Category: Blind Justice

BP Deepwater supervisors will be tried on manslaughter charges

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Deepwater_Horizon_fire_Coast Guard

It’s about fucking time. Of course, they should be going after the owners:

Law360, New York (January 28, 2014, 6:30 PM ET) — A Louisiana federal judge on Monday refused to toss manslaughter charges against two BP PLC supervisors for their roles in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, rejecting claims that the charges are unconstitutionally vague because they lack a clear standard of care that the supervisors allegedly violated.

The U.S. Department of Justice claims Robert Kaluza’s and Donald Vidrine’s negligence caused the 11 rig worker deaths in the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which sent nearly 5 million barrels of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.

More on Todd Christie

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

082812_ConventionSpeech_003

You may not remember how Todd Christie was under investigation by the feds, and got off under unusual circumstances:

When Christopher Christie went on to Seton Hall Law School, Todd Christie followed their father’s path to the financial world, where his high energy and salesman’s bravado allowed him to flourish quickly at the Wall Street trade specialist firm Spear, Leeds & Kellogg. He rose to become chief executive, and when Goldman Sachs bought the company in 2000 for more than $6 billion, Todd Christie’s piece of the deal amounted to about $60 million.

By 2003, however, Spear, Leeds was under investigation on suspicion of cheating customers to benefit the firm. Todd Christie resigned in March 2003, although he says that his departure was not related to the inquiry and that he did not find out until months later that he was among the traders being investigated. When the United States attorney in Manhattan, David N. Kelley, secured criminal indictments against 15 traders at the firmin 2005, Todd Christie was spared, and faced only civil fraud charges along with four other traders.

The company ultimately settled the case, repaying more than $16 million to investors, without admitting or denying wrongdoing. During the campaign, Christopher Christie stated that his brother had done “absolutely nothing wrong,” and in an interview this week Todd Christie said he had been “completely exonerated.” Two of the indicted traders pleaded guilty; the 13 others were ultimately cleared of criminal charges.

The Securities and Exchange Administration settlement Todd Christie signed, dated Oct. 15, 2008, maintains that he carried out hundreds of trades that brought the firm thousands of dollars in profits at its customers’ expense, and had violated stock exchange rules.

While the investigation produced uncomfortable headlines, particularly when Christopher Christie was deliberating whether to run for governor in 2005, the windfall his brother earned on Wall Street certainly helped ingratiate him with party leaders.

Todd Christie began giving tens of thousands of dollars to New Jersey’s Republican county chairmen in 2001, at a time when they were deciding whom to recommend that the Bush administration nominate as the state’s United States attorney. Three months after his brother was sworn in at that job, Todd Christie wrote a $225,000 check to the Republican National Committee.

Democrats have characterized those contributions as a blunt attempt to help his brother become United States attorney, but Todd Christie insists there was no connection between the two.

“I’d always been involved in politics, but since I’d had the good fortune to become successful, I had more to give,” he said.

[…] In the general election, Democrats also tried to make an issue of Todd’s legal troubles with federal regulators and Chrisopher Christie’s decision in 2007 to give a no-bid legal contract, to monitor an orthopedics firm, to David N. Kelley, the former federal prosecutor who had handled the case against Todd Christie’s firm.

Christopher Christie says that the contract was awarded on merit, and that he and Mr. Kelley have never discussed his brother’s case. Mr. Kelley has concurred, saying his decisions in the Spear, Leeds investigation were influenced solely by the evidence.

What a fracking company did to one activist

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

You have to see this to believe it:

Vera Scroggins, an outspoken opponent of fracking, is legally barred from the new county hospital. Also off-limits, unless Scroggins wants to risk fines and arrest, are the Chinese restaurant where she takes her grandchildren, the supermarkets and drug stores where she shops, the animal shelter where she adopted her Yorkshire terrier, bowling alley, recycling centre, golf club, and lake shore.

In total, 312.5 sq miles are no-go areas for Scroggins under a sweeping court order granted by a local judge that bars her from any properties owned or leased by one of the biggest drillers in the Pennsylvania natural gas rush, Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation.

“They might as well have put an ankle bracelet on me with a GPS on it and be able to track me wherever I go,” Scroggins said. “I feel like I am some kind of a prisoner, that my rights have been curtailed, have been restricted.”

The ban represents one of the most extreme measures taken by the oil and gas industry to date against protesters like Scroggins, who has operated peacefully and within the law including taking Yoko Ono to frack sites in her bid to elevate public concerns about fracking.

Debtors prison in PA

~ susie

district court

If I recall correctly, there is already a legal provision where the defendant can sign an affidavit that you can’t afford to pay the money, but this district justice seems to have decided to make his own rules:

Defendants in Montgomery County said they were repeatedly sent to jail by a district judge over fines and court costs they didn’t have the money to pay. Court observers say it’s happening more frequently across Pennsylvania.

Anna Lisa Wodarski made a call to District Court 38-1-15 in Norristown the day after she learned there’s a bench warrant out for her arrest. She hadn’t responded to an open container ticket she received back in 2012. Now, she would like to get the warrants lifted until she has money to pay the fine.

The woman on the phone told her she would need to come in with the $50 fee for a hearing, visibly frustrating Wodarski.

She turned away and whispered, “This is why I want a drink.” It’s a half joke. She’s a recovering alcoholic living in transitional housing for women on probation. She still reports to a probation officer for an old assault conviction.

