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From the Los Angeles Times

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Gunfire shatters a new sense of calm

As Los Angeles grows safer, high-profile shootings can reinforce long-held perceptions of danger.

by Cathleen Decker, Los Angeles Times

January 23, 2011

Last week started off with a heady breeze of optimism in a place where often none has been felt. In Compton, according to Tuesday's Times, residents are now able to enjoy the things people in other places take for granted, because much of the gunfire is gone.

They can sit on their front porches. They can walk their kids to school. They can push their grandbabies on the swings at the neighborhood park, without the risk that once accompanied those everyday pleasures.

Crime in Compton, the paper noted, is way down from last year — and far, far removed from the bloody 1990s. That is of a piece with the rest of the county.

On Monday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department announced that the homicide rate in regions it patrols was lower last year than any time since 1965, accounting for changes in population. The Los Angeles Police Department had earlier released tallies that showed that 2010 brought the lowest number of homicides since 1967, when the city was almost a third smaller.

"You just don't have the fear there used to be before," one Compton resident told The Times for the article on Tuesday's front page.

Hours after that was published, and a few miles away, the fear roared back.

Last week's spasm of violence started at Gardena High School, where a 17-year-old student carried a loaded Beretta to school in his backpack. It accidentally discharged, and a round went through one student's neck and slammed into another's skull. Two students — two children — were rushed to the hospital. Another was captured, reportedly apologetic. Later in the week, he was charged with two felonies: possessing a gun at a school and discharging it. Prosecutors hope to try him as an adult.

With the national trauma of the Tucson rampage still fresh, the Gardena shooting zoomed into prominence on local media outlets and beyond. Students were caught in their classrooms, their frantic parents unable to reach them. SWAT teams walked the halls of the school and helicopters throbbed above.

The communal blood pressure had barely calmed before Wednesday brought the lockdown of 9,000 students in the Woodland Hills area after a gunman shot a school police officer near El Camino Real High School. Back came the police and the news coverage and the awful wait for parents and children to be reunited.

So the week was a conflict between head and heart. It was thrilling, particularly for those who lived through more violent years, to hear again that crime is down. And yet statistics vanish in the face of fear.

On the one hand, a Times analysis shows that only two homicides have occurred within a mile of Gardena High since 2007 and little violent crime takes place in the Woodland Hills area that was locked down. On the other, one police officer and two children were wounded, one of the students critically.

The timing seemed particularly painful because of the good news, as if the week's events served to perpetuate an image of Southern California that, by the numbers, should have disappeared long ago.

There are two reactions to this sort of thing, according to Laura Abrams, a UCLA associate professor of social welfare. Short-term, parents particularly can grow fearful. Longer-term, such incidents can force shifts in public policy that may — or may not — bring meaningful improvement.

The intense media focus can also heighten fear of young men like the Gardena student with the gun. News reports said he was on probation for a misdemeanor battery charge.

But his friends told The Times that the young man, a special education student, had taken the gun to school for his own protection, because he feared for his safety on his bus ride home.

"We don't know anything about his community circumstances, or whether he himself was bullied," Abrams said. "Often special ed students are targeted. The media tends to portray young men of color in part as repeat violent offenders but rarely projects the fuller circumstances."

Studies have shown that worry about crime can persist long after the rates actually drop, Abrams said, in part because of media focus.

"The everyday juvenile shooting, gang fighting, the things that Southern Californians always hear about and always worry about, I would doubt that people's perceptions have changed that much" despite the drop in actual crime, she said. "Part of that is because we continue to see it."

Those negative perceptions tend to persist more strongly the farther one is from high-crime areas, she said; those closest are more aware of how things have improved. They are like the people of Compton, sitting on their front porches, or going to the park, or walking their kids to school and hoping they don't collide with bullets.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-theweek-20110123,0,4873871,print.story

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Servant or snoop in the parking garage?

