say the amendment is needed to thwart what they maintain is an effort by radical Muslims to impose Shariah law in the United States.

Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange of Federal District Court in Oklahoma City, however, said in her decision to grant a preliminary injunction on Monday that the measure did not appear to pass constitutional muster.

It conveys a message, she said, that the state favors one religion or particular belief over others. The federal courts have long held that such a message violates the First Amendment's clause prohibiting the establishment of a state religion, she said.

“While defendants contend that the amendment is merely a choice-of-law provision that bans state courts from applying the law of other nations or cultures — regardless of what faith they may be based on, if any — the actual language of the amendment reasonably, and perhaps more reasonably, may be viewed as specifically singling out Shariah law, conveying a message of disapproval of plaintiff's faith,” the judge wrote.

The judge barred the State Election Commission from certifying the results of the election until she makes a final ruling. She set no timetable for her decision.

Muneer Awad, the executive director of the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, had sued to block the amendment, arguing that the state was condemning his religious beliefs.

“We are definitely satisfied,” Mr. Awad said. “She is recognizing the majority vote cannot be used to take away my constitutional rights.”

At a hearing last week, Scott Boughton, an assistant attorney general for the state, said the measure was not intended to infringe on anyone's religion; it was intended to keep Oklahoma judges from looking at the legal principles of other nations and cultures in applying state and federal law. When the judge asked whether that had ever happened in Oklahoma, however, Mr. Boughton acknowledged that he did not know of an instance in which Shariah law had been invoked by the courts.

Mr. Awad testified in court that the amendment was impossible to enforce, since the concept of Shariah law varies from person to person. He asserted the law might make it impossible for the courts to enforce his own last will and testament, since it requests he be buried according to Islamic principles.

Many Muslims in Oklahoma worry the courts will no longer be able to adjudicate Islamic marriages, wills and contracts.

In her ruling on Monday, Judge Miles-LaGrange said she agreed with Mr. Awad's contention that the definition of Shariah shifts depending on the country in which a Muslim lives and on each person's religious beliefs.

She noted that one strong precept of Islamic law is to abide by the law of one's land, and this explains why American Muslims do not generally practice bigamy, even though the Koran allows it.

The judge concluded that Shariah law “lacks a legal character” and “is not ‘law' but is religious traditions that differ among Muslims.” As a result, she said, the amendment “conveys a message of disapproval of plaintiff's faith and, consequently, has the effect of inhibiting plaintiff's religion.”

Supporters of the measure in the state Legislature had portrayed it as a protection against what they see as an international effort by radical Muslims to establish Islamic law throughout the world.

The principal author, State Representative Rex Duncan, a Republican from Sand Springs, did not respond to telephone messages on Monday. He has called the amendment a part of “a war for the survival of America” and “a pre-emptive strike.”

During the election, a nonprofit group in Florida, Act! For America, spent heavily on one-minute radio advertisements to encourage people to vote yes on the measure. The group also paid for 600,000 telephone calls to likely voters, featuring the recorded voice of Jim Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director and Oklahoma native who endorsed the amendment.

Since the lawsuit was filed, the main mosques in Tulsa and Oklahoma City have received a flood of hate mail, including one video of a man destroying a mosque.

“As the judge pointed out, the will of the people is not always just,” said Imad Enchassi, the imam at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City. “The will of the people seems like it was manipulated by a well-funded campaign of hate, bigotry and xenophobia.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/us/30oklahoma.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Wisconsin Gunman Shoots Himself After Standoff

CHICAGO — A student armed with a handgun held 23 other students and a teacher hostage for several hours on Monday before shooting himself at a high school in Marinette, Wis., which borders the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the authorities said.

All of the hostages were released unharmed after about five hours. The student, 15, shot himself after police officers entered the room, Chief Jeff Skorik of the Marinette police said. He was taken to a hospital, and his condition was not immediately known.

The officers went in after hearing gunshots, Chief Skorik said.

The episode began after 3 p.m., before school let out, when the student entered a classroom at Marinette High School carrying a handgun, the police said. He kept the class and the teacher in the room as the rest of the school emptied and evening set in.

By late Monday, scores of law enforcement officials and other state authorities from all over eastern Wisconsin had gathered near the school, which was cordoned off, and police negotiators spoke by telephone to the teacher.

The student first released five hostages around 9 p.m.; the rest were released a short time later.

Chief Skorik said the armed student had made no demands during the standoff and provided no sense of why he had taken hostages. Investigators met with his parents, whom they did not name publicly, as the standoff continued, the police said.

One of the students taken hostage said that the gunman had appeared depressed but that he had seemed as if he did not want to hurt anyone, The Associated Press reported.

The student, Zach Campbell, said the class had been watching a film when the gunman pulled out a weapon and shot at the projector. The other students tried to keep him calm by talking about hunting and fishing, Mr. Campbell said.

Families of the students trapped at the school gathered in a room usually reserved for jurors at the local courthouse in Marinette, a city of 11,700 about 50 miles north of Green Bay.

