#Court Records San Bernardino County

[blaze-papers]

Mexico Launches Ambitious Overhaul of Judicial System

In a sweeping move to reform its judicial system, Mexico has made a historic decision to replace its current appointment-based model with an electoral system for selecting judges. This radical overhaul, approved by the majority of the country's state legislatures, aims to address pervasive issues of corruption and inefficiency within the justice system.

On Thursday, Mexico’s states moved swiftly to back the amendment to the Constitution, marking one of the most extensive judicial reforms ever attempted by a large democracy. The new system will allow voters to elect judges, a shift that proponents believe will enhance transparency and public trust. However, critics argue that this move risks politicizing the judiciary and potentially undermining the rule of law.

Judge Michael Sachs of San Bernardino County has issued a preliminary injunction, halting the enforcement of a related policy and striking down most of the district’s original plan, save for provisions requiring notification when a student’s name or pronouns are formally recorded in school documents. This decision follows recent legislation, AB 1955, which prohibits schools from mandating such notifications.

The legislation has received praise from LGBTQ+ advocacy groups for its protective measures for transgender and gender-nonconforming students. Tony Hoang, Executive Director of Equality California, hailed the reform as "critical" for ensuring that students are not outed to potentially hostile home environments.

In contrast, conservative groups such as the California Family Council argue that the law infringes on parental rights. Jonathan Keller, President of the Council, condemned AB 1955 as a violation of parental authority and a potential threat to children’s safety.

The overhaul represents a significant shift in Mexico’s judicial landscape. By June 2025, voters will choose members of the Supreme Court, an oversight tribunal, and approximately half of the nation’s 7,000 judges. The remaining judges will be elected in 2027.

The amendment has been met with both support and opposition. Protests and strikes by judges and court workers have erupted, with some demonstrators storming the Senate to halt debate on the measure. Despite the unrest, the Senate has passed the amendment, which now awaits final approval from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a strong advocate of the reform.

López Obrador has defended the overhaul, asserting that it reinforces democratic principles by allowing citizens to elect their judicial representatives. However, the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, has warned that the reform could jeopardize judicial independence and exacerbate issues of corruption within the judiciary.

The reform plan also includes significant structural changes, including the separation of the judiciary from its oversight body, the Federal Judicial Council. Current investigations reveal issues of nepotism and inadequate disciplinary actions within the council, highlighting the need for reform.

Despite the controversy, many Mexicans see the reform as a chance to address long-standing issues within the judicial system. Government surveys indicate widespread distrust of judges, with perceptions of corruption and nepotism remaining high.

While the reform’s ambitious scope raises questions about implementation and judicial independence, it also brings much-needed attention to the state of justice in Mexico. As the nation prepares for a new era of judicial elections, the debate continues to unfold, reflecting the complexities of balancing reform with safeguarding democratic values.

[midnightbailsan]

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[reasoningdaily]

A California appeals court tossed a reputed gang member’s murder conviction, ruling that prosecutors unfairly used a rap video as evidence and citing a new state law that curbs such practice.

Travon Rashad Venable, 34, remains at Calipatria State Prison pending possible review by the state's high court or a potential retrial for his role in the March 5, 2014, slaying of Enon “Bubba” Edwards, who was shot in the head.

Venable was convicted of first degree murder, after prosecutors said he was behind the wheel of the drive-by shooting near Medical Center Drive and West Union Street in San Bernardino, which is about 60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

Jurors were showed a YouTube rap video that featured Venable’s younger brother, “Young Trocc" and included appearances by Venable and other members of California Gardens Crips gang, court records showed.

"They could be seen flashing gang signs and displayed guns, drugs, and money," according to the state's Fourth Appellate Division ruling issued on Feb. 17.

"At one point, Venable held a rifle with an extended magazine. One of the lines in the rap was: 'Got word from a bird[] that they did that [racial slur] dead wrong/Slid up Medical and left that [racial slur] head gone.' ”

A gang expert testified that the video showed that "a California Gardens member shot someone else in the head on Medical Center" and that the group was “claiming ownership” of the slaying, the court said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom this past fall signed into law restrictions on how prosecutors could use such music in their cases.

Rappers Killer Mike, Meek Mill, Too $hort, Ty Dolla $ign, YG, E-40 and Tyga were at a virtual bill signing ceremony to support Newsom's action.

"There’s no question the trial judge’s admission of the rap evidence in this case did not comply with the new requirements for admission of creative expression," the appeals court said.

"There’s also substantial concern that admitting the evidence may have had the precise effects the Legislature sought to avoid. The rap video contains offensive language, including frequent uses of the n-word, depictions of guns and drugs, and references to violent gang activities. Most of the people who appear in the video are young Black men."

This could the first time a conviction could be erased due to that new state law.

"As far as I know this is the first published appellate decision addressing this new state law," Venable's attorney Joshua Siegel said in a statement to NBC News on Friday.

Venable had been sentenced to 129 years to life behind bars, according to the appears court. State prison record show he would have been eligible for parole as soon as October of 2048.

Reps for the San Bernardino County District Attorney's Office, San Bernardino Police Department and California Attorney General's Office could not be immediately reached for comment on Friday morning.

Venable’s attorney said his client is aware of the ruling but the lawyer declined any further comment.

[efile-expert]

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[sanbernardinocounty1-blog]

Court Records San Bernardino County There are Californian rules that keeps a mandate on the availability of court records of San Bernardino County. https://california.staterecords.org/sanbernardino

[longeko]

San bernardino county court records smart search

Once freed from prison, however, the former inmates have trouble getting hired professionally because of their criminal records, despite a first-in-the-nation, 18-month-old law designed to ease their way and a 4-year-old training program that cost taxpayers at least $180,000 per graduate. Two state programs designed to get more former inmate firefighters hired professionally have barely made a dent, according to an Associated Press review, with one $30 million effort netting jobs for just over 100 firefighters, little more than one-third of the inmates enrolled.Ĭlad in distinctive orange uniforms, inmate crews protect multimillion-dollar homes for a few dollars a day by cutting brush and trees with chainsaws and scraping the earth to create barriers they hope will stop flames. Yet one homegrown resource is rarely used: thousands of experienced firefighters who earned their chops in prison. YouTube sets this cookie via embedded youtube-videos and registers anonymous statistical data.SACRAMENTO - As wildfires rage across California each year, exhausted firefighters call for reinforcements from wherever they can get them - even as far as Australia. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. Installed by Google Analytics, _gid cookie stores information on how visitors use a website, while also creating an analytics report of the website's performance. The pattern element in the name contains the unique identity number of the account or website it relates to. This cookie is installed by Google Universal Analytics to restrain request rate and thus limit the collection of data on high traffic sites.Ī variation of the _gat cookie set by Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to allow website owners to track visitor behaviour and measure site performance. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to recognize unique visitors. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. It does not store any personal data.Īnalytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The JSESSIONID cookie is used by New Relic to store a session identifier so that New Relic can monitor session counts for an application. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.

[beardedmrbean]

Three people claiming to be "sovereign citizens" were arrested Saturday morning after live ammunition and explosives were found in a vehicle they were driving and at their remote compound, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.

Deputies had conducted a traffic stop for suspected vehicle code violations Saturday just after 10 a.m. PT on a Ford Taurus near Joshua Tree National Park, a press release from the sheriff's department said. Inside the car were David Russell, 50, and Jeffery Russell, 46, who identified themselves to the deputies as sovereign citizens. Sovereign citizens are a fringe group whose members consider themselves exempt from U.S. law and who sometimes use violent tactics to justify their beliefs, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Authorities said a records check showed that the two men were prohibited from possessing and owning firearms. Deputies found "live ammunition, black gun powder, and an improvised military-grade explosive device" inside the car, they said, adding that the explosive device was safely disposed of.

Deputies then obtained a search warrant for a property in Johnson Valley, California, the community where the Russells reside. They discovered more military-grade explosives and ammunition, as well as firearms, at the compound; a woman at the compound, Venus Mooney, 54, was arrested.

The three were booked at the Morongo Basin Jail for possession of an explosive device and possession of a controlled substance while armed. They are being held without bail pending a court appearance.

It was not immediately clear if the three suspects had an attorney.

Sovereign citizens often retaliate through acts of "paper terrorism," which involves bombarding the legal system with frivolous lawsuits or falsified documents. Violence is the most extreme form of the movement and is typically directed at government officials, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

[96thdayofrage]

Although Brown, who is Black, was 23 years old and 5 feet, 7 inches tall, the subject of the arrest warrant was a 5-foot-11, 49-year-old white man with a “bushy white beard” and blue eyes. Brown spent days in the Henderson Detention Center, and then the Clark County Detention Center, after both Las Vegas and Henderson police officers failed to properly check records comparing the two men, according to the federal civil rights lawsuit.

“It’s pretty hard to make a mistake of that magnitude when you have such different characteristics and races of a suspect,” said attorney Brent Bryson, who wrote the lawsuit.

The suit named the Metropolitan Police Department, Henderson Police Department, the city of Henderson, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo and Henderson Police Department Chief Thedrick Andres as defendants.

