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From the Los Angeles Times

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L.A. slaying victim's kind nature may have cost him his life

Police are looking for a York, Pa., couple in connection with the death of Herbert Tracy White, whose body was found dismembered in a hotel room near skid row on Nov. 29.

by Nardine Saad, Los Angeles Times

December 9, 2010

During Herbert Tracy White's 15 years of sobriety, he liked to reach out and help others who were battling alcoholism. The holidays, his brother said, were White's "busy season."

His brother and other family members said they believe it was White's desire to help other alcoholics that cost him his life at a skid row hotel late last month.

On what would have been White's 50th birthday, his family gathered with police Wednesday to ask for the public's help in catching his suspected killers.

A maid at the Continental Hotel discovered White's severed limbs stuffed in a backpack on the morning of Nov. 29. The rest of his body was found wrapped in a blanket under a bed in the hotel room.

The Pennsylvania couple who had rented the $40-a-night room — Edward Garcia Jr., 36, and his wife, Melissa Hope Garcia, 25, are wanted on suspicion of murder and torture. The couple is considered armed and dangerous, police said.

White's family said his kind nature often meant he left family functions early to provide rides or otherwise help alcoholics in the middle of the night. He had told his brother that he was especially busy during the holidays because people tended to backslide and drink.

White's wife, Annie Coty White, 73, said her husband left their Hollywood home early on the morning of Nov. 28 after receiving a phone call from a person asking him for a ride.

"I asked who it was and he said, 'Oh you know those crazy Hollywood types,'" she said. "My husband hated drunk drivers."

Police suspect White met the Garcias in Hollywood, befriended them and gave them money, said Det. Richard Arciniega of the Los Angeles Police Department. At some point, White accompanied the Garcias to the Continental Hotel, a white brick three-story walk-up, where the couple had been staying for several days.

On the night of the slaying, a hotel security guard reported receiving a complaint about a commotion in the Garcias' room, police said. But when the guard went to investigate, the couple promised that they'd keep quiet and the guard left.

Police suspect that the Garcias were looking to rob White before killing him.

LAPD detectives are working with police in York, Pa., to determine whether the Garcias are responsible for a "similar crime in which the victim was not killed," Arciniega said. He added that the Garcias have criminal records in York for robbery and drug charges.

White was a handyman who answered his phone by adding the phrase "entrepreneur extraordinaire" to his name. He graduated from University High School and was an avid UCLA fan. He took numerous classes through the university's extension program, family members said.

He frequented Alcoholics Anonymous meetings near skid row and was inclined to help people he encountered on the street, said his younger brother, David White.

"He would accept you first, then run your resume later," he said. "He was looking forward to being the sober driver for the holidays, and I believe that's what cost him his life."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dismemberment-slaying-20101209,0,4458985,print.story

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This Facebook image shows Antonio Martinez, also known as Muhammad Hussain.

Baltimore man arrested in foiled terrorism plot A 21-year-old U.S. citizen who called himself Muhammad Hussain, according to U.S. officials, allegedly tried to blow up a military recruitment center with a fake car bomb built by the FBI. by Bob Drogin and Richard Serrano Los Angeles Times December 9, 2010 Reporting from Washington A 21-year-old Baltimore construction worker, who drew federal scrutiny after he boasted on Facebook about his devotion to violent jihad, was arrested Wednesday after he allegedly tried to blow up a U.S. military recruitment center with a dummy car bomb built by the FBI. The dramatic take-down is the second FBI sting since Thanksgiving against an alleged homegrown terrorist trying to detonate a powerful car bomb. It raised fresh concerns about how English-speaking extremists from Al Qaeda and its allies are increasingly able to recruit Americans willing to commit mass violence. U.S. officials said Antonio Martinez, a U.S. citizen who recently converted to Islam and called himself Muhammad Hussain, dialed a cellphone that he believed would ignite barrels of explosives packed into a sport utility vehicle. The SUV had been parked by the Armed Forces recruiting station at a strip mall in Catonsville, a bedroom suburb west of Baltimore.

In court documents, Martinez is quoted as saying, "We have to be the ones to pull that trigger. Send that message."

But like the recently thwarted plot in Portland, Ore., the bomb was a phony prepared by the FBI, and agents immediately arrested Martinez. He was charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and attempted murder of federal officers and employees. If convicted, he faces life in prison.

At an afternoon court hearing in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Martinez wore an untucked white T-shirt with jeans. He had wild curly hair and his face was unshaven, and he looked down as U.S. Magistrate Judge James K. Bredar read the charges. Bredar set a hearing for Monday.

The White House said President Obama was informed about the sting before the arrest, and that no one was in danger because the FBI was tracking the suspect's movements and communication.

