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From the Los Angeles Times

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Connecticut agency had questions years ago about kidnapped girl

Child-protection officials raised questions more than five years ago about Nejdra Nance's true identity, but it's unclear why nothing came of it.

by Matthew Kauffman and Josh Kovner, Hartford Courant

January 30, 2011

Reporting from Hartford, Conn.

Connecticut child-protection officials had questions more than five years ago about the true identity of a girl now known to have been kidnapped as an infant in 1987 and raised in Bridgeport under the name Nejdra Nance.

But although the Department of Children and Families discussed the issue with law enforcement, Commissioner Joette Katz said the agency should have done more years ago to help reunite the girl, now 23, with her biological family.

She has since found out her real name is Carlina White. She scoured the Internet and enlisted the help of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in an effort to unravel her mystery. The recent discovery of her kidnapping and her dramatic reunion with family earlier this month attracted national attention.

"Commissioner Katz is convinced that the department had a greater obligation in supporting Nejdra Nance," department spokesman Gary Kleeblatt said in a written statement. "It's hard not to think this situation could have been handled differently to help this young woman find her birth family — who clearly had hoped to be reunited with her one day — years earlier."

The department opened a file in 2005 involving the then-teenage girl and Ann Pettway, 49, a Bridgeport woman who has admitted snatching her from a New York City hospital in 1987, Kleeblatt said. The department provided services, including housing, educational and training assistance, he said, and also "reached out to law enforcement and communicated directly regarding the question of the identity of the girl's biological parents at the time."

Kleeblatt said he could not say what prompted those questions, and he would not identify the law enforcement agency involved. But he said that Katz, who was recently installed as commissioner, is aware that more than five years passed before the girl confirmed her own doubts that Pettway was not her biological mother.

Pettway, meanwhile, is in federal custody facing kidnapping charges.

The department's statement came in response to questions from the Hartford Courant about any agency interaction with Pettway or White. Kleeblatt said that child-protection files are typically confidential, but that the commissioner has the discretion to make information public, and Katz believed that the high profile of White's case made it appropriate to disclose the agency's involvement.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-kidnaped-girl-20110130,0,5575263,print.story

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If Loughner is convicted, death penalty would be difficult to carry out

Prosecutors are expected to pursue the death penalty in the Tucson shootings. But precedent suggests it would be unlikely that Jared Lee Loughner, if found guilty, would ever be executed.

by Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau

January 30, 2011

Reporting from Washington

On the day Jared Lee Loughner was indicted for the shootings in Tucson, the top federal prosecutor in Arizona signaled that the government most likely would request the ultimate punishment.

But the federal death penalty process is filled with obstacles, and Loughner's execution would be far from assured if he is convicted. Most defendants initially targeted for death are more likely to spend their lives in prison.

Of 182 federal death penalty prosecutions approved by Washington since 1988, 60 defendants are on death row, and only three — including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh — were executed, according to Kevin McNally, director of the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, which tracks capital cases. None of the 60 are even close to a date with the executioner.

Other defendants with profiles as high or higher than Loughner — the Unabomber, the Olympics bomber, even Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks — were all spared death and given life in prison.

In some cases prosecutors drop the death penalty to assure a conviction. In others, juries sympathetic to some aspect of a defendant's life or wary of creating a martyr decide on life without parole.

A similar picture holds true for capital punishment by the state of Arizona, where law enforcement officials in Tucson are assembling their own criminal case against the 22-year-old Loughner.

Only 24 Arizona prisoners have been executed in the last 35 years. And this doesn't include Viva Leroy Nash, who died of natural causes last year at the age of 94 after 27 years on death row.

Before federal prosecutors can seek the death penalty, they must get around a series of roadblocks.

Dennis K. Burke, the U.S. attorney in Arizona, is preparing a prosecution memorandum for the Justice Department's Capital Case Unit. He also must file a narrative of facts in the case, background on Loughner and his victims, and "views of [each] victim's family on seeking the death penalty," Burke said.

