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From the Los Angeles Times

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South Gate man wanted in death of daughter is caught in Mexico

A man wanted in connection with the death of his 10-month-old daughter has been apprehended in Mexico, authorities said Monday night.

Jose Deras, 20, was being held by authorities in Mexico City pending extradition requests, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said. 

Authorities said Deras allegedly assaulted his wife and daughter. The girl died of blunt-force trauma, according to authorities.

Deras was last seen driving a black, four-door 2008 Nissan Sentra with the California license plate 6FYB170, according to the  Sheriff's Department.

Deras allegedly assaulted his wife and baby on Saturday about 5:40 p.m. at their home in the 5100 block of McCallum Avenue, police said.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/

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Authorities from L.A.-area task force seize 43 kilos of cocaine, $2.3 million in cash

Two men were booked into the Santa Monica jail on drug charges after a multi-agency task force seized 47 kilos of cocaine and $2.3 million in cash, police said Monday.

The task force of federal agents and local police officers uncovered the cash and cocaine Wednesday at a Valencia warehouse after serving search warrants at three Los Angeles-area locations, said the Santa Monica Police Department, whose officers were part of the effort.

Vasile Babuschin and Sergei Souetov, both Canadian citizens, were arrested and booked on narcotics charges, police said.

Babuschin was detained as he arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on a flight from Canada. He led investigators to suspected drug-storage locations, according to police.

The money was in a safe that had to be cut open by firefighters.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/

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From the New York Times

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Shooting Suspect Had Been Known to Use Potent, and Legal, Hallucinogen

TUCSON — No one has suggested that his use of a hallucinogenic herb or any other drugs contributed to Jared L. Loughner's apparent mental unraveling that culminated with his being charged in a devastating outburst of violence here.

Yet it is striking how closely the typical effects of smoking the herb, Salvia divinorum -- which federal drug officials warn can closely mimic psychosis — matched Mr. Loughner's own comments about how he saw the world, like his often-repeated assertion that he spent most of his waking hours in a dream world that he had learned to control.

Salvia is a potent but legal drug marketed with promises of producing a transcendental spiritual journey: out-of-body experiences, existence in multiple realities, the revelation of secret knowledge and, according to one online seller, “permanent mind-altering change in perception.”

Mr. Loughner, 22, was at one point a frequent user of the plant, also known as diviner's sage, which he began smoking while in high school during a time in which he was also experimenting with marijuana, hallucinogenic mushrooms and other drugs, according to friends. Mental health professionals warn that drug use can both aggravate and mask the onset of mental illness.

“He always had it on him,” said George Osler IV, whose son, Zach, was good friends with Mr. Loughner in high school. It is unclear when Mr. Loughner last used the drug.

It remains unclear what, if any, role salvia played in shaping Mr. Loughner's views. But the shootings have once again drawn attention to a drug that — for little more than the cost of a pack of cigarettes and without the hassle of showing a driver's license — a growing number of young people here and throughout much of the country are legally buying and using.

“It's a draw for adventure seekers — the people who are attracted to the sort of bungee-jumping attempt in psychopharmacology,” said Matthew W. Johnson, a professor of behavioral pharmacology at Johns Hopkins University medical school, who has studied the effect of the drug on humans. “They are looking for that sort of thing as a part of their belief system. Sometimes they are extremely compelled by what they are experiencing.”

A perennial in the mint family related to the ornamental plant popular with gardeners, Salvia divinorum is native to Mexico and has historically been used by Mazatec shamans in religious rituals, where the large green leaves are chewed or made into a tea. (Some researchers have said the herb holds promise for developing new medicine to control pain and treat drug addiction.)

Smoked, the effect is shorter and more intense, typically lasting just a few minutes.

People who have smoked the herb say the experience is often unpleasant, and many never use it again. The powerful effects have been documented in thousands of online videos documenting experiences on the drug — including a recent video of the teenage music and television star Miley Cyrus laughing hysterically and babbling nonsensically after smoking the drug. Nearly 6 percent of high school seniors and college students reported using the drug in the previous year, a higher percentage than used Ecstasy or cocaine and more than twice as much as LSD, according to a federal survey released in 2009.

“It pretty much puts you in a different world,” said Casey Hazelton, 19, describing his own experience with the drug while visiting a local smoke shop that sells packets of the herb. “It's like you're dreaming if you're awake.”

Nationwide, poison centers treated 117 Salvia divinorum exposures in 2010, up from 81 the year before.

Salvia's growing popularity has led nearly half the states to ban or restrict the sale of the herb, which is often treated with concentrated extract of the active chemical to make it more powerful. The push coincides with recent efforts by states around the country to outlaw a number of other legal drugs that often sit alongside salvia on the shelves that use chemical additives to mimic the effects of illegal drugs like marijuana.

“It's an issue that the states are increasingly paying attention to,” said Alison Lawrence, policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In Arizona, however, salvia and other synthetic drugs like Spice and K2 can legally be sold to anyone, including minors, and are available at smoke shops, liquor stores and even grocery stores. The drug is also widely sold on the Internet with more potent versions accompanied by warnings like “reality is ripped to shreds.”

Eric Meyer, a doctor and member of the Arizona Legislature, has introduced bills each of the past two years to restrict the sale of salvia to those 21 and older (three states, including California, have age restrictions). Both years the bill died without coming to a final vote. Mr. Meyer said he planned to introduce the legislation again next week, with the hope that the increased attention would allow the bill to go forward.

“It's a first step to get some control over the drug,” he said.

The Drug Enforcement Agency has listed salvia as a drug of concern and is considering classifying it as a Schedule I drug, like LSD or marijuana, according to the National Institutes of Health.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/us/18salvia.html?_r=1&ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Ghailani's Lawyers Detail Terror Defense Strategy

The jury had been deliberating over four days in the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani when it sent a note to the judge, asking how much the defendant needed to know about Al Qaeda's conspiracies to bomb and kill in order to be convicted.

To the defense lawyers, the issue of what their client knew was pivotal, as they had been arguing that Mr. Ghailani — the first former Guantánamo detainee tried in a civilian court — was duped into assisting in the 1998 conspiracy to bomb two American Embassies in East Africa.

“This is it right here,” one lawyer, Steve Zissou, wrote in an e-mail to the rest of the defense team, about two hours after the federal jury in Manhattan concluded deliberations for the day on Nov. 16. “The entire case rests on this charge. Everybody please think and dream about this all night and let's be ready tomorrow.”

The next morning, the judge gave the jury a new instruction, including key language sought by the defense. Late that afternoon, Mr. Ghailani was acquitted of more than 280 counts of murder and conspiracy, while being convicted of just one count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property. The jury also found that his conduct had directly caused the death of a person, which meant that he could receive life imprisonment when he is sentenced next Tuesday.

The jury has not explained how it reached that decision, and with conjecture that the verdict reflected a compromise by a sharply divided panel, no one knows what the jurors had believed about Mr. Ghailani's guilt or innocence.

Still, the verdict was a surprising counterpoint to the overwhelming number of convictions in similar terrorism trials in the United States, and has deepened the debate over the use of civilian courts for terrorism detainees.