"This arrest underscores the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism here and abroad and why we have been focusing on addressing the challenge posed by domestic radicalization," said Nicholas Shapiro, a White House spokesman.

Court documents portray Martinez as passionate about joining jihad, and determined to punish the U.S. military for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a Facebook posting Oct. 14, according to an FBI affidavit, Martinez wrote how "it was his dream to be among the ranks of the mujahedeen" and "all he thinks about is jihad."

Martinez allegedly praised Maj. Nidal Hassan, the Army psychiatrist who has been charged with killing 13 people at Ft. Hood, Texas, last year. And he allegedly called Anwar Awlaki, the American-born Al Qaeda propagandist believed to operate from Yemen, a "real inspiration." U.S. officials have designated Awlaki a "specially designated global terrorist" and have sought to kill him.

But Martinez also appeared unskilled in terror tactics until the FBI offered to help, according to the affidavit. At one point, he suggested stuffing "a sock or something" in the exhaust pipes of Army vehicles so passengers would "slowly but surely die." He also proposed building a secret mosque in the woods where he could hide after an attack, the affidavit said.

His mother disapproved of his life choices, according to records. "She wants me to be like everybody else, being in school, working," he told an FBI informant. "Glad I am not like everyone else my age — going out having fun, be in college, all that stuff. That's not me.... That [sic] not what Allah has in mind for me."

Counter-terrorism officials said the case is further proof that Al Qaeda no longer needs to lure recruits to far-flung training camps to foment potentially deadly plots. Nearly all the recent terrorism plots discovered or foiled by the FBI have involved U.S. citizens.

"It just points to the fact that we're seeing more young people become radicalized in this country than we've ever seen before," said a senior U.S. official, who said he was not authorized to speak on the record.

In recent weeks, arrests have come in Portland, Ore., where a 19-year-old allegedly thought he was setting off a car bomb at a crowded Christmas tree lighting ceremony; in Chicago, where a man is accused of placing a backpack with fake explosives at a sports bar near Wrigley Field; and near Washington, D.C., where a man was charged with seeking to bomb subway trains around the Pentagon.

The Maryland case began Oct. 8 after an FBI informant in Baltimore, who is not identified in court papers, spotted Martinez's provocative Facebook postings under the name Muhammad Hussain. With FBI approval, the informant replied and the two struck up an Internet friendship.

On Oct. 22, court papers say, Martinez asked his Facebook friend "about attacking Army recruiting centers or anything military. He indicated that if the military continued to kill their Muslim brothers and sisters, they would need to expand their operation by killing U.S. Army personnel where they live. He stated that jihad is not only in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but also in the United States."

A week later, according to court papers, Martinez had the informant drive him to the two-story Armed Forces center in Catonsville, and announced his intention to "shoot everybody in the place." The pair then discussed building a car bomb instead, and an undercover FBI agent was brought in Nov. 16, court documents say.

The FBI said Martinez asked at least three friends to join him, but all declined — and one tried to dissuade him from going forward.

"The danger posed by the defendant in this case was very real," said Richard McFeely, special agent-in-charge of the FBI's Baltimore division. He and other officials defended the use of a sting to capture a terrorism suspect.

"Stings are part and parcel of the toolbox law enforcement must have and must employ, particularly in this kind of a terrorist environment," Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, said Wednesday. "There are rules that govern them and they are done very carefully, and the FBI abides by those rules, law enforcement abides by those rules, but they are an important tool to have."

She added that the terrorism threat from domestic radicals is "increasingly active." There is, she said, "an increasing amount of hometown or homegrown terrorist activity particularly by individuals who have become radicalized and associated with Al Qaeda or Islamist terrorism beliefs and techniques and tactics."

Federal officials in Baltimore said their use of the undercover agent, who passed himself off as an "Afghani brother" to get close to Martinez, was a "proactive investigative stance."

After the FBI sting in Portland hit the headlines, Martinez worried that he too was being set up. "I'm not falling for no b.s," the FBI said Martinez told the federal agent.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bomb-plot-arrest-20101209,0,2484718,print.story

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Ronni Chasen killing appears solved

Beverly Hills police believe the publicist was shot in a bungled holdup by a desperate ex-con acting alone.

By Andrew Blankstein and Harriet Ryan, Los Angeles Times

December 9, 2010

After three weeks of frenzied speculation about hired killers, gang initiations and Russian mobsters, Beverly Hills police said Wednesday that the shooting death of veteran movie publicist Ronni Chasen probably was a botched robbery by a small-time ex-convict who had grown desperate for money.

Harold Martin Smith, a 43-year-old unemployed laborer with a rap sheet stretching back to the early 1990s, committed suicide last week as detectives attempted to question him about Chasen's killing.

"We believe that Mr. Smith acted alone. We don't believe it was a professional hit," Police Chief Dave Snowden told a crowded news conference.

