DETROW: That’s what the press secretary says. The Pentagon has repeatedly said, the United States does not deliberately target civilians, and yet the president is talking about attacking a desalination plant. Would that be a war crime?
RONA: Absolutely, Scott, both under international law and U.S. law. We have a War Crimes Act that prohibits precisely this kind of thing. It would also be a violation of laws against terrorism. It’s prohibited to engage in attacks in armed conflict where the primary purpose is to spread terror among the civilian population. If you’re targeting a desalination plant, then that would be an act of terrorism.
DETROW: Help us understand a little bit more just ’cause I think you cannot overexplain this enough, right? Like, here’s an example. In the early days of the war, it seems like the United States accidentally bombed a girls school. What is the difference between something like that and deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure like a desalination plant?
RONA: So the difference is that even though one might have been mistaken and the other intentional, under U.S. law, both intentional and mistaken attacks that aren’t pursuant to due diligence can be war crimes.
Tag: Crime
Routine-Activity Theory and Serial Killers
There is a third possible explanation for the serial-killer epidemic, and although Fraser doesn’t mention it, it happens to be the prevailing inclination among contemporary criminologists. “Routine-activity theory,” which was first elaborated by sociologists in the late nineteen-seventies, treats crime as a matter of ecology. The “golden era” of serial killers was made possible by the contingent rise of some technologies and practices—the automobile, the interstate highway system, the prevalence of hitchhiking—that happened to facilitate crimes of opportunity. In the last quarter century, the development of other technologies and practices—surveillance cameras, phone tracking, interjurisdictional coöperation, and DNA evidence, along with a much greater degree of interpersonal paranoia—have drastically limited those opportunities. Ted Bundy might have been profoundly lead-poisoned, but he also lived in a time and a place where it wasn’t hard to kill with impunity.
Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers?
Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus
10 Nonfiction Books on Law, Crime, and Punishment
Selections mine, summary by Wikipedia, except where noted. Ordered by date.
Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders – 1974
Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders is a 1974 book by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. Bugliosi had served as the prosecutor in the 1970 trial of Charles Manson. The book presents his firsthand account of the cases of Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and other members of the self-described Manson Family. It is the best-selling true crime book in history.
One L – 1977
One L tells author Scott Turow’s experience as a first-year Harvard Law School student. The book takes place in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Harvard University is located. First years, or One-L’s as they are often called, all face similar issues in their initial year of law school. Harvard, known for its reputation as one of the best law schools in the country, takes only about 12% of applicants.
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets – 1991
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is a 1991 non-fiction book written by Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon describing a year spent with detectives from the Baltimore Police Department Homicide Unit. The book received the 1992 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category.
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing – 2000
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing is a nonfiction book by journalist and professor Ted Conover published in 2000 by Vintage Books. In the book, Conover recounts his experience of learning firsthand about the New York State prison system by becoming a correctional officer for nearly a year. Conover sought the job of correctional officer after the New York State Department of Correctional Services denied his request to shadow the department’s employees in a journalist role.
The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Private Life of the American Death Penalty – 2001
(Amazon summary)
In fascinating detail, Ivan Solotaroff introduces us to men who carry out executions. Although the emphasis is on the personal lives of these men and of those they have to put to death, The Last Face You’ll Ever See also addresses some of the deeper issues of the death penalty and connects the veiled, elusive figure of the executioner to the vast majority of Americans who have claimed to support executions since 1977. Why do we do it? Or, more exactly, why do we want to?
The Last Face You’ll Ever See is not about the polarizing issues of the death penalty — it is a firsthand report about the culture of executions: the executioners, the death-row inmates, and everyone involved in the act. An engrossing, unsettling, and provocative book, this work will forever affect anyone who reads it.
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron – 2003
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron is a book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, first published in 2003 by Portfolio Trade. In 2005, it was adapted into a documentary film, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
McLean and Elkind worked on the book when they both were Fortune senior writers. McLean had written a March 5, 2001 article for Fortune called, “Is Enron overpriced?”