Prosecutors declined to comment for this article. But they made clear in a filing on Friday that they believed evidence showed that Mr. Ghailani, 36, was a knowing participant in the plot, and that in convicting him of destroying property — and finding that his conduct caused death — the jury rejected the characterization of him as an innocent dupe.

Prosecutors are seeking life imprisonment, the same term he would have faced had he been convicted of every count. Such an outcome could make the acquittals seem a hollow victory; indeed, his lawyers say their reaction has been tempered by that prospect.

But the lawyers said they felt the verdict validated their strategy of portraying Mr. Ghailani as an unwitting pawn in the Qaeda conspiracy.

“It would be impossible, I would think, for a jury to have found ‘not guilty' on all of those counts if they had not accepted our defense that he did not know and that he was used,” Peter E. Quijano, the lead defense counsel, said. “It's as simple as that.”

In their first extensive interviews since the verdict, Mr. Ghailani's lawyers provided a rare look inside a terrorism trial, albeit a one-sided view. They discussed how their strategy evolved as their relationship with their client developed. Some provided copies of e-mails they exchanged in the final hours of the case, as they pushed back against the government's response to the jury's last question. They also described the pendulum of emotions as they reassessed their initial assumption that the jury was overwhelmingly against them.

What Jury Wasn't Told

The challenges for the defense were formidable.

The prosecutors had described Mr. Ghailani as an integral member of the Qaeda cell that carried out the bombings that killed 224 people in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania — “Al Qaeda's most spectacular attack to that point on America,” a prosecutor, Harry Chernoff, said in his closing argument.

Mr. Ghailani, he added, had “the blood of hundreds on his hands.”

But some of the most potentially damaging evidence against Mr. Ghailani was never heard by the jury.

On the eve of the trial, the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court, ruled that the government could not use an important witness, Hussein Abebe, who prosecutors said had sold Mr. Ghailani the TNT that was used to blow up the embassy in Dar es Salaam; he was barred because the government had learned about him through coerced interrogation of Mr. Ghailani while he was in the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The government also did not introduce statements Mr. Ghailani made before he was brought into the civilian system, even though prosecutors said they amounted to a confession. For example, he said a plotter had told him of the plans to attack the embassy in Tanzania “about a week before it was bombed,” a statement Mr. Ghailani has conceded making voluntarily, prosecutors said. The jury also never heard allegations that during Mr. Ghailani's six years as a fugitive, he trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and worked as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.

Instead, prosecutors concentrated on the events leading to the embassy bombings. They charged that Mr. Ghailani helped to buy the truck that carried the bomb that blew up the embassy in Dar es Salaam, as well as gas tanks that were placed inside the truck to magnify the blast. They said he stored a detonator in his residence and used a false passport to flee along with other operatives. “This is Al Qaeda,” Mr. Chernoff told the jury, pointing at the defendant. “This is a terrorist. This is a killer.”

The defense team included six lawyers, among them two trial veterans: Mr. Quijano, a death penalty specialist who was initially appointed when the government was still considering capital punishment in the case, and Mr. Zissou, whose focus included forensics and searches in the case.

Mr. Quijano said that the dupe strategy evolved after hundreds of hours of jailhouse meetings that the lawyers, particularly Anna N. Sideris, an associate in his office, held with Mr. Ghailani. “Developing trust with the client was huge in this case,” Ms. Sideris said, “because we needed him to open up and just talk to us, so we could learn his story — which was our defense.”

The story that emerged was that Mr. Ghailani had been one of hundreds of enterprising young men who frequented Dar es Salaam's busy marketplace area, Kariakoo, running errands and hustling for deals, hoping to earn commissions and tips.

Mr. Quijano, Ms. Sideris and a third lawyer, Michael K. Bachrach, traveled to Tanzania, where they met with Mr. Ghailani's family, interviewed potential government witnesses and visited Kariakoo, where Mr. Quijano said he could imagine his client as a young man — he was 24 at the time of the attacks — making purchases and doing tasks for friends without asking questions.

After the trip, Mr. Quijano said, “His story was so much more believable to us in a way that we could portray it to a jury.”

The defense also consulted closely with two military lawyers who had represented Mr. Ghailani at Guantánamo, and who had concluded that he had been duped. “That was also going to be our defense in Guantánamo,” one lawyer, Marine Col. Jeffrey P. Colwell, recalled.

Mr. Ghailani's physical appearance bolstered the portrait the defense hoped to offer to jurors: he was short, with a youthful, almost boyish face. “I mean, he doesn't look like Al Qaeda,” Mr. Quijano said. “He doesn't look like somebody who'd blow up an embassy. He looks like somebody you'd want to take home with you.”

Strip-Search Trauma

But as the trial approached, Mr. Ghailani had been refusing to attend hearings, saying he did not want to undergo the required strip-searches on every trip to court. His lawyers were concerned about his potential absence. “How's it going to look,” Ms. Sideris recalled thinking, “if there's an empty chair?”

Moreover, until Judge Kaplan barred Mr. Abebe's testimony, Mr. Quijano was considering asking Mr. Ghailani to testify on his own behalf to rebut the witness — an impossibility if he were not in court. (Mr. Ghailani has said he thought the TNT was to be used for mining and other legitimate purposes.)

A psychologist, Katherine A. Porterfield, who earlier evaluated Mr. Ghailani for the defense, had determined that the strip-searches set off post-traumatic stress disorder linked to his harsh treatment by the C.I.A.

The lawyers pleaded with him to come to court, and ultimately, Mr. Ghailani agreed to attend the trial after Dr. Porterfield helped reduce his anxiety.

In court, Mr. Ghailani typically appeared relaxed and engaged as he sat with his lawyers. And in closing arguments, Mr. Quijano spoke at length about the naïve “child of Kariakoo” who had innocently assisted others. “Ahmed did not know,” he said repeatedly.

Mr. Quijano said that as the jury began its deliberations, he felt confident, but his mood changed when a juror wrote to the judge on Monday, Nov. 15, the third day of deliberations, claiming that she was alone and “secure” in her views, but that she was being attacked by other jurors.

“My conclusion it not going to change,” she wrote in broken English, asking that she be excused or replaced.

The note offered no hint as to her actual position, but the lawyers said they had to assume she was the only juror holding out for acquittal, and that the rest of the jury, apparently by an 11-to-1 vote, supported conviction.

Mr. Quijano said he was “beyond despondent.”

“I couldn't believe with those facts, I'd lost 11 that quickly,” he said.

A new strategy arose: to make sure that Judge Kaplan did not remove the holdout juror, and to protect her from being pressured into changing her vote. The lawyers' best hope appeared to be for a mistrial. “We certainly are not consenting to any kind of replacement at this time,” Mr. Quijano told the judge.

Judge Kaplan called in the jurors and reminded them that they could change their position if they were convinced it was erroneous, but that they were not bound to surrender their “honest convictions” solely because of other jurors' views.

At lunchtime, Mr. Quijano, Ms. Sideris and Dr. Porterfield walked to the nearby Whiskey Tavern on Baxter Street. The lawyers each downed a bloody mary with their meals and discussed the possibility that a note announcing a guilty verdict would be waiting.