Snowden said preliminary ballistics tests showed the handgun that Smith used to shoot himself in the head in the lobby of a Hollywood apartment building was the same weapon that killed Chasen on Nov. 16 as she drove her Mercedes-Benz sedan along Sunset Boulevard after a film premiere.

Smith, who had been evicted from the Harvey Apartments and was wanted by authorities for violating his probation, "was at a desperate point and was reaching out and doing desperate measures," Det. Sgt. Michael Publicker said.

"Most likely it was a robbery gone bad," he said.

Vivian Mayer Siskind, a close friend of Chasen's, said she was surprised by what the investigation had found.

"Regardless of what happened, this is a senseless murder," she said. "We have lost a dear friend and family member in Ronni. All of this is completely surreal and as each day goes by, and something new is discovered about this horrible crime, it just continues to get more unbelievable."

Investigators believe Chasen was stopped at a traffic light at Sunset and Whittier Drive when Smith approached on a bike — his only known mode of transportation — and attempted to rob her, Publicker said.

Chasen was shot repeatedly in the torso. Her car continued traveling on Whittier until it crashed into a light pole.

Chasen's purse was in the car when neighbors found her, and Publicker said there was no indication that Smith ever entered the car. The Los Angeles Police Department recovered a bike in the area, but Beverly Hills police have not yet examined it, Publicker said.

Wednesday's announcement was a stunning development in a case that has captivated the city and transfixed the entertainment world, where the 64-year-old Chasen was a fixture of red carpets and studio offices.

Theories on her killing were traded at industry parties and on back lots and made their way into the national media. It was a tip to the Fox program "America's Most Wanted" that led police to Smith. At the urging of Hollywood insiders and the Beverly Hills Police Department, the program reconfigured its Nov. 20 show to include the case.

A man phoned the show's hotline three days after the show aired and said Smith was bragging about involvement in the crime. John Walsh, the program's host, called the tipster, who has insisted on anonymity, "a real hero." He said the man expressed relief when employees of the show called to tell him about the ballistics results.

"He broke into tears. He was hopeful that he had done the right thing. He was worried what if this guy wasn't the right guy," Walsh said.

After Smith's suicide, residents at the Harvey Apartments said that he had talked about the crime and also said he was expecting a $10,000 windfall. Those reports had spurred talk that Smith was a hit man, but police said their investigation had found nothing to suggest other conspirators.

Still, Publicker described the investigation as only "60-70%" completed and said that additional investigation was needed. Neither he nor Snowden would describe the gun used in the killing and the suicide or talk about surveillance videotape seized as evidence by police.

The chief criticized pundits — "quasi experts who do not know what they are talking about" — who had speculated on the case in the media and said reports purporting to describe the caliber of the weapon and the accuracy of the shooter were erroneous.

Smith's rap sheet includes a raft of mostly petty crimes, many of them drug-related. He had been arrested for robbery in Beverly Hills in 1998 and was convicted of stealing a Sony Walkman.

Smith was sentenced to 11 years in prison and was released in 2007. According to neighbors, he swore he would never return to custody.

Martha Smilgis, a friend of Chasen and co-executor of her estate, said she was surprised by the results of the investigation.

"I wouldn't have expected a bike," she said. But, she added, the randomness of the crime was more consistent with Chasen's personality than a murder-for-hire plot.

"She doesn't have a lot of enemies," Smilgis said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ronni-chasen-20101209,0,3681680,print.story

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Fugitive drug lord or schoolteacher?

It turns out that one of Mexico's most-wanted fugitive drug lords is also a schoolteacher who has been on the government payroll for years. That is what one of Mexico's leading dailies, El Universal,  is reporting (link in Spanish), citing none other than the website of the Mexican Education Ministry.

Servando "La Tuta" Gomez is sought by Mexican security officials who say he is a top commander of the violent drug cartel La Familia, based in the western state of Michoacan. He's been on the lam for several years, and there's a $2-million bounty on his head. All the while, however, he's been collecting a paycheck from the government's education office, to the tune of about $4,000 in the first part of this year, El Universal reported.

Does this help explain why Mexico's education system fares so poorly in global quality rankings? Asked about La Tuta's appearance on the payroll, Education Minister Alonso Lujambio (mentioned occasionally as a potential presidential candidate) said  (link in Spanish) it wasn't his job to search teachers' background, shifting the responsibility to local authorities.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2010/12/fugitive-druglordor-school-teacher.html

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House passes immigration Dream Act

The bill gives young illegal immigrants a path to citizenship if they enroll in college or enlist in the military. Supporters call its passage historic — but Democrats probably don't have enough votes to get it through the Senate.