He is precluded from seeking death just to strengthen his bargaining position on a plea deal. Rather, he must convince Washington that the crime itself merits Loughner's death if he is convicted.

The unit studies the material and invites defense lawyers to participate as well. McNally said they almost always do, if for no other reason than it offers a sneak peek of the government's case against their client.

The 12-member unit sends its findings to the Capital Case Review Committee at the Justice Department. The committee is composed of a mix of career lawyers and political appointees, and they make a recommendation to the attorney general.

Justice Department officials declined to name the members of either panel.

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. will make the final decision on whether to push for the death penalty. In a case of this magnitude, sources said, he most surely will grant the go-ahead.

Although the Justice Department under President George W. Bush sought far more death sentences than in President Clinton's time, in the last two years, "Holder has been seeking a healthy number of death cases too," McNally said. The Justice Department last week declined to release the number of times it had sought the death penalty under Holder.

And there are other obstacles for getting a convicted Loughner into the death chamber. There are jurisdictional issues, such as whether he knew that John M. Roll was a federal judge when Loughner is believed to have fatally shot him or whether the judge was at the Jan. 8 congressional event "in the performance of his official duties."

A huge backlog in federal cases in Arizona has just led officials to declare a judicial emergency and allow lengthy trial delays. And Loughner's mental fitness could sway a jury to give him a prison term rather than death.

McVeigh was the best known of the three who have been put to death since 1988. He was executed in 2001, just four years after he was convicted — but only because he abruptly dropped his legal appeals. Until then, it had been nearly four decades since the federal government executed a prisoner — Victor Feguer, who in 1963 was hanged in Iowa for kidnapping and killing a doctor.

The last man executed by the federal government was Louis Jones Jr., a highly decorated Army Ranger. He was put to death in March 2003 in Indiana for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a female Army private in Texas.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-death-penalty-20110130,0,5374075,print.story

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From the New York Times

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OPINION

Watch Out! The Assault Vehicle Is Loose!

Americans are infatuated with guns. And when you're infatuated, you sometimes can't think straight. Maybe that's why, three weeks after the Tucson shootings that shook the nation, we're still no closer to banning oversize magazines like the 33-bullet model allegedly used there. Maybe it will help clarify issues if we imagine an alternate universe — one in which Americans exhibit their toughness not with assault weapons but with assault vehicles, a world in which our torrid libertarian passion is not for our guns but for our cars. That alternate universe might look like this:

The powerful National Automobile Association warned today that vehicle regulation, such as a ban on assault vehicles, would be “the first step toward totalitarianism.”

“Autos don't kill people,” declared Hank Magic, a N.A.A. spokesman. “People kill people.” As part of a campaign against auto registration, the N.A.A. has started selling new bumper stickers: “They'll register my car when they pry the steering wheel from my cold, dead fingers.”

The N.A.A. defends assault vehicles as essential for self-defense and also “loads of fun.”

Taken aback by the furor, the White House denied any interest in banning assault vehicles or registering all vehicles. The White House said that the president was considering more modest steps, such as banning repeat drunken drivers from the roads, prohibiting televisions mounted on the steering wheel and curbs on lethal car accessories that serve no transportation purpose — such as bayonets mounted on the front and back bumpers.

Mr. Magic warned: “Now the White House is trying to prevent Americans from enjoying themselves and defending themselves.” He cited a driver in Florida in 1997 who had been threatened by a carjacking but was able to impale the attacker on his bumper. “Bumper bayonets save lives,” he asserted.

The president also distanced himself from a proposed Transportation Department directive that would curb private tanks on the basis that they are damaging roads and, with road rage on the rise, sometimes rolling over other vehicles. The N.A.A. has denounced the proposal, warning: “Without tanks, how can we keep our children safe?”