‘Longest Afternoon'

At one point, Dr. Porterfield offered some supportive analysis. “A juror who would send such a forceful and strong letter was not going to change her opinion,” she recalled telling the two lawyers. “She will never flip.”

After lunch, Mr. Zissou asked for an immediate mistrial, suggesting an apparent deadlock. The defense wanted the request in before another note arrived. Judge Kaplan denied the request.

It was the “longest afternoon,” Mr. Quijano recalled. But with continued silence from the jury through the next morning, Mr. Quijano said he began to consider whether they had misread the note — perhaps the vote was not 11 to 1, or the jury was split over some lesser issue.

But Mr. Quijano, who, like many lawyers, said he had his own rituals and superstitions — he always tries to work in his Scottish terrier, Watson, when giving a closing argument (“About the only living creature who will live with me,” he told the Ghailani jury) — hesitated to overanalyze the situation. “You don't mess with the trial gods,” he explained, adding that if something has worked, keep doing it. So, he dragged Ms. Sideris and Dr. Porterfield back to lunch at the Whiskey Tavern: same booth, same waitress and same meals — a cheddar burger for him, chicken fingers for Ms. Sideris and a taco salad for Dr. Porterfield.

Lunch was not as somber this time, and Dr. Porterfield recalled that they discussed a startling proposition: What if the jury was split 11-to-1 in favor of acquittal? What if they were protecting the wrong juror?

It was around 3 p.m. when the jury's note arrived, asking about the level of knowledge Mr. Ghailani needed to have in order to be convicted.

But muddying the issue a bit, the note asked about “conscious avoidance,” or willful blindness. The jury wanted to know whether Mr. Ghailani could be convicted if he had suspected that something illegal was under way, but had buried his head in the sand to avoid knowing the full story.

If that were the case, the note asked, did he need to know the plot's specific objectives, as charged in the indictment, like bombing embassies or killing Americans? Or was it enough to say that he knew something unlawful was going on?

It was the kind of convoluted, paradoxical question upon which verdicts can turn, Mr. Zissou said.

There was an intense discussion outside the jury's presence. A prosecutor argued that Mr. Ghailani needed only to know there was “some illegal purpose” to his activity, even if he had kept himself in the dark about its ultimate ends. Mr. Zissou argued for a higher degree of knowledge — Mr. Ghailani had to have known the ultimate aims of the charged conspiracies — which would seemingly be harder for the government to prove.

Late that afternoon, Judge Kaplan proposed an instruction that he said he would deliver the next morning. It included language the defense had sought, requiring the higher level of knowledge. It was “not enough,” the judge had written, for Mr. Ghailani to have known only that “some crime” would be committed; he had to know the specific objectives of the conspiracies.

‘Lock This Down'

That evening, Mr. Zissou sent out his urgent e-mail, declaring that the case rested on this instruction. He says he wanted to fend off any government attempt to weaken the judge's version. The point of the e-mail was “to make sure we lock this down,” he says.

Within an hour, around 8:15 p.m., prosecutors had a new proposal for the judge, asking again for an instruction requiring the lower level of knowledge.

The government's letter prompted a flurry of messages among the defense lawyers; some consulted law partners, and even a former moot court instructor at Albany Law School. Mr. Bachrach wrote to his colleagues that the government's newest version was “directly inconsistent” with Judge Kaplan's proposal. Mr. Bachrach told Mr. Zissou he would draft a response in the morning, “once I have fresh eyes.”

Ideas flowed through the night. Around 5:30 a.m., Mr. Bachrach began drafting a three-page letter to Judge Kaplan, calling the government's proposal “a nonstarter” and asking that it be “rejected in its entirety.”

At 7:10 a.m., Mr. Zissou wrote to him, asking, “How is the thinking cap?”

“Going good,” Mr. Bachrach responded. “Should have a draft for you in the next few minutes.” The letter was sent to court just after 8 a.m. on Nov. 17.

When the judge read the instruction to the jury that morning, he largely included the language the defense had wanted.

With the jury still deliberating at lunchtime, Mr. Quijano and his two colleagues returned again to the Whiskey Tavern, taking the same booth, and again ordering the same meals and drinks.

Later that day, told that a verdict note had arrived, Mr. Quijano, Ms. Sideris and Dr. Porterfield met with Mr. Ghailani in the cellblock. Mr. Quijano recalled that as he prepared his client for the worst, Mr. Ghailani said he felt optimistic.

In court, Mr. Ghailani sat in his usual place between Ms. Sideris and Mr. Bachrach, holding each of their hands as the jury foreman announced the results.

Looking back, Mr. Bachrach said Mr. Ghailani felt vindicated at being acquitted of murder, and was happy “a jury could see through the politics of this case and view him fairly.”

And despite knowing he still faces a steep sentence next Tuesday, “he knows that he's only getting that sentence after a fair trial, and in the end, that's what he wanted, a fair trial.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/nyregion/18defense.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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A Good Time to Offer First-Aid Training for All

TUCSON

WHEN the shooting rampage happened here, I was on the other side of town. But it occurred to me afterward that even if I had been at the horrific scene outside that Safeway supermarket, I would have been of no help whatsoever.

The last formal first-aid training I had was when I was in the Boy Scouts during the Eisenhower administration. So this seems a good time to reflect on how we can be prepared to lend a hand in dire situations.

On that fateful day, we saw how so many bystanders, ordinary citizens suddenly confronted with a stunning emergency, were prepared to literally hit the ground and assist gravely wounded victims with first aid, even while the stench of gunfire hung in the air.

As business travelers, we expose ourselves to a wide range of environments and circumstances. We presume that we are always in control, but somewhere in the back of our minds, we vaguely sense that things can abruptly go very wrong. Sudden illness, violent crime, an airplane disaster, epidemic, terrorism, tsunami, earthquake are all possible (though statistically unlikely) as business travel spans ever-wider areas of the globe.

In Tucson, lives literally were saved by the immediate response of a surprising number of ordinary citizens who happened to have been trained in basic first aid.

Their stories have been told, but I was especially taken with that of one citizen: an office worker named Anna Ballis, who had gone to the Safeway to buy beef broth and ended up crawling on the ground and saving lives before the emergency medical teams arrived. Only months earlier, Ms. Ballis had taken a refresher first-aid course through her work.

Many companies, to their credit, offer employee training in first aid, including cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Airlines also train flight attendants in these techniques, of course. But lots of business travelers, myself included, who may be quite willing to help when others lie stricken, simply lack basic first-aid skills that can make the difference between life and death in those initial minutes before trained emergency medical responders arrive.

“You have to be willing to engage, and it seems as if the people of Tucson have a culture, a strong community sense that, hey, if someone is in dire need, I will jump in,” said Dr. Myles Druckman, a physician who is the vice president for medical assistance in the Americas for International SOS, the global medical emergency-response and security company.

As we saw here, willingness in an emergency matters a great deal more when coupled with basic skills. “If you have someone who can follow appropriate directions, like hold the neck this way, do chest-compressions this way, you are way ahead of the curve” before emergency technicians and physicians enter the picture, Dr. Druckman said.

First-aid training is simple. For years, corporations have trained employees as initial responders for in-house emergencies, and the trend is growing to ensure that business travelers also have basic skills.

