Crime

I read this last night and scratched my head:

He reported that he had been at the Last Call Tavern in Penfield and as he was leaving a fight broke out in the parking lot.

Tarter reported that a man he didn't know bit off his upper lip and ran.

Huh?

How often do we see this in the report of a traffic fatality:

Coile said Black was also issued tickets for driving under suspension, operating an uninsured motor vehicle and failure to reduce speed to avoid an accident.

Usually unreported, but generally understood:

All those are petty traffic offenses.

It is a painful pattern to watch.  Guy gets arrested for DUI, and is hammered with that draconian punishment of having his driving priviledges suspended.  Yeah, big deal.  The punishment for driving without a license is a PETTY TRAFFIC OFFENSE.  So he just keeps driving.  And, often, repeats the drinking and driving that got him in trouble in the first place.  The guy that killed the Elsworthy girls didn't have a valid license, as I recall.

This needs to be tightened up - seriously tightened up.  If you are caught driving on a suspended license, I think some jail time is in order.  That's a bit gentler than taking the car - my other idea.  These people have a blatant disregard for the law - let's get them off the road one way or the other.

Two more articles in this weekend's News-Gazette about the Garden Hills neighborhood:  Garden Hills Has Been Foundation for Generations of Families and Residents Have Ideas Where City Can Help Subdivision:

Restad would like to see signs on some streets warning motorists that there may be children present and to slow down. She would also like to see lighting for the park and some streets.

"It's really dark out there. Hopefully, the city and park district will improve the lighting," she said. "There's no sidewalks.

"I don't know how many times I've seen kids almost hit by a car."

In yesterday's News-Gazette there was this excellent article by Mike Monson about Champaign's Garden Hills neighborhood, some of its history and challenges, and plans for it moving forward:

Garden Hills has a way of getting noticed.

The northwest neighborhood of roughly 1,000 homes – a proud, diverse and working-class neighborhood – has its share of problems. But it's also filled with many longtime residents who say they wouldn't live anyplace else.

This summer, Garden Hills is the focus of an intense city effort to provide activities and guidance to local youths, who alarmed city officials last spring by gathering in large numbers on many nights and sometimes clashing with police.

More than 50 years ago, Garden Hills was getting noticed for a different reason: its sheer unprecedented scale. The dream of developer Cecil Ozier and his two sons, Darrell and Mervyn, all now deceased, Garden Hills was described in a 1955 news article as "the largest single residential development ever proposed here at one time."

Discuss.

This one act has unfairly been put into place to entrap honest Americans.  Government agencies can eavesdrop on conversations in the homes of Americans.  Wiretap their phones and place of work, to try and uncover some act of illegality.  This is all done because government officials believe that these decent and patriotic citizens of the United States are allegedly involved in 'corrupt' acts.  What happend to 'innocent until proven guilty'?  This is the reverse, presumed guilty, spied upon, and innocence vanishes.  Gambling can be done in casinos with no prosecution but in the privacy of ones home, one can be tried and imprisoned.  The only reason that law enforcement is aware of leisurely gambling is because the F.B.I resides in the phones and lamps.   

Cosa Nostra existed to protect the rights of immigrants in a new land.  They had lotteries for the immigrants to play to win extra money and some vendors left soup on the stove after hours to feed the hungry.  These men were men of honor, who took care of their own people and that is still what occurs today.  Joe Bonnano's father assisted new Americans to start anew in a foreign place.  Now they are labeled as 'criminals', society never hears the other side of this American dream.    

Educate Thyself. 

Don't talk to the police.  Don't talk to the police.  Don't talk to the police.

http://www.hackaday.com/2008/06/16/dont-talk-to-the-police/

Today's articles about the Jon White travesty are a follow-up to yesterday's "How Could This Happen" series.

First, Districts more careful about who comes in contact with children:

As for mandated reporting, Williams said, staff members "get information when they're hired, and then also at the beginning of the year."

Staff members must all sign a sheet stating that they understand they are mandated reporters. As well, he said, in the first in-service meeting of the school year, they get training on mandated reporting, another new element.

Training staff on mandated reporting is one way schools can make a difference in recognition and response to child sexual abuse, said Charol Shakeshaft, the author of a U.S. Department of Education-sponsored paper on educator sexual misconduct and an educational leadership professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

"Training in this area needs to be done regularly," she said. "It needs to be done every year."