To help absent-minded shoppers searching for 'lost' automobiles, Santa Monica Place installs the nation's first camera-based 'Find Your Car' system. Despite a few bugs, the technology is gaining fans — but there are privacy concerns.

by Martha Groves, Los Angeles Times

January 23, 2011

Anyone who has ever tramped through a dim, Escher-esque parking garage in search of a "lost" automobile might welcome an abracadabra technology that could help locate it.

But what if that magic involved an array of 24/7 surveillance cameras and was also available to police and auto repossessers? What if it could be tapped by jilted lovers, or that angry guy you accidentally cut off in traffic? Would the convenience be worth the loss of privacy?

Those are some of the questions civil libertarians and others are asking as technology capable of spying on motorists and pedestrians is converted to widespread commercial use.

Santa Monica Place recently unveiled the nation's first camera-based "Find Your Car" system. Shoppers who have lost track of their vehicle amid a maze of concrete ramps and angled stripes can simply punch their license plate number into a kiosk touch screen, which then displays a photo of the car and its location.

In Sacramento, the Police Department and Arden Fair Mall partnered to install license plate readers on mall security vehicles. The vehicles roam parking lots and garages in search of "hot list" vehicles provided by the state Department of Justice. If a car with a "hot" plate is spotted, mall security guards view closed-circuit TV footage to locate the vehicle's driver and alert police.

To date, the scans have helped police recover 44 stolen vehicles and arrest 38 individuals, according to mall security manager Steve Reed.

Both shopping centers are owned by the U.S. mall giant Macerich Co., which extols the surveillance systems' ability to locate lost and stolen cars. However, some wonder whether the convenience of such systems justifies their intrusive nature.

Under U.S. law, the entity taking the video owns it and can largely use or share it however it likes as long as the video is taken in public. There is, however, a difference between being allowed to share and being required to share. Police do have the power to compel the owner of the video to share it, usually through a subpoena.

"What should give people pause is that this technology is advancing upon us without anyone having chosen it," said Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, which studies national security issues. "We have not decided as a society or as individuals that we want this convenience. It is being thrust upon us."

The car finder is just one of many license plate imaging and facial-recognition devices that have proliferated in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, popping up in airports, border crossing stations, tollways and police cruisers.

Developed by New York-based Park Assist, the Santa Monica Place system goes beyond programs found at the Grove and Westfield Century City shopping centers, where electronic billboards alert shoppers to packed parking aisles and shepherd them to vacant spaces.

In addition to featuring red and green lights and signs showing the number of available spaces by level, Park Assist's system offers "Find Your Car" kiosks that allow drivers to key in their plate number — or just the first few characters — on a screen to bring up a photo of a vehicle and a description of its location.

The system, which uses a network of cameras and a central computer, "has proven so far to be a big assist," said Doug Roscoe, senior manager of Santa Monica Place. "We don't have close to as many direct assists." In mall security parlance, "direct assists" refer to occasions when a security person drives a frantic shopper around in an electric cart to find a vehicle.

Macerich paid to install the system in the center's two city-owned parking garages, which have a total of 2,000 spaces. At Arden Fair Mall, the license plate scanning technology was covered by $100,000 in grants from the federal Department of Homeland Security, Reed said.

Across the country, more businesses and government agencies are using technology to collect personal information on consumers. Privacy concerns arise if the information is saved for a long time and shared, experts say.

"What if a divorce attorney came and asked who was in the mall? Or someone looking to repossess vehicles for past nonpayment?" said Chris Calabrese, the American Civil Liberties Union's legislative counsel in Washington. "The unintended consequences can be huge."

Park Assist said its technology is indeed an effective tool for high-risk sites such as government buildings and airports. Although the Santa Monica Place information is for internal use, Roscoe said the mall would share it if the Santa Monica Police Department ever asked.

Like any new technology, the system is bound to have a few bugs — both technical and human.

At Santa Monica Place recently, the "Find Your Car" system did not recognize the license plate numbers of some cars parked near the main-floor kiosk. Also, one driver who had recently purchased her car and did not yet have plates was out of luck.

There was also another weakness in the system for those who were searching for a lost car.