Brown, now 25, was driving after finishing work on Jan. 8, 2020, when Henderson officers pulled him over. He didn’t have his driver’s license with him, but he gave officers his name, Social Security number and Social Security card, the lawsuit said.

During a records check, the officers confused Brown with the 49-year-old man wanted on a bench warrant, the lawsuit said. The older man faced a charge of ownership or possession of a firearm by a prohibited person, court records show.

The weapons charge is typical when someone with a prior felony conviction is arrested with a gun. But 49-year-old Shane Brown had first been convicted of a felony in 1994, before Shane Lee Brown was born, the lawsuit said.

Shane Lee Brown was held in the Henderson Detention Center for two days, although he “repeatedly explained” that he was not the same Shane Brown as the man with the bench warrant.

“Upon information and belief, the unknown Henderson police officers and supervisors failed to perform even a cursory review of the warrant to determine if Shane Lee Brown was the person named in the warrant,” the lawsuit said.

On Jan. 10, Las Vegas police transferred the 23-year-old to the Clark County Detention Center, where his correct date of birth, race and height was recorded, the lawsuit said. He was also given an identification number different from the number assigned to the older Shane Brown.

An “agent of LVMPD” filed court records ordering Shane Lee Brown to appear in front of a judge for the bench warrant, the lawsuit said. The document filed Jan. 10 listed the younger man’s correct race and date of birth, court records show.

“Despite being informed of this mistaken identity, none of the unknown LVMPD police or LVMPD corrections officers bothered to review its own records to determine whether Shane Lee Brown was the subject of the warrant,” the lawsuit said.

The 23-year-old was in the Clark County Detention Center for four days before he appeared in front of District Judge Joe Hardy. After Shane Lee Brown’s public defender showed the judge the two men’s booking photos, Hardy ordered the younger man to be released from jail.

Metro on Tuesday declined to comment on the lawsuit. City of Henderson spokeswoman Kathleen Richards said once city attorneys are served with the lawsuit, they will “address the claims in their response to the court.”

Bryson said Tuesday that if officers have a reason to believe they arrested the wrong person, they’re required to investigate.

“This happens much more frequently then what the public hears about,” he said. “It’s a result of either intentional or unintentional conduct by the officers.”

The suit is asking for compensatory damages of $500,000 under federal law, as well as at least $50,000 under state law, in addition to punitive damages.

Eight days after Shane Lee Brown was released from jail, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office contacted Las Vegas police with the location of the 49-year-old Shane Brown, court records show.

He was in jail in Needles, California, the Sheriff’s Office told Metro. It was unclear Tuesday if the older Shane Brown was in the jail when the 23-year-old was arrested.

Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0240. Follow @k_newberg on Twitter.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Mayumi Komatsu was raped and brutally murdered while fundraising for the UC in California in 1985

Reader advisory: RAPE AND HORRIFIC MURDER

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SBS19850605.1.5

It took the Unification Church FOUR days to report Mayumi missing.

Life in prison sought for suspect in missionary’s death

San Bernadino Sun, Wednesday, June 5, 1985, page B-5

By EDWARD SIMONS Sun Staff Writer

SAN BERNARDINO — A prosecutor said Tuesday that he Is seeking life imprisonment for a Redlands man charged with sexually assaulting and murdering a Japanese missionary who was last seen alive selling Easter eggs for her church.

David Arthur Spooner, 22, is charged with the April 5 rape or attempted rape and murder of Mayumi Komatsu, 22, in his parents’ house in Redlands.

He was arrested after his parents told authorities, who were searching house to house for Komatsu, about finding bloodstains in their home, including some on their bed.

Deputy District Attorney Larry Balderama filed notice in Municipal Court here Tuesday that Spooner is charged with the special circumstance of murder during the commission of a rape or attempted rape.

The special circumstance carries the possibility of either the death penalty or life imprisonment. Balderama said Spooner’s youth, a clean record and his history of mental problems figured into the decision to seek life imprisonment instead of death.

Spooner was arrested for Komatsu’s death after a house-to-house search in the area where she was last seen. Spooner’s parents told authorities they had found blood in their house a few days before and said their son told them it was from having sex with a woman who was menstruating, said sheriff’s Sgt. Dick Lake.

He said Komatsu was in the Redlands area April 5 selling Easter eggs for the Unification Church, founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. She was last seen on Mulvihill Avenue, he said.

Her body was discovered about midnight that night in the middle of Greenspot Road and was inadvertently hit by a car full of teenagers before the road could be blocked off, said Steve Levine, the deputy public defender assigned to defend Spooner.

Komatsu’s body wasn’t identified until April 9, when her friends filed a missing person report with the Redlands Police Department.

The door-to-door search by sheriff’s deputies led them to 106 Mulvihill Ave., where Spooner lived with his parents.

An April 10 inspection of the house showed “quite a bit” of blood had been sprayed over the pillow cases in the bedroom where Spooner’s parents slept, Lake said. In addition, there was a large bloodstain along one edge of their mattress — the sheets had been washed — as well as spray patterns on two walls of the bedroom, Lake said.

Spray patterns are caused by blows to a body, Lake said.

Blood was also found on the hallway floor of the house and in Spooner’s bedroom, Lake said.

Spooner was arrested at work that day and has been held without bail since, Balderama said.

Balderama was reluctant to give details about the case, but Levine said the prosecution will attempt to show Spooner killed Komatsu by beating her with the butt end of a rifle.

Levine said he believes Komatsu tried to jump out of Spooner’s vehicle while it was traveling on Greenspot Road, hitting her head and causing her death.

The autopsy, both attorneys agreed, doesn’t address the subject of whether she was alive or dead when she was taken to Greenspot Road.

Levine said Spooner was “a troubled young man.”

He said Spooner’s mother gave him up at the age of 5 years, and the boy grew up in numerous foster homes before moving back in with his natural mother and her husband. Spooner has a history of mental health problems, the attorney said.

Spooner was a mental health outpatient at San Bernardino County Medical Center for three years, beginning when Spooner was 13 years oId in 1976, Levine said.

Reports from other hospitals are “trickling in,” he said.

Komatsu, of Nagoyo, Japan, arrived in New York about seven months ago to attend a training seminar for Unification Church missionaries, said Joe Coyne, director of the Artesia branch where she was stationed.

Komatsu and other church members were selling eggs for an Easter fund-raising drive, Coyne said.

Spooner’s preliminary hearing is scheduled for June 27, Levine said. The hearing will be to determine if there is sufficient evidence to warrant a trial.

________________________________________

May 22, 1986

Murder conviction in Easter egg killing

By Susan Seager  UPI

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — A man who said he flew into a rage when a Japanese missionary came to his door selling Easter eggs for the Unification Church was convicted Wednesday of beating, raping and murdering the woman.

Court testimony also showed that the defendant mistakenly thought he had killed the victim, but that she regained consciousness as he was driving her off to bury her and then fell out of his truck and was killed.

David Spooner, 23, of Redlands, was convicted of first-degree murder in the course of a rape in the death of Mayumi Komatsu, 22, of Nagoya, Japan, who came to his door in April 1985 selling eggs to raise money for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.

A psychologist who interviewed Spooner after his arrest said the defendant recalled that he ordered the woman to leave his house because he feared she might try to ‘brainwash’ him. He said he became enraged when she did not go, then beat her over the head with a rifle butt.

He said the frightened woman ran into a bedroom, where he raped her and beat her again. When she responded too slowly to his order to get dressed, he told the psychologist, he flew into another rage and choked her unconscious.

Believing she was dead, Spooner put Komatsu in the back of his pickup truck and drove off to bury her. But as they rode through town, he said, he saw her struggling to stand up.

He stopped to check on her condition – reportedly wondering whether he should ‘take her to the hospital or finish her off.’

The woman had already climbed or fallen off the truck, however, and was run over by a car. She died at the scene, and an autopsy showed she suffocated on her own blood.

Spooner fled, but was arrested later by sheriff’s deputies who found the rifle and traced a check he had written, apparently buying some Easter eggs, before becoming enraged.

The Superior Court jury rejected defense arguments that Spooner’s actions were not premeditated but the result of a spontaneous, uncontrollable rage.

Prosecutor Victor Stull said Spooner, who has been treated since childhood at institutions for the emotionally disturbed, faces a maximum term of life in prison without possibility of parole when he is sentenced June 18.

________________________________________

Los Angeles Times

May 25, 1986

... Thinking she was dead, he put her in the bed of his pickup truck and was driving her away to bury her when—apparently still alive—she either climbed out or fell into the street and was run over by a car. She died at the scene.

________________________________________

Christiane Coste was raped and murdered: Sun Myung Moon said: “Our sister is a glorious martyr in God’s providence”

Montreal girl dies fundraising for the Unification Church

Atsushi Funaki murdered while selling roses in E. Philadelphia

Man charged with strangling Seattle teen fundraising for the UC

Hitoshi Hara was murdered on July 20, 1987 while selling roses for Sun Myung Moon’s church

Rape and trafficking in Bolivia. Eight church members involved.