Second, Urbana getting bigger legal bills:

In invoices dated Feb. 15, 2007, and March 23, 2007 – just after White's charges were filed – the district received $24,928 in legal bills from Weedman's firm. In the previous two months, the district received $7,307 in legal bills from Weedman's firm.

The Urbana school board hired a separate firm, The Taylor Law Office in Effingham, specifically for the purpose of evaluating the district's response to concerns about White and to look at its policies.

Bills from the law firm – one from April 2007 and one from June 2007 – show the school district has already paid at least $42,804 for the external review.

Third, 2002 case strikingly similar to White case:

If the case of Jon White feels eerily familiar to some East Central Illinoisans, there's a good reason.

In 2002, Gerald Scott Huddleston, then a teacher at Chatsworth Elementary School in Livingston County, was charged with committing oral sex acts against young girls.

The circumstances of his acts read like a playbook that White – who attended nearby Illinois State University at the time – could have followed: bringing students to the classroom to help with cleaning, blindfolding students and having them perform a "tasting game."

Huddleston was convicted on three counts of predatory criminal sexual assault, and is now serving life in prison at Menard.

Discuss.

Today's N-G has an excellent article on how Jon White might have been stopped earlier, and wasn't.  There's also a followup about what's happened since, and some related articles about mandatory reporting.

Jon White could have been stopped much earlier.

There were at least seven warning points at which a school employee in either Urbana or McLean County could have justified a call to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

No one did.

And so White – the man convicted of aggravated criminal sexual abuse for acts involving 10 children – kept teaching.

Discuss.

So, in the aftermath of my somewhat controversial comparison of violence in Iraq and violence in Chicago, does anyone want to take a stab at comparing the security situations in Iraq compared to the policies now being implemented in Washington, DC?

D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence.

Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.

Lanier has been struggling to reverse D.C.’s spiraling crime rate but has been forced by public outcry to scale back several initiatives including her “All Hands on Deck” weekends and plans for warrantless, door-to-door searches for drugs and guns.

Of course, I would never dream of comparing the two situations.  Wouldn't be politically correct.

Aside:  Good thing that DC has a gun ban, otherwise things would be much, much worse!

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catalina, patientia nostra?

The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 3038) is going into discussion.  Doubly arrogant, they think that not only can they legislate against physics and geology, but also they believe they can hoodwink the public with this pretext for more devastating and stifling control and crippling taxation.  And they call it security?  How dare they!?  Are the people really so stupid as this to suck up this drivel?   This is the same Joe Lieberman who we saw on TV with his hand up Senator McCain working McCain's mouth.

"Global warming has little to do with the improving the environment or reducing pollution. The real agenda is taxation and further consolidation of authority into a powerful centralized and increasingly global government." 

more here.

The continuing expensive, brutal, illegal and seemingly interminable war in Iraq was the defining issue in the 2006 and portends to be so in 2008 election, as one cause of the fracture of among conservatives, departure of GOP membership in droves, and the cause of the impending November trainwreck.  There is another reason for Americans and particularly young people to be concerned.  This is not a push-button war fought with unmanned drones and electromechanical technology.  This version of Neocon Playstation X demands bodies for its meatgrinder.  Do you feel a draft?

It has been pointed out in this forum that neoconservative warmongering is definitely not part of the conservative Republican tradition, and both McCainoids and Obamites scoff and laugh at this notion.  There is a a new book supporting this concept.  Bill Kauffman, onetime Senate staffer and think tank editor turned essayist and author, who lives in upstate New York has written - Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism.  This book is the subject of an excellent review by Doug Bandow.  Doug Bandow is a Washington-based political writer and policy analyst and Robert A. Taft Fellow with the American Conservative Defense Alliance. He served as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and as a senior policy analyst in the 1980 Reagan for President campaign.  Some excerpts from the book and review follow.