The book is not only about the Enron scandal, but also describes the authors’ effort in following the developing story as it happened. It is based on hundreds of interviews and details from personal calendars, performance reviews, e-mails, and other documents. BusinessWeek called it, “The best book about the Enron debacle to date.”
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx – 2003
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx is a 2003 narrative non-fiction study of urban life by American writer Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.
The book, LeBlanc’s first, took more than 10 years to research and write. Random Family is a nonfiction account of the struggles of two women and their family as they deal with love, drug dealers, babies and prison time in the Bronx. LeBlanc began the long period of research after reporting on a piece in Newsday about the trial of “a hugely successful heroin dealer” named George ‘Boy George’ Rivera.
Blue Blood – 2004
… Blue Blood (2004), which covers Conlon’s years in the NYPD, his work conducting street-level narcotics enforcement in the Housing Bureau, his family’s law enforcement background, and various anecdotes about the history of policing. The book received a favorable review on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, debuted at #9 on the Times Best Seller list, and remained on the list for two weeks.[citation needed]
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption – 2014
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014) is a memoir by American attorney Bryan Stevenson that documents his career defending disadvantaged clients. The book, focusing on injustices in the United States judicial system, alternates chapters between documenting Stevenson’s efforts to overturn the wrongful conviction of Walter McMillian and his work on other cases, including children who receive life sentences, and other poor or marginalized clients.
The Second Chance Club: Hardship and Hope After Prison – 2020
(Amazon summary)
A former parole officer shines a bright light on a huge yet hidden part of our justice system through the intertwining stories of seven parolees striving to survive the chaos that awaits them after prison in this illuminating and dramatic book.
Prompted by a dead-end retail job and a vague desire to increase the amount of justice in his hometown, Jason Hardy became a parole officer in New Orleans at the worst possible moment. Louisiana’s incarceration rates were the highest in the US and his department’s caseload had just been increased to 220 “offenders” per parole officer, whereas the national average is around 100. Almost immediately, he discovered that the biggest problem with our prison system is what we do—and don’t do—when people get out of prison.
Ex Cons and the Workplace – JP Morgan CEO Wants More Opportunity
One in three American adults — more than 70 million people — have some type of criminal record. To put this in perspective, about the same number of Americans have college degrees right now.
Unfortunately, these Americans, who were incarcerated or have a conviction on their record, are essentially unable to secure good jobs in this country. Nearly half of formerly incarcerated people are unemployed one year after leaving prison. That is a moral outrage.
This group is ready to work and deserves a second chance — an opportunity to fill the millions of job openings across the country. Yet our criminal justice system continues to block them from doing so.
If You Paid Your Debt to Society, You Should Be Allowed to Work
Jamie Dimon
NYTIMES
Inmates on Dostoevsky
He gets up abruptly from the desk he’s been leaning on and lumbers over. “All right,” he says. “Let me have one of those Pall Malls.” I offer the whole pack. He takes three, puts one behind each ear, lights the other, and French-inhales the smoke in a way I haven’t seen for twenty years. “The first thing to understand about an execution,” he says, “is that it’s a ritual. You’ve heard that before, but probably only as a truism. There’s nothing cliché about an execution. It is a modern religious ritual, sanctified in the sense that everything represents something else. The executioner’s fee is the eye for the eye. The sacrifice is implicit in the fact that only one out of every hundred or so gets killed. The blood atonement is what the prisoner’s last meal symbolizes. Notice how the exact menu always gets in the newspaper story? That’s just some AP asshole, acting out a ritual he doesn’t even know is a ritual. He’s covering a communion.”
Dennis is a middle-class northerner, a black sheep who at the age of nineteen killed a man accidentally while sowing wild oats in a barnstorming through the South in the late 1950s. He wound up in Angola and lost his eye in a knife fight in which he killed an inmate, for which he received a death sentence. Like Rideau, who taught himself to read on the row, Dennis spent the 1960s reading everything from the New Republic to Dostoevsky. Everyone in this office has read Dostoevsky, in fact, and to a man they are convinced that he murdered someone during his youth. No one, they say, could have understood the psyche of a murderer that well without having tasted blood himself.