All these UC members were killed while fundraising for Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, April 6, 2021

Biden Effort to Combat Hunger Marks ‘a Profound Change’ (NYT) With more than one in 10 households reporting that they lack enough to eat, the Biden administration is accelerating a vast campaign of hunger relief that will temporarily increase assistance by tens of billions of dollars and set the stage for what officials envision as lasting expansions of aid. The effort to rush more food assistance to more people is notable both for the scale of its ambition and the variety of its legislative and administrative actions. The campaign has increased food stamps by more than $1 billion a month, provided needy children a dollar a day for snacks, expanded a produce allowance for pregnant women and children, and authorized the largest children’s summer feeding program in history. “We haven’t seen an expansion of food assistance of this magnitude since the founding of the modern food stamp program in 1977,” said James P. Ziliak, an economist at the University of Kentucky who studies nutrition programs. “It’s a profound change.”

Police, communities across U.S. fight back against anti-Asian hate crimes (Reuters) More than a dozen San Jose, California, police officers walked through the white arches of the Grand Century Mall in “Little Saigon” to reassure a Vietnamese-American community fearful over the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States. Across the United States, law enforcement agencies are scrambling to better protect Asian communities amid a wave of violence targeting them since lockdowns to cope with the coronavirus pandemic began about a year ago. A recent report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, showed that while hate crimes overall in the United States had fallen slightly in 2020, crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) had jumped by 145%. A vicious assault last week in which a man kicked a 65-year-old immigrant from the Philippines in New York City multiple times was captured on video and went viral, further stoking fears about anti-Asian hate crimes. New York City has deployed a team of undercover Asian police officers. Other major cities, from San Jose to Chicago, have boosted patrols in Asian neighborhoods and sought to forge closer ties with communities, some of which have sought to fill gaps the police can’t fill.

Florida works to avoid ‘catastrophic’ pond collapse (AP) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Sunday that crews are working to prevent the collapse of a large wastewater pond in the Tampa Bay area while evacuating the area to avoid a “catastrophic flood.” Manatee County officials say the latest models show that a breach at the old phosphate plant reservoir has the potential to gush out 340 million gallons of water in a matter of minutes, risking a 20-foot-high (about 6.1-meter-high) wall of water. Authorities have closed off portions of the U.S. Highway 41 and ordered evacuations of 316 homes. Some families were placed in local hotels. Crews have been discharging water since the pond began leaking in March. On Friday, a significant leak that was detected escalated the response and prompted the first evacuations and a declaration of a state of emergency on Saturday. A portion of the containment wall in the reservoir shifted, leading officials to think a collapse could occur at any time.

Demonstrators protest a policing bill in England and Wales (Vox) Thousands of demonstrators marched across Britain on Saturday in protest of a massive new policing bill that would create new restrictions on protest in England and Wales and impose hefty fines for not following police instructions. The bill, officially known as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, was introduced in early March and has been met with widespread pushback in England and Wales since then. It also includes sentencing and court reforms, among other changes, but protesters are specifically incensed by proposed new police powers concerning protests. According to the BBC’s Dominic Casciani, the bill would criminalize violating restrictions that protesters “‘ought’ to have known about, even if they have not received a direct order from an officer,” and “intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance.” This weekend’s “kill the bill” marches aren’t the first. According to the Guardian, Bristol, in southwest England, has been the site of at least five protests over the last two weeks, including one that turned violent and saw at least two police vehicles set on fire earlier in March.

Marine Le Pen’s growing support (Financial Times) It would be a political earthquake as disruptive as the UK referendum vote for Brexit in 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as US president later that year. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s extreme right Rassemblement National party, is doing so well in the polls that she threatens to foil Emmanuel Macron’s re-election bid and could win next year’s presidential vote to become the country’s first far-right leader since the second world war. Only last week, she likened herself to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the UK’s Brexiters—and by implication former US president Trump—as a politician who could triumph with the support of all kinds of voters. “There’s no more split between left and right, there’s a split between the globalists and the nationalists,” she said.

Polish hospitals struggle with surge of virus patients (AP) Polish hospitals struggled over the Easter weekend with a massive number of people infected with COVID-19 following a huge surge in infections across Central and Eastern Europe in recent weeks. Tougher new pandemic restrictions were ordered in Poland for a two-week period surrounding Easter in order to slow down the infection rate. The country hit new records of over 35,000 daily infections on two recent days, and deaths have been in the hundreds each day. The aim of the new restrictions was to prevent large gatherings over the long weekend culminating with Easter Monday. Meanwhile, the government is also trying to speed up the country’s vaccine rollout, but the pressure on the country’s hospitals is still relentless.

Maoist Insurgents Kill 23 Indian Forces in Ambush, Officials Say (NYT) At least 23 Indian security forces were killed in an ambush by Maoist militants in the central state of Chattisgarh, officials said on Sunday, reviving concerns around a decades-old insurgency that appeared to have been largely contained in recent years. A large force of Indian security personnel had been carrying out a clearance operation in a densely forested area on the edges of the Bijapur district when they were ambushed by the insurgents on Saturday in a firefight that lasted four hours. Avinash Mishra, the deputy superintendent of police in Bijapur, said an additional 31 security personnel were wounded in the attack. The insurgents, who trace their roots to communist politics in the 1960s, use violence against the state in the name of championing the cause of India’s poor and marginalized. Their reach was once so widespread, and their attacks so frequent, that in 2006, India’s prime minister declared them the country’s “single biggest internal-security challenge.”

China is betting that the West is in irreversible decline (The Economist) Its gaze fixed on the prize of becoming rich and strong, China has spent the past 40 years as a risk-averse bully. Quick to inflict pain on smaller powers, it has been more cautious around any country capable of punching back. Recently, however, China’s risk calculations have seemed to change. First Yang Jiechi, the Communist Party’s foreign-policy chief, lectured American diplomats at a bilateral meeting in Alaska, pointing out the failings of American democracy. That earned him hero status back home. Then China imposed sanctions on British, Canadian and European Union politicians, diplomats, academics, lawyers and democracy campaigners. Those sweeping curbs were in retaliation for narrower Western sanctions targeting officials accused of repressing Muslims in the north-western region of Xinjiang.      China’s foreign ministry declares that horrors such as the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and the Holocaust, as well as the deaths of so many Americans and Europeans from covid-19, should make Western governments ashamed to question China’s record on human rights. Most recently Chinese diplomats and propagandists have denounced as “lies and disinformation” reports that coerced labour is used to pick or process cotton in Xinjiang. They have praised fellow citizens for boycotting foreign brands that decline to use cotton from that region. Still others have sought to prove their zeal by hurling Maoist-era abuse. A Chinese consul-general tweeted that Canada’s prime minister was “a running dog of the us”.      Such performance-nationalism is watched by Western diplomats in Beijing with dismay. Envoys have been summoned for late-night scoldings by Chinese officials, to be informed that this is not the China of 120 years ago when foreign armies and gunboats forced the country’s last, tottering imperial dynasty to open the country wider to outsiders. Some diplomats talk of living through a turning-point in Chinese foreign policy. History buffs debate whether the moment more closely resembles the rise of an angry, revisionist Japan in the 1930s, or that of Germany when steely ambition led it to war in 1914. A veteran diplomat bleakly suggests that China’s rulers view the West as ill-disciplined, weak and venal, and are seeking to bring it to heel, like a dog.

Minorities in Myanmar borderlands face fresh fear since coup (AP) Before each rainy season Lu Lu Aung and other farmers living in a camp for internally displaced people in Myanmar’s far northern Kachin state would return to the village they fled and plant crops that would help keep them fed for the coming year. But this year in the wake of February’s military coup, with the rains not far off, the farmers rarely step out of their makeshift homes and don’t dare leave their camp. They say it is simply too dangerous to risk running into soldiers from Myanmar’s army or their aligned militias. “We can’t go anywhere and can’t do anything since the coup,” Lu Lu Aung said. “Every night, we hear the sounds of jet fighters flying so close above our camp.” The military’s lethal crackdown on protesters in large central cities such as Yangon and Mandalay has received much of the attention since the coup that toppled Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government. But far away in Myanmar’s borderlands, Lu Lu Aung and millions of others who hail from Myanmar’s minority ethnic groups are facing increasing uncertainty and waning security as longstanding conflicts between the military and minority guerrilla armies flare anew.

Tropical cyclone kills at least 97 in Indonesia, East Timor (Reuters) Floods and landslides triggered by tropical cyclone Seroja in a cluster of islands in southeast Indonesia and East Timor have killed 97 people, with many still unaccounted for and thousands displaced, officials said on Monday. At least 70 deaths were reported in several islands in Indonesia’s West and East Nusa Tenggara provinces, while 70 others were missing, after the cyclone brought flash floods, landslides and strong winds amid heavy rain over the weekend, disaster agency BNPB said.

Lawyer says mediation resolves feud among Jordan royals (AP) Mediation between Jordan’s King Abdullah II and his outspoken half brother, Prince Hamzah, successfully de-escalated one of the most serious political crises in the kingdom in decades, the palace and a confidant of the prince said Monday. The apparent resolution of the unprecedented public feud capped a weekend of palace drama during which the king had placed Hamzah under house arrest for allegedly plotting with foreign supporters to destabilize Jordan, a key Western ally. The announcement of the successful mediation came after Abdullah’s paternal uncle, Hassan, met with Hamzah on Monday. Hamzah was joined by his brother Hashem and three of their cousins. “In light of the developments of the past two days, I put myself at the disposal of His Majesty the King,” said the statement signed by Hamzah. He said he would remain loyal to the king and to Jordan’s constitution. Malik R. Dahlan, a professional mediator and a friend of the family, then issued a separate statement, saying the mediation has “been successful and I expect a resolution shortly.” He said that “this regrettable incident was the result of the clumsy actions of a senior security official and misrepresentation by a government official,” adding that “it should have remained a family matter.”