*

"[T]here is a long and honorable (if largely hidden) tradition of antiwar thought and action among the American Right. It stretches from ruffle-shirted Federalists who opposed the War of 1812 and civic-minded mugwump critics of the Spanish-American War on up through the Midwestern isolationists who formed the backbone of the pre-World War II America First Committee and the conservative Republicans who voted against U.S. involvement in NATO, the Korean conflict, and Vietnam. And although they are barely audible amid the belligerent clamor of today's shock-and-awe Right, libertarians and old-fashioned traditionalist conservatives are among the sharpest critics of the Iraq War and the imperial project of the Bush Republicans."

..."In pre-imperial America, conservatives objected to war and empire out of jealous regard for personal liberties, a balanced budget, the free enterprise system, and federalism," explains Kauffman. To them, dissent was "a patriotic imperative." But another commonality was being vilified and worse. He adds: "As the American Firsters discovered, protesting war is a lousy career move. Dissenters are at best calumniated, at worst thrown in jail for standing against foreign wars and the drive thereto."

If today the Right seems a wholly-owned subsidiary of the War Party, the American people are less enthused. Naturally, this worries the elites who believe their role is to initiate wars for other Americans to fight. Observes Kauffman, "Bush Republicans and pro-war Democrats have fretted mightily over recent surveys from the Council on Foreign Relations showing that the American people are reverting to – horrors! – isolationism, which the CFR defines invidiously as a hostility toward foreigners but which I see as a wholesome, pacific, and very American reluctance to intervene in the political and military quarrels of other nations."

Indeed, the essence of nonintervention, however labeled, is that it is not the American purpose to engage in global social engineering. Whether the genesis of that belief is fear of or respect for foreigners really doesn't matter. This reluctance to intervene is the highest form of internationalism. That is, noninterventionists respect other peoples enough to believe that Americans do not have the unilateral right to roam the world killing, maiming, and injuring whoever happens to be Washington's declared enemy of the moment in pursuit of whatever happens to be Washington's declared objective of the moment.

Kauffman appropriately begins with the nation's founders, men whose views on war are dismissed as quaint by most politicians today. For instance, George Mason told the 1788 Virginia convention debating ratification of the U.S. Constitution: "I abominate and detest the idea of a government, where there is a standing army." Notes Kauffman, "His view was not anomalous; militarism was."  Imagine that, national politicians opposed to war. But a wariness of military entanglements was a constant of early America. There is, Kauffman observes, George Washington's Farewell Address, which is "as close to an expression of early American political omnifariousness as one might find," a veritable "sacred text among conservative critics of empire." American children typically read it, or parts of it, but how many learn that, as Kauffman writes, "Washington's valedictory amounts to a repudiation of U.S. foreign policy from 1917 to the present"?

Then there was the Mexican-American War (which Thoreau vigourously condemned - r.k.) , a shameless spasm of imperialist war-mongering growing out of a border incident created by the U.S....Kauffman's lauds an obscure Whig politician by the name of Abraham Lincoln who exposed the lies that brought America into the Mexican-American War, as well as a Congregationalist minister, Samuel J. May, who denounced the war from his pulpit....The Spanish-American War and, even worse, the brutal suppression of Filipino freedom fighters – who resisted American imperial rule just like they resisted Spanish imperial rule – moved a step beyond previous conflicts. An estimated 200,000 Filipinos, most of them civilians, died. Kauffman cites Felix Morley: "The deeper result was to make Washington for the first time classifiable as a world capital, governing millions of people overseas as subjects rather than as citizens. The private enslavement of Negroes was ended. The control of alien populations had begun."

....If Woodrow Wilson was liberal, his liberalism was symbolized by the jackboot...

Support for nation-building has come to dominate much of the Right. Even liberal Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) receives right-wing accolades because he supports visiting death and destruction along the Euphrates. But Kauffman points to other conservatives – the traditionalist icon Russell Kirk, for instance, who denounced proponents of "American hegemony." ...Current political heroes include Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), the sole antiwar voice in the Republican presidential race, and Rep. John "Jimmy" Duncan (R-Tenn.), an old line conservative who told Kauffman: "I've become convinced that most of these wars have been brought about because of a desire for money and power and prestige." Duncan, ever gracious to those around him, "is a throwback, a Taft Republican in search of a party of peace and frugality," as well as "a glorious anachronism as a representative of a place and a people," enthuses Kauffman.