By Lisa Mascaro and Kathleen Hennessey, Tribune Washington Bureau

December 9, 2010

Reporting from Washington

The House passed a landmark youth immigration bill known as the Dream Act on Wednesday night largely along party lines, but the measure faces a tough test in the Senate as Democrats struggle to pass priority legislation in the waning days of this Congress.

Eight Republicans joined in approving the bill, 216 to 198. Thirty-eight Democrats voted no. The measure offers a path to citizenship for young people who were brought to this country illegally before age 16 and who have enrolled in college or entered the military.

President Obama said the passage was historic. "This vote is not only the right thing to do for a group of talented young people who seek to serve a country they know as their own by continuing their education or serving in the military, but it is the right thing for the United States of America," he said in a statement.

Obama called on the Senate to follow suit.

The bill could come up there as soon as Thursday but is unlikely to attract the necessary 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Republican senators have vowed to block all legislation until a stalemate over the George W. Bush-era tax cuts is resolved. Obama and the GOP have reached a deal, but Democrats haven't signed on.

The Dream Act isn't the only Democratic priority at stake.

Earlier in the day, the Senate postponed at least until Thursday a vote on repealing "don't ask, don't tell," the 1993 ban on openly gay personnel in the military.

Democrats worked late into the night trying to strike a deal with the few Republican senators who support lifting the policy but who have asked for more time to debate it.

The lame-duck congressional session offers Democrats their best chance to pass both bills because, in January, Republicans will hold the majority in the House and more seats in the Senate.

The House passed the Dream Act after a late, hastily scheduled vote. Proponents called it the most significant immigration legislation to pass the House in a decade.

"Let's give the dream kids an opportunity. They are American in every way but a piece of paper," said Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), a leading supporter. "We have come here to support the rule of law, yes, but to change the law when it is unfair."

A handful of Republicans in both chambers criticized the Dream Act as "nightmare" amnesty legislation bound to be abused and easily subject to fraud. They said it would create more competition for work in a recession.

"The American people want us to focus on creating jobs and getting Americans back to work. This will prevent Americans from getting jobs," said Rep. Lamar Smith (R- Texas). "It puts the interest of illegal immigrants ahead of those of law-abiding Americans."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-1209-congress-20101209,0,5707387,print.story

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Payment of $250 to Social Security recipients rejected by House, Senate

The one-time payment falls short of the supermajority needed for passage in the House, and the 60-vote margin required to avoid a Senate filibuster. Republicans say they fear the $13-billion payout would raise the deficit.

Michael A. Memoli, Tribune Washington Bureau

December 8, 2010

Reporting from Washington

A proposal to provide a one-time payment of $250 to Social Security recipients failed in both the U.S. House and Senate on Wednesday.

Under the formula used to calculate cost-of-living adjustments for the retirement safety net, seniors will otherwise see no rise in their payments in 2011. Advocates for the plan argued in part that the formula used to calculate inflation fails to accurately reflect costs.

Though a majority supported the approval in the House, the final margin was short of the supermajority required under a suspension of the rules. In the Senate, the final tally of 53-45 was short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster.

Republicans who blocked the measure cited concern about the deficit.

"While many seniors are hurting, so too are American working families. Increasing our nation's crushing deficit on the backs of our children by an additional $14 billion is wrong," said Rep. Sam Johnson (R- Texas).

The measure would have cost approximately $13 billion.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D- Ohio) took to the Senate floor after the vote, charging Republicans with hypocrisy for blocking the measure the same week they called for an extension of tax cuts for the wealthy.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-social-security-20101209,0,914280,print.story

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From the New York Times

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With Video Everywhere, Stark Evidence Is on Trial

By JOHN SCHWARTZ and KATIE ZEZIMA

In a world that is always on camera, the centuries-old courtroom experience is becoming a lot more complicated.

The advent of video-in-your pocket camcorders and cellphones, and the proliferation of surveillance cameras, mean that events that once would have gone unrecorded are preserved for posterity — and, inevitably, for trial.

Legal experts say the technology shift could lead to harsher experiences for jurors, and could put pressure on judges to re-examine the balancing act that they have long used to determine what kind of evidence makes its way into court.

Videos, some quite grisly, are increasingly a major feature of cases. Just Tuesday, a judge in a Massachusetts manslaughter trial said that video of an 8-year-old boy accidentally shooting himself in the head with a submachine gun at a gun show could be shown to jurors.

In the case of a former Oakland, Calif., transit police officer convicted in July of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of an unarmed man on a subway platform, jurors watched widely disseminated cellphone video of the shooting. And in Stockton, Calif., this month, jurors saw video of an emaciated, dirt-caked 16-year-old boy wearing only boxer shorts and a leg shackle, running into a gym in Tracy, Calif. The boy had escaped from a home where he had been burned, beaten, cut and tortured for a year.