Netanyahu’s favours were ‘currency’, prosecutor says as corruption trial starts (Reuters) Israeli prosecutors accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of treating favours as “currency” on Monday at the opening of a corruption trial which, along with an inconclusive election, has clouded his prospects of remaining in office. Netanyahu, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of bribery, breach of trust and fraud, came to Jerusalem District Court in a dark suit and black protective mask, conferring quietly with lawyers as his supporters and critics held raucous demonstrations outside. Meanwhile, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin began consulting with party heads on who might form the next coalition government—a toss-up after the March 23 election, the fourth in two years, gave neither Netanyahu nor his rivals a clear mandate.

Pandemic Spreads Isolation (WSJ) A year ago when Japan was under a pandemic state of emergency, Seiji Saejima called his ex-wife for the first time since they divorced a few years earlier. He said she told him she was about to remarry and asked him not to call again. It was an unwelcome reminder of the isolation he was feeling. “I did not have many friends to contact even before,” said the 34-year-old, who works at a city government office near Tokyo. Then the pandemic forced reductions in activities that kept him connected, like going to singles’ mixers. “The coronavirus has made me realize I’m lonely,” he said. Recent data suggest many more people are having the same experience, and that is changing the thinking of some governments. Japan recently named a loneliness and isolation minister, following the U.K.’s example from three years ago. The U.K. named a minister after recognizing the impact of isolation on people’s health and its economy. One study linked deficiencies in social relationships to a 29% increase in heart disease. Another estimated that a chronically lonely person could cost the government, on average, the equivalent of an extra $16,600 over 15 years, owing to higher medical and other costs. “The magnitude of effect of social connection on mortality risk is comparable, and in many cases, exceeds that of other well-accepted risk factors, including smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day, obesity and air pollution,” said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a Brigham Young University professor of psychology and neuroscience, in 2017 U.S. Senate testimony.

[stephsmith321]

Steph Smith, unlike most other landowners, is not after the biggest dollar sign

Originally published on Stephanie-steph-smith-pacific-palisades-los-angeles.gonevis.com Nov 18, 2020

served an underserved niche market and supplied the industry with high quality properties.

Steph Smith shrank from public attention when she was part of a very different scandal a decade ago, legally changing her last name to something that’s as anonymous as it can get. This time, she says she’s fighting back.

Steph Smith sued Palisades News for defamation (libel), false light, and intentional infliction of emotional distress in Smith v. Palisades News.

Steph Smith sued the city of San Bernardino to overturn its pot regulation ordinance that could bar her from the industry.

Steph Smith thinks one of cannabis' most remarkable powers has been the ability to expose corruption and hypocrisy. The cannabis industry has exposed corrupt practices in every city and county and it’s proven that the real “outlaws” are often the government and the authorities failing to follow the law or trying to extort those that want just laws enacted.

Steph Smith values the relationships with her tenants and chooses the person she feels would succeed in the space. That has been her motto ever since, she says.

Steph Smith wanted to escape the struggling lifestyle that her “liberal hippie family” in Minnesota had endured.

Steph Smith was a commercial real estate developer and landlord who leased her properties to marijuana growers who paid her more than three times the standard rent and produced tens of thousands of weed plants

Steph Smith was making millions of dollars per month running the operation, sources said.

Steph Smith was not arrested or charged, but got plenty of media attention: “Mom accused of running multimillion-dollar pot-growing operation,” said one headline on a local television station’s website.

Steph Smith wasn’t arrested or fined. But headlines the next day painted the 43-year-old as a “queenpin” and the “mastermind” of a multimillion-dollar illegal marijuana-growing operation.

Steph Smith weathered the bad publicity — and then some.

Steph Smith will have properties ready to house those valuable tenants.

Steph Smith wore a gray cotton shirt, jeans and colorful sneakers on a recent Friday evening as she joined a political support team canvassing San Bernardino’s Verdemont neighborhood. The goal is to collect the 8,602 signatures needed to get her proposed cannabis measure on the November ballot.

Steph Smith's first rule in real estate is also her first rule in cannabis: location, location, location.

Steph Smith's home is littered with toys, her schedule revolves around when she has to pick up her kids from school.

Steph Smith's prospective tenants must be professional and “understand that you need a real person to sign a lease, you can’t steal power — you need to act like a real business. Not everyone has the executive skills to step forward into the light.”

Steph Smith's team is collecting signatures for marijuana ballot measures in Colton, Hemet, Upland, Bakersfield and Kern County.

Steph Smith's tenant B-Real is an established businessman who has a downtown studio where he records entertaining cannabis-related YouTube videos as “Dr. Greenthumb.” In a recent recording, he and actress Michelle Rodriguez got high in a classic Chevy he keeps parked there as they discussed movies and marijuana.

Steph Smith, Founding PrincipalSteph Smith manages acquisitions, operations, and finances at IPG. Combining 15 years of real estate development experience with a passion for the environment, Steph pushes IPG projects forward with green building, solar, water reclamation systems. Steph is an advocate for cannabis regulation and land use in California. She is also passionate about women and children's issues and is a member of the Pacific Palisades Woman's Club and is on the Policy Committee of EveryChild Foundation. She is a mother of five and active fundraiser for several child focused foundations. She has a BS in business from Boston College and attended UCLA's Anderson MBA program.

Steph Smith, the Minnesota child who wanted to inspire the world, would be happy with that.

Steph Smith, the owner of a business called Bubba Likes Tortillas, said in the lawsuit filed Friday in San Bernardino County Superior Court that the city's new law could create monopolies and also prevent her from renting property to pot growers and other marijuana operations.

[sanbernardinocounty1-blog]

Court Records San Bernardino County

There are Californian rules that keeps a mandate on the availability of court records of San Bernardino County.https://california.staterecords.org/sanbernardino

[bountyofbeads]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/local/dc-hate-prosecutions-drop/

D.C. hate crimes: Inside a record year of hatred in the nation’s capital - Washington Post

“Of the 178 suspected hate crimes in 2017, police closed 54 cases involving adults by arrest. Prosecutors charged two cases as hate crimes, and both were later dropped as part of plea deals.”- (Via Washington Post)

ABOUT THIS SERIES

As hate crimes soar across the country, The Post examines those who commit acts of hatred, those who are targets of attacks, and those who investigate and prosecute them.

Hate crime reports

have soared in

D.C. Prosecutions

have plummeted.

Ashly Taylor was shot for being a lesbian. Then she watched as the hatred that fueled the attack was ignored in court.

By Michael E. Miller and Steven Rich  | Published Aug. 21, 2019 | Washington Post | Posted by 21, 2019 12:34 PM ET |

The hatred that day couldn't have been clearer to Ashly Taylor.

She had endured it ever since coming out as a teenager, when strangers said lewd things to her for holding another girl’s hand and one of her own relatives called her a “dyke.” Yet the 27-year-old had never encountered a problem on the construction sites she’d worked since high school, where she was just another laborer in baggy clothes and a hard hat, until a chilly February afternoon in 2018.

She had been sitting in the back of a pickup truck in Southeast Washington during a break from digging a ditch when a new hire sauntered up and began harassing her for being a lesbian.

“Why you dress like you’re a boy?” demanded Enjoli Gaffney, a felon who had been released from prison seven months earlier. Then he launched into a lurid tirade that ended, according to court records, with him vowing to have sex with her and ordering her to climb out of the truck so he could kiss her.

When Taylor got out to confront him, court documents show, Gaffney pulled a small silver and black pistol from his waistband and pointed it at her chest.

Then he pulled the trigger.

Hate crimes are surging across the country, with racist slurs scrawled on schools and houses of worship, assaults on gay and transgender people, and white gunmen targeting Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue and Latinos at an El Paso Walmart.

In Washington, the number of attacks investigated by police as bias-motivated reached an all-time high of 204 last year. The District had the highest per capita hate-crime rate of any major city in the country, according to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino.

[D.C. hate crimes: Inside a record year of hatred in the nation’s capital]

Yet hate-crime prosecutions in the nation’s capital have plummeted, even as the number of people arrested on those charges — including Taylor’s attacker — has soared, The Washington Post found.

Last year, police made arrests in a record 59 hate-crime cases involving adults. But the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which handles most criminal cases in the capital, prosecuted only three as hate crimes, and one was quickly dropped.

Of the 178 suspected hate crimes in 2017, police closed 54 cases involving adults by arrest. Prosecutors charged two cases as hate crimes, and both were later dropped as part of plea deals.

The Post’s months-long analysis of more than 200,000 D.C. police and court records found that hate-crime prosecutions and convictions are at their lowest point in at least a decade.

