Thursday, May 1, 2008

May 1

The Sun has the story of Javon Thompson, the missing toddler whose body might've been found in a suitcase in Philly.

Dang. The HoCo police seem to have it out for teenagers and old ladies.

There was a badass car chase in the Southeastern yesterday.

Charges against Montay Jackson were dropped because the evidence is for shit and the SA office doesn't want to risk double jeopardy. Jackson was charged with manslaughter for dragging Charles Erdman to death after a traffic accident last year.

Preston Feaston was charged with assaulting Examiner photographer Arianne Starnes. If there were bystanders to the attack (and this is Baltimore, so of course there were bystanders), maybe they'll get probation like the two guys who egged on the beatdown of 73-year-old Sun journalist Carl Schoettler.

The nun said no, but the judge said yes, and Jennifer McMenamin spun it into an engrossing yarn:
Sister Muriel Curran faced the man who shoved her to the ground and ripped away her purse three years ago. She quoted Scripture. She thanked him for the guilty plea that spared her a trial. And she asked a Baltimore County judge not to send him to prison ... Police officers waiting for other cases listened in astonishment
... Charles R. Dodson still got 4 1/2 years. "The judge explained that he, like Sister Curran, believes in rehabilitation. But he said he also believes in punishment."

Antajuan Wilson was indicted for the murder of Bryan Adams in Columbia. (If he had to kill a doppleganger of a bad Canadian singer, couldn't he have taken out someone named Celine Dion instead?)

Fred Mackler is a trip. A successful businessman and community philanthropist with a bunch of guns and drugs and bird bangers.

15 comments:

badfish said...

I realize that MD's Good Samaritan laws act as a liability shield, but aren't there some states (for some reason I keep thinking of Florida) where failure to assist someone in need of medical help is an offense in itself? I did a cursory search online but didn't find anything, aside from recent legislation mandating the report of child abuse.

Which I guess leaves open the question, why don't we treat the "adults" in Baltimore the same way we treat the children?

ramsey said...

there was a rape yesterday in the 2200 block of saint paul st. in charles village. private investigators just came into my work, which is across the street, asking to see if our video cameras captured anything. no news yet on whether we got any footage.

buzoncrime said...

ramsey---why private investigators? Were the police called?

LCS said...

For those of you who followed the Zach Sowers case, there's an interesting write-up in Urbanite...

"Through a Glass, Darkly"
http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/

ppatin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ppatin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ramsey said...

no idea. thats all i know. they came in, said theyre private investigators from the sex offense unit of baltimore city and wanted to take a loot at our footage.

John Galt said...

Interesting observation, that a Baltimore adult is often held to a lesser degree of responsibility than is a child in many other jurisdictions.

John Galt said...

The Hon. John Glynn hopes two hoods who aided & abetted an assault on a journalist will "behave with more nobility" in the future.

Don't hold your breath, your Honor.

Stewie del Gato said...

badfish:
I believe that a person can be sued for negligence for not helping someone if they are fully capable of helping that person and does not put themselves in undue harm's way. That is a tort, but not a crime. I don't know about criminal law. But I ain't no lawyer either.

Sean said...

Nope, there's actually no general "duty to rescue", and failure to render aid is not tortious. There are a few exceptions to this, in cases where a "special relationship" exists, like spouses, parents, emergency workers, etc. But it doesn't usually apply to the general public. A few states actually DO have duty to rescue laws, but they're basically not enforced. Other countries, such as in Europe, however, DO have duty to rescue laws.

You're correct, badfish, that Good Sam laws protect those offering aid from liability. The exception here is that once aid is begun, it can't just be abandoned halfway through, etc unless it puts the aid-giver at risk.

graham said...

Nope, there's actually no general "duty to rescue", and failure to render aid is not tortious.

Hasn't anyone seen the last episode of Seinfeld??

ppatin said...

Interesting article in Urbanite, although I take issue with some of the things I read.



-"Still others, viewing the Sowers case as just one of many, shrug and ask a more vexing, if utterly familiar, question:
What are we going to do about these kids?"

This is not a difficult question. The answer is you punish them. You punish them harshly enough that they will regret what they did for every remaining day of their lives. Ideally I'd put a bullet in back of the head of every violent felon, but since that'll never happen in our gutless, thug-coddling society I'll shoot for a more realistic goal of long (ideally life) prison sentences.

-"At age 11, he told a male teacher he would "fuck [him] up," which led to a city school system psychiatric evaluation."

Another fine example of what's wrong with our society. Kids who threaten teachers don't need psychiatric evaluations, they need to be punished.

