Brian Edward Dotson of Bel-Air thought it would be appropriate to videotape himself having sex with a 5-year-old girl. He was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison (along with a concurrent 35 year sentence on an unrelated rape charge), after which he must be on supervised release.
17-year-old Deontary Neal was charged with arson, attempted murder, and assault after setting fire to his family's Anne Arundel County house last night then trying to kill his aunt with an axe.
Apparently, July 18 is also known as "Attack Your Loved Ones with an Axe Day." Two women were kidnapped from their suburban Harrisburg, PA home and taken to the Eastern Shore. One of the woman had head and facial injuries from being hit with an axe. Elijah Tanui was arrested and charged with a bunch of bad stuff, including attempted homicide.
Taavon Johnson was arrested for the 2002 murder of Dawnta Daney.
After many, many delays, the murder trial of Tyrone Beane has finally started.
A local group is trying to reopen the case of Robert Clay Sr. several months after his death was ruled as a suicide.
The credibility of Lamar Owens' accuser is being called into question in court. In what is surely a complete coincidence, several of the defense witnesses used the same exact language as Owens' defense attorneys in describing the woman.
Darius Spence was convicted to more than 11 years for being the "heroin tester" for a major drug organization. The leader of that organization only got 6 years.
Prosecutors dropped the charges in over half of the criminal cases filed in the city last year, including those with "serious constitutional problems," petty arrests, and police officers who didn't show up.
A 49-year-old Harford County man was arrested and charged with stabbing a 41-year-old neighbor.
A batch of deadly heroin just hit the Eastern Shore.
8 comments:
from WJZ:
Issac Smith, was sentenced to 150 months in prison, followed by 3 years of supervised release, for conspiracy to commit witness tampering and use of fire and explosives to commit a felony, United States Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said in a release.
Smith conspired with a gang of drug dealers who planned the January 2005 attack on Harwood Community Association President Edna McAbier, who had repeatedly complained to police about drug trafficking.
again, from WJZ: in response to apparent crime,
More officers will be assigned to the Eastern, Southwestern and Western districts in the early morning hours between 2:00AM and 6:00AM. Additionally, more organized crime units will patrol neighborhoods identified as new criminal hot spots.
http://wjz.com/local/local_story_199165003.html
My answer: Um, as usual, you need more total sworn officers. Just moving them around in a shell game gets you nowhere, because the criminals are more mobile than you are. You need more cops.
And you need to fire whosoever is getting in the way of promptly securing them.
Residents in the Edgewood vicinity of Harford County are concerned about a rash of murders, sufficiently so that they are seeking the deployment of National Guard troops in order to maintain order. The Harford County Sheriff's office has drawn the parallel to deploying the Guard in crime-plagued Baltimore City.
Really good Editorial
I totally disagree with the editorial in the examiner.
It the same old argument about the police arresting or focusing on people who are not so-called "real criminals".
The sad truth is that "non-violent" offenders are the ones who cause the most harm to communities. And shockingly, they are often juveniles.
I keep hearing the same old stories about the minister and the couple who got lost in Cherry Hill-- as though these are some kinds of common occurance. These things are not common. Enough already.
Although there are always going to be newsworthy freak exceptions, if someone gets arrested in this town, its usually for a damn good reason or they were doing something incredibly stupid.
Oh, I'n not proposing leniency on nonviolent offenders. Far from it. But cases brought before the court should be readily prosecuble.
step 1) Ensure that police officers are available in sufficient supply that they can reliably discharge their obligations at trial with distinction and integrity, thereby eliminating the excuse of...
2) the State's Attorney's office, which needs to stop null prossing any case charged, except to the extent that a) no witness is available per 1), b) evidence is inadequate, or c) there's an insurmountable constitutional-type issue.
step 3) publicize the degree to which particular judges have undermined the sentences prescribed/authorized by state law for these offenses.
We should understand, however, that perfectly innocent (ok, maybe nonoffending) people really do get arrested by BCPD officers for nothing in certain neighborhoods. It's happened to me on more than one occassion. It seriously diminishes the credibility of officers before the court and undermines the confidence of citizens from whom the department may one day seek assistance.
You need to hire more decent cops. Many more. The shoddiness is a direct result of too few (of even very good) cops spead over an area containing way, way too many hoodlums. You'll never get anywhere until you step up to that deficiency. Like, as in now.
I agree that the extent to which particular judges undermine sentencing guidelines should be publicized.
The information is public, but delibrately _NOT_ in electronic form, last time I checked. It would take a lot of meticulous work to sift through this stuff and generate useable reports. Properly publicized, such reports could shame officials into not selecting particular judges (or lead to more turnover if the judges are elected).
Perhaps that would be a good (positive) project for you, Galt? It would be much more effective than merely complaining about this stuff on angry blogspots.
I've actually sought assistance in this regard from the SA's office, which was immediate defensive about actually tracking public servants.
You can't really do this for some cases, as the bias associated with the excluded cases is difficult to determine and probably endogenous to the reporting agency. In other words, you're going to get pretty skewed results, unless you get all cases.
I proposed to record results as a percentage of the maximum penalty, classified by judge and by Asst. State's Attorney, because those identities do matter in outcomes.
The hardest part is figuring how to deal with plea-bargaining and strategic dismissals of parts of the total charge. You'd really need to be privy to a) the bench discussions with counsel and b) the negotiations on the record to tease out how much of the sentence reduction/exclusion came from the judge and how much from the prosecutor. You can't very well blame the judge for an easy prosecutor.
Of course, you can always just take the data by judge and by prosecutor and run ANalysis Of VAriance.
Post a Comment