Solotaroff, Ivan. The Last Face You’ll Ever See
True Crime Stories – Bag Murders and the Last Call Killer
“It’s a fluke that he got caught because once the task force in 1993 was over, a case like that goes to the bottom of the pile. This is not one of those situations where there’s a team of detectives that are still working on it. Reality is not like that,” Green said.
Green said that because of the push and persistence from Margaret Mulcahy, the wife of victim Thomas Mulcahy, cops looked at it again. Detectives involved in the case from in New Jersey utilized a new fingerprint technology that their counterparts at the Toronto Police Department had been using.
“Toronto Police Service was using a reasonably new technology called vacuum metal deposition. Because of the relationships that the New Jersey police had with the Canadian police, they were aware of this technology and called in a favor,” Green said.
The detectives sent fingerprints they were able to lift from the victims and sent them to Canada. Toronto Police were able to look to see what fingerprints matched from their massive database. And, as luck would have it, they found a match from someone who was fingerprinted in Maine in 1973.
How the Bag Murders and the Last Call Killer Put in Focus the Dangers the New York LGBTQ+ Community Faces
Sal Bono
Inside Edition
50 Years of the War on Drugs
Hinton has lived his whole life under the drug war. He said Brownsville needed help coping with cocaine, heroin and drug-related crime that took root here in the 1970s and 1980s.
His own family was scarred by addiction.
“I’ve known my mom to be a drug user my whole entire life,” Hinton said. “She chose to run the streets and left me with my great-grandmother.”
Four years ago, his mom overdosed and died after taking prescription painkillers, part of the opioid epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Hinton said her death sealed his belief that tough drug war policies and aggressive police tactics would never make his family or his community safer.
Brian Mann
Morning Edition
Many a True Word is Spoken in Jest – Example of
The Seven Five (2014) Police Corruption in New York’s 75th Precinct from Documentaries
idgafmods
I let a friend stay at my place for a while, and he was always the funniest person. He’d joke about stabbing me sometimes (sounds weird, but it was always in jest).
A couple years ago he got locked up for murder on a DNA match, for a crime he committed just before living at my place, where he stabbed a guy to death. He basically used my place to lie low, and joked about it openly to our clueless asses.
PhantomOSX
Wow… were there any close calls or anything worth mentioning that stood out after you found out he was a murderer?
idgafmods
Not with me but my best friend definitely almost got stabbed, in hindsight. They got into a really heated debate about something, and my friend is a super hot-headed Italian. They basically came close to fighting and the stabby dude kept telling him “I’ll shank you” when they were face to face.
Nobody at the time thought it was anything but a bullshit threat that didn’t mean anything. Turns out he meant it all along!
Everyone’s gone Hollywood
After McCartin and Knolls deliver a synopsis of the case, they provide Krumer with the phone numbers for Luda’s mother and husband in Kiev. Start with the husband, Knolls tells Krumer, even though they were separated.
McCartin calls the manager of Luda’s apartment building. When he hangs up, he is chuckling. “You know the first thing the manager says?” he asks Knolls. “He asked me what the victim’s ‘backstory’ was.” “Everyone’s gone Hollywood,” Knolls says.
Corwin, Miles. Homicide Special
Cracking a Zodiac Cipher – Youtube Explanation
Unequal Justice, Example of
Judge Les Hayes once sentenced a single mother to 496 days behind bars for failing to pay traffic tickets. The sentence was so stiff it exceeded the jail time Alabama allows for negligent homicide.
Marquita Johnson, who was locked up in April 2012, says the impact of her time in jail endures today. Johnson’s three children were cast into foster care while she was incarcerated. One daughter was molested, state records show. Another was physically abused.
“Judge Hayes took away my life and didn’t care how my children suffered,” said Johnson, now 36. “My girls will never be the same.”
Fellow inmates found her sentence hard to believe. “They had a nickname for me: The Woman with All the Days,” Johnson said. “That’s what they called me: The Woman with All the Days. There were people who had committed real crimes who got out before me.”