Most disastrously, writes Kauffman, "the Republicans in the age of George W. Bush have become a War Party, nothing less and certainly nothing more. Dissident GOP voices are rare and unwelcome echoes." Even more tragic is the fact that the so-called Religious Right has joined the War Party. Notes the waggish Kauffman: "The Christian conservatives who have supplied Bush with an indispensable, almost blasphemously enthusiastic following might consider alternative Christian political traditions," such as that of William Jennings Bryan, "Or, if I am not being too much of an originalist, a biblical fundamentalist, that of Jesus Christ."

Conservatism once was an honorable term, associated with "decentralism, liberty, economy in government, religious faith, family-centeredness, parochialism, smallness," notes Kauffman. But he thunders: "The cockeyed militarism of the Bush administration, and the historical ignorance and cowardice of the subsidized Right that has cheered him on, have poisoned the word conservative. For years, if not wars, to come." Today, he complains, the word conservative "reeks of manslaughter and militarism."

Ain't My America is deeply moving, with its eloquent retelling of the largely lost American tradition of conservatives against war. The loss of that tradition has cost Americans much blood and treasure. In closing this fine volume Kauffman echoes George McGovern, calling us all to rediscover our better nature,: "Come home, America. Reject the empire."

Patrick Thompson's third trial has begun:

Thompson, a member of the Visionaries Educating Youth and Adults group, which tried to shed light on local police interaction with young black men in the summer of 2004, is charged in connection with an Aug. 24, 2004, incident in which he is alleged to have entered his neighbor's apartment at 1702 E. Colorado Ave., U, without her permission and fondled her.

His first trial in July 2005, in which he represented himself, ended in a mistrial when a jury couldn't come to a unanimous verdict. Represented by Urbana attorney Harvey Welch, Thompson was retried in July 2006 and convicted of the Class X felony of home invasion and the less serious criminal sexual abuse charge.

Thompson then hired Kirchner and Wyman in August 2006 to represent him. They filed a post-trial motion asking for a new trial, alleging ineffective assistance by Welch. In April 2007, Clem granted the new trial.

Discuss.

UPDATE:  One charge dismissed:

Judge Harry Clem said the prosecutor had not presented enough evidence on the count of home invasion lodged against the 39-year-old Champaign man to even send it to the jury.

Conviction on that charge would have meant a mandatory prison sentence of six to 30 years for Thompson. The trial on the remaining charge of criminal sexual abuse, alleging Thompson fondled the woman in her Urbana apartment on Aug. 24, 2004, will go forward Thursday. That is a Class 4 felony with penalties ranging from probation to one to three years in prison if convicted.

According to the News-Gazette, Brian Chesley received conditional discharge and 100 hours of community service.

A Rantoul teen convicted of resisting and obstructing police in Douglass Park in north Champaign more than a year ago has been sentenced to a year of conditional discharge and 100 hours of public service.

The sentence for Brian Chesley, 19, who also lives part time with a grandmother in Urbana, means he will have a misdemeanor conviction on his record but will not have to report to a probation officer for monitoring. It was the least restrictive sentence that Champaign County Judge John Kennedy could have imposed for the crimes.

What's interesting is that the Very Green candidate for CB 9 started out with a couple of felony charges and ended up with first offender's probation, meaning that he'll have no record if he successfully completes it.  Chesley started out with an offer of diversion and ended up with a couple of misdemeanor convictions.  I wonder if this has anything to do with the former getting Diana Lenik as a defense attorney and the latter getting Kirchner and Wyman?

Gov. Blagojevich is using the surge of violence in Chicago for political reasons.

Blagojevich said the $150 million for his anti-violence initiative, which includes up to 20,000 summer jobs for young people in high-risk communities, isn't an unreasonable amount of money.

"This is an emergency. Children are being shot and killed. And for lawmakers to say we can't do it, that's exactly the reason why there's so much violence out there today and so we're just not gonna take no for an answer," Blagojevich said as he left the youth center surrounded by reporters trying to ask him questions.

Blagojevich's proposal includes spending $30 million to provide summer jobs statewide. He's proposing another $20 million to fund grants for after-school programs and other activities to keep kids off the streets. And he wants to invest $100 million to revitalize neighborhoods, support local businesses that create jobs and help police departments buy equipment, according to his office.

I'm shocked - shocked, I tell you - that anyone would use the deaths of children to push a political agenda.

