Eideard

A Canadian senator has said imprisoned murderers should have the “right to a rope in their cell”.

Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu, a Conservative senator, later backtracked from the statement, which came a month after two Canadians charged but not convicted of murder were found dead in jail.

Canada abolished the use of capital punishment in 1976…

Mr Boisvenu made his comments to reporters ahead of a meeting of the Conservative caucus. “Each assassin should have the right to a rope in his cell to make a decision about his or her life,” he said. He serves on the committee currently reviewing Canada’s omnibus crime bill.

Mr Boisvenu said he does not expect Canada to reopen the debate on the death penalty, but said “in horrible cases such as [serial killer Clifford] Olson, can we have a reflection on that issue..?”

Mr Harper’s office confirmed that it will not reopen the death penalty debate, but made no other comment…

Mr Boisvenu’s statements were roundly criticised by fellow Canadian politicians.

Bob Rae, an MP for Toronto and interim Liberal Party leader, told CBC the comments “were obviously completely unacceptable”. “He’s also suggesting that the prison system break the Criminal Code, which is equally ludicrous,” Mr Rae said.

Frankly, I think the idea has merit. Understand, I oppose the death penalty [1] our criminal justice and prosecutorial system teeters perpetually on the edge of corruption and [2] life without parole is cheaper than the time and money consumed in endless appeals against execution.

But, just as I feel the individual has the right to order the end of their own lives – whether because of terminal illness or ennui – I see nothing wrong with someone sentenced to life without parole being able to choose a simple means of doing the state a favor and ending his imprisonment with suicide.

Capuchin habit of using bones of dead monks as decoration

An Italian prisoner who was serving out his sentence in an institution run by Capuchin monks has begged to return to jail rather than submit to the rigours of monastic life.

David Catalano this week fled the halfway house in Sicily for the second time in six weeks, complaining that the regime run by the bearded Capuchins was too austere. The 31-year-old inmate first ran away from the Santa Maria degli Angeli halfway house, near the town of Enna in central Sicily, at the end of November.

He turned himself into a police station, was re-arrested, and sent back.

But the criminal, who was serving a sentence for theft and had been sent to the institution under a form of house arrest, made a fresh break on Monday evening. “I don’t want to go back with the Capuchins,” he told probation officers…

The authorities acceded to his request – he was promptly sent to a prison in the nearby town of Nicosia.

The Capuchins are an off-shoot of the Franciscans, from whom they split in the early 16th century. They advocated a much simpler, more rigorous monastic code based on poverty, prayer and penance…not allowed to own property or handle money, and their food was obtained by begging…

I’d call it cruel and unusual punishment – even for a society like Italy – paying homage to religious foolishness.

Tormenting yourself to please some invisible dude in the sky has been left behind by most mainstream religions. The nutballs remaining are on their own.

“I’m only looking at your buttons”

An 81-year-old man who admitted posing as a doctor and giving free breast exams to women at a Lauderdale Lakes apartment complex in 2006 was sentenced on Friday to serve the next 13 months in prison.

Phillip Winikoff, of Coconut Creek, will also serve three years of community control followed by 15 years of sex offender probation once he gets out of Florida state prison. By the time he’s done answering for his crimes, he will be 100 years old…

Zann said Winikoff went to the 3200 block of Northwest 40th Street carrying a black bag and approached a woman taking out her garbage. The white-haired man said he was a doctor performing free breast exams in the area.

According to Zann, Winikoff went to the woman’s apartment, with the woman’s significant other in the next room, and began massaging the woman’s breasts. Then he had her remove her pants and penetrated her with his fingers, Zann said.

That’s when the woman stopped the exam and called for her boyfriend. Winikoff fled the apartment, and the victim called 911. But Winikoff wasn’t done, Zann said. He quickly found another victim and repeated the ruse. Again he talked his way into the woman’s apartment, got her to undress and fondled the woman’s breasts and genitals.

He was charged with sexual battery and practicing medicine without a license. Had he been convicted at trial, he could have been sentenced to 55 years behind bars.

Appearing humbled before the judge, Winikoff spoke softly, barely above a whisper. “I know I did wrong,” he said. Most of what he told the judge was inaudible from the audience, but he did appear to be tearful and remorseful.

The victims did not appear in court.

Sadly demented. But, criminal behavior requires penalties and supervision on behalf of society.

Authorities say a surprise search at a prison in Acapulco resulted in the discovery of two peacocks, 100 fighting cocks, two sacks filled with marijuana and 19 prostitutes.

Police in the Mexican resort city also found dozens of televisions, several bottles of alcohol and knives.

Arturo Martinez, the Guerrero state spokesman, said federal and state police searched the prison before dawn on Monday.