Officials from the school, which has about 800 students, met with the parents and reviewed a class roster to sort out who was still inside.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/us/30hostage.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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OPINION

Broken Beyond Repair

You can only hope that you will be as sharp and intellectually focused as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens when you're 90 years old.

In a provocative essay in The New York Review of Books, the former justice, who once supported the death penalty, offers some welcome insight into why he now opposes this ultimate criminal sanction and believes it to be unconstitutional.

As Adam Liptak noted in The Times on Sunday, Justice Stevens had once thought the death penalty could be administered rationally and fairly but has come to the conclusion “that personnel changes on the court, coupled with ‘regrettable judicial activism,' had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.”

The egregious problems identified by Justice Stevens (and other prominent Americans who have changed their minds in recent years about capital punishment) have always been the case. The awful evidence has always been right there for all to see, but mostly it has been ignored. The death penalty in the United States has never been anything but an abomination — a grotesque, uncivilized, overwhelmingly racist affront to the very idea of justice.

Police and prosecutorial misconduct have been rampant, with evidence of innocence deliberately withheld from defendants being prominent among the abuses. Juries have systematically been shaped — rigged — to heighten the chances of conviction, and thus imposition of the ultimate punishment.

Prosecutors and judges in death penalty cases have been overwhelmingly white and male and their behavior has often — not always, but shockingly often — been unfair, bigoted and cruel. The Death Penalty Information Center has reams of meticulously documented horror stories.

Innocents have undoubtedly been executed. Executions have been upheld in cases in which defense lawyers slept through crucial proceedings. Alcoholic, drug-addicted and incompetent lawyers — as well as lawyers who had been suspended or otherwise disciplined for misconduct — have been assigned to indigent defendants. And it has always been the case that the death penalty machinery is fired up far more often when the victims are white.

I remember reporting on a study several years ago by the Texas Defender Service, which represented indigent death row inmates. It mentioned a Dallas defense lawyer, who, reminiscing in 2000, said: “At one point, with a black-on-black murder, you could get it dismissed if the defendant would pay funeral expenses.” A judge, looking back on his days as a prosecutor in the 1950s, recalled being told by an angry boss: “If you ever put another nigger on a jury, you're fired.”

Prosecutors cleaned up their language somewhat over the years, but the discrimination has persisted, along with the pernicious idea that white lives are inherently more valuable than black ones. Patricia Lemay, a white juror in a Georgia death penalty case that resulted in an execution, told me in an interview in 2002 that she had been nauseated by the vile racial comments made by other jurors during the deliberations.

Justice Harry Blackmun was 85 years old and near the end of his tenure on the Supreme Court when he declared in 1994 that he could no longer support the imposition of the death penalty. “The problem,” he said, “is that the inevitability of factual, legal and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.”

Justice Blackmun vowed that he would no longer participate in a system “fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake.”

In 1990, Justice Thurgood Marshall asserted: “When in Gregg v. Georgia the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery.”

Justices Blackmun and Marshall are gone, but the death penalty is still with us. It is still an abomination. Illinois has tried mightily to deal with a system of capital punishment that had, as The Chicago Tribune described it, “one of the worst records of wrongful capital convictions in the country.”

The sentences of 167 condemned inmates were commuted in 2003. Four others were pardoned and a moratorium on the death penalty has been in effect since 2000. But prosecutors continue mindlessly to seek the death penalty. And the system for trying murder cases remains a mess. As The Tribune wrote in an editorial just last week:

“Lawmakers still haven't taken adequate steps to ensure that the death penalty is applied evenly across the state, or to guard against wrongful convictions based on errant identifications of witnesses or mistakes at forensic labs. False confessions and prosecutorial missteps are still alarmingly common.”

In the paper's view, “Illinois must abolish the death penalty.”

And so must the United States.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/opinion/30herbert.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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OPINION

Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt

Palo Alto, Calif.

THERE you are, peacefully reading an article or watching a video on the Internet. You finish, find it thought-provoking, and scroll down to the comments section to see what other people thought. And there, lurking among dozens of well-intentioned opinions, is a troll.

“How much longer is the media going to milk this beyond tired story?” “These guys are frauds.” “Your idiocy is disturbing.” “We're just trying to make the world a better place one brainwashed, ignorant idiot at a time.” These are the trollish comments, all from anonymous sources, that you could have found after reading a CNN article on the rescue of the Chilean miners.

Trolling, defined as the act of posting inflammatory, derogatory or provocative messages in public forums, is a problem as old as the Internet itself, although its roots go much farther back. Even in the fourth century B.C., Plato touched upon the subject of anonymity and morality in his parable of the ring of Gyges.

That mythical ring gave its owner the power of invisibility, and Plato observed that even a habitually just man who possessed such a ring would become a thief, knowing that he couldn't be caught. Morality, Plato argues, comes from full disclosure; without accountability for our actions we would all behave unjustly.

