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From the New York Times

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To Defend the Accused in a Tucson Rampage, First a Battle to Get Inside a Mind

by JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN and MARC LACEY

TUCSON — Judy Clarke, the public defender for the man charged in the Tucson shooting, Jared L. Loughner, has made motions on his behalf and entered a plea for him of not guilty. But one of her most essential acts of lawyering came when she patted Mr. Loughner on the back in court last month, leaned in close and whispered in his ear.

For the small cadre of lawyers specializing in federal death penalty cases, getting the defendant to trust them, or just to grudgingly accept them, can be half the battle. That is especially true when mental illness is a factor, as it may be in the case of Mr. Loughner, a troubled young man accused of opening fire on a crowd on Jan. 8 in an attempt to kill Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

In her unassuming, almost motherly way, Ms. Clarke excels at getting close to people implicated in awful crimes. In jailhouse meetings that can stretch most of the day, she listens intently and grows to know her outcast clients in a way few ever have in their troubled lives, colleagues say.

Still, Ms. Clarke, who has made a name for herself representing notorious murderers and terrorists, sometimes falls short. One client threatened to kill her during his trial. More than one has tried to dump her midway through.

How Mr. Loughner and Ms. Clark get along, or fail to, will set the course for how the criminal case unfolds. One of Ms. Clarke's biggest challenges may be persuading Mr. Loughner to allow her to raise questions about his mental health; that issue led to conflict between Ms. Clarke and some of her previous clients, like the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, and the Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui.

“It could go many different ways,” said Michael First, a psychiatrist who has worked on a case with Ms. Clarke. “He could be totally acknowledging he's mentally ill, or he could be the Kaczynski and Moussaoui type and be absolutely adamant there is nothing wrong with him.”

Mr. Kaczynski severed ties with Ms. Clarke and the rest of his legal team when they pushed the idea of presenting his mental illness to the jury as a reason to spare his life. Once a mathematician, he was proud of his mind and found his lawyers' suggestion offensive.

And Mr. Moussaoui, who faced the death penalty on charges that he helped plan the Sept. 11 attacks, opposed the efforts of his legal team, which Ms. Clarke was assisting, to portray him as mentally ill. Mr. First recalled spending hours outside Mr. Moussaoui's cell, being rebuffed in his efforts to coax him into a conversation.

Next to nothing is known of what Mr. Loughner and Ms. Clarke have spoken about in the month since he was arrested. But it is unlikely, former colleagues of Ms. Clarke say, that she and her two co-counsels, Mark Fleming and Reuben C. Cahn, are very far along in planning his defense. It is possible, lawyers say, that they have not even broached the extent of Mr. Loughner's mental illness or the shooting that left six dead and 13 wounded, among them Ms. Giffords, who is recovering in a rehabilitation center in Houston.

“That's not something you jump into during the first or the fourth or even the 10th interview,” said Michael Burt, an experienced capital defender who worked with Ms. Clarke to defend Eric R. Rudolph, a serial bomber responsible for the fatal blast at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. “It takes a long time to get to that point.”

In the Loughner case, Ms. Clarke agreed with the prosecution's request to move the court proceedings from Phoenix to Tucson, but she said she had questions about the facility where he would be held. Ms. Clarke last week temporarily prevented the United States Marshals Service from releasing new photographs of him.

In past cases, Ms. Clarke has used her initial meetings with defendants to improve their lot in the short term, by trying to get them less restrictive conditions in jail or relaying messages to family members.

“We didn't talk about the death penalty or anything legal at first,” said Quin Denvir, Ms. Clarke's co-counsel on the Unabomber case. “We spent a lot of time getting him out of the Sacramento County jail to the federal detention center, because it was quieter and he couldn't stand how noisy the county jail was. That's the kind of thing where we can help.”

Ms. Clarke, rather than focusing on her clients' innocence, spends much of her defense work trying to persuade jurors to spare her clients' lives. She does this by presenting what lawyers call a “mitigating social history” — a narrative of abuse, violence or mental illness that the defendant may have suffered. She sends investigators to find grade-school teachers, former girlfriends, classmates, anyone who can provide insight into what made her client go awry.

Ms. Clarke rarely gives interviews to the news media, but she did explain her philosophy last year in a law school publication at Washington and Lee University. “None of us, including those accused of crime, wants to be defined by the worst moment or worst day of our lives,” she said.

In representing Susan Smith, a South Carolina mother who killed her two boys, Ms. Clarke focused the jury's attention on the facts that Ms. Smith's father had committed suicide and that her stepfather had sexually abused her.

