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From Los Angeles Times

Stepmother of boy accused of killing his neo-Nazi father charged with child endangerment

The stepmother of a 10-year-old Riverside boy charged with shooting his father, a local neo-Nazi activist, was charged Tuesday with child endangerment and failure to properly store a firearm.

Krista F. McCary and her husband, 32-year-old Jeffrey R. Hall, recklessly stored the loaded handgun on a shelf in the house where their five children had easy access to the weapon, said Assistant Dist. Atty. Ambrosio E. Rodriquez.

“There are going to be consequences for anyone who leaves a .357-magnum within easy reach of their small children, especially when that gun kills someone,'' said Rodriquez, the prosecutor in the case. “It's like playing Russian roulette.''

The 10-year-old boy is scheduled to come before a Riverside County Juvenile Court judge Wednesday morning for a detention hearing, where he is expected to enter a plea. On May 5, the boy's attorney told the judge he may pursue a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity.

The boy has been charged as a juvenile in the shooting death of his father, a regional director for the National Socialist Movement. Hall was shot about 4 a.m. May 1 on the living room couch. Detectives believe the shooting was an "intentional act."

McCary, 26, has been charged with five counts of child endangerment and four counts of criminal storage of a fire arm.

“The gun didn't have a trigger lock and was not in a lock box as required by law. It was fully loaded," Rodriguez said. “The children knew where it was, and the children could easily access this gun.''

Rodriguez said state laws protecting juveniles bar him from discussing details of the shooting until after Wednesday's hearing.

Two of Hall's children were from a previous marriage, including his 10-year-old son. According to court records, the boy had a history of aggression and violence after his parents went through a bitter divorce, with both Hall and his ex-wife, Leticia Neal of Spokane, Wash., accusing each other of abusing and neglecting the children.

Hall was granted full custody of the children. Last year, Neal filed for custody of the 10-year-old boy and his 9-year-old sister, saying she was concerned about the children's well-being because of the father's affiliation with the neo-Nazi group. Hall opposed the motion, saying Neal had had no contact with the children for six years.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/05/neo-nazi-father-killed.html

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From the New York Times

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Fewer Emergency Rooms Available as Need Rises

Hospital emergency rooms, particularly those serving the urban poor, are closing at an alarming rate even as emergency visits are rising, according to a report published on Tuesday.

Urban and suburban areas have lost a quarter of their hospital emergency departments over the last 20 years, according to the study, in The Journal of the American Medical Association. In 1990, there were 2,446 hospitals with emergency departments in nonrural areas. That number dropped to 1,779 in 2009, even as the total number of emergency room visits nationwide increased by roughly 35 percent.

Emergency departments were most likely to have closed if they served large numbers of the poor, were at commercially operated hospitals, were in hospitals with skimpy profit margins or operated in highly competitive markets, the researchers found.

Although the study did not examine emergency care at the remaining facilities, the closings take a toll on the quality of care in all emergency rooms, said Dr. Renee Y. Hsia, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the lead author of the study.

“Some people think, ‘As long as my emergency room isn't closing, I feel O.K. and protected,' ” said Dr. Hsia, whose research was financed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “But even if they don't lose the E.R. in their own neighborhood, they do experience the effect of fewer emergency rooms — the waits get longer and longer, and people's outcomes get worse.”

New York City lost three hospital emergency rooms in 2008, two in 2009 and two more last year, when St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan in Greenwich Village closed, followed by North General Hospital in Harlem. St. Vincent's had handled more than 60,000 emergency visits a year, while North General's E.R. had recorded 36,000 annual visits.

A 24-hour emergency care and ambulatory surgery center, operated by North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, is planned for Greenwich Village. Neighborhood advocates have expressed concern that the free-standing emergency room will not be able to deliver adequate care without the backing of a full-service acute-care hospital.

The new study warns of delays in emergency care that are already playing out in the community, said Dr. David L. Kaufman, a member of the Coalition for a New Village Hospital who worked at St. Vincent's for more than 30 years. Patients who would have sought care at St. Vincent's, he said, “take longer to get to nearby hospitals in New York City traffic. They're waiting many, many hours to be seen and managed, and if they require admission, they have to wait another 12 to 24 hours because there are no beds.”

The aim of the analysis was to figure out what characteristics make a hospital emergency department likely to close, Dr. Hsia said. Rural hospitals were excluded because some are designated “critical access hospitals” and operate under federal mandate.

Emergency rooms at commercially operated hospitals and those with low profit margins were almost twice as likely as other hospitals to close, Dr. Hsia and her colleagues found. So-called safety-net hospitals that serve disproportionate numbers of Medicaid patients and hospitals serving a large share of the poor were 40 percent more likely to close.