“There's no doubt it can be helpful,” said Jake Wark, a spokesman for District Attorney Daniel F. Conley of Suffolk County, Mass., whose office prosecuted cases in Boston involving surveillance video of the shooting of a 15-year-old boy waiting for a school bus and a shooting in a convenience store. “It's a powerful tool for us in determining the truth.”

But it also leads to greater resistance from defense lawyers, he said. “With every new type of evidence comes a new type of evidence-suppression motion,” Mr. Wark said.

Being subjected to such images could make jury service a brutal experience. Last year, Las Vegas jurors wept as prosecutors played a 15-minute video of a man molesting a 2-year-old girl. A juror said showing the tape was not necessary to convict the defendant, Chester Stiles, on 22 counts of sexually assaulting a minor and other charges.

“It's absolutely horrific, there's no other way to put it,” said the juror, who asked not to be identified. The experience left him with “post-traumatic type things,” he said. “For a regular citizen to have to watch that, it's too much.”

Some jurors require counseling for post-traumatic stress after a particularly grueling trial, including some of those involved in the recent case involving a triple murder in Cheshire, Conn.

Video evidence can spark responses that surpass those of oral testimony and still images, said Clay Shirky, a new-media expert at New York University. “It seems like it's happening as you're watching,” he said. The widespread use of such powerful evidence, he predicted, could also shift the balance of justice.

“My guess is that other things being equal, the availability of video evidence will lead juries to make harsher decisions,” he said.

That is where judges come in, said Greg Hurley, an analyst for the National Center for State Courts. “Judges are worried that jurors' passions and sympathies will be excited, and they won't be judging cases solely on the facts and the law,” he said.

Paul G. Cassell, a former federal judge who teaches at the University of Utah college of law, said most judges choose to allow disturbing evidence into trial. “The law generally places a thumb on the side of admissibility of evidence like this, requiring the opponent of admission to show a particularly good reason for exclusion.”

Professor Cassell, who is an advocate for victims' rights, said judges must also be mindful of weakening the information for a jury. “You cannot deprive the other side the moral force of its evidence simply by stipulating to the facts,” he said.

The rise of video technology, he predicted, will not change the principles behind the balancing act, but will force judges to grapple more directly with the technology and become innovators themselves. They may need to employ tools for editing and changing resolution and masking parts of a frame to ensure that a video presented has “a laserlike focus on probative parts of the tape and exclusion of irrelevant parts of the tape.”

Prosecutors predict that there will be more challenges to introducing video evidence. Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, said such challenges were increasingly likely “but if the goal is to seek the truth and you have compelling evidence that shows what happened, it's fairly important,” he said.

Stephen B. Bright, the president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, said he did not expect the greater number of challenges to cause the judicial balance to shift. “Every law student learns that there is a delicate balancing test to see if the prejudicial impact outweighs the probative value before such evidence is admitted,” but “they quickly learn that in practice the balance always comes out in favor of admitting gruesome crime-scene photos, autopsy pictures, 911 calls, everything.”

Many judges, Mr. Bright said, favor the prosecution side, and so emotionally charged evidence is rarely excluded.

Valerie Hans, a law professor at Cornell, said the power of video evidence has to become part of jury selection — to find people who can withstand the emotional battering of the evidence and still do the job before them and not be “dominated by vengeful thoughts.”

“We really ask our jurors to do a lot,” Professor Hans said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/us/09jury.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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To Test Housing Program, Some Are Denied Aid

It has long been the standard practice in medical testing: Give drug treatment to one group while another, the control group, goes without.

Now, New York City is applying the same methodology to assess one of its programs to prevent homelessness. Half of the test subjects — people who are behind on rent and in danger of being evicted — are being denied assistance from the program for two years, with researchers tracking them to see if they end up homeless.

The city's Department of Homeless Services said the study was necessary to determine whether the $23 million program, called Homebase, helped the people for whom it was intended. Homebase, begun in 2004, offers job training, counseling services and emergency money to help people stay in their homes.

But some public officials and legal aid groups have denounced the study as unethical and cruel, and have called on the city to stop the study and to grant help to all the test subjects who had been denied assistance.

“They should immediately stop this experiment,” said the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer. “The city shouldn't be making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable.”

As controversial as the experiment has become, New York City is among a number of governments, philanthropies and research groups turning to so-called randomized controlled trials to evaluate social welfare programs.

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development recently started an 18-month study in 10 cities and counties to track up to 3,000 families who land in homeless shelters. Families will be randomly assigned to programs that put them in homes, give them housing subsidies or allow them to stay in shelters. The goal, a HUD spokesman, Brian Sullivan, said, is to find out which approach most effectively ushered people into permanent homes.