This certainly seems to be true for the anonymous trolls today. After Alexis Pilkington, a 17-year-old Long Island girl, committed suicide earlier this year, trolls descended on her online tribute page to post pictures of nooses, references to hangings and other hateful comments. A better-known example involves Nicole Catsouras, an 18-year-old who died in a car crash in California in 2006. Photographs of her badly disfigured body were posted on the Internet, where anonymous trolls set up fake tribute pages and in some cases e-mailed the photos to her parents with subject lines like “Hey, Daddy, I'm still alive.”

Psychological research has proven again and again that anonymity increases unethical behavior. Road rage bubbles up in the relative anonymity of one's car. And in the online world, which can offer total anonymity, the effect is even more pronounced. People — even ordinary, good people — often change their behavior in radical ways. There's even a term for it: the online disinhibition effect.

Many forums and online communities are looking for ways to strike back. Back in February, Engadget, a popular technology review blog, shut down its commenting system for a few days after it received a barrage of trollish comments on its iPad coverage.

Many victims are turning to legislation. All 50 states now have stalking, bullying or harassment laws that explicitly include electronic forms of communication. Last year, Liskula Cohen, a former model, persuaded a New York judge to require Google to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who she felt had defamed her, and she has now filed a suit against the blogger. Last month, another former model, Carla Franklin, persuaded a judge to force YouTube to reveal the identity of a troll who made a disparaging comment about her on the video-sharing site.

But the law by itself cannot do enough to disarm the Internet's trolls. Content providers, social networking platforms and community sites must also do their part by rethinking the systems they have in place for user commentary so as to discourage — or disallow — anonymity. Reuters, for example, announced that it would start to block anonymous comments and require users to register with their names and e-mail addresses in an effort to curb “uncivil behavior.”

Some may argue that denying Internet users the ability to post anonymously is a breach of their privacy and freedom of expression. But until the age of the Internet, anonymity was a rare thing. When someone spoke in public, his audience would naturally be able to see who was talking.

Others point out that there's no way to truly rid the Internet of anonymity. After all, names and e-mail addresses can be faked. And in any case many commenters write things that are rude or inflammatory under their real names.

But raising barriers to posting bad comments is still a smart first step. Well-designed commenting systems should also aim to highlight thoughtful and valuable opinions while letting trollish ones sink into oblivion.

The technology blog Gizmodo is trying an audition system for new commenters, under which their first few comments would be approved by a moderator or a trusted commenter to ensure quality before anybody else could see them. After a successful audition, commenters can freely post. If over time they impress other trusted commenters with their contributions, they'd be promoted to trusted commenters, too, and their comments would henceforth be featured.

Disqus, a comments platform for bloggers, has experimented with allowing users to rate one another's comments and feed those ratings into a global reputation system called Clout. Moderators can use a commenter's Clout score to “help separate top commenters from trolls.”

At Facebook, where I've worked on the design of the public commenting widget, the approach is to try to replicate real-world social norms by emphasizing the human qualities of conversation. People's faces, real names and brief biographies (“John Doe from Lexington”) are placed next to their public comments, to establish a baseline of responsibility.

Facebook also encourages you to share your comments with your friends. Though you're free to opt out, the knowledge that what you say may be seen by the people you know is a big deterrent to trollish behavior.

This kind of social pressure works because, at the end of the day, most trolls wouldn't have the gall to say to another person's face half the things they anonymously post on the Internet.

Instead of waiting around for human nature to change, let's start to rein in bad behavior by promoting accountability. Content providers, stop allowing anonymous comments. Moderate your comments and forums. Look into using comment services to improve the quality of engagement on your site. Ask your users to report trolls and call them out for polluting the conversation.

In slowly lifting the veil of anonymity, perhaps we can see the troll not as the frightening monster of lore, but as what we all really are: human.

Julie Zhuo is a product design manager at Facebook.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/opinion/30zhuo.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the Chicago Sun Times

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19-year-old burglar killed cops to hide theft  

November 30, 2010

BY KIM JANSSEN AND MICHAEL SNEED

Free on parole, convicted armed robber Timothy Herring Jr. was determined not to go back to prison.

So when the 19-year-old sneaked back Friday to the scene of a burglary he'd committed hours earlier and overheard veteran police officer and evidence technician Michael Flisk say “I've got a good fingerprint,” he acted in the coldest of blood, law enforcement sources said.

A funeral mass will be held at 10 a.m. Wednesday at St. Rita of Cascia Shrine Chapel, 7740 S. Western, Chicago.

Stephen Peters' wake will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday at A.A. Rayner & Sons Funeral Home, 318 East 71st St., Chicago.

A funeral will be at the same location at 10 a.m. Saturday.

Armed with a handgun and wearing an electronic tracking bracelet on his ankle, Herring crept up on Flisk and former CHA police officer Stephen Peters in the alley on the 8100 block of South Burnham and shot both men dead, it's alleged.

Prosecutors charged him with the first degree murder of both men Monday, marking the end of a 72-hour round-the-clock effort to find justice for Peters and Flisk, the fifth Chicago cop murdered this year.

Flisk's fellow officers “worked non-stop, even in the face of extreme grief,” Supt. Jody Weis said as he announced the charges against Herring and an alleged accomplice, Timothy Willis, who's charged with unlawful use of a weapon and is accused of helping Herring cover up the murders.