“The solution is more tanks, not fewer tanks,” Mr. Magic told a rally yesterday. “If tanks are banned, then only criminals will have tanks!”

Auto safety advocates say that tens of thousands of lives could be saved annually if the president and Congress would register vehicles, require seat belts and require licenses to drive cars. “It's tough because our country's history is steeped in automobiles,” said one advocate. “But with political leadership, we can rise above that, as every other civilized country in the world has done.”

O.K., O.K. That's the end of our alternate history. In reality, of course, we have taken a deadly product — motor vehicles — and systematically made them quite safe. Scientists have figured out how to build roads so as to reduce accidents and have engineered innovations such as air bags to reduce injuries. Public campaigns and improved law enforcement have reduced drunken driving, and graduated licenses for young people have reduced accident rates as well. The death rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled has fallen by almost three-quarters since the early 1970s, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The trade-off is that we have modestly curbed individual freedom, but we save tens of thousands of lives a year. That's a model for how we should approach guns as a public health concern.

Granted, the Second Amendment complicates gun regulation (I accept that the framers intended for state militias, and possibly individuals, to have the right to bear flintlocks). But even among those favoring a broader interpretation, the Second Amendment hasn't prevented bans on machine guns. There are still lines to be drawn, and a prohibition on 33-bullet magazines would be a useful place to start.

If we treat guns as we do cars and build a public health system to address them, here's what we might do: finance more research so that we have a better sense of which gun safety policies are effective (for example, do gun safes or trigger locks save lives?); crack down on gun retailers who break laws the way we punish stores that sell cigarettes to kids; make serial numbers harder to erase; make gun trafficking a law enforcement priority; limit gun purchases to one per person per month; build a solid database of people who are mentally ill and cannot buy firearms; ban assault weapons; and invest in new technologies to see if we can design “smart guns” that require input of a code or fingerprint to reduce accidents and curb theft.

Particularly after a tragedy like Tucson, why can't we show the same maturity toward firearms that we show toward vehicles — and save some of the 80 lives a day that we lose to guns?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/opinion/30kristof.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=opinion&adxnnlx=1296396137-UN6VYWnlaMU/tZZRLJOzEA&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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Facebook page supports alleged killer

Page has caused 'pain and hurt' to family

Sunday, 30 Jan 2011

by Tom Hillen

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) - A Facebook page has popped up in support of Junior Lee Beebe, the man charged with the murders of Amy Henslee and Tonya Howarth.

The page showed up on Facebook on Saturday and it encourages people to support Beebe claiming he is innocent.

Matt Utley, Amy's brother-in-law, said that the page is not helping the family in the healing process.

"The creator has offended a lot of people, its pretty sick, its hurting a lot of people and it is going to cause a lot of grief."

There is a picture that has been posted to the page that calls Beebe a hero.

"It brings nothing but pain and hurt to the family," said Utley.

Another posts lets people know that soon there will be a link to a paypal account so that people can donate to Beebe's legal expenses.

Most of the posts on the page are against the page, however there are some supporters posting their comments on the page as well.

According to Henslee's brother-in-law the family is not sure who created the page, but they have already contacted Facebook to have it removed.

Utley said that this page is "like adding salt to an open wound, it is sick and deviant."

Beebe is accused of killing both Amy Henslee and Tonya Howarth.

http://www.woodtv.com/dpp/news/local/sw_mich/Facebook-page-supports-alleged-killer

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Police say mother admits killing teen-aged children for being "mouthy"

(CNN) -- A mother in Tampa, Florida has admitted in detail to killing her two teen-aged children, police said.

Police checking on the family at the request of a relative found Julie K. Schenecker, 50, on the back porch of her home Friday morning, dressed in blood-covered clothing, according to a police statement.

They found her son, Beau Powers Schenecker, 13, dead in the family's SUV, which had been parked in the garage, the statement said. Calyx Powers Schenecker, 16, was in an upstairs bedroom, also dead.