Jessie K. Liu, the U.S. attorney for the District, took office two years ago promising local activists that “as a woman of color,” she took hate crimes very seriously. Liu declined multiple requests for an interview to explain why prosecutions have fallen so low. Instead, she released a statement Tuesday defending her record, saying “we provide every potential case with a hate crimes enhancement with the careful attention and commitment it deserves.”

At a community meeting last month, she acknowledged the growing gap between hate-crime arrests and prosecutions in the District, without revealing just how large it has grown.

“The fact that there are more reported hate-bias crimes has definitely not gone unnoticed in our office,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of conversations about it in recent weeks, thinking about how we can revamp our efforts and resources to address it.”

She said she had recently added a second hate-crimes coordinator to ensure cases were prosecuted appropriately.

Activists, legal experts and prosecutors, including two of Liu’s predecessors, said they were troubled by The Post’s findings.

“Wow,” said Ronald C. Machen Jr., who served as U.S. attorney for five years under President Barack Obama, when told of the numbers. “We were really aggressive on these cases. Hate crimes really tear at the fabric of our democracy.”

But Machen also noted it can be difficult to prove that a crime was committed because of hatred. And prosecutors worry, he said, that bringing hate-crime charges can make cases harder to win.

Others said prosecutorial caution isn’t a new phenomenon and cannot explain the drop.

“This is a red flag,” said David Friedman, the Anti-Defamation League’s vice president of law enforcement and community security, who helped create the District’s hate-crime law 30 years ago. “When you have that high of a number of referrals, and you do not have hate-crime prosecutions, you have to be concerned about the statement that makes.”

Ruby Corado, a prominent Washington advocate for LGBTQ rights, and other activists argue that what’s happening reflects the priorities of President Trump, who appointed Liu and has rolled back rights and protections for minorities, especially the LGBTQ community.

The District is the only place in the country where local crimes are prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office, whose leader is appointed by the president. The setup makes it hard to hold prosecutors accountable, especially in a city where Trump won just 4 percent of the vote, advocates said.

“There is a disconnect between the people who experience these hate crimes and the people who are in charge of prosecuting them,” Corado said. That has created what she called a “culture of impunity,” in which bigots are emboldened and victims are left feeling “disposable.”

For Ashly Taylor, a bullet to the chest was just the beginning of her ordeal. She would survive the Feb. 2, 2018, shooting, only to watch as the evident hatred that left a scar above her heart was ignored in court.

As hate crime reports have climbed in Washington, D.C., federal prosecutors have brought hate crime charges in fewer

he drop in hate-crime prosecutions in the nation's capital stands in stark contrast to other cities. In Los Angeles, Seattle and the Brooklyn borough of New York City, hate-crime prosecutions have risen along with hate-crime arrests.

In San Diego County, Calif., for example, when police doubled the number of hate-crime cases referred to the district attorney’s office to 51 last year, hate-crime prosecutions rose even more sharply to 30.

Leonard Trinh, a deputy district attorney in San Diego County who specializes in bigotry-fueled crimes, said his office recently hired a second person to help him keep pace with the increasing number of hate-crime arrests.

“If the evidence is there, we should be charging” cases as hate crimes, said Trinh, whose Vietnamese family was the victim of a hate crime when he was growing up in Washington state.

D.C.’s numbers seem “really low,” he said, especially given that its statute protects more groups than California’s hate-crime law.

Mike Hogan, a hate-crimes prosecutor in King County, Wash., which includes Seattle, echoed that assessment.

“If you have a whole bunch of referrals with identified suspects, and you aren’t filing a lot of cases, you’d have to look closely to see if you were following best practices,” said Hogan, who helped persuade the state to amend its hate-crime law in the 1980s after he and a friend were targeted for being gay.

In Washington, D.C., the gap between hate crime reports and hate crime charges stands out among other large cities.

The District’s Bias-Related Crime Act was enacted in 1989 at a time when fear over the AIDS epidemic had led to violent assaults on gay people. The D.C. Council passed the law after three teenagers attacked a gay man with baseball bats near Rock Creek Park.

The act allows judges to enhance sentences by up to 50 percent for crimes committed based on a victim’s race, religion, age, ethnicity or national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or political affiliation, among other categories. (Homelessness would be added in 2009.)

But for a long time, the law was not enforced. In 1994, D.C. police reported only two hate crimes.

“We were getting calls from people who believed they were victims of hate crimes,” recalled Friedman, the ADL’s Washington regional director at the time. “But when they tried reporting it” to the Metropolitan Police Department, “MPD was blowing them off.”

In 1998, the department created a Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit to foster communication between police and the gay community. Reports of suspected hate crimes started to rise, then skyrocketed after Trump’s election.

The District is now one of the nation’s most active police departments in identifying potential hate crimes, and experts say dedicated policing is probably part of the reason the city’s numbers are so high. When officers detect bias while investigating an incident, they are required to call in a supervisor and, in the case of a crime, a detective. A notification is sent to the Special Liaison Branch, whose ranks include gay, transgender and minority officers. Each month, a six-member committee reviews suspected hate crimes, and the department keeps a list of confirmed cases on its website. (The Post sometimes classified the type of suspected hate crime differently than police, and counted the incidents by the year in which they occurred.)

“We are way ahead of the curve,” said Lt. Brett Parson, commander of the Special Liaison Branch, which includes the now-renamed Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Liaison Unit.

Nearly half the District’s suspected hate crimes in 2018 targeted people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Ashly Taylor was one of them.

When she was shot, she fellbackward against the pickup truck’s trailer. As blood began to soak through her sports bra, Taylor said, she wondered whether she was going to die.

But then, to her own surprise as much as her attacker’s, she got up. As Taylor grabbed a two-by-four to defend herself, co-workers wrestled the gun out of Gaffney’s hands.

“He was trying to shoot me [again] in the head,” she recalled.

After Gaffney ran away, Taylor managed to drive herself to a hospital, where doctors found that the bullet had torn through five layers of clothing, pierced her chest, bounced off her ribs and then sliced sideways across her skin. She was treated and released. Then she got back in her car and drove to a police station.

“The complainant walked into the Fifth District Station and reported that she had been shot in the chest by her coworker,” Gaffney’s arrest warrant begins.

The shooting happened in broad daylight along a busy avenue, but the only public mention was a brief online statement by police that they were “investigating this offense as being motivated by hate or bias.”

It would be the last time those words were used in her case.

Taylor lay in bed as her girlfriend tended to her gunshot wound, which had become infected.

But the injury festered in other ways. Even after the pain subsided, she could no longer sleep on her chest. In fact, she could hardly sleep at all. She woke up at the slightest touch, sweating from nightmares of Gaffney smiling and squeezing the trigger.

A therapist diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder, but her insurance wouldn’t cover psychiatric care, Taylor said. She began drinking more, staying inside the couple’s apartment in Hyattsville, Md., and refusing to return to her construction job.

“She didn’t want to be around anyone,” recalled her girlfriend, Briana Phillips. “She didn’t want to go outside.”

When Gaffney was arrested after 14 days, the couple hoped court proceedings would help close the wound.

Taylor was encouraged by her first meeting with Liu’s office, in which the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case, Melissa Price, told her prosecutors planned to charge Gaffney with a hate crime, she recalled.

But when she met with Price about a month later, the message was very different.

“She said she had to drop the hate crime and give him a plea” deal, Taylor recalled.

Price did not respond to requests for comment. In her statement, Liu said she could not comment on specific cases.

The decision to drop the hate-crime charge enraged Taylor. Her father had served 10 years in prison for shooting someone, she said, so she expected Gaffney to get at least that much time for what she considered an attempted murder fueled by bigotry.

Gaffney has a long criminal record. He pleaded guilty to four felony drug-distribution charges in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Then, in 2015, a police officer caught him with a loaded .38 revolver, its serial number scratched out. He pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of a firearm and was sentenced to 30 months but released in less than 22, on June 13, 2017.

On May 9, 2018, Gaffney pleaded guilty once more — to assault with a dangerous weapon for the attack on Taylor. As part of the deal, she learned, he would serve 36 months in prison.

Taylor was so angry that she stormed out of the courtroom.

“I felt like it was bull crap,” she said. “The plea was bull crap. The whole system is bull crap.”

Over the past two years, an increasing number of victims of suspected hate crimes in the District have watched in frustration as their alleged attackers were arrested but never charged with a hate crime — or never charged at all.

The U.S. attorney’s office filed hate-crime charges in just four of the 113 bias-motivated cases it received from police for 2017 and 2018.

By contrast, prosecutors filed hate-crime charges in 44 of the roughly 100 cases they received from police between 2012 and 2015. They also filed hate-crime charges in seven additional cases that police did not flag as bias-motivated.

The steep drop-off in hate-crime prosecutions in 2017 did not happen solely under Liu. By the time she took office that September, roughly one-third of the year’s bias-motivated cases had already been resolved without hate-crime charges by her predecessor, Channing D. Phillips.

Phillips, an Obama appointee who charged five cases from 2016 as hate crimes, said his office made decisions on a case-by-case basis and there was no policy shift or pressure to back off hate-crime prosecutions after Trump’s inauguration.

Days before leaving office, Phillips filed hate-crime charges in a case police had not flagged as bias-motivated, in which security guards and supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attacked protesters outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington on May 16, 2017.