In the past dozen years, state and local judges have repeatedly escaped public accountability for misdeeds that have victimized thousands. Nine of 10 kept their jobs, a Reuters investigation found – including an Alabama judge who unlawfully jailed hundreds of poor people, many of them Black, over traffic fines.
Michael Berens And John Shiffman
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-judges-misconduct/
What is the strangest mystery that is still unsolved? – AskReddit
What is the strangest mystery that is still unsolved? from r/AskReddit
WhaddaFucc
An unknown group of people broke into an FBI building, and no one has found out who they are. But the best part of the story is, they did it by leaving a sticky note that said “Do not lock the door tonight” and it worked.
snekholstervegatale
Imagine being the guy who left it unlocked
billhilly008
I think that would be everyone that day…
zenkique
Last one out was the most rotten egg, though.
ohshawty
This is my favorite weird and barely known one:
Back in 2013 an unknown group assaulted a power substation in California. By all appearances it was pretty sophisticated: scouted firing positions, all casings wiped of prints, they targeted transformers so they’d take time to overheat before triggering any alarms, also knew exactly when the police would arrive.
No suspect or motive to this day, they also cut some fiber optic cables in a vault nearby. Conspiracy types think it was a dry run by Russia or possibly China to see how effective an attack like that might be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
CrazyDinosaurGuy
What kind of Transformers, Autobots or Decepticons?
BulkDiscountAbortion
Since the mystery was never solved, I’d say it’s the perfect Optimus Crime.
iPhone app is replacing the police notebook in New York
Why the N.Y.P.D. Dropped One of Its Oldest Crime-Fighting Tools
Officers’ most-used item since the 1800s isn’t the gun or handcuffs, but the handwritten activity log. Now an iPhone app is replacing it.
For more than a century, the New York City Police Department has required its officers to keep a detailed, handwritten memo book while on patrol.
“It’s basically our bible,” said Officer Ramses Cruz, who joined a platoon of officers writing down patrol assignments in oversize black leather binders at a recent afternoon roll call at the 90th Precinct Station House in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Corey Kilgannon, NY TImes
‘Criminals and thugs have laid claim to downtown’: Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses and other Seattleites share their frustrations
I have worked on Third Avenue since 1996. During this time, I watched Third Avenue become an open-air market of drugs and stolen goods, and other criminal activities. I have witnessed shoplifting at nearly every store; stores close due to shoplifting; people defecate in the streets; people injecting heroin; and untreated addiction and mental illness cause heartbreaking misery. My suburban friends have stopped coming downtown.
Criminals and thugs have laid claim to downtown, and Durkan and Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best have done little or nothing to thwart criminal activity that I, or any other brave Seattle citizen, can witness — night or day — by walking Third Avenue between Pike and Pine.
Letters to the Editor, Seattle Times
see also:
Downtown Seattle businesses and employees scared, frustrated after latest shooting
Yet some employees and managers said these new measures would do little to address the deeper problems that have made the several-block area between Pike Street and Denny Way — an area nicknamed “The Blade” — into a magnet for criminals and drug dealers as well as people struggling with homelessness, addiction, and mental health issues. Many described a sense of powerlessness in the face of a constant presence of petty criminals who often seem to operate with impunity.
You know it’s a good time to move when you get this email.
I’m out of here.
January 19, 2020
Dear Residents:
We unfortunately must inform you of a troubling occurrence that took place in the community on Saturday night or early Sunday morning. Certain unidentified youth gained access to the community’s clubhouse for an unauthorized gathering during which gunshots were fired and one or two individuals were injured. The __Denver Police Dept. are currently conducting an investigation and if you have any information that might assist in the investigation, please contact the ___Denver Police Dept.___ at [REDACTED].
Unfortunately, crime has no zip code and is a problem that affects all communities. Awareness is one major way of deterring crime so we ask that you immediately report any criminal or suspicious activity by calling your local law enforcement agency, or by dialing 911 IN AN EMERGENCY. It is imperative that you call the police before contacting the management office, as time spent contacting the management office will only delay police response time. Only after reporting a matter to the police should you notify the management office of any incident.