“There is a lot more general preparedness,” Dr. Druckman said. “With all of these recent incidents, whether terrorist attacks, natural disasters, the H1N1 pandemic, many organizations really are taking it to heart and saying, how do we better prepare?”

At some companies, he said, first-aid and emergency-response training is now “part of the orientation for the international traveler.”

Obviously, when something truly horrible happens in front of you, or to you, he said, “it's a shock to the system, and you never know how people are going to react. Sometimes the people who you wouldn't suspect rise to the occasion. But the more training people have had, the more they have prethought what they would do in an emergency, and how they would do it, the better it is.”

First-aid training was once mainly offered through community organizations. Schools now do a good job, but in recent years the focus for adults has moved more into corporations. “More and more people are getting it through work as opposed to other associations they were involved with,” Dr. Druckman said, adding, “In an ideal world, everyone would be first-aid trained.”

Business travelers spend many long hours waiting in airports. So given all of that spare time, and given the amount of underperforming retail space in airports, why not set up a national network of permanent first-aid training centers in airports, perhaps under the aegis of the Red Cross?

I'll let you know how that idea flies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/business/18road.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Interfering With Flight?

The announcement over the plane's speaker seems as much a part of the routine before takeoff as the demonstration of how to buckle a seat belt: Please turn off all electronic devices.

But some passengers invariably ignore the request, perhaps thinking that their iPods or e-books do not count. And really, does it matter if the devices are left on?

The answer, it turns out, is that sometimes it may.

“It's a good news-bad news thing,” said David Carson, an engineer with Boeing. Electronic devices do not cause problems in every case, he said. “And that's good,” he said. “It's bad in that people assume it never will.”

Passengers are taking an increasing array of devices on board planes — cellphones, tablets, GPS units and more. Many of these devices transmit a signal, and all of them emit electromagnetic waves, which, in theory, could interfere with the plane's electronics. At the same time, older planes might not have the best shielding against the latest generation of devices, some engineers said.

“Is it worrisome?” asked Bill Strauss, an engineer who studied passenger use of electronic devices several years ago. “It is.”

Safety experts suspect that electronic interference has played a role in some accidents, though that is difficult to prove. One crash in which cellphone interference with airplane navigation was cited as a possible factor involved a charter in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2003. Eight people died when the plane flew into the ground short of the runway.

The pilot had called home, and the call remained connected for the last three minutes of the flight. In the final report, the New Zealand Transport Accident Investigation Commission stated, “The pilot's own cellphone might have caused erroneous indications” on a navigational aid.

Since 2000, there have been at least 10 voluntary reports filed by pilots in the United States with the Aviation Safety Reporting System, administered by NASA. In 2007, one pilot recounted an instance when the navigational equipment on his Boeing 737 had failed after takeoff. A flight attendant told a passenger to turn off a hand-held GPS device and the problem on the flight deck went away.

The Federal Aviation Administration says there are risks associated with electromagnetic interference and prohibits the use of electronics below 10,000 feet because pilots have less time at lower altitudes to deal with a problem. It is up to each airline to set the policy at higher altitudes. “There's not enough evidence to warrant a change,” said Les Dorr, a spokesman for the agency.

There are many reasons that passengers do not comply with the restrictions. Mr. Carson of Boeing cited one. “Devices blur the distinction. P.D.A.'s that are cellphones, cellphones that play music. In the mind of the nominal consumer, it is hard to know what the device is actually doing.”

Some passengers are like Nicole Rodrigues of Los Angeles, who acknowledges that she listens to music on her cellphone when she is not supposed to. “In my head, I imagine it not being a problem,” she said. “The whole airplane is filled with electronics that are constantly on. Is my little cellphone going to make that big of a difference?”

Even flight attendants, charged with enforcing the rules, can fail to recognize the potential for problems, said Dinkar Mokadam, an occupational safety specialist with the Association of Flight Attendants. “I don't believe it is general knowledge that someone could plug in an iPod and potentially harm the aircraft — even among the flight attendant and pilot community,” Mr. Mokadam said.

There is no recent survey of how often passengers ignore restrictions on use of their gadgets, though seven years ago, Mr. Strauss, then a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, monitored the signals emitted from cellphones during flights and discovered that they were being left on.

Airline executives say that for the moment, they do not plan to create more restrictive policies. “We're accommodating the wishes of our passengers,” said Tom Hendricks, head of safety and operations for the Air Transport Association, the airlines' trade group. “They wish to use these devices.”

John Darbo, an air safety consultant and former airline executive who was a member of the group that helped the F.A.A. develop rules, said airlines could not police passengers or stop them from bringing electronics on the airplane. “Do you expect us to do that?” he asked. “That's absurd. What we have to do is tell them what's going on, elicit their cooperation and harden the airplanes.”

Before deciding whether to allow passengers to use phones before takeoff, several airlines conducted ground tests to see if cellphones would interfere with systems. At American Airlines, people dialed cellphones from out-of-service planes parked at various airports. “They found no interaction with the aircraft instruments on any aircraft type,” said Tim Smith, a spokesman for American.

As a result, the airline like most others, decided to permit the use of phones at the gate before departure and after landing.

Newer airplanes have more sophisticated protection against electromagnetic interference. “The technical advancements for wireless devices and portable electronic equipment is so rapid, it changes every week,” said Doug Hughes, an electrical engineer and air safety investigator. “The advances in airplanes take 20 years.”

Still, Mr. Strauss said the deterioration of planes and devices over time had not been taken into account. “A plane is designed to the right specs, but nobody goes back and checks if it is still robust,” he said. “Then there are the outliers — a cellphone that's been dropped and abused, or a battery that puts out more than it's supposed to, and avionics that are more susceptible to interference because gaskets have failed. And boom, that's where you get interference. It would be a perfect storm that would combine to create an aviation accident.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/business/18devices.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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How Many Deaths Are Enough?

On April 22, 2008, almost exactly one year after 32 students and faculty members were slain in the massacre at Virginia Tech, the dealer who had sold one of the weapons used by the gunman delivered a public lecture on the school's campus. His point: that people at Virginia Tech should be allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus.

Eric Thompson, owner of the online firearms store that sold a .22-caliber semiautomatic handgun to the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, did not think that his appearance at Virginia Tech was disrespectful or that his position was extreme. He felt so strongly that college students should be allowed to be armed while engaged in their campus activities that he offered discounts to any students who wanted to buy guns from him.

Thompson spun the discounts as altruistic. He told ABCNews.com, “This offers students and people who might not have otherwise been able to afford a weapon to purchase one at a hefty discount and at a significant expense to myself.”

The sale to Cho was not Thompson's only unfortunate link to a mass killer. His firm sold a pair of 9-millimeter Glock magazines and a holster to Steven Kazmierczak, a 27-year-old graduate student in DeKalb, Ill., who, on the afternoon of Feb. 14, 2008, went heavily armed into an auditorium-type lecture hall at Northern Illinois University. Kazmierczak walked onto the stage in front of a crowd of students and opened fire. He killed five people and wounded 18 others before killing himself.