He did not say how the women, birds and other banned objects got into the prison, referring to the peacocks as “pets”. Cockfighting is popular in parts of Mexico.

There are no sanctions announced over this level of corrupt administration. Officials in Mexico’s government will delay any such announcement until they have someone equally on the take ready to resume.

Those who lose their jobs will probably be transferred to another government department – equally incompetent, equally corrupt.

Redbelly the dog receiving award from local coppers

A mother imprisoned for lying to police about her pregnancy is battling for custody of the child she left in the yard of a neighbor shortly after his birth.

Nunu Sung is scheduled for parole in January after serving some of a three-year prison term imposed after she pleaded guilty in October 2010 to felony obstruction of justice. In exchange, prosecutors agreed they would not seek to terminate the woman’s parental rights.

However, prosecutors are now involved in terminating Sung’s parental rights to 2-year-old Joshua in favor of a Wheaton couple who are the child’s foster parents.

DuPage Circuit Judge Blanche Hill Fawell said…prosecutors may have erred in making the promise but were legally obligated to get involved in the parental termination proceedings. The judge said Sung’s only option is to file a post-conviction request to reopen her plea and sentence…

Sung’s attorneys said she hid her pregnancy because she was afraid she would be punished and scorned by her family…

A civil attorney appointed by Fawell as Joshua’s guardian filed paperwork to terminate Sung’s parental rights based largely on her abandoning the child…

The newborn was found in June 2009 by a Wheaton man who noticed the baby with its umbilical cord still attached after his dog spotted the child under a tree and barked. Prosecutors alleged the child might have died if he hadn’t been found.

“The baby, who was left outside on the cold, hard ground, had a body temperature in the low 80s and was hypothermic,” Assistant State’s Attorney Anne Therieau wrote earlier this year in court records. “But for a dog, who was let out in the morning hours, this baby would have died.”

Tough decision for lot of folks. I’d come down on the side of the wee’un who’s been living with folks who loved him from the gitgo. It’s nice that Joshua’s natural mother wants to retake the responsibility of raising him – but, she was equally ready to leave him to die.

Five current or former police officers have been found guilty on a combined 25 counts of civil rights violations tied to fatal shootings on New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Jurors reached a verdict in the closely watched trial after three days of deliberations.

The shootings occurred on Danziger Bridge on September 4, 2005, six days after much of New Orleans went underwater after the powerful hurricane slammed into the Gulf Coast.

Prosecutors contend the officers opened fire on an unarmed family, killing 17-year-old James Brissette and wounding four others. Minutes later, one of the officers shot and killed Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old man described by Justice officials as having severe mental disabilities.

Madison was trying to flee the scene when he was shot, according to a Justice Department statement. One of the officers allegedly “stomped and kicked” Madison before he died, the statement noted.

Officers Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Robert Faulcon and Anthony Villavaso were convicted in the shootings along with a fifth defendant, former detective Arthur Kaufman.

The five men are scheduled to be sentenced on December 14. Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso are facing potential multiple life sentences, as well as additional penalties for charges tied to a conspiracy to cover up what happened on the bridge. Kaufman faces a maximum penalty of 120 years in prison.

“Today’s verdict by these jurors sends a powerful, a powerful, unmistakable message to public servants, to law enforcement officers and to the citizens we serve and indeed to the world,” U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said. “That message is that public officials and especially law enforcement officers will be held accountable for their acts, and that any abuse of power, especially that power that violates the rights and the civil liberties of our citizens, will have serious consequences.”

“The citizens of this country will not, should not, and we intend that they will never have to fear the individuals who are called upon to protect them,” Letten declared.

Overdue.

RTFA if you need your memory jogged. Local officials could have taken care of this – and didn’t. The police department could have come down on the side of justice and didn’t. Federal efforts on behalf of abused civil rights are still needed for justice in many of these United States.

A 59-year-old man has been jailed in Gastonia, N.C., on charges of larceny after allegedly robbing an RBC Bank for $1 so he could get health care in prison. Richard James Verone handed a female teller a note demanding the money and claiming that he had a gun, according to the police report.

He then sat down and waited for police to arrive. “… I say, ‘I’ll be sitting right over here, on the chair, waiting for the police,’” Verone told reporters, recalling the June 9 robbery in an interview from Gaston County Jail.

And wait for the police, he did.

“He’s sitting on the sofa as you walk in the front door,” the bank teller said in a 911 call.

Police arrested Verone where he sat. He was unarmed.

Verone said he asked for $1 to show that his motives were medical, not monetary, according to news reports. With a growth in his chest, two ruptured disks and no job, Verone hoped a three-year stint in prison would afford him the health care he needed.

“I’m sort of a logical person and that was my logic, what I came up with,” Verone told reporters. “If it is called manipulation, then out of necessity because I need medical care, then I guess I am manipulating the courts to get medical care.”