Such trials, while not new, are becoming especially popular in developing countries. In India, for example, researchers using a controlled trial found that installing cameras in classrooms reduced teacher absenteeism at rural schools. Children given deworming treatment in Kenya ended up having better attendance at school and growing taller.

“It's a very effective way to find out what works and what doesn't,” said Esther Duflo, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has advanced the testing of social programs in the third world. “Everybody, every country, has a limited budget and wants to find out what programs are effective.”

The New York study involves monitoring 400 households that sought Homebase help between June and August. Two hundred were given the program's services, and 200 were not. Those denied help by Homebase were given the names of other agencies -- among them H.R.A. Job Centers, Housing Court Answers and Eviction Intervention Services -- rom which they could seek assistance.

Advocates for the homeless said they were puzzled about why the trial was necessary, since the city proclaimed the Homebase program as “highly successful” in the September 2010 Mayor's Management Report, saying that over 90 percent of families that received help from Homebase did not end up in homeless shelters. One critic of the trial, Councilwoman Annabel Palma, is holding a General Welfare Committee hearing about the program on Thursday.

“I don't think homeless people in our time, or in any time, should be treated like lab rats,” Ms. Palma said.

But Seth Diamond, commissioner of the Homeless Services Department, said that just because 90 percent of the families helped by Homebase stayed out of shelters did not mean it was Homebase that kept families in their homes. People who sought out Homebase might be resourceful to begin with, he said, and adept at patching together various means of housing help.

The department, Mr. Diamond added, had to cut $20 million from its budget in November, and federal stimulus money for Homebase will end in July 2012.

“This is about putting emotions aside,” he said. “When you're making decisions about millions of dollars and thousands of people's lives, you have to do this on data, and that is what this is about.”

The department is paying $577,000 for the study, which is being administered by the City University of New York along with the research firm Abt Associates, based in Cambridge, Mass. The firm's institutional review board concluded that the study was ethical for several reasons, said Mary Maguire, a spokeswoman for Abt: because it was not an entitlement, meaning it was not available to everyone; because it could not serve all of the people who applied for it; and because the control group had access to other services.

The firm also believed, she said, that such tests offered the “most compelling evidence” about how well a program worked.

Dennis P. Culhane, a professor of social welfare policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said the New York test was particularly valuable because there was widespread doubt about whether eviction-prevention programs really worked.

“There's no doubt you can find poor people in need, but there's no evidence that people who get this program's help would end up homeless without it,” said Professor Culhane, who is working as a consultant on both the New York and HUD studies.

Professor Culhane added that people were routinely denied Homebase help anyway, and that the study was merely reorganizing who ended up in that pool. According to the city, 5,500 households receive full Homebase help each year, and an additional 1,500 are denied case management and rental assistance because money runs out.

Still, legal aid lawyers in New York said that apart from their opposition to the study's ethics, its timing was troubling because nowadays, there were fewer resources to go around.

Ian Davie, a lawyer with Legal Services NYC in the Bronx, said Homebase was often a family's last resort before eviction. One of his clients, Angie Almodovar, 27, a single mother who is pregnant with her third child, ended up in the study group denied Homebase assistance. “I wanted to cry, honestly speaking,” Ms. Almodovar said. “Homebase at the time was my only hope.”

Ms. Almodovar said she was told when she sought help from Homebase that in order to apply, she had to enter a lottery that could result in her being denied assistance. She said she signed a letter indicating she understood. Five minutes after a caseworker typed her information into a computer, she learned she would not receive assistance from the program.

With Mr. Davie's help, she cobbled together money from the Coalition for the Homeless and a public-assistance grant to stay in her apartment. But Mr. Davie wondered what would become of those less able to navigate the system. “She was the person who didn't fall through the cracks,” Mr. Davie said of Ms. Almodovar. “It's the people who don't have assistance that are the ones we really worry about.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/nyregion/09placebo.html?ref=us

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OPINION

Framed for Murder?

“California may be about to execute an innocent man.”

That's the view of five federal judges in a case involving Kevin Cooper, a black man in California who faces lethal injection next year for supposedly murdering a white family. The judges argue compellingly that he was framed by police.

Mr. Cooper's impending execution is so outrageous that it has produced a mutiny among these federal circuit court judges, distinguished jurists just one notch below the United States Supreme Court. But the judicial process has run out for Mr. Cooper. Now it's up to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to decide whether to commute Mr. Cooper's sentence before leaving office.

This case, an illuminating window into the pitfalls of capital punishment, dates to a horrific quadruple-murder in June 1983. Doug and Peggy Ryen were stabbed to death in their house, along with their 10-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old houseguest. The Ryens' 8-year-old son, Josh, was left for dead but survived. They were all white.