“All of Chicago owes them a debt of gratitude as they helped get a killer off the streets,” Weis said.

Herring was sentenced to six years behind bars for an armed robbery in 2007 but was released in April on parole. He was locked up again in July after testing positive for marijuana, according to Illinois Department of Corrections spokeswoman Sharyn Elman.

On Sept. 14, Herring was freed again to his home, across the alley from Friday's murder scene, records show.

During his brief period of freedom over the summer, Herring tried to kill another man, according to new charges also filed Monday. On June 18, Herring tried to kill 41-year-old Fernando Townsend just a block from where Flisk and Peters were shot, authorities alleged.

On Friday, Herring allegedly broke into Peters' mother's garage during the early hours. He returned later to collect stolen parts from Peters' prized red Ford Mustang that he'd stashed in garbage cans.

It was then that he allegedly encountered Flisk, who was investigating the burglary, and Peters, who was guiding Flisk around the crime scene, police said. Both men were armed but neither “had a chance to defend himself” before Herring shot them, Weis said.

After killing the men, Herring called his girlfriend and told her to come over, a source said. He then asked her to get rid of his gun, saying he had just shot two people, the source said.

Herring was arrested Saturday, when his home was also searched.

Herring had every reason to fear Flisk's expertise at a crime scene. A meticulous and skilled forensics man, Flisk put away countless bad guys and was about to be commended for cracking the case of a serial burglar who targeted the Beverly community this summer, his co-workers said Monday as they paid tribute to his skill, determination and sense of humor.

At a crime scene, Flisk could “think like the offender and place himself there and know where they put their hands, and dust there and come up with quality stuff,” said fellow evidence technician John Murphy. Flisk used so much powder in his search for clues that Murphy once came back from a scene with him looking “like a glazed donut,” Murphy laughed.

But Flisk was humble enough that his locker was full of commendations he'd never taken home or told his wife or four kids about, colleagues said. The family was presented with a check for $15,000 Monday, the first installment of a $50,000 donation made by the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation and the Hundred Club of Chicago.

“We've really lost a good officer,” Lt. Bob Dubiel said, adding that Flisk's death shows there are no safe jobs in the Chicago Police Department.

Peters' family was certainly grateful for the efforts that saw Herring charged.

“We've known his family for years,” Peters' father Robert Peters said, adding that Peters' mother often said hello to Herring's uncle when she saw him in the street.

“He left a lot of evidence behind, but we're very, very, glad they caught him.”

Peters' family also thanked Townsend, whom Herring allegedly tried to kill in June, for contacting police after Friday's murders.

Speaking Monday, Townsend alleged Herring shot him as he was standing outside his home on the 8000 block of Burnham this summer. Townsend, who was hospitalized for a month and walks with a cane as result of the shooting, said he didn't identify Herring to police at the time because his mother was afraid of reprisals.

But “when I heard what happened to Stephen I had to do something,” he said. “I hope he never gets out...I hope he gets the death penalty.”

http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2930732,cop-death-charges-112910.article

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Massage parlor employee pleads guilty to helping hide illegals

MOUNT PROSPECT | Owner accused of branding workers

November 30, 2010

BY NATASHA KORECKI

An associate of a massage parlor owner who is accused of branding his female workers with tattoos pleaded guilty Monday to aiding the owner by harboring women who were in the country illegally.

Danielle "Princess" John, 24, admitted on Monday that by helping hide the women's legal status, she helped Alex A. Campbell, who used the women to work for him at his massage parlor. Campbell is accused of keeping their earnings through extortion and allegedly forced some to have sex with him and each other, according to charges.

Campbell operated the Day and Night Spa in Mount Prospect and allegedly "branded" the women who worked there with the same horseshoe tattoos. One woman told authorities he forced her to get three tattoos.

Campbell is accused of making extortionate demands of the women, including from one victim who told federal agents that she paid Campbell $10,000 after he promised he'd help her.

After that, he demanded sex from her and forced her to have sex with another woman while he videotaped it, according to charges that were unsealed in January.

Campbell then allegedly upped his demand of money and told her he'd broadcast the footage if she didn't pay up, according to charges.

John admitted to helping hide the women from July 2008 to January 2010. As part of her plea deal, John is expected to cooperate in the case and testify at Campbell's trial.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2931424,CST-NWS-branded1130.article

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100-year-old Wal-Mart greeter shoved to floor by exiting customer

MILWAUKEE | Might lead to charge of aggravated battery

November 30, 2010

MILWAUKEE -- A 100-year-old greeter at a Milwaukee Wal-Mart was shoved by a customer after the centenarian tried to stop the woman to determine if she'd paid for items that were in the lower part of her shopping cart, police said Monday.

Greeter Lois Speelman fell down and went to a hospital after she was shoved Sunday.

"I'm bruised a little, but I'm able to go back to work Thursday," Speelman told the Associated Press from her home Monday.