The hate-crime charges were dropped against two supporters, both U.S. citizens, in exchange for pleading guilty to assault, but 15 Turkish security guards and two Canadian Erdogan supporters left the country before they could face trial.

The one case from 2017 that Liu charged as a hate crime was an assault on a Palestinian American teacher outside the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference. But the hate-crime charge against Yosef Steynovitz, a member of the militant Jewish Defense League, was dropped in exchange for his pleading guilty to three misdemeanors. He received a suspended sentence.

Liu’s office charged three incidents from 2018 as hate crimes. One case, in which a man allegedly called two women “dykes” before attacking them on the street, was dropped after three months because prosecutors were “not ready to proceed with this matter,” according to court records.

The two others attracted significant media attention. In one, a white cyclist called a black motorist the n-word before attacking him with a bicycle lock in Georgetown. In June, a jury convicted him of two felony assault charges but deadlocked on the hate-crime enhancement. In the other case, which is ongoing, a black man is accused of shouting racist threats at a Hispanic elementary school crossing guard in Chevy Chase.

Machen and Phillips were reluctant to criticize Liu without looking at the cases in detail.

“Charging a case as a hate crime can be a little tricky,” Phillips said. “You are increasing your burden of proof. Not only do you have to prove the underlying offense, such as an assault, but you have to prove that it was committed because of a bias.”

Sometimes, even racial epithets are not enough to prove a racist motive, Machen said. And prosecutors are duty-bound to bring only charges they believe they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

In the District, juries normally vote once on a crime and then again on a hate enhancement. Nonetheless, the difficulty of proving hate was a motivation can endanger an entire case, Machen and Phillips said.

“You lose credibility if you bring a charge and you can’t prove it,” Machen said. “It does affect your overall credibility and can affect you on other parts of the case.”

Those fears appeared to play a role in a high-profile hate-crime trial earlier this year.

In February, two men went on trial in the fatal shooting of Deeniquia “Dee Dee” Dodds, a transgender woman who was killed during a 2016 armed robbery. But in the middle of the trial, Liu’s office reversed course, asking the judge to dismiss the hate-crime enhancement against one defendant. The judge then threw out the enhancement against the other man, too. The jury wound up acquitting the men of many charges and deadlocking on the murder charge, leading to a mistrial.

Prosecutors say they will retry the case next year, but not as a hate crime.

An analysis of a decade of hate-crime cases calls into question prosecutors’ fears of jeopardizing cases with hate-crime enhancements. The Post found six cases from 2008 to 2017 in which juries considered a hate crime and failed to convict on any charge. In 16 other cases during the same period, juries either convicted the defendants of hate crimes or rejected the hate-crime enhancement but convicted on other charges.

Cases charged as hate crimes also are more likely to result in a conviction. More than 70 percent of the hate-crime prosecutions during that decade ended in some kind of conviction, and 41 percent ended in hate-crime convictions.

By contrast, prosecutors secured convictions in 29 percent of the suspected-bias cases they decided not to charge as hate crimes in 2017, the most recent year for which outcomes are available.

Of the 42 hate-crime convictions since 2008, however, only four resulted in defendants serving additional jail time, The Post found.

Phillips offered two possible reasons. Many misdemeanor hate crimes are committed by first-time offenders, he said, and judges are often reluctant to hand out stiff sentences to people with no previous criminal record. And in serious felony cases, he said, defendants already face steep sentences without hate enhancements.

Frederick M. Lawrence, an expert on hate crimes and a lecturer at Georgetown University Law School, said those numbers suggest the District should change its law to limit judges’ discretion in applying sentencing enhancements.

“If you get the conviction and then the judge doesn’t enhance the sentence, that is very problematic,” he said. “It is extremely important that law enforcement be seen as unequivocally on the side of identifying these crimes for what they are, prosecuting them for what they are and sentencing them for what they are.”

Corado, the LGBTQ rights advocate, agreed. Otherwise, she said, “it gives perpetrators a green light.”

Other activists lament that since Liu took office, meetings of the District’s Hate-Bias Task Force, which includes police, prosecutors and advocacy group leaders, have become less frequent and no longer include statistics or details on hate-crime prosecutions.

“It has been a source of frustration,” said Stephania Mahdi of the D.C. Anti-Violence Project.

Liu acknowledged as much at a meeting of the task force on July 24.

“We have not been as systematic as we could be about keeping data,” she said. “So we’re going to do that, and I’m pledging to you now that I’m going to review those at least once a month so I have a better understanding of what’s going on and how we’re handling these cases.”

In addition to adding the second hate-crimes coordinator, she said, she was considering asking the D.C. Council to simplify jury instructions for hate crimes, which her office blamed for several recent setbacks.

The meeting was the first Liu had attended in almost two years, activists said.

“I’m pledging to be a lot more engaged,” she said.

On a Tuesday morning in March, Enjoli Gaffney walked into D.C. Superior Court accompanied by a federal marshal and the soft rustle of metal chains. An orange jumpsuit hung loosely on his lanky frame as he craned his neck to look at the audience.

Ashly Taylor’s girlfriend, Briana Phillips, sat on the end of a bench near the back. But Taylor was missing.

After she stormed out of the courtroom over the plea agreement, the U.S. attorney’s office had assigned another prosecutor to the case who had tried to rescind the deal, Taylor said. She hoped Gaffney would be charged with a hate crime after all.

But 10 months later, he was back in court to be sentenced under the same agreement. She was too disgusted to attend.

“I’m lucky to be alive,” she said. “I think to myself, ‘What if I died? Then what would y’all charge him with?’ ”

In the courtroom, it fell to Phillips to recount the shooting’s toll. Taylor had become angry, guarded and paranoid, she told Judge Milton C. Lee.

“She is not the same person as before,” Phillips said wearily. “That’s something I have to live with every day.”

In her own statement, written by hand and filed in court a day earlier, Taylor had left no doubt about how she felt.

“I think it is ridiculous and unfair that you can get a simple three years for almost taking someone’s life, just because I’m a proud lesbian woman,” she had written to Gaffney. “And your insecure, biased ways did not give you the right to target me.”

She has not returned to construction and the outdoor physical labor she enjoyed. She’d become too afraid that someone would attack her again.

Instead, she was sitting in front of a computer in a warehouse office when her phone rang after the sentencing.

The hearing was a “waste of time,” her girlfriend told her. The word “hate” hadn’t even come up.

Jennifer Jenkins and Peter Hermann contributed to this report.

[96thdayofrage]

The deadly shootings of unarmed Black men and women by police officers in the U.S. have increasingly garnered worldwide attention over the last few years. The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., sparked a week of protests that catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement into the national spotlight. Since then, tens of thousands of people across the country have taken to the streets to protest police brutality of Blacks by mostly white officers.

Since 2015, police officers have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed Black men and women nationwide, an NPR investigation has found. NPR reviewed police, court and other records to examine the details of the cases. At least 75% of the officers were white. The latest one happened this month in Killeen, Texas, when Patrick Warren Sr., 52, was fatally shot by an officer responding to a mental health call.

For at least 15 of the officers, such as McMahon, the shootings were not their first — or their last, NPR found. They have been involved in two — sometimes three or more — shootings, often deadly and without consequences.

Those who study deadly force by police say it's unusual for officers to be involved in any shootings.

"Many officers will go their entire career without shooting — sometimes without pulling their gun out at all," said Peter Scharf, a criminologist and professor in the School of Public Health at Louisiana State University and co-author of The Badge and the Bullet: Police Use of Deadly Force. "It's rare."

Not every law enforcement agency releases detailed information about police shootings. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Kansas City, Mo., Police Department, for example, refused to release specifics such as officer names or their race, citing open investigations.

Still, NPR reviewed thousands of pages of job applications, personnel records, use-of-force reports, citizen complaints, court records, lawsuits, news releases, witness statements and local and state police investigative reports to examine the backgrounds of the officers and analyze details of each shooting. We also interviewed use of force experts, criminologists, police, lawyers, prosecutors and relatives of victims.

Among NPR's other findings:

• At least six officers had troubled pasts before being hired onto police departments, including drug use and domestic violence. One officer had been fired from another law enforcement agency, and at least two others were forced out.

• Several officers were convicted of crimes while on the force, such as battery, and resisting and obstructing, but kept their jobs. In one instance, officials in a tiny Louisiana parish repeatedly fired and rehired a deputy who got into trouble with the law: three times over 30 years, records show.

• More than two dozen officers have racked up citizen complaints or use-of-force incidents. A Fort Lauderdale, Fla., police officer had 82 reviews over use-of-force incidents but was never found in violation; a Vineland, N.J., officer had more than three dozen use-of-force incidents over a five-year period.

• Several officers have violated their department policies and been cited for ethics violations, including a Hollywood, Fla., officer accused of trying to steer business to his company, and an Arizona state trooper accused of misuse of state property.

• Nineteen of the officers involved in deadly shootings were rookies, with less than a year on the force. One was on the job for four hours, another for four days. More than a quarter of the killings occurred during traffic stops, and 24 of the dead — 18% — suffered from mental illness. The youngest person shot was a 15-year-old Balch Springs, Texas, high school freshman who played on the football team. The oldest was a 62-year-old man killed in his Los Angeles County home. Nearly 60% of the shootings occurred in the South, with more than a quarter in Texas, Georgia and Louisiana, NPR found.