Josh initially told investigators that the crime had been committed by three people, all white, although by the trial he suggested that he had seen just one person with an Afro. The first version made sense because the weapons included a hatchet, an ice pick and one or two knives. Could one intruder juggling several weapons overpower five victims, including a 200-pound former Marine like Doug Ryen, who also had a loaded rifle nearby?

But the police learned that Mr. Cooper had walked away from the minimum security prison where he was serving a burglary sentence and had hidden in an empty home 125 yards away from the crime scene. The police decided that he had committed the crime alone.

William A. Fletcher, a federal circuit judge, explained his view of what happens in such cases in a law school lecture at Gonzaga University, in which he added that Mr. Cooper is “probably” innocent: “The police are under heavy pressure to solve a high-profile crime. They know, or think they know, who did the crime. And they plant evidence to help their case along.”

Judge Fletcher wrote an extraordinary judicial opinion -- more than 100 pages when it was released -- dissenting from the refusal of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to rehear the case. The opinion is a 21st-century version of Émile Zola's famous “J'Accuse.”

Mr. Fletcher, a well-respected judge and former law professor, was joined in his “J'Accuse” by four other circuit judges. Six more wrote their own dissents calling for the full Ninth Circuit to rehear the case. But they fell just short of the votes needed for rehearing.

Judge Fletcher laid out countless anomalies in the case. Mr. Cooper's blood showed up on a beige T-shirt apparently left by a murderer near the scene, but that blood turned out to have a preservative in it — the kind of preservative used by police when they keep blood in test tubes.

Then a forensic scientist found that a sample from the test tube of Mr. Cooper's blood held by police actually contained blood from more than one person. That leads Mr. Cooper's defense team and Judge Fletcher to believe that someone removed blood and then filled the tube back to the top with someone else's blood.

The police also ignored other suspects. A woman and her sister told police that a housemate, a convicted murderer who had completed his sentence, had shown up with several other people late on the night of the murders, wearing blood-spattered overalls and driving a station wagon similar to the one stolen from the murdered family.

They said that the man was no longer wearing the beige T-shirt he had on earlier in the evening — the same kind as the one found near the scene. And his hatchet, which resembled the one found near the bodies, was missing from his tool area. The account was supported by a prison confession and by witnesses who said they saw a similar group in blood-spattered clothes in a nearby bar that night. The women gave the bloody overalls to the police for testing, but the police, by now focused on Mr. Cooper, threw the overalls in the trash.

This case is a travesty. It underscores the central pitfall of capital punishment: no system is fail-safe. How can we be about to execute a man when even some of America's leading judges believe he has been framed?

Lanny Davis, who was the White House counsel for President Bill Clinton, is representing Mr. Cooper pro bono. He laments: “The media and the bar have gone deaf and silent on Kevin Cooper. My simple theory: heinous brutal murder of white family and black convict. Simple as that.”

That's a disgrace that threatens not only the life of one man, but the honor of our judicial system. Governor Schwarzenegger, are you listening?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/opinion/09kristof.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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FBI issues alert for Video Barbie

BY ASSOCIATED PRESS

Dec 8, 2010 12:56PM

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The FBI has issued a cyber crime alert on a new Barbie doll that comes with a hidden video camera.

Mattel's Barbie Video Girl has a video camera lens built into its necklace that can record up to 30 minutes of footage to be downloaded on a computer.

Officials warn that it could possibly be used to produce child pornography, but say they don't have any reported crimes.

The FBI's Sacramento office issued a report with the warning on the doll last month.

FBI spokesman Steve Dupre says the alert was inadvertently sent to the media but was meant for law enforcement agencies advising them not to overlook the doll during any searches.

A Mattel spokeswoman says the FBI has confirmed no reported incidents of using the doll for criminal activity.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/2744154-418/fbi-doll-video-alert-barbie.html

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From the Department of Homeland Security

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Secretary Napolitano and Administrator Johnson Announce Expansion of “If You See Something, Say Something” Campaign to Federal Buildings Throughout the Country

WASHINGTON—Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano today joined U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) Administrator Martha Johnson, Federal Protective Service (FPS) Director Eric Patterson, and GSA Commissioner of Public Buildings Bob Peck to announce the expansion of DHS' national “If You See Something, Say Something” public awareness campaign to approximately 9,000 federal buildings throughout the United States.

“Homeland security begins with hometown security and every citizen—including government employees—plays a critical role in ensuring America's safety and security,” said Secretary Napolitano. “Our partnership with FPS and GSA to expand the ‘If You See Something, Say Something' campaign to our nation's federal buildings is a crucial step in helping the millions of people who work in or visit our federal buildings every day identify and report suspicious activity indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats.”