Andrea Minnich of San Pedro approached a kiosk but then realized she had forgotten more than where she parked.

"It might help if I knew my license plate offhand, but I don't," she said.

To Holly DiFonzo, 30, of Chatsworth, the system seemed "pretty cool," although she acknowledged a bit of Big Brother unease. "If I had an ex-boyfriend who I didn't want to find me, that could be a concern," she said.

DiFonzo noted that there were alternatives to the mall's car finder, such as "find my car apps" on smart phones.

The system can help alleviate "the most frustrating aspect of shopping," said Jeff Becker, a vice president with Amano McGann, a Minneapolis company that develops custom software for parking. Amano McGann first saw the Park Assist technology at a parking conference in Amsterdam; last March it became the exclusive distributor of the new system in the United States.

According to a survey by National Car Parks Ltd., Britain's largest parking lot operator, 44% of drivers had at some point forgotten where they parked.

System developers say consumers are more likely to return to shopping centers if they don't have to worry about parking hassles. Park Assist says its systems typically lead to a 3% to 5% increase in customer visits.

"We've seen fairly overwhelming demand globally," said Richard Joffe, co-founder and co-chief executive of Park Assist. He said furniture seller Ikea plans to roll out the system in Europe, beginning with stores in the Netherlands. In Australia, customers include shopping malls and the Brisbane Airport.

Park Assist has developed even newer technology with Amano McGann to better balance customer service with privacy concerns. With that system, which Joffe said would be installed in a few months at a major shopping mall a few miles from Santa Monica, a customer will be able to feed a parking stub into a machine that will then bring up the vehicle's location.

For Minnich, the shopper who didn't know her license plate number, that upgrade might be helpful. As she hunted for her car at Santa Monica Place, privacy meant little.

"If I was somebody famous and worried about my personal security, I would be concerned," she said. "Since I'm basically nobody, I'm not too concerned."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-santa-monica-parking-20110123,0,2075482,print.story

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Gun laws were tougher in old Tombstone

No need to check your firearm today in the Arizona town famed for the gunfight at the OK Corral.

by Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times

January 23, 2011

Reporting from Tombstone, Ariz.

A billboard just outside this Old West town promises "Gunfights Daily!" and tourists line up each afternoon to watch costumed cowboys and lawmen reenact the bloody gunfight at the OK Corral with blazing six-shooters.

But as with much of the Wild West, myth has replaced history. The 1881 shootout took place in a narrow alley, not at the corral. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday weren't seen as heroic until later; they were initially charged with murder.

And one fact is usually ignored: Back then, Tombstone had far stricter gun control than it does today. In fact, the American West's most infamous gun battle erupted when the marshal tried to enforce a local ordinance that barred carrying firearms in public. A judge had fined one of the victims $25 earlier that day for packing a pistol.

"You could wear your gun into town, but you had to check it at the sheriff's office or the Grand Hotel, and you couldn't pick it up again until you were leaving town," said Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of True West Magazine, which celebrates the Old West. "It was an effort to control the violence."

A national debate over gun control has flared since a gunman killed six people and wounded 13 others, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, two weeks ago in Tucson. The suspect, Jared Lee Loughner, is accused of firing 31 shots from a Glock semiautomatic pistol with a high-capacity ammunition magazine.

Hours after the rampage, Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik appeared to partly blame Arizona's lax gun laws for the violence, saying he opposed "letting everybody in the state carry weapons under any circumstances that they want, and that's almost where we are."

"I think we're the Tombstone of the United States of America," he declared.

Dupnik's dig didn't go down well here.

Deep in the desert southeast of Tucson, Tombstone is tucked in a sere landscape of gullies and gulches, sagebrush and sorrel. About 1,500 people call it home, though the population swells each day as tourists clomp down wooden sidewalks, munch buffalo burgers and shop for cowboy kitsch.

Dupnik has "bank robberies and murders every week up there," fired back Ben Traywick, 83, a Tombstone historian who keeps a pistol on his desk and a shotgun nearby. "And he's bad-mouthing us? If you wanted to commit a crime, would you go to a town where everyone carries a gun? We have no crime."