“She was able to change her from Susan the monster to Susan the victim,” said Tommy Pope, a South Carolina legislator who prosecuted the case against Ms. Smith. A jury spared her life.

Ms. Clarke helped Buford O. Furrow Jr., a white supremacist, avoid the death penalty even after he confessed to wounding five people by opening fire at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles and then shooting a postal worker in 1999. During the trial, it came to light that Mr. Furrow had threatened to kill Ms. Clarke and the rest of his defense team, but they remained on the case.

In the case of Roy C. Green, an inmate accused of fatally stabbing one guard and wounding four others in 1997, a judge agreed with Ms. Clarke that Mr. Green was mentally incompetent to stand trial even though the defendant agreed with prosecutors that he was fit. During a hearing, Ms. Clarke told the judge that Mr. Green had expressed fears that she and others were working against him, using it as evidence of his paranoid delusions.

In her court arguments, Ms. Clarke can be quite vehement, lawyers who have seen her at work say. Ms. Clarke once told The Los Angeles Times: “I like the antagonism. I like the adversarial nature of the business. I love all of that.”

But her demeanor changes to that of a social worker when meeting with her clients one on one.

“Even people who are quite mentally ill can identify someone who is real and who wants to protect them,” said David Bruck, a lawyer at Washington and Lee University's School of Law who has worked with Ms. Clarke. “She's a great listener, and she's focused on the client. She tries to understand the client. The client becomes her world.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/us/13tucson.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Inmate's Death Exposes Health Care Problems in Local Jails

LONGVIEW — Amy Lynn Cowling was 33, she had three children, and her first grandchild was born a day after she died in an East Texas jail — slumped over her bed, clutching a bottle of Diet Dr Pepper, after a day of wailing and seizures.

Ms. Cowling was pulled over on Christmas Eve for speeding and arrested for outstanding warrants on minor charges. She was bipolar and methadone-dependent and took a raft of medications each day. For the five days she was in Gregg County Jail, Ms. Cowling and her family pleaded with officials to give her the medicines that sat in her purse in the jail's storage room. They never did.

Ms. Cowling's death is the most recent at Sheriff Maxey Cerliano's Gregg County Jail in Longview. Since 2005, nine inmates have died there — most were attributed to health conditions like cancer, diabetes and stomach ulcers — far more than at other facilities its size. Bowie County Jail, in East Texas on the Arkansas border, reported five deaths in the same period, as did Brazoria County Jail, south of Houston on the Gulf Coast. In Williamson County in Central Texas near Austin, the jail reported just two deaths.

Interviews with prison experts and people with firsthand experience with the Gregg County lockup and its medical staff, as well as a review of scores of public documents, reveal a troubled local jail where staff turnover is high and inmates routinely complain about conditions. Criminal justice advocates say the situation in Gregg County is not unique; it is representative of systemic problems that plague local jails statewide.

Sheriff Cerliano defends the medical treatment in his jail and said he does his best to weed out bad jailers. “It's only about doing the right thing,” he said.

Vicki Bankhead never went a day without talking to Ms. Cowling, her daughter and best friend. “I miss hearing her voice,” Ms. Bankhead said, sobbing. Ms. Cowling became a mother at age 15. She had become addicted to prescription pills and was found guilty in 2001 of possessing a fraudulent prescription. She struggled to keep a job.

Although Ms. Cowling had been clean for several years and was getting treatment at a methadone clinic, Ms. Bankhead said, her daughter had other health problems, including bipolar disorder, heart troubles and a failing kidney. “Amy needed her medication to stay alive,” she said. “That's why I was begging them to help her repeatedly.”

Public records show that Ms. Cowling told Gregg County Jail officials that she had high blood pressure, arthritis and only one kidney. She reported that she took Seroquel to treat bipolar disorder and that she had been receiving methadone treatment for a decade — but neither of those drugs is allowed in the jail.

State standards require only that jails provide treatment according to the facility's health care plan. Dr. Lewis A. Browne, the county health administrator and jail doctor since 1992, decides which drugs are allowed. Drugs like Seroquel and methadone, he said, are often traded among inmates for illicit favors.

Gregg County officials said that Ms. Cowling had received appropriate substitute medications.

Reports on her case submitted to the Texas attorney general's office show that Ms. Cowling began having “seizure activity” while she was in the facility. The morning before she died, a jail nurse called Dr. Browne to report that Ms. Cowling was “hollering and uncooperative.” Dr. Browne told the nurse to give Ms. Cowling a dose of the antipsychotic drug Haldol. When a nurse called Dr. Browne later to report that Ms. Cowling was yelling again, he ordered more Haldol and put her on suicide watch. Ms. Cowling was booked on a Friday morning, and a jailer discovered her dead just after midnight on Wednesday.