Speelman declined to answer further questions, saying she didn't want to lose her job and the investigation wasn't over. A Wal-Mart Stores Inc. spokeswoman didn't have more details but said that Speelman's health was the company's primary concern.

"Most importantly, our associate is doing OK and we're grateful for that. The actions of this individual are appalling and we appreciate the work of police in this case," spokeswoman Ashley Hardie said.

Milwaukee police spokeswoman Anne E. Schwartz said the case has been referred to prosecutors for a potential aggravated battery charge.

Speelman became a local celebrity briefly when she was profiled by several news outlets after she celebrated her 100th birthday at the store in August.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Speelman has been twice widowed and started greeting at the store when she was 90. She retired at 95, but came back at 97 after her only living son died and continues to work an average of 34 hours a week.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/2931770,CST-NWS-greeter30.article

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From Google News

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Custody Dispute May Have Lead to Mysterious Disappearance of Three Young Michigan Boys

Boys' Father Says He Gave His Sons to a Woman Named Joann Taylor, Cops Not So Sure

A nasty custody battle may have led to the disappearance of three Michigan brothers who haven't been seen since Thanksgiving and who police believe may be in "extreme danger."

New details are emerging about the relationship between the boy's father, John Skelton, and his wife, Tanya Skelton. They married eight years ago but decided to separate earlier this year. Both sought permanent custody of their three sons -- Andrew Skelton, 9, Alexander Skelton, 7, and Tanner Skelton, 5 -- hurling insults at each other another about how capable each was to parent the trio.

John Skelton argues his wife is an "unfit parent," citing her status as a registered sex offender (she was convicted of having sex with a 14-year-old boy more than a decade ago), according to court documents. Tanya Skelton argues her husband's long absences as a truck driver make him an unfit parent.

Now police are preparing to spend another day searching for the young boys who were at first believed to be with a woman named Joann Taylor, whom Skelton said he'd given the kids to in an attempt to shield them from his botched suicide attempt.

Skelton had told police that he'd handed his sons off to Taylor who was to return them to their mother on Thanksgiving evening.

Skelton had said he'd met Taylor and her husband a few years ago after he helped them when their car broke down, and then began e-mailing her, police said.

But confirming that Taylor even exists has been a challenge for authorities since the boys disappeared.

"A reported relationship between Mr. Skelton and Joann Taylor doesn't exist," Weeks said, adding that Skelton had lied during questioning.

Skelton may have also had a history of taking the children without their mother's knowledge. According to the Associated Press, Skelton took his sons to Ohio and then to Florida in September.

Michael Welner, a top forensic psychologist and an ABC News consultant, said today on "GMA" that if Skelton is involved in the disappearance, he may have been feeling a "heightened sense of failure."

"Pride is very much tied into financial ruin and there are some fathers in states of deep depression, sometimes accelerated by alcohol or other substance abuse, who might feel that they can't face their children seeing them fail," said Welner.

"They may feel that they're doing the children a service, that they won't be homeless, improverished and have a father in ruins," he said.

Skelton has not been named a suspect in his childrens' disappearance but authorities are asking for the public's help in locating his car which Weeks said was not at the home Thursday and Friday. Specifically, Weeks wants to know whether anyone saw the car between 2:30 p.m. Thursday and 1 p.m. Friday.

"Authorities have information that the vehicle was not at home during some of that time and believe the boys were in the car that morning or the evening before," Weeks said.

The blue 2000 Dodge Caravan, license plate No. 9JQ H93, has since been towed from Skelton's home, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Investigators are also expanding their search to the Ohio-Michigan border, specifically in Holiday City in Ohio, and said they have taken several items from Skelton's home. Weeks declined to comment on whether authorities had seized Skelton's computer.

Doug Rowland, the owner of the Lazy River Campground in Pioneer, Ohio, told ABCNews.com that about 60 investigators visited his property today to search for the boys but came up empty handed.

Rowland said police told him they were working on a lead from a "ping" they got off a cell phone and they also suggested that Skelton himself mentioned a campground during an interview.

Police have said that the boys, who have been missing for four days, could be in "extreme danger."

"We remain hopeful," Weeks said. "That's why we're doing what we're doing to find these boys and bring them home."

The grandmother of the missing boys earlier today made an emotional plea for their return.

"We just have to reach out to this person and relay how very important it is that they come home to their mom," said Roxann Skelton, the boys' fraternal grandmother. "[Taylor] needs to put herself in the mother's position for five seconds and multiple it by one thousand and she'd realize the pain and hurt and terribly agony the family is going through for these boys."

FBI and State Police Help Search

Search crews, as well as hundreds of volunteers, looked for the boys throughout the weekend, focusing much of their efforts in wooded areas surrounding Skelton's home.

Asked how she knows her son is telling the truth about Taylor, Roxann Skelton responded, "Because I know my son. ... He loves his boys, his boys are his life, it's as simple as that.

"Whether her name is Joann Taylor or Mary Poppins doesn't matter to me, all I know is that these children are with her, I know this," she said. "Those boys are out there terrified, but they are out there.