“GSA is pleased to partner with DHS to bring the ‘If You See Something, Say Something' campaign to the over 9,000 properties we own or lease on behalf of the Federal Government,” said GSA Administrator Martha Johnson. “The campaign is yet another important example of the work GSA and DHS do to ensure that our federal buildings are safe and welcoming to over one million federal employees and visitors alike.”

The “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign—originally implemented by New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority and funded, in part, by $13 million from DHS' Transit Security Grant Program—is a simple and effective program to engage the public and key frontline employees to identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to the proper transportation and law enforcement authorities.

“The men and women of the Federal Protective Service work tirelessly every day to protect the safety of Americans who work in and visit federal facilities,” said FPS Director Eric Patterson. “This collaborative security effort will enable our law enforcement and protective security officers to join forces with the public to secure federal facilities from threats.”

In the coming weeks, “If You See Something, Say Something” public awareness materials designed to help America's businesses, communities and citizens remain vigilant and play an active role in keeping our homeland safe will be posted in approximately 9,000 federal buildings throughout the country. Signage will appear at FPS guard stations at each facility, and any calls reporting suspicious activity will be directed to the existing national network of FPS call centers, which operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Over the past five months, DHS has worked with its federal, state, local and private sector partners, as well as the Department of Justice, to expand the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign and the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative—an administration effort to train state and local law enforcement to recognize behaviors and indicators related to terrorism, crime and other threats; standardize how those observations are documented and analyzed; and expand and enhance the sharing of those reports with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and DHS—to communities throughout the country, including recent statewide expansions of the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign across Minnesota and New Jersey. Other partners include Walmart, Mall of America, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the sports and general aviation industries, and state and local fusion centers across the country.

In the coming months, the Department will continue to expand the "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign nationally with public education materials and outreach tools designed to help America's businesses, communities and citizens remain vigilant and play an active role in keeping the country safe.

For more information, visit www.dhs.gov

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1291831242174.shtm

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From the FBI

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A Byte Out of History

Turning the Tables on Telemarketing Fraud

12/08/10

One Ohio widow was scammed out of some $240,000—her life savings—by 50 different telemarketers. A 92-year-old woman in California lost $180,000, then was conned out of another $5,000 trying to get some of it back. An elderly lady living out West gave away $60,000 from her family's retirement fund to a telemarketer, only to turn around and agree to take out a costly loan.

These sad stories were just the tip of the iceberg in the 1990s, when telemarketing fraud was in its criminal heyday, mostly preying on the elderly and ringing up an estimated $40 billion in losses from the pockets of American consumers.

But the FBI and its partners fought back during the decade through a series of major investigations that put a sizeable dent in the operations of telemarketing hucksters.

One of the most important of these cases was publicly unveiled 15 years ago yesterday—on December 7, 1995. Dubbed Operation Senior Sentinel , it was as novel as it was successful. Successful, because it ultimately resulted in some 1,200 arrests and hundreds of convictions across the nation. And novel, because for the first time, it put victims themselves in an undercover role to help current and retired FBI agents catch fraudsters.

That case was a spin-off of two earlier major investigations led by the FBI that targeted telemarketing “boiler rooms” —so named because they typically involve a crowded room full of sales persons using high-pressure, often illegal sales tactics on unsuspecting victims over the phone. The first investigation—Operation Disconnect—began in 1991 in Salt Lake City, expanding nationwide and culminating in a wave of 240 arrests in March 1993. The second, called Operation Sunstroke because it was based in Miami, was launched in the summer of 1993. It featured an innovative technique for a telemarketing case: retired FBI agents and informants posing as victims.

At the time, the FBI office in Miami had a close working relationship with its counterpart in San Diego, since both cities were hotbeds of boiler room activity. Operation Sunstroke was eventually expanded by the San Diego Division into Operation Senior Sentinel.

In Senior Sentinel, we added yet another effective investigative twist and a first in law enforcement. In addition to tapping into retired agents, we asked citizen volunteers recruited by the AARP—the American Association of Retired Persons—to aid the investigation by acting as victims. These individuals (some of whom actually were victims) were trained by Bureau agents, who secretly recorded the conversations. The tapes were then forwarded to our office in San Diego, where they were catalogued and indexed for the investigation. More than 7,000 phone calls were recorded between 1993 and 1995.

These three cases—along with Operation Double Barrel in 1998 and others that followed—have had a lasting impact in reducing the scourge of telemarketing fraud.

San Diego Special Agent in Charge Keith Slotter, who helped launch Operation Sunstroke while an agent in Miami, says the days of the massive telemarketing boiler room operations are essentially over. “We came down so hard on the boiler room criminals and sent so many to jail that it discouraged them from going back into the business,” he said. “We sent a psychological message as well as a criminal message.”

The message remains: the FBI is committed to taking down bogus telemarketers, now and in the future.

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2010/december/telemarketing_120810/telemarketing_120810

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