But that's another Tombstone myth.

Local crime is low by big-city standards. But given the size of its population, with two rapes and 10 assaults in 2009, the last year for which figures are available, the town's violent-crime rate was higher than the state's average on a statistical basis. Similarly, with 88 crimes total, the town's crime index per 100,000 was higher than the national average, 475.5 compared with 319.2.

Arizona's gun laws are among the most lenient in the nation. Under legislation passed last year, guns are permitted almost everywhere in the state except doctors' offices and some businesses. It is one of three states, along with Alaska and Vermont, that allow people 21 or older to carry concealed weapons without a permit. Concealed guns may be carried into bars as long as the gun owner isn't drinking, and guns are permitted on school grounds as long as the weapon is unloaded and the owner remains in a vehicle.

Any law-abiding citizen 18 or older may buy or possess a rifle or shotgun. To buy a handgun, federal law requires a minimum age of 21. Firearms may be sold 14 hours a day, seven days a week, except Christmas.

Arizona's love of guns is rooted in its rugged rural history and enshrined in the state's constitution, drafted in 1910. "The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself or the state shall not be impaired," it reads. The state celebrates its independent spirit and a culture of individual rights and distrust of government.

Given its lurid past, Tombstone may not be a typical community. But it provides vivid evidence of what state law allows in practice.

"In this town, pretty much everyone carries a gun," said John Wiest, 65, a storekeeper who patted a Ruger semiautomatic pistol on his side.

"I carry it into the bank when I go in to make a deposit each morning," said Dave Ericson, 60, a California native who moved here last year and wears a working reproduction of an 1873 Colt Peacemaker in a hand-tooled holster on his hip. "No one even looks up."

A few shops and restaurants in the historic district, including Big Nose Kate's Saloon, remain true to the Old West gun ordinances that were common on the frontier and have posted "No Weapons Allowed" on their doors. A block away, the OK Corral gunfight site similarly bars anyone from bringing a real gun to the fake gunfight.

Still, many here view the idea of gun control — even restricting sales of the extended-ammunition magazine used in the Tucson shootings — as little better than cattle-rustling.

"Once you take something away, it's just a foot in the door," said G.T. Amell, 64, who retired here from North Carolina and who wore a leather-fringe jacket and a handlebar mustache. The Tucson killer, he said, "is just one nut in 310 million people. It's just going to happen."

Out on Boot Hill, where rocky graves still mark the remains of the three men killed in the 1881 shootout, as well as others who were shot, stabbed, hanged and, in one case, "taken from the county jail and lynched," Janet Presser, a 47-year-old Nevada visitor, was also skeptical of curbing gun sales.

"My view is any kind of rule limiting guns only limits honest people from getting weapons," she said, snapping photos of Tombstone's tombstones.

In its heyday, Tombstone was a rough-and-tumble silver mining town with more than its share of saloons, gambling dens and prostitutes, then known euphemistically as "soiled doves." But so were lots of other Old West settlements.

So what made it famous? On Oct. 26, 1881, the three Earp brothers and Doc Holliday faced off against four supposed desperadoes in a 15-foot-wide alley between two buildings a block from the OK Corral. "We have come to disarm you," warned Virgil Earp, the marshal, seeking to enforce the town gun ordinance. It was never clear who fired first, but when the dust cleared, three of the cowboys lay dead and their leader, Ike Clanton, had run away.

The gunfight was little known until the 1920s, when a pulp novelist dubbed it the "Gunfight at the OK Corral" and Hollywood turned it into a symbol of the Wild West. That too was a kind of myth.

"Believe it or not, Tombstone had one of the few stand-up fights where men squared off and just shot it out," said Marshall Trimble, Arizona's state historian. "That kind of thing was really rare. Also, it was named Tombstone. If they had fought it out in Bisbee or Benson, we might never have heard of it."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-tombstone-20110123,0,7456407,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Two Weeks After Rampage in Tucson, Survivors Struggle With ‘What If?'