Oh. No one else noticed we live in a nation that guarantees better health care for criminals than ordinary citizens?

Our fear-driven politicians will not notice the passing of a poor man like Richard James Verone through their banking system, jail system – anymore than any other small creature invading their palaces for a moment or two.

Thanks, Helen

Gonzalo Esquivel said to be a leader in Nuestra Familia cops a free ride

The authorities in California announced…the arrest of more than 100 people suspected of being gang members in the largely agricultural Central Valley, the latest sweep by law enforcement to stem what they call a growing — and international — menace in the nation’s most populous state.

The announcement, made by California’s attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, capped raids on Tuesday in six towns, many of which have long struggled with gang-related crime.

“This operation was a success,” said Ms. Harris, standing at City Hall in the small farm city of Los Banos, about 120 miles southeast of San Francisco. “And this operation will bear its fruit in terms of public safety for the Central Valley and throughout the state of California.”

The investigation, called “Red Zone,” was conducted over several months and aimed at the leadership of two gangs: Nuestra Familia, a Mexican-American prison-based gang that operates in detention facilities across the state, and the Norteños, which the authorities say often acts as the Familia’s street-level arm…

“This is part of what we’re seeing in terms of the changing face of crime,” Ms. Harris said, adding that the emphasis was going from “purely drug enforcement” to being “equally about gangs, equally about guns, equally about drugs.”

Large amounts of narcotics, firearms and cash were seized in the Central Valley raids, including methamphetamine and crack cocaine and five assault rifles. Charges included assault, mayhem, gun possession and attempted murder.

Throw away the key!

The view from Tower #3
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

For over a century the picturesque waters around McNeil Island had a job to do: they kept the inmates in.

Convicted criminals arriving at “the prison without walls” soon found out that attempting to swim the three miles through the frigid Puget Sound was a death sentence. But after 135 years, Friday will be closing time at McNeil — and the water off its shores will no longer be needed to deter escaping prisoners…

Before this week’s closing, almost all of the prison’s 1,200 inmates and 400-person staff were transferred to other facilities. A separate institution housing sexual offenders remains on the island, but nature is being allowed to retake much of the roughly 7-square-mile island.

Shortly after McNeil’s opening, an official described the prison’s location as “one of the most impractible (sic) situations that could possibly be selected for an institution of that kind,” according to “The McNeil Century,” a book on the prison’s history. Moreover, the prison initially was built without living facilities for guards…

The relative openness of McNeil Island prison and slim chance of escape meant the community of prison employees and their families became accustomed to living among inmates.

“We had inmates as housekeepers; they took care of our yards,” said Tim Taylor, who has spent 54 years on the island, first while growing up as the son of a guard and later while working there as a construction supervisor…

Taylor said inmates, under the watchful eyes of guards, crewed the boats to the mainland and drove the island’s school buses…

The prison passed into state hands in 1981 after officials at the Federal Bureau of Prisons decided that the expense of operating an island prison ran too high…For the next 30 years, the state of Washington also grappled with those same costs…

Last year, as the state faced a $4 billion budget shortfall, prison officials announced they would shut down the facility. McNeil’s closure will save the state more than $8 million a year, Morgan said. In the last weeks of McNeil’s life, inmates dissembled their own prison. Windows, door locks and kitchen ovens were removed and sent to other state facilities on the mainland as McNeil was readied to be mothballed.

Everyone overlooks the expense of a seriously secure island prison requires decent living conditions for the guards and their families, schools for their children. Of course, you could always try a sci-fi movie solution – and just air-drop food and medical supplies and leave the cons to fend for themselves. Right.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Former Israeli president Moshe Katsav has been sentenced to seven years in prison for rape and other sexual offences following a year-long trial which ended with his conviction in December.

Katsav, president from 2000 to 2007, said he was innocent and was being persecuted by the courts and Israeli society at large. He is expected to appeal.

Katsav was convicted of two counts of rape of an employee at the tourism ministry, where he was minister from 1996-1999. He was also convicted of the indecent assault and sexual harassment of two other employees at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem during his presidency.

The president was given the chance of a plea bargain in which he could admit lesser charges but chose to fight all charges in a trial which, although conducted in private, was accompanied by leaks from both sides in the media.

The judges told the court: “The crime of rape damages and destroys a person’s soul … Due to the severity of the crime, the punishment must be clear and precise. The defendant committed the crime and like every other person, he must bear the consequences. No man is above the law…”

The former president was also ordered to pay 100,000 shekels ($28,000) to the rape victim and 25,000 shekels to each of the other victims.

He isn’t the first president – nor will he be the last – to end up in prison. There is an endless supply of politicians seeking the highest office in their land – who think they are above the law.