"She did tell us that they talked back, that they were mouthy," Tampa police spokeswoman Laura McElroy told CNN affiliate WTSP. "But I don't think that will ever serve as an explanation to the rest of us of how you could take a child's life."

The woman shot her son as she drove him to soccer practice and returned home to shoot her daughter as she studied on her computer, CNN affiliate WFTS reported, citing investigators.

The preliminary investigation indicates that the teens were killed on Thursday evening, a police statement said, but a medical county examiner will determine the time of death.

Police have charged the mother in the killings, the police statement said.

Police were called to the house after Schenecker's mother called from Texas to express concern about her daughter's welfare, saying she was depressed, the police statement said.

Schenecker was initially booked into jail, but was transferred to Tampa General Hospital for treatment of an existing medical condition, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, WTSP reported.

Hundreds of people attended a candlelight vigil on Friday night in memory of the siblings, according to WTSP.

"It's just sad that his mom did this to him and his sister because he didn't deserve this," one of the mourners, Hailey Johnson, told WTSP. "He was the sweetest kid ever."

"I came out here tonight because I just needed to show respect and show that I really did care about Beau," said another mourner, teenager Ann Sloan.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/01/29/florida.children.killed/?hpt=T2

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Korean vets do not have to prove Agent Orange exposure

The Department of Veterans Affairs has expanded the pool of Korean War vets who can make claims related to exposure to Agent Orange. This toxic defoliant has been linked to more than a dozen serious, often fatal health problems, including various types of cancer.

Until now, only those Korean War vets who served in certain units along the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) between April 1968 and July 1969 could make claims regarding Agent Orange exposure. The new ruling, which was published in the Federal Register, extends the net of health coverage to those who served between April 1, 1968, and August 31, 1971 “in a unit determined by VA and the Department of Defense to have operated in an area in or near the Korean DMZ in which herbicides were applied.”

According to the Department of VA, Agent Orange is the name assigned to a combination of herbicides used by the US military sprayed from 1961 to 1971 in Vietnam to eliminate foliage that provided cover for the enemy. It was called “Agent Orange” because the 55-gallon drums in which it was stored had an orange stripe.

Agent Orange contained minute traces of a substance known as TCDD or dioxin (2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin), which causes various illnesses in laboratory animals. Other herbicides were also used during the war, including Agent Blue and Agent White, but Agent Orange was the toxin most widely applied.

The VA estimates that 2.6 million US military personnel were exposed to Agent Orange. Among the diseases for which veterans can make claims regarding exposure to the toxin are acute and subacute peripheral neuropathy, chronic B-cell leukemias, chloracne, type 2 diabetes, Hodgkin's disease, multiple myeloma, prostate cancer, respiratory cancers (e.g., larynx, lung, trachea, bronchus), ischemic heart disease, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Parkinson's disease, and some forms of soft tissue sarcoma.

The VA noted that Korean War vets do not have to prove their medical condition happened during their time in Korea. By presuming their conditions are associated with Agent Orange, the application process is accelerated and makes sure the vets have access to the health benefits they need and deserve.

The VA is asking that Korean War vets who meet the new guidelines submit claims for conditions presumed to be associated with Agent Orange exposure as soon as possible.

http://www.emaxhealth.com/1275/more-korean-war-vets-can-make-agent-orange-claims

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Three Illegal Immigrants Accused in Death of American Teen Surrender in Arizona

January 30, 2011 | FoxNews.com

U.S. officers tell Reuters that Orel Vasquez, 20, Christian Vasquez, 26, and Juan Leon, 29, turned themselves in Saturday for the 2009 murder of 15-year-old Brenda Arenas of Tucson.

Arenas was shot in the head during a botched carjacking and died in her mother's arms.

The U.S. Customs and Borders Protection agency took the three into custody.

All three men were in the U.S. illegally.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/01/30/mexican-murder-suspects-turn-death-american-teen/

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