TUCSON — What if he had not had that second cup of coffee? What if he had not asked the cashier about the two-for-one special on cigarettes? Maybe he would have been there a minute, or just 30 seconds, earlier. Maybe that would have been enough.

Joseph Zamudio was like any of the other witnesses to the Jan. 8 shooting rampage here — terrified, bewildered, furious. But he had a gun with him that day, when a young man opened fire, killing six people and wounding 13, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

So now Mr. Zamudio wakes up at night breathless, unable to fall back to sleep, torturing himself about whether he might have done more that morning to stop the gunman.

As victims and witnesses in the shootings replay the day in their minds, some — like Mr. Zamudio, who was there to buy cigarettes and ended up helping restrain the gunman — ask themselves what they could have, maybe should have, done differently.

What if Ms. Giffords's aides had requested security? What if the bystanders had been quicker to tackle Jared L. Loughner, the 22-year-old accused in the shootings? What if they had just gone somewhere else that day? Why did they live when others, standing just inches away, had died?

Psychologists have a term for it: “survivor's guilt.”

“They have to call it something,” said Mr. Zamudio, who has been seeing a counselor regularly since the shooting. He finds that talking helps.

So does Suzi Hileman, who days after the shooting awoke in her hospital bed shouting: “Christina! Christina!”

That Saturday morning, Ms. Hileman picked up Christina-Taylor Green, her 9-year-old neighbor, and promised the girl's mother that they would return in three or four hours.

Ms. Hileman, 59, had simply wanted to take Christina to meet their congresswoman. They would make a day of it — going for lunch and a manicure after the “Congress on Your Corner” event outside a local Safeway. Instead, a gunman opened fire, killing Christina and wounding Ms. Hileman.

“I never got to bring Christina home,” Ms. Hileman said. By now, her voice is almost matter-of-fact. But her sadness is betrayed by the long pauses she takes, the way she buries her face in a throw pillow when the tears start to fall.

The guilt comes in waves. It was there in the hospital. It still lurks, threatening to return at any moment. When someone asks about it, she calls her husband over to hold her hand as she answers.

For Ms. Hileman, the rawness of the guilt has worn off, along with her pain medication. As she sat on her couch last week, the evening after returning home from the hospital, she raked her hands through her cropped salt-and-pepper hair and repeated the same thing she had said to herself for days and days.

It almost sounds like an affirmation: “I am a woman who took a little girl to the market,” Ms. Hileman said.

It is the ordinariness that confounds her. “I don't feel guilty about that,” she continued. “I can feel bad about what happened, but I can't feel bad about being there. What happened had nothing to do with Christina and me and why we were there.”

Survivor's guilt is intensely complicated and personal. Randy Gardner, who was shot in the foot that morning, wonders if he could have done more, somehow, rather than running to protect himself. Ronald Barber, who leads Ms. Giffords's district office, has asked himself countless times why he survived while two of his friends, standing on either side of him, did not.

Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, a professor and the chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, said that this sort of traumatic experience inevitably changes people, creating “soul-searching moments.”

“None of the people that were there will ever be the same,” Dr. Lieberman said. “The question is how they will handle this. Will they grow and use this as a positive psychological adaptation? Or will it gnaw at them and be a memory that gives them emotional distress?”

Perhaps nobody asks himself more questions than Mr. Zamudio, 24, who arrived at the Safeway parking lot just as the shooting stopped, his gun tucked inside his jacket.

He did not use it, did not even pull it from his pocket. He had been in Walgreens, buying Camel cigarettes and asking about the two-for-one special. By the time he ran to the Safeway, the shooting was over. People were on the ground, already dead, or close to it. Now, the weight of those 30 seconds can be crushing.

“Maybe he could have only got through half his clip if I had gotten there in time,” Mr. Zamudio said, his voice flat and eyes distant. “I shouldn't have been there buying cigarettes. I should have been there to shoot him.”

Ms. Hileman, a former social worker, says asking “What if?” is a waste of energy. But she knows that the question could come racing into her mind at any second. She has not spent much time alone since the shooting; she has been constantly surrounded by her closest friends, her daughter and her husband.