We've allowed the extremists to carry the day when it comes to guns in the United States, and it's the dead and the wounded and their families who have had to pay the awful price. The idea of having large numbers of college students packing heat in their classrooms and at their parties and sporting events, or at the local pub or frat house or gymnasium, or wherever, is too stupid for words.

Thompson did not get a warm welcome at Virginia Tech. A spokesman for the school, Larry Hincker, said the fact that he “would set foot on this campus” was “terribly offensive” and “incredibly insensitive to the families of the victims.”

Just last week, a sophomore at Florida State University, Ashley Cowie, was shot to death accidentally by a 20-year-old student who, according to authorities, was showing off his rifle to a group of friends in an off-campus apartment complex favored by fraternity members. A second student was shot in the wrist. This occurred as state legislators in Florida are considering a proposal to allow people with permits to carry concealed weapons on campuses. The National Rifle Association thinks that's a dandy idea.

The slaughter of college students — or anyone else — has never served as a deterrent to the gun fetishists. They want guns on campuses, in bars and taverns and churches, in parks and in the workplace, in cars and in the home. Ammunition everywhere — the deadlier, the better. A couple of years ago, a state legislator in Arizona, Karen Johnson, argued that adults needed to be able to carry guns in all schools, from elementary on up. “I feel like our kindergartners are sitting there like sitting ducks,” she said.

Can we get a grip?

The contention of those who would like college kids and just about everybody else to be armed to the teeth is that the good guys can shoot back whenever the bad guys show up to do harm. An important study published in 2009 by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine estimated that people in possession of a gun at the time of an assault were 4.5 times more likely to be shot during the assault than someone in a comparable situation without a gun.

“On average,” the researchers said, “guns did not seem to protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. Although successful defensive gun uses can and do occur, the findings of this study do not support the perception that such successes are likely.”

Approximately 100,000 shootings occur in the United States every year. The number of people killed by guns should be enough to make our knees go weak. Monday was a national holiday celebrating the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While the gun crazies are telling us that ever more Americans need to be walking around armed, we should keep in mind that more than a million people have died from gun violence — in murders, accidents and suicides — since Dr. King was shot to death in 1968.

We need fewer homicides, fewer accidental deaths and fewer suicides. That means fewer guns. That means stricter licensing and registration, more vigorous background checks and a ban on assault weapons. Start with that. Don't tell me it's too hard to achieve. Just get started.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18herbert.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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For Ex-Prisoners, a Haven Away From the Streets

This year, the United States will release nearly three-quarters of a million people from prison, a record high.   Nationally, 2.3 million people are in prison in the United States, and 95 percent of them will, at some point, get out and go home.

Society has a strong interest in keeping them home — in helping them to become law-abiding citizens instead of falling back into their old ways and returning to prison.  But American programs for newly released prisoners echo the typical follies of our criminal justice system:  our politicians usually believe that voters only want the emotional satisfactions of meting out maximum punishment, even if these policies lead to even more crime.

The usual package granted to someone released from prison in New York state is $40, a bus ticket and the considerable stigma that follows an ex-offender.  Since prisoners are often held far away from their families and states charge astronomical rates for prison phone calls, prisoners often lose touch with their loved ones and may not have anyone to take them in when they get home.  They may arrive in their home cities with no plans, other than — worrisomely — those hatched with fellow prisoners.  They have little prospect for jobs or housing.  Since many don't get effective drug treatment in prison, they might still crave a fix, which costs money.  It is little wonder that some former prisoners fall back into crime within hours or days.

Returning prisoners need many things: stable housing, drug treatment, job training, G.E.D. (high school equivalency) classes, parenting lessons, anger management.  But even the handful of people who do worry about ex-offenders rarely mention what may be the most crucial need of all: a better class of friends.

Former prisoners go back to their old neighborhoods and meet up with their old gang, or new people of the only type they may be comfortable with — criminals.  But what people need is to stop hanging out with associates who tempt them with promises of easy money or drug-filled nights.  They need to start hanging out with people who think about the consequences of their actions, who value legitimate jobs, sobriety and family — people who go to their A.A. meetings and G.E.D. classes, who are trying to rebuild their lives.

How important are the right friends?  We know that people get into crime and gangs primarily because their friends do.  Hanging around with delinquent friends encourages young people to think of themselves as delinquents, and puts them in a world where criminal behavior is easy to engage in and brings social rewards.  We do not know as much about whether pro-social peer groups can turn people away from crime.  But it is reasonable to believe that the right peer group can help.

In West Harlem there is a large and beautiful Gothic building overlooking the Hudson River.  It is called the Fortune Academy, but it is known to all as the Castle.  It is owned by the Fortune Society, a group dedicated to helping returning prisoners succeed with starting new lives.  The Fortune Society helps about 4,000 newly released prisoners each year with job training and placement, drug treatment, classes in cooking and anger management and being a father, and G.E.D. studies.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times The Fortune Academy in West Harlem.

Most of the people who work at Fortune were once themselves drug addicted, homeless or imprisoned.  This is important.  “The clients can look at the staff and say, ‘a few years ago, that person was where I am,'” said Glenn E. Martin, Fortune's vice president of development and public affairs.  (He himself served six years in prison, and was released nine years ago.) The staff can also see past appearances:  “Some others may see a guy with his pants pulled down and his hat on, yelling, and say ‘he's not ready,' ” said Martin.  “But we'll talk to him.”  The credibility and understanding produced by having a staff of former offenders is important.  But about 300 of Fortune's clients each year get something more: a bed in the Castle, and the chance to start a law-abiding life in the company of other people trying to do the same.

The Castle provides solutions to several of the most important problems facing newly released prisoners.  One is housing.  Between 10 and 20 percent of people released from state and city prisons and jails have nowhere stable to go — they couch surf with friends or go into homeless shelters.  But a stable home is a prerequisite for all the other things needed for a productive life.  The Castle can be that home for a few nights or many months, until the person can find work and safe housing he or she can afford.

Anyone newly released from prison with nowhere else to go can apply to live in the Castle.  Open beds are filled by the first qualified applicant, but the Castle turns away at least 10 people for every one it accepts.  Prisoners throughout New York state apply — because the Fortune Society has physical offices in some jails and prisons, the parole bureaucracy refers them and because prisoners themselves spread the word.  “We get several thousand letters a year,” says JoAnne Page, the president and chief executive of the Fortune Society.  “We get referrals from people's mothers.”  The Castle has single rooms for residents who earn them; the rest have roommates.  It serves meals and has staff on duty around the clock.  It has a computer lab, laundry and a cafeteria.  Residents are required to go full time to counseling, services such as drug treatment or job placement, or to school.

But perhaps more important than housing, the Castle gives people a new group of friends to identify with.  Every Thursday night at 6 the Castle has a group meeting of all its residents.  At one recent meeting, people sat around an enormous table and talked about the successes of their week.  One woman talked about her job as a janitor at a shelter for women.  “It's a safe place, and clean — that's because of me,” she said with pride.   One man recounted a speech he attended by a political candidate.  Another said he opened a bank account for the first time in his life.  One woman was applying for jobs and wondered aloud how best to phrase the information that she was a felon.  JoAnne Page took the opportunity to deliver one of Fortune Society's key messages: You are not a felon.  You committed a felony and did your time, but that is not who you are .  One man announced that the Castle's chorus was rehearsing and was open to new members.  The residents applauded each other fervently.