"Those children need to come home to their mother and if she can't bring them home, if she feels for some reason she can't do it, drop them off to a house of safety; a fire department, a police department, a McDonald's, for heaven sake," she said. "Anything, just bring these boys home with their mother where they belong."

Police said it is possible that Taylor lives in either Jackson or Hillsdale, Mich., but they are not sure the woman even exists.

The FBI and Michigan State Police are also involved in the search.

Neighbors of the Skelton family say they're shocked that the boys are missing.

"They lived across the street from me, I used to watch them playing outside, being boys and having fun," neighbor Jody Pummell said.

Family friend Shelly Meyers said, " A lot of people didn't sleep the last couple of nights, that's for sure."

Searcher Steve Clegg said, "We haven't had anything remotely close to this happen and now to have something this happen, yeah, it hits home."

Alexander Skelton is 3-foot-9, 45 pounds and has brown eyes, brown hair and a scar on his chin. Tanner Skelton is 3-foot-6 with blue eyes and blonde hair. Andrew Skelton 4 feet tall, with brown hair and brown eyes.

Morenci police asked that anyone with any information about the boys' whereabouts or who might have seen John Skelton with them any time after Thursday, contact them at (517) 263-0524.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/custody-dispute-lead-michigan-brothers-disappearance/story?id=12273122&page=1

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From the Toledo Blade

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Search targeting new areas in case of missing Mich. boys

Investigators say dad's story is discounted

By JENNIFER FEEHAN and MARK REITER

BLADE STAFF WRITERS

MORENCI, Mich. -- On the same day that investigators expanded a search into a second state in hopes of finding three missing Morenci brothers, they discounted the story their father provided about the disappearance.

Morenci Police Chief Larry Weeks said Monday that authorities have found no relationship between John Skelton, 39, and a Joann Taylor -- a person he said he gave his boys to last week for return to their mother.

The chief and FBI also asked for leads from anyone who may have seen the boys sometime early Friday inside a Skelton family vehicle, a blue 2000 Dodge caravan with a Michigan plate of 9JQH93 that may have been driving in Ohio's Williams County.

Meanwhile, family members, Morenci residents, and even strangers continued to hold out hope that the boys, Andrew, 9, Alexander, 7, and Tanner, 5, Skelton are alive.

"I think they're alive. We just have to find them. ...It's such a big wide open area," said a frustrated Lori Poynter of Lake Seneca, Ohio, who joined an expanding search party yesterday. "You're just trying to pick your brain about where these boys would be. If he would just talk a little more and let us know exactly what went on."

Mr. Skelton, who was unemployed from his job as a long haul truck driver, has been hospitalized for mental health reasons since an unsuccessful suicide attempt Friday.

He earlier told police his suicide was the reason he gave his boys to a third party for transfer to their mother, Tanya Skelton.

Lenawee County court records show Ms. Skelton had filed for divorce on the day Mr. Skelton took two of the boys to Florida in September without her knowledge.

Ms. Skelton contacted the Morenci police chief when her boys turned up missing and Mr. Skelton then returned them. But later that day, Mr. Skelton picked them up at home and drove to Florida with them, the document states.

Based on later discussions with a Florida court, a Lenawee County Circuit Court judge ordered that both Mr. Skelton and Ms. Skelton should travel together -- but in separate cars -- to bring the boys home from Florida.

Lenawee County Circuit Judge Margaret Noe said that Ms. Skelton received exclusive custody after Mr. Skelton returned from Florida with the boys, but the couple subsequently negotiated an agreement that allowed visitation.

"The agreement was without my intervention," Judge Noe said. "It is not unusual for judges to encourage parents to engage in agreements between themselves relative to visitation because they best know the circumstances."

She said the brothers' disappearance was "sad and unfortunate" and declined further comment.

The boys were reported missing on Friday, a day after two of them were seen playing outside on Thanksgiving Day. An Amber Alert was issued, and authorities said at the time that they were in "extreme danger." Police have set up at a hot line at 517-458-7104

After a morning news conference yesterday, Chief Weeks sent smaller search crews into a sweeping area of northwest Ohio, where they hunted through a 64-acre campground and walked for 20-30 miles stretches alongside busy roadways.

After three days of slogging through woods and searching along roadways, Beverly Bovee said she isn't about to give up hope of finding the three young boys.

"I just hope to find them and in the back of my mind, I hope he gave them to somebody," she said of the boys' father.

While weekend searches focused on wooded areas around Morenci as well as state parks like Harrison Lake and Lake Hudson, searchers yesterday focused on rural areas in Williams County around the towns of Pioneer, West Unity, and Holiday City.

A team of firefighters and police officers were dispatched about 10:30 p.m. to the Lazy River Resort Campground near Pioneer where they combed the facility in groups, trying the doors of campers, scanning ponds, and walking along a creek on the grounds. By 1 p.m., the search was completed without a trace of the missing boys.

"We don't feel there's anything of value here," Lenawee County Sheriff's Corporal Jeff Paterson said after dispersing the crews back to the Pioneer Community Center.