Judge Francis Lawrence has already sent Wodarski to jail six times in the past over unpaid fines and court costs. She’s served a combined two months, costing Montgomery County taxpayers more than $3,000.

Modern-day debtor’s prison

According to court records, Lawrence sent people to jail 228 times from 2011 through the middle of December 2013 for “failure to pay collateral.” That’s money paid in advance of a plea, used here sort of like bail to make sure defendants attend the hearing to contest the ticket or the fine they’re asked to pay. These could be traffic tickets, having an open container in public or failing to keep your dog on a leash.

Wodarski and a half-dozen other defendants contacted said they were sent to jail for costs they didn’t have the money to pay.

This is illegal, according to Vic Walczak, legal director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

“What is perfectly clear under both the U.S. Constitution and the Pennsylvania Rules of Criminal Procedure is that you cannot send someone to jail if they cannot afford to pay the fine,” Waldzak said, “because that’s the equivalent of having a debtor’s prison — of putting someone in jail simply because they’re poor.”

People are going to jail in advance of a hearing often enough that the Pennsylvania Criminal Procedural Rules Committee, lawyers and judges who look at issues in the system have proposed changes to the judicial code, emphasizing that jail should be a last resort.

Records show this happening in Montgomery County at least as far back as 1999, with people spending from a day to a month in the county jail. Each day behind bars was worth $40 towards their total fines and costs.

Damages

~ susie

TAFT SCHOOL WATERTOWN CT - CHILD PORN - TEACHER GUILTY
This seems like poetic justice:

A woman whose childhood rapes by her uncle were captured on camera and widely traded on the Internet wants the Supreme Court to make it easier for victims of child pornography to collect money from people who view the brutal images on their computers.

The case being argued at the Supreme Court on Wednesday involves a Texas man who pleaded guilty to having images of children engaged in sex acts on his computer. Doyle Randall Paroline is appealing an order holding him responsible for the full amount of losses, nearly $3.4 million, suffered by the woman known as Amy. Of the several hundred incriminating images on Paroline’s computer, just two were of Amy.

Advocates for child pornography victims say that holding defendants liable for the entire amount of losses better reflects the ongoing harm that victims suffer each time someone views the images online. The threat of a large financial judgment, coupled with a prison term, also might deter some people from looking at the images in the first place, the advocates say.

“The threat that a person in the child pornography market may well bear the entire cost of the harm done to the victim, even if they are a ‘minor player,’ is likely to be a large deterrent, especially when the harm done typically runs into the millions for a victim’s lifetime of care,” said Marci Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva University. Hamilton wrote a brief in the case on behalf of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children.

Feds probing Chris Christie for using Sandy relief money to fund ads during campaign

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Once in a while, there’s a perfect storm that enfolds a politician, and this is one of those times:

Feds probing Chris Christie for using Sandy relief money to fund ads during campaign (via Raw Story )

Federal inspectors are investigating whether New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who was forced to fire two top aides over the George Washington Bridge scandal last week, misused relief funds from superstorm Sandy to make commercials with his family…

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Why the drug war is a joke

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

lanny

I kept forgetting to post this. It’s Matt Taibbi’s take on the HSBC settlement (naturally, with no criminal charges!) and what it all means. Go read it all:

If you’ve ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you’ve ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or “drug paraphernalia” in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.

Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who’s ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a “record” financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.

The banks’ laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC’s Mexican branches and “deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows.”

This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the “legitimate” banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank’s teller windows. Tony Montana’s henchmen marching dufflebags of cash into the fictional “American City Bank” in Miami was actually more subtle than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through one of Britain’s most storied financial institutions.

Do you believe this guy?

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Even though, of course, it hasn’t worked and is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment:

Federal Judge Rules NSA Metadata Collection Legal (via slashdot)

A federal judge in New York has ruled that the National Security Agency (NSA) has the legal right to collect metadata on phone calls made within the United States. In so doing, Judge William H. Pauley III of the U.S. District Court for the Southern…

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Good news

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Capitol Tree Lighting 2013

One small step for humankind!

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Thursday struck down provisions of the state’s Oil and Gas Act that stripped municipalities of the power to determine where natural gas drilling activity could occur within their boundaries.

The long-awaited decision is a blow to a 2012 law known as Act 13 that was promoted by Gov. Corbett and the Marcellus Shale natural gas industry as a means to create a uniform statewide standard for gas development.

By a 4-2 vote, the court ruled that the zoning provisions in the law were unconstitutional, though the court disagreed on the grounds for striking down the law.

“The bottom line is that the majority of the court agreed that Act 13 is unconstitutional, and that local governments can zone oil and gas drilling like they do other activities,” said Jordan B. Yeager, a Doylestown environmental lawyer who argued the case on behalf of several municipalities.

Corbett, Republican legislative leaders, and the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the industry trade group, called the 162-page ruling a “disappointment” in separate statements.

“We must not allow today’s ruling to send a negative message to job creators and families who depend on the energy industry,” Corbett said in a statement. “I will continue to work with members of the House and Senate to ensure that Pennsylvania’s thriving energy industry grows and provides jobs while balancing the interests of local communities.”

Dave Spigelmyer, the coalition’s president, said the decision “represents a missed opportunity to establish a standard set of rules governing the responsible development and operation of shale gas wells in Pennsylvania.”

Environmental groups applauded the decision, saying it would allow municipalities some control over where drilling and hydraulic fracturing take place.