Delancey Street, in San Francisco, is a very different community with the same purpose.   People come to live at the Delancey Street residential building for an average of four years.  Each resident is required to get at least a high school equivalency degree and learn several marketable job skills, such as furniture making, sales or accounting.  The organization is completely run by its residents, who teach each other — there is no paid staff at all.  Teaching others is part of the rehabilitation process for Delancey residents.   The residence is financed in part by private donations, but the majority of its financing comes from the businesses the residents run, such as restaurants, event planning, a corporate car service, a moving company and framing shop.  All money earned goes to the collective, which pays all its residents' expenses.

At both Fortune and Delancey, a person emerging from prison is surrounded by a community of people who support him, hold him accountable, teach him skills and model good behavior.  Many of the men and women in these programs come to think of themselves as productive members of society for the first time in their lives, and it may also be the first time they ever feel competent at anything besides lawbreaking.

The Delancey Street residence, which began in 1971, has never been formally evaluated.  But there is no question that is phenomenally successful.  It has graduated more than 14,000 people from prison into constructive lives.  Carol Kizziah, who manages Delancey's efforts to apply its lessons elsewhere, says that the organization estimates that 75 percent of its graduates go on to productive lives.  (For former prisoners who don't go to Delancey, only 25 to 40 percent avoid re-arrest.)   Since it costs taxpayers nothing, from a government's point of view it could very well be the most cost-effective social program ever devised.  The program has established similar Delancey Street communities in Los Angeles, New Mexico, North Carolina and upstate New York.   Outsiders have replicated the Delancey Street model in about five other places.

There is one possible caveat about the Castle's effectiveness:  most of the people I saw at the Castle were in their 30s or older.  Older people who get out of prison, by definition, are more likely than young ones to have served long sentences for serious offenses.  And the longer the sentence, the more disconnected and disoriented prisoners are likely to be upon release.  So they are important clients for the Castle. But they are also at an age where people are leaving crime on their own, finally ready to accept some responsibility and aware they are not immortal and want a family and a stable life. Crime is a young person's game. It may be true that many people at the Castle successfully turn around their lives.  The question is whether their age would help them to do so in any case.

There are two puzzles here.  Delancey Street is now celebrating its 40th anniversary.  One would think that by now there would be Delancey 2.0 models sprouting all over.  But there are not.  A related mystery concerns the idea that underlies both Delancey and the Castle: the importance of pro-social peers.  Our guts tell us they matter; we know the effect our friends can have on our behavior.  Peer pressure may be the single most important factor getting people into crime — surely it should be employed to get them out again.  Yet it is not.  Besides Delancey and the Castle, there is probably not a single government agency or citizen group working with former prisoners that lists “clean-living peers” alongside housing, job training and other items on its agenda for what former prisoners need to go straight.   These two communities of former prisoners are good projects, but they have failed to have a wider impact.   Saturday's column will look at why this is the case.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/for-ex-prisoners-a-haven-away-from-the-streets/?pagemode=print

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Indiana's Answer to Prison Costs

For states that are serious about trimming deficits, out-of-control prison costs are a good place to start cutting. The expenses of housing and caring for more than one million state prison inmates has quadrupled in the last decade from about $12 billion a year to more $52 billion a year. This, in turn, has squeezed budgets for essential programs like education.

Governors seeking wisdom on how to proceed could start by looking at what Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, is trying to accomplish in Indiana.

The centerpiece of Mr. Daniels's approach is a set of reforms governing sentencing and parole. Judges would be allowed to fit sentences to crimes and have the flexibility to impose shorter sentences for nonviolent offenses. A poorly structured parole system would be reorganized to focus on offenders who actually present a risk to public safety.

Addicts would be given drug treatment to try to make them less likely to be rearrested. And there would be incentives for towns to handle low-level offenders instead of sending them into more costly state prisons.

Mr. Daniels devoted the last year to building a wide political consensus behind these ideas, beginning with a study from the Council of State Governments Justice Center, a prison policy group that has helped several states revise their corrections strategies.

In partnership with the Pew Center on the States' Public Safety Performance Project, the council discovered that Indiana's prison count had grown by 41 percent between 2000 and 2009 — an increase three times that of neighboring states. It also found that the increase had been caused not by violent criminals but by drug addicts — who needed treatment, not jail — and by low-level, nonviolent criminals. Indiana, the study found, was punishing both groups much more severely than neighboring states.

Unless current policies were changed, the study said, the state prison population would rise by another 21 percent by 2017, forcing lawmakers to come up with an estimated $1.2 billion for new prisons. Indiana could cut its inmate count significantly and save almost all of that money if it invested a modest sum — about $28 million — in the kinds of changes that Mr. Daniels has now included in his reform package.

A legislative package containing these reforms has been introduced in the Indiana Legislature. If it passes, as it should, Indiana will show the nation what good things can happen when leaders apply good sense.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18tue2.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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The Insanity Defense, Post-Hinckley

As the country struggles to find meaning in the horrific Tucson shooting, another heated national debate over gun violence comes to mind: the furious reaction to the acquittal, by reason of insanity, of John Hinckley Jr., the man who tried to kill President Ronald Reagan.

Nearly 30 years later, Mr. Hinckley remains in a psychiatric ward, with permission in recent years to leave in his mother's custody for limited visits. After the acquittal, politicians across the country blamed the insanity defense for excusing a detestable and miserable young man from imprisonment. Vowing that it would boost public safety and ensure another Hinckley would not “get off,” the federal government and 38 states rewrote their laws, establishing a much more difficult standard of proof.

The most common test had been that a person could be found insane if the defendant “lacks substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.” Most of the new restrictions reduced the test to a simple question: Did the defendant not know what he or she was doing?

A generation later, we know this retrenchment was based on misconceptions, above all that the defense was commonly, and successfully, used. A study of eight states from 1976 to 1987 documented that the defense was employed in less than 1 percent of criminal cases and only a quarter of those defendants were acquitted by reason of insanity.

While the Supreme Court declared in 1983 that such an acquittal was certain proof of dangerousness, that was largely wrong as well. Half the pleas and 35 percent of the acquittals came in cases involving nonviolent offenses; 15 percent of the acquittees were accused of murder. As for insanity acquittees going free, it rarely happened. Nine of 10, whatever the offense, ended up in mental hospitals, some for much longer than they would have been imprisoned.

John Hinckley Jr., suicidal and haunted by violent stories from movies and novels, said he shot President Reagan to win the attention of the actress Jodie Foster and become famous. The prosecution and defense agreed that he was seriously mentally ill at the time of the shooting. The trial was about whether he was sick enough to be found insane.

Medicine defines illness, the law, responsibility. The fields long tried to resolve their differences scientifically. After the Hinckley verdict, politics undermined that quest.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18tue4.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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Calif. city considers DUI mug shots on Facebook

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Police in a city ranked top in the state for alcohol-related traffic fatalities might soon be trying a new tactic to keep drunken drivers off the road: Electronic shaming on Facebook.