So Ms. Hileman is dealing with her feelings the best way she knows — she is talking to anyone who will listen. (“I'll be talking in my grave,” she told a visitor.) For years, she worked in hospitals and rehabilitation centers, helping others cope with tragedy.

When Ms. Hileman was still in the hospital, after being shot three times and shattering her hip when the bullets knocked her down, she said the biggest challenge to her recovery would be getting past the guilt.

But in many ways, she is among the most sympathetic characters in the aftermath of the shooting. She is the woman any mother can identify with. She said she was “overwhelmed by the outpouring of love” from friends, neighbors, even strangers.

With her adult children hundreds of miles away and no grandchildren, Ms. Hileman has taken several youngsters in the neighborhood under her wing. With Christina, she bonded over games of pickup sticks. And she saw herself in the child.

“She was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead,” Ms. Hileman said. “We were definitely a couple of partners in crime.”

Now, Ms. Hileman said, “I'm just really, really sad. I lost a friend. My girlfriend died 10 days ago. How would you feel?”

Several parents in the neighborhood have already volunteered to take their children to visit Ms. Hileman, lest she get bored or worry that she is no longer trusted. The Hilemans have already reconnected with Christina's parents, John and Roxanna Green.

They cried together. They promised one another to seek professional help. And they said they would remain in frequent touch. When Mr. Green drove by with his son the other day, Ms. Hileman vowed that there would be more backyard water gun fights.

In a certain sense, Ms. Hileman sees herself, along with Ms. Giffords, as the third corner of a triangle — she wanted Christina to know that she, too, could become the kind of woman who emanated intelligence and pizazz.

“Christina and I were doing exactly what we wanted to do,” Ms. Hileman said. “We weren't dragging somebody to the movies. We were happy. Some idiot decided to rain on my parade.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/us/23survivors.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Squalid Abortion Clinic Escaped State Oversight

PHILADELPHIA — For years, state health officials missed some unsettling patterns at the three-story brick abortion clinic on Lancaster Avenue.

It was always open late, way past the time the pizza place next door closed at midnight. The women who emerged from it — often poor blacks and Hispanics — appeared dazed and in pain, and sometimes left in ambulances. The doctor who ran the clinic, Kermit Gosnell, had been sued at least 15 times for malpractice. Two women died while under his care.

But the dangerous practices went unnoticed, except by the women who experienced them. They were discovered entirely by accident, during a prescription drug raid by federal agents last February.

The clinic — now closed, with dead plants in its windows and old mail on its front desk — stands as a grim reminder of how degrading it was for the women who went there and how long state officials ignored their complaints.

On Wednesday, the Philadelphia district attorney, Seth Williams, indicted Dr. Gosnell on eight counts of murder in the deaths of seven infants and a Bhutanese refugee who died after a late-term abortion in 2009.

A grand jury report issued on the same day offered its own theory on why so little happened for so long.

“We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color,” the report said, “and because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.”

Kevin Harley, a spokesman for Gov. Tom Corbett, said Friday that the governor “was appalled at the inaction on the part of the Health Department and the Department of State,” the two agencies that were responsible for overseeing the clinic.

Mr. Corbett has ordered an investigation into what happened, Mr. Harley said, and was awaiting recommendations. He said he did not know whether any of the officials named in the report would be fired.

It was raw anxiety that propelled Sherry Thomas to Dr. Gosnell's clinic in the summer of 1999. She was 38, she already had three children, and with her partner working as a machinist, she knew they could not afford the fourth child she was pregnant with. She left the problem alone for a while, fretting, and then decided to have an abortion. She was five months pregnant by the time she had saved enough to afford it.

She chose Dr. Gosnell's clinic because that was where women she knew went. But when she was led into a waiting room, she started having second thoughts.

“It was like walking into a nightmare,” she said. “Everyone was sedated, no one was making sense. People were slumped over and waiting in line like they were going into a soup kitchen.”