Doug Rowland, owner of the campground, said he was unaware of the missing children until Sunday evening when law enforcement officers called him to see if they could search the grounds. They said they believed Mr. Skelton had used his cell phone in the vicinity.

The campground has been closed for the season since Oct. 10, although people occasionally walk back into the grounds to check on their campers, Mr. Rowland said. He said he did not recognize the boys and does not believe they had camped there in the past.

"We don't have them on record as having camped here," Mr. Rowland said.

Volunteers who showed up at the Morenci Fire Department to assist with the search were asked to wait inside a church across the street for most of the morning.

Bill Foster, who was helping coordinate volunteers, asked the crowd to be patient.

"I know everyone cares, everyone wants to help. This is a very serious matter," he said. "I know you want to get out in the woods and search, but please don't jeopardize anything, don't go out and try to be nosy."

By 1 p.m., many of the volunteers had carpooled to Pioneer where they were dispatched on three North Central Local school buses to search along State Rt. 15 and U.S. 20A, 127, and 20 close to where the Ohio Turnpike cuts through Williams County.

Civilian volunteers walking alongside firefighters were dropped off a mile apart and picked up after they covered a mile of ground.

Cynthia Hendricks of Pioneer discovered a blue paper towel from a gas station that had what appeared to be blood on it as she walked along State Rt. 15. She stood by until a law enforcement officer came to collect the potential evidence.

Just before dark, the buses returned to the Pioneer Community Center where Steve Meller, a Morenci firefighter, asked them to listen to the news to find out whether the search would resume this morning. The weather report was calling for rain, he said, which could make ground searches in the rural areas difficult.

The fire department was coordinating the searches at the direction of police and FBI, which meant volunteers were at times forced to wait, he said.

"Law enforcement is going off of tips in this search and they have to evaluate each and every tip," Mr. Meller said. "This does mean people may have to sit around a little while... They understood and we greatly appreciate that."

Throughout the afternoon, people came into the community center to see how they could help. Pam Carpenter of Morenci, who was staffing the information table, had to turn some away as the day wore on. She asked them to take fliers with photos of the missing boys and check back today.

"We have been so blessed," she said. "Whatever we need, people bring. People are just so willing to do anything."

Ms. Bovee agreed.

"It's a great community," she said, adding that Morenci residents are being asked to keep their porch lights on until the boys are found.

Miranda Gilbert, the manager of Pizza Box in Morenci, said the owner of her restaurant sent pizzas to the fire department and to volunteers.

"I am hoping that [the boys] will turn up alive and unhurt. It is just scary to think about. I just can't imagine anything happening to my children," she said.

"Morenci is a very good community for joining together. If somebody needs something everyone bands together to help out."

To the south in Ohio's Fulton County, Emilio McVey hauled his ATV from his home in Delta to assist in the search for the boys.

The father of three young children, Mr. McVey said having his children fail to return home would be his worst nightmare.

"I could not imagine what their mother is going through," he said. "It just breaks your heart. I can't imagine my kids not coming home some day."

Some volunteers gathered at Morenci Bible Fellowship across the street from the fire department, which authorities were using for the command center.

Larry McCrea, 69, said he had planned to spend the day hunting but changed his mind to instead join the hundreds of other volunteers.

"I just felt the need to come here. I love my grandchildren," said Mr. McCrea, of Milan, who is a retired teacher for Dundee Community Schools. "I was going hunting, and someone, who I think was the Lord, told me to come here."

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101130/NEWS16/11290408

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From the Department of Justice

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Federal Courts Order Seizure of 82 Website Domains Involved in Selling Counterfeit Goods as Part of DOJ and ICE Cyber Monday Crackdown

WASHINGTON – Seizure orders have been executed against 82 domain names of commercial websites engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works as part of Operation In Our Sites v. 2.0, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director John Morton of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced today.

The coordinated federal law enforcement operation targeted online retailers of a diverse array of counterfeit goods, including sports equipment, shoes, handbags, athletic apparel and sunglasses as well as illegal copies of copyrighted DVD boxed sets, music and software.

During the course of the operation, federal law enforcement agents made undercover purchases from online retailers suspected of selling counterfeit goods. In many instances, the goods were shipped directly into the United States from suppliers in other countries using international express mail. If the goods were confirmed as counterfeit or otherwise illegal, seizure orders for the domain names of the websites that sold the goods were obtained from U.S. magistrate judges.  Individuals attempting to access the websites will now find a banner notifying them that the domain name of that website has been seized by federal authorities.

"By seizing these domain names, we have disrupted the sale of thousands of counterfeit items, while also cutting off funds to those willing to exploit the ingenuity of others for their own personal gain,” said Attorney General Holder. “Intellectual property crimes are not victimless. The theft of ideas and the sale of counterfeit goods threaten economic opportunities and financial stability, suppress innovation and destroy jobs. The Justice Department, with the help of our law enforcement partners, is changing the perception that these crimes are risk-free with enforcement actions like the one announced today.”