From today's News-Gazette:

He cried intermittently as he apologized to his victims, their families, his own family, including his wife and almost 2-year-old daughter, the school districts, and the Bloomington-Normal and Champaign-Urbana communities.

Reynard said he found White "authentically remorseful but not perfectly remorseful until he's completely honest with himself," adding he believes White to be a pedophile who showed deviant tendencies as early as age 12.

Reynard said prosecutors in Champaign and McLean counties gave White a huge concession by allowing him to plead guilty to less serious sex crimes even though he felt there was evidence that would have supported the dismissed charges alleging actual physical contact between White's sex organ and some of the girls.

And:

White's attorney, Carol Dison, indicated she and fellow defense attorney Brett Olmstead will file motions to reconsider White's sentence in both counties as the necessary first step in the appeal process.

Dison, urged the judge to consider that there was "no overt sexual contact" with the children.

Discuss.

UPDATE: Typo in title fixed.  Sorry!

McLean County added 12 more years to Jon White's sentence.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich is extorting Illinois social service agencies into endorsing his budget proposals.

No, I'm not kidding. 

I cannot think of a more compelling argument for limited government.

As a follow-up to this post about the City of Urbana spending more than half-million dollars beautifying Philo Road while not mentioning addressing the crime issues in the area, this information was included in Council Member Lynn Barnes' email newsletter sent out over the weekend:

Calls for Service and Reported Crimes for the area bounded by Florida, Kinch, Colorado and Cottage Grove.

	2005	2006	2007	2008 (YTD)
Calls for Service	1349	1636	1303	324
Reported Crime	554	513	416	89

Discuss.

From today's News-Gazette:

Despite being fired from the McLean County Unit 5 school district in 2005 for viewing pornography on a computer at school and inappropriate communication with a fifth-grade girl, Jon White got a letter of reference from his principal there.

White was then hired by the Urbana school district and became a teacher at Thomas Paine School in August 2005.

A police investigation launched in late January 2007 revealed that almost from the beginning of his employment as a second-grade teacher at Thomas Paine, White engaged in improper conduct with 7- and 8-year-old girls at the school.

I'm so angry I don't know what to say.

Brian Chesley was found guilty this afternoon on both counts.

There's a blog post from last year at http://www.illinipundit.com/2007/03/31/crash%2C-champaign-style .  Kirchner and Wyman found it and decided to subpoena me, so I got served around 9 PM the night before I was supposed to testify.  This didn't make much sense to me, and I pointed out that I hadn't even seen anything but the aftermath and most of the post was hearsay.  But I had to come anyhow, and so did Gina Jackson and Mike LaDue, who hadn't seen any more than I did.

It seemed odd that there was no witness preparation - no interview, no discussion of what people were supposed to do in court, or anything.  Gina and Mike said that there hadn't been any preparation with them either.  While we were waiting out in the hall, we met another local attorney who had a pretty good reputation, and I described the situation to him and asked if this how defense lawyers normally operated.  He said it would probably be best not to answer that question.

The second day we were there (the third for Mike LaDue), Wyman told us that they didn't actually need our testimony and we were released from our subpoenas.  This didn't seem too professional, and I was curious whether they were doing any better inside the courtroom.  I noticed that the defendant was wearing a T-shirt, baggy pants, and a hooded sweatshirt, and wondered whether they'd gotten around to discussing issues like courtroom attire with him.  Someone told me that some of the defense witnesses were contradicting each other as well as the police, and Kirchner didn't seem too happy about that.

After Gina Jackson was released as a defense witness without testifying, the state called her.  I talked to another attorney I knew that evening about the trial, and he explained some things to me.  He said that jurors are sometimes impressed by sheer numbers of witnesses, so Kirchner and Wyman might have some testify and let the jurors believe that other witnesses who are not called would have said the same thing.  So if that was the case, it wouldn't have mattered whether I'd actually seen anything - I would have just been subpoenaed to push up the number of defense witnesses.

What really bothered me about the whole case was that it seemed like the defendant might just be a pawn.  Some other people I talked with expressed similar concerns.  Someone told me that Kirchner was one of the people who'd urged the defendant to turn down the state's diversion offer.  So the kid now has a misdemeanor conviction instead of a clean record.