The clinic was smelly, in part from a dirty turtle tank in the lobby, but also from generally squalid conditions. The grand jury report said the clinic had blood on the floor, a stench of urine in the air and cat feces on the stairs when agents raided it.

“Semiconscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets,” the report said.

Confusion was a standard reaction to the conditions, women said in interviews last week, but many of the patients were young and lacked confidence and simply sat in silence.

“It was the first time for me, and I didn't know if that's how women usually are,” said a young woman who had an abortion at the clinic in 1999 shortly after graduating from college.

The clinic had as little regard for the patients' dignity as it had for their safety. The doctor would arrive late, often after 8 p.m., leaving the untrained staff, including Dr. Gosnell's wife, Pearl, a cosmetologist, to sedate the women and administer labor-inducing drugs, the report said.

If labor began, the woman was asked to sit on a toilet, and the fetus would drop. It would be fished out later so as not to clog the plumbing, the report said. The remains of 45 fetuses were found at the clinic during the raid, according to the report. Some were stored in the staff's refrigerator.

Ms. Thomas remembers waking up, soaked in her own blood and feeling scared. People were moving around her, trying to put her in an ambulance. Her uterus had been punctured. She was rushed to the hospital, where she was given a partial hysterectomy.

“When I woke up I thought, ‘I might die today,' ” Ms. Thomas said. Dr. Gosnell offered her $500, she said, possibly in an effort to avert a lawsuit. She had paid $800 for the abortion.

Complaints against Dr. Gosnell date back to 1983, according to the grand jury report, but none moved state regulators to action. Some malpractice suits produced settlements that were paid by Dr. Gosnell's insurance company, including nearly $1 million paid to the family of Semika Shaw, a 22-year-old mother of two who died from an infection in 2002 after an abortion at the clinic.

The report details a sweeping pattern of negligence, with no inspector stepping foot inside the clinic for more than 16 years. Even the death of Karnamaya Mongar, a Bhutanese refugee who died after a procedure in 2009, was ignored.

Janice Staloski, a Health Department official, declined to investigate the death, saying the department had no authority to do so, the report said. The department's chief counsel, Christine Dutton, defended the agency's actions to the grand jury, stating bluntly, “People die.”

Ms. Thomas tries to forget what happened. She felt helpless and disposable in Dr. Gosnell's clinic, and she wants him to feel the same. She recalls him joking with her when she lay down on the operating table. “You'll be fine,” he told her. “This is just like a walk in the park.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/us/23doctor.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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OPINION

Legacy of a Fence

I fell in love with Janet Napolitano before I ever met her, back in 2005, when she was governor of Arizona and had this to say about the proposal in Washington to build a fence along the Mexican border:

“You show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder.”

You don't hear that kind of blunt-spoken common sense from public officials very often, and we didn't hear much more of it from Janet Napolitano once she became President Obama 's secretary of homeland security, in charge of the very same fence.

Eventually, the actual fence ground to a halt at something short of 700 miles as the project morphed into a “virtual fence” that was supposed to use the latest technology to catch trespassers across the 2,000-mile southern border. Finally, last weekend, on the same quiet Friday on which the president announced an easing of restrictions on travel to Cuba , Secretary Napolitano announced that the virtual fence was history. She said her department had concluded, after spending $1 billion on the first 53 miles, that the project failed to meet “current standards for viability and cost effectiveness.”

Further efforts would be tailored to specific local conditions, Secretary Napolitano said, explaining: “There is no one-size-fits-all solution to meet our border technology needs.”

While I think Governor Napolitano would have come to that conclusion somewhere short of the first billion, my purpose here is not to beat up on her. To the contrary, I assume she exercised her valuable common sense inside the government and was responsible for bringing this misbegotten substitute for an immigration policy to its inglorious end.

But before the fence fades from memory, if not from view, I want to note that our momentary infatuation with walling off our neighbor to the south leaves a legacy beyond a scarred landscape. This episode inflicted real damage on our domestic law.