“The sale of counterfeit U.S. brands on the Internet steals the creative work of others, costs our economy jobs and revenue and can threaten the health and safety of American consumers,” said ICE Director John Morton. “The protection of intellectual property is a top priority for Homeland Security Investigations and the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center. We are dedicated to protecting the jobs, the income and the tax revenue that disappear when counterfeit goods are trafficked.”

The operation builds upon Operation in Our Sites I, which was announced in June 2010. In that first action of this broader law enforcement initiative, authorities executed seizure warrants against nine domain names of websites offering pirated copies of first-run movies.

The nationwide operation was spearheaded by the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) led by ICE's Office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), in coordination with the Criminal Division's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section and nine U.S. Attorneys' Offices including the Southern District of New York; District of Columbia; Middle District of Florida; District of Colorado; Southern District of Texas; Central District of California; Northern District of Ohio; District of New Jersey; and the Western District of Washington. The Criminal Division's Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section also provided significant assistance.

The IPR Center is one of the U.S. government's key weapons in the fight against criminal counterfeiting and piracy. The IPR Center is led by ICE's HSI and includes partners from U.S. Customs and Border Protection; the FBI; the Department of Commerce; the Food and Drug Administration; the Postal Inspection Service; the General Services Administration, Office of the Inspector General; the Naval Criminal Investigative Service; the Defense Criminal Investigative Service; the Army Criminal Investigative Division's Major Procurement Fraud Unit; the Consumer Product Safety Commission, INTERPOL; and the Government of Mexico Tax Administrative Service. The IPR Center allows law enforcement and the private sector jointly to address the growing transnational problem of counterfeit products. The IPR Center coordinates outreach to U.S. rights holders and conducts domestic and international law enforcement as well as coordinates and directs anti-counterfeiting investigations. To learn more about the IPR Center, visit www.ice.gov

The enforcement actions announced today are an example of the type of efforts being undertaken by the Department of Justice Task Force on Intellectual Property (IP Task Force). Attorney General Eric Holder created the IP Task Force to combat the growing number of domestic and international intellectual property crimes, protect the health and safety of American consumers, and safeguard the nation's economic security against those who seek to profit illegally from American creativity, innovation and hard work. The IP Task Force seeks to strengthen intellectual property rights protection through heightened criminal and civil enforcement, greater coordination among federal, state and local law enforcement partners, and increased focus on international enforcement efforts, including reinforcing relationships with key foreign partners and U.S. industry leaders. To learn more about the IP Task Force, go to www.justice.gov/dag/iptaskforce/

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/November/10-ag-1355.html

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From the FBI

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Crime Statistics

New Online Tool Makes Research Easier

11/29/2010

The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, which collects and publishes crime statistics, has developed an online database tool to make it easier to search for crime data going back to 1960.

The publisher of the annual Crime in the United States report today rolled out the UCR Data Tool, which lets users perform queries on custom variables like year, agency, and type of offense. Until now, making comparisons of our crime data required searching the annual reports and then manually crunching the numbers. The new tool aims to make it easier for users—including our law enforcement partners who supply the data—to make use of the raw numbers.

“It's a flexible, user-friendly way for our contributors and users to access the FBI's UCR crime data,” said Robert Casey, chief of the Law Enforcement Support Section in our Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division, which manages the UCR program.

The FBI has administered the UCR program since 1930, when law enforcement organizations in 400 cities in 43 states (representing 20 million people) started sending us data on crimes classified as Part I offenses—murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Since then, the program has expanded along with the population and the number of police departments serving them. Today, the population represented by law enforcement agencies participating in the UCR program is more than 295 million people, or 96 percent of the U.S. Participation in the program is voluntary and varies from year to year.

UCR Data Tool
Results from customized searches in the Data Tool can
be exported as spreadsheets and turned into graphics

The online database contains crime offense statistics from 1985 to 2009 (the most recent reporting year) for city law enforcement agencies with populations of 10,000 and over, and for county agencies with populations of 25,000 and over. Estimated crime counts from 1960 to 2009 for national and state-level data are also included in the UCR Data Tool. (Because not all law enforcement agencies provide data, the FBI estimates some crime counts.) Figures for arson, which was added to the UCR program as a Part I offense in 1979, are not included in the database.

The tool makes it easier to look at longitudinal data—data over a period of time. Users can export results in a universal format for easy display on spreadsheets or graphics programs.

“We're working hard to modernize and revitalize UCR,” Casey said. “The Data Tool is one step toward that goal.”

The UCR program publishes a number of statistical reports each year. The most recent annual Crime in the United States report was released in September; next month we'll post preliminary statistics for the first six months of 2010. Other annual UCR reports include Hate Crime Statistics and Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted . The dual aims of the reports are to provide information to the public, and to provide data-driven insight that might help law enforcement agencies tailor their programs and training and allocate resources.

The rollout of the Data Tool is part of a larger FBI effort to improve customer service and streamline the UCR database, which could result in shorter turnaround times for publications. More information about methodology and best practices for using the tool are available at www.ucrdatatool.gov

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2010/november/ucrtool_112910/ucrtool_112910

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