-"He began flunking several classes at a time. More distressingly, he started leaving the house around midnight and staying out until dawn. He would spend both days and nights in a house three blocks north with several other teens, "smoking weed and hanging out with girls," Reed says. He got picked up by police for breaking the city's curfew law and for trespassing. At home, he threatened to hit his mother. Less than a year before the Sowers attack, Reed had her son tested for emotional and mental illness at Villa Maria, a psychiatric services organization downtown run by Associated Catholic Charities, which recommended counseling for ADHD and learning and mood disorders."

Again, we are making the mistake of thinking that thuggish behavior is some sort of illness that can be treated with counseling and ADHD (:rolleyes:) medication.

-"He had just gotten to know Ramos in the spring of 2007, but he had been tight with Arthur "Ace" Jeter Jr., a kid from Pratt Street two blocks north, for years. Jeter is a former special education student—in court, his lawyer said he never learned to read—with a juvenile criminal record for assault.

"Eric looked at Ace like he was some kind of god, like some kind of male role model," Reed says. "Whatever he said went." "

You have a society that condones and practically encourages widespread illegitimacy and this is what you get.

-"Ramos and Eric got out and walked south on Robinson Street, while Jeter and Martin waited. When Zach reached his front steps, Ramos asked him for a cigarette. Ramos, who outweighed Zach by ninety pounds, used his heft to knock Sowers out with a punch, Eric said. Ramos, dressed in jeans, a long-sleeved white T-shirt, and black shoes, then used the fender of a Nissan Sentra parked outside the Sowers home as leverage, leaning on it with his right hand as he repeatedly slammed his foot against the back of Zach's head, which lay between the car and the curb."

Jesus, "A Clockwork Orange" no longer seems like a work of fiction.

-"In a surprising number of instances, kids go at each other for petty things—misheard conversations, somebody eyeing someone else's girlfriend, a battle on the basketball court."

I've reached the point where I no longer give a shit if thugs go after each other. Please just don't hit anyone else in the crossfire, and don't attack those who don't lead a hoodlum lifestyle.

-"As police rounded up the quartet of suspects, Anna couldn't believe that these four youths could be angry enough to do this to her husband. "They reminded me of some of the kids on The Wire," she says."

More like Alex & his three droogs...

-"Friends also sold T-shirts decorated with the image of a thin man spinning records, an homage to Zach as well as a way to help pay for his staggering medical bills."

Do hoodlums have to pay medical bills when they end up in the ER? Nope, only law-abiding citizens pay those.

-"While she says she supports finding public-health interventions that help stop people before they hurt someone, the focus of her efforts is on the sentencing side: When juveniles commit violent crimes, they need to be subject to laws with teeth, and punishments that fit the horrifying nature of the crime, like the one four teens inflicted upon her husband. "I want criminals to think twice before they kick the shit out of someone," she says."

Anna, you are my hero.

-"Instead, Anna could only make a victim impact statement in court last December during a sentencing hearing, after the plea deal was accepted. Screaming at the four defendants through tears, she called them "monsters." One of the parents walked out, to Anna's consternation. "I wasn't nice," she says defiantly."

That parent is a prime example of why some people need to be forcibly sterilized. Or shot...

-"He also suggested they work with the family of Isaiah Simmons, a black 17-year-old who was killed while being held at a juvenile facility in Carroll County. But once Anna found out that Simmons had once been arrested for armed robbery, she refused to get involved with Simmons' family. "That's what happened to Zach," she says."

Good for her. The lives of all murder victims are not equally valuable, and a thug like Isaiah Simmons doesn't deserve the kind of sympathy that Zach Sowers does.

Speaking of people who do deserve sympathy, whatever happened with the Zachariah Hallback case? That was a murder that should've upset people, but was practically ignored. I assume his killer was never found?

ppatin said...

Fred Bealefeld was on the Ron Smith show this afternoon. I have to say, it wasn't his best performance. He came off as little more than a cheerleader for city hall.

Sean said...

Last episode of Seinfeld? If I may quote Wikipedia:

"A Good Samaritan law was featured in the May 1998 series finale of the popular NBC sitcom Seinfeld, in which the show's four main characters were all prosecuted and sentenced to one year in jail for making fun of (rather than helping) an overweight man who was getting robbed at gunpoint. In reality, while Massachusetts (where the crime is committed) does have a law requiring passers-by to report a crime in progress, the most stringent punishment the characters could have suffered under those circumstances would have been a $500-$2500 fine (assuming they were prosecuted under state law); in addition, the phrase "Good Samaritan law," when used in Massachusetts, refers only to the civil law definition, and does not have any actual relevance to the law that Seinfeld and his friends were prosecuted for."