The killings have led to at least 30 judgments and settlements totaling more than $142 million, records show. Dozens of lawsuits and claims are pending.

An examination of individual cases reveals the myriad ways that law enforcement agencies fail to hold officers accountable and allow them to be in a position to shoot again. In many instances, the criminal justice system refuses to prosecute, often resulting in departments putting officers back on the street instead of desk jobs where they have little contact with the public. Other times, police unions protect officers from accountability. And sometimes, departments are so desperate to recruit officers that they ignore warning signs such as an officer's troubled past and hire them anyway.

"Why do they get passes on killing people?" asked Paula McGowan, Foster's mother. "If the system was right ... they would hold these people accountable."

"Unnecessary and unreasonable"

Nathaniel Pickett II was walking back to his $18-a-night room at the El Rancho, a seen-better-days bungalow motel along historic Route 66 in Barstow, Calif. It was shortly after 9 p.m. on Nov. 19, 2015, and Nate, as his family called him, often took evening walks. As the 29-year-old former engineering student crossed the street, he caught the eye of Kyle Woods, a San Bernardino sheriff's deputy. Woods made a U-turn into the motel parking lot, jumped out of his cruiser and approached Pickett, police records show.

He demanded Pickett's name and birthdate. Pickett complied. In fact, he did everything Woods asked of him, including taking his hands out of his pockets. When Woods asked him if he lived at the motel and where he was from, Pickett said he didn't know. When Pickett asked if he had done something wrong, the deputy said he just wanted to talk to him.

"What's the problem?" Pickett asked Woods nine times as the deputy peppered him with questions about whether he had ever been arrested (yes), if he had lived in Barstow all of his life and where he was going.

"There is no problem," Woods responded.

Pickett asked if he could go to his room where he had lived since moving to Barstow seven weeks earlier. Woods would later admit under oath that he knew he had no probable cause to arrest him and that Pickett had the right to walk away. But when he tried, Woods grabbed him and told him to "stop resisting." Woods threatened to use a Taser on him. Pickett put his arms up and was running toward his room — Room 45 — when he tripped and fell in the breezeway. As he scooted backward from Woods, the deputy caught him. The two scuffled while a male citizen volunteer on patrol with Woods watched from a few feet away. Woods punched Pickett 15 to 20 times before pulling out his service weapon and threatening to shoot him. He fired, hitting Pickett twice in the chest — once with the barrel of the gun pressed against the man's chest.

"Ow," Pickett moaned. One of the bullets pierced his heart and left lung. Pickett was pronounced dead at the scene.

Woods, on the force for two years at the time but on the street for just a few months, said he shot him because he feared for his life.

Woods, who is Black, didn't give a statement to police about the incident for 28 days. And when he did, he said that he stopped Pickett after seeing him hop the motel fence. He thought Pickett was trespassing, and he was fidgety, like he might be under the influence, Woods said. Pickett had marijuana in his system, and his blood alcohol level was 0.01%, far below the level to be considered legally impaired, records show.

The deputy never faced criminal charges in Pickett's death, but the victim's family filed civil charges. And when he testified under oath at the civil trial, Woods told a different story: He said he never saw Pickett jump over the fence and that the gate actually was open. He also said it never occurred to him that Pickett could be mentally ill. Pickett was diagnosed with mental illness during his freshman year at Hampton University in Virginia and had been treated through the Mental Health Court in San Bernardino in 2012 after a conviction for resisting a peace officer and "false personation," records show.

Scott DeFoe, who spent two decades with the Los Angeles Police Department, testified as an expert witness at the civil trial. He said that Woods' use of force was "unnecessary and unreasonable."

"This is probably one of the worst cases I have looked at because of the mental health component," DeFoe testified. "There was no crime. ... He ran as he had a lawful right to do."

The jury in the civil trial was unanimous. Jurors agreed that Woods had no right to detain Pickett; used unreasonable or excessive force against him, which caused his death; and delayed getting him medical care. They awarded Pickett's family $33.5 million, one of the largest amounts ever in an officer-involved shooting case.

[creepingsharia]

92% of New Muslim Candidates Won’t Express Support for Constitution

3 out of 36 (92%) Muslim American candidates who appeared to be seeking public office for the first time

92% of New Muslim Candidates Won’t Express Support for Constitution; One MN Republican Makes it Bipartisan

By Stephen M. Kirby

It is not appropriate to label all, or even the majority of those, who question Islam and Muslims as Islamophobes.   ~ (CAIR Report 2013, Legislating Fear: Islamophobia and its Impact in the United States, p. ix)

In January 2020, I wrote about the results of a survey I had done in which I presented four questions to eighty Muslim public officials across the United States; each question asked the Muslim public official to choose between following the U.S. Constitution/our man-made laws or Islamic Doctrine.  An eye-opening 93% of these Muslim public officials would not express support for the U.S. Constitution or our man-made laws.  Of the six who did express this support, only two allowed me to mention their name.[1]

I also submitted these same four questions to seven prominent Muslim Americans who have been publicly aspiring to reform Islam; I sent four similar questions, based on Canadian law, to six prominent Muslim Canadians who had also been publicly aspiring to reform Islam.  Of these thirteen aspiring reformers, only two Muslim Americans and one Muslim Canadian responded saying they supported man-made laws over the commands of Allah and the teachings of Muhammad.[2]

I then decided to submit the same four questions to 36 Muslim American candidates who appeared to be seeking public office for the first time.[3]

We shall first look at the four questions I used and then examine the variety of responses I received from those Muslims seeking public office.  I then list the Muslim candidates, by State, who did not respond.  This is followed by my concluding remarks.

The Questions

On February 10, 2020, I sent the following e-mail to a group of 36 Muslims who were running, or had been running, for public office at various levels of government across the United States; on February 17th I sent it again to the Muslims who had not initially responded:[4]

I have written extensively about Islam (six books and numerous articles and brochures) and think it important that non-Muslims gain a better understanding of Islam.

 If you are elected to public office you will take an oath of office that includes swearing, or affirming, to support the United States Constitution.  With that in mind, I am interested in your response, as a candidate who follows the religion of Islam, to the following questions:

No. 1:  Will you go on record now and state that our 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech gives the right to anyone in the United States to criticize or disagree with your prophet Muhammad, and will you also go on record now and state that you support and defend anyone’s right to criticize or disagree with your prophet Muhammad, and that you condemn anyone who threatens death or physical harm to another person who is exercising that right?

No. 2:  Our 1st Amendment guarantees freedom of religion in the United States. As part of that freedom, anyone in the United States has the right to join or leave any religion, or have no religion at all.  Will you go on record now and state that you support and defend the idea that in the United States a Muslim has not only the freedom to leave Islam, but to do so without fear of physical harm, and will you also go on record now and state that you condemn anyone who threatens physical harm to a Muslim who is exercising that freedom?

No. 3:  According to the words of Allah found in Koran 5:38 and the teachings of your prophet Muhammad, amputation of a hand is an acceptable punishment for theft.   But our U.S. Constitution, which consists of man-made laws, has the 8th Amendment that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment such as this.  Do you agree with Allah and your prophet Muhammad that amputation of a hand is an acceptable punishment for theft in the United States, or do you believe that our man-made laws prohibiting such punishments are true laws and are to be followed instead of this 7th Century command of Allah and teaching of Muhammad?

No. 4:  According to the words of Allah found in Koran 4:3, Muslim men are allowed, but not required, to be married to up to four wives.  Being married to more than one wife in the United States is illegal according to our man-made bigamy laws.  Do you agree with Allah that it is legal for a Muslim man in the United States to be married to more than one woman, or do you believe that our man-made laws prohibiting bigamy are true laws and are to be followed instead of this 7th Century command of Allah?

I look forward to your responses.

Support for the U.S. Constitution

Only three Muslim candidates clearly stated that they would support the U.S. Constitution/our man-made laws over Islamic Doctrine; they each gave me permission to use their name:

Deedra Abboudd (D), Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Arizona

Iman-Utopia Layjou Bah (I), U.S. House of Representatives (AZ-2)

Rashid Malik (D), U.S. House of Representatives (GA-7)

Other Replies

I received various replies from five other Muslim candidates:

Leila Shukri Adan (D), U.S. House of Representatives (MN-5):  On February 17th Adan responded to my second e-mail:

Thank you so much for your email and for the reminder.  I am confirming receipt and will get back to you soon!

I have not heard back from Adan.

Muhammad Arif (D), United States Senate, Arizona:  Arif responded the same day to the February 10th e-mail.  He asked if we could meet for coffee or lunch to discuss the questions.  I explained that I lived too far away for that.  We exchanged several additional e-mails, and on February 11th he wrote:

Since you do not live in Arizona and I’m busy in my campaign because I have limited time … can I email you these answer [sic] next week … I apologize for delay [sic] because the questions I have to read carefully and answer in details [sic]

I replied that would be fine.  The “next week” came and went, and on February 22nd I sent him an e-mail asking when I could expect his responses.  I have not heard back from Arif.