Precisely what caused Ms. Cowling's death remains unknown. A preliminary autopsy was inconclusive. Her family has retained a lawyer.

County officials contend that Ms. Cowling's death was not their fault. She was not honest with them about all of her health problems, said Robert Davis, a lawyer for the county. “I absolutely do not believe that the jail or jail staff contributed to this inmate's death whatsoever,” Mr. Davis said.

Sheriff Cerliano, however, concedes that not everything went according to the jail's policies. After Ms. Cowling's death, he conducted an investigation that he said showed that one jailer falsified observation logs that night. He fired five jailers and a sixth resigned. (Not all of the firings were related to Ms. Cowling's death, he said, but were for conduct discovered during the investigation.) Two of the jailers were arrested for falsifying government documents.

Still, he said, the jail staff followed medical protocol in caring for Ms. Cowling. “We do everything we can to take care of inmates,” he said.

Since 2008, Gregg County inmates have filed more than 20 complaints with the Texas Commission on Jail Standards about conditions in the lockup. Most of the complaints were health-care-related; inmates said they could not get medicine and did not receive timely medical attention. An inmate who hanged himself in the jail in 2009 had complained that among many other grievances, he was not allowed medication he had been prescribed on the outside and had not been seen by a doctor.

In letters responding to nearly all the complaints, Adan Muñoz, the commission's executive director, wrote, “The Texas Commission on Jail Standards does not question the professional opinion of medical personnel.”

Inmates have sued Sheriff Cerliano and Dr. Browne at least twice since 2005, alleging that their constitutional rights were violated by the jail's deliberate indifference to their medical needs. In both cases, the courts found that Dr. Browne and the jail had attempted to provide adequate care.

Dr. Browne, who has his own family medical practice in Longview, is paid more than $100,000 per year to act as the jail doctor and director of the county health authority. He said that inmate health care was “the toughest medical situation to deal with.” Inmates are often uncooperative and dishonest about their health conditions, he said, and many are drug addicts. Adding to the challenge is that it is hard to retain medical staff, Dr. Browne said.

Medical staff members at the jail are not the only ones with a high turnover rate; records from the sheriff's department show that in 2009 and 2010, more than 40 percent of the 167 jail employees either quit or were fired.

Sheriff Cerliano said the pay is low for jailers and that they have to go through months of training, pass drug screenings and work in challenging situations.

Lt. David Drosche, who works in the Brazos County Sheriff's Office and is president of the Texas Jail Association, agreed that retaining jailers is difficult but said that a 40 percent turnover rate is “extremely high.” The higher turnover, he said, results in more inexperienced jailers.

County lockups in Texas are accountable to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. Before Ms. Cowling's death, the Gregg County Jail had passed every commission inspection for the last five years. Within weeks after she died, the commission, which reviews county jail deaths, decided the jail was in compliance with state standards.

But the commission does not require that jails meet specific health care criteria, only that they have medical plans on file. It also doesn't keep track of jail staff turnover.

Diana Claitor, executive director of the Texas Jail Project, which advocates for improved jail conditions, said better health care standards and monitoring of data like staff turnover could help prevent more deaths like Ms. Cowling's. From January 2005 to September 2009, more than 280 inmates died from illnesses in Texas county jails.

“One of the chief factors playing into mistreatment or neglect would be ill-trained, inexperienced staff,” she said. But with the state budget crunch, pressing the jail standards commission to provide additional oversight is a tough sell, Ms. Claitor said.

Sheriff Cerliano said his jailers already receive more training than is required by state standards and that the medical staff provides the best care possible. Ms. Cowling's death was unfortunate, he said, but it does not mean that wholesale changes are needed in the way jails are regulated.

“We do have inmates that come in sick,” he said. “It's incumbent upon us to try to do the best we can.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/us/13ttjail.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From the Washington Examiner

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$650k of cocaine found in backpack on Baltimore ship

The blue backpack with eight bricks of cocaine, totalling more than 20 pounds, was detected in a container of steel machine parts on the shipping vessel Ital Lunare, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The ship traveled from China to Panama, then stopped in Georgia and New Jersey, before mooring in Maryland, CBP spokesman Steve Sapp said.

Sapp said the cocaine was likely a "drop load" deposited on the ship by someone trying to smuggle drugs into the United States and it could have been placed on board at any of the ports.