In addition, hospital emergency rooms in the most competitive markets were 30 percent more likely than others to close.

“This suggests market forces play a larger role in the distribution and availability of care” in the United States, Dr. Hsia said, especially emergency care. “We can't expect the market to allocate critical resources like these in an equitable way.”

Conditions in emergency rooms may be worsened by the new health care law, several experts said. The law will expand eligibility for Medicaid, the government health plan for the poor. Often beneficiaries turn to emergency rooms for care, because many physicians do not accept Medicaid payments, said Dr. Sandra M. Schneider, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Emergency rooms are required by law to provide treatment regardless of ability to pay. “People will have coverage, but there's a concern that there will be nowhere for them to go,” Dr. Schneider said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/health/18hospital.html?_r=1&ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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The Supreme Court's Stinky Ruling on Marijuana Odor: What Does it Really Mean?

This week's Supreme Court decision in Kentucky v. King has civil-libertarians and marijuana policy reformers in an uproar, and rightly so, but it's not exactly the death of the 4th Amendment. Here's a look at how this case could impact police practices and constitutional rights.

It all started when police chased a drug suspect into a building and lost him. They smelled marijuana smoke coming from an apartment and decided to check it out, so they announced themselves and knocked loudly on the door. They heard movement inside, which the officers feared could indicate destruction of evidence, so they kicked in the door and entered the apartment. Hollis King was arrested for drugs and challenged the police entry as a violation of his 4th Amendment right against unreasonable searches.

In an 8-1 decision written by Justice Alito, the Court determined that an emergency search was justified to prevent destruction of evidence, even though police created the risk of such destruction by yelling "Police!" and banging on the door. The determining factor, in the Court's view, was that police had not violated the 4th Amendment simply by knocking on the door. Since the subsequent need to prevent destruction of evidence was the result of legal conduct by the officers, the events that followed do not constitute a violation of the suspect's constitutional rights.

Naturally, any fan of the 4th Amendment can look at this scenario and wonder what's to stop police from "smelling" marijuana and "hearing" evidence being destroyed any time they have an urge to enter a particular dwelling. What does destruction of evidence sound like anyway, and what doesn't it sound like? Doesn't someone jumping up to destroy evidence sound the same as someone jumping up to answer the door before police kick it down? It's hard to argue with anyone who sees this result as a blueprint for facilitating not only widespread police actions that circumvent the warrant requirement, but also more innocent people being killed in their own homes in misunderstandings that could have been prevented by just a little patience from police.

These are very valid concerns, but it's also true that in the immediate aftermath of any unfortunate Supreme Court ruling, there's a tendency to commence eulogizing the 4th Amendment and proclaiming that our freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures has been abolished once and for all. That's not the case here any more than it was with any number of previous rulings we wish had been decided differently. It's not a fatal diagnosis; it merely sucks.

The fact that police were chasing a suspect when they entered the building and the fact that they smelled marijuana coming from the defendant's apartment and the fact that they heard suspicious noises after knocking were all factors in the legal outcome. Remove any one of these conditions and the case might have been decided differently. In other words, this Supreme Court decision does not mean police can start knocking on doors randomly and bursting in any time they hear a sound coming from inside. They must already have probable cause to believe there's a crime taking place and, fortunately, any prudent citizen can take measures to prevent their home from reeking of probable cause.

Ultimately, the lesson here is something we've been emphasizing at FlexYourRights.org for a long time now: stay calm, don't expose yourself to police attention, and know your rights in case something happens. Police often knock on doors without a warrant, so your best move is just to stay calm and make an informed decision about how to handle the situation.

If you prefer not to answer, which is your legal right, then do so by waiting silently for the officers to leave. If you choose to speak with them, stepping outside is a smart way to keep them from claiming to detect criminal evidence within your home. Unless they have a warrant, they may not search or even enter the home without your permission. Don't give it to them. Finally, understand that if the officers do have a warrant, your legal options are limited to the point that you should just focus on not getting hurt. In the event of any kind of negative outcome, remain silent and discuss your options with an attorney.

It's a shame that we even have to prepare people for situations like this in what's supposed to be a free society, but modern drug enforcement practices are so prone to error and abuse that every citizen should know how to protect their constitutional rights in an emergency situation. As the Supreme Court continues to reduce the scope of our 4th Amendment protections, understanding how to properly exercise our remaining rights becomes more important than ever before.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-morgan/what-does-the-supreme-cou_b_863415.html

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