Zainab Baloch (D), Mayor of Raleigh, North Carolina:  Baloch lost the 2019 general election to become the Mayor of Raleigh.  However, her subsequent social postings appeared to indicate that she was in politics for the long haul; she had written: “This isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.”  On February 17th she responded to my second e-mail:

I didn’t miss it [my first e-mail]. If I have time to respond to your harassing questions, I will. Have a great week!

I have not heard back from Baloch.

Ameena Matthews (D), U.S. House of Representatives (IL-1):  On February 24th, in reply to my second e-mail, I received the following from Dr. La’Shawn Littrice, Matthews’ Campaign Manager:

Hi, Steve. How are you?  I will forward this to Dr. Matthews and get it back to you by Wednesday [February 26th] of this week.

On February 28th I sent Littrice an e-mail asking her for an update.  I have not heard back from Littrice.

Reem Subei (D), Ohio State Senate:   In response to each of the two e-mails I sent Subei, I received the following form response:

Thank you for contacting Reem for Ohio. This campaign is about bringing justice and equality to all. Please click the link below to provide us with your preferred volunteering activity. Let’s build a system that works for everyone, because we all win when we all win. 

The link takes one to a form for volunteers to complete.  I have received no other response from Subei.

No Reply

These Muslim candidates did not reply:

California

Kaisar Ahmed (Nonpartisan) – San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors

Shahid Buttar (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (CA-12)

Fatima Shahnaz Iqbal-Zubair (D) – California State Assembly

Cenk Uygur (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (CA-25)

Colorado

Iman Jodeh (D) – Colorado State House of Representatives

Delaware

Madinah Wilson-Anton (D) – Delaware State House of Delegates

Georgia

Nabilah Islam (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (GA-7)

Illinois

Junaid “J” Afeef (D) – Kane County State’s Attorney

Rush Darwish (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (IL-3)

Mohammed Faheem (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (IL-8)

Sarah Gad (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (IL-1)

Inam Hussain (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (IL-8)

Moon Khan (D) – Circuit Court Clerk, DuPage County

Azam Nizamuddin (D) – Circuit Judge, Circuit Court of DuPage County

Abdelnasser Rashid (D) – Cook County Board of Review

Maryland

Saafir Rabb (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (MD-7)

Massachusetts

Ihssane Leckey (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (MA-4)

Nichole Mossalam (D) – Massachusetts State House of Representatives

Michigan

Solomon Rajput (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (MI-12)

Minnesota

Dalia Al-Aqidi (R) – U.S. House of Representatives (MN-5)

Omar Fateh (D) – Minnesota State Senate

New Jersey

Alp Basaran (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (NJ-9)

New York

Tahanie Aboushi (D) – Manhattan District Attorney

Shaniyat Chowdhury (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (NY-5)

Mary Jobaida (D) – New York State Assembly

Badrun Nahar Khan (D) – U.S. House of Representatives (NY-14)

Zohran Kwame Mamdani (D) – New York State Assembly

Ohio

Mohamud Jama (D) – Ohio State House of Representatives

Conclusion

These 36 Muslim Americans seeking public office would have to, if successful, take an oath of office that includes swearing (or affirming) to support the U.S. Constitution.  In theory then, one would think such Muslim Americans would be quite willing even now to express their support for that Constitution and our man-made laws.  The fact that 92% of them would not take this opportunity to express that support is troubling.

Troubling, but not surprising.  As we saw earlier, 93% of current Muslim public officials and 77% of aspiring Muslim reformers also declined to make such a choice.  This, in spite of the fact that anyone holding a public office in the United States is required to take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution and our man-made laws, and we regularly hear from aspiring Muslim reformers that Islamic Doctrine needs to be modernized and made more compatible with Western laws.  But when faced with specific choices, instead of glittering generalities, 91% of all the Muslims listed in these three categories would not express support for Western laws over Islamic Doctrine.

One might wonder if it is fair to ask Muslims to make such a choice.  It certainly is because of the irreconcilable conflict between major tenets of Islamic Doctrine and Western Laws, especially the U.S. Constitution.[5]

Here is an additional consideration.  In its 2020 ‘Muslim Vote Campaign’ the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has included a questionnaire asking non-Muslim candidates and government officials whether or not they support specific “Muslim needs.”  CAIR explained:

CAIR’s 2020 questionnaire is an update to its 2016 questionnaire and provides sample questions for Muslims to ask local city council, mayoral, state legislative, gubernatorial, and congressional candidates running for office and government officials.

Candidate responses to CAIR’s election questionnaire will assist American Muslims in evaluating each candidate’s leadership criteria and their ability to unite and engage the community on policies and programs that meet Muslim needs.

The questions and the issues included in the questionnaire emphasize the American Muslim community’s concerns, as well as those of its civil rights, immigrant rights and worker rights allies.[6]

Here is a sampling of the issues about which the American Muslim community is concerned:[7]

1. Do you plan to address the rise in Islamophobia and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States?

2. Do you support the right of Muslim inmates to make religious accommodation requests for religious headwear, like hijabs, kufis, and other head coverings?

3. Do you support the right of Muslim inmates to make religious accommodation requests for copies of the Quran and other religious texts, prayer mats, prayer beads, and other religious items?

4. Do you support the right of Muslim inmates to make religious accommodation requests for modified meal schedules while fasting during Ramadan?

5. Do you support the right of Muslim inmates to make religious accommodation requests for daily congregational prayers and Friday religious services?

6. Do you support public school systems with significant Muslim populations in your congressional district and/or state closing for the Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, when many students or faculty would otherwise be absent?

The focus of CAIR’s questions is on the need for non-Muslims to accommodate certain Islamic religious teachings.  Since CAIR has turned the focus on certain Islamic religious teachings, it is only appropriate that the focus should now be turned on all Islamic religious teachings, especially those that are irreconcilably in conflict with the U.S. Constitution and our man-made laws.  Muslims running for and holding public office need to be asked about these conflicts and expected to publicly, categorically choose between the U.S. Constitution/our man-made laws and those contradictory teachings of their religion.

We need to pay heed to these words of Winston Churchill from 1940:

This is no time for ease and comfort.  It is the time to dare and endure.

Dr. Stephen M. Kirby is the author of six books about Islam. His latest book is Islamic Doctrine versus the U.S. Constitution: The Dilemma for Muslim Public Officials.

[1]           Stephen M. Kirby, “93% of Muslim Public Officials Would Not Express Support for the Constitution They Swore to Uphold,” Jihad Watch, January 7, 2020, https://www.jihadwatch.org/2020/01/93-of-muslim-public-officials-would-not-express-support-for-the-constitution-they-swore-to-uphold.

[2]           Stephen M. Kirby, “The Adventures of Asking Muslim Reformers to Categorically Choose between Western Laws and Islam,” Jihad Watch, January 16, 2020, https://www.jihadwatch.org/2020/01/the-adventures-of-asking-muslim-reformers-to-categorically-choose-between-western-laws-and-islam.

[3]           I would like to thank Deplorable Kel for a majority of these names: https://deplorablekel.com/category/u-s-elections/2020-election/.

[4]           These questions were taken from Chapter 10 of my latest book, Islamic Doctrine Versus the U.S. Constitution: The Dilemma for Muslim Public Officials (Washington DC: Center for Security Policy Press, 2019); https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2019/12/03/csp-press-releases-primer-on-islamic-doctrine-versus-the-u-s-constitution/.

[5]           For details about this irreconcilable conflict see Islamic Doctrine Versus the U.S. Constitution: The Dilemma for Muslim Public Officials.  For ways in which Islamic Doctrine allows Muslims to appear to take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution and our man-made laws, see Chapter 1, “Taking the Oath of Office.”

[6]           “CAIR Launches 2020 ‘Muslims Vote’ Campaign with Release of Candidate Questionnaire, Calendar of Election Dates,” CAIR, January 21, 2020, https://www.cair.com/press_releases/cair-launches-2020-muslims-vote-campaign-with-release-of-candidate-questionnaire-calendar-of-election-dates/.

[7]           “Sample Questions for Candidates and Public Officials,” CAIR, 2020, https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/cairhq/pages/1125/attachments/original/1579621884/2020_Sample_Questions.pdf?1579621884.

[ph4z0n]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued the San Bernardino County sheriff over what the advocacy group says is a failure of the law enforcement agency to adequately release public records relating to its use of cell-site simulators, or "stingrays."

The lawsuit, Electronic Frontier Foundation v. County of San Bernardino et al., which was filed in county court on Tuesday, explains how a 2015 state law requires that law enforcement agencies in most cases seek a warrant to use the surveillance devices. Prior to the law's passage, Ars reported that since the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department (SBSD) acquired a stingray in late 2012, the agency has used it 303 times between January 1, 2014 and May 7, 2015, all without seeking a warrant...

[...] As Ars has reported for years, stingrays are in use by both local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide. The devices determine a target phone's location by spoofing or simulating a cell tower. Mobile phones in range of the stingray then connect to it and exchange data with the device as they would with a real cell tower.

Once deployed, stingrays intercept data from the target phone along with information from other phones within the vicinity—up to and including full calls and text messages. At times, police have falsely claimed that information gathered from a stingray has instead come from a confidential informant.