"Someone must have been on this side waiting to get the drugs," he said.

It's now rare for authorities to find drugs on a ship in this region. That might be happening because fewer vessels are arriving from source nations or because other drug supply chains have been developed through air or ground transportation, Sapp said.

He said it's also unusual to find drugs on a vessel arriving from China, because the contraband is usually more valuable there. Authorities say they believe the cocaine was deposited on the ship in Panama.

CBP randomly selected 50 containers from the vessel to screen, and the drugs were detected in one of them.

"Customs and Border Protection officers may scan hundreds of containers without detecting a single anomaly," Ricardo Scheller, the CPB port director for Baltimore, said.

The agency uses imaging technology that gives investigators a picture of the container's contents and lets them decide whether to examine the item further.

"Nonintrusive technology allows CBP officers a quick and clear picture of a conveyance's contents so that we can expedite release of legitimate commercial goods and detain anomalous containers for a more hands-on inspect," Scheller said.

No one has been arrested in connection with the cocaine, and CBP officials said it's rare for arrests to be made in such cases.

Sapp said he wasn't aware of any past smuggling activities associated with Ital Lunare.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/crime-punishment/2011/02/650k-cocaine-found-backpack-baltimore-ship

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Big myth on campus

Why privacy shouldn't trump public safety

In the weeks since the Tucson shootings left six people dead and 13 wounded, I've heard a lot of denial on my campus and elsewhere. I've heard, for instance, that the alleged shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, 22, was determined to commit violence and would have succeeded with or without a gun. I've heard too many people imply that lunatics will be lunatics, and there's just nothing to be done about them. And I've heard that it can't happen here – not in our state, not at our school. None of this is true.

For too long, we've been in denial about the risk of domestic terrorism on college campuses. In one 2009 study, the majority of college counseling centers surveyed said they were unlikely to discuss guns with students seeking mental health treatment. And a 2008 survey of university police chiefs revealed that the primary barrier to adopting campaigns to prevent gun violence was the belief that it “was not a problem on their campus.” This from a sample of about 400 colleges where 1 in 4 had experienced a firearm incident that past year.

The truth is, colleges aren't ivory towers, and student-age gun owners tend to be more dangerous, not less, than the general public. “Their brains are still developing, and they don't have the same impulse or judgment control as adults,” says Daniel Vice, senior attorney for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “So there's a much greater danger when young people get access to firearms.” Harvard researchers have also found that student gun owners are less law-abiding than their peers and more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors, such as binge drinking.

Even though 18- to 20-year-olds make up only 5 percent of the US population, Vice says, they are responsible for about 20 percent of the homicide and manslaughter cases.

At the memorial service in Tucson last month, President Obama assumed the role of healer in chief. He was right to call for a renewed faith in civility, but avoiding the subject of how to improve national safety was hardly a profile in courage. It was a missed opportunity to push forward policy that could reduce the chance that such tragedies will happen again.

Many political pundits have argued that new legislation would “politicize” the memories of the victims. But after Seung-Hui Cho opened fire at Virginia Tech in 2007, lawmakers ushered in changes that make it easier to work around privacy rules and report students that seem dangerous. Cho killed 32 people; the Arizona shooter killed six – there can't be a minimum body count under which legislative change is appropriate.

In Loughner's case, the warning signs he allegedly exhibited were never raised by a federal background-check system that vets gun buyers. The Army rejected him over a failed drug test, but that didn't raise any red flags when he went to purchase a firearm. After multiple run-ins with campus police, Pima Community College suspended Loughner. Campus officials told him he could only return with a note from a mental health professional saying he wasn't a threat to himself or others.

For whatever reason -- privacy rules, a lack of explicit threats -- Pima apparently did not then communicate its concerns to outside authorities. So when Loughner sought to buy a gun two months after the suspension, his background check turned up clean. Something is wrong when a man is judged too dangerous to remain in school, but not too dangerous to own a gun.

Those concerned about such security gaps must push for national legislation that lays the groundwork for greater collaboration between our universities and federal and state authorities. We need a revitalized Brady Act, one that targets young Americans and encourages universities and high schools to always share information about troubled students.

This is a complicated problem, this balancing of student privacy and public safety, but we must find a solution. We cannot afford another Virginia Tech, another Tucson.

In his ode to civic virtues, the president said the shooting had provoked a national conversation on the merits of gun safety laws, yet he has not demanded reforms. He said the killings forced us to reflect on the future. But the time for that has passed – now is the time to act.

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2011/02/13/why_privacy_shouldnt_trump_public_safety/

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