I refer specifically to the separation of powers, a concept not without complexity, sorely tested in the post-9/11 era. But it is basically quite straightforward, and in the rush to build the border fence, every branch of government got it wrong.

First, Congress, in a 2005 enactment entitled the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief, bestowed on the secretary of homeland security breathtakingly broad authority to set aside “all legal requirements” that he might regard as standing in the way of building the fence.

This authority extended not only to major federal environmental laws but also to any other laws the secretary, in his “sole discretion,” might think of. In early 2008, Secretary Michael Chertoff issued orders setting aside relevant portions of 37 federal statutes (even including the Religious Freedom Restoration Act), as well as all related state and local laws and regulations within a 500-mile swath of the border that cut across four states.

True, in one sense Mr. Chertoff was simply exercising the authority that Congress had given him, which in the ordinary case is what the separation of powers contemplates from the executive branch. But such a broad and unfettered delegation of essentially legislative authority raises substantial constitutional questions, as the secretary, a former Supreme Court law clerk, surely sensed. If he had any doubts, he did not acknowledge them. “Criminal activity at the border does not stop for endless debate or protracted litigation,” he explained.

Affected cities, towns and Indian tribes, along with environmental groups, rushed to court. But Congress had done its best to make that journey fruitless. It required all cases to be filed within 60 days of the secretary's invocation of authority, thus ensuring that cases would be dismissed as “not ripe,” or for lack of standing, because no actual construction would likely yet be under way. Congress also provided that the federal district courts could hear only constitutional challenges to the statute itself, not garden-variety complaints about how the secretary was carrying out his authority. In effect, Congress was daring federal district judges to declare the law unconstitutional; not surprisingly, none did.

But there's more: Congress also stripped the federal appeals courts entirely of jurisdiction, leaving the Supreme Court as the only avenue of appeal. One appeal, brought by El Paso County, Tex., did reach the Supreme Court in the spring of 2009. The justices considered the case (County of El Paso v. Chertoff) at eight consecutive closed-door conferences before rejecting it, without dissent or explanation. By refusing to hear the case, the justices thus left on the books, unreviewed, a deeply disquieting distortion of how the American system of government is supposed to work.

Good fences may make good neighbors, but bad fences make bad law.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/legacy-of-a-fence/?ref=opinion

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EDITORIAL

Housing and a Chance

If the federal government is going to end homelessness among veterans in five years, as Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki has vowed to do, then it will have to find a way to help the hard cases. These are the long-term street people — men mostly, many fragile in mind or body, often addicted to alcohol or drugs. They shuttle from shelter to street to emergency room, burning up caregivers' energy and social-service dollars.

A new program in Los Angeles seeks to break that cycle for a small number of the most troubled veterans using a strategy known as “housing first.” This approach, which has been successfully used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development for nearly a decade, doesn't wait for people to sober up or get a job before they are given a place to stay. A permanent home, provided through a Section 8 voucher, instead becomes the anchor that makes all the rest possible: addiction services, therapy, sobriety, a steady job.

Critics worry that the vouchers come with no strings attached, so the incentive for positive change disappears. The numbers tell a different story. Federal officials reported a 30 percent drop in homelessness from 2005 to 2007, crediting the “housing first” programs. But the downturn has since hit hard, and new crops of soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan are returning to a brutal job market. Veterans currently make up an estimated 13 percent of the people in America's shelters. There are believed to be more than 17,000 homeless veterans in Los Angeles County alone.

Despite the size of the problem, there is nowhere near enough money these days for ambitious programs. The Senate adjourned last year without passing a bill to increase V.A. financing for homeless services by $50 million a year. Advocates are promising to be creative and keep trying.

The Los Angeles pilot, called Vets to Home Project 60, for the 60 people it aims to help over the next two years, comes with no new funds, just new coordination among Veterans Affairs, Los Angeles County and several small nonprofit organizations. Organizers say that this is the first time these agencies have worked together this way toward one focused goal. We hope it works, and proves worthy of rolling out nationwide to meet the great unmet need.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/opinion/23sun2.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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