In a contentious move that has raised the hackles of privacy advocates and been met with resistance from a police department fearful of alienating residents, a councilman in Huntington Beach wants police to begin posting the mug shots of everyone who is arrested more than once for driving while under the influence.

"If it takes shaming people to save lives, I am willing to do it," said Devin Dwyer, the councilman behind the proposal. "I'm hoping it prevents others from getting behind the wheel and getting inebriated."

Dwyer initially wanted the police department to post on Facebook photographs of everyone arrested for DUI in the bar-laden beach town just south of Los Angeles. He has watered down his proposal — now only repeat offenders would be featured on the virtual wall of shame — in hopes of winning support from the rest of the seven-member council, which is set to vote on the issue Tuesday.

Huntington Beach, a city of about 200,000 famed for its Surf City alias, an off-leash dog beach and a downtown packed with bars, is ranked top out of 56 California cities of similar size for the number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities. In 2009, 195 people were killed or injured.

Drunken driving laws are aggressively enforced, and in 2009, there were 1,687 DUI arrests.

"There is a saying: Come to Huntington Beach on vacation, leave on probation," said attorney Randall Bertz, who specializes in DUI cases.

Bertz, a former police officer who has been defending such cases for 23 years, said uploading DUI suspects' photos onto Facebook violates their right to privacy and would likely not be a deterrent to habitual drunken drivers.

"It will have a negative impact on relations with the community, the police department and city officials," he said. "What's next, will they have drunk drivers walk around with sandwich boards? Will it be public flogging?"

For its part, the Huntington Beach police department is pushing back against Dwyer's proposal. Police spokesman Lt. Russell Reinhart said that since launching its Facebook page in November, officers have found it to be a valuable way of getting information to the public and soliciting tips on tough cases.

A couple of DUI suspect mug shots have been posted, but they were from egregious cases where police thought the public could be at immediate risk from the suspect. Reinhart fears Facebook fans could be turned off by the routine public shaming of all repeat DUI offenders.

"We see no value in doing that," he said. "Law enforcement is not about public shaming."

Dwyer said he has received wide support from residents for his proposal, including from a woman whose husband and three children were killed in an alcohol-related crash. He decided to push his plan forward after the local newspaper had a change in editorial policy and ceased publishing arrest logs.

Connie Boardman, a Huntington Beach councilwoman who opposes Dwyer's idea, said posting the photos would have little effect on behavior.

"People who habitually drink and drive are alcoholics and are not going to be shamed by this," she said. "But their parents and their spouses would be mortified."

She added that children might be bullied if peers see their parents on a Facebook wall of shame.

"That is going to result in tremendous humiliation for a kid who has no hope of controlling his parent's behavior," she said.

Other police departments have already tried putting up a rogue's gallery of DUI arrestees, though some of these attempts have been short lived.

In Evesham Township, N.J., the 75-officer police force maintains an active Facebook page and initially posted every DUI arrest mug shot. Within four months, the county prosecutor told police to stop the practice because it was unclear whether it was allowed under rules about what information police can release.

"It wasn't our intention to shame people," police Chief Mike Barth said. "But it did cause a stir."

In March, the Honolulu police department abruptly stopped posting DUI mug shots on its website under a pilot project. The site had developed a significant following and spawned a Facebook fan page, but no reason was given why the project was cut short.

Many police agencies have set up Facebook accounts where they routinely disseminate suspect photographs, often for individuals wanted for serious crimes.

The Oconee County sheriff's office in Georgia maintains a Facebook page that includes a photograph of a suspected child molester.

Chief Deputy Lee Weems said typically, only photos of people who are convicted are posted on Facebook. A tabloid newspaper called "Bad and Busted" prints photos of all arrestees.

In California, nothing can prevent a police department from releasing photographs of people who've been arrested, and state law compels police agencies to make certain information available, including the full name and occupation of everyone arrested, along with a physical description.

Clare Pastore, a civil rights and poverty law professor at the University of Southern California, said she was troubled by the idea of publicizing photos of a suspect before they have been convicted.

"There's a little bit of a presumption of innocence problem," she said. "It's not really appropriate to shame someone before they are found guilty."

• http://www.facebook.com/HuntingtonBeachPolice

Kensington slaying suspect arrested

by Troy Graham, Sam Wood, and Robert Moran

Inquirer Staff Writers

At 10 a.m. Monday, a state police DNA database got a hit identifying the so-called Kensington strangler, police said, as 22-year-old Antonio Rodriguez, sparking a massive manhunt across the city.

By 6:30 p.m., authorities had tracked down and arrested Rodriguez, suspected of raping and strangling three women since November. He was being held on outstanding bench warrants.

Detectives planned Monday night to take another DNA sample, which they expected to conclusively link him to the killings that have gripped the city.

"To the people in the Kensington area, they can rest easy," said Homicide Capt. James Clark. "We believe we have this killer off the street."

Rodriguez, a convicted felon, was required to submit his DNA when he was released from jail this summer. It had been waiting to be uploaded into the state police database since Oct. 25, because of a backlog that averages about eight weeks.

Philadelphia police submitted DNA taken from the crime scenes on Nov. 23. Had his DNA been in the system then, he might have been identified about three weeks before the final victim was killed.

Clark and Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey declined to comment Monday evening on the backlog, a long-standing problem that plagues police departments across the nation.

"Pennsylvania state police recognize the need to devote additional resources," Maj. Kenneth F. Hill, director of the state Bureau of Forensic Services, said in a statement, "and used all available means to address the issue."

Rodriguez was being held for violating probation. Further charges await the results of the second DNA test. Lab technicians at the department's Forensic Science Bureau were waiting Monday night to begin the testing.

Mayor Nutter on Monday night praised the work of investigators and said he was optimistic that Rodriguez was the strangler.

"Somewhere in the course of the next 24 hours, I'll also have that greater sense of comfort, knowing that we absolutely, positively, 100 percent have the person off the streets," he said. "We never stopped looking for him. There was never a break in the action."

There was little information available Monday night on Rodriguez, whose family lives in North Philadelphia, close to the western edge of Kensington. Several of his relatives were taken to the Homicide Unit to be interviewed Monday night, and a man at the family home who said he was Rodriguez's brother declined to comment.

Amanda Rios, 22, grew up in the neighborhood and said she had known Rodriguez since he was a little boy.

"That is so crazy," she said when she learned that her neighbor was a suspected serial killer. "I walk these streets every single day."

Family and friends of the victims, meanwhile, cheered the arrest.

"It doesn't bring my daughter back, but it has really been difficult to have this bastard walking around free knowing what he's done," said Joe Goldberg, father of the first victim, Elaine Goldberg. "He'll get his now."

Elaine Goldberg, a 21-year-old nursing student, was found dead in a lot on Nov. 3. The second victim, 35-year-old Nicole Piacentini, was found at an abandoned building 10 days later. The final victim, Casey Mahoney, 27, was discovered Dec. 15 in the woods along a set of train tracks.

None of the victims was from Kensington, a neighborhood teeming with drugs and prostitution, but all three had struggled with addiction. The victims all were sexually assaulted and strangled.

Several other women came forward after the first deaths to say they had been attacked in a similar fashion, but no other attacks have been linked to Rodriguez.

"I'm just so glad they caught him before he could hurt anybody else," said Jodie Melodia, a friend of Mahoney's. "It was horrible losing Casey in such a traumatic way and not knowing if he would hurt someone else. I wouldn't want anyone to feel the hurt that way."

The deaths brought a swarm of police - and publicity - to Kensington. A task force of Homicide, Special Victims, and other officers worked the streets, arresting more than 120 people on prostitution charges and swabbing more than 150 people for DNA, looking for a match.

Fliers were printed and distributed throughout the neighborhood, and $37,000 in reward money was offered for information. The Guardian Angels showed up to patrol the neighborhood.

Sandy Salzman, executive director of the New Kensington Community Development Corp., called the arrest "an amazing relief" for the neighborhood.

"People wouldn't walk around at night, and some of the businesses were starting to hurt," she said. "During the day, most people felt safe, and once it got dark, people didn't want to be out."

Rodriguez was released on probation from the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility on Aug. 29 after being jailed for nearly three months on a felony drug charge, sources said. Two bench warrants subsequently were issued after Rodriguez failed to comply with the terms of his probation.

As a convicted felon, his DNA was collected when he was released from jail. The state police database received his DNA on Oct. 25, but it wasn't uploaded until Jan. 10.

Clark said Rodriguez was believed to be homeless, hanging around Kensington and staying in vacant buildings.

He was arrested at a home in the 3300 block of Mutter Street in North Philadelphia around 6:30 p.m. by a team of detectives and U.S. marshals.

Clark said the Homicide Unit received an anonymous tip that Rodriguez was at that address shortly after his name and picture were released to the public Monday evening. He was arrested in the kitchen without incident.

Goldberg's family was heartened that the arrest came right before a benefit and "celebration of life" that Elaine Goldberg's friends have planned for Saturday. The money raised will be used to pay down her school loans, for which her father is now responsible.

"Every parent signs," said Joe Goldberg. "Who expects the student to be murdered?"

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/front_page/20110118_Kensington_slaying_suspect_arrested_1.html

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New faces of Detroit rapist emerge

by GINA DAMRON

Detroit Free Press Staff Writer

Three faces, each unique, all the possible face of a suspected serial rapist preying on women in Detroit.

The Detroit Police Department released two new composite sketches Monday of the suspect, based on information from the victims.

Each shows a man with a dark complexion and facial hair and lists the man as either 5-foot-8 or 5-foot-9, but there are slight differences in features, such as the nose and shape of the face. One portrays a man in a black skullcap, and another shows a man with facial blemishes.

And, maybe most importantly, police announced that forensic evidence that could help eliminate or confirm suspects is being tested.

"We don't want people to be gripped by fear," Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. said. "We are not going to let this monster cripple us."

Detroit police arrest 9 as search for rape suspect continues

Eight attacks, dozens of tips, nine men arrested on various charges, numerous investigators and citizens on patrol.

One suspected serial rapist -- still at large.

Detroit police said Monday that they are still searching for a man who has raped seven women and attempted to rape another in northeast Detroit since Jan. 1.

"We want to stop this madness, as soon as possible," Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. said at a news conference.

Last week, the Free Press published information on locations where the attacks reportedly occurred, which is information that was not initially made available by police officials. At the news conference, the department released the locations, which include areas near Gratiot and 7 Mile, near I-94 on Cadieux and Beaconsfield and further west along 7 Mile on Conant and Charleston.

The victims have all been black women ranging in age from 17 to 33. Seven are from Detroit; one is from Clinton Township, Godbee said.

The women were attacked between 7:40 p.m. and 6:15 a.m. and were alone in the vicinity of bus stops, either waiting at, walking to or walking away from a stop, Godbee said. One woman was attacked after the man bumped her vehicle with his and she got out.

An official familiar with the investigation told the Free Press last week that the man is believed to be driving a dark car, possibly a Grand Am.

As a result of the investigation, Godbee said, nine men, ages 20 to 38, have been arrested on various offenses, including outstanding warrants and being parole absconders. He said the forensic testing may help eliminate or confirm suspects. Kimberly Jackson, president of the community relations council in the police department's Northeastern District, said she is glad to have the exact locations of the attacks.

"If you have to go to those areas, you're alert," she said. "You need to be aware of where this gentleman is going."

But police have said they are concerned with releasing too much information that could hinder their investigation.

It's a delicate balance between informing the public and finding a suspect, some experts say.

Dennis Jay Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a former police officer, said releasing too much information could result in copycats, or cause suspects to change their methods or location. But, he said, serial criminals often choose locations for a reason, so being driven out could make them easier to catch.

"For police," Kenney said, "it's a difficult balancing act."

Of the eight assaults, only two -- the Jan. 4 and Jan. 6 attacks -- were included on daily crime summaries now being released by the Detroit Police Department. The Jan. 6 incident was removed from the summary after investigators notified the department's public relations office that a series of rapes could be connected, said spokeswoman Sgt. Eren Stephens.

"We just have to be careful what we put out there," she said. The department is "not trying to deny the citizens' right to know," she said, emphasizing that the overall goal of the department is to catch the suspect.

Beth Morrison, president and CEO of HAVEN, a Pontiac-based shelter and counseling center, who said she was on a task force in another state when a serial rapist was at large, said she understands why some information on a rapist -- for example, a calling card -- is not released by police. But knowing the locations of attacks could be useful in helping witnesses "put two and two together," she said.

Also Monday, Detroit police announced that forensic evidence is being tested that could help confirm or eliminate suspects.

"The science is going to be critical from this point forward," Godbee said.

In addition, police released two new composite sketches of the man.

Raphael B. Johnson, co-founder of the citizens' group Detroit 300, said he was contacted by some of the witnesses, who said the original composite sketch didn't closely resemble their attacker. The group has been patrolling neighborhoods near where the attacks took place and plans to go back out again tonight.

"Eight young people's lives have been changed forever," Johnson said, adding that the group is determined. "We are going to find him."

So far, police have investigated 71 tips called in by citizens, Godbee said. There were 48 tips called into Crime Stoppers of Michigan, said John Broad, president of the organization.

"If women cannot walk around and feel safe," Broad said, "then shame on us."

Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 800-773-2587 ( 800-SPEAK-UP or police at 313-596-1950 . Katherine Hull, a spokeswoman for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, or RAINN, said women can reduce the risk they might be attacked by being aware of their surroundings, staying alert, employing the buddy system and making sure to have a cell phone on hand in case of an emergency.

If women do become a victim of sexual assault, Hull said it is important to let them know it is not their fault and to trust their instincts when in the situation. Sometimes, she said, fighting back can incite more violence, but for one woman attacked by the suspected rapist in Detroit, fighting back worked.

Hull said that if a woman is raped, she should immediately call 911 to share any details she can recall and should remember the power of DNA evidence. Victims should wait before showering, brushing their teeth or changing their clothing because evidence can be found everywhere, even under fingernails.

"Your body," Hull said, "is really the crime scene in that instance."

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110118/NEWS01/101180403/New-faces-of-Detroit-rapist-